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Report: US rejected UAE request to purchase F-35 fighter jets

MEMO | November 26, 2019

The United States has rejected a request by the United Arab Emirates to purchase the F-35 Stealth Fighters, Israeli Channel 13 reported.

According to the news station Pentagon officials said they would not allow the sale of F-35 Stealth Fighters to the UAE in order to preserve Israel’s qualitative military edge (QME).

According to the channel, the UAE has been seeking to purchase the stealth fighters for more than six years without success.

The US, Channel 13 continued, has a long held policy of upholding Israel’s qualitative military edge, whereby Israel maintains a technological advantage in the region when it comes to defence capabilities.

Israel has recently received two additional F-35 fighter jets amid escalating tensions with Iran in the region.

November 26, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Recognition of a Palestinian state without liberation is an illusion

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | November 26, 2019

During the Berlin European Council summit in 1999, the European Union declared “its readiness to consider the recognition of a Palestinian state in due course” and conditionally dependent upon the Oslo framework, as well as “Israel’s security and Israel’s acceptance as an equal partner in the region.” Two decades later, the EU is still being prompted to recognise a Palestinian state.

The latest recommendation came from Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister, Jean Asselborn, as a reaction to the US reversing its official position over the legality of Israeli settlements. However, Asselborn himself emphasised the limitations of such a move, describing it as “a mere recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to [their] own state.” Speaking to Reuters, Asselborn insisted that any such recognition “would not be meant against Israel,” but rather a step towards implementing the two-state paradigm.

In other words, such recognition would merely affirm the EU’s consistency with its foreign policy. By no means is EU recognition of a Palestinian state meant to advance Palestinian liberation. Furthermore, the constant political reactions to the US and Israel advancing colonial expansion in Palestine is rendering any possible significance of recognition negligible.

The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) highlighted reasons why the European Parliament should vote in favour of a Palestinian state, mentioning, among other things, the “significant EU financial investment in the two-state solution”. Of particular significance is how the ECFR ties recognition of a Palestinian state to Israel’s purported legitimacy as evidenced by its statement that, “Recognising a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders reaffirms the EU’s support for the two-state solution and the legitimacy of Israel.” Furthermore, the ECFR opined that such recognition would “likely have a restraining influence” on Palestinians resorting to armed resistance. The Council maintained that in the event of “no progress with Israel, at least all is not lost in the world and that their [the Palestinian] leadership can deliver a diplomatic success.”

What the ECFR fails to mention is that diplomatic successes for Palestinians, conditioned as they are by powerful institutions aligned with Israeli demands, are responses as opposed to claims for rights. The fact that the Palestinian Authority is at the helm, endorsing this labyrinth of half-truths that protects Israel at all costs, creates bleak prospects for the people of Palestine. It is one thing to advocate for the two-state paradigm, and another to impart what the PA is grovelling for at an international level, namely prioritising Israel’s presence and security narrative at the expense of Palestinian land and people, which is what the two-state compromise is all about, as the ECFR spells out.

Even if it were to issue such recognition, the EU will not step away from its commitment to maintain Palestinians as a humanitarian project. State recognition without its equivalence in terms of land, sovereignty and liberated people is as deceptive as the state-building which the EU funds the PA for, in return for its complete acquiescence to the two-state paradigm which keeps Palestinians stateless. Without changing its politics, EU rhetoric and drawn-out symbolic concessions will only serve to highlight the fact that a Palestinian state without Palestinian liberation is an illusion.

November 26, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

US harassing Iran on behalf of Israel

Press TV – November 25, 2019

A political analyst says the latest move by the US to call on social media networks to block the accounts of Iran’s leaders is part of Washington’s usual pattern of “harassing Iran on behalf of Israel.”

Brian Hook, special US representative for Iran, has recently urged Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to block the accounts of Iranian government leaders over an Internet blackout that began in the country following riots over fuel price hikes.

Tehran says it had to restrict access to the Internet to prevent “saboteurs” from using online services like navigation and maps to coordinate their activities in large cities across the country.

The government nevertheless has begun reestablishing Internet connectivity after around 100 of the ringleaders of the riots were apprehended.

In an interview with Press TV on Sunday, Walt Peretto said “this latest move by the State Department follows the usual pattern of the US harassing Iran on behalf of Israel and their New World Order overlords and the rest of global organized psychopathy.”

He said the US cannot invade “a nation like Iran that remains strong and independent,” so “instead, they harass them with rhetoric and propaganda, sanctions, nuclear agreements that they renege on.”

He went on to say that “hypocrisy and lies are as common as breathing with the officials in the State Department and White House.”

“On one hand the US has a mainstream media that is completely Zionist run, while independent sources of information particularly on social media and YouTube are harassed and often censored when truthful information becomes an irritant to the globalist overlords.”

“In the minds of the general public that receives its news and information from mainstream sources, the US is actually fighting censorship by reprimanding Iran for reacting in the way it chose in order to quell destructive protests, when in fact censorship is standard everyday practice in the US mainstream media and now harassment and censorship is increasingly becoming a problem with independent media based mostly on the internet. There is nothing that the globalist psychopaths fear more than the dissemination of the truth,” he stated.

November 25, 2019 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

World Jewish Congress: Billionaires, Oligarchs, Global Influencers for Israel

Billionaire Mikhael Mirilashvili and his son Yitzhakis with Israeli minister Yaffa Deri.
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | November 24, 2019

The World Jewish Congress (WJC), which calls itself “The Representative Body of over 100 Jewish Communities Worldwide,” held its annual gala at the Pierre hotel in New York City on Nov. 6.

It bestowed its annual Theodor Herzl Award (named after Israel’s founding father) on former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley for her work on behalf of Israel. Some previous awardees have been Joe Biden and Henry Kissinger.

One of the WJC’s main issues is support for Israel. Among its many activities in this realm, it collaborates with the Israeli government to defend Israel from criticisms of its human rights abuses and discriminatory system.

The WJC defines many factual statements about Israel to be “antisemitic,” and labels legitimate opposition to Israeli violence and oppression against Palestinians “antisemitism.” As a result, its top issue, combating “antisemitism,” often consists of efforts to suppress information about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and to combat efforts on behalf of Palestinian human rights.

At one of its recent international conferences to oppose this newly defined “antisemitism,” US Special Envoy Elan Carr proclaimed that every law enforcement office and every prosecutorial agency throughout the world must “force everybody who has even a hint of antisemitism to undergo a tolerance program.” … continue

November 24, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Umbrella Man, the Sins of the Father, and the Kennedy Curse

By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • November 22, 2019

I first heard of the so-called “Umbrella Man” from a commenter to my unz.com article “Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?” (thanks again). It is one of the most puzzling pieces in the JFK assassination file. An intriguing introduction to it is this short interview of Josiah Thompson filmed by Errol Morris for the New York Times, on the 48th anniversary of his death:

Or view on Vimeo.

This film is interesting because, besides presenting the facts accurately, it illustrates the kind of “cognitive dissonance” they can produce, leading reasonable people to believe an implausible but harmless and comforting explanation, rather than a more logical but deeply disturbing one. In that case, it seems that normally programmed brains will reject vigorously, as unspeakable and therefore unthinkable on the conscious level, the notion that John Kennedy’s assassination can possibly have anything to do with his father’s appeasement policy in 1938, despite the fact that that notion has been deeply ingrained in our subconscious mind through the twin Jewish mythemes of “The Sins of the Father” and “The Kennedy Curse”, as illustrated by those two books:

The “sins of the father” is a not-so-subtle reference to Exodus 20:5:

“I, Yahweh, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”

Chief among Joe Kennedy’s sins was, of course, that “he was a documented anti-Semite and an appeaser of Adolf Hitler” (publisher’s presentation of Kessler’s book).

The “Kennedy Curse” is a quasi kabalistic attempt to explain how the Kennedys were “on a fatal collision course with reality” because they “made the fatal mistake of thinking of themselves as divine.” By implication, their assassinations are to be blamed on their “self-defeating behavior” (publisher’s presentation of Klein’s book).

Taken together, those twin hasbara refrains evoke a notion of divine punishment. JFK and RFK were punished for the sins of their Jew-hating, Nazi-loving father. Mind you, it was Yahweh who took vengeance, not Israel!

The Umbrella Man fits so perfectly in this mythic narrative! The problem is that myths are not supposed to incarnate themselves so patently in physical reality. The implications are here too disturbing: for no reasonable man can believe that Yahweh supernaturally inspired Louie Steven Witt his “bad joke” (as he called it when interviewed by the special House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978). Then who inspired it?

Such a question is off-limit for Josiah Thompson’s mind. So he simply decided not to see anything “sinister” in the weird fact that he relates. He not only takes Witt’s explanation at face value (“this is just wacky enough, it has to be true!” in other words, credo quia absurdum), but assumes that the strange behavior of the Umbrella Man and JFK’s assassination are unrelated, and happened precisely at the same time and at the same spot by pure quantum physics coincidence.

By setting his mind on that explanation, Thompson obviously feels relieved not to have to get into “conspiracy theories”, because “everybody else got into the conspiracy theories,” and he is above the crowd. I find it hard to explain that this is the same Josiah Thompson who published in 1967 a book titled Six Seconds in Dallas: a micro-study of the Kennedy assassination proving that three gunmen murdered the President, for which he studied the Zapruder film and interviewed eyewitnesses in order to come up with a plausible line of fire, and the conclusion of a conspiracy and government cover-up. What happened to Josiah in between?

Russ Baker has posted on his website WhoWhatWhy a couple of articles in reaction to Thompson’s NYT interview: here and here. Contrary to Thompson, he finds Witt’s explanation literally unbelievable, and opts for the theory of the “signal man”: the Umbrella Man was “signaling the shooters, perhaps that JFK had been hit, perhaps that he still seemed to be alive, perhaps to keep shooting.” That theory, adopted by film director Oliver Stone for his 1991 movie JFK, is of course far more credible than the theory of the fléchette-shooting umbrella that Thompson chose to mention to his own satisfaction. But I must say I find it not entirely convincing. I cannot conceive that professional snipers would need such a conspicuous accomplice, standing almost in their line of fire (in the case of those shooting from the Grassy Knoll).

I also find no reason to doubt, as Baker does, that Witt was the real Umbrella Man. Witt was identified by neighbors and local newsmen before he came forward to the HSCA, and the photos of him on Dealey Plaza seem to match.

Baker borrows from John Simkin of Spartacus Educational the opinion that the umbrella was never the symbol of Chamberlain anyway, and so that Witt’s explanation makes no sense. Baker is wrong on that point, apparently. The umbrella was so much the iconic trademark of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that cartoonist David Low of the London Evening Standard, not only systematically drew him with his umbrella, but even drew him as an umbrella!

Chamberlain, who became a reviled symbol of appeasement (his biography bears the significant title, More Than Munich: The Forgotten Legacy of Neville Chamberlain) was the archetypal Umbrella Man.

According to Edward Miller,

“Umbrella protests first began in England after Chamberlain arrived home from the [Munich] conference carrying his trademark accessory. Wherever Chamberlain traveled, the opposition party in Britain protested his appeasement at Munich by displaying umbrellas.”[1]

Louie Steven Witt declares in his testimony to the HSCA that he had heard that “some members of the Kennedy family” had once been offended in an airport by people brandishing umbrellas. I haven’t found any confirmation that Joseph Kennedy or any other Kennedy had been heckled by open umbrellas as a “silent protest” against their objectionable lack of love for the Jews, but I find it plausible that “the umbrella was a sore spot to the Kennedys,” as Witt put it in his HSCA testimony. So John Kennedy being heckled with Chamberlain’s umbrella at the same time as being assassinated under Ben-Gurion’s order does strike me as both plausible and significant, as a sort of cryptic signature by the Zionist-Irgun mafia.

In my view, summarized here, John Kennedy was assassinated by Israel for three major reasons:

Dimona: President Kennedy, who had made nuclear disarmament his grand mission on the international level, and was on the way to achieve it with Khrushchev (as shown by James Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable), was determined to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb. According to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s interpretation, it was to plunge into the Israeli deep state and supervise Kennedy’s assassination that Ben-Gurion resigned in July 1963 before receiving Kennedy’s ultimatum letter demanding inspections of Dimona.

American Zionist Council: John Kennedy and his Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright (whom Kennedy had been prevented to name as Secretary of State) aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a “foreign agent” subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would have rendered its lobbying division, the AIPAC, near powerless. On October 11, 1963, the AZC received a formal demand from RFK’s office to register within 72 hours (details here).

Nasser: Kennedy unequivocally supported Arab nationalism in 1957 as a senator,[2] reversed Eisenhower’s foreign polity in a pro-Nasser way (as documented by Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012), and committed the U.S. to support U.N. Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. That was a major threat to Zionist interests, who had bet on making Nasser an enemy of the United States.

To these reasons for assassinating Kennedy, we must add the opposite reasons for putting Johnson instead in the Oval Office, for Johnson buried both the Dimona and the AZC proceedings, and cut U.S. support for Nasser’s in order to boost support to Israel. In 1967, he would commit high treason against his own country by allowing and covering-up Israel’s failed false-flag attack on the USS Liberty. No wonder Israel loved Johnson as much as they hated Kennedy.

In the Zionists’ view, JFK’s anti-Israel policies (discreet or secret) were part of a more general “Kennedy problem” that went back to his father’s attempt to prevent WWII by supporting Chamberlain’s appeasement with Hitler rather than Churchill’s appeasement with Stalin. According to German documents declassified in 1949, the German Ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, after meeting U.S. ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy in 1938, wrote that he “understood our Jewish policy completely,” and was “Germany’s best friend” in London.[3] When Roosevelt entered the war, Joseph Kennedy resigned, and later complained privately that, “the Jews have won the war.”[4] According to biographer David Nasaw, Joseph was not an anti-Semite in the racial sense, but rather someone who believed in a Jewish conspiracy to push the United States into an unnecessary war with Germany (Nasaw insists he was mistaken, because “Jewish influence on American foreign influence was negligible, its influence on the State Department nonexistent”).[5]

Zionists had reasons to fear that Joseph Kennedy did “inject some poisonous drops of anti-Semitism in the minds of his children, including his son John’s” (as printed in September 1960 by the Herut, Menachem Begin’s political party).[6] In 1940, John had published a book titled Why England Slept, adapted from his Harvard thesis which was, as the title alluded, a response to Churchill’s 1938 book While England Slept, and a veiled support for his father’s pro-appeasement views. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956), Kennedy had declared his admiration for Senator Robert Taft, who by calling the Nuremberg trials a shameful parody of justice had sacrificed his political career, including his chances for the presidency, rather than build it on hypocrisy. Although Zionists probably didn’t know it until recently, in 1945, JFK had written the following in his diary, as quoted here by Abigail Abrams:

“You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”[7]

Joseph Jr., Joseph Sr., and John Kennedy in 1938

The Kennedys were a family of strong traditions and strong convictions. They had to be destroyed, politically as had Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), and if necessary physically, before they extirpate America from Zionists’ clutches.

Dallas was an Israeli coup, ordered from Tel Aviv with Johnson’s support, and supervised by the local B’nai B’rith under the cover of the Dallas Citizens Council, who was sponsoring Kennedy’s visit, and of whom Abraham Zapruder himself was a member (watch his satisfaction when interviewed two hours after JFK’s assassination in the History Channel documentary JFK – 3 Shots That Changed America , at 43:34).

When trying to make sense of Dallas’ Umbrella Man, we are faced with a dilemma: should we believe Witt’s explanation of his strange behavior (as does Josiah Thompson), or should we consider him an accomplice to the assassination (as does Russ Baker)? Only in the framework of the Israeli theory pioneered by Michael Collins Piper is it possible to surmount the dilemma.

Let’s recap what we know for certain. Fact number 1: on the sunny day of November 22, 1963, one man was standing on the President’s motorcade route with an open umbrella, at the precise moment and place when JFK was shot. To assume that the Umbrella Man’s strange behavior and JFK’s assassination are unrelated is unreasonable. The coincidence is just too improbable.

Fact number 2: In 1978, Louie Steven Witt claimed in front of the HSCA that he was the Umbrella Man and explained that he wanted to heckle JFK about his father’s policy of appeasement of Hitler in 1938.

Although Thompson and Baker disagree about everything else, they agree that there can be no connection between John Kennedy’s assassination and Joseph Kennedy’s appeasement policy. That is where they are both wrong.

Was Louie Steven Witt a Zionist agent, a sayan? Not necessarily. Operations like the JFK assassination are planned on a strict need-to-know basis: no one knows more than he needs to know. Witt declared to the HSCA that he belonged to no organization whatsoever. He summarized his motivation for his “bad joke” in these words:

“In a coffee break conversation someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family. Being a conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him in the liberal camp and I was just going to kind of do a little heckling.”

What would be interesting to know is: who inspired Witt during his coffee break? Did the coffee break take place in the office of Witt’s Jewish boss, director of the Rio Grande National Life insurance Co. in Dallas? Did Witt have insurmountable debts, like Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby? Russ Baker mentions that the company wrote a lot of insurance for the military and was located in the same building that housed the local office of the highly negligent Secret Service.

Mr Witt, would you kindly come forward again and answer a few questions?

Notes

[1] Edward H. Miller, “Umbrella Man”, November 22, 2013, on The Historical Society, on

[2] “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, ‘The New Dimensions of American Foreign Policy’,” University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 1, 1957”; Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 554.

[3] Edward Renehan Jr., “Joseph Kennedy and the Jews”, History News Network; Kellen Perry, – “The Dark Side Of Joe Kennedy Sr.” allthatsinteresting.com, April 17, 2017.

[4] Quoted in Herbert Druks, John F. Kennedy and Israel, Praeger Security International, 2005, p. 10

[5] David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, Penguin, 2015, p. 509.

[6] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2013, p. 252.

[7] Abigail Abrams, “Auction of Rare Diary Highlights What John F. Kennedy Really Thought About Hitler,” Time, March 23, 2017, on

Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State , Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018. (or $30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).

November 22, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Trump Accepts Israeli ‘Realities on Ground’ – Realities Funded by His Administration

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 21, 2019

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week announced yet another radical shift in Washington’s policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by way of saying that the United States “was accepting realities on the ground”.

What the mendacious and cynical Pompeo omits to add is that the Trump administration has been dramatically fueling the change in “realities” – specifically the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory and the demolition of Palestinian homes.

This week the top US diplomat declared that Washington would no longer adopt the international consensus position, backed by several UN resolutions, that Israeli settlement-building and occupation of Palestinian territory was a violation of international law. Washington is henceforth recognizing Israeli settlements as legitimate.

The move overturns more than four decades of official US policy which adhered to the UN-backed position of condemning Israeli occupation in the Palestinian West Bank and in East Jerusalem as illegal and a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Since the 1967 Six War, successive Israeli governments have overseen a relentless process of annexing Palestinian territory. Over that period, Palestinian lands have diminished and become increasingly fragmented with little contiguity that would be normal for a future state. There are estimated to be around 200 Israeli new-build settlements of towns and villages with a population of 600,000 Jewish settlers who have usurped Palestinian land and properties. The UN has repeatedly condemned the annexation and occupation as illegal, to no avail.

The latest move by the Trump administration is a flagrant repudiation of UN resolutions and international law. It follows previous declarations by President Trump recognizing Israeli claims to Jerusalem as its capital, as well as Israel’s annexation of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights.

“Calling the establishment of civilian settlements inconsistent with international law has not advanced the cause of peace,” said Pompeo on Monday. “The hard truth is that there will never be a judicial resolution to the conflict, and arguments about who is right and who is wrong as a matter of international law will not bring peace.”

That is an astounding dereliction of international law by the American government. The “hard truth” that Pompeo ignores is that US administrations have constantly undermined “judicial resolution of the conflict” because they have, to varying degrees, over the decades pandered to Israeli criminal occupation of Palestinian lands.

What the Trump administration is doing is not entirely unprecedented. Successive American presidents have merely paid lip service to a supposed peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, declaring their support for a “two-state solution” and presenting Washington as some kind of “honest broker”. The reality is that Washington has consistently undermined Palestinian national rights by its systematic bias towards Israel, indulging the latter’s criminal policies of occupation and military aggression towards Palestinian population.

However, Trump and his coterie of Middle East aides have taken the American bias and complicity with Israel to naked levels. Part of that is no doubt payback for the multi-million-dollar funding of Trump’s 2016 election campaign by Jewish-American billionaire and arch-Zionist Sheldon Adelson.

Israeli peace groups have recorded a surge in Israeli expansion of settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the past three years of the Trump administration. Demolition of Palestinian homes by Israeli bulldozers are at a record high.

There is an imperative business reason for this. President Donald Trump has personally invested in Israeli settlements, as have his ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and the White House’s special envoy to the region, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

One of those settlements is at Beit El which is described as “one of the most aggressive” in terms of expansionist scope. It overlooks the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the West Bank which is supposed to be the administrative seat of the Palestinian Authority.

Trump, Friedman and the Kushner family have in the past funneled millions of dollars into Beit El and other Israeli settlements. In return, Israeli financial companies have made huge investments in Jared Kushner’s family real-estate business back in the US. For example, Menora Mivtachim, a pension and insurance firm, invested $30 million in apartments in Maryland owned by the Kushner family.

Jared Kushner officially stepped away from his family’s property conglomerate when he was appointed by his father-in-law as special envoy on the Middle East “peace process”. But few would believe his future wealth will not benefit from investments in and from Israel. He is still a beneficiary of trusts that have holdings in Kushner properties, notes Haaretz newspaper.

It seems incredible given this blatant conflict of interest that Kushner has been tasked with producing a “peace plan” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Trump had previously boasted about as being the “deal of the century”. That plan has since wilted to non-existence. The media don’t even talk about its expected publication, so far off the radar is it.

The latest move by the Trump administration to effectively reward and accelerate further Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory has American self-interest and profit written all over it. It mirrors Trump’s declaration in March this year recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, where there is irrefutable evidence that Trump and the Zionist clique in the White House have major business interests in oil exploration and production in that contested region.

Russia warned this week that Washington’s policy is inflaming further conflict amid an intensification of air strikes by Israel on Gaza where more than 30 people have been killed over the past week, including one Palestinian family of three adults and five children. The bloodshed makes Pompeo’s announcement all the more repulsive.

The Arab League and the European Union have also condemned the unilateral rejection of international law by the US. Jordan, Egypt and other Arab states said the United States has forfeited its right to act as a peace broker in the region.

The “reality on the ground” – to use a talking point favored by Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and now Mike Pompeo – is that the US is an accomplice in Israel’s illegal occupation and war crimes. Even more heinous, the US policy is being driven by Trump’s family business profits.

November 21, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , | Leave a comment

UN Security Council members strongly condemn Trump’s support for Israeli settlements

Press TV – November 21, 2019

The European Union, Russia, China and other members of the UN Security Council on Wednesday strongly opposed the US announcement that it no longer considers Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank to be a violation of international law.

Nickolay Mladenov, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, opened the Security Council meeting, expressing “regret” at the US action and reiterating the UN position that settlements under a December 2016 council resolution “are a flagrant violation under international law.”

Indonesian Ambassador Dian Triansyah Djani, whose country has the world’s largest Muslim population, called the US announcement “irresponsible and provocative,” saying it “incontrovertibly constitutes a de facto annexation and is a barrier to peace efforts based on the two-state solution.”

Following the Security Council meeting, ambassadors from the 10 non-permanent council members who serve two-year terms stood before reporters while Deputy German Ambassador Jurgen Shultz read a critical joint statement.

“Israeli settlement activities are illegal, erode the viability of the two-state solution and undermine the prospect for a just, lasting and comprehensive peace” as affirmed by the 2016 council resolution, the statement said.

It also called on Israel to end all settlement activity and expressed concern at calls for possible annexation of areas in the West Bank.

Kuwaiti Ambassador Mansour al-Otaibi, the Arab representative on the council, then told reporters that 14 countries agreed in the private session on the press statement.

Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour also said he was grateful to the 14 council nations and their commitment to international law, saying that all 193 UN member nations are required to implement all Security Council resolutions, including on the illegality of all settlements.

“The US administration once again makes another illegal announcement on Israeli settlements in order to sabotage any chance to achieve peace, security and stability in our region and for our people,” Mansour said.

“We strongly reject and condemn this unlawful and irresponsible declaration; we consider it to be null legally, politically, historically and morally.”

Before the meeting, British Ambassador to the UN Karen Pierce had told reporters that “all settlement activity is illegal under international law and it erodes the viability of the two-state solution and the prospects for a lasting peace.”

She was speaking on behalf of Germany, France, Poland, Belgium and Britain, the EU’s current Security Council members.

The meeting was held two days after an announcement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reversed a four-decade-old US position on illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The move was welcomed by Israel but drew condemnation from Palestinians and Arab leaders.

The shift has been widely interpreted as a green light for Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank.

November 20, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Palestinian Journalist Loses Left Eye after Being Shot by Israeli Sniper

Palestine Chronicle – November 20, 2019

Doctors at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem yesterday removed the eye of Palestinian photojournalist Moath Amarneh who was shot by an Israeli sniper on Friday.

A committee of specialists decided that Amarneh’s left eye must be removed along with the bullet which is logged in it. Surgery to do this took several hours.

His family said they had contacted hospitals in a number of countries in the hope of saving his eye but no medical centers were hopeful that this could be done.

Meanwhile, a group of Palestinian journalists organized a protest in solidarity with Amarneh in Bethlehem, but the Israeli occupation forces used force to disperse them.

Amarneh, 32, was shot by an Israeli occupation soldier while he was covering Palestinian protests in Hebron, south of the occupied West Bank.

Witnesses said that he was shot by a sniper, but the Israeli occupation army said he was shot accidentally as he was standing among the “rioters”. … Videos

November 20, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Trump Goes to Israel: Another Settler from the United States?

By Philip Giraldi | American Herald tribune | November 19, 2019

President Donald Trump’s lack of any precision when he speaks or tweets sometimes means that multiple meanings can be construed from what he chooses to say or write. At a private gathering last week in which he was wooing potential Orthodox Jewish donors, he responded to a blessing from a rabbi with what he thought to be a joke. Fighting for his political life in the middle of an impeachment process, he observed that if things do no go well in the United States, he could always move to Israel and run for office, saying “if anything happens here, I’m taking a trip over to Israel. I’ll be prime minister.”

The fund-raiser at the Intercontinental Hotel in Manhattan was arranged by the America First Super PAC. Trump’s son-in-law and principal adviser Jared Kushner and his special representative for international negotiations Avi Berkowitz, both Orthodox Jews, also were in attendance. Numerous Trump supporters were present in the ballroom and began shouting out “Four more years!” when the president rose to speak. Rabbi Y.Y. Jacobson offered a blessing, saying “Blessed are you, our Lord, King of the universe, that you have shared of your glory and love and compassion with a human being who maintains the honor of every innocent person and Jew. Thank you, amen.”

The Trump joke appeared to be based on media reports that he enjoys an approval rating of 98% among Jewish voters in Israel, the only country in the world where he has a favorable rating. And he was also presumably referring to the fact that Israel has had two deadlocked elections and may be heading for a third due to the fact that neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor his opponent Benny Gantz seems able to pull  together a governing coalition. Trump quipped in his usual self-serving fashion, “What kind of a system is it over there, right, with Bibi? They’re all fighting and fighting. We have different kinds of fights, but at least we know who the boss is. They keep having elections, and nobody’s elected.”

The president also spent some time affirming his complete support for the Jewish state, citing how it was at that moment defending itself from missile attacks coming from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group and Hamas in Gaza. He also recalled for the potential donors his unilateral (and illegal) recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and his decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear program. As expected, the audience cheered.

Also, in a statement that should offend and serve as a wake-up call for all of America’s remaining Arab friends, Trump described how he was able to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He claimed that when he received calls from Arab leaders objecting to the proposed shift, he refused to speak to them, saying to his aides “Just tell them I’m very busy, I’ll call them back. And then I did it, we got it done, it’s done. And then I announced it, and then I went into the office, I made about 25 calls…. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s done already; there’s nothing I could do about it.’ It’s much easier. I say, ‘I’m sorry, I wish I could have gotten back to you sooner.’”

So, on the surface it was a complete rah-rah evening among friends, saying wonderful things about Israel and dumb things about Arabs while also bringing in $4 million in donations from the Orthodox Jewish businessmen who made up most of the audience. But at the same time, the Trump remark about moving to Israel and being elected prime minister can be construed as having a darker meaning as Israel is, in fact, a settler state that illegally has dispossessed the original residents of the country and replaced them. Foreign Jews can move to Israel and become citizens automatically under the “law of return” but the people who used to live on that land cannot go to their homes. Trump, who joked about moving and becoming Israeli, described in his usual caustic, off-hand fashion the racist reality of the Jewish state.

Donald Trump might not have been in such a humorous mood if he had considered the fact that while he is wildly popular in Israel because he gives the Israeli Jews everything they want, he continues to be mistrusted and not very well received by American Jews, who continue to vote for and provide most of the funding for the Democratic Party. Some Israelis and many American Zionists have even come to the conclusion that Trump is not to be relied upon when he pledges total support for the Jewish state. They point to the recent White House decision to pull out of Syria, which was made in consultation with Turkey, which the Israelis regard as a hostile power, and without any input from Israel. The fact that Trump then reversed himself also has been noted as characteristic of his basic unreliability.

Some Israelis and their think tank associates in the United States have also expressed particular concern over the fact that Trump and Netanyahu, who still heads the interim government, have not even spoken over the phone in weeks. As Trump’s policy making style is best described as impulsive, there is concern that he will make bad decisions from the Israeli perspective. It is often noted that the Administration’s desire to confront Iran appears to have waned and will probably be even less evident as the 2020 election approaches. Some observers have also cited the example of the betrayal of the Kurds, suggesting that Trump might be inclined to abandon Israel and its other allies in the Middle East in the same fashion.

To be sure, Donald Trump has done everything possible to pander to American Zionists and to Israelis and it is clear that he considers Jews to be a group that has to be courted, if only due to their influence over the media and their willingness to donate large sums to political causes. Israeli concerns that he will pull the plug on them are overstated to put it mildly given their control over Congress and the media. As long as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson continues to be willing to donate $100 million to the GOP every two years, the status quo is guaranteed. But there remains a long-term problem due to the fact that American Jews are overwhelmingly politically liberal and they do not like Trump, no matter what he does for Israel. And Adelson is reported to be in poor health. If he dies and the cash flow dies with him, Trump’s view of Israel just might change dramatically.

November 19, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Holocaust Training for American Police

Law enforcement copies Israeli brutality

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • November 19, 2019

Jewish groups in the United States are adept at creating mechanisms that benefit themselves and also frequently Israel at the expense of the American taxpayer. The proliferating holocaust museums are a good example, sometimes built by private donations but then paid for and operated by the local government. The national holocaust museum in Washington is, for example, supported by the taxpayer to the tune of $54 million per year. When one considers that the so-called holocaust occurred nearly eighty years ago and did not involve the United States at all, it is a remarkable achievement to so memorialize the claimed uniqueness of Jewish suffering, which then is used to justify other abuses and excuse Israel’s ongoing war crimes.

For those who deny that claims of the uniqueness of Jewish suffering are exploited and even promoted in order to be able to influence public opinion while also obtaining special favors from government, one might cite specific instances where that has most definitely been the case. Jewish organizations receive over 90% of discretionary grants from the Department of Homeland Security, for example, and Israel benefits from $1.8 billion in aid annually plus another $10 billion through bogus charities, trade concessions and U.S. government funded projects approved by Congress that the American public knows little or nothing about.

And benefiting Jews worldwide is also part of the agenda. Apart from the creation of the state of Israel itself, which was opposed by most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, the first major effort to condition U.S. foreign policy to benefit Jews specifically came with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1975, which made some aspects of relations with the Soviet Union conditional on that country’s willingness to let Jews emigrate. Far more outrageous was the so-called Lautenberg Amendment enshrined in the 1990 Public Law 101-167 that granted refugee status to Russian Jews even though they were not actually being persecuted or in any way endangered. The refugee status is significant as it provided food stamps, housing, social security, Medicaid and educational benefits along with a free ticket into the U.S. to an “estimated… 350,000 to 400,000 Jews [who] entered the United States …”

Holocaust education is mandatory in the public schools of 15 states and Jewish groups are active in determining just what appears in textbooks about Israel, which means that the propagandizing about Jews and Israel begins early and continues throughout one’s education. Twenty-seven states have laws criminalizing or otherwise punishing anyone who advocates boycotts of Israel while the federal government has similar legislation in the pipeline and has declared that criticism of Israel is ipso facto anti-Semitism.

Given all of that it is perhaps not surprising to learn that policemen in Tampa Florida are now undergoing “holocaust training,” sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League. Conveniently, there is a holocaust museum located just down the road in St. Petersburg where the first group of officers was taken to be indoctrinated.

The training is mandatory and is reported to be the first in the state of Florida, though more such initiatives will likely be in the pipeline as governor Ron DeSantis has declared himself to be the most pro-Israel head of any state in the U.S. The newscaster discussing the training also observed in passing that “holocaust awareness training” has been mandatory “for about a decade” for all federal law enforcement officers. It is difficult to imagine what such training is intended to do in the American context, though it clearly seeks to remind trainees that in Nazi Germany policemen were involved in concentration camps and the claimed execution of Jews.

One would think that the public will eventually arrive at an “enough already” point when it comes to government and private sector efforts to exploit the holocaust and monetize Jewish suffering. Unless the Jewish creators of the “training” program honestly believe that something like Germany 1939-45 is coming to the United States and are intent on giving a warning, it would seem to be yet one more tip of the hat to Jewish power in America, quite likely also intended to send a positive message about what Israel represents. What it all has to do with U.S. national security or in benefiting the American people is, of course, irrelevant.

Joint training programs run in Israel are also being used to indoctrinate American police forces and are equally difficult to comprehend as the Israelis are clueless when it comes to conducting investigations or protecting all of their country’s citizens. Israel’s cops are at the forefront of state violence against Palestinians as well as serving as protectors of rampaging heavily armed settlers who destroy Arab livelihoods so they can steal their land. The Israeli police are also quite good at using the “Palestinian chair” for torture when they are not shooting Arab teenagers in the back, skills that American cops hopefully will not emulate.

In fact, there have been suggestions that certain policemen might well be picking up some unanticipated pointers from the Israelis. Georgia has been experiencing a surge in officer involved shootings, nearly half of the victims being unarmed or shot from behind. As this has unfolded, the state continues to pursue a “police exchange” program with Israel run through Georgia State University.

The police “exchange programs” began twenty-seven years ago in 1992 and are paid for through grants from the U.S. Department of Justice as well as from the state and local governments. Reportedly “law enforcement from [a number of] U.S. states have participated in the program, including those from Tennessee, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.” In some states and local jurisdictions, the Israel exchange program is managed by the Anti-Defamation League, which also sponsors propagandistic seminars on Israeli “counter-terrorism” practices throughout the U.S.

Some states and cities, however, concerned over being linked to Israel’s militarized police forces and their brutal occupation of Palestinian land, are beginning to withdraw from the training program. Recently the Vermont State Police, the Northampton, Massachusetts police department and the Durham North Carolina city police have canceled their planned training in Israel.

There has been particular concern expressed over the Israeli “us-versus-them” dual track mode of policing where the 20% of the country’s citizens that are Arab are regarded as an enemy while the settlers who prey on the Palestinians are automatically protected by police solely because they are Jewish. Lethal force is frequently resorted to on a “shoot-to-kill” basis in any incident involving Arabs and Jews, even when there is no serious threat. Some critics of the training note how that type of policing is basically racial profiling while areas on what was once the Palestinian West Bank and along the Gaza border have become free fire zones for the Israeli army and law enforcement, killing hundreds of Arabs, many of them children. Palestinians injured by policemen or settlers also obtain no redress from the Israeli courts with only 3 per cent of investigations resulting in a conviction.

That some American police forces are now questioning the wisdom of training in an Israel where police officers can freely shoot and kill members of an oppressed religious and ethnic minority should not be a surprise but for the fact that it took so long. That Jewish groups in the United States get away with obtaining taxpayer money to promote an essentially criminal Israeli enterprise is perhaps just as discouraging as it suggests that Jewish power and money will continue to prevail in the brainwashing of the American public. Holocaust training and exchanges in Israel for police officers are shameful ideas, promoted by the usual ambitious government officials who pander to the Jewish lobby for their own personal gain.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

November 18, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | Leave a comment

Israel justice ministry contradicts police on killing of Palestinian

Fares Abu Nab, from Ras Al-Amud in occupied East Jerusalem was shot dead by Israeli police

MEMO | November 18, 2019

Israel’s Justice Ministry has contradicted the police’s account of the killing of a Palestinian, stating that officers shot the man after he had emerged from his vehicle, reported Haaretz.

The ministry’s department responsible for investigating police misconduct announced yesterday that the police officer who shot Fares Abu Nab, from Ras Al-Amud in occupied East Jerusalem, did not in fact shoot the suspect during a car chase, as previously claimed by police.

A gag order has been placed on releasing the name of the police officer involved.

According to police, officers were chasing suspected car thieves when one of the drivers “endangered the lives of policemen and other users of the road”, without specifying how.

“He was shot in order to neutralise the threat he posed,” the original police statement added.

According to Haaretz, yesterday three other Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem were arrested “on suspicion of belonging to the gang of alleged car thieves that included Abu Nab”.

The three men arrived in court “with signs of violence on their bodies”, and their lawyers “said they had been beaten by policemen”.

The paper noted that “six people have died so far this year in incidents that involved the use of force by the police”, but that “none of the policemen involved has yet been indicted”.

Furthermore, “only in two of the six cases did the Justice Ministry department that investigates police misconduct question the policemen as suspects.”

One of these cases was closed, while the other, “the shooting of Ethiopian-Israeli Solomon Teka by an off-duty policeman in Kiryat Haim in June”, is awaiting a decision by the State Prosecutor.

November 18, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Is the Middle East Beginning a Self-Correction?

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 18, 2019

“Two years, three years, five years’ maximum from now, you will not recognize the same Middle East”, says the former Egyptian FM, Arab League Secretary General and Presidential Candidate, Amr Moussa, in an interview with Al-Monitor.

Mousa made some unexpected points, beyond warning of major change ahead (“the thing now is that the simple Arab man follows everything” – all the events). And in reference to the protests in Iraq, Moussa says that Iraq is in “a preparatory stage for them to choose their way as Iraqis — emphasizing that “the discord between Sunni and Shia is about to fade away.”

The present regional turbulence, he suggests, is [essentially] a reaction to the US playing the sectarian card – manipulating “the issues of sect and religion, et cetera, was not only a dangerous, but a sinister kind of policy”. He added however, “I don’t say that it will happen tomorrow, but [the discord between Sunnis and the Shi’a fading away], will certainly happen in the foreseeable future, which will reflect on Lebanon too.”

What we are witnessing in Iraq and Lebanon, he adds, “are these things correcting themselves. It will take time, but they will correct themselves. Iraq is a big country in the region, no less than Iran, no less than Turkey. Iraq is a country to reckon with. I don’t know whether this was the reason why it had to be destroyed. Could be. But there are forces in Iraq that are being rebuilt … Iraq will come back. And this phase – what we see today, perhaps this is the — what can I say? A preparatory stage?”

Of course, these comments – coming from a leading Establishment Sunni figure – will appear stunningly counter-intuitive to those living outside the region, where the MSM narrative – from Colombia to Gulf States – is that the current protests are sectarian, and directed predominantly at Hizbullah and Iran. Certainly there is a thread of iconoclasm to this global ‘Age of Anger’, targeting all leaderships, everywhere. In these tempestuous times, of course, the world reads into events what it hopes and expects to see. Moussa calls such sectarian ‘framing’ both dangerous and “sinister”.

But look rather, at the core issue on which practically all Lebanese demonstrators concur: It is that the cast-iron sectarian ‘cage’ (decreed initially by France, and subsequently ‘corrected’ by Saudi Arabia at Taif, to shift economic power into the hands of the Sunnis), is the root cause to the institutionalised, semi-hereditary corruption and mal-governance that has infected Lebanon.

Is this not precisely articulated in the demand for a ‘technocratic government’ – that is to say in the demand for the ousting of all these hereditary sectarian Zaim in a non-sectarian articulation of national interests. Of course, being Lebanon, one tribe will always be keener for one, rather than another, sectarian leader to be cast as villain to the piece. The reality is, however, that technocratic government exactly is a break from Taif – even if the next PM is nominally Sunni (but yet not partisan Sunni)?

And just for clarity’s sake: An end to the compartmentalised sectarian constitution is in Hizbullah’s interest. The Shi’i – the largest minority in Lebanon – were always given the smallest slice of the national cake, under the sectarian divide.

What is driving this sudden focus on ‘the flawed system’ in Lebanon – more plausibly – is simply, hard reality. Most Lebanese understand that they no longer possess a functional economy. Its erstwhile ‘business model’ is bust.

Lebanon used to have real exports – agricultural produce exported to Syria and Iraq, but that avenue was closed by the war in Syria. Lebanon’s (legal) exports today effectively are ‘zilch’, but it imports hugely (thanks to having an artificially high Lebanese pound). All this – i.e. the resulting trade, and government budget deficit – used to be balanced out by the large inward flow of dollars.

Inward remittances from the 8 – 9 million Lebanese living overseas was one key part – and dollar deposits arriving in Lebanon’s once ‘safe-haven’ banking system was the other. But that ‘business model’ effectively is bust. The remittances have been fading for years, and the Banking system has the US Treasury crawling all over it (looking for sanctionable Hizbullah accounts).

Which brings us back to that other key point made by Moussa, namely, that the Iraqi disturbances are, in his view, “a preparatory stage for them to choose their way as Iraqis … and that will reflect on Lebanon too”.

If the ‘model’ – either economically or politically – is systemically bust, then tinkering will not do. A new direction is required.

Look at it this way: Sayyed Nasrallah has noted in recent days that other alternatives for Lebanon to a US alignment are possible, but have not yet consolidated into a definitive alternative. That option, in essence, is to ‘look East’: to Russia and China.

It makes sense: At one level, an arrangement with Moscow might untie a number of ‘knots’: It could lead to a re-opening of trade, through Syria, into Iraq for Lebanon’s agricultural produce; it could lead to a return of Syrian refugees out from Lebanon, back to their homes; China could shoulder the Economic Development plan, at a fraction of its projected $20 billion cost – and, above all it could avoid the ‘poison pill’ of a wholesale privatisation of Lebanese state assets on which the French are insisting. In the longer term, Lebanon could participate in the trade and ‘energy corridor’ plans that Russia and China have in mind for the norther tier of the Middle East and Turkey. At least, this alternative seems to offer a real ‘vision’ for the future. Of course, America is threatening Lebanon with horrible consequences – for even thinking of ‘looking East’.

On the other hand, at a donors’ conference at Paris in April, donors pledged to give Lebanon $11bn in loans and grants – but only if it implements certain ‘reforms’. The conditions include a commitment to direct $7 bn towards privatising government assets and state property – as well as austerity measures such as raising taxes, cutting public sector wages and reducing social services.

Great! But how will this correct Lebanon’s broken ‘business model’? Answer: It would not. Devaluation of the Lebanese pound (almost inevitable, and implying big price rises) and further austerity will not either make Lebanon a financial safe-haven again, nor boost income from remittances. It is the classic misery recipe, and one which leaves Lebanon in the hands of external creditors.

Paris has taken on the role of advancing this austerity agenda by emphasising that only a cabinet acceptable to the creditors will do, to release crucial funds. It seems that France believes that it is sufficient to introduce reforms, impose the rule of law and build the institutions – in order to Gulliverise Hizbullah. This premise of US or Israeli acquiescence to this Gulliverisation plan – seems questionable.

The issue for Aoun must be the potential costs that the US might impose – extending even to the possible exclusion of Lebanese banks from the dollar clearing system (i.e. the infamous US Treasury neutron bomb). Washington is intent more on pushing Lebanon to the financial brink, as hostage to its (i.e. Israel’s) demand that Hizbullah be disarmed, and its missiles destroyed. It might misjudge, however, and send Lebanon over the brink into the abyss.

But President Aoun, or any new government, cannot disarm Hizbullah. Israel’s newly ambiguous strategic situation (post – Abqaiq), will likely hike the pressures on Lebanon to act against Hizbullah, through one means or another. Were Aoun or his government to try to mitigate the US pressures through acquiescence to the ‘reform’ package, would that be the end to it? Where would it all end, for Lebanon?

And it is a similar conundrum in Iraq: The economic situation though, is quite different. Iraq has one-fifth of the population of neighbouring Iran, but five times the daily oil sales. Yet the infrastructure of its cities, following the two wars, is still a picture of ruination and poverty. The wealth of Iraq is stolen, and sits in bank accounts abroad. In Iraq, it is primarily the political model that is bust, and needs to be re-cast.

Is this Moussa’s point – that Iraq presently is in the preparatory stage of choosing a new path ahead? He describes it as a self-correcting process leading out from the fissures of sectarianism. Conventional Washington thinking however, is that Iran seeks only a Shi’i hegemony for Iraq. But that is a misreading: Iran’s policy is much more nuanced. It is not some sectarian hegemony that is its objective, but the more limited aim to have the strategic edge across the region – in an amorphous, ambiguous, and not easily defined way – so that a fully sovereign Iraq becomes able to push-back against Israel and the US – deniably, and well short of all-out war.

This is the point: the end to sectarianism is an Iranian interest, and not sectarian hegemony.

November 18, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment