| Author | Message | | dangerousdna | | Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 2:53 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=535&Itemid=1
Framing Muslims and Locking Up Their Money
Wednesday, 20 February 2008
by Cynthia McKinney
The U.S. government has for years been engaged in a witch hunt against Muslim charities, seizing assets and persons on little or manufactured evidence of "terrorist" activities. Meanwhile, blatant spying on behalf of Israel goes unprosecuted, and is even rewarded with promotions to the highest, most sensitive levels of government. Human rights cease to exist in a legal free-fire zone in which all things Muslim or Arab are deemed subversive. All pretense of constitutional government vanishes when institutions and individuals are targeted based on ethnicity and religion. The real conspiracy against so-called "American values" is headquartered in U.S. law enforcement and "security" agencies that "wreak fear and terror inside this country's Muslim community."
Framing Muslims and Locking Up Their Money
by Cynthia McKinney
"The government falsified evidence and broke the law while spying on the Foundation."
Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney delivered the following remarks to a banquet for the Dallas Muslim Legal Fund of America.
What I want to talk to you about tonight, is why you must support the Muslim Legal Fund of America even more now than ever before. I know there are some big donors in here, but everyone must donate until you feel it. Then you will know that you did something with your money. You will remember this contribution. And soon enough, you will be glad you did.
That's because we haven't reached a point where human rights are respected in this country. We haven't reached a point where justice rolls down like a might stream in this country. And so, we must be prepared for times of injustice, times of abuse, times of great pain and hurt.
To illustrate my point, I would like you to consider the case of a powerful and famous organization. It had friends that lavished it with money and it learned to use its resources to achieve its goals. Pretty soon, this organization had a multi-million dollar budget. It became very powerful, some said the largest of its kind in the country. Soon, the organization became so effective that people began to take notice. People began to wonder if the organization was really American, advancing American values, or was in service to non-American or even anti-American goals? Eventually, the organization became ensnared in our country's legal system and its supporters were accused of criminal activity. In some cases even treason! People were maligned, had their lives ruined, and some were even jailed.
"We haven't reached a point where human rights are respected in this country."
Imagine, you've got large sums of money, foreign intrigue, political power, a court battle, charges of treason, and nothing written in the newspapers at all about the sordid mess. What's the difference between the Holy Land Foundation and the organization I'm talking about?
For eight long years, the FBI watched the Holy Land Foundation with surveillance that included illegal wiretaps. The government would have had the jury believe that the supporters and the managers of the Holy Land Foundation and just about every other Muslim organization in the United States that was tied into the litigation was guilty of a crime. Millions of dollars later, after wreaking fear and terror inside this country's Muslim community, the jury told the government what the men and women whose lives were on trial already knew. The charges leveled by the government could not stand the jury's scrutiny. So why was the allegation even leveled in the first place? Why did the press parrot the allegations without one moment of questioning whether or not the government could have been as off in its assessments of the Holy Land Foundation as it was in its estimates of pre-war Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?
I would like to take a moment to follow the trail of another trial involving the sale or give-away of U.S. national security secrets to a foreign government; the name of that government is never mentioned; and the litigation never pierces the American psyche due to an effective news blackout. News of this is nowhere to be found while we know in detail the mental state of Brittany Spears.
"Why did the press parrot the allegations without one moment of questioning whether or not the government could have been so off in its assessments of the Holy Land Foundation."
Consider for just a moment what is happening, though unpublicized, today. In case number one, a Pentagon man is found with 83 top secret documents at his home, some of them having been passed to American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who then passed them to Israel - known in the newspapers as Country A. The other case involves the outing of a CIA agent who was tracking nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. This is the case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, that saw the chief of staff of the Vice President of the United States sentenced to prison, only to be later pardoned by the President!
Interestingly, when George Bush came to the White House, he brought with him Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and others. Perle would soon leave because it was learned that he tried to use his position as head of the Defense Policy Board to make money off the War on Terror. Feith, as head of the Office of Special Plans, presided over the most ignominious period in the history of the Pentagon, with it producing faked intelligence, stove piping it to the White House, and then to the American people and the U.S. Congress, sending our young men and women into war in Iraq. Feith left the Pentagon as soon as the investigation into Larry Franklin, his subordinate in his Office, started to get hot. Larry Franklin is now in jail.
When Franklin met with two AIPAC operatives, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, what he didn't know was that every word was being recorded. Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman formed a neat circle. Elliot Abrams at the National Security Council, Dov Zakheim, Comptroller at the Pentagon, Doug Feith number three at the Pentagon in its Office of Special Plans, and Paul Wolfowitz, number two at the Pentagon, closed that circle.
"Perle and Feith were investigated by the FBI for passing secret information to Israel."
Ex-CIA agent Phil Giraldi in "Kill the Messenger" confirms that both Perle and Feith were investigated by the FBI for passing secret information to Israel. He continues, "In no cases, were any of them convicted. The prosecutions were dropped ... in my opinion because of political pressure not to get into this kind of case that involves Israel and espionage." Wolfowitz was under investigation for passing U.S. secrets to Israel through AIPAC.
Spying inside the United States is not new.
In 2001, the FBI discovered new, "massive" Israeli spying operations in the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey," and they began watching Naor Gilon (at the Israeli Embassy), who eventually led them to Franklin.
In 1970 while working for a U.S. Senator, Richard Perle was caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel.
In 1985, the New York Times reports that the FBI is aware of at least a dozen incidents in which classified information is transferred to Israel.
In 1987, the Wall Street Journal headlined that Israel's role in the Iran-Contra scandal would not be investigated by Congress.
In 1993, the Anti-Defamation League is caught operating a massive spying operation on critics of Israel, Arab-Americans, the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, Oakland Educational Association, NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco police. Data collected was sent to Israel and in some cases to South Africa. Pressure from certain organizations forces the city to drop the criminal case, but the ADL settles a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum of cash.
General Karen Kwiatkowski, who quit the Pentagon, wrote that during her time there, Doug Feith gave the Israeli military access to the Pentagon without signing in, in violation of security policy.
"Data collected was sent to Israel and in some cases to South Africa."
And finally, Sibel Edmonds, who has a gag order on her, but she courageously is now speaking, says that Patrick Fitzgerald will find more than just a few guys spying for Israel if he conducts a real investigation. Sibel says that it's basically the same people over and over again and the activities include multi-billion dollar black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes. She says that the beauty of the larger case is that you can start form any angle. [b] If you start from the AIPAC angle, you wind up at the same people. If you start from the Valerie Plame case, you end up with the same people. The FBI probe of Pentagon intelligence activities had as its target Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans. On her website, Sibel Edmonds shows photographs of those involved. I went to her website and I recognized the following photographs:
Retiring former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, retiring Member of Congress Tom Lantos, and Pentagon and State Department officials.
Sibel concludes that the investigations were shut down in 2000 and in 2001 "because they ended up going to higher levels and involving maybe way too many people, US persons. I'm talking about individuals who are breaking the law, misusing the trust and abusing their power, and in some cases I would even say engaging in treason."
Now in the face of all of this, why is it that we have to defend a young Muslim girl, talented at running track, from being put off the team because she wants to cover her body consistent with Islamic practice?
Why is it that Dennis Kucinich gets a visit from representatives of Nancy Pelosi and AIPAC and they tell him that they will guarantee his reelection if he drops his impeachment effort. That tells us, that at the end of the day, AIPAC feels that it can guarantee someone a Congressional seat if the AIPAC agenda is put forward. This exchange, recently made public, might also tell us why impeachment is off the table.
"I'm talking about individuals who are breaking the law, misusing the trust and abusing their power."
Now, by golly, that's power. Especially if they can get away with it in the midst of an investigation that has already put one person in jail and seen Condoleezza Rice on a list of witnesses to be subpoenaed.
[/b]
In the meantime, the newspapers were filled with the news of a 42-count indictment against the Holy Land Foundation that had to be defended. The government falsified evidence and broke the law while spying on the Foundation. The LA Times reported: "The government's allegations not only proved unpersuasive but engendered skepticism among some jurors.
"The whole case was based on assumptions that were based on suspicions," said juror Scroggins, who added: "If they had been a Christian or Jewish group, I don't think [prosecutors] would have brought charges against them."
In Lima, Ohio recently, a young mother was murdered by the police as she held her baby in her arms. Yet the face of terror on your local television news is Muslim and the face of crime is black.
Dr. King reminded us that injustice anywhere was a threat to justice everywhere. What has happened to you is unjust. But what are you going to do about it? My father paid a price because I recognized that all human beings are supposed to have human rights. And I've paid a price, too for believing that.
The Muslim Legal Fund of America gives you an important tool in defense of your rights. And I'm smart enough to know that when your rights are protected, mine are too. So give to the Muslim Legal Fund - give until your bank account knows that you've given. The level of injustice in the world ensures that we'll need it far sooner than we wish.
Cynthia McKinney is a candidate for President of the United States. Go to her campaign web site: http://www.runcynthiarun.org/. | |  | | dangerousdna | | Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 3:31 pm Post subject: |
| Africa: The Final Frontier?
By A. Peasant(A. Peasant)
The February 2008 issue of Commentary Magazine, the official periodical of the American Jewish Committee, has also proposed in an article by Norman Podhoretz that Israel could launch a devastating pre-emptive nuclear attack against Iran ...
Twelfth Bough - http://twelfthbough.blogspot.com/ | | | | dangerousdna | | Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 3:49 am Post subject: |
| Israel: "Iran is TOO a threat! It is, it is, it is, it is, it is is is is is is IS!!! --FK
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/956000.html
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. (Archives)
Last update - 11:37 20/02/2008
MKs to fan out globally to warn of Iran threat
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent and News Agencies
Some 15 Knesset members from a broad spectrum of parties will soon embark on a tour of Europe and the Far East to explain the dangers of Iran's nuclear program and urge that sanctions against the Islamic Republic be intensified.
Sometime in March, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency will meet for another discussion of Iran's nuclear program, and a few weeks later, the Security Council will meet to discuss a third round of sanctions against Tehran, in light of its continued defiance of the council's demand that it cease enriching uranium. Therefore, the next few weeks are critical in drumming up support for harsher sanctions.
Israel's stepped-up lobbying effort is in part a response to the release by the United States late last year of a new National Intelligence Estimate, which claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program. The decision to recruit MKs to help out was made by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik and Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chair Tzachi Hanegbi. The first group of legislators will hold a round of meetings in Europe this week.
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"For the initial stage, we recruited MKs who have knowledge and experience in the diplomatic-security realm, as well as good ties with senior European officials," explained a senior Foreign Ministry official. "MKs also have greater credibility in the Europeans' eyes, since they are seen as independent, not people who follow the government's line."
The politicians were deliberately chosen to represent both coalition and opposition parties.
"It's important for Europeans to see that on this issue, there is a consensus in Israel," the official said.
Meretz Chair MK Yossi Beilin, who arrived in Berlin on Wednesday to meet with German parliament members and government officials, including Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier agreed. "Not all the MKs have the same opinions on diplomatic-security issues, but we all share a concern over Iran's nuclearization," he said.
MK Ephraim Sneh (Labor) and former foreign minister MK Silvan Shalom (Likud) will hold similar meetings in London this week, while MKs Yuval Steinitz (Likud) and Danny Yatom (Labor) are heading for Budapest. In the following weeks, Hanegbi (Kadima), MK Gideon Sa'ar (Likud) and MK Isaac Ben-Israel (Kadima), a former air force major general, will be dispatched on similar missions.
In addition to their official meetings, the MKs will also give briefings to the local media.
To prepare them for the mission, they were given a series of in-depth briefings last week on the latest Israeli intelligence on Iran, as well as on Israel's diplomatic efforts to halt Tehran's nuclear program.
Iran says bringing world powers 'to their knees'
The Iranian president said on Wednesday Iran's determination to continue its disputed nuclear work had brought major powers "to their knees".
In a typically defiant speech as the International Atomic Energy Agency prepared to issue a report on Iran this week, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran would ignore calls by major powers to halt sensitive nuclear work that has led to two rounds of UN sanctions.
"The Iranian nation will not allow any power to trample even on its smallest [national] right," he said in a televised speech to a rally in the southern Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas.
"The Iranian nation's will to continue nuclear work has won over the will of big powers ... [and] brought them to their knees," the president said, to chants by those in the crowd of "Death to America" and "Nuclear energy is our obvious right".
As well as worrying the West, Ahmadinejad's uncompromising speeches have stoked concerns among moderate politicians in Iran, an issue that has come to the fore before the March election for parliament. Critics say the president is pushing Iran into international isolation.
Former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, who is running for a parliament seat, said in remarks published on Wednesday he had quit the post of negotiator over "differences on management mechanism" with Ahmadinejad. He did not elaborate.
The IAEA report is expected to be released this week. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said the agency has made "good progress" in resolving outstanding issues.
UN Security Council members are expected to scrutinize the details in his report before finalising any new sanctions text, which is now being considered.
The final word in nuclear policy lies with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, under Iran's system of clerical rule, but the leader has also said Iran will not stop atomic work.
"Today the agency, which is legally in charge of this case, has prepared a report and announced that Iran's activities are legal and there is no diversion," Ahmadinejad said.
"Big powers should respect the agency and its findings."
The IAEA has been seeking answers to long-standing questions about Iran's program, closing some of its files, under a deal with Iran reached last year, when Larijani was leading the Iranian nuclear negotiating team.
The United States is spearheading efforts to impose more sanctions in Iran for refusing to halt uranium enrichment, the part of Iran's programme that most worries the West because it has civilian and, potentially, military uses.
Russia and China, commercial partners with Iran, have been resisting U.S. moves to toughen penalties.
Iran insists its work is entirely peaceful and only aimed at mastering technology to be used to generate electricity.
Larijani told the Financial Times that Iran had responded to the IAEA to show the country's plans were peaceful. "We have finished answering all their ... questions," he said. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 4:27 am Post subject: Congressman Howard Berman on Israel and the pro-Israel lobby |
| This Israel first hack is replacing Tom Lantos as the chair of House Committee on Foreign Affairs as I am sure that AIPAC is very happy with such!:
Congressman Howard Berman on Israel and the pro-Israel lobby :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6-BGY7X1ro
Additional about Mearsheimer/Walt at the following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/03/17/u-s-middle-east-policy-motivated-by-pro-israel-lobby.php
Look what Tom Hayden wrote about Berman and his brother after the Mearsheimer/Walt paper came out:
Tom Hayden: Things Come ’Round in Mideast:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060718_tom_hayden_things_come_round/
Posted on Jul 18, 2006
By Tom Hayden
Editor’s note: In this essay, veteran social activist Tom Hayden, drawing upon his own rude political awakening to the realities of Israeli and Middle East politics during the 1980s, warns that the Israel lobby in the U.S. aims to “roll back the clock” and “change the map” of the region and that its neoconservative supporters will probably try to use the current Middle East crisis to ignite a larger war against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twenty-five years ago I stared into the eyes of Michael Berman, chief operative for his congressman-brother, Howard Berman. I was a neophyte running for the California Assembly in a district that the Bermans claimed belonged to them.
“I represent the Israeli defense forces,” Michael said. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. Michael seemed to imagine himself the gatekeeper protecting Los Angeles’ Westside for Israel’s political interests, and those of the famous Berman-Waxman machine. Since Jews represented one-third of the Democratic district’s primary voters, Berman held a balance of power.
All that year I tried to navigate the district’s Jewish politics. The solid historical liberalism of the Westside was a favorable factor, as was the strong support of many Jewish community leaders. But the community was moving in a more conservative direction. Some were infuriated at my sponsorship of Santa Monica’s tough rent control ordinance. Many in the organized community were suspicious of the New Left for becoming Palestinian sympathizers after the Six Day War; they would become today’s neoconservatives.
I had traveled to Israel in a generally supportive capacity, meeting officials from all parties, studying energy projects, befriending peace advocates like the writer Amos Oz. I also met with Palestinians and commented favorably on the works of Edward Said. As a result, a Berman ally prepared an anti-Hayden dossier in an attempt to discredit my candidacy with the Democratic leadership in the California state capital.
This led to the deli lunch with Michael Berman. He and his brother were privately leaning toward an upcoming young prosecutor named Adam Schiff, who later became the congressman from Pasadena. But they calculated that Schiff couldn’t win without name recognition, so they were considering “renting” me the Assembly seat, Berman said. But there was one condition: that I always be a “good friend of Israel.”
This wasn’t a particular problem at the time. Since the 1970s I had favored some sort of two-state solution. I felt close to the local Jewish activists who descended from the labor movement and participated in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements. I wanted to take up the cause of the aging Holocaust survivors against the global insurance companies that had plundered their assets.
While I believed the Palestinians had a right to self-determination, I didn’t share the animus of some on the American left who questioned Israel’s very legitimacy. I was more inclined toward the politics of Israel’s Peace Now and those Palestinian nationalists and human rights activists who accepted Israel’s pre-1967 borders as a reality to accommodate. I disliked the apocalyptic visions of the Israeli settlers I had met, and thought that even hard-line Palestinians would grudgingly accept a genuine peace initiative.
I can offer my real-life experience to the present discussion about the existence and power of an “Israel lobby.” It is not as monolithic as some argue, but it is far more than just another interest group in a pluralist political world. In recognizing its diversity, distinctions must be drawn between voters and elites, between Reform and Orthodox tendencies, between the less observant and the more observant. During my ultimate 18 years in office, I received most of my Jewish support from the ranks of the liberal and less observant voters. But I also received support from conservative Jews who saw themselves as excluded by a Jewish (and Democratic) establishment.
However, all these rank-and-file constituencies were attuned to the question of Israel, even in local and state elections, and would never vote for a candidate perceived as anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian. I had to be certified “kosher,” not once but over and over again.
The certifiers were the elites, beginning with rabbis and heads of the multiple mainstream Jewish organizations, especially each city’s Jewish Federation. An important vetting role was held as well by the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), a group closely associated with official parties in Israel. When necessary, Israeli ambassadors, counsels general and other officials would intervene with statements declaring someone a “friend of Israel.”
In my case, a key to the “friendship issue” was the Los Angeles-based counsel general Benjamin Navon. Though politics drew us together, our personal friendship was genuine enough. I think that Benny, as he was called, wanted to pull me and my then-wife, Jane Fonda, into a pro-Israel stance, but he himself was an old-school labor/social democrat who personally believed in a negotiated political settlement. We enjoyed personal and intellectual time together, and I still keep on my bookshelf a wooden sculpture by his wife, of an anguished victim of violence.
The de facto Israeli endorsement would be communicated indirectly, in compliance with laws that prohibit foreign interference in an American election. We would be seen and photographed together in public. Benny would make positive public statements that could be quoted in campaign mailings. As a result, I was being declared “kosher” by the ultimate source, the region’s representative of the state of Israel.
Nevertheless, throughout the spring 1982 campaign I was accused of being a left-wing madman allied to terrorism and communism. The national Democratic leader Walter Mondale commented jokingly during a local visit that I was being described as worse than Lenin. It was a wild ride.
I won the hard-fought primary by 51% to 45%. The Bermans stayed neutral. Willie Brown, Richard Alatorre and the rest of the California Democratic establishment were quietly supportive. I easily won the general election in November.
But that summer I made the mistake of my political career. The Israel Defense Forces invaded Lebanon, and Benny Navon wanted Jane and me to be supportive. It happened that I had visited the contested border in the past, witnessed the shelling of civilian Israeli homes, and interviewed Israeli and Lebanese zealots—crazies, I thought, who were preaching preventive war. I opposed cross-border rocket attacks and naively favored a demilitarized zone.
Ever curious, and aware of my district’s politics, I decided we should go to the Middle East—but only as long as the Israeli “incursion,” as it was delicately called, was limited to the 10-kilometer space near the Lebanese border, as a cushion against rocket fire. Benny Navon assured me that the “incursion” was limited, and would be followed by negotiations and a solution. I also made clear our opposition to the use of any fragmentation bombs in the area, and my ultimate political identification with what Israeli Peace Now would say.
There followed a descent into moral ambiguity and realpolitick that still haunts me today. When we arrived at the Israeli-Lebanon border, the game plan promised by Benny Navon had changed utterly. Instead of a localized border conflict, Israel was invading and occupying all of Lebanon—with us in tow. Its purpose was to destroy militarily the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) haven in Lebanon. This had been Gen. Ariel Sharon’s secret plan all along, and I never will know with certainty whether Benny Navon had been deceived along with everyone else.
For the next few weeks, I found myself defending Israel’s “right” to self-defense on its border, only to realize privately how foolish I was becoming. In the meantime, Israel’s invasion was continuing, with ardent Jewish support in America.
Finally, a close friend and political advisor of mine, Ralph Brave, took me for a walk, looked into my eyes and said: “Tom, you can’t do this. You have to stop.” He was right, and I did. In the California Legislature, I went to work on Holocaust survivor issues while withdrawing from the bind of Israeli-Palestinian politics. When the first Palestinian intifada began, I sensed from experience that the balance of forces had changed, and that the Israeli occupation was finished. Frictions developed between me and some of my Israeli and Jewish friends when I suggested that Israel must make a peace deal immediately or accept a worse deal later.
It is still painful and embarrassing to describe these events of nearly 25 years ago, but with Israel today again bombing Lebanon and Israeli officials bragging about “rolling back the clock by twenty years” and reconfiguring the Middle East, I feel obliged to speak out against history repeating.
How do I read today’s news through the lens of the past?
What I fear is that the “Israeli lobby” is working overtime to influence American public opinion on behalf of Israel’s military effort to “roll back the clock” and “change the map” of the region, going far beyond issues like prisoner exchange.
What I fear is that the progress of the American peace movement against the Iraq war will be diverted and undermined, at least for now, by the entry of Israel from the sidelines into the center of the equation.
What I fear is the rehabilitation of the discredited U.S. neoconservative agenda to ignite a larger war against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. The neoconservatives’ 1996 “Clean Break” memo advocated that Israel “roll back” Lebanon and destabilize Syria in addition to overthrowing Saddam Hussein. An intellectual dean of the neoconservatives, Bernard Lewis, has long advocated the “Lebanonization” of the Middle East, meaning the disintegration of nation states into “a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties.”
This divide-and-conquer strategy, a brainchild of the region’s British colonizers, is already taking effect in Iraq, where America overthrew a secular state, installed a Shiite majority and its militias in power and now portrays itself as the only protection for Sunnis against those same Shiites. The resulting quagmire has become a justification for American troops to remain.
What I fear is trepidation and confusion among rank-and-file voters and activists, and the paralysis of politicians, especially Democrats, who last week were moving gradually toward setting a deadline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The politics of the present crisis favor the Republicans and the White House in the short run. How many politicians will favor withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq under present conditions? Isn’t this Karl Rove’s game plan for the November elections?
What I know is that I will not make the same mistake again. I hope that my story deepens the resolve of all those whose feelings are torn, conflicted or confused in the present. It is not being a “friend of Israel” to turn a blind eye to its never-ending occupation.
One might argue, and many Americans today might agree, that Hezbollah and Hamas started this round of war with their provocative kidnappings of Israeli soldiers. Lost in the headlines, however, is the fact that the Israelis have 9,000 Palestinian prisoners, and have negotiated prisoner swaps before. Others will blame the Islamists for incessant rocket attacks on Israel. But the roots of this virulent spiral of vengeance lie in the permanent occupation of Palestinian territories by the overconfident Israelis. As it did in 1982, Israel now admits that the war is not about prisoner exchanges or cease-fires; it is about eradicating Hezbollah and Hamas altogether, if necessary by an escalation against Syria or even Iran. It should be clear by now that the present Israeli government will never accept an independent Palestinian state, but rather harbors a colonial ambition to decide which Palestinian leaders are acceptable.
In 1982, Israel said the same thing about eliminating PLO sanctuaries in Lebanon. It was after that 1982 Israeli invasion that Hezbollah was born. I remember Israeli national security experts even taking credit for fostering Hamas and Islamic fundamentalism as safe, reclusive alternatives to Palestinian secular nationalism. I remember watching Israeli soldiers blow up Palestinian houses and carry out collective punishment because, they told me matter-of-factly, punishment is the only language that Arabs understand. Israelis are inflicting collective punishment on Lebanese civilians for the same reason today.
It is clear that apocalyptic forces, openly green-lighted by President Bush, are gambling on the impossible. They are trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in Iraq through escalation in Lebanon and beyond. This is yet another faith-based initiative.
If the American people do not see through the headlines; if the Democrats turn hawkish; if the international community fails to intervene immediately, the peace movement may be sidelined to a prophetic and marginal role for the moment. But we can say the following for now:
Militarism and occupation cannot extinguish the force of Islamic nationalism. Billions in American tax dollars are funding the Israeli troops and bombs.
There needs to be an exit strategy. The absence of any such exit plan is the weakest element of the U.S.-Israeli campaign. Just as the White House says it plans to deploy 50,000 troops on permanent bases in an occupied Iraq, so the Israelis speak of permanently eliminating their enemies, from Gaza to Tehran. The result will be further occupation, resistance and deeper quagmire.
The immediate conflict should not become a pretext for continuing the U.S. military occupation of Iraq. American soldiers should not be stuck waist-deep in a sectarian quagmire. Congressional insistence on denying funds for permanent military bases is a vital first step. Otherwise we will witness a tacit alliance between Israel and the U.S. to dominate the Middle East militarily.
Most important, Americans must not be timid in speaking up, as I was 25 years ago. Silence is consent to occupation. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Feb 24, 2008 3:11 am Post subject: The Israeli Agenda and the Scorecard of the Zionist Power Co |
| The Israeli Agenda and the Scorecard of the Zionist Power Configuration for 2008
James Petras
February 2008
The Israeli Agenda openly defended, publically practiced and aggressively pursued by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) has greatly influenced the US Presidential elections and the likely future course of Washington’s Middle East policy.
The strategy of the Jewish state is the complete Zionization of Palestine, the takeover of land, water, offshore gas (estimated to be worth $4 billion dollars) and other economic resources and the total dispossession of the Palestinian people. Tel Aviv’s tactics have included daily military assaults, giant walls ghettoizing entire Palestinian towns, military outposts and controls undermining commerce and production to force bankruptcy, poverty, severe deprivation and population flight. The second priority of the Israeli colonial state is to bolster the Jewish state’s political and military supremacy in the Middle East, using preposterous arguments of ‘survival’ and ‘existential threats’. The key postulate of Israeli Middle East policy is to destroy or intimidate the principle adversaries of its Zionization of Palestine and its expansionist Middle East policy. In pursuit of that policy, it invaded southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, bombing neighborhoods and critical infrastructure in Beirut and other cities, bombed Syria as a provocation. Earlier the Israeli state played a major role in directing the ZPC in formulating US war policy toward destroying Iraq as a viable nation. Recently Israel, through the ZPC in the US, has engaged in a comprehensive, intense and highly charged political, diplomatic, economic and military campaign to isolate and ultimately destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran as a political counterweight to its ambitions in the Middle East (“Israel: Iran building Nuclear Arms”, Aljazeera February 12, 2008). The principal propaganda tool of the ZPC and its Israeli patrons is to claim Iran represents a ‘military threat’ to Israel, Iraq, the Gulf oil producers and the US. This outlandish charge is repeatedly made by ZPC ideologues. According to the 2008 edition of the International Institute of Strategic Studies Military Balance, Iran’s total defense spending for 2006 was nearly 55% less than Israel despite having ten times the population of the Jewish state and facing hundreds of US- supported terrorist incursions across its borders. Per capita, Israeli military expenditures were 17 times more than Iran ($1,737 per Israeli – not counting US direct military assistance – versus $110 for each Iranian citizen). It is widely acknowledged that Israel has over 200 nuclear weapons capable of striking Iranian population centers while Iran has none. Israel receives over $3 billion US dollars a year in direct US military aid, including the most advanced offensive military technology – while Iran receives no foreign military aid and has little defensive technology. According to US Budgetary Hearings, from 2009 to 2018 Israel will receive a $30 billion dollar package of direct foreign military financing from the US, while Iran will receive nothing from any foreign state.
Contrary to Israeli and ZPC propaganda, the Gulf States, Iraq and many US military commanders do not consider Iran a military threat, but rather a factor in stabilizing the volatile situation. The Gulf States invited Iran to their annual meetings; Iraqi government leaders meet with Iranian officials on trade and security and Saudi Arabia is following a similar course by inviting Iranian leaders to Mecca for the Hadj.
After the destruction of the secular republic of Iraq, the job of the ZPC has been to push for greater US military aggressin against Israel’s perceived adversaries – Iran being the prime target – by massive falsification of the actual correlation of military forces between Israel and Iran.
Israeli and ZPC Intervention in the US Presidential Elections and Economic Policy
The second task of the ZPC in pursuit of Israel’s agenda is to ensure no major political candidate debates or questions Israeli genocidal policies toward the Palestinians and its military ambitions in the Middle East. In the US Presidential election of 2008, the ZPC’s role is to ensure that all major candidates endorse, support and promote the Israeli political agenda, despite its genocidal policies (see Gideon Levy, “The Lights have been turned off”, Haaretz February 4, 2008) and repudiation of international law. The ZPC has imposed on all Presidential candidates Israel’s bellicose posture toward Iran, and its explicit policy of liquidating Hamas political leaders. According to Israeli Minister of Housing and construction, Zeev Boim, “all members of Hamas political leadership are involved in terrorist acts against Israel…so they must be liquidated.” (Israeli Army Radio- Galei Tzahal, February 9, 2008 cited in Haaretz).
The third task of the ZPC is to use their strategic positions in the White House, Treasury, Pentagon and State Department to undermine Iran’s economy, politically isolate it and provoke internal and external confrontations.
Israel 2008: The Theory and Practice of Genocide
Israel has totally shredded any and all verbal commitments made at the Bush-organized Annapolis Middle East Conference in November 2007. The Jewish state is building 1000 new housing units in “Palestinian” East Jerusalem. It allows 100 new settler posts to occupy Palestinian land. It has attacked and killed Palestinian civilians, police and supporters of its ‘negotiating partner’ Abbas throughout the West Bank. Israel retains its 300 checkpoints throughout the West Bank, undermining travel, transport, trade and medical treatment. Jewish colonial settlements expand, further encroaching on Palestinian land, under the flimsy pretext that the peace process only precludes whatever the Jewish officials designate as ‘new settlements’, in effect isolating and reducing Palestinian East Jerusalem into a walled enclave.
Israeli leaders have intensified their military assaults on Gaza, killing nearly 800 and wounding over 1,000 Palestinians since the democratically elected Hamas government took effective control over Gaza in 2007 (‘IDF to step up Gaza Assassinations’ Haaretz February 13, 2008). Worse still they have imposed the genocidal strategy of starving 1.4 million residents of Gaza into submission, practicing the internationally outlawed practice of collective punishment against civilians in order to incite them into overthrowing their elected government. Israeli officials have publicly embraced and defended their totalitarian policies of cutting off electricity generation in the Gaza Strip, thus drastically reducing or eliminating the supply of safe water, halting all sewage treatment, electricity for hospitals, refrigerators, food and vaccine storage, home, school and business lighting. The Israeli Supreme Court has approved this policy of mass, brutal collective punishment of over 1.4 million civilians. (Haaretz February 2, 2008). They have imposed a tight blockade on food and medical supplies resulting in what the United Nations officials and international human rights groups have called a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented magnitude with widespread disease and famine becoming a reality. The Israeli Army blocks even the movement of sick and critically injured children. The Israeli judicial system led by its Supreme Court judges has ruled in favor of the power cuts, bombing of generators and water treatment plants and blockage of food, providing an unprecedented ‘legal’ framework for genocide.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations have publicly defended Israeli genocidal policies and the ZPC has been successful in securing the support of both major US political parties and presidential candidates for Israeli collective punishment against Palestinian civilians.
Deliberate State Genocide in the Service of Colonial Aggrandizement
Israeli policymakers claim that their totalitarian tactics are a ‘response to ‘rocket attacks’ by Palestinian ‘terrorists’. In fact there are no attacks from the West Bank – not a single rocket attack throughout the past two years. Even more significant, Israel has repeatedly rejected Hamas offer to sign a joint comprehensive long-term ceasefire involving an end to rocket fire in exchange for an end to Israeli military air and tank assaults. All Israeli leaders have categorically rejected Hamas cease-fire offers and have refused to even negotiate with or recognize the duly elected Hamas leadership.
The Jewish state has affirmed its policy of political extraterritorial assassinations of democratically elected political leaders irrespective of rocket or other attacks as part of its strategy of practicing international state terrorism against the Palestinian people, in violation of international law.
In summary, genocide and state terror at the service of ethnic dispossession and racial-ethnic colonial settlements is the openly stated, judicially sanctioned practice of the Israeli state. There is no basis for speaking of a Jewish, Zionist or Israeli ‘conspiracy’ against the Palestinians. State terror is practiced openly and publicly defended by the Supreme Court while international law is publicly dismissed as irrelevant to the extent that it infringes on the freedom of action, expansion and ‘security’ of Jewish territorial ambitions, military superiority in the Middle East and Israeli influence over US Middle East policy.
As Israeli policy makers clearly embrace totalitarian policies, engaging and justifying international assassination of adversaries and the collective punishment of over 1.4 million civilians in Gaza, their political, academic and journalistic apologists rely on unadulterated vituperation and paranoid screeds against Israel’s critics in the US. The now deceased super-Zionist Congress-person Tom Lantos (Democrat California), accused ex-President Carter of being filled with ‘venom’ for comparing the oppression of the Palestinians to South African Apartheid. Zionist zealot, Eugene Kontorovich, Professor of Law (sic) at Northwestern University, claims that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to Israel’s violent seizure and settlement of Palestinian lands (Daily Alert February 15, 2008). Alex Safian ‘refutes’ Professors Walt and Mearsheimer’s classic study of the Israel Lobby in the United States as ‘a fraud’. Israeli Ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, refers to Israel’s privileging of Jews over Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as ‘the poisonous myth of Israel’s Apartheid’ (National Post-Canada cited in the Daily Alert February 15, 2008).
The violent vituperative language follows the deep frustration that Zionist leaders feel in failing to stem the growing rejection of Israel’s totalitarian politics. Their belief that no one should ever attack Israel’s colonial and racist policies leads them to blind rage, blacklisting, censorship and vicious character assassinations. Israel’s expansionist and militarist policies, in violation of international law, are accompanied by a powerful tendency among mainstream Zionist leaders to reject international law, vilifying the United Nations and insulting the International Court of Justice.
Pro-Israel Western leaders adopt Israel’s paranoid style of politics and translate it into the American political discourse. Zionist zealot and head of US Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, engages in widespread internal espionage of US citizens in violation of constitutional protections. Zionist fanatic, US Attorney General Michael Mulkasy, refused to investigate the illegal, but widely acknowledged practice of torturing suspects in US custody, including water-torture (water-boarding), considering this internationally outlawed torture to be ‘acceptable under certain conditions’. The most egregious example of Israel’s political and intellectual degeneration is found in the logic of its chain of enemies. Israeli military targeting starts with attacking the Palestinian armed resistance; then it extends to their family members, neighbors, their homes, schools, workshops, offices and fields. It implicates civilians, ambulances and food distribution outlets. It proceeds to target the entire community, a whole people, with round-ups of all males less than 45 years of ages. Paranoia leads to verbal assaults of overseas European and US critics of Israeli crimes against humanity. Israeli death squads cross borders and assassinate political leaders, train terrorists in Iraq, Iran, Colombia and elsewhere to weaken countries, regimes and groups, which politically support the Palestinian struggle for independence and sovereignty.
Accompanying the Israeli policy of permanent global war and paranoia are the entire leadership of the Zionist Power Configuration in the US. The ZPC’s introduction of the Israeli paranoid style of politics in our country becomes one of the biggest threats to American freedoms and our desire to avoid Israeli entrapment in another brutal war in the Middle East.
The Zionist Power Configuration: 2008
The ZPC is made up of all the major Jewish organizations, pro-Israel plutocrats, media barons and government officials who are Israel Firsters. In the face of the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe imposed by Israel’s food and energy blockade of Gaza, and its thorough repudiation of the terms of the Annapolis peace negotiation the Zionist power configuration had its work cut out for it in selling the Israeli genocidal agenda as a defensive, justifiable policy of a peace-loving democracy. The second task of the ZPC was to overcome the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran which refuted Israeli and White House propaganda painting Iran as a nuclear threat. The Israeli state propaganda machine went on an all out assault of the NIE, claiming to have superior knowledge of hidden Iranian research programs – without providing a shred of reliable evidence. Once the Israeli state defined its position to the NIE, the entire leadership of the Conference of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CPMAJO), all the major Zionist- controlled propaganda centers (‘think tanks’) and an army of Israel-First academics (self-styled ‘intelligence experts’) and ideologues deluged the print and electronic mass media with attacks on the NIE report, echoing and citing the rhetoric and claims of the Israeli state. The White House and Congress (with few exceptions) followed the line of the ZPC, downplaying and distorting the NIE, escalating their bellicose rhetoric and pressure for sanctions on Iran in the UN Security Council and among the EU and NATO countries. The success of the ZPC in sustaining US confrontational policies against Iran, and forcefully selling the Israeli policy to the US political elite even against the findings and report of all the US intelligence agencies is a measure of the decisive power of the ZPC over US Middle East policy. Never in the entire history of the US has a small and economically insignificant foreign power wielded so much influence over Washington in a strategic region through its overseas representatives over and against the advice of America’s entire intelligence establishment.
The key to Zionist power is its ability to leverage and multiply its influence through non-Zionist congressional, media, pension fund managers, state and municipal officials and a host of trade union, academic and other notables and civic organizations. Strategically placed Zionists focused on the single issue of Israel, bring to bear the economic and organizational resources of their 1 million affiliates, supporters and media publicists on targeting policy makers in all relevant fields. The targeted individuals and organizations representing many millions of American Gentiles and non-Zionist Jews usually capitulate to the pressure or payoffs or are persuaded to follow the lead of the aggressive focused Zionist zealots. The propaganda value of having non-Zionists with a mass organizational base carrying out Israeli policies is immense. Leveraging the ‘others’ allows the pro-Israel liberal ideologues to obfuscate, downplay and dilute the real power of Israel and the ZPC in the making of US Middle East policy. As a consequence, we find what I call ‘mish-mash’ analyses which argue that “The Zionist pro-Israel lobby (sic) is only one of many groups and interests influencing US Middle East policy”. In other words, Zionist leveraged politicians are given a degree of autonomy and attributed a set of interests, which effectively hides Zionist initiatives, pressures and tactical leverage.
In 2008 Zionist direct and leveraged power is manifested in several decisively important areas of US politics, especially in foreign policy.
The ZPC and the Presidential Elections
All of the major presidential candidates have slavishly followed the most extreme pro-Israel positions promoted by the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations. John McCain, the Republican front-runner declares his unconditional support for Israel’s territorial expansion, settlements and genocidal policy toward Gaza. According to the Jewish weekly, The Forward (February 13, 2008), “On Israel,…McCain has been uncharacteristically conventional. He offers unqualified support, expressed in years of public statements…” The same article emphasizes how in 2006 McCain capitulated to Zionist pressure in a matter of days by recanting his position on Israel returning to its 1967 borders: “I’ve never held the position that Israeli should return to the 1967 lines and that is not my position today.” On February 7, 2008 McCain defined US-Iranian policy on strictly Zionist terms: “Those (Democratic) senators won’t recognize and seriously address the threat posed by an Iran with nuclear ambitions to our ally Israel in the region.” (McCain’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, February 7, 2008, quoted in Haaretz Februaru 10, 2008). In 2007, McCain happily echoed Israeli demands to bomb Iran with the vulgar and sinister new refrain to an old Beach Boys rock song… “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb…Bomb-bomb Iran”.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have supported every major position and demand of the ZPC: Both have pledged unconditional support for Israel; they have backed Israel’s genocidal policies against Gaza, the expansion of settlements and the total takeover of Jerusalem. Hillary Clinton urges recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – contrary to the United Nations, the European Union and even the Bush Administration’s position. Zionist ideologues are among the top foreign policy and Middle East advisers of all three top contenders for their party’s presidential nomination. The public record reads Zionist decisive influence over the next US President’s Middle Est policy. The only possible deviation is Obama’s statement that he is willing to negotiate with the Iranian government – a policy that the Bush regime, in part, already practices at a lesser official level via meetings in Iraq. For his minor discrepancy from the Zionist war rhetoric toward Iran, Obama was chastised by Malcolm Hoenlein, head of the CPMAJO (Haaretz January 18, 2008). To compensate for talking too much about ‘change’ which worries the paranoid Jewish leaders, like Hoenlein, Obama went out of his way to blame the civilians living in Gaza for the Israeli campaign to starve them into surrender and called on them to revolt against their democratically-elected Hamas government. The ZPC is the only major national political-social apparatus, which engages in a comprehensive, persistent and intensive campaign to direct US foreign policy into a full-scale (diplomatic, military and economic) confrontation with Iran.
Silencing Potential Critics of the ZPC
Almost every major centrist, leftist or progressive journal, weekly magazine, radio and web site has refused to discuss the singular influence of the ZPC over the Presidential candidates’ Middle East policy - a further indication of the reach and influence of the ZPC. The best indication that the ZPC is not ‘just another lobby’ as Mearsheimer and Walt claim, or a simply another bellicose neo-conservative current of opinion, is found in their slavish adherence to the Israeli state’s policies, even when they blatantly defy and repudiate the rightwing policies of President Bush. At Annapolis (November 2007) President Bush called on Israel to cease building new settlements in order to further peace negotiations. Exactly three months later Israel announced plans to build over 1,000 (1,250) new Jews-only homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem (BBC News, February 12, 2008). The Daily Alert propaganda sheet of the CPMAJO immediately endorsed the Israeli position and set in motion its major lobbyists, op-ed ideologues and media ‘experts’ to justify Israel’s crass repudiation of its agreement with President Bush.
Rather than confront this flagrant, highly public, unilateral and shameful Israeli repudiation of its agreement with the White House, President Bush , Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Gates all played ‘Mickey the Dunce’. White House press secretary, Dana Perino, claimed she had not seen the report about Israel’s plans to build new apartments in East Jerusalem – though it was ‘news’ in all the mass electronic and print media. In fear of the ZPC, Perino responded as if the entire affair was simply a problem for the Palestinians: “But obviously, there is no doubt that an announcement of that sort (building 1,125 new Jews-only segregated apartments) would make the Palestinians concerned” (Santa Barbara News-Press February 12, 2008).
Zionist Power: Treasury Department
Within the government, the principal architect and key operative of the US worldwide campaign to strangle the Iranian economy is a top Treasury Department official, Stuart Levey, a zealous Zionist and key agent of the ZPC in the executive branch. Levey has successfully browbeat the reticent, persuaded the gullible and teamed up with co-thinkers who control state, municipal and private pension funds to withdraw investments from any enterprise which deals with Iran. Levey is a major architect of the Treasury’s economic sanctions policy, which Washington has promoted in the United Nations Security Council. Levey’s policies have succeeded in blocking Iranian private bank transactions. They have received the support of the White House and the National Security Council despite the NIE report, which found that Iran was not engaged in a nuclear weapons program. Mohamed El Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency have confirmed the position of the NIE (Associated Press, February 23, 2008). Unlike Levey, the NIE and the IAEA are agencies, which are not influenced by the Zionist power configuration.
Nevertheless, the Israeli demands (pushed by the ZPC) for further sanctions based on unfounded claims of continued nuclear arms programs trumps the NIE and IAEA intelligence findings. The White House, France, England and Germany demand new and harsher sanctions against Iran. Never in the history of Israeli influence over US Middle East policy has the pro-Israel power configuration so much influence as it has today: The US government (President to Congress to Presidential hopefuls) repudiate its own intelligence agencies in favor of the ‘intelligence’ claims of a foreign power. Never has the US Treasury Department been so influenced by Israel Firsters, like Stuart Levey, Daniel Glaser and their colleagues in putting the interests of Israel above and beyond the interests of the major US and European oil companies.
At every AIPAC meeting since 2004, in every publication of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations over the past 5 years, in each and every state and citywide conference of Jewish community councils, every effort has been made to promote US military action or economic sanctions against Iran. In fact, the ZPC escalated its campaign against Iran after the NIE was published and intensified their campaign in favor of Israel’s fabricated ‘intelligence claims’ (Daily Alert, November 2007 – February 2008). The dual power position of Israel Firsters in key policy positions and civil society defines their influence over US Middle East policy.
The International Dimension
The US ZPC has been immensely aided in securing its bellicose anti-Iranian agenda by the appointments of prominent Zionists to key foreign policy positions in England and France. David Milliband, the British Foreign Minister, has close family ties with Jewish settlers from Britain colonizing the occupied West Bank. During a visit to Israel, he spent several days with Israeli officials and an evening with his relatives, while totally ignoring the issue of the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza suffering from Israel’s genocidal blockade. Milliband has been a fierce defender of keeping the ‘military option on the table’, heightening economic sanctions against Iran and is an unconditional supporter of Israel’s brutal policy preventing the shipment of food and fuel from reaching the suffering people of the Gaza strip.
Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister is a lifelong zealous Zionist who, upon taking office, pronounced himself in favor of a military attack on Iran ‘if negotiations fail’. As the new Foreign Minister, Kouchner went to US occupied Iraq and praised the occupation and puppet ‘government’ despite the over 1 million civilian deaths and 4 million destitute refugees which has resulted from the invasion and occupation. Kouchner (appointed by French President Sarkozy – under pressure from the Zionists), like president Bush gave strong backing to any Israeli ‘military pre-emptive action’ (offensive military assault), though a strong negative reaction from the French public forced him to tone down his overt support of Israeli military actions.
With such powerful political allies and co-thinkers in the American, French and British governments and the controlling role of the ZPC over US policymakers in the United Nations, it comes as no surprise that Israel received no reprimand for its daily murders and abductions of civilians and Palestinian officials in Gaza and the West Bank. Zion power prevents the UN from even applying its own basic international principles to prosecute crimes against humanity, including torture and collective punishment. Since its founding in the late 19th century and its spread to the US, especially after WWII, organized Zionism has never been so influential in so many spheres of government and had so much control over US Middle East policy as it possesses today. Most major pro-Israel Jewish leaders in moments of candor have publicly acknowledged that they are at the pinnacle of influence, to the effect that ‘we have never had an administration as favorable to Israel as under President Bush.’ Certainly this is an understatement that speaks to an underlying truth : Never has the US engaged in a very costly Middle Eastern war to benefit a foreign power; never has the US deliberately prevented big oil companies from signing billion dollar oil contracts by imposing economic sanctions on Iran in order to weaken a regional opponent of Israel.
The Show Must Go On
Not only does the ZPC directly influence US policy against Palestine, Iraq and Iran, but it has extended its campaign against ‘third parties’, countries like China which have economic relations with Sudan (a Muslim nation with an independent foreign policy which supports Palestinian rights). To an overwhelming degree, the propaganda campaign behind the so-called “Darfur genocide campaign’ is the Israeli state and its political apparatus in the US, namely the ZPC. Most of the media celebrities, led by prominent Hollywood Zionist director Steven Spielberg, have engaged in an exercise of selective moral indignation – supporting Israel, while ignoring its starvation blockade of Gaza, supporting the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq while attacking China for its ‘immoral’ oil contracts with the Sudan. The CPMAJO has focused on the Darfur ‘genocide’ because by doing so it favors the brutal separatists in southern Sudan, armed and advised by Israel, as a means of depriving pro-Palestinian Sudan of a large oil rich region in the south of the country. The Darfur campaign deliberately and systematically excludes any mention of the Israeli Supreme Court’s approval of Israel’s food and fuel blockade and deliberate prevention of the movement of medical personnel in Gaza and the West Bank, its approval of Israel’s practice of torture (‘forceful interrogations’), armed assaults on the vital infrastructure and civilian population centers of Gaza.
Hollywood’s Darfur sideshow is a sham propaganda effort at selective humanitarian concern, which does not deviate a millimeter from the official line promoted by the Israeli state and publicized in the US by the Daily Alert, the principle bulletin of the ZPC.
ZPC: Scorecard for 2008
From January to the middle of February 2008, Israeli had killed, wounded and arrested nearly a thousand Palestinians, mostly but not exclusively from Gaza. Over half of those killed, arrested and wounded were unarmed civilians, the rest include Hamas and PLO security officials, militia members and anti-colonial resistance fighters. Of the 700 primitive rockets and shells launched from Gaza, not a single Israeli Jew was killed and fewer than a dozen suffered serious bodily harm. Only a contract farm laborer from Ecuador died on the Israeli side from the rockets.
In a speech to Jewish-American leaders in mid-February, Prime Minister Olmert spelled out the gist of Israel’s totalitarian strategy. According to the BBC News (February 18, 2008) “Mr Olmert said, ‘Israel had a free hand to respond and attack anyone who has any kind of responsibility. This applied to everyone, first and foremost Hamas,” (my emphasis). The entire leadership of the major Jewish organizations, whole-heartedly approved the use of unrestrained and unlimited violence (a ‘free hand’) against the entire Palestinian population (‘any kind of responsibility’), which would include individuals who transport, feed, educate, shelter, vote for or interact with Hamas, their family members, friends, neighbors – 99% of the residents of Gaza. Giving priority to targeting ‘first and foremost Hamas’ includes several hundred thousand voters who elected Hamas in free and democratic elections.
The ZPC has succeeded in securing the near unanimous US Congressional support for Israel’s mass arrests and daily assaults on Gaza, even when a few mass media outlets published photos of Israeli colonial soldiers parading eighty arbitrarily arrested Palestinian civilians bound and blindfolded to notorious Israeli interrogation centers (BBC News February 18, 2008) for unlimited detention with no legal guarantees against physical and psychological torture.
The ZPC has swamped the US mass media with praise of Israel’s cross border assassinations, such as the international political murder of Hizbullah leader, Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, Syria (Daily Alert February 15, 2008). Reproducing articles from the Israeli press (Jerusalem Post, Haaretz) and Zionist think tanks and weeklys (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, New York Jewish Week, YNET News, CAMERA, New York Sun, and Middle East Strategy at Harvard) the Daily Alert has provided legitimacy to international assassinations by official state-directed death squads thereby extending the violence and counter-violence throughout the world. This is a fact recognized by the US FBI and Israeli officials. Heads of the Israeli international secret police, the MOSSAD, openly acknowledge the role of Israeli assassinations in provoking terrorist reprisals by putting a world-wide alert to Jews to avoid Islamic and Arab countries as well as locations where “there is a high concentration of Israelis” (Prime Minister’s Office, reprinted in the Daily Alert February 15, 2008). The Israeli practice of staging international assassinations of opposition leaders in major cities will not only invite retaliation against Israelis and Jews but also endanger sites in the US and EU, for tolerating these acts of state-sponsored terror. In other words, Israeli terror invites terrorist counter attacks like September 11, 2001. Israel, by provoking a new round in the Palestinian ‘war through global terror’ and the US and EU by embracing an Israeli car bomb assassination in Damascus endanger Western lives everywhere. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, their publicists and op-ed ideologues in the mass media are opening the entire Western world to terrorist attacks. By supporting Israeli terror and increasing the chance of Muslim reprisals, the ZPC strengthens the repressive structure of a growing police state in the US. (The ‘professional’ killing by Israeli operatives of a major figure in Damascus, Syria raises the question of the role of Israeli operatives in the as-yet unsolved series of car bomb assassinations in Lebanon – given Israel’s desire to maintain a state of internal tension in that country.) The brilliant and precocious Ivy League academic apologists of each and every act of official Israeli state-sponsored international terror apparently dissociate these acts of assassination from likely reprisals in our country and the consequent further destruction of our remaining precarious democratic freedoms. Could it be that Zionist American intellectuals welcome more US police state agencies and laws in order to prosecute a rising number of Americans who are critical of Zionist influence over the American political process? They might do well to recall that police state structures and laws could be used against them in the future.
Except for a small, courageous and isolated band of Anglo-American-Canadian Jewish intellectuals and academics, all the mainline Jewish organizations raised not a single question, let alone criticism regarding Israel’s role in instigating international terror.
From the beginning of the year, the ZPC has intensified its campaign to strangle the Iranian economy through US-promoted sanctions in the UN. They raised the ante in demonizing Iran as a military-nuclear threat to Israel, the US and the Gulf States. Almost a third of every issue of the Daily Alert (from January 1 to February 20, 2008) is devoted to reproducing propaganda pieces from Israeli officials claiming the Iranians are a nuclear threat and are advancing toward nuclear war. They repeat Israeli propaganda about an ‘existential threat to the survival of Israel’. The CPMAJO never mention that Israel has a current Middle East monopoly of over 200 nuclear weapons and missiles. Since most leading US Zionists believe that they will not have another President as servile to Israeli interests as the current President Bush (a doubtful proposition) they are pushing hard to find a pretext for a US attack or an Israeli strike backed by Washington before Bush leaves office. While the White House has raised its bellicose rhetoric and aggressively pursued new sanctions, Washington and its backers in the ZPC have failed to isolate Iran. In late 2007 and into 2008, Iran has met with top Iraqi politicians in Baghdad and Teheran, reached agreements with US military officials to stabilize Iraq, addressed the Gulf Cooperation Council at their annual meeting in Doha, while the Saudi monarch invited Iranian President Ahmadinejad to fulfill the Hadj pilgrimage in Mecca in December 2007 ( Al Jazeera, February 16, 2008). In other words the ZPC’s militarist anti-Iran strategy has succeeded in isolating the US form its conservative Gulf allies, split US civilians and military policymakers and cost major US and EU oil companies over $20 billion dollars in lost Iranian oil contracts. While the ZPC, via its influence in the mass media and contributions to the leading presidential candidates, has shaped elite opinion in defense of Israeli genocide in Gaza and war policy toward Iran, it has failed to ‘turn’ the great majority of the American public opposed to Middle East wars from favoring the prompt withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and condemning the officially acknowledged use of torture in detainee interrogations.
Cracks in the Zionist Monolith
There are even some cracks in the ZPC monolithic control of public debate on the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the disastrous role of the pro-Israel power configuration in formulating US domestic security and war policy. Despite the Daily Alerts reproduction of at least a dozen vitriolic, histrionic, ad hominum attacks on Professors Mearsheimer and Walt and their book on the Israel Lobby and former President Jimmy Carter’s book on the Israeli apartheid policy against Palestinians, the issues they raise have circulated widely and continue to influence millions of Americans. Jewish critics, both secular and religious, Zionist and anti-Zionist (especially the younger generations), are publicly challenging the pretense of the mainline Jewish organizations’ claim to speak for the Jewish community with regard to Israel and US Middle East policy.
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, a primarily anti-Zionist Jewish organization, has joined with the province of Ontario’s biggest public sector trade union in denouncing Israeli colonial policy in Palestine and challenging Zionist dominance of the Jewish community and influence over the Canadian trade union movement.
Major protestant denominations in the United States, including the Presbyterians and Methodists are supporting divestment of US companies aiding Israel’s brutal colonial rule in the West Bank and Gaza. In the first week of February, the student government at the London School of Economics voted by an overwhelming majority in favor of divestment campaign against companies supporting Israeli occupation. A growing number of universities organized well-attended teach-ins throughout North America, protesting Israel’s apartheid regime and policy, despite vitriolic attacks from prominent Jewish administrators and Zionist academics.
Top US military commanders, active and retired, have taken initiatives that directly contravene the ZPC dictates on Iran by praising its cooperation in stabilizing Iraq and playing a critical supporting role in overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The major intelligence agencies in the US report on Iran’s absence of a nuclear weapon development program, contradicting the propaganda line of the Administration. This has struck a powerful blow against the ZPC warmongers and their Israel-First agents in the Treasury Department (Levey, Glaser), the National Security Council (Elliott Abrams), the White House (Joshua Bolton), State Department (Wolfowitz) and Pentagon (Shumsky).
We are engaged in a life and death struggle against war, terror and genocide – against Imperial and Zionist barbarism. As the ZPC push for a military confrontation with Iran before Bush leaves office; as the ZPC back Israel’s policy of economic blockades to starve the people of Gaza, assassinate its leaders and shred all public order in Gaza; as the ZPC back Israeli state-sponsored extra-territorial murders (likely to provoke new terror retaliatory attacks in the US and EU and the end of democratic freedoms in America); and as the ZPC actively support the shredding of constitutional and judicial liberties of American citizens and residents and the expansion of a repressive security state, we should recognize the following: In the final instance, in fighting the ZPC, we should be aware of powerful enemies in high places, acting against the interests of our country. But we should recognize we also have enormous support among the American people and even tactical allies among some officials in the military and intelligence community. We have a new generation of active dissident Christian, secular and Jewish critics of Israel and the ZPC, as well as billions of supporters among Muslims world wide, among secular Arabs and the majority of citizens in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa. Above all, we are defending our own, hard-won democratic freedoms, our own families’ and communities’ security from Israeli-provoked terrorist attacks and, even more important, our right to develop policies in the interest of the American people, free from the dictates of Israel and its agents. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
