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Imprisoned Palestinian journalist reiterates call for solidarity

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | August 19, 2018

Imprisoned Palestinian journalist and director of Al-Quds TV Alaa Rimawi said on Sunday, 19 August that the arrests carried out by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinian media and journalists are part of a comprehensive attack on Palestinian media, preventing it from doing its work and minimizing its role in publicizing Palestinian realities.

In a statement released by his family and lawyer, Rimawi said that this agenda was clear during the interrogation sessions he was subjected to personally in the past two days. He also noted the cases of journalist Ali Dar Ali, arrested by occupation forces, and the administrative detention of journalist Mohammed Muna, saying that these attacks reflected the same purpose.

Rimawi said in his statement that the occupation considers terms like “martyr,” “occupation,” “steadfastness,” “confrontation” and “resistance” to be “inciting” content. He also noted that the arrests of journalists is meant to keep the situation in Palestine from being covered in the media. “The occupation is carrying out a policy of intimidation with its police and intelligence services. This is clear and obvious, bringing forward the names of journalists to continue these detentions, a threat against every free Palestinian journalists.”

He called for a unified position in support of Palestinian journalists from the International Federation of Journalists, Arab Press Union and other concerned bodies around the world to come together with a unified goal of protecting Palestinian journalists under occupation.

Occupation arrests of Palestinian journalists like Dar Ali, Muna, Lama Khater and others, and the forcible closure of media institutions by military bodies have escalated recently, under various pretexts and charges.

August 19, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Is Israel planning for something world is unaware of?

PressTV – August 18, 2018

It’s one thing for a military budget to increase for the coming year, but for every year through the next two decades? Such is the case with Israel’s military budget. One obvious question: why does Israel want to increase its military budget so dramatically?

August 19, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Corbyn’s Labour Party is Being Made to Fail: by Design

By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | August 17, 2018

The Labour party, relentlessly battered by an organised campaign of smears of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn – first for being anti-semitic, and now for honouring Palestinian terrorists – is reportedly about to adopt the four additional working “examples” of anti-semitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Labour initially rejected these examples – stoking yet more condemnation from Israel’s lobbyists and the British corporate media – because it justifiably feared, as have prominent legal experts, that accepting them would severely curb the freedom to criticise Israel.

The media’s ever-more outlandish slurs against Corbyn and the Labour party’s imminent capitulation on the IHRA’s full definition of anti-semitism are not unrelated events. The former was designed to bring about the latter.

According to a report in the Guardian this week, senior party figures are agitating for the rapid adoption of the full IHRA definition, ideally before the party conference next month, and say Corbyn has effectively surrendered to the pressure. An MP who supports Corbyn told the paper Corbyn would “just have to take one for the team”.

In a strong indication of the way the wind is now blowing, the Guardian added:

“The party said it would consult the main [Jewish] communal bodies as well as experts and academics, but groups such as the pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour have not been asked to give their views.”

No stomach for battle

The full adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism will be a major victory both for Israel and its apologists in Britain, who who have been seeking to silence all meaningful criticism of Israel, and for the British corporate media, which would dearly love to see the back of an old-school socialist Labour leader whose programme threatens to loosen the 40-year stranglehold of neoliberalism on British society.

Besieged for four years, Corbyn’s allies in the Labour leadership have largely lost the stomach for battle, one that was never about substance or policy but about character assassination. As the stakes have been constantly upped by the media and the Blairite holdouts in the party bureaucracy, the inevitable has happened. Corbyn has been abandoned. Few respected politicians with career ambitions or a public profile want to risk being cast out into the wilderness, like Ken Livingstone, as an anti-semite.

This is why the supposed anti-semitism “crisis” in a Corbyn-led Labour party has been so much more effective than berating him for his clothes or his patriotism. Natural selection – survival of the smear fittest for the job – meant that a weaponised anti-semitism would eventually identify Corbyn as its prime target and not just his supporters – especially after his unexpectedly strong showing at the polls in last year’s election.

Worse, Corbyn himself has conceded too much ground on anti-semitism. As a lifelong anti-racism campaigner, the accusations of anti-semitism have clearly pained him. He has tried to placate rather than defy the smearers. He has tried to maintain unity with people who have no interest in finding common ground with him.

And as he has lost all sense of how to respond in good faith to allegations made in bad faith, he has begun committing the cardinal sin of sounding and looking evasive – just as those who deployed the anti-semitism charge hoped. It was his honesty, plain-speaking and compassion that won him the leadership and the love of ordinary members. Unless he can regain the political and spiritual confidence that underpinned those qualities, he risks haemorrhaging support.

Critical juncture

But beyond Corbyn’s personal fate, the Labour party has now reached a critical juncture in its response to the smear campaign. In adopting the full IHRA definition, the party will jettison the principle of free speech and curtail critical debate about an entire country, Israel – as well as a key foreign policy issue for those concerned about the direction the Middle East is taking.

Discussion of what kind of state Israel is, what its policy goals are, and whether they are compatible with a peace process are about to be taken off the table by Britain’s largest, supposedly progressive party.

That thought spurred me to cast an eye over my back-catalogue of journalism. I have been based in Nazareth, in Israel’s Galilee, since 2001. In that time I have written – according to my website – more than 900 articles (plus another few hundred blog posts) on Israel, as well as three peer-reviewed books and a clutch of chapters in edited collections. That’s a lot of writing. Many more than a million words about Israel over nearly two decades.

What shocked me, however, as I started to pore over these articles was that almost all of them – except for a handful dealing with internal Palestinian politics – would fall foul of at least one of these four additional IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt.

After 17 years of writing about Israel, after winning a respected journalism prize for being “one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East”, the Labour party is about to declare that I, and many others like me, are irredeemable anti-semites.

Not that I am unused to such slurs. I am intimately familiar with a community of online stalkers who happily throw around the insults “Nazi” and “anti-semite” at anyone who doesn’t cheerlead the settlements of the Greater Israel project. But far more troubling is that this will be my designation not by bullying Israel partisans but by the official party of the British left.

Of course, I will not be alone. Much of my journalism has been about documenting and reporting the careful work of scholars, human rights groups, lawyers and civil society organisations – Palestinian, Israeli and international alike – that have charted the structural racism in Israel’s legal and administrative system, explaining often in exasperating detail its ethnocractic character and its apartheid policies. All of us are going to be effectively cast out, denied any chance to inform or contribute to the debates and policies of Britain’s only leftwing party with a credible shot at power.

That is a shocking realisation. The Labour party is about to slam the door shut in the faces of the Palestinian people, as well as progressive Jews and others who stand in solidarity with them.

Betrayal of Palestinians

The article in the Guardian, the newspaper that has done more to damage Corbyn than any other (by undermining him from within his own camp), described the incorporation of the full IHRA anti-semitism definition into Labour’s code of conduct as a “compromise”, as though the betrayal of an oppressed people was something over which middle ground could be found.

Remember that the man who drafted the IHRA definition and its associated examples, American Jewish lawyer Kenneth Stern, has publicly regretted their impact, saying that in practice they have severely curbed freedom of speech about Israel.

How these new examples will be misused by Corbyn’s opponents should already be clear. He made his most egregious mistake in the handling of the party’s supposed anti-semitism “crisis” precisely to avoid getting caught up in a violation of one of the IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt: comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.

He apologised for attending an anti-racism event and distanced himself from a friend, the late Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor and defender of Palestinian rights, who used his speech to compare Israel’s current treatment of Palestinians to early Nazi laws that vilified and oppressed Jews.

It was a Judas-like act for which it is not necessary to berate Corbyn. He is doubtless already torturing himself over what he did. But that is the point: the adoption of the full IHRA definition will demand the constant vilification and rooting out of progressive and humane voices like Meyer’s. It will turn the Labour party into the modern equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee. Labour activists will find themselves, like Corbyn, either outed or required to out others as supposed anti-semites. They will have to denounce reasonable criticisms of Israel and dissociate themselves from supporters of the Palestinian cause, even Holocaust survivors.

The patent absurdity of Labour including this new anti-semitism “example” should be obvious the moment we consider that it will recast not only Meyer and other Holocaust survivors as anti-semites but leading Jewish intellectuals and scholars – even Israeli army generals.

Two years ago Yair Golan, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, went public with such a comparison. Addressing an audience in Israel on Holocaust Day, he spoke of where Israel was heading:

“If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.”

Is it not a paradox that, were Golan a member of the Labour party, that statement – a rare moment of self-reflection by a senior Israeli figure – will soon justify his being vilified and hounded out of the Labour party?

Evidence of Israeli apartheid

Looking at my own work, it is clear that almost all of it falls foul of two further “examples” of anti-semitism cited in the full IHRA definition that Labour is preparing to adopt:

“Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

and:

“Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

One hardly needs to point out how preposterous it is that the Labour party is about to outlaw from internal discussion or review any research, scholarship or journalism that violates these two “examples” weeks after Israel passed its Nation-State Basic Law. That law, which has constitutional weight, makes explicit what was always implicit in Israel as a Jewish state:

  1. that Israel privileges the rights and status of Jews around the world, including those who have never even visited Israel, above the rights of the fifth of the country’s citizens who are non-Jews (the remnants of the native Palestinian population who survived the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948).
  2. that Israel, as defined in the Basic Law, is not a state bounded by internationally recognised borders but rather the “Land of Israel” – a Biblical conception of Israel whose borders encompass the occupied Palestinian territories and parts of many neighbouring states.

How, one might reasonably wonder, is such a state – defined this way in the Basic Law – a normal “democratic” state? How is it not structurally racist and inherently acquisitive of other people’s territory?

Contrary to the demands of these two extra IHRA “examples”, the Basic Law alone shows that Israel is a “racist endeavour” and that we cannot judge it by the same standards we would a normal western-style democracy. Not least, it has a double “border” problem: it forces Jews everywhere to be included in its self-definition of the “nation”, whether they want to be or not; and it lays claim to the title deeds of other territories without any intention to confer on their non-Jewish inhabitants the rights it accords Jews.

Demanding that we treat Israel as a normal western-style liberal democracy – as the IHRA full definition requires – makes as much sense as having demanded the same for apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s.

Unaccountable politics

The Labour party has become the largest in Europe as Corbyn has attracted huge numbers of newcomers into the membership, inspired by a new kind of politics. That is a terrifying development for the old politics, which preferred tiny political cliques accountable chiefly to corporate donors, leaving a slightly wider circle of activists largely powerless.

That is why the Blairite holdouts in the party bureaucracy are quite content to use any pretext not only to root out genuine progressive activists drawn to a Corbyn-led party, including anti-Zionist Jewish activists, but to alienate tens of thousands more members that had begun to transform Labour into a grassroots movement.

A party endlessly obsessing about anti-semitism, a party that has abandoned the Palestinians, a party that has begun throwing out key progressive principles, a party that has renounced free speech, and a party that no longer puts the interests of the poor and vulnerable at the centre of its concerns is a party that will fail.

That is where the anti-semitism “crisis” is leading Labour – precisely as it was designed to do.

August 18, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The UK’s Prime Minister-in-Waiting Must Zap the Circling Sharks

Nice-guy Jeremy Corbyn needs to get mean

By Stuart Littlewood | American Herald Tribune | August 17, 2018

“Don’t argue, do as we say!” Confronted with that attitude many of us would simply slam the door. Like me, you’re probably sick to death with the unedifying spectacle of Britain’s Labour Party being bullied by the Jewish Leadership Council, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and a handful of Labour MPs to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in full, with not one jot or tittle left out no matter how silly, and to make it a cornerstone of the party’s code of conduct.

And you’ll know by now that the IHRA definition is deeply flawed. It lacks the two important caveats recommended by the Home Office Select Committee and has been slammed by legal experts because it collides head-on with everyone’s right to freedom of expression. Corbyn resists it presumably because of the nightmare consequences of adopting it without sensible modification.

Yes, the Conservative Government accepted the definition without the caveats. It is claimed that 80% of Conservative MPs and MEPs are signed up Friends of Apartheid Israel so they happily do as they are told. The fun will come when they try to use it to punish people.

The acrimony between Labour’s wise heads and its dumb-asses is eagerly stoked by our venomous mainstream media. Take this gem, an editorial from The Independent…

“Mr. Corbyn needs to accept the IHRA definition in full, with all its examples, if he is to start to regain the trust of not just Jews but of all those genuinely opposed, as he so often claims to be, to all forms of racism.

“Three weeks ago, The Independent said that the row over the IHRA definition had gone on too long. That it is still going on is testament to the Labour leader’s stubbornness, which some of his supporters’ mistake for strength.

“Unless Mr. Corbyn does the right thing, and quickly, they will find out what kind of weakness it really is.”

Mr. Corbyn doesn’t “need to accept” anything of the sort. In the same editorial, The Independent says that the Labour Party’s failure to define anti-Semitism in a way that commands the confidence of most British Jews “is extraordinary”. But what about the non-Jew majority? Shouldn’t it be acceptable to them? The row is still going on because the Jewish lobby frantically insists their opinion is the only one that matters and they’re ramming it down Labour’s throat. They should know by now that people in this country don’t take kindly to being bossed around like that. Besides, Corbyn has the confidence and support of many Jewish groups. Too bad for the Jewish Establishment if they are the ‘wrong’ sort of Jews.

This IHRA example of anti-Semitism – ‘Claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’ – illustrates how stupid the argument has become. Leaving it out of the party’s code of conduct, says The Independent, is “a critical omission”. Really? It has been obvious for more than 100 years that the Israel Project is a racist endeavour. Why deny it when Israel has just passed new racist laws to legitimise Jewish supremacy?

The claptrap from The Independent is typical of the torrent of idiotic stuff mainstream outlets are now vomiting all over the public. No use moaning, though; we’re saddled with mainstream and Corbyn’s media strategists must get a grip on it. But they don’t even provide news feeds or briefings to sympathetic ‘alternative’ media sites. The editor of a very successful one tells me he receives nothing from Labour and knows no-one who does.

Assault on humanitarian mission “of insufficient editorial merit” says BBC

While the mainstream, including the BBC, have been sticking the knife into Corbyn, none of them (as far as I’m aware) reported a much more serious outrage – the hijacking by Israeli Occupation Forces of two vessels heading for Gaza and the violent assault, abduction and imprisonment of the 34 people from 12 countries who were on board – one of them a British consultant from the famous ‘Barts’ Hospital in London.

The two boats, ‘Al Awda’ (The Return) and ‘Freedom’, were in international waters 42 and 49 nautical miles respectively off the coast of Gaza when raided by Israeli warships and forced into an Isreali port, say the organizers. During their unlawful detention the crew, participants, and journalists were subjected to a range of physical and emotional violence. “The captain of Al-Awda was threatened with execution, 4 people were tasered, 3 people had ribs broken by the Israeli military and one person had his foot broken.

“They were all taken against their will to Israel, unlawfully imprisoned and ultimately deported. The Israeli authorities have stolen the boats and the 13,000 Euros worth of medical supplies that we were carrying as gifts, as well as many of the participants’ personal belongings (including clothes, a Bible, credit cards, IDs and mobile phones). Incredibly, they have begun to take legal action to attempt to confiscate the boats.”

There’s a mainstream media blackout on this story in the UK. The BBC, replying to a complaint, implied that piracy on the high seas against a mercy ship bound for stricken Gaza with a British surgeon (Dr. Swee Ang) onboard had insufficient editorial merit; but never mind, we can all “be assured there is no ulterior motive” in the state broadcaster’s decision not to run it.

Dr. Swee emailed me: “I managed to get a CT of my chest confirming that I have two rib fractures. They are still painful but I am coping. Wonder if you got my interview on Russian TV?”

So it is left to the likes of RT to report the sickening truth. And if it doesn’t make our Israel-loving MPs and ministers squirm I don’t know what will.

Meanwhile, Dr. Swee’s written account of what happened appeared in several ‘alternative’ news outlets. One of these, Redress Information & Analysis, attracted 28,000 views overnight. Within a few days, the score had rocketed to an editorially insufficient 100,000.

Did Britain collude with Israel to thwart the mercy mission?

Why isn’t Corbyn taking the heat off himself by blasting Theresa May and her Foreign Secretary for not reacting to Israel’s piracy against unarmed humanitarian boats on the high seas? What has the Government done to retrieve their possessions and obtain compensation after failing to protect an important British citizen from appalling treatment by May’s Israeli ‘friends’? Has ambassador Regev been summoned and given a severe dressing-down? Have the 114 boxes of medical supplies destined for Gaza been released to Gaza?

And what gives the Israelis the right to confiscate the boats at least one of which was intended as a gift to the Gazans?

The other day in Parliament Lord Ahmed submitted this Written Question (HL9824): “To ask Her Majesty’s Government what representations they have made to the government of Israel regarding the safety of British humanitarian workers travelling to Gaza as part of the Freedom Flotilla; and what responses they have received to any such representations.”

Lord Ahmad (different guy) answered: “On 30 July, officials from our Embassy in Tel Aviv sought consular access from the Israeli authorities to a British national who was detained aboard the flotilla that was travelling to Gaza. This access was granted. Embassy officials also discussed the travelling flotilla with the Israeli authorities on 6 June. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office advises against all travel to Gaza (including the waters off Gaza).”

“Including the waters off Gaza”? Isn’t he referring to international waters where neutral civilian vessels are entitled to free passage under the UN Conventional on the Law of the Seas? Shouldn’t unarmed aid boats, which pose no threat to anyone, be able sail international waters unmolested and claim ‘innocent passage’ in accordance with that same Law when they enter territorial waters? Is the Law of the Seas now dead? Is Britain no longer committed to keeping the sea lanes open to innocent shipping? Why is the UN not upholdings its own Convention?

And if, as Lord Ahmad says, our embassy was discussing the aid flotilla with Israel nearly 2 months before the hijacking, what were they talking about? Were they, by any chance, colluding to thwart this mercy mission? I think we are entitled to know. And Corbyn and his shadow ministers ought to be on the rampage.

Anti-Semitic remarks pale into insignificance alongside Israel’s violent acts against this and earlier humanitarian missions, on one occasion resulting in the murder of 10 people. Yet Corbyn’s media people are fast asleep. He was struggling yesterday when an over-persistent TV reporter nagged him mercilessly about his presence at a wreath-laying ceremony in Tunisia before he became Labour leader. He had already answered the question to the point of boredom several times but was too polite to tell her to change the subject or piss off.

On top of that, he’s had to put up with terror chief and mass murderer Netanyahu using our mainstream media to intrude into UK politics by tweeting: “The laying of a wreath by Jeremy Corbyn on the graves of the terrorist who perpetrated the Munich massacre and his comparison of Israel to the Nazis deserves unequivocal condemnation from everyone – left, right and everything in between.” Actually, Corbyn didn’t compare Israel to Nazis and was attending a Tunisian government-organised conference which included a memorial for those killed in a horrific Israeli air strike (on Tunisian territory) back in 1985. The funny side is that this uncalled-for meddling by a universally despised slimeball like Netanyahu has probably done Corbyn no harm at all, popularity-wise.

Let’s debate the S-word (Semitism)

But Corbyn clearly has a problem with his spin doctors and media team who should by now have deflected the orchestrated slurs and turned the tables on his detractors. He’d do well to bring on board sharper PR skills and public affairs know-how before it’s too late.

And as the S-word has been weaponised and tossed around so indiscriminately, it’s time Semitism was publicly debated, turned inside out and examined more closely. The point is that hardly any of the Jews who claim Palestine is theirs and theirs only, such as Netanyahu and most of his gang, have ancestral links to Biblical Israel. Research has established, ironically, that the real Semites are the indigenous people of the Holy Land including – and especially – the Palestinians.

Perhaps Corbyn, when next accused of anti-Semitism, should simply say: “It’s hostility towards Palestinians that is anti-Semitic. As you know, the Labour Party doesn’t tolerate anti-Semitism. Good day.”

And slam the door.

August 17, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel’s “Loyal” Druze move into Open Revolt

Druze army general leads protests to overturn nation-state law that makes explicit the privileged status of Jewish majority

By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | August 15, 2018

Israel’s small Druze community, long seen as “loyal” to the state, is on a collision course with the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu over a new law guaranteeing superior citizenship rights for Jews, according to analysts.

Israel has traditionally cited the Druze, a secretive religious sect whose men serve in the Israeli army, as proof that non-Jews can prosper inside a self-declared Jewish state.

However, recent days have seen an unprecedented outpouring of anger from large segments of the Druze community over a nation-state law passed last month by the Israeli parliament.

The new legislation has been widely criticised for making explicit the privileged status of the Jewish majority while omitting any reference to “democracy” or “equality”.

One Druze scholar, Rabah Halabi, said his community’s response had been like a mini-“intifada” – the word Palestinians used for two lengthy uprisings against the occupation.

“Much of the Druze community are in a state of shock,” he told Middle East Eye. “They thought that by proving their loyalty, they would be treated as equals. But now they are being forced to re-evaluate, to accept that this view was mistaken.”

Halabi, who has written a book on Druze identity, added: “Their illusions are being shattered. It looks like a process of awakening has begun that will leave both sides bruised.”

Protesters call for equality

The new law, which has a constitutional-like status, has angered the fifth of Israel’s population that are not Jewish, mostly descended from Palestinians who survived a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948. This Palestinian minority eventually received citizenship.

But unlike the Muslim and Christian communities, the 120,000-strong Druze sect in Israel has long been showcased as “loyal” and plays a key role in the army, especially in combat duties in the occupied territories.

Druze leaders have angrily pointed to the disproportionate sacrifices made by their community, including more than 420 Druze killed while in uniform.

The Druze also enjoy outsized influence in Israeli politics. Although comprising about 1.5 percent of Israel’s population, they have five legislators in the 120-member parliament, four of them in Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.

Unusually, the figurehead of the protests has been a retired and much-decorated Druze general, Amal Asad.

He led the speakers at a rally in Tel Aviv earlier this month, attended by some 60,000 Druze and Israeli Jewish sympathisers, including many former senior security officials.

The protesters demanded that the new Basic Law – one of a body that serves as Israel’s equivalent of a constitution – be annulled or amended to confer equal rights on all citizens.

Another key Druze figure, spiritual leader Sheikh Muwafaq Tarif, told the crowds: “Despite our unreserved loyalty, Israel doesn’t see us as equals.”

Crowds chanted “Equality! Equality!” and banners bore the slogan: “If we are brothers, we must be equals.”

Netanyahu blindsided

Druze legislators and Palestinian leadership organisations in Israel have separately petitioned the Israeli supreme court to overturn the legislation. The court is not expected to hear the cases until early next year.

Adalah, a legal rights group for the Palestinian minority, has described the law as having “apartheid characteristics” and noted that there is “no [other] constitution in the world that does not include the right to equality for all its citizens and residents”.

The Druze protests appear to have blindsided Netanyahu and his cabinet, even though the law was under consideration for nearly a decade.

Nonetheless, he has stood his ground. According to analysts, the law is the centrepiece of his efforts to win elections, expected in the coming months, as he tries to face down intensifying corruption investigations.

In a sign of his hardline approach, Netanyahu walked out of a meeting held shortly before the rally when Druze leaders – including Asad, Tarif and several mayors – refused to accept a compromise that would have offered special benefits to the Druze while keeping the law unchanged.

Wahib Habish, mayor of the Druze town of Yarka in the Galilee, who attended the meeting, told the Israeli media afterwards: “We can’t be bought off with benefits and rhetoric on closing gaps.”

Amal Jamal, a politics professor at Tel Aviv University and a Druze resident of Habish’s town, said Netanyahu’s strategy was to stoke “internal divisions” in Druze society.

“He has no intention of backing down,” he told MEE. “He hopes to dismiss the protests by saying: ‘If the Druze can’t agree among themselves, how is it possible for us to find a solution?’”

Secretive religious sect

The Druze are a secretive religious sect that broke away from Islam some 1,000 years ago. For protection, they chose to live in a mountainous region of the Middle East that is today split between Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

Scholars have noted that, as a survival strategy, the Druze traditionally preferred to ally with whoever was in power.

Some Druze communities in the Galilee supported Zionist forces during the 1948 war that founded Israel on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland. A few years later, the Druze leadership in Israel signed a pact with the state, agreeing that the community’s men would be conscripted for three years into the army.

In return, Israel recognised the Druze as a “national” group, rather than as a religion, separating them from the rest of the Palestinian minority.

Complicating the picture, a much smaller Druze population fell under Israeli rule in 1967 when Israel occupied the Golan Heights, part of Syria. The 25,000 Druze in the Golan have mostly stayed loyal to Syria and refused Israeli citizenship. They are not drafted.

‘Brainwashed’ at school

Jamal said sections of Israeli Druze society were increasingly wondering whether they had paid a “double price” for their agreement to conscription.

“Not only were the Druze discriminated against like other Arab citizens, but they sacrificed their lives on the battlefield too,” he noted. “Look at it this way, the Druze are not just second-class citizens, they are second-class Arabs.”

As part of the agreement, Israel introduced a separate school system for the Druze in the 1970s, which has encouraged them to view their military service as a “covenant of blood” with the Jewish people.

Dalia Halabi, herself Druze and the executive director of Dirasat, a policy research centre in Nazareth, said the Druze education system was among the worst in Israel for matriculation rates. Instead, Israel had used the schools to “brainwash” Druze children.

“The Druze are taught to fear other Arabs, not only their neighbours in the Galilee but in the wider region,” she said. “They are encouraged to believe that they would be vulnerable and alone without the protection of the Israeli army.”

Refusal movement growing

Israel has long trumpeted the Druze’s military service as proof that it is possible for non-Jewish minorities to integrate.

Druze analysts consulted by MEE, however, noted that for many years there had been an intensifying split within the Druze community on the issue of military service that the new Basic law had brought to a head.

A refusal movement among young Druze men has become more prominent over the past decade, as have complaints that successive Israeli governments failed to make good on promises to give the Druze equal rights.

Druze communities are generally as overcrowded and poorly resourced as other Palestinian communities in Israel, noted Dalia Halabi: “Some 70 percent of Druze lands were confiscated by the state, despite our communities’ ‘loyalty’. They did not get a better deal than other Palestinian communities.”

Rabah Halabi, who teaches at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, pointed out that the loss of their farmland left many Druze men dependent on Israel’s extensive security economy.

More than a quarter are recruited after army service as security guards, prison wardens or border policemen, the latter a paramilitary force operating inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, he said.

“For a substantial section of Druze youth, army service is the only way to ensure a career. It is primarily an economic issue for them.”

Army officers resign

The new Basic Law has inflamed these existing tensions by enshrining privileges for Jewish citizens in a range of key areas, including immigration rights, access to land, and in housing and budgets. It also downgrades Arabic, stripping it of its status as an official language.

In an unprecedented move for a Druze leader, Asad, the general leading the protests, warned on social media that the Basic Law risked laying the foundations for “apartheid”. He called the measure “evil and racist”.

The groundswell of anger was apparent too at a recent awards ceremony attended by Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence service and one of the architects of the law. He needed protection as Druze protesters publicly confronted him, denouncing him as a “traitor” and “Nazi”.

Several Druze army officers have resigned and others have threatened to stop serving, sparking fears of mass insubordination.

Druze leaders have so far refused to cooperate with a special ministerial committee set up by Netanyahu to advance a solution for the Druze, as well as a tiny Circassian community and sections of the Bedouin that also serve.

It seems likely to propose extra benefits on an individual basis for Palestinian citizens who serve in the army.

Jamal, of Tel Aviv University, said: “There are many Druze who have invested in this so-called ‘historical bond’ and do not want to lose their special status.

“But at the same time they can’t accept the deal Netanyahu is offering of perks for army service. They don’t want to look like they have been bought off with money, to seem like mercenaries.”

‘We’re not going anywhere

Unless one side backs down, the Druze community now looks set for a major clash with the government for the first time in the country’s history.

A recent poll indicated that 58 percent of Israeli Jews support the law, though a similar number expressed sympathy for Druze concerns.

Ayelet Shaked, the justice minister, has already warned of “an earthquake” on the political right if the courts dare to annul the law.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has appeared in no mood for compromise. After his meeting with Druze leaders broke up in acrimony, his officials implied that General Asad and his supporters were disloyal.

Channel 2 TV quoted a source close to Netanyahu stating, apparently in reference to Asad and his followers: “Whoever doesn’t like it [the Basic Law], there’s a large Druze community in Syria, and they’re invited to found the state of Druzistan there.”

Dalia Halabi observed: “Netanyahu is fanning the flames because he assumes the Druze will agree to whatever he says. He thinks we now have no option but to be loyal.”

But Mano Abu Salha, aged 58 from Yarka, and among those who attended the mass demonstration in Tel Aviv, told MEE that Netanyahu would be proved wrong.

He said: “We didn’t come from Syria. We are living on our historic lands and we’re not going anywhere. We are the native population. Netanyahu better realise that we are staying put and will fight for our rights.”

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

August 16, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Netanyahu has dug himself into a hole in a graveyard full of untruths

By Yvonne Tidley | MEMO | August 15, 2018

Benjamin Netanyahu has dived headlong into the furore engulfing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, revealing the most blatant meddling to-date by Israel in British politics. What’s more, he’s done it armed with lies and distortions.

The Israeli Prime Minister blasted Corbyn for apparently paying tribute to those behind the 1972 Munich massacre in which 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were killed. The allegations were thrown at Corbyn after photographs emerged in the right-wing media of him attending a wreath-laying ceremony in 2014 at a cemetery in Tunisia.

Incorrect reports suggested that Corbyn had joined a ceremony eulogising the Palestinians who took part in the Munich atrocity. Their bodies, though, are buried in Libya, where they were flown after being killed by German security forces in an ill-fated attempt to rescue the Israeli athletes. A funeral procession was held from Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square to Sidi Munaidess Cemetery back in 1972.

While Corbyn protested that the Israeli leader’s “claims about my action and words are false,” Netanyahu himself had already taken to the social networks. “The laying of a wreath by Jeremy Corbyn on the graves of the terrorists who perpetrated the Munich massacre and his comparison of Israel to the Nazis deserves unequivocal condemnation from everyone – left, right and everything in between,” he wrote on Twitter.

The wreath laying in question was actually marking the 1985 air strike by Israel on the Tunisian capital which was condemned around the globe at the time. Details of exactly what took place at the memorial ceremony have been confirmed by Dr Mohammed Shtayyeh, a minister from the Palestinian Authority who stood next to Corbyn in 2014.

Despite the Labour leader’s efforts to clear his name, a tsunami of condemnation has been raised on the social networks by supporters of Israel and British politicians, including some within Labour ranks who want to oust Corbyn. The direct involvement of both Israel and Netanyahu in the plot to remove Jeremy Corbyn is now apparent following the Prime Minister’s inaccurate contribution to the Twitter storm which has been concocted with a plethora of fake details.

Corbyn was in Tunisia in 2014 for a conference aimed at solidifying relations between the Palestinian factions Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Hamas, which has effectively formed the government in the Gaza Strip since it won the 2006 Palestinian elections. During the conference, delegates went to the Palestinian cemetery at Hammam Chott to pay tribute to those killed in the 1985 Israeli air strike on what was then the PLO headquarters.

Eight fighter jets of the Israeli Air Force took part in the raid on 1 October 1985; the operation was codenamed Wooden Leg. The F-15s took off from Tel Nor airbase near Tel Aviv and flew low over the Mediterranean Sea to avoid detection by Egyptian, Libyan and US radar. The six-minute attack on the PLO HQ in the seaside town killed 47 people, including 15 Tunisian civilians, and injured another 65.

The rogue action was condemned worldwide; even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher joined in by criticising the Israelis, something else that Netanyahu has chosen to forget in his rush to attack Corbyn. The UN Security Council also registered its anger and “condemned vigorously the act of armed aggression” by Israel in Resolution 573 on 4 October. Although the US abstained from the 14-0 vote, it did not use its veto to block the resolution, which branded the deed as an “act of armed aggression perpetrated by Israel against Tunisian territory in flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations, international law, and norms of conduct.” US President Ronald Reagan changed his original position, and instead of calling the bombing a “legitimate response,” he said that it “cannot be condoned.”

In their desire not to let the facts spoil a good story, anti-Corbyn individuals and groups have been posturing and gesturing since the Tunisian photographs were published, and calling on Corbyn to resign. Among them has been Home Secretary Sajid Javid, whose Conservative Party has sought to exploit the controversy by choosing — conveniently some might say — to forget Thatcher’s words at the time of the Israeli air strike on Tunisia. The late Prime Minister’s speech was made on the 40th anniversary of the UN, where she contested the assertion of the then Israeli leader Shimon Peres that the attack was justified.

Archives reveal that at a meeting with Peres, held at the UN Plaza Hotel on 23 October, Thatcher is reported (by Charles Powell) to have said that she had “recoiled” from Israel’s attack on Tunis with the killing of many civilians. “There was no legal or historical justification for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Nor was it right that Israel should now deny the Palestinians the rights which Israel had sought for herself for more than 2,000 years,” she added.

For those left in any doubt at her feelings about the issue, the so-called Iron Lady went on to condemn the Israeli air strike during a meeting in the House of Commons on 29 October when — according to Hansard, the official parliamentary record — she was asked during Prime Minister’s Questions to comment on the Israeli bombing of Tunis. “We have in fact condemned the attack on Tunis,” she told the House.

In conclusion, it is clear that Corbyn did not lay a wreath at the Tunisian graveyard, nor was the event held to commemorate those from the Black September group who carried out the terror attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Their graves are in Libya.

For Corbyn to travel to Tripoli to lay a wreath at the graves of those responsible for the Munich massacre would be regarded as offensive as, for example, Israeli terrorists and their supporters from Irgun gathering annually at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem to celebrate the killing of 91 people, including 28 Britons, in a bomb attack on 22 July, 1946. Oh, but hang on a minute… that’s exactly what has been done in Jerusalem for decades.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) meets with British Prime Minister Theresa May (R) during his official visit in London, UK on 2 November 2017 [UK Prime Ministry/Anadolu Agency]

While most of the perpetrators were not around for the 70th anniversary of the terrorist atrocity in 2016, a plaque was unveiled by former Irgun terror gang members and right-wing politicians at the King David Hotel ten years earlier on the 60th anniversary. It reads: “The hotel housed the Mandate Secretariat as well as the Army Headquarters. On July 22, 1946, Irgun fighters at the order of the Hebrew Resistance Movement planted explosives in the basement. Warning phone calls had been made urging the hotel’s occupants to leave immediately. For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded, and to the Irgun’s regret and dismay 91 persons were killed.”

To kill 91 innocent people and then blame the victims for not acting on the warning is deplorable. But to then go on to hold annual gatherings to commemorate the event and even unveil a plaque on the 60th anniversary is even more disturbing. Netanyahu and Britain’s anti-Corbyn Lobby should tweet about that.

They won’t, of course, because they are fully at ease with Israel acting with impunity. Even, it must be said, to the extent that its Prime Minister commemorates the killing of British citizens by “Jewish terrorists” in 1946, and interferes blatantly in the affairs of an independent sovereign state as part of the efforts to have the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition discredited and thus less likely to win the next General Election. Such interference in British democracy is totally unacceptable; Netanyahu has dug himself into a hole in a graveyard full of untruths, but Britain, as all Members of Parliament must make clear to Israel’s lobbyists, is not the United States of America. His words just won’t wash here.

READ:

UK Labour leader slams Netanyahu’s ‘false’ claims

August 15, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel approves plans to build military colleges in Jerusalem

MEMO | August 15, 2018

Israel’s Jerusalem Municipality Planning and Construction Committee has approved a plan to build military colleges on Palestinian land located in Ein Karem village, southwest of the holy city, Safa reported yesterday.

According to the news site, the Israeli Broadcasting Committee has said that the plan was approved despite strong opposition by the Franciscan Church and its followers who fear the construction will drown Mary’s Spring, which is a holy site for Christians.

Ein Karem is one of the largest and most important villages in Jerusalem. It lies along the highway that connects Jerusalem with Yaffa. Palestinians who inhabited the village were forced out of their homes during the 1948 Nakba.

Occupation forces continue to target Islamic and Christian sites in the occupied Palestinian lands through land expropriation and allocating areas as “military zones”.

August 15, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Israelis leaving and not returning to Israel

MEMO | August 15, 2018

The number of Israelis leaving the country is higher than the number of those who are immigrating, Arab48 reported data from the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) showing.

Data from 2016 showed that 6,300 more Israelis left Israel than those who moved back to the country.

The CBS statistics also showed that between 560,000 and 596,000 Israelis remained abroad at the end of 2016. This number does not include children born outside the country.

According to the data, 53 per cent of the people who left were accompanied by their wives, but only 38 per cent of those who returned brought their wives back with them.

At least 26 per cent of those who left in 2016 emigrated to Israel during the last decade.

The data showed that the average age of those who left Israel in 2016 was 28.3 and 53 per cent of them were male.

In 2016, 8,900 Israelis, from those who remained abroad more than a year, returned to Israel, compared to 8,500 in 2015, including 6,700 Jews and 2,200 non-Jews with an age average of 29.1.

August 15, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | Leave a comment

Israel releases Palestinian mail held since 2010

MEMO | August 14, 2018

Israeli occupation forces yesterday gave the Palestinian Authority tonnes of post which it has been holding since 2010, Felesteen.ps reported.

PA Minister of IT and Communications, Allam Mousa, said in a statement that Israel stopped tonnes of Palestinian mail arriving from Jordan since 2010.

Palestine signed an agreement of direct mail delivery to Jordan with Israel in 2016, noting that agreement was brokered by the Global Mail Union.

He added: “Israel, in violation of international law, has not yet implemented the agreement and does not allow the export or import of mail directly through Jordan.”

Israel controls the movement of Palestinian trade and people through international crossings and borders.

Occupation authorities have also been holding back postal revenues due to the Palestinians worth thousands of dollars, Mousa added.

August 14, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel’s Culture Ministry funds settlers ‘squatting illegally’ in Palestinian home

MEMO | August 14, 2018

Israel’s Culture Ministry has been funding a Jewish religious institute “whose founders illegally took over a Palestinian home in the central West Bank”, reported the Times of Israel.

According to the report, “an investigation into the financials of the Mishpetei Eretz (‘laws of the land’) institute revealed that it has received at least NIS 200,000 ($54,786) annually for the past three years from the Culture Ministry.”

In total, the settlement-based academy has received 781,617 shekels ($214,039) in government funding since 2015.

The state funds have come “despite a 2013 Jerusalem District Court decision concluding that the compound housing the institute still belongs to its original Palestinian owners, and that the settler group claiming to have purchased the building had forged the necessary documents.”

The Israeli army, meanwhile, has not tried “to remove the squatters”, but instead, has “built a fence around the compound with the stated goal of protecting its Israeli inhabitants.”

“We see here another example that reveals the corrupt system that Israel maintains in the West Bank,” the Kerem Navot settlement watchdog said.

“Rather than enforce the law, and evict and punish the settlers who invaded the property, the IDF [army] issued a corrupt military order based on security needs that de facto enables them to stay there.”

In a Facebook post summarising the story, Kerem Navot further slammed Israel’s Culture Minister Miri Regev for “subsidising criminals”.

August 14, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , | Leave a comment

Gaza and the ‘Great March of Return’

Wikimedia Commons/gloucester2gaza
By Ron Forthofer | Boulder Weekly | August 2, 2018

The illegal Israel blockade of Gaza begun in 2007 and the three major Israeli attacks on Gaza since then have created a living hell for Palestinians there. In 2006, before the siege was implemented, Dov Weisglass, senior advisor to then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said the goal for Gaza was “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Despite Israeli claims, Gaza is an occupied territory and, in actuality, Palestinians and their leadership have little control over their lives. For example, Israel, abetted by Egypt, controls all of Gaza’s borders and determines what and who may or may not enter the area. Israel’s control has turned Gaza into what many call the “largest open-air prison in the world” while others call it a concentration camp.

Making matters worse, the two major Palestinian groups, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, have been at odds for years and their in-fighting adds to the incredible hardships Gazans face.

In 2012, the UN issued a report saying that Gaza would be unlivable by 2020. In 2017, the group Save the Children said it considered Gaza to be unlivable then. Among the many things it cited are:

  • Gaza struggling with just two to four hours of electricity per day.
  • 741 schools struggling to function without electricity.
  • Breakdown of health and emergency services putting children’s lives at risk.
  • Water-borne diseases increasing because of power shortages.
  • Environmental disaster due to untreated sewage.
  • Children unable to sleep, study or play.

With the above background, let’s now consider the Palestinian ‘Great March of Return’. This march  is a grassroots-led and mainly peaceful effort despite the media’s attempt to portray it as a cynical and violent Hamas ploy.

The media coverage, besides being biased, is also incomplete in that it seldom considers the reasons that led Gazans to participate in this resistance action and to return week after week. Generally, as shown above, Palestinians in Gaza face dire living conditions. In addition, many have lost confidence in the Palestinian leadership that has been unable to bring about relief. Thus the grassroots are organizing and acting. In particular, Palestinians are:

1) protesting the illegal Israeli siege that will likely bring about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza;

2) standing up for their internationally recognized right of return to their former homes or for compensation for their losses; and

3) protesting the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem.

The Israeli reaction to this mainly peaceful march was to have well-protected snipers firing from long range into crowds and even at people away from the protest. The media desperately tried to justify this reaction.

Only one side was shooting and killing/wounding large numbers of people. Some Palestinians, against the stated desire of the grassroots organizers, have thrown rocks or flown burning kites over the fence setting some fields on fire.

To date, the Israeli snipers have killed 136 Palestinians including women, children, press, doctors and nurses and wounded over 14,000 whereas one Israeli soldier was slightly wounded when hit by a rock.

Unfortunately, perhaps these killings could have been or were foreseen. For example, in 2004, Arnon Soffer, a Haifa University demographer and advisor to Ariel Sharon, said: “when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. … The pressure at the border will be awful. … So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day….If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist.”

This abominable Israeli behavior towards Palestinians will continue as long as the US provides political cover at the UN, vetoing resolutions that would impose any penalties on Israel for its crimes. The most effective current approach for changing Israeli behavior is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.

Israel falsely claims that BDS is anti-Semitic and that BDS is also challenging its legitimacy. Unfortunately, similar to this false claim, the anti-Semitic charge has been so abused, like the boy who cried wolf, that there is an increased risk many will ignore the claim even in cases when the charge is actually warranted.

Regarding Israel’s legitimacy, it is Israel’s own brutal and illegal policies that are delegitimizing it. Support BDS to change this intolerable situation.

– Ron Forthofer, Ph.D. is a retired professor of biostatistics and an activist with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, Boulder, CO.

August 14, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Confronting Israel Is Important

The Jewish state is no friend

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • August 14, 2018

I am often asked why I have this “thing” about Israel, with friends suggesting that I would be much more respected as a pundit if I were to instead concentrate on national security and political corruption. The problem with that formulation is that the so-called “special relationship” with Israel is itself the result of terrible national security and foreign policy choices that are sustained by pervasive political and media corruption, so any honest attempt to examine the one inevitably leads to the other. Most talking heads in the media avoid that dilemma by choosing to completely ignore the dark side of Israel.

Israel – not Russia – is the one foreign country that can interfere with impunity with the political processes in the United States yet it is immune from criticism. It is also the single most significant threat to genuine national security as it and its powerful domestic lobby have been major advocates for the continuation of America’s interventionist warfare state. The decision to go to war on false pretenses against Iraq, largely promoted by a cabal of prominent American Jews in the Pentagon and in the media, killed 4,424 Americans as well as hundreds of thousands Iraqis and will wind up costing the American taxpayer $7 trillion dollars when all the bills are paid. That same group of mostly Jewish neocons more-or-less is now agitating to go to war with Iran using a game plan for escalation prepared by Israel which will, if anything, prove even more catastrophic.

And I can go on from there. According to the FBI, Israel runs the most aggressive spying operations against the U.S. among ostensibly “friendly” nations, frequently stealing our military technology for resale by its own arms merchants. Its notable successes in espionage have included the most devastating spy in U.S. history Jonathan Pollard, while it has also penetrated American communications systems and illegally obtained both the fuel and the triggers for its own secret nuclear weapons arsenal.

Israel cares little for American sovereignty. It’s prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have both boasted how they control the United States. In 2001, Israel was running a massive secret spying operation directed against Arabs in the U.S. Many in the intelligence and law enforcement communities suspect that it had considerable prior intelligence regarding the 9/11 plot but did not share it with Washington. There was the spectacle of the “dancing Shlomos,” Israeli “movers” from a company in New Jersey who apparently had advanced knowledge of the terrorist attack and danced and celebrated as they watched the Twin Towers go down.

Jewish power, both in terms of money and of access to people and mechanisms that really matter, is what allows Israel to act with impunity, making the United States both poorer and more insecure. A well-funded massive lobbying effort involving hundreds of groups and thousands of individuals in the U.S. has worked to the detriment of actual American interests, in part by creating a permanent annual gift of billions of dollars to Israel for no other reason but that it is Israel and can get anything it wants from a servile Congress and White House without any objection from a controlled media.

Israel has also obtained carte blanche political protection from the U.S. in fora like the United Nations, which is damaging to America’s reputation and its actual interests. This protection now extends to the basing of U.S. troops in Israel to serve as a tripwire, guaranteeing that Washington will become involved if Israel is ever attacked or even if Israel itself starts a war. The current U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley is little more than a shill for Israel while America’s Ambassador in Israel David Friedman is an open supporter of Israel’s illegal settlements, which the U.S. opposes, who spends much of his time defending Israeli war crimes.

And here on the home front Israel is doing damage that might be viewed as even more grave in Senator Ben Cardin’s attempt to destroy First Amendment rights by making any criticism of Israel illegal. The non-violent Israel Boycott movement (BDS) has already been sanctioned in many states, the result of intensive and successful lobbying by the Israeli government and its powerful friends.

So if there is a real enemy of the United States in terms of the actual damage being inflicted by a foreign power, it is Israel. In the recent Russiagate investigations it was revealed that it was Israel, not Russia, that sought favors from Michael Flynn and the incoming Trump Administration yet Special Counsel Robert Mueller has evidently not chosen to go down that road with his investigations, which should surprise no one.

Noam Chomsky, iconic progressive intellectual, has finally come around on the issue of Israel and what it means. He has always argued somewhat incoherently that Israeli misbehavior has been due to its role as a tool of American imperialism and capitalism. At age 89, he has finally figured out that it is actually all about what a parasitic Israel wants without any regard for its American host, observing on “Democracy Now” that

… take, say, the huge issue of interference in our pristine elections. Did the Russians interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I mean, in most of the world, that’s almost a joke. First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done… I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015….

Politicians are terrified of crossing the Jewish lobby by saying anything negative about Israel, which means that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu always gets a pass from the American government, even when he starves civilians and bombs hospitals and schools. Netanyahu uses snipers to shoot dead scores of unarmed demonstrators and the snipers themselves joke about their kills without a peep from Washington, which styles itself the “leader of the free world.”

Just recently, Israel has declared itself a Jewish State with all that implies. To be sure, Israeli Christians and Muslims were already subject to a battery of laws and regulations that empowered Jews at their expense but now it is the guiding principle that Israel will be run for the benefit of Jews and Jews alone. And it still likes to call itself a “democracy.”

A recent television program illustrates just how far the subjugation of America’s elected leaders by Israel has gone. British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is featured on a new show called “Who is America?” in which he uses disguises and aliases to engage politicians and other luminaries in unscripted interviews that reveal just how ignorant or mendacious they actually are. Several recent episodes remind one of a February 2013 Saturday Night Live skit on the impending confirmation of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. A Senator asks Hagel. “It is vital to Israel’s security for you to go on national television and perform oral sex on a donkey… Would you do THAT for Israel?” A “yes” answer was, of course, expected from Hagel. The skit was never aired after objections from the usual suspects.

Baron Cohen, who confronted several GOP notables in the guise of Colonel Erran Morad, an Israeli security specialist, provided a number of clues that his interview was a sham but none of the victims were smart enough to pick up on them. Cohen, wearing an Israeli military uniform and calling himself a colonel, clearly displayed sergeant’s stripes. Hinting that he might actually be a Mossad agent, Cohen also sported a T-shirt on which the Hebrew text was printed backwards and he claimed that the Israeli spy agency’s motto was “if you want to win, show some skin.”

Cohen set up Dick Cheney by complimenting him on being the “the king of terrorist killers” before commenting that “my neighbor in Tel Aviv is in jail for murder, or, as we call it, enhanced tickling.” Morad went on to tell Cheney that he once waterboarded his wife to check for infidelity and then convinced the former Vice President to sign a “waterboarding kit” that “already had” the signatures of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon and Demi Lovato.

Another more spectacular sketch included a Georgia state senator Jason Spencer who was convinced to shout out the n-word as part of an alleged video being made to fight terrorism. After Cohen told Spencer that it was necessary to incite fear in homophobic jihadists, Spencer dropped his pants and underwear, before backing up with his exposed rear end while shouting “USA!” and “America!” Spencer also spoke with a phony Asian accent while simulating using a selfie-stick to secretly insert a camera phone inside a Muslim woman’s burqa.

In another series of encounters, Cohen as Morad managed to convince current and ex-Republican members of Congress — to include former Senate majority leader Trent Lott — to endorse a fictional Israeli program to arm grade school children for self-defense.

Cohen’s footage included a former Illinois congressman and talk radio host named Joe Walsh saying: “The intensive three-week ‘Kinderguardian’ course introduces specially selected children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semiautomatics and a rudimentary knowledge of mortars. In less than a month — less than a month — a first-grader can become a first grenade-er.”

Both controversial Alabama judge Roy Moore and Walsh were fooled into meeting Cohen to attend a non-existent pro-Israel conference to accept an award for “significant contributions to the state of Israel.” Representative Dana Rohrabacher, meanwhile, also was interviewed and he commented that, “Maybe having young people trained and understand how to defend themselves and their school might actually make us safer here.” And Congressman Joe Wilson observed that “A 3-year-old cannot defend itself from an assault rifle by throwing a ‘Hello Kitty’ pencil case at it.”

Cohen’s performance is instructive. A man shows up in Israeli uniform, claims to be a terrorism expert or even a Mossad agent, and he gains access to powerful Americans who are willing to do anything he says. How Cohen did it says a lot about the reflexive and completely uncritical support for Israel that many American politicians — particularly Republicans — now embrace. This, in a nutshell, is the damage that Israel and its Lobby have done to the United States. Israel is always right for many policymakers and even palpably phony Jews like Colonel Morad are instantly perceived as smarter than the rest of us so we’d better do what they say. That kind of thinking has brought us Iraq, Libya, Syria and the possibility of something far worse with Iran.

Israel routinely interferes in American politics and corrupts our institutions without any cost to itself and that is why I write and speak frequently regarding the danger to our Republic that it poses. It is past time to change the essentially phony narrative. Israel is nothing but trouble. It has the right to defend itself and protect its interests but that should not involve the United States. One can only hope that eventually a majority of my fellow American citizens will also figure things out. It might take a while, but the ruthless way Israel openly operates with no concern for anyone but itself provides a measure of optimism that that day is surely coming.

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.

August 14, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

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