of course you don't see who's cropped out, but they hold up the whole thing.

If the State Department had issued travel advisory warnings to US government officials about to travel to Israel, Vice President Joe Biden would have no doubt ignored them.  A better friend to Israel could not have been found in the 36 years that Biden represented Delaware in the US Senate and there was speculation that his popularity among Jewish voters and major Jewish donors was the primary reason he was added to the Democratic ticket. According to all reports, Biden’s trip was to mend fences with the Israeli officials and with the Israeli Jewish public which had become disenchanted with the Obama administration where the president’s popularity is measured in the low single digits.

Indeed, even a day after having been blind-sided by the announcement that Israel would build 1600 new and exclusively Jewish housing units in East Jerusalem, Biden was still trying. In a prepared speech, he once again bragged, this time to a Tel Aviv university audience, that he was a Zionist and that, “Throughout my career, Israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as Vice President of the United States,” a statement that should raise questions about dual loyalties and which, curiously, was omitted from all reports on his speech in the US press.

In addition, Biden repeated what he said on his arrival in Jerusalem, that, “There is no space — this is what they [the world] must know, every time progress is made, it's made when the rest of the world knows there is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to security, none. No space.  That's the only time when progress has been made.” Biden did not offer any examples of such progress and would have had a hard time doing so.

It was not until the end of his speech, after he had thoroughly regurgitated the standard Israeli line on the threats to its existence from Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, that he felt safe to offer words of criticism for his treatment at the hands of his hosts. The words of condemnation issued the previous day, however, were patently missing. Almost apologizing for doing so, Biden told his audience:

“Now, some legitimately may have been surprised that such a strong supporter of Israel for the last 37 years and beyond… as an elected official, how I can speak out so strongly given the ties that I share as well as my country shares with Israel. But quite frankly, folks, sometimes only a friend can deliver the hardest truth.

“And I appreciate… the response your Prime Minister today announced this morning that he is putting in place a process to prevent the recurrence of that sort of that sort of events [sic] and who clarified that the beginning of actual construction on this particular project would likely take several years … That's significant, because it gives negotiations the time to resolve this, as well as other outstanding issues. Because when it was announced, I was on the West Bank. Everyone there thought it had meant immediately the resumption of the construction of 1,600 new units.”

What, of course, Biden meant was not that Israel should not be able do as it pleases in East Jerusalem, but that announcements of its plans should be handled in a more tactful manner, when, presumably, he, or other US officials are several thousand miles away.

Biden, of course, was patently ignoring repeated statements by Netanyahu that Israel’s decisions to build in East Jerusalem will not be subject either to pressure from Washington or negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

Moreover, as Ha’aretz noted, those projected 1600 units are only a small part of 50,000 units planned for the eastern part of the city, which was annexed in 1967, and which are designed to preclude it not only from becoming the capital of a Palestinian state but also to prevent Palestinian residents of the city from traveling to the West Bank.

According to Yediot Ahronoth, Israel’s most widely read newspaper, Biden had privately complained to Netanyahu that Israel’s behavior was “starting to get dangerous for us.” “What you’re doing here,” he reportedly said, “undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.”   That Biden made such a statement has been denied by the White House, but it follows closely an earlier memorandum sent by General Petraeus to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his testimony before a US Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

In his prepared statement, Petraeus depicted the Israeli-Arab conflict as the first “cross cutting challenge to security and stability” in the CENTCOM area of responsibility [AOR]. “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR.”

Treading in an area where few members of the US military have dared to go before, Petraeus observed that “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.” It should be noted that neither the NY Times’ Elizabeth Bumiller nor the Washington Post’s Anne Flaherty included any reference to these comments by Petraeus in their coverage of his testimony.

In other words, in the view of Gen. Petraeus, resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is critical to the US national interest and that, plus his reference to the “perception” of Washington’s pro-Israel bias, is what may have been what, for the moment, occasioned President Obama through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ratchet up the criticism and publicly brand Israel’s treatment of Biden as “insulting.”

Rather than letting the issue die, she had her office publicize the fact that she had given a piece of her mind to Netanyahu in a 43 minute phone call in which, according to her spokesperson, P.J. Crowley, she described the planned units in East Jerusalem as sending a “deeply negative signal about Israel's approach to the bilateral relationship and counter to the spirit of the vice president's trip" and that "this action had undermined trust and confidence in the peace process and in America's interests." 

Moreover, she made three demands of Netanyahu that were spelled out in the Israeli press but which were only alluded to in the US media: cancelling the decision to approve the 1600 units, making a "significant" gesture to the Palestinian Authority to get it back to the bargaining table, and issuing a public statement that the indirect talks will deal with all the core issues, including Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. Pretty heady stuff for those used to see Clinton falling all over herself to show her loyalty to Israel.

To emphasize the US position, the Obama administration cancelled the scheduled visit of Middle East envoy George Mitchell who had planned to meet with Israelis and Palestinians in what had been touted by the administration as “proximity talks.”

The gravity of the situation was not lost upon Israel’s new ambassador, American-born historian, Michael Oren, who, in a conference call with Israel’s US consulates, reportedly expressed the opinion (which he now denies) that this was the worst crisis in US-Israel relations since 1975 when Pres. Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly blamed Israel for the breakdown of negotiations with Egypt over withdrawing from the Sinai.  As a consequence, Ford announced that he was going to make a major speech calling for a reassessment of Israel-US relations. Although hardly the powerhouse that it has become today, AIPAC, the only officially registered pro-Israel lobby, responded to the threat by getting 76 senators to sign a harsh letter to Ford, warning him not to tamper with Israel-US relations. Ford never made the speech and it would not be the last time that AIPAC got three quarters of the US Senate to sign a letter designed to keep an American president in check.

Others point to the nationally televised speech on September 12, 1991 of the first President Bush, who, upon realizing that AIPAC had secured enough votes in both houses of Congress to override his veto of Israel’s request for $10 billion in loan guarantees, went before the American public depicting himself as “one lonely man” battling a thousand lobbyists on Capitol Hill. A national poll taken immediately afterward gave the president an 85 per cent approval rating which sent the lobby and its Congressional flunkies scuttling into the corner but not before AIPAC director, Tom Dine, exclaimed at that date, Sept. 12, 1991, “would live in infamy.” Following the election of Yitzhak Rabin the following year and up for re-election himself, Bush relented and approved the loan guarantee request.

There are those who, while aware of what happened to Ford and of the subsequent humiliations visited by Israel upon American presidents and secretaries of state, view the Biden affair as a charade designed to placate the heads of Arab governments as well as their respective peoples and give the impression that there is a space between Israel and the US when it comes to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict when, they assert, none exists.

Viewing the unrelenting expansion of Jewish settlements and settlers in the West Bank through one US administration after another for the past four decades they would appear to have a solid argument.  It is undermined, however, by one obvious fact: while the rest of the world considers the Israel-Palestine conflict to be a foreign policy concern, for Washington and both Democrats and Republicans it has been and remains primarily a domestic issue. In that arena there is only one player, the pro-Israel “lobby” which is represented by a multitude of organizations, the most prominent of which is AIPAC.

As if it needed more help, flocking to Israel’s side in increasing numbers over the past several decades have come the majority of America’s Christian evangelicals whose doomsday theology fits in nicely with that of Israel’s ultra right wing settler movement. The result is that in each election cycle anyone with any hope of being elected to a national political office, be it in the White House or Congress, whether incumbent or challenger, feels obligated to express his or her unconditional loyalty to Israel by shamelessly groveling for handouts from Jewish donors and the nod from Jewish voters who make up critical voting blocs in at least six states.

This being the case, it is not so strange that a string of leading elected American officials would willingly submit to public humiliation by a country so politically and militarily dependent on the U.S. and whose population is less than that of New York City or Los Angeles County, even when doing so has made the U.S. seem weak in the eyes of a world in which Washington has other, more pressing interests, than pleasing Israel.  There is no better example of this phenomenon than Barack Obama whose stature as leader of “the world’s only superpower” has been severely undercut by repeated verbal face-slappings at the hands of Netanyahu and his cabinet ministers.

It clearly has been in the US interest that the Israel-Palestine conflict be peacefully resolved. There is nothing in the proposed “two-state solution” that would interfere with Washington’s regional objectives.  On the contrary, the creation of a truncated Palestinian statelet, allied and dependent, politically and financially on the US, as it most certainly would be, would be a boon to US regional interests and ultimately viewed as a setback for anti-imperialist struggles worldwide. It was not just to expend some US taxpayers’ money that the GW Bush administration built a four story security building for the PA in Ramallah (that Sharon later destroyed), brought PA security personnel to Langley, VA for training with the CIA, and had Gen. Dayton build a colonial army to maintain order.

Israeli officials view all of this from a very different perspective, as should be obvious, and will do everything they can to prevent any kind of a Palestinian entity from coming into existence since this would interfere not only with its expansion plans but would also create a junior competitor for US favors in the region. This was why Sharon targeted the US built institutions on the West Bank and the CIA trained personnel during the Al-Aksa Intifada despite the fact that they were non-participants, which raised the hackles at CIA headquarters, as reported at the time in the Washington Post.

What the insult to Biden was clearly designed to do, as were the previous humiliations, was to remind the current and future occupants of the White House that when it comes to making decisions concerning the Middle East, it is Israel that calls the tune. As Stephen Green spelled it out in "Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with Militant Israel" (Morrow, 1984) a quarter century ago, "Since 1953, Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with tactical issues."

That Netanyahu was also taken unawares by the announcement concerning the housing units as he claimed is questionable, particularly since he has apologized only for its timing, not its content and the offending minister remains unpunished.  Netanyahu was surely cognizant that next week he will be coming to Washington to speak before AIPAC’s annual policy conference where he will find a greater degree of support than anywhere in his own country. Last year’s conference attracted a record 7,000 attendees plus half of the US Senate and a third of the House and it is likely to be ever larger this year in response to the administration’s perceived hostility to Israel.

Netanyahu will no doubt happily recall that before he met with President Obama for the first time last year, 76 US senators, led by Christopher Dodd and Evan Bayh, and 330 members of the House, sent AIPAC- crafted letters to the president calling on him not to put pressure on the Israeli prime minister when they met. The only report of this in the mainstream media was by a Washington post blogger who noted the AIPAC tagline on the pdf that was circulated among House members.  Netanyahu will also be succored by memories of the House’s near unanimous support of Israel’s assault on Gaza and by its 334 to 36 vote condemning the Goldstone Report in its aftermath.

In addition, during last year’s Congressional summer recess, 55 members of the House, 30 Democrats led by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and 25 Republicans, led by Eric Cantor, the House’s lone Jewish member, visited Jerusalem.  Both groups met with Netanyahu and afterward held press conferences in which they expressed their solidarity with Israel, particularly with its claims on East Jerusalem, at a time when the Obama administration was calling for a settlement freeze. These visits, too, went unreported in the mainstream media.

Under the present circumstances, we can expect to see AIPAC extend every effort to make this year’s event the largest and more successful yet and there should be no doubt that those attending will give a far more rousing welcome to Netanyahu and to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is also on the AIPAC program, than to Secretary of State Clinton.

AIPAC is already posting statements on its website from members of Congress who are taking the Obama administration to task for making its differences with Israel public and for keeping the issue alive when the focus should not be on Jewish settlements but on the growing threat of a nuclear Iran which has been at the top of AIPAC’s agenda since the beginning of the Iraq War.

Nevertheless, given that the Democratic Party remains dependent on wealthy Jewish donors for the bulk of its major funding, estimated to be at least 60 per cent, and that this is an election year, we can expect Clinton to reach out and once again embrace Israel as she did at the 2008 AIPAC conference when, Biden-like, she said, “I have a bedrock commitment to Israel's security, because Israel's security is critical to our security….[A]ll parties must know we will always stand with Israel in its struggle for peace and security. Israel should know that the United States will never pressure her to make unilateral concessions or to impose a made-in-America solution.”

For those with short memories, here is a sampling of past humiliations of US presidents and secretaries of state at the hands of our loyal ally:

March, 1980, President Carter was forced to apologize after US UN representative Donald McHenry voted for a resolution that condemned Israel’s settlement policies in the occupied territories including East Jerusalem and which called on Israel to dismantle them.  McHenry had replaced Andrew Young who was pressured to resign in 1979 after an Israeli newspaper revealed that he had held a secret meeting with a PLO representative which violated a US commitment to Israel and to the American Jewish community.

June, 1980 After Carter requested a halt to Jewish settlements and his Secretary of State, Edmund Muskie, called the Jewish settlements an obstacle to peace, Prime Minister Menachem Begin announced plans to construct 10 new ones.

In December, 1981, 14 days after signing what was described as a memorandum of strategic understanding with the Reagan administration, Israel annexed the Golan Heights “which made it appear that the US either acquiesced in the move or else has absolutely no control over its own ally’s actions. In both cases the US looks bad….he has once again poked his ally, the source of all his most sophisticated weapons and one third of his budget in the eye.” (Lars Erik-Nelson)

In August, 1982, the day after Reagan requested that Ariel Sharon end the bombing of Beirut, Sharon responded by ordering bombing runs over the city at precisely 2:42 and 3:38 in the afternoon, the times coinciding with the two UN resolutions requiring Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

In March, 1991, Secretary of State James Baker complained to Congress that “Every time I have gone to Israel in connection with the peace process.., I have been met with an announcement of new settlement activity… It substantially weakens our hand in trying to bring about a peace process, and creates quite a predicament.” In 1990, he had become so disgusted with Israel’s intransigence on the settlements that he publicly gave out the phone number of the White House switchboard and told the Israelis, "When you're serious about peace, call us."

In April 2002, after Pres. George W Bush demanded that Ariel Sharon pull Israeli forces out of Jenin, declaring “Enough is enough!,” he was besieged by a 100,000 emails from supporters of Israel, Jewish and Christian and accused by Bill Safire of choosing Yasser Arafat as a friend over Sharon and by George Will, of losing his “moral clarity.” Within days, a humiliated Bush was declaring Sharon “a man of peace” despite the fact that he had not withdrawn his troops from Jenin.

In January 2009, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert publicly boasted that he had “shamed” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice by getting President Bush to prevent her from voting for a Gaza cease-fire resolution at the last moment that she herself had worked on for several days with Arab and European diplomats at the United Nations.

Olmert bragged to an Israeli audience that he pulled Bush off a stage during a speech to take his call when he learned about the pending vote and demanded that the president intervene.

 “I have no problem with what Olmert did,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Forward. “I think the mistake was to talk about it in public.”

That episode and Foxman’s comment may have summed up the history of US-Israel relations.

Jeffrey Blankfort is a long-time pro-Palestinian activist and a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He an be contacted at jblankfort@earthlink.net

Below is the analysis of Henry Herskovitz (with Michelle J. Kinnucan) of Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends to a recent

There are many problems with IJAN, which lead me to doubt the purposes of the group. I first question whether they are a Palestinian solidarity group or yet another group that seeks to shield and preserve Jewish power both in Palestine and in the U.S.

In this writer's opinion, Jews – if they are acting in a group that represents Jews in the peace movement – should first and foremost challenge what Akiva Eldar and J. J. Goldberg, among others, call the "Jewish lobby" – the powerful people and institutions (and their rank-and-file supporters) who dominate the US discourse and policy regarding Jews and Israel. Often, these are the very people behind the charge of "self-hating Jews" (and for non-Jews, "anti-Semites") about whom Rebecca Tumposky, national organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, complains. Yet, nowhere in her article does Ms. Tumposky show a disposition to directly do that.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that three originators of IJAN who live in southeast Michigan, including "Invincible," declined the invitation to stand vigil with Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends at our Global Vigil Day in 2007 or at any other time. They refused to expose and challenge Beth Israel Congregation–a local institutional bastion of open, unabashed Jewish support for Israel–when they had the opportunity. And yes, I'm the first to admit that standing in front of a synagogue is not the only way to challenge Jewish power, but at the same time ask where does IJAN directly challenge this power using another tactic?

In Tumposky's op-ed she says IJAN "seeks to challenge the violence and injustice of Israeli apartheid" but she and IJAN are US-based. So, where is her mention, let alone challenge, of the Jewish supremacism/power that allows Jews – less than two percent of the US population – to so effectively steer US policy and resources into underwriting Jewish apartheid in Palestine?

Right out of the box, she shows her hand – Tumposky's and IJAN's opposition to apartheid is rooted not in universalistic notions of justice and human rights but in Jewish chauvinism/exceptionalism. Thus, they appeal to Jews on the grounds of "our varied traditions of social justice." And Tumposky wants to make sure – absolutely certain – that fighting anti-Semitism is prioritized in any work on freeing Palestine from the genocide brought on by the Jewish state. Thus, she writes, "We challenge anti-Jewish prejudice while standing in solidarity with organizations that support Palestinian liberation and historic justice …" In short, IJAN enters the Palestinian solidarity movement with an explicit agenda of highlighting, if not foregrounding, the concerns of Jews, the very people who enjoy Jewish privilege here and in Israel.

Her opposition to Zionism is carefully couched as a subset of opposing colonialism and imperialism, in general: "We share a commitment to participation in struggles against colonialism and imperialism. We therefore oppose Zionism … IJAN, in fact, opposes all imperialist aggression". She refuses to take notice of the peculiar situation of Zionism – Jewish imperialism – in that Jews lacked a nation-state of their own and, thus, Zionists commandeered other countries, namely Britain and the US, to realize their goals.

Tumposky beats up one or two carefully placed straw men along the way: "We will say it again and again, despite accusations of being 'self-hating Jews': Zionism is not Judaism and the Jewish community." Just who is it that equates Zionism with "Judaism and the Jewish community"? And why is this point so essential for "anti-Zionists" like the IJAN folks? What would Tumposky say to the 757 rabbis – "the largest number of rabbis whose signatures are attached to a public pronouncement in all Jewish history" – who in 1942 stated that Zionism is an "Affirmation of Judaism" and "Anti-Zionism, not Zionism, is a departure from the Jewish religion"?

She also plays a Left Zionist game when she attempts to distinguish the 'types' of Zionism, claiming that "the Zionism we oppose is not a longstanding cultural or religious expression". She conveniently ignores the fact that when push came to shove, all the Zionists – Left, Right and Center – gave their blessings to destroying Palestine.

In the first chapter of his book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Norman Finkelstein challenged the myth that any of the Zionist tendencies (Labor, Religious, etc.) were ever benign. In short, the only thing about Zionism that really matters is that it "is a form of racism and racial discrimination," as the UN General Assembly correctly identified in 1975.

Tumposky's definition of Zionism is also problematic – "the 19th century ideology that led European Jews to work with imperialist powers to displace and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people, which continues today." It is folly to imply that Jews were passive objects of that "ideology". Zionism was created, implemented, and popularized by Jews. Are readers supposed to believe that it was the imperialist powers that Jews only "worked with" that committed this crime? Isn't it more accurate to say that Jews led these imperialist powers by the nose – as they still do today – to have non-Jews die for the Jewish state?

When she writes "Israel and its U.S. lobby helped pushed us toward the Iraq war and are exerting similar pressure to attack Iran", readers need to be cognizant of what she omits – EVERY major constituent group of the organized Jewish community pressed for war on Iraq, and there's a list of at least two dozen Jewish individuals – in powerful government or media positions – who also pressed strongly for war.

Tumposky touts "Jewish visions of collective liberation and traditions of social justice", but doesn't give us any proof that this tradition ever existed, other than in the minds of Jews who want their image spit-shined, if not outright falsified. More than 300 years ago, Benedictus de Spinoza, who is often upheld as a great Jewish intellectual, observed that Jews had in fact nothing to commend themselves as superior to others, had acted in such a way as to "incur the hatred of all", and that this hatred was the glue that bound Jews together. Other than, perhaps, a few years during the Civil Rights struggle (and Benjamin Ginsberg casts doubt on even this), Jews collectively have acted in concert NOT for universal well-being, but for the benefit of Jews. IJAN does not seem to be an exception.

Distinguishing IJAN from AIPAC, J-Street and Tikkun, might make good reading, but doesn't let them off the hook. Once again, I'm reminded of Paul Eisen's words: "The crime against the Palestinian people is being committed by a Jewish state with Jewish soldiers using weapons displaying Jewish religious symbols, and with the full support and complicity of the overwhelming mass of organized Jews worldwide. But to name Jews as responsible for this crime seems impossible to do." It seems obvious to me that IJAN and similar organizations exist, in no small part, to prevent the naming of Jews as responsible for the Jewish-led genocide against the Palestinian people.

Israeli Tourism poster in London... Where's Palestine?

A common blueprint of Israeli hasbara, or official propaganda, is to deflect criticism of its actions in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip by stressing that within the 1948 boundaries, it is a model of democracy incomparable to other societies in the Middle East. The reality however is far from this. In fact, Israel is in the grip of a wave of unchecked racism and incitement, both from a societal and an institutional point of view. It therefore does not come as a surprise that last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee that Israel is going to officially monitor "incitement" within the Palestinian Authority (PA), and periodically issue reports on it.

Toward this end, Netanyahu appointed Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, the former senior intelligence officer of the IDF Central Command, as government coordinator for incitement in the PA. "The incitement index" will be produced by monitoring broadcasts in the official PA media, statements and actions by senior PA officials and textbooks, senior Israeli official spokesmen stated.  Yossi aims to monitor all acts which "encourage terrorist acts", which demonize Israel and which create an atmosphere of hostility. This "index" will allow the Israeli government to "set parameters by which to measure the level of incitement," and which encourage a supposed atmosphere of violence and alleged anti-Semitic manifestations.

Not only is it hard to understand how the collection of non-numerical data can be "quantified", there also seem to be various flaws in the thrust underpinning this proposal.

The debate started with Mahmoud Abbas' decision to name a square in Ramallah after Dalal Mugrhabi, a Palestinian woman who took part in the coastal road operation three decades ago, in which 38 Israelis were killed. It seems however that the granting of "martyrdom" status is not confined to the Palestinian Authority only.  Let us not forget the 1994 massacre, in the city of Hebron, when Baruch Goldstein entered a mosque and opened fire, killing 29 Muslims during prayer. Subsequently, a shrine was erected in Goldstein's memory in the Meir Kahane Memorial Park, a Jewish settlement adjacent to Hebron. Until 1999, when legislation and a Supreme Court ruling prohibited monuments to terrorists, this shrine was a pilgrimage site visited by over 10,000 people. Its plaque read: "To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah and the nation of Israel." In any case, the inauguration ceremony in the Ramallah square was cancelled.  Netanyahu stated that naming a square after Mughrabi was "problematic in the extreme" and that "this was not how peace was made". Well, let us look back a couple of decades, and see how, if anything, Israel can enlighten us on how peace is not made. 

Israel's argument is that, under the "1993 Oslo Agreements", the Palestinians committed themselves to eliminating violence and "incitement" against Israel.  In fact, the Oslo Agreements required a commitment from both sides to refrain from incitement and an agreement to amend the educational systems to reflect the peaceful coexistenceⁱ.  Under the 2003 Quartet-backed "Road Map for peace" proposal, the Palestinians committed to end violence and incitement against Israelis, and Israel was required to halt all settlement construction, amongst other things. There is no point for Israel to point the finger at Palestinians for "inciting" violence against Israel, when a plan to build 1,600 settler homes in the Ramat Shlomo settlement was officially approved last week.  Not only are these settlements unlawful under international humanitarian law, which prohibits population transfers by an Occupying Power into lands that it occupies, but they are severely depriving the Palestinians from their basic human rights. Therefore, by reducing the argument to whether or not the Palestinians have abided by their agreement and stopped "incitement" against Israel, simply misses the point.

We can easily turn the coin and examine how Israel uses misleading language and terminology in the media on the events occurring in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  For example, Zvi Bar'el explains in his article, Israel is demanding peace from the Palestinians as its own racism spreads. The West Bank is referred to as "Judea and Samarae", we are often presented with a decorated illegal annexation of East Jerusalem which is termed a "defensive operation" and settlements which are deemed illegal under international law commonly referred to as mere "towns".  So who is inciting violence against whom?

Israeli settler violence against civilians is a theme which is also often overlooked. When Palestinians attack Israelis, the Israeli authorities use all means at their disposal (including non legal means such as administrative detention and arbitrary arrests, which are incompatible with international law and international humanitarian law) to arrest suspects and bring them to trial. Settlers on the contrary enjoy the support of the government, and when they attack Palestinians, the Israeli authorities employ leniency and fail to enforce the law against them.  The discrimination undermining this difference of treatment is a clear example of how Israel flouts the well known principle of "equality before the law." One is probably not bewildered by this attitude, since the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, Avigdor Lieberman, has himself lived since 1988 in Nokdim, a settlement in the West Bank. 

Before moving to racism within the 1948 boundaries, it is worth mentioning how Palestinian children are often used as tools to support Israel's "incitement" campaign. Israel claims that these children are "full of hate" against Israel. What else is to be expected from children, when up to 300 are being held in Israeli prisons in administrative detention for throwing stones, or not even that? These children are forced to sign confessions in Hebrew, forcing them to admit to crimes they did not commit. Some of these are as young as 12, who according to a recent Guardian article, when held behind bars are treated like "terrorists". What other means of protesting do they have when the checkpoints and Jewish only roads prevent them from going to school? Israel state officials also complain about the Palestinian educational system, whose textbooks apparently do not portray history accurately and do not refer to Israel. It is interesting that they touch on the issue of geography textbooks, because not too long ago the Northern Line on the London Underground advertised an "Experience Israel" tourism campaign which wiped out the West Bank and Gaza Strip off the map (and Lebanon, for that matter).

Finally, it is important to mention the spread of racism within Israel. A recent poll conducted by the Maagar Mochot research institution and presented at a Tel Aviv University Conference show that 56% of Israeli high school students believe that the country's Arab citizens should be prohibited from being elected to the Knesset and should not be allowed to vote, and that the figure rises to 82 percent among religious youths.  Israel lacks a written constitution unlike Britain, which has no written constitution either but contains the Habeas Corpus act of 1679, the Human Rights Act of 1998 and many other quasi-constitutional documents and constitutional conventions which guarantee individual rights. Israel is yet to enact a constitution or laws which guarantee equal rights to all citizens regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or national origin. The Israeli Supreme Court is flooded with employment or land dispute cases, and is simply not equipped to guarantee equality between Israeli Jews and their Arab counterparts. If the Israeli government wants to condemn "incitement", shouldn't they start by first cleaning up their act and redress this discriminatory imbalance?

This article does not aim to justify any alleged Palestinian incitement, since two wrongs do not make a right. It is evident however that the position of both parties is substantially different, and the context of the occupation should always be taken into account. Officially monitoring Palestinian levels of incitement distorts the reality and demeans the suffering of the 1,5 million Palestinians under siege in the Gaza Strip, of the hundreds of innocent Palestinians who are administratively detained and of the hundreds of families who are left homeless when their houses are demolished by bulldozers.  It also silences the voice of brave young Israelis who refuse to serve in the IDF army and are jailed for this, and of human rights activists like Rachel Corrie, who was killed by a bulldozer operated by the IDF forces whilst attempting to prevent them from demolishing the home of a Palestinian family. 

This initiative aims to portray Israel as angelic. It aims to transform its status of "Occupier" to that of "victim". It is a hoax and I did not fall for it.

iArticle XXOO Oslo II Agreement

source: http://www.middleeastmonitor.org.uk/articles/35-palestine/791-on-the-absurdity-of-a-qpalestinian-incitement-indexq

By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem

As a torrent of questions was directed at him, the British diplomat switched "from straight talk" to PR talk, recollecting some of the "pro-Palestinian" gestures and postures made recently by the British government, such as supporting the Goldstone Report at the United Nations.

Day was asked if he thought that the flaccid British approach toward Israel – for example, asking nicely if the Jewish state would like to refrain from undermining peace efforts   would really make Israel reconsider its manifestly criminal policy toward the Palestinians. Fleeing from the heat of the question, Day said there was no alternative to peace talks. He then dodged another question on whether he thought the impending talks would be truly genuine or just more of the same, as most Palestinians think. He was reminded about the fiasco of direct PA-Israel talks which lasted for eighteen years. One journalist asked, "What makes you think that three months or even one year of indirect talks will succeed in achieving what eighteen years of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians failed utterly to achieve?" Frustrated by the directness of the questions, Day seemed at a loss about how to answer, knowing very well that the present so-called "peace efforts" are nothing more than a desperate regurgitation of previous talks.

He refused to answer a question on why the European Union, including Britain, was refusing to exert meaningful pressure on Israel to stop building Jewish colonies on occupied Palestinian territories, which undermine really seriously the feasibility of the increasingly moribund two-state solution. One journalist asked Day if he thought the Obama administration, which has been unable to persuade Israel to freeze settlement expansion, would be able to force Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Unable to answer the question, Mr. Day, who had earlier praised the Obama administration, said he was speaking only on behalf of the British government.

Our encounter with the British diplomat convinced us that Britain has a consistently pro-Israeli policy and that the occasional gestures made toward the PA regime are meant only to cover up the long-standing British acceptance of Israeli criminality. Britain does give the PA regime some aid in the form of training the PA police force. However, it is very clear that the British aid is not conditional on an undertaking by the PA to respect the human rights and civil liberties of Palestinian citizens in the West Bank. Hence, one can claim safely that Britain is effectively helping the PA to torment its citizens and violate their human rights, a fact corroborated by many human rights organizations, including the London-based Amnesty International.

Palestinians, along with many honest and conscientious people around the globe, including many British citizens, have hoped that successive British governments would one day try to atone for Britain's grave sins against the Palestinian people. After all, it was Britain which gave Palestine to the Zionist movement through the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917.

However, to the chagrin of many, Britain has shown consistently that the same criminal mindset that gave Palestine to Zionism on a silver platter remains alive and well in London. In fact, one could cite hundreds of examples showing that Britain is not really sincere about reaching a just peace in Palestine.

For example, the decision by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to prevent the issue of arrest warrants for suspected Israeli war criminals, such as Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Gabi Ashkenazi and Ehud Olmert, to name but a few. Under the new proposal made by Brown less than two weeks ago, the Crown Prosecution Service will take over responsibility for prosecuting war crimes and other violations of international law. Bowing to Zionist pressure and utterly ignoring the massacres Israel carried out in Gaza last year, Brown wrote in the Daily Telegraph, "As we have seen, there is now significant danger of such a provision being exploited by politically-motivated organizations and individuals who set out only to grab headlines knowing their case has no realistic chance of a successful prosecution".

This ill-advised proposal by Brown should be viewed as a blunt betrayal of the thousands of Palestinians killed, maimed and incinerated by the Israeli war machine during Israel's genocidal onslaught against the people of Gaza. It should also be viewed as a tacit encouragement to Israel to keep up its militaristic approach toward the Palestinians. In the final analysis, crime unpunished is crime encouraged. The proposal also shows that the British decision to back the Goldstone Report at the UN was no more than a PR exercise intended to maintain a semblance of credibility among Britain's Arab friends.

This duplicity on the part of the British government is further underscored by the virtual British silence in the face of the latest provocative decisions by the Israeli occupation authorities to build tens of thousands of additional settler units for Jews in East Jerusalem.

The feeble and certainly ineffective British stand in the face of Israel's determination to destroy every chance for peace proves that Britain is actually a hindrance to, rather than a facilitator of, peace in the Middle East. Indeed, since British Ambassador to the UN Lord Caradon drafted the Resolution 242 in November 1967, Britain has been pandering to the whims of the Zionist regime in a manner that is only outmatched by America.

Some Palestinians and Arabs had thought naively that the exit of the certified war criminal Tony Blair from the British government would restore some balance to British foreign policy toward the Muslim world, especially Palestine. However, with a gung-ho approach towards Iran, the murderous intervention in Afghanistan and the nefarious connivance with the Israelis, Britain is riding roughshod over all Arab and Muslim sensibilities. This more or less strengthens the arguments of extremist groups like al-Qaeda, which say that the West will not behave justly and decently toward Muslims unless it is forced to do so.

While the British government is certainly to blame for its hypocrisy and duplicity toward the Palestinians' plight, for which it must shoulder some responsibility, Palestinian and Arab officials should always challenge British diplomats and officials to act on their criticism of Israel. It is unacceptable to criticize Israeli settlement expansion in the morning while assuring Israel in the evening that relations with Britain will remain exceptionally strong and be unaffected by any differences over the settlement issue. Britain is the mother of all the calamities that have befallen the Palestinian people since 1914. Hence, a British discourse toward the Palestinian people that is based on deception and dishonesty can never be accepted, even if British diplomats claim it is based on good will.

source: Middle East Monitor  

Cassese notes the “obvious discipline and sophistication of those behind the attack.”  He explores at length the theoretical ethos of the work being undertaken, a step he terms “indispensable.” He concludes that

“All the organs of the STL are not unmindful of the host of hurdles they will have to face, both at present and when they begin to discharge their judicial mandate fully. But they are prepared to surmount those hurdles with intrepidity. After all, the undertakings of anybody struggling for the realization of human rights, and in this case, for the vindication of the rights of the victims and the punishment of the authors of very serious misdeeds, is a labour of Sisyphus.”

Intrepid as they may be, however, it must be remembered what the tale of Sisyphus has come to symbolise: a task that accomplishes nothing beyond its own futile implementation.  The mythological figure, you will recall, was subject to the eternal punishment of pushing a boulder up a hill, waiting for it to roll back down, and then pushing it up again and again.  

 The complex mysteries of unsolved assassinations in Lebanon, Cassese suggests, may always remain just that.  It is ironic timing then, that just as the STL published its report, we find other perplexing news reports on this complex business of assassinations in the Middle East.  There is the admiration expressed for a British/Israeli “spy.”  And there is the audacious pride exhibited over the recent “Dubai mission.”

“He exemplified how to fulfill a public mission,” said Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in praise of David Kimche, who died of cancer 8 March.  Born and bred in Britain, Kimche emigrated to Palestine in 1946, where he went to work for the Zionist project of Israel.  As agent and later deputy head of the Mossad, as well as director-general of the Foreign Ministry, Kimche “took to his grave,” says the Jerusalem Post, “scores of secrets about Israeli clandestine activities that were not only classified information, but in many cases were without documentation and filed only in his brain.”

Israeli media champions this “master of disguise” who posed as a British businessman, a journalist, or maybe a diplomat, with his “extraordinary talent for winning people’s confidence,” noting that the “work he did in Arab countries is inestimable.”

Following the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, for instance, Kimche “helped direct Israel's spectacular revenge” with the aid of its European agents: a string of assassinations in Lebanon and across Europe.  “The aim was not so much revenge but mainly to make them frightened,” Kimche stated.  “We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them. And therefore we tried not to do things by just shooting a guy in the street—that’s easy.”

Easy indeed. 

Kimche was well-suited to his position, as he was “known for his elegant English accent and courteousness, and these qualities sometimes deceived people, as he could be very cunning, determined, and even cruel.”  He was just the man to woo the Francophile, Christian Phalangists in Lebanon, in order to set the groundwork of allies for the Israeli military invasion in 1982, when assassinations were camouflaged amongst the carnage of the brutal onslaught that ensued. 

Yet inexplicably, Kimche inspired an aura of admiration rather than disgust.  The BBC labels him a “spymaster,” a “descendant of a prominent Swiss Jewish family.”  Haaretz finds him “similar in style to the characters described by the British author John le Carre in his spy novels.”

(Quote sources: Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, BBC)

It seems there are many who admire the Bondian license to kill.  American media giant ABC expresses amusement that “After Dubai Hit, Sales of Mossad Merchandise Soar.”   The “tale of an Israeli hit squad swooping into an Arab country to kill a Palestinian militant commander,” ABC reports, “has sparked pride” in Israel.  Quoting a representative of Israel-Catalog.com, t-shirts reading “don’t mess with the Mossad” are now best sellers.  “Before the Mossad operation no one was really interested in these t-shirts, but now everyone wants one.”  Many varieties are available, including “Mossad’s Dubai Operation” (now on “weekly special”) and “I’m Gail Folliard’s alibi.”  This last one is particularly noteworthy.  As Folliard is wanted by Interpol for an arrest warrant issued by the UAE for Crimes against Life and Death, it is a fair indication of the extent that cover-up is routinely endorsed in this complex business of assassination. 

The Western-Middle Eastern collusion is far from an isolated incident.  On 9 March Dubai's police chief accused Israel of “vast falsification” of travel documents, noting that dozens of false passports have been uncovered:

“Israel is falsifying Western passports on a large scale. We discover forged passports on a daily basis.  The world must stop an operation of vast falsification of official documents (that) a formal body (Israel's spy agency Mossad) is carrying out.  It is shameful for the European countries that a country which claims to be a state of law is falsifying their passports.  This is an unprecedented phenomenon for one country to forge the documents of another, [which is] usually done by criminal gangsters, not states.” [AFP]

Meanwhile, an Israeli supermarket has created a new advertising campaign.  Mocking the security camera footage showing suspected assassins in Dubai, the commercial shows actors carrying tennis rackets, and wearing hats, glasses and wigs — the same disguises worn by the alleged killers — as they make their way through store aisles. “We offer killer prices,” announces the advertisement's tagline.  The advertising executive responsible claims “It's a funny take of this event.” [AP] 

“Event”?  An assassination, an international scandal steeped in fraud and political greed, is laughed off as an “event” suitable for parody.  Clever salesmen ridicule the justice system to joe-public, who parades the untouchable crime and criminal on his t-shirt.  A cold-blooded con-man who ordered executions like room service is remembered for his cunning and polished accent. 

 Assassinations in and around Lebanon have for years been challenged only by gossip.  Yet in this complex business of international intrigue, we see $51.4 million in the first year alone being spent in a Netherlands office building to house a “Special” Tribunal for Lebanon.  A tribunal that hopes somehow it might balance its aim to “render expeditious and true justice and to accomplish the truth-seeking mission entrusted upon it by its founding instruments” on the one hand. . . with a boulder-pushing Sisyphus on the other.

Vice President Joe Biden is a seasoned politician with over 30 years in the US Senate with many years of tenure as Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one would assume is a smart man who can understand words and actions. He seemed to lose both while on his visit to Israel.

It seems the Obama-Biden’s White House does not get it. V.P. Biden's statement quoted in Haaretz, “Palestinians, Israelis must decide for themselves if they want peace” sounds very good but when it comes from someone like Joe Biden such statement is not only stupid but reckless as well.

All of the US administrations with the exception of Eisenhower and Kennedy including Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and now Obama has always acted not as an unbiased arbitrator but as partners with Israel and always gave Israel the legal, political, economic and military cover needed to continue with its occupation, with its expanding settlements, with its seizures and closures, its never ending daily aggression and pretended always to ignore the fact that Israel whether Labor, Likud, Kadima, Shas or whatever never was interested in peace with the Palestinians based on land for peace. One can only explain US-Israel relationship as one of a “pimp and his bitch” with Israel being the “pimp” of course.

Elie Yishai, the Israeli interior minister, did not let the visit of Joe Biden to Israel end without taking deliberate action not only to humiliate Joe Biden and the Obama administration but also to make sure he rubs Biden's face in the dirt with his announcement that Israel will build 1,600 new units in occupied East Jerusalem.

For many years since the early days of the Reagan and Bush administration continuing with Clinton and now Obama administrations, everytime there is visit by a high ranking American official, Israel announces either expansions of Jewish settlements, expulsions of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, expansions of security checkpoints, expanding the Apartheid Wall, committing targeted assassinations or attacking neighboring countries.  This is the message American officials get from Israel every time they can pretend they are on a “peace mission”.

One would think that after some 43 years the American administrations get the message right, that Israel never was and never will be interested in any kind of peace with the Palestinians. Israel was, is and remains committed to Greater Israel, remains committed to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from all of Palestine including Israel and the West Bank with calls for making Jordan the home for the future Palestinian state.

Haaretz also announced that Israel is in the process of planning to build 50,000 more units in the occupied West Bank, this is in addition to those 1,600 announced by the Netanyahu government as a welcome reception to Joe Biden and George Mitchell. The Israeli actions from the early days of 67 was for making the West Bank part of the “Jewish” state never referring to the area as “occupied” but as “Judea and Samaria” and at best “disputed” territories.

One can understand Washington’s failure to understand that Israel does not want peace; one could never understand Ramallah and the Arab League actions and statements that assume Israel does want peace.

The PLO leadership failed to understand this "strategic” and “ideological” decision on the part of Israel when it entered into negotiations with Israel leading to Oslo with the agreement and acquiesce of the Palestinian Trio of Arafat, Abbas and Qurai leaving Israel with total and absolute control over 57% of the “occupied territories”, total and absolute control over East Jerusalem including the power to ethnically cleanse Arabs from East Jerusalem.

More troublesome is the decision by Abbas and his administration in Ramallah to continue to negotiate with Ehud Olmert for a couple of years while Olmert and his government was building and expanding settlements more than ever.

In 2008 Israel built 1,647 units in the West Bank an increase of 60% over 2007 and built 5,431 new units in East Jerusalem an increase of 600% over 2007, not to mention expulsions of tens of thousands of Arabs from East Jerusalem. Yet Mahmoud Abbas, and his chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and the PLO executive secretary Yaser Abed-Rabou continued to negotiate with Olmert on a regular basis, meeting at times over dinner as if there are no new settlements.  One has difficulty to understand why Abbas and his PLO team continued to negotiate with Olmert and his war criminal partners Livni and Barak and needed to have Arab League cover to start “proximity” talks with Netanyahu.  Nothing has changed between Olmert and Netanyahu, both are committed to Greater Israel, both are committed to keeping Jerusalem united and under total Israeli control and both never considered the West Bank as “occupied territories” but always referred to it as “Judea and Samaria”.

I guess the only thing left for the Ramallah and the PLO leadership to negotiate is the annual management fees it gets from Israel, US and EU as manager of the Jewish Occupations and the numbers of VIP passes for its many top level executives and functionaries.  One can understand if Washington does not get it, one could never understand why the PLO leadership does not get it? Why Amer Musa and the Arab League do not get it? That Israel was and is and will remain never interested in “peace” with the Palestinians if that “peace” means ending the Jewish Occupation that started on June 5^th, 1967. One also could never understand the Arab continued reliance on the US as an “honest broker” in the “peace process” when the US past and present administrations where always Israel’s “bitch”. Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, peace can happen only when Israel decides and takes the necessary measures and actions it wants peace not before.

also here:
http://www.jeffersoncorner.com/america-does-not-get-it/

Noam Chomsky had once observed an insightful nature of such 'conspiracies', as the open shared natural goals stemming from the very nature of its definition, which could therefore, no more be termed a conspiracy than both GM and Ford endeavoring to maximize their profits at all cost be termed a 'global corporate conspiracy'.

I have always added to that, the equally un-remarkable observation that a hungry lion anywhere in the world pouncing upon a lamb is similarly no global conspiracy by the world's lions to eat up all the lambs on the planet. That is just the nature of the bestial predators when its 'might defines right'. The higher cerebral concepts of 'right', 'wrong', 'moral', 'immoral', etc., do not even exist among any primal predators, for these only behave according to their nature. Pious platitudes, if they could be argued by the lion or the snake for instance, would in fact only be disseminated to the lambs and the mice to make them an even easier morsel to acquire!

The only thing that occasionally deters such exercise of primacy is a collective natural response like the one observed in the 'Battle at Kruger' park. Indeed, the quest for the holy grail of extracting voluntary servitude from the masses of mankind is the key idea of cultivating a willingly compliant public in order for the illuminated ones becoming their stewards for life. In Bertrand Russell's' timeless characterization, to extract voluntary servitude such that: "

Thus we observe that from Plato to Nietzsche, from the philosopher-king to the 'Ubermensch', all have argued the necessity of ruling upon the sheepish masses as the 'divine' imperative of the 'enlightened ones'. Indeed, Zbigniew Brzezinski even sub-titled his seminal book "The Grand Chessboard" with its egotistical subtitle "American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives", merely extending that idea of 'Ubermensch' rule from the most 'enlightened ones', to the most powerful sole-superpower!

The same theme exists among the 'Chosen Peoples', to deem their primacy upon the goyim their inherent nature, their divine destiny. The 'Ubermensch' are suckled these lessons in their mothers milk to acquire those imperatives across generations in perhaps the same way as the generations of corporate executives and CEOs who inherently know that they need to continually enhance the valuation of their company's stock performance in a capitalist system.

So, when these 'divine' ubermensch creatures who are beyond good and evil, behave in their primal predatory natural manner across time and space, across evolution or creation, are they being 'conspiratorial'?

In the Chomsky-Ebrahim nomenclature, perhaps not.

In the Ron Paul nomenclature, it is merely a shared 'Conspiracy of Ideas'  in which 'CFR exists, the Trilateral Commission exists', and that, it is only 'an ideological battle' wherein:

These are real things, it's not somebody made these up, it's not a conspiracy, they don't talk about it, and they might not admit about it, but there has been money spent on it …

According to such legalism, smart conspirators, if powerful enough, could affect the enaction of conducive federal statutes, or prevent the enaction of adverse ones, that would enable them to get away with many morally reprehensible systems and acts. The Federal Reserve System for instance, falls into this category. A legalized extortion racket to enslave the public in perpetual debt for the issue and supply of their own national currency. Similarly, bootlegging is a federal crime one decade, a respectable business the next! And internationally, it is the enaction of laws under WTO which defines what is criminal and what isn't - not the raping and harvesting of developing nations that goes on under its conspiratorial rubric!

Thus suffice it to say, the word 'conspiracy' even has legal semantics, albeit rather limited. It is limited because it is easy to circumvent an abhorrence and call it legal when the king makes the laws.

But the multitudinous connotations of this word do not stop there. It also has a 'tin-hatted' or 'kookish' implication in furtherance of the devilish art of political science based state-craft. This was indeed implied by Congressman Ron Paul in his afore-quoted speech when he stated regarding the North American Union: "

In fact, some of the best cloaking devices for clandestine covert-operations and hidden agendas have been invented by the most brilliant minds - here is one exposition for instance from Ezra Pound: "invent two lies and have the public keep arguing which one of them might be true". Another is by Leo Strauss - the erudite teacher of the majority of the neo-cons - called "Noble Lies". A third by the White House, often referred to as "plausible deniability", okay may be it was invented by the DIA, the grand-daddy of all intelligence agencies. This thinly-veiled euphemism for deception to protect the leadership if things go badly in covert-operations became public knowledge during the Iran-Contra scandal, the televised coverage of which had gripped the American nation for months, including myself. And this wasn't just a rogue operation with ad hoc deniability cover by patriotic agents as most in the public are led to believe. Deniability is official government policy vis a vis any covert operation dating back to President Truman's signing of NSC 10/2. That directive made the introduction of 'plausible deniability' a requirement for CIA's clandestine operations in case they were ever blown while still active. Below is an excerpt from

'Management of Covert Actions in the Truman Presidency

Lastly, we also have the 'limited hangout' and 'modified limited hangout' conspiracies to mislead the public in case 'plausible deniability' for governmental wrong-doing doesn't work. This modus operandi of accepting partial mea culpa for something less consequential in order to mask the more egregious crimes was amply demonstrated by Richard Nixon during the waning years of his presidency. A good description of it with excerpts from the Nixon tapes planning the red herrings is on Wikipedia.

It should now be self-evident that while still active, or while mileage is being extracted from a clandestine operation recently concluded, or some egregious wrong-doing, all references to it must be squashed or dismissed, inter alia, by labeling them as kookish 'conspiracy theories'. And when blown, to have the cover story ready for 'plausible deniability', and/or some version of 'limited hangout'. What are these if not real conspiracies to mask real clandestine covert-operations and wrong-doings?

Thus, if it is axiomatically asserted that there is no such thing as a real conspiracy theory, then that really works wonderfully in the interest of the cloak-makers because it makes one forget the perspectives of history.

And this complex Machiavellian deception game behind alleging 'kookishness' bears exposing fully: invent two or more lies, not just one, and keep the good hearted well meaning peoples in the 'populist democracy' occupied debating which one of them might be true, for it would hardly matter what conclusions they reached. And wherever they ended up, to perhaps yank one of the lies from underneath them by conclusively showing it to be false thus conveniently demonstrating a baseless 'conspiracy theory' in order to keep that notion alive in the public imagination. This consequently delegitimizes in the public mind serious researchers' efforts in uncovering any covert-operation while its secrecy is of paramount necessity. Afterwards, after faits accomplis, after statute of limitations expiring, it makes little difference if historians and con-fession artists make a pecuniary gain peddling what is inconsequential history to the newer evolving realpolitik du jour. The recognition of this self-evident truth of the matter and its utility to Machiavellian statecraft was boldly narrated even in the New York Times (Ron Suskind, Oct. 17, 2004):

Cass R. Sunstein of Harvard Law School, the man who is today President Obama's Information Czar in the White House, in his 2008 paper titled Conspiracy Theories, called this process of the creation of diabolical red herrings, introducing 'beneficial cognitive diversity' through 'cognitive infiltration'. The paper has to be read in its entirety in order to be appreciated for its brazen and open appeal to Machiavelli.

So many complex semantics for the simple term 'conspiracy theory' - it's not just mere nomenclature - that this overview of its usefulness to statecraft was necessary in order to situate anything with such a bombastic title as 'The Capitalist Conspiracy', in its proper social-political-legal-conspiratorial context.

And an equally insightful and rational response to this question of long enduring conspiracy for world domination, is added to the motivational mix by G. Edward Griffin in the video below:

Thus, Griffin aptly noted: "The New World Order Is Not New", but a common objective borne of natural inclination to primacy which apparently transcends time, space, geography and race. It naturally increases in its scope in proportion to the vistas of power it acquires. And it automatically attracts to its cause the coterie of sycophants and useful idiots essential in realizing its overarching agendas. It is helped along, as W. Cleon Skoussen uncannily observed in his commentary in 'The Naked Capitalist':

'The real value of Tragedy and Hope … [is the] bold and boastful admission by Dr. Quigley that there actually exists a relatively small but powerful group which has succeeded in acquiring a choke-hold on the affairs of practically the entire human race. Of course we should be quick to recognize that no small group could wield such gigantic power unless millions of people in all walks of life were -in on the take- and were willing to knuckle down to the iron-clad regimentation of the ruthless bosses behind the scenes. As we shall see, the network has succeeded in building its power structure by using tremendous quantities of money (together with the vast influence it buys) to manipulate, intimidate, or corrupt millions of men and women and their institutions on a world-wide basis.' (pg. 6)

Subsequent manipulation of global events through statecraft machinations become trivial when one has already taken over the state's machinery and its many essential instruments of policy-making. The upshot of it all is that it becomes a moot point what label one might give to this empirical predatory behavior. Zbigniew Brzezinski even openly proclaimed its pertinence to statecraft in the very first sentence of his book mentioned earlier: 'Hegemony is as old as mankind'. The undeniable fact remains that world-government has been a long historical passion of oligarchs! The quest for the hegemony of the entire world has been their natural enduring conspiracy for world government. And it is finally coming to its grand fruition in our own time as most useful idiots still mindlessly chatter on about 'conspiracy theories'.

Until now.

The mainstream media's favorite scapegoat, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, resurfaced on Saturday amidst reports that he called the attacks of September 11, 2001 "a big lie." According to the immediate and rabid response of virtually every Western news network around, this was simply the latest insane claim of the same raving madman who has previously threatened to wipe a foreign state off the map and denied the Holocaust.

Yet, as with those other mistranslated or misunderstood statements, this new claim hardly stands up to even the most cursory scrutiny, as it has been reported with little accompanying context and comparison. According to a translation by Reuters, Ahmadinejad, addressing the staff of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, stated that, "The September 11 incident was a big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan." PressTV translated the President as saying that the circumstances of 9/11 were a "big lie intended to serve as a pretext for fighting terrorism and setting the grounds for sending troops to Afghanistan."

Most of the press, including CBS, Huffington Post, and Fox, ran with an Associated Press report by Ali Akbar Dareini entitled, "Iran's Ahmadinejad: Sept. 11 attacks a 'big lie'" while CNN and Ha'aretz reprinted the AP with some slight variations like using the headline "Ahmadinejad Calls 9/11 'A Big Fabrication'."

Robert Mackey, writing for The New York Times editorialized that Ahmadinejad told Iranian intelligence officials that the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City was "staged."

By reporting that he called 9/11 a "lie" or "fabrication," the press has completely subverted the meaning of Ahmadinejad's actual statement. Headlines and ledes like the ones printed by the mainstream media give the intentionally misleading interpretation that Ahmadinejad claimed that 9/11 didn't actually happen. But the full quote obviously reveals something quite different. The events of 9/11 – that hijacked airplanes were flown into buildings, killing tens of hundreds of people – is not questioned or denied by Ahmadinejad in these statements. The attacks, in and of themselves, are not debated or disputed. What Ahmadinejad says is that the event itself was the result of, as PressTV reports, a premeditated "scenario and a sophisticated intelligence measure," that was subsequently used as an excuse to justify the so-called "War on Terror" and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In short, President Ahmadinejad does not claim that 9/11 itself is a lie. He never has. In May 2006, in a letter written directly to George W. Bush, Ahmadinejad states, clearly and unequivocally,

"September Eleven was a horrendous incident. The killing of innocents is deplorable and appalling in any part of the world. Our government immediately declared its disgust with the perpetrators and offered its condolences to the bereaved and expressed its sympathies."

Ahmadinejad's words echo those of his predecessor, President Mohammad Khatami, who in the wake of the attacks declared, "On behalf of the Iranian people and the Islamic Republic, I denounce the terrorist measures, which led to the killing of defenseless people, and I express my deep sorrow and sympathy with the American people." Furthermore, Iran was one of the first countries to hold candle-light vigils in solidarity and sympathy with the victims of the attacks.

What Ahmadinejad does claim, however, is that the official story of the events – publicly memorialized in the publication of the US government-sponsored The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) – is dubious, incomplete, and may very well have been the result of well-calculated misinformation and deliberate action (or, perhaps, inaction on previously obtained intelligence) by the US government. This is neither a new revelation for Ahmadinejad nor for the world community in general. In his letter to Bush, Ahmadinejad wrote,

"Could it be planned and executed without coordination with intelligence and security services – or their extensive infiltration? Of course this is just an educated guess. Why have the various aspects of the attacks been kept secret? Why are we not told who botched their responsibilities? And, why aren't those responsible and the guilty parties identified and put on trial?"

In questioning the job done by American intelligence agencies, and questioning the US government's official version of events and responsibility, in the lead-up to September 11th, the Iranian President isn't alone.

Esfahan is Half the World, and Half the World Questions the 9/11 Story

To read the hysterical reports about his recent 9/11 comments questioning the accepted story of the event, one would think that Ahmadinejad is voicing roundly rejected, widely unpopular, and insanely outrageous conspiracy theories, devoid of any reasonable evidence or public support. This is hardly the case.

In fact, Ahmadinejad is in the company of more than half of planet Earth, half of New Yorkers, and almost half of all Americans. His views are not particularly uncommon, let alone unique. They surely don't demonstrate a lunatic fringe viewpoint, but rather an opinion well within the public discourse, though not often discussed by Western media.

Whereas the 9/11 Commission was officially "created by congressional legislation and the signature of President George W. Bush in late 2002…to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks," a plurality of the public believe this goal was not successfully accomplished and have doubts about the Commission's findings.

An August 2004 Zogby poll, conducted right after the Commission's report was made public and just days before the Republican National Convention was held in Manhattan, found that over 49% of New York City residents and 41% of New York State citizens say that at least some US government officials "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act."

Another Zogby poll from May 2006 found that 42% of Americans believe that "the US government and its 9/11 Commission concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks" and said "there has been a cover-up." Another ten percent of respondents were unsure. The same poll found that 44% of Americans believe that "the Bush Administration exploited the September 11th attacks" in order to advance its own foreign policy agenda in the Middle East, namely, "to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Furthermore, 45% of those polled agree that "so many unanswered questions about 9/11 remain that Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success," while eight percent remain "unsure."

A Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll from July 2006 discovered that "More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East."

The next year, in May 2006, a Rasmussen poll revealed that "overall, 22% of all voters believe the President [sic] knew about the attacks in advance," while "a slightly larger number, 29%, believe the CIA knew about the attacks in advance."

Between May 2002 and October 2006, polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News found that upwards of 79% of the American public believed that "When it comes to what they knew prior to September 11th, 2001, about possible terrorist attacks against the United States," members of the Bush Administration were either "mostly telling the truth but hiding something," "mostly lying," or "not sure." In those four and a half years, the number of respondents convinced that the government was "mostly lying" grew by 20%.

A September 2008 World Public Opinion survey, asked "16,000 people in 17 countries who they thought was responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington." The results showed that "majorities in only nine of the 17 countries believed that al-Qaida was behind the attacks." In response, WPO director Steven Kull stated,

"Broadly, I think what this tells us is that there is a lack of confidence in the United States around the world. It is striking that even among our allies, the numbers that say al-Qaida was behind 9/11 do not get above two-thirds, and barely become a majority. So this is a real indication that the United States is not in a strong position to, in a sense, tell its story. The American narrative is not as powerful in the world today."

Evidence aside, the mainstream media presents Ahmadinejad's recent statements as if they represent an outlandish theory based upon nothing more than paramount insanity.

Wiping Context Off the Map

Disingenuously reporting that Ahmadinejad called 9/11 a "big lie" without exploring the context his statement, notably his claim that 9/11 was used as a "pretext" to carry out the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, is much akin to headlines announcing that Ahmadinejad threatens to "wipe out" Israel without presenting the statement in full. For instance, a Jerusalem Post article from December 12, 2006 and entitled "Ahmadinejad: Israel will be 'wiped out'" states in the first paragraph that the Iranian President "vowed once again that Israel would be 'wiped out.'" Only later in the piece does writer Herb Keinon reproduce the entire quote, which reveals a contextually vital qualification:

"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom…[elections should be held among] Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner."

Similarly, press reports from the previous fall, which sparked the entire "wiped off the map" fiasco, failed to tell their readers the whole story. In that speech, analyst Arash Norouzi explains, "Ahmadinejad declares that Zionism is the West's apparatus of political oppression against Muslims. He says the "Zionist regime" was imposed on the Islamic world as a strategic bridgehead to ensure domination of the region and its assets." Apparently, in his reading of history, Ahmadinejad was simply reiterating the suggestions of Zionism's founder Theodor Herzl. In chapter 2 of his 1896 manifesto, Der Judenstaat, Herzl wrote,

"We [Jews] should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence."

Ahmadinejad reminded his audience that, while the eventual weakening or complete dissolution of America's hegemony over the Middle East via its colonial-settler garrison state may be unthinkable or unimaginable to some, "as Khomeini predicted, other seemingly invincible empires have disappeared and now only exist in history books." He listed the Shah's tyrannical monarchy in Iran, the repressive and expansionist Soviet Union, and the Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, as examples of "regimes that have collapsed, crumbled or vanished" in only the past three decades. In conclusion, Ahmadinejad repeated Khomeini's prescient view that the political demise of the Zionist government of Israel would soon follow: "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

Of course, all we've ever heard from Western press reports is that Ahmadinejad threatened to "wipe Israel off the map," an idiom that doesn't even exist in the Persian language, and that was the end of the discussion.

Confusing "Pretext" with "Pretense"

When Ahmadinejad speaks about historical events acting as pretexts to subsequent injustices, he is not claiming that the first event never happened, but simply stating that the event served to justify what followed. This pretext, then, is the exploitation of terrible tragedies as an excuse, motive, and ostensible reason ascribed to explain what historically occurred next. Using horrific events to nefarious advantage is what Naomi Klein has essentially defined as "The Shock Doctrine." This is what Ahmadinejad has spoken about when he uses the term "pretext," which is why, in his speech on Saturday, he stated that "Depredation, bullying and killing the reality of humanity are the outcomes of the capitalist way of thinking."

Unfortunately, the media has decided to equate the term "pretext" with "pretense" and insist that they are both identical synonyms for a claim, invention, myth, fabrication, or lie. With this in mind, it is easy to see how the demonization campaign of Ahmadinejad has been so successful.

This deliberate misinterpretation is not at all new. Even though it is commonplace in the press to insist that Ahmadinejad is a virulent anti-Semite who believes the Nazi holocaust never happened, this is an absurd suggestion unsupported by the facts.

When, at last April's Durban II conference, Ahmadinejad addressed the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 by stating, "As was the case after World War II, armies occupied other territories and people were transferred from territories…In reality, under the pretext of compensating for the evil done in the name of xenophobia, they in fact set up the most violent xenophobes, in Palestine."

He continued, "The Security Council made it possible for that illegitimate government to be set up. For 60 years, this government was supported by the world. Many Western countries say they are fighting racism; but in fact support it with occupation, bombings and crimes such as those committed in Gaza. These countries support the criminals."

The media reported that Ahmadinejad called the holocaust a myth, which promoted a pre-staged walkout by attending European delegations. But the usage of the word "pretext" is obvious to anyone willing to actually read.

Ahmadinejad's Durban II comments repeat remarks he previously wrote back in early September 2006, in a letter sent to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In it, Ahmadinejad stated, "World War II came to an end with all its material and moral losses and its 60 million casualties. The death of human beings is tragic and sad. In all divine religions and before all awakened conscience and pure nature of mankind and the sense of right and wrong, the life, property and honor of people, regardless of their religious persuasion and ethnic background, must be respected at all times and all places."

By accepting the 60 million death toll of World War II, how could Ahmadinejad be denying the mechanized ethnic cleansing of millions of European Jews? He continued,

"Honorable Chancellor

I have no intention of arguing about the Holocaust. But, does it not stand to reason that some victorious countries of World War II intended to create an alibi on the basis of which they could continue keeping the defeated nations of World War II indebted to them. Their purpose has been to weaken their morale and their inspiration in order to obstruct their progress and power. In addition to the people of Germany, the peoples of the Middle East have also borne the brunt of the Holocaust. By raising the necessity of settling the survivors of the Holocaust in the land of Palestine, they have created a permanent threat in the Middle East in order to rob the people of the region of the opportunities to achieve progress. The collective conscience of the world is indignant over the daily atrocities by the Zionist occupiers, destruction of homes and farms, killing of children, assassinations and bombardments.

Excellency, you have seen that the Zionist government does not even tolerate a government elected by the Palestinian people, and over and over again has demonstrated that it recognizes no limit in attacking the neighboring countries."

If Ahmadinejad's point still isn't clear, he elaborates:

"Using the excuse for the settlement of the survivors of the Holocaust, they encouraged the Jews worldwide to migrate and today a large part of the inhabitants of the occupied territories are non-European Jews. If tyranny and killing is condemned in one part of the world, can we acquiesce and go along with tyranny, killing, occupation and assassinations in another part of the world simply in order to redress the past wrongs?"

The question is not whether the holocaust happened or not, rather, it is how that horrendous tragedy has been exploited in order to justify the establishment of a "Jewish State" in Palestine and rob indigenous Palestinians of their own rights to self-determination. The issue is not to call history into question, but rather to explore the consequences of historical acts.

Furthermore, Ahmadinejad has always made a stark distinction between Jewish people and Zionists. He has said on numerous occasions that his opposition to a Jewish State is a political and ideological one, and not to be confused with a violent ultimatum or military threat to the Israeli people. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that Iran has "no problem with people and nations" and that Iran does "not have any confrontation with anyone. We seek relations based on respect and justice." Even more specifically, in a 2008 CNN interview with Larry King, he stated quite clearly that "we don't have a problem with the Jewish people."

Just to be extra clear, Ahmadinejad declared, "We are opposed to the idea that the people who live there should be thrown into the sea or be burnt," reiterating his belief in self-determination of all people based upon elections: "We believe that all the people who live there [in Israel and Palestine], the Jews, Muslims and Christians, should take part in a free referendum and choose their government."

Even during his widely lambasted Durban II speech, Ahmadinejad clearly demarcated the distinction between the 19th century colonial ideology of Jewish nationalism and the Jewish religion, stating, "The word Zionism personifies racism that falsely resorts to religion and abuses religious sentiments to hide their hatred and ugly faces."

Despite the fact that Ahmadinejad called for an "end to Zionism," countless news agencies erroneously reported that he sought the "destruction of Israel," and numerous commentators, including British ambassador Peter Gooderham, called these remarks "anti-Semitic."

In his piece about Ahmadinejad's 9/11 statement on Saturday, The New York Times' Robert Mackey, reminded his readers about comments made by the Iranian President during an International al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day rally on September 18, 2009, a national celebration in solidarity with the Palestinian people and in opposition to Zionism. Mackey, who refers to Quds Day as "Iran’s annual anti-Israel day," writes that Ahmadinejad told the crowd that "The pretext for the creation of the Zionist regime is false…It is a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim." Again, the pretext of the holocaust is not at all the same thing as a lie.

The holocaust, as an historical occurrence admitted to by its own perpetrators in Europe and widely described as the systematic and mechanized murder of millions of Jews, is not being called a lie in this statement. Considering that the indigenous people of Palestine bear no responsibility for the atrocities committed by the Nazis, the consequences of the holocaust, however, as it was used to justify the creation of Israel in Palestine, is what Ahmadinejad states is based on a "mythical claim." This becomes quite clear by listening to the very next line of Ahmadniejad's speech, unreported by Mackey or anyone else in the Western press: "The occupation of Palestine has no connection with the issue of the holocaust."

Later in the Quds Day speech, Ahmadinejad once again made sure to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism:

"The Zionists have no faith. It is a big lie that the Zionists should be considered tantamount to the Jews or the Christians. Zionists are not Jews nor Christians, and, rather, the Zionists seek to destroy all the values brought about by the divine prophets…the basis of Zionism is to destroy human culture and human values and the values of all nations."

Iran itself has an ancient community of over 25,000 Jews, the second largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel itself. Along with Ahmadinejad, Siamak Morsadegh, the Jewish Iranian legislator and community leader, has criticized Israel's policies towards Palestinians, especially in Gaza, saying it showed "anti-human behavior…they kill innocent people," and continuing that the Jewish community in Iran does "not recognize a government or a nation for the Zionist regime."

"A New Pearl Harbor"

That Ahmadinejad – along with millions and millions of others around the world – would find the official story of 9/11 suspicious is not without good cause.

A year before the September 11, 2001 attacks, neocon think tank Project for a New American Century, published a 90-page manifesto for a imperially dominant American Empire, urging "that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces." Among its aims, the report, entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century, calls for the United States to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars" and achieve "a global security order that is uniquely friendly to American principles and prosperity."

PNAC's members, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Eliot Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, John Bolton, Scooter Libby, and Richard Perle, believed that "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." Maybe those many PNAC members who, later that year, were subsequently appointed to top level positions in Bush's new administration didn't want to wait that long for such a galvanizing moment in order to pursue their own agenda of unilateral preemptive invasions of Middle Eastern countries.

When Ahmadinejad speaks of 9/11 as involving a "complicated intelligence scenario and act," shouldn't the media perhaps contextualize his statement by discussing the exaggerated and manipulated 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident which was largely responsible for launching the American military campaign in Vietnam, the 1954 Israeli false flag operations known as the Lavon Affair conducted against Egypt, or the planned, but never implemented, Operation Northwoods scheme in 1962 concocted by the U.S. Department of Defense to instigate a war with Cuba (one of the plans consisted of hijacking an airplane and blaming the new Castro regime).

IranAffairs' Cyrus Safdari reminds us of "Emad Salem, an undercover FBI informant who had infiltrated the group that carried out the first WTC bombing back in 1993. He was smart enough to record his conversations with the FBI. Turns out, he specifically warned the FBI of the bombing, and offered to replace the bomb material with a harmless substance, but the FBI said no." What about the completely bogus, but thoroughly hyped, "Newburgh bomb plot" to bomb synagogues in Riverdale, NY and fire a missile at a US military jet, which was entirely set up by FBI informant Shahed Hussain.

What about the 2007 statement by National Medal of Science laureate Lynn Margulis in which she referred to 9/11 as a "new false-flag operation, which has been used to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as unprecedented assaults on research, education, and civil liberties"? Or former CIA Middle East operative Robert Baer, who has written, "Until we get a complete, honest, transparent investigation – not one based on 'confession' extracted by torture – we will never know what happened on 9/11." Or former senior CIA official Bill Christison, who wrote that there is a "strong body of evidence showing the official US government story of what happened on September 11, 2001 to be almost certainly a monstrous series of lies." What about the other CIA officials who question the official story?

What about the Guardian report from November 1, 2001 which revealed that, according to French intelligence officials, "Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent"?

What about the mysterious collapse of Tower 7, Able Danger, the failure to scramble jets, the myriad National Security experts denied, ignored, or censored from the 9/11 Commission report, deception and non-cooperation by the Department of Defense, whistle-blowers like Coleen Rowley, supposed short-selling and text message warnings, or the five dancing Israelis seen watching and videotaping the attacks from New Jersey's Liberty State Park across the Hudson River?

What about the British intelligence report, entitled "Responsibility for the terrorist atrocities in the United States," which purports to provide evidence that "Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the atrocities on 11 September 2001, yet begins with the following disclaimer: "This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law"?

What about the BBC report, entitled "The investigation and the evidence," which concludes, "There is no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks…At best the evidence is circumstantial."

What about the evidence that, in no verified audio or video tapes, has bin Laden actually claimed responsibility for the attacks, yet has even been quoted as stating, "I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act…we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed."

What about the fact that Osama bin Laden is, to this very day, not specifically wanted in connection with the 9/11 attacks, according to FBI's own Most Wanted List?

As a result, is there not plenty of dubious information and spurious evidence surrounding the official story of the September 11 attacks to warrant some sort of suspicion, regardless of what you may personally think actually happened? In this way, with his recent comments, President Ahmadinejad has given voice to the majority of the world. But clearly, for fear they might stumble on some uncomfortable truths, it appears easier for the mainstream media to decontextualize his statements and label him a crackpot conspiracy theorist who is a danger to the American way of life, thus leading the United States down the path to attacking a third Middle Eastern country, than to do its own job.

By misrepresenting the country of Iran, its people, its system of government, its culture, its religion, its elected and unelected leaders, the Western press has already set the stage for an attack on the Islamic Republic. Because of the media's sensational and propagandistic reporting, 71% of Americans already believing that Iran currently possesses nuclear weapons. 90% think that the power of Iran's military poses either a critical or important "threat to U.S. vital interests" (despite the fact that Iran's military budget that is literally one hundred times smaller than that of the US). 59% of American citizens even support unilateral, preemptive US military action against Iran regardless of whether economic or diplomatic efforts achieve the government's desired effect.

Perhaps, as was seen with the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, the press is doing exactly what the US government wants it to do.

*****

Contact him at wideasleepinamerica@gmail.com.
–
Wide Asleep In America
Brooklyn, NY
http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com

Personal reflections on my forthcoming lecture

Since the date for my new lecture became fixed, a few months back, at my alma mater university in the State of Minnesota, USA, where I received my first 4 years of higher education, and earned my Bachelor’s degree, I was in a quandary.  Certainly, this would not be the first lecture I give to an American academic audience in my long career, but since I chose the topic of “Whither Palestine/Israel: What Future?  I have been preoccupied almost constantly with this lecture.  Whatever else I was doing, researching, writing, attending conferences, workshops, meetings, etc, or being involved in domestic and manual chores at home, and so forth, this forthcoming lecture dominated my mind.  It was my nagging concern, and I kept pushing to have it become my wife’s nagging concern too.  Why?

Whatever I read on this broad subject during this period (and I read a lot!); whatever came into my “in box”—reports, studies, analyses, position papers, book reviews, articles, petitions to sign, etc., all was perused; and some was read thoroughly and carefully, with the forthcoming lecture in mind! Why? What was I looking for?

The audience to whom I will be speaking, who is not unfamiliar to me (because I taught there for seven years) was firmly nestled in the back of my mind … my memory.  Basically, this is an audience of privileged Catholic young men and women; the product of middle and upper economic classes; well-bred and well-immersed in the so-called “Judeo-Christian tradition”; and who do well financially when they graduate.  They succeed in gravitating voluntarily and enthusiastically, with unmatched conviction, nurtured by a deep sense of Catholic loyalty (avoiding the wrath of generations of cumulative Catholic guilt), to good job opportunities in mainstream sectors that reproduce and sustain prevalent American culture.  My recollection of this audience (at least in the mid to late 1970’s and through the review of the “Alumni magazine”, which I receive regularly) is that they are not much interested in knowing and analyzing the changing state of the world beyond US borders, unless they happen to have been somehow affected by it, or participating in it through the direct occupation of other countries, e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, etc, or indirectly, e.g., Palestine.

Therein lays my quandary.  My main and nagging concern was this: How can I constrict more than a century-old Palestinian struggle for liberation and against foreign colonialism in a lecture of about 30-40 minutes, to such an audience, without “force spoon-feeding” them; without suffocating them with reams and reams of information; and without thrusting them into the realm of history, to where they would be very reluctant to go on their own volition? How best to etch in their brains one or two deep insights that they will not forget, and that they would keep coming back to for reference, even if they naturally resist doing so?

At the same time, doesn’t this quandary apply in speaking to any audience who identifies and supports the illegal American invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as their patriotic duty? Wouldn’t this require at least two to three “pruning” attempts before you can get to the core of the issues, and before you can get such an audience to see and acknowledge the core?

Initially, and as a way out of my predicament, I began working on a basic premise that I need to find and cast in front of them bits of critical data, strung in a somewhat coherent logical chain that can be verified empirically, without requiring leaps of a different system of logic.  I started squeezing my mind, and everything I read and re-read.  I wanted to come up with some type of a list of what is important (for them to know) and what is less important?

I concluded, readily, that they needed to have a visual image of how the land of Palestine was effectively eviscerated, decimated, dismembered … since 1947.  So, I worked on providing maps revealing the gradual obliteration of the land of Palestine.  This is easy to show, because such maps abound.  But this, in itself, wasn’t satisfactory to me.  Should I, then, refer them to basic good references that document this process of genocidal tragedy? But, then, how I can bring them from there to today? How can I entice them to cross with me, quickly and without major diversions, the last century of the Zionist colonial onslaught on Palestine?

How much detail should I expose them to, while introducing the entire “Oslo process”, for example? But, regardless of the level of detail I would provide them, what essence would they retain from these “Oslo” details? And what essence I want them to hold on to and, hopefully, internalize? Should I, for example, highlight the fragmentation of the land (the essence of coherent geography and space)? Should I underscore the acquiescence to a continued military colonial occupation, as it is driven and encouraged by the emergence of a Quisling “Palestinian Authority” in its role as a sub-agent for Israeli control and oppression? Or, should I give more attention to the pre-designed role of “Oslo” in the total fragmentation of the Palestinian people, and the dissolution of their struggle for liberation and freedom, etc ? Or, should I deal with all the above components as constituting the elements of an insidious plan? And finally, is my audience opposed, in principle, to military occupation and colonization of another people?

Or, on the other hand, should I start with the now and telescope it back into its historical context? Why not, it occurred to me, start shocking them by focusing, for example, on the most recent racist genocidal calls to “curb Palestinian births” by one Martin Kramer of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs? Or, by the Israeli decision to erase the 800 years old Palestinian Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem to make room for a Jewish so-called “Museum of Tolerance” in its stead?  Or, by the multitude of stories of Palestinian daily human sufferings and humiliation on the military checkpoints, in all Palestinian areas under occupation (Gaza, West Bank, Jerusalem)?  Or, should I focus on the rise in numbers and percentages (since 2001) of attempted suicides among Palestinian young people (18 – 30 years of age), mostly women (about 80%), because of the absence of hope, blocked horizons, and evaporating alternatives for decent human and free existence? Etc, etc.

As always, I attempted to engage my wife in this process of mental deliberations.  She was instrumental in helping me get out of this predicament.  “This is important, but not shocking ”, she advised.  “Why don’t you focus on the real basics? It is about time, at this critical stage, to re-focus on the real essentials of the entire struggle, and to forcefully engage your American audience to reflect on these essentials.” And this is what I am doing.  I “shifted gears” to go faster towards the target! What are the real essentials, and where do we go from here? This will be the core of my forthcoming lecture.

Essential one:

The creation of Israel, as a result of the “Partition Resolution” (UNGA 181) in 29 November 1947 is illegal and has no legitimacy, just like the invasion and occupation of Iraq by American forces.

*  “Israel was created, mainly, by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing – a pre-planned process that saw three-quarters of the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine dispossessed of their homes, their land and their rights.” 

*  The assertion that Israel’s birth certificate and legitimacy was given by the UN Partition Resolution is pure Zionist propaganda, because: 

“In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.” 

• “The UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. But the General Assembly resolution was only a recommendation – meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.”
   
• “The General Assembly's recommendation never went to the Security Council for consideration because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force given the extent of Arab and other Muslim opposition to it; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.  So the partition plan was vitiated.”

*  Hence, the push and pressure on the Palestinians to recognize the Zionist state.  “In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved.”  (See Alan Hart, “ Zionism Unmasked" , Palestine Think Tank, 13 February 2010.)

*  “The vote was 33 in favor, 13 against and 10 abstentions, with a requirement for a 2/3 majority. Is that a large majority? Abstentions obviously were not counted, but why and under what pressure of ideals were those abstentions made? And what about the other countries, more than the fifty-six voting within the UN, and probably more including the many colonies that were probably excluded at the time?”

*  “The UN Partition Plan of 1947 is of dubious validity … based as it was on a limited and perhaps contrived vote count. … Further questions arise from the Plan itself in which it says: ‘The Security Council determine as a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression, in accordance with Article 39 of the Charter, any attempt to alter by force the settlement envisaged by this resolution;’

*  The historical record documents clearly that there was a large "attempt to alter by force the settlement envisaged by this resolution," and that “rose immediately from the Israeli ‘defence' forces who quickly set about the ethnic cleansing of over 400 towns using tactics which today would be considered terror.”  (For the above, see Jim Miles, “ Shlaim's Israel and Palestine”,, 18 January 2010,  Jim Miles's ZSpace Page).

*  Although I accept the position of those who argue that “Israel exists and the vote is irrelevant”, it is, nevertheless, imperative to keep reminding that Israel, as a state, was created by Zionist colonialism and terror, not a political peaceful entity along side of Palestine, but a settler colonial entity on top of Palestine, and obliterating it.

*  It is vital to keep questioning “What is the true nature of this state of Israel that commands the allegiance of the American people and is now seeking to enlist the governments of the world against its perceived ‘existential’ enemy, Iran?” and that may ignite a third world war!

*  It is vital to keep reminding that this rogue state is in defiance of international law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions that apply to occupying powers.  This is a state “that possesses weapons of mass destruction, including hundreds of nuclear weapons, and refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty”, not to mention stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons;

*  It is crucial to keep reminding that this State “has defied more than 160 UNGA and 39 UNSC resolutions, demanding it act as a civilized state abiding by international law and protocol”;

* It is fundamental to keep reminding that this is “a state that has systematically confiscated, appropriated, annexed, and assimilated virtually all land belonging to the Palestinians in a sixty-year period of time, leaving them approximately 14 percent of their original land, making it the greatest visible land theft known to human kind in our day”;

*  It is important to keep reminding that this is “ a state that proclaims itself a democracy but is not and, with malicious intent, confiscates the money belonging to a democratically elected government in Palestine and arrests their representatives without charge or trial.” (See William A. Cook,  “The Unstated Script of the Wiesel Open Letter to President Obama”,  23  February 2010, Information Clearing House. 

Essential Two:

The “Oslo Process” with all its accords, starting with the “Declaration of Principles” in September 1993, is an international plan, inspired, devised and supported by the very Western powers that created the illegitimate state of Israel.  It was imposed on the Palestinians for the simple reason to force them to acquiesce to the status quo of Israeli colonialism and occupation of the entire land of Palestine. “By mortgaging the Palestinian leadership to US and Israeli sponsorship, by creating and maintaining administrative, legal and financial structures that will ensure this dependence, Oslo has been what it was designed to be from the start: the mechanism of ending the Palestinian quest to end Israeli colonialism and occupation, and the legitimation of Israel's racist nature by the very people over whom it exercises its colonial and racist dominion.”

The main pillars of this process, as it has been shown in actual application and results, are the following:

• The fragmentation of Palestinian political leadership, and the obfuscation and destruction of the principle of “representation”, namely, the relationship between the PLO and the PA;
• The fragmentation of the Palestinian people into unconnected pieces and geographies: West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, Areas occupied in 1948, refugees in camps, “shatat” (Diaspora) Palestinians, Areas “A”, “B”, and “C” in the West Bank, etc ;
• The Palestinian dependence on international aid for their basic physical survival, the daily running of the administrative governing apparatus, with emphasis on security rather than on the productivity of agricultural lands for food security, etc;
• The creation of distorted and corrupt social and economic classes who usurped power and economic resources, rendering society more pauperized: “A political class”, “A policing class”, “A bureaucratic class”, “An NGO class”, and “A business class”;
• The continued international legitimation of Israel’s racist nature.  (For the above, See Joseph Massad, “Oslo and the end of Palestinian independence”, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 21-27 January 2010). 

Essential Three:

The only way to ensure Palestinian emancipation from this system of occupation, colonialism and apartheid is to work towards establishing a free, democratic, secular and non-racist country in the entire land of historic Palestine, while Israeli Jews embark on self-liberation from the dominant racist Zionist ideology.  The cardinal question is this:  How to break this vicious cycle of colonial occupation and apartheid, and to expose the various measures of “managing the conflict” as delusionary substitutes for a just, lasting and democratic solution targeting the entire people of the historical land of Palestine? How to really seize the initiative for freedom and democracy? What should be our guiding principles?

To start with, what’s the situation today in Palestine/Israel?

• The status quo on the ground reveals the presence of 3.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, about 40% of whom live in, what has been described, an open air prison in Gaza; nearly half a million illegal Zionist colonists (called “settlers”)living in the West Bank; and 1.3 million Palestinians living as a subjugated minority on their land, inside Israel, among nearly 6.0 million Israeli Jews.
   
• At the end of 2008, at least 7.1 million Palestinians, representing 67 percent of the entire Palestinian population (10.6 million) worldwide were displaced persons (6.6 million refugees and 427,000 IDPs). This makes Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) the largest and longest-standing case of displaced persons in the world today.
   
• Starting sometime un the late 1980s, “the number of settlements, and even the size of their population, became immaterial because the apparatus of Israeli rule was perfected to such a degree that the distinction between Israel proper[Areas occupied in 1948] and the occupied territories [Areas occupied in 1967]—and between settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Jewish communities inside Israel—was totally blurred.   Similarly, the takeover of land ceased to be chiefly for the purpose of settlement construction and became primarily a means of constricting the movements of the Palestinian populace and of appropriating their physical space”.
   
• “As far as Israeli citizens and their range of interests are concerned, the annexation of the territories is a fait accompli. …  The continuation of the status quo creates a quasi-stable situation: the Jewish community, a loose framework of cultures and ethnic tribes in constant tension, is held together by enmity to the Palestinian “Other”, and by a determination to rule them. … Fragmentation became the major tool of Israeli control, to preserve their rule over Israel/Palestine from the river to the sea. … The ruling Jewish community will continue, even when it becomes a minority, to force this split on the Palestinians with the usual carrots and  sticks, dictating the agenda, presenting threats, imposing collective punishments and bribery. … The ‘peace process’ serves as a curtain behind which divide and rule is entrenched”.
   
• “They have invented a unique concept of a ‘state’: its ‘sovereignty’ will be scattered, lacking any cohesive physical infrastructure, with no direct connection to the outside world. …  The airspace and the water resources will remain under Israeli control.  Helicopter patrols, the airwaves, the hands on the water pumps and the electrical switches, the registration of residents and the issue of identity cards, as well as passes to enter and leave, will all be controlled (directly or indirectly) by the Israelis.”
   
• “The status quo will endure as long as the forces wishing to preserve it are stronger than those wishing to undermine it, and that is the situation today in Israel/Palestine.”  

• Several factors sustain the current status quo and ensure its survivability.  These include the high level of fragmentation of Palestinian society and the ongoing incitement of the fragments against each other; the “mobilization of the Jewish community into support for the occupation regime, which is perceived as safeguarding its very existence”; the sustained funding of the status quo by the so-called “donor countries”, which “frees Israel from the burden of coping with the enormous cost of maintaining the control over the Palestinians and creates a system of corruption and vested interests” ; the ongoing delusion that “negotiations” will end the status quo, thus rendering it a temporary state; and “the silencing of all criticism as an expression of hatred and anti-Semitism”.
• The status quo is characterized by a huge gap in GDP between Palestinians under occupation and the occupying Israelis, of a magnitude of 1:20. “This gap cannot endure without the force of arms … which enforces a draconic control system. … All the economic, social and spatial systems of governance in the occupied territories are designed to maintain and safeguard Israeli privileges and prosperity on both sides of the ‘Green Line’, at the expense of millions of captive, impoverished Palestinians”.  

• This status quo is labeled, by Benvenisti, as “de facto bi-national regime” , a term stressing  “the total dominance of the Jewish-Israeli nation, which controls a Palestinian nation that is fragmented both territorially and socially.” (For the above quotes, see Meron Benvenisti, “The Inevitable Bi-national Regime”, January 2010).
   

To work strategically on our liberation process, we need to instill an appropriate discourse that embodies our future strategic vision.  This discourse should start by purging itself from the language of  “two-state solution”,  “two states for two people”, “West Bank and Gaza”, “East Jerusalem”, “peacemaking”, “direct or indirect negotiations”, “state building”, “legal or illegal settlements”, etc.  Our language should focus on means of resistance to achieve our liberation towards living in a free, non-racist, secular country in the entire land of historical Palestine; on emancipation from occupation and economic dependency; on individual and collective rights; on international law; on responsive and accountable leadership; on self-reliance and productivity; and on the right of all the refugees and displaced persons, who were ethnically cleansed from their homes and country by the Zionist colonial movement, to return to Palestine.

To embark on this course, we should be committed to struggle, with anti-Zionist Jews, for:

• “The dismantlement of the existing system of colonial apartheid, and all forms of racist political, spatial, economic, and psychological separation on the historical land of Palestine”, on the premise that: “all activities resulting from the illegal and criminal Zionist-Western colonization of Palestine, since Palestine was targeted at the turn of the twentieth century, including land and water theft for exclusive Jewish-Zionist settlements, political and legal structures, displacement and replacement of indigenous populations, privileged access and exploitation of natural resources, etc, are null and void, and should be dismantled.”

• “The unhindered return of all Palestinian individuals and groups who were forced by the Zionist colonial enterprise, with the active support of the Western imperialist centers, to abandon their homes and properties; and to exercise their inalienable natural right to acquire these properties back;”
• “The unobstructed productive use of their lands and other natural resources for the indigenous development of the society;”
• “The total freedom of all the people of historical Palestine to chose the type of their governance system, without any coercion or prejudice;”
• “The safeguarding of the seminal principle of separating religious beliefs from the political system, and the use of religion as the basis of government;”
• “The legal guarantee of equal rights of individuals and groups for all minorities living in the new Palestinian Society;”
• “The insistence on the basic principle that majority-minority relations must be based on equality and non-exploitation.” 

Such a worthwhile, justified, and difficult but legitimate struggle would: 

• “Rectify the historical and continuous evil and injustice done to the Palestinian people;
• Preserve the geographical and territorial integrity of the land of Palestine, and will work as a counterweight to the insidious process of fragmentation;
• Insist on the Right of Return of all Palestinians to their lands and properties from which they were forcefully and criminally evicted;
• Dismantle all Zionist and Jewish-Israeli structures and laws that were built on inequality and on the exclusion of Palestinian Arabs, with the purpose of imposing and maintaining a hegemonic control of the Zionist-Ashkenazi state over the entire region;
• Allow and encourage mutual living and existence between the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli anti-Zionist Jews in the historical land of Palestine, within a democratic, non-sectarian, equal, non-repressive, non-exploitative, just and open society;
• Promise genuine and sustainable development of the territory of Palestine, for the benefit of all its inhabitants, especially the poor and the marginalized, by focusing on the effective, productive and purposeful use of land and water, for the full employment potential of its workers;

Set an important human example of how antagonists may live together harmoniously in a delineated physical space, once racist and exclusionary ideology and practices are expunged.”

(For the above quotes, see Khalil Nakhleh, “Thinking the Thinkable”, 20 August 2008,  http://www.kanaanonline.org/articles/01633.pdf). 

Khalil Nakhleh, Ph.D.

Independent Researcher and Writer

Ramallah, Palestine/Israel

(Struggling to Transform Our Homeland)

Roberts also insults the Iraqi resistance by stating it inflicted losses on the American superpower “in their spare time” off from fighting Shi’is. Completely disregarding 1,400 years of Islamic history, a single athletic dispute leads Roberts to conclude that “Muslims cannot even play together”. This focus on an isolated event is selective, as Mr. Roberts doesn’t appear to recall that Sunnis and Shiis both celebrated the Iraqi soccer team’s victory in the 2007 Asian Cup.  Even if we were to assume Iraq’s Muslims aren’t united enough for Roberts’ taste, he seems to have ignored the USA’s critical divide-and-conquer role in Iraq. He doesn’t appear aware of the USA’s deployment of Shii and Kurdish troops to battle Sunni cities, such as Fallujah in November 2004. He ignores the USA’s political and financial support of sectarian parties, politicians and clergymen. He also neglects to mention the Israeli role in sowing the seeds of conflict in Iraq, outlined in Oded Yinon’s infamous A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. Roberts is unaware of 17-year old Othman from A’athamiya, a young Iraqi who drowned after rescuing nearly a dozen Iraqis when the A’imma Bridge in Baghdad collapsed in 2005. He also overlooked the joint Sunni-Shii celebrations of Muntathar Zaidi’s throwing his shoes at Bush. The US corporate media, which cheerlead for the war, has every interest to blackout, marginalize and ignore stories of Iraqi unity. It is regretful that Roberts condescends Iraqis in the same manner.

One wonders whether Mr. Roberts would’ve displayed this same white man’s burden, vilifying misbehaving oppressed peoples, by admonishing Native American tribes who may have been at odds during the theft of their land by white settlers. Would Mr. Roberts have weighed in on the dispute between the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X? Would he have demonstrated moral authority to arbitrate between Martin Luther King Jr’s philosophy of nonviolence and Malcolm X’s commitment to freedom by any means necessary? Would he have appointed himself as judge between the North and South Vietnamese? Dictating derogatory suggestions to the oppressed is no business of “solidarity” activists. If Roberts is entitled to instruct Iraqis to unite, surely Iraqis are far more entitled to tell Americans, including Roberts, to put their right-wing, left-wing, class and racial divisions aside to meaningfully mobilize to end their seven-year occupation of our country (by “meaningful”, I mean more substantive than symbolic anti-war protests every anniversary of the war). When they have extra time on their hands, Iraqis could probably tell Americans to unite on their debilitating healthcare disputes.

It is frustrating enough when the operators of the US war machine and their mouthpieces in mainstream media refer to Iraqis in demeaning sectarian language. It is far more disappointing when those involved in the “anti-war” movement, who are supposedly in solidarity with Iraqis, use such divisive, disrespectful discourse. I call on Mr. Roberts to apologize to the beleaguered Iraqi people, victims of two decades of his country’s ruthless foreign policy, funded by his tax dollars, for publishing such an undeserved portrayal.

Qais Nawwaf is one of millions of displaced Iraqis. He resides on a colonized part of Indigenous territory commonly referred to as the "United States." He has a degree in a discipline invented by his ancestors: writing. He may be reached at: qnawwaf@gmail.com.

The fingerprints of Israel’s meddling are all over the place in Yemen. And you better believe that we’ll be hearing a lot more about Yemeni connections to all manner of atrocities committed in the name of “Allah” against the United States. Israel will make darn sure of that. And what’s my evidence? Well, recent history would be a good place to start.

Does anybody remember the USS Cole? In October, 2000 while refueling in the Port of Aden, the USS Cole was sunk by a small boat loaded with explosives, resulting in the death of 17 soldiers and injuring another 39. Samples of the explosives taken from the ships hull revealed that the explosive was of a type only available in the U.S. and…(drum roll please) that’s right-Israel!

How about the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Sa'ana? In October 2008 Yemeni security forces arrested a group of alleged Islamists militants linked to Israeli intelligence in connection to that provocatuered attack. The network was described as 40 people from different Arab nationalities that were spying for the Mossad. Say it ain’t so, Joe!

Israel has even been linked to the Somali piracy trade when Somali pirates were found to have telephone links to former Israeli Prime minister Ehud Olmert’s office. Nasty business.

Now how could our “only ally in the Middle East” do such awful things to their best friend in the whole wide world? Simple. It’s the old Mossad “we will wage war by way of deception” technique of carrying out attacks on your ally and blaming it on the one’s you want your ally to attack in retaliation (in layman’s terms of course).

So what’s the hubbub, bub? Why all this activity concentrated in and around Yemen? Well, Israel has always salivated over controlling that region. In an article appearing in “The Yemen Times” on October 26, 2008 titled “Israeli Strategy to occupy Al-Mandab Strait” Najeeb Al-Ghurbani writes:

“The first President of the Zionist government David Goryon expressed his state’s aspirations to control the Red Sea in 1949. He rather said, “We are besieged from land frontiers while sea is the only passage to the outside world and the only means for establishing communication with other continents.”

If you want an even better grasp on the Israeli strategy you can find it in Saudi Arabian Colonel Turki Al-Anazi’s “Strategy Research Project” document titled “Strategic Importance of the Red Sea”. Starting on page 13 under the heading “Israeli Strategy”, Col. Al-Anazi states:

“Free navigation to and from Eilat is considered absolutely essential to Israel’s security and economic interests and to reduce Israel’s political isolation, due to the enmity with its Arab neighbors.

The Red Sea’s importance for Israel grew since it is the best waterway for shipping and trade with East Africa and the Far East. The prime concern for the Israelis is to secure free passage through the straits of the Red Sea so it would not be under any political or economical pressure.

The Israeli strategy in the Red Sea stands on certain bases.

First, the necessity of Israel’s security that demands controlling the straits and waterways of the Red Sea and preventing any of its adversaries from controlling them.

Secondly, the Red Sea is vital to Israel’s economic well being since it’s a maritime route to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean’s and links it to Asian and African trading markets.

The Israelis even set their own goals dealing with the Red Sea region, which are:

1.) To secure free navigation on the Red Sea

2.) To accomplish a strategic depth in the Red Sea, which enable Israel to monitor the Arab military in this region

3.) To break any Arab blockade on any of the Red Sea straits, waterways or on the Israeli ships

4.) To guarantee and secure the civilian line and military lines in the Red Sea which are directed to the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal or to the Indian Ocean through the Strait of Bab Al-Mandab.”

So it should come at no suprise that Connecticut Senator and Israel-firster Joe Lieberman wants a pre-emptive strike on Yemen. Not only does he want retaliation for the failed attempt to blow up a Delta airliner in Detroit by Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; but it’s also the fulfillment of a lifelong Israeli dream.

And since we’ve touched on the subject of the Christmas day “Fruit of the BOOM!” false flag event, I might as well point out that even that smells of Israeli mischief. When you consider that security at the Amsterdam airport where our alleged terrorist sailed through was run by an Israeli company ICTS (the same company responsible for security for every airport from which the 9-11 terrorists departed) and when you factor in that his father (who is mistakenly reported by the MSM to be a Nigerian banker) is an arms dealer with intimate and far reaching ties to Israel and the Mossad, you can’t blame me for sending up red flags all over the place.

But I know. You’re going to tell me that Obama has already assured us that he has no intention of sending troops into Yemen, right? Well, actually I believe him. How can he? We’re already over-extended with a war in Afghanistan and one staring in Pakistan. Where is he going to get the troops? Now Bush might try to pull off a crazy thing like that but that’s not Obama’s style. Obama is a protégé of Zbigniew Brzezinski and using your own men and resources to fight wars is not how old Zbig rolls. Brzezinski’s strategy is one of proxy wars. Brzezinski method is to pit one group against the other in order to destabilize the region. An example of this is the creation of al-Queda in Afghanistan (by none other than Obama’s current Defense Secretary Robert Gates). The U.S. trained and equipped a fighting force and pitted them against the Russians. Nice way to save some scratch while at the same time devastating your opponent.

So how can this strategy be applied to an offensive in Yemen? Well, I tend to side with Webster Tarpley here and his assessment of the situation. Tarpley points out that the objective in Yemen is to break it up into micro-states and mini-states. And there are at least four groups that can be used to facilitate this. To the north are the Shiite Houthie rebels who are supported by Iran and fighting in opposition to the central government. Then we have the Saudi backed Sunni who are in support of the central government. Throw in some hard lined Communist left-overs from the old soviet days and a bunch of Guantanamo ex-cons and escaped prisoners joining the CIA…uh, I mean…al-Queda and you’ve got the makings of one hell of a party!

And of course after they get through killing each other off and pieces of Yemen start breaking into sub-regions and enclaves, Obama can step in with his Nobel prize in hand and offer humanitarian aid and assistance; which essentially means Wall Street, Tel-Aviv and London coming in for the kill under the President’s left cover.

And by the time its all over, the U.S. will have set a nice little table for its client state Israel to feast upon.

But that’s just my opinion. What do I know?

http://revoltoftheplebs.wordpress.co…nd-everything/

Khalid Amayreh

In addition to its protracted war of terror against the Palestinian people, Israel has long waged an unrelenting campaign of psychological warfare against the Palestinian will, aimed at debilitating the domestic front across the occupied territories. The Israeli media, which often operates in sync with the Israeli occupation army and intelligence agencies, readily and routinely parrot the carefully concocted lies coming out of the Disinformation Department at the Israeli Defence Ministry headquarters at Hakirya in Tel Aviv.

The dirty propaganda is based on half-truths or outright falsehoods. Sometimes these lies are leaked to pro-Israeli media organs abroad in order to give them an air of credibility. But in most cases, the "scoops" are released to the Israeli media itself.

This pattern of disinformation is as old as Israel itself and has been used frequently. I remember that during the Romanian revolution Israeli radio reported that the bodies of dozens of Arab mercenaries, who had been fighting for the Ceausescu regime, were scattered on the streets of Bucharest and Timisoara, a claim that turned out to be totally untrue.

During the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1992), the Israeli media would often describe a Palestinian activist freshly arrested by the Israeli army as "a high-ranking leader of the uprising" who was responsible for attacks on Israeli soldiers. However, a few days or weeks later, when the suspect was arraigned before a military court, all the talk about being a "high-ranking leader" of the intifada would have disappeared from the list of charges. In many cases, the activist would be released a few months later for lack of evidence against him.

Similarly, the Israeli media will often publish reports claiming that major Palestinian businesses and factories faced bankruptcy and were closing down. This, of course, has a demoralising effect, as is intended.

These are examples of the psychological warfare Israel has been waging against the Palestinians, which, by the way, failed to stop the intifada or, indeed, force the Palestinians to succumb to the Israeli occupation.

When I first read the fictionalised story of Musa’ab Yousuf, the son of Hasan Yousuf, a former Hamas spokesman in Ramallah, I remembered these and other examples of Israeli disinformation. We Palestinians have been living under the Israeli occupation for decades and not even the Americans know the Israeli way of thinking better than us. To put it bluntly, the Israelis lie as often as they breathe. Indeed, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that Israel is based on three elements: murder, theft and mendacity.

The Israeli media claims, inter alia, that Musa’ab, who had been recruited by Israel’s chief domestic security agency, the Shin Beth, penetrated the high echelons of Hamas and that he prevented and thwarted resistance operations against the Israeli occupation army and other targets. Well, it is true that the Shin Beth succeeded in recruiting the disoriented young man when he was 17 years old through blackmail. However, it is also true that Hamas and his own father knew about his tryst with Shin Beth from the very inception as a result of which Hamas’s student activists were warned against dealing with him.

Moreover, it is well known that Sheikh Hasan Yousuf, whom I have met several times, was never involved, either directly or indirectly, in the activities of Hamas’s military wing, the Izzidin al Qassam Brigades. Any claim to the contrary should be treated with contempt. Indeed, with all due respect, Sheikh Yousuf was no more than a media spokesman who would explain the Hamas position and reaction to certain events, and he would do that after careful coordination and consultation with the movement’s political leaders in the occupied territories.

Hence, the claim that the Sheikh’s son, Musa’ab, was able to penetrate the military wing of Hamas and thwart several resistance operations, including an assassination attempt against Shimon Peres, the certified war criminal responsible for the Qana massacre in 1996, looks like a vile lie.

I have spoken to several peers of Musa’ab who knew him very well both when he was a student at Beir Zeit University and following his graduation. The following are taken from their testimonies:

"He was not a serious person, he was kind of happy-go-lucky, he would go out with foreigners and tourists, brag about his English. I think very few people took him seriously," said Ahmed.

One college classmate described Musa’ab as "looking insecure, a person without an intellectual direction, infatuated with the luxurious life, would do anything to attract attention."

These and other statements indicate that Musa’ab was nearly always viewed with suspicion by Hamas people in Ramallah, including his own father.

Toward the end of the 1990s, Musa’ab mingled with evangelical Christian missionaries who, probably through a feminine connection, brainwashed him to "accept Jesus as his saviour". They also promised that they would facilitate his migration to the US, where Christian Zionists used him on his arrival as a propaganda asset in their war against Islam and the Palestinian people. Musa’ab, nearly penniless when he arrived in the US, was given a house and a job in exchange for praising Israel, maligning Islam and singing halleluiah.

According to Ha’aretz newspaper (27 February), the Shin Beth officer who looked after Musa’ab, code-named Captain Loay, said, "The amazing thing is that none of his actions were done for money. He did things he believed in. He wanted to save lives."

What lives? Even a person with minimal intelligence and living in Ramallah during the Second Intifada would know all too well that the Israeli occupation army murdered Palestinian civilians in cold blood, including children. These murders were nearly always carried out knowingly and deliberately just like the killings in Gaza last year.

For example, on 4 March 2002, and not far from Musa’ab’s home, Israel bombed the car of Hussein Abu Kweik, a political activist affiliated with Hamas, killing his wife and three children as they were returning home from school. So, why did we not hear anything about "saving lives" when the targets were Palestinian civilians? Could Musa’ab have converted secretly to the Chabad sect of Judaism which, apparently, views all non-Jews as animals whose lives have no sanctity?

In fact, the repeated invocation of "saving [Jewish] lives", terminology characteristic of the Israelis, suggests that Musa’ab was instructed, perhaps in return for a certain sum of money, to say what the author of the story wanted him to say in order to sell the book, or that the author wrote what he did in Musa’ab’s name.

The Shin Beth handler makes many claims suggesting that Musa’ab was aware of what was going on with the Izzidin al Qassam Brigades. "Let me tell you a story. One day we received information that a suicide bomber was going to be picked up at the Manara Square in Ramallah and be given an explosive belt. We didn’t know his name or what he looked like-only that he was in his twenties and would be wearing a red shirt. We sent ‘the Green Prince’ [Musa’ab] to the square and with his acute sense, he located the target within minutes."

Being thoroughly aware of the vicissitudes of Hamas and its military wing, I can safely say that this story is unlikely to be true since only two or three people are normally put in contact with any given military operation. This, I venture to suggest, means that people like Musa’ab would have no opportunity to know what was going on inside the Izzidin al Qassam Brigades.

In the beginning of the Ha’aretz’ article, written by Avi Issacharoff (who is notorious for his Shin Beth connections), Musa’ab is quoted:

"I wish I were in Gaza now. I would put on an army uniform and join Israel’s special forces in order to liberate Gilad Shalit. If I were there, I could help. We wasted so many years with investigations and arrests to capture the very terrorists that they now want to release in return for Shalit. That must be done."

Such a quote could only come from a person who is so badly disoriented and so thoroughly brainwashed, that he identifies himself with the enemies of his own family.

Such a coup is not uncommon in the history of bitter conflicts, as the Israelis know very well. The Jewish Virtual Library has the following information: "The German concentration camps depended on the cooperation of trustee inmates who supervised the prisoners. Known as Kapos, these trustees carried out the will of the Nazi camp commandants and guards, and were often as brutal as their SS counterparts. Some of these Kapos were Jewish, and even they inflicted harsh treatment on their fellow prisoners. For many, failure to perform their duties would have resulted in severe punishment and even death, but many historians view their actions as a form of complicity. After the war, the prosecution of Kapos as war criminals, particularly those who were Jewish, created an ethical dilemma which continues to this day."

Such an emotional-cognitive phenomenon is known as "identification with the criminal aggressor", a more than appropriate term for the relationship between Musa’ab Yousuf and his Israeli handlers.

I read your article 'Why no Jewish writer can be believed' with much interest. You know, sometimes I feel like that about the Anglo Saxons. Often times, as history is evidence, especially vis a vis the East India Company and its colonial conquests whose enduring shackles of mental servitude are still felt daily in my native nation, can one really tell the difference between the Jewish white Anglo-Saxon and the Christian white Anglo-Saxon race? While the religious rituals may be different, the imperial practices aren't when the reference begins and ends with 'race'! Any conflict between them is often only the white man's burden negotiation between two ubermensch fighting over primacy!

Let me therefore, begin this response by first agreeing that every name which you have mentioned in your article, I too have similarly unraveled some aspects of their narratives which weren't entirely wholesome (to put it charitably). The last one, Gilad Atzmon's, was here:

But that website took down my comment (now why would they do that?)! Fortunately, I had saved a local copy which is cached here:

Often times, as G. Edward Griffin also puts it, the sins of the 'left' are uncovered by their enemies on the 'right', and vice versa. The in-fighting among hegemonic pigs often betrays their criminal secrets. For an astute non-bigoted seeker of truth and justice for all, that's simply the low hanging fruits of the rotten tree to be plucked for forensic analysis. Especially, if they also happen to be the type-3 of Hitler's classification of people:

"In journalistic circles it is a pleasing custom to speak of the Press as a 'Great Power' within the State. As a matter of fact its importance is immense. One cannot easily overestimate it, for the Press continues the work of education even in adult life. Generally, readers of the Press can be classified into three groups: First, those who believe everything they read; Second, those who no longer believe anything; Third, those who critically examine what they read and form their judgments accordingly." (Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter X)

Otherwise, I for one do not have the infinite resources to dig out the dirt on all the hectoring hegemon pigs on the planet. Let them dig it out on each other. I'll only use it circumspectly. I cannot permit my mind, and my guard, to take vacation for even a single moment - for the 'devil' knows no race, color, cast, or creed! Minimally I need to protect myself from being tainted by your prejudices - but I also find your views interesting, and often worth refuting lest they taint the feeble of mind too comfortable in their own adjusted worldview.

So, back to your narrative, I find the race construct disturbing no matter who uses it, the antagonist, or the protagonist.

I quite agree that the Talmud is a major tortuous source of Jews' misanthropic ambitions as god's ubermensch created on earth to lord over the Goy. But not completely. Atheism too is not an unfamiliar imperial driving force in the same vein:

By that token, I could condemn your non-beliefs the same way - couldn't I? It is just logic.

People generally do not lie, cheat, deceive, murder, become water boys or house negroes for the ubermensch, or endeavor to conquer the 'untermenschen' by way of deception, by their race or religion - the political ponerologists advocating the psychopathic view of ubermensch not withstanding. In my humble view, people do so by choice (including perverse indoctrination and the 'banality of evil').

I am unwilling to condemn such misanthropes by their race, religion, caste, or creed � because, by its logic, I would unfairly have to condemn all peoples belonging to those sets. That is guilt by association! I see no difference between that, and the crimes of Nazism, Zionism. I condemn criminals only by their acts. To the extent that misanthropic doctrines from their books, cultural heritage, or tortuous philosophies might motivate them, well, there are at least 60 million white Anglo Saxon ubermensch Christian misanthropes alone in the Bible Belt of America trying to bring on Armageddon and Jesus! I think they far surpass the Jews in sheer numbers. Therefore, should I condemn all Christians for the twisted perversion of such a large number of criminals among them who think bombing other nations will lead to some Rapturous Nirvana? Or, perhaps the entire white Anglo Saxon population by their race alone, for between Jews and Christians, that's the entire Western civilization? By your logic, why not?

I find the following recipe which was legally averred at Nuremberg by Robert H. Jackson rather defining, reasonable, equitable, and wisely applicable to all cases of misanthropic thoughts that transform into inflicting actual harm upon others, whether by bombs, or by debt-enslavement, whether in the quest of Lebensraum, Zionistan, or one-world government:

"The intellectual bankruptcy and moral perversion of the Nazi regime might have been no concern of international law had it not been utilized to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers. It is not their thoughts, it is their overt acts which we charge to be crimes." (Nuremberg, Closing Speech)

I charge as crimes against humanity, the enactment of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. All those who crafted it, proposed it, enabled it, aided and abetted in its passage as well as in its obfuscation over the past 100 years, and benefitted from its enslaving action of the entire nation, are more appropriate candidates for being accorded the full 'enemy combatant' protocol at Guantanamo Bay than its present indigent inhabitants! For indeed, in that one enabling Act, is accumulated the combined evil of all the evil that has followed over the past 100 years, including all the wars, its 100 million victims, and entire nations entrapped in un-payable debt to steal their public commons! That first monumental crime is independent of the race - all the Congressman who signed the Bill under the stewardship of Bernard Barauch and Col. House, including the President of the United States at the time who approved it, and the vast numbers of newsmedia and PR spokespersons of both political parties who got on the Hegelian Dialectic bandwagon of sloganeering "banking reform" and filled the newspapers with their bullshit, were Christian white folks right alongside the Jewish white folks. (The blacks in America at the time only lived in their ghettos after their escape/emancipation from the clutches of their white Christian Anglo Saxon plantation owners, and therefore can't rightly be counted among the races who contributed to the hijacking of America.)

So, are all the white Anglo Saxons of America guilty of that first monumental crime against the American public, and the world's peoples? Are they all complicit in hiding it, spinning it, obfuscating it? But you have already absolved Eustace Mullins. I apologize for using an obvious truism to make the blatant point that by your criterion of guilt by association, you should have dismissed the good Samaritan Christian Mullins too without reading, just like the anti-Semitic choir does!

In a previous communication regarding another article way back in September 2009, titled: 'Jewish disinfo the specialty of popular Rense columnist', I had also noted your zeal for gross, and what I felt at the time was ignorant, generalization. In that article, you had carelessly maligned Islam in the same breadth as Christianity by asserting: "Throughout human history, the Talmud is the heart of darkness, and the Bible and the Qu'ran are complicit in concealing this fact." I had written to you:

'As a Muslim, I would only like to inquire on your statement: "Qu'ran are complicit in concealing this fact". Would you kindly let me know what you have based that assertion upon? While I might concur with anyone that the Talmud contains some really abhorrent things, nay shocking things, I also wonder who among the Jews really believes in what's in their old books…. but that's not the purpose of this letter to you. It is to only inquire the basis upon which you chose to malign Islam, by asserting that the Qur'an is deliberately complicit in concealing some abhorrence, some distortions in Judaism like its Talmudic teachings. As you surely [must] know [Islam], both Prophet Moses and Jesus are revered in the Qur'an as among the Great Prophets. Qur'an assert that God sent both Moses, and Jesus, among many other prophets, to mankind, to every people, and each time sent a new one to correct the erroneous man-made teachings that had cropped in the previous prescription over time, or to generalize the particularized teachings, as the case between Moses followed by Jesus, with Prophet Muhammad being the last one to correct all past manmade errors, and to generalize God's religion to all mankind. So, while one may not believe in Islam, or any religion [for that matter], the fact of your assertion being false [in the context of Qur'an and Islam] is plainly manifest. Thus I inquire if it was inadvertent, malicious, or merely ignorant. And if none of those, then kindly do enlighten me the reason for your statement. We can always learn from each other � no one has monopoly over knowledge.'

That moment onwards, I could easily have dismissed you on the same grounds as you have dismissed all the Jews: "[Anglo Saxon] writers inevitably [distort and prevaricate], blur and twist the contours of any argument to invariably shape it into advantage for only themselves."!But I still read your present article with care, and I am even taking the time to respond to you, once again - since it warrants a response - because I refuse to bow to the vagaries of your personal prejudices and myopia lest it infect others. You already may have a great following among the white supremacists I imagine, despite perhaps your own aversion to it - I hope.

Finally, I do thank you Mr. John Kaminski for your often provocative and bold viewpoints, whether or not one agrees with them. I think it is courageous and un-inhibited people like yourself who continually push on the acceptable envelop of thought and its public expression, and thus widen the discourse space for many more ordinary people like myself to have our tiny voice (for what little that's worth). Minimally, the brownshirt thought-police will chase you before they might chase me (or perhaps they will soon lock up all the non-conformists regardless)! Be that as it may, let's not get carried away as the self-proclaimed avantgarde in provocative thought, into realms of moral absurdity, especially in falling prey to the antagonists own vices: guilt by association, the race factor, arrogance, and ignorance.

Thank you.

Zahir Ebrahim

Project Humanbeingsfirst.org

Source URL: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/02/respto-johnkaminski-jewish-writers.html

Source PDF: http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/respto-johnkaminski-jewish-writers-feb282010.pdf
Kaminski article URL: http://www.johnkaminski.info/pages/the_next_chapter/too_late_for_trust.htm

Another one has more serious problems, she was in a car accident and she has no health insurance. She has no car insurance either, so now she will lose her license. How will she get to her job?

Someone else wants a girlfriend, he thinks then he'll be happy. He lives with his parents and battles depression. He's a little underweight, but it's just in his genes. He thinks it's the end of the world.

The everyday issues that consume people are really not that serious. If they are mine or yours, none of it really matters compared to the big ones that no one likes to think about. We're just too overwhelmed by our day to day lives to wonder what things might possibly be like on the other side of the globe.

Often what we think might be our biggest problems, would be outright luxuries to another people! I like to think that if I've got a roof over my head, clothes on my back, a pound or two to spare, fresh water to drink then hey, I'm pretty fortunate!

**********************************************************************************

We've got parties and plans and shopping and fun. We've got Starbucks and Disneyland and Hollywood and sun. We've got everything we want and even that much more. We've got famines and genocides and climate change and war. But we never think of THOSE things, life's too painful for that; to worry about people on the other side of the map! You see the bad stuff's only for those who live in foreign places and we'll never have to look upon the horror in their faces

So we'll stuff our face with muffins made with nuts grown in Brazil.
We drill holes in foreign places for our gas tanks we fill
We use ancient trees to wipe our butts.
build bigger homes to hold our stuff.
Is it possible we have enough?
ENOUGH!

Source: http://idreamofroses.blogspot.com/2010/02/personal-problems-in-privliged-society.html

We may idealize human intellect and enlightenment, but in practice, human social biology usually proves to be stronger than ideology. While most people today believe that their strength lies in the success of their perceived Utopian model of society, and that the ideas of a prominent persona are more important than his personal characteristics, their behavior is often indicative of the opposite. Being herd animals, changes usually happen when the majority of the human herd flocks behind a leader who is perceived as charismatic, strong, sympathetic and courageous.

The effect of charisma

In democratic societies, politicians seem to be very aware of this human behavioral phenomenon, especially during campaign time. A good example is the victory of Barack Obama in the American elections of 2008. We can all clearly see that the policies of the new administration, with its promises of 'change', barely show any significant differences – especially in foreign affairs – when compared to the much reviled Bush administration. To perceptive observers this has come as no surprise, since it was rather easy to read it between the lines of those 'historical' election campaigns. Still, people not only in the USA but even worldwide were under the spell of Obama's personal charm, eloquence and strong charisma, which consolidated his famous landslide electoral victory regardless of these simple facts.

Many people seem to believe that it was Gandhi's famous and impressive philosophy of non-violence (Satyagraha), which gave him the leverage to be able to rally the vast majority of the population of India behind him and make them take to the streets. They seem to forget that India's independence was immediately followed by war, strife and violence which still has not been resolved today. While one can easily maintain that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh owe their independence from British colonial rule to the persona of Gandhi, it is quite difficult to make the case that it was his ideology that won the victory. If this was indeed the case, then Satyagraha would have survived its charismatic founder, and would have been instated as the region's main philosophy. What we see instead, is that India and Pakistan have gone to war with each other three times since their independence, and can both boast nuclear destructive capability, not Satyagraha, as their source of power.

There is no doubt that Gandhi's non-violence was an incredibly effective strategy for liberation, but its success at the same time was entirely dependent on his leadership in that struggle. No wonder that this successful feat has not yet proven to be reproducible under the leadership of other activist figures in the world.

With the assassination of Malcolm X, who was able to inspire millions into taking action against overwhelming odds, his movement was effectively stopped in its tracks before it could be consolidated into a victory. His legacy now lives on as a powerful inspiration, rather than as an example of liberation. The Libyan struggle for independence under Omar El Mukhtar, who was able to mobilize the Libyan population against colonialism and oppression, was effectively maimed by the elimination of his inspiring leadership, when he was hanged at the gallows.

People need leaders, not ideologies

Almost every significant mobilization for change of a population in history has taken place under the charismatic leadership of a person. It is very difficult to find any examples in history of successful uprisings or revolutions that were not inspired by a leader who was considered to be a hero by the majority of the people. People need a leader, not an ideology.

Even the qualities that define these historical figures of change, are almost disappointingly simple. The leader needs to be someone of high intelligence, with deep strategic insights and communication skills which enable him (or her) to express the concerns of the people in a way that appeals to them. He needs to possess rhetorical qualities that can appeal to people of different levels of education and social background. He also needs to have personal traits that enable a majority of people to identify with him, instead of seeming alien or superimposed to them. His message needs to be simple and convincing, and contain a promise of change. Once this person has earned the love of the majority of the people, the awe-inspiring herd-behavior of the human race makes it easy for this leader to rally the people behind him, whether we are talking about national elections, a revolution or a popularity contest at a local school.

When we observe other herd animals, we can see that they always have some leading animals that are followed by the rest. In the savannas of Africa, we can see how these herd animals migrate in a splendidly concerted flow, without any confusion about the herd's direction, which can often be seen from an breathtaking aerial view in wildlife documentaries. In the skies of Europe, during the fall season, one can see the impeccable figures drawn in the skies by huge clouds of thousands of starlings, which seem almost surreal in their coordinated movements as they elegantly sway between the treetops. Since there seems to be no difference of opinion among them on whom to follow, these starlings never collide with one another. This requires an almost unfathomable level of coordination, but is mainly achieved by their complete acceptance of their leadership's commands.

The fallacy of negotiations

In the Palestinian situation there is little confusion about which stated principles have the potential to unite the majority of the people. Our common cause, which is liberation from oppression, is our common interest; this suffices as an ideology and is the common denominator of all existing Palestinian factions. Nevertheless the popular movement against zionist occupation and persecution is chaotically torn into many shreds. There is an abundance of opinions and ideologies, which concern themselves with end goals and final solutions, and end up leading to people sometimes being fanatically opposed against one another. What Palestine lacks is not a 'one-state' or 'two-state' solution, and not a progressive or conservative movement, but simply a leader who has the trust of the majority of the people. Coming from such a loved leader, people would most likely be prepared to accept any solution he would present, as long as he would promise to lead their struggle for liberation with full dedication.

While a significant portion of the population has been led to believe that negotiations are the way forward out of their dire situation, it is a matter of realism to conclude that this can never be successful. Again, history is our teacher. No overwhelming military or economical superpower has ever gone against its own interests simply because its adversaries were such smart speakers. It is therefore rather simplistic to expect the US-Israeli-European axis of racist colonization to steer off its course of total domination of the region, based on the communication skills of some intelligent or eloquent Palestinians. In fact, as long as they are aware that the representatives they are negotiating with are not backed by a massive majority of the population, they cannot even be blamed for not taking their so-called Palestinian 'partner in peace' seriously.

In truth, if they were certain that a leader had such a massive popular backing, they would most likely start a campaign of vilification against him. They would contend that he is an 'impossible partner in peace', based on whatever argumentation they would deem useful to prove their point to the masses in the West. Eventually, they would aim to physically eliminate him, as they have done with many promising Palestinian leaders, from all existing resistance groups.

The ineffectiveness of moderation

One can be sure that a population is in a state of confusion when a significant proportion of it, despite living under harsh oppression, puts its hopes in a moderate leader. No oppressed people in history ever won their freedom by choosing a moderate leader to represent them; even Gandhi was a radical, although his unique method was non-violence. Changes come about when a leader is massively hated and reviled by the adversary, and equally overwhelmingly loved by his own people. Therefore, rallying behind a leader who is deemed acceptable to the enemy, is by definition a crucial waste of time and effort. He has no choice but to balance between serving the occupier's goals and keeping his own people appeased, since these maneuvers are his only guarantee to keep his undesirable position at the negotiating table intact. Undesirable, not for the personal ambitions of that leader, but for the Palestinian cause. These 'negotiations at gunpoint' merely create an illusion of progress, while consolidating the domination of the zionist colonizer, day after day, even when negotiations are 'stalled', as has often been the case.

In Palestine, a leader with the necessary charisma is absent on the political stage. We have a variety of candidates; some of them are more interested in gaining popularity among Western politicians and masses, than among their own people, in the meantime deriving their position of power from the status and popular backing of their organizations. Others care so little about their public relations status towards the world community, that they lose the trust of a portion of their own people in terms of being representative to the outside world. None of them is massively feared or reviled in Israeli society on their personal merits, not in the way Ahmad Yasin and Yasser Arafat were. None of them is massively loved by an overwhelming majority of Palestinians, across the entire spectrum.
Palestine is full of heroes

Therefore, these painful and tragic decades have not really been spent waiting for a 'solution'. Palestine is waiting for her leader, who is radical, sincere, courageous, charismatic and not only speaks clearly in terms of the liberation of Palestine, but proves and displays his full dedication to achieving it. Once this leader emerges, only a minority of the people will still give priority to serving the goals of their factional leadership, party or even their ideology. Once this leader appears on the stage and unites the people, not even Barack Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu and the whole leadership of the European Union combined will be able to stop the Palestinians from claiming their freedom and turning it into a reality.

Are you disappointed by my view? Do you feel as if I have dashed all our hopes for the future, because no such leader exists? Then perhaps you have misunderstood me. The point I am trying to make contains a message of hope, despite all the cynicism. We just have to stop being impressed by people who wave around US dollars or Euros, or brag about their Western contacts, because these people ultimately represent nothing but a dead end street for the Palestinian cause. The leader who can really make a change, will have to be one who has the courage to be a truly independent Palestinian.

We need to start realizing that Palestine is full of selfless and charismatic heroes, although they are seldom seen on center stage, and are rarely revered by their surroundings, unless they have achieved the status of martyrdom – which effectively means they are not there to lead us anymore. We have to try and modify our cultural practice of celebrating heroes only when they are dead, and start embracing and supporting the powerless but dedicated and trustworthy Palestinian heroes who are still alive and kicking in every village and town.

Only then we will have started to prepare the ground for that rare person who will eventually grow to win all of our hearts, and whom we can trust to lead us towards our liberation. The 'Palestinian Gandhi' most likely already exists; all it takes is for us to start noticing him, and supporting him.

Tariq Shadid is a Palestinian surgeon living in the Middle East, and has written numerous essays about the Palestinian issue over the years. Most of these were published by the Palestine Chronicle http://www.palestinechronicle.com , and have been bundled in the book "Understanding Palestine", which is available through Amazon.com. He also runs a website of internationally oriented music dedicated to the Palestinian cause, which can be found at http://www.docjazz.com .

"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
–Prof. Arnold Toynbee, Foreword to the Transformation of Palestine, 1971

"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial."
–Ariel Sharon

"Well, it's a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel then we bring up the holocaust. When in this country US) people are criticizing Israel then they are anti-Semitic. And the organization (Israel Lobby) is very strong and has lot of money. And the ties between Israel and American Jewish establishment are very strong – and they are strong in this country as you know. And they have power which is ok."
–Shulamit Aloni, Former Israeli Minister of Education, On Democracy Now, August 14, 2002

Honorable President of Harvard University Dr. Drew Faust
Honorable Members of the Board of Directors
Harvard Faculty Members
Harvard Student Organizations

Dear Madame President Faust;

I must strenuously and in the strongest terms possible protest the silence and inaction of Harvard University toward the outrageous, inhumane, offensive, even racist eugenic proposal that Dr. Martin Kramer, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard made during his speech at the Israeli Herzliya Conference on January 31, 2010.

In that speech Dr. Kramer implored the West to stop its Pro Natal services to the already besieged and starving Gaza Palestinian pregnant mothers and infants as a method of controlling the rapid birth rate in Gaza as a matter of political and social policy. To him such control will naturally lead to a decrease in the radicalization of Palestinian youth which he calls "superfluous men" as well as relieve the "demographic threat" to Israel's Jewish identity.

How racist is the term "superfluous men" to describe young Palestinian men who are constant fodder for Israeli soldier's bullets, missiles, and tank shells (as soldiers themselves have told "Break the Silence" group of former IDF Soldiers) as unnecessary and wasteful human beings.

Dr. Kramer's eugenic proposal not to provide Pro Natal care, which I take he means Pre and Post Natal care, is tantamount to genocide of fetuses and infants. Pregnant mothers would not receive the preventive care, regular OB exams, nutritional guidance (such as providing Folic Acid and Vitamins given their already malnourished state), appropriate vaccines or a healthy medically supervised delivery in hospitals, which all are damaged by Israel's assault on Gaza in 2008-2009. Infants would not receive the necessary medical care, or intensive care if necessary (difficult given the lack of electricity, oxygen, or antibiotics in Gaza), regular immunizations, nutritional guidance, or regular Pediatric checkups. Dr. Kramer shouldn't worry about a Palestinian population explosion; Israel's militarily with our tax dollars and weapons is determined not to leave any Palestinian child behind.

His proposal meets the accepted definition of eugenics, passive euthanasia, and genocide and no amount of spin cover up, rationalization, justification, taken out of context lies; nor the canard of Freedom of Speech that's available to Pro Israelite hate mongers to the exclusion of Pro Justice proponents for Palestinians and peace in the Holy Land.

In addition to Israel's three year physical devastating siege of Gaza, Dr. Kramer is proposing another physical and medical siege, this time of a Palestinian woman's womb that would ultimately result in a secondary ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that has continued unabated since 1947.

In Harvard as elsewhere, Academic Freedom and Free Speech means never having to say Israel is wrong, or that Israel defies all divine and human laws, or that Israel's occupation and theft of Palestinian land is illegal and immoral, and Israel's wars upon a captive population under its control is tantamount to "war crimes, nor that the Israel Lobby dominates the formulation of our foreign policy in the Middle East and the Islamic world. To them it's Baghdad, next stop is Iran.

No politician, academic institution, or American citizen dare have an honest public discourse on our self destructive relationship with Israel. Even the Pentagon's Defense Science Board confirmed that the Muslim world doesn't hate our freedoms but hates our blind policy of supporting Israel.

In describing freedom of speech the famous Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote:

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

Contrary to Dr. Kramer's assertion and his defense by WCFIA controlling or preventing a population's birth right and rate meets the definition of Genocide according to the First Geneva Convention Against Genocide which states:

"This convention bans acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religion group…imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group".

Dr. Kramer need not worry that Gaza's children are growing up healthy, safe, able to go to school, eat right, receive medical care, play, or even visit family, given Israel's persistent military attacks, invasions, and total blockade of Gaza. During the unprovoked onslaught on Gaza a year ago Israel killed hundreds of infants and children. That is why the Goldstone report accusing Israel of committing war crimes never appeared in TV news or most of our print media. Neither will the media report on Dr. Kramer's speech or the angst of many Americans who find it abhorrent and offensive.

While Israel destroys the lives of current Palestinian children, Dr. Kramer seeks to ensure the end of future Palestinian children.

In fact Palestinian children are living breathing beings who often serve as fodder and target practice for Israel's soldiers. (Guardian, Nov. 24, 2004: "Israeli Officer: I was right to shoot 13 year old child")

Chris Hedges, the famed journalist, author, and war correspondent who was also a Neimen Fellow at Harvard and served for years as MidEast Bureau Chief for the New York Times horrifically captured the plight of Palestinian children in Gaza in a Harper Magazine article titled, "A Gaza Diary", October 2001.

"It was in Gaza, where I lived for weeks at a time during the seven years I spent in the Middle East, that I came to know the dark side of the Israeli Defense Force….Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered-death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo-but I have never before watched soldiers (IDF) entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."

Madame President, imagine the outrage in Harvard and among worldwide Jewish groups if a Harvard Muslim Professor suggested that limiting Jewish births in the U.S. will lead to a dramatic decline in their political, financial, and media clout thereby ending their stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy and its blind support of the rogue state of Israel. How long before you, Madame President, the Board of Trustees, Deans, Faculty, the ADL, AIPAC, ZOA, JDL, JINSA, WINEP, and the mainstream media would be calling for his Anti-Semitic head not just to be fired, even with tenure.

Madame, you'd be the first to initiate the firing of such a person who'll be blacklisted never again to find academic employment in this country. Such is the power of Pro Israelite's wrath.

Again, I am under no illusion that you or Harvard's Board of Trustees would even consider the slightest reprimand against Dr. Kramer for his most offensive call to limit the freedom for Palestinians to procreate lest their population growth translates into future political violence, an argument used effectively for years by Apartheid South Africa.

Dr. Kramer enjoys the protection of rich philanthropic donors to Harvard, Jewish colleagues and superiors, Jewish organizations, and a supportive media.

But, in the larger scheme of education which is the foundation of any civilization is Harvard's mission and responsibility to its students, community, and the world; to teach the truth on any subject or at least present both sides of an argument, to stand up for the principles of freedom and equality for all, for justice, for world peace, constructive dialogue, respect for human life and human rights, respect for the law and due process; or is Harvard akin to all institutions in our capitalistic money corrupted society where special interest groups with money and power determine the content of our education and the extent of our freedoms.. If so, who will speak for and advocate for the voiceless, the invisible poor, the homeless and the oppressed?

This is the issue and challenge for our times. Will we lend an ear and voice for those who have no money to endow chairs, hold no high positions in the government, think tanks, banking and financial institutions, the media and the entertainment industry?

Have we all lost our souls for the expediency and reward of the moment at the expense of others and our future?

Given that our nation's future demographics will result in today's minorities becoming tomorrow's majorities, should we adopt Dr. Kramer's proposal and limit by any means necessary the procreation of our Hispanic, African American and Asian populations?

How will such a future majority impact our relationship with Israel and the power of the Israel Lobby upon our foreign policy?

If Harvard remains silent regarding Dr. Kramer's speech, as I expect it will, perhaps we should recall Elie Wiesel's hypocritical statement:

"Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

The famous Harvard graduate John Kennedy once said:

"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest; but the myth, persistent, persuasive and realistic"

How tragic that in Harvard there is no longer a commitment to Veritas or Justice. Fear and the maintenance of the status quo have become the corruptive regressive tools of an outstanding institution denying its bright young minds the dream of a brighter, safer, and peaceful future for this fragile planet.

With all due respect to you, the Board of Trustees, Faculty and students of our beloved Harvard, I remain.

Note: Martin Kramer is Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and President-Designate of Shalem College (in formation). He is also the Wexler-Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and National Security Security Studies Program Visiting Scholar at Harvard University.

Dr. Kramer was also former editor of the Middle East Quarterly a publication of the Middle East Forum founded by Daniel Pipes founder of campuswatch.org which "monitors" universities and scholars who teach Middle East Studies. lest they, God forbid, describe Israel in its true historical colors.

http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2010/02/wcfia-at-harvard-accusations-are-baseless/
M. Kramer's blog which contains his speech and the defense of his speech by the Directors of WCFIA at Harvard where he is a Visiting Scholar.

http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA) at Harvard where Dr. Kramer is described as Visiting Scholar, National Security Studies Program. Former Director, Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University.

From the Electronic Intafada website which brought the issue to the attention of WCFIA at Harvard:

"In her initial response to a query from the Electronic Intifada regarding Dr. Kramer's speech, Professor Beth Simmons, the director of WCFIA, wrote, "I agree with your assessment of the appalling nature of these [Kramer's] statements," but added, "the WCFIA does not have a policy of censoring or censuring our affiliates on the basis of their opinions." Simmons also stated, "I very much hope you bring these [Kramer's] words to the attention of others affiliated with the WCFIA, Harvard and the broader community, where I hope they will garner their just reaction." She encouraged individuals to make their concerns known to Professor Stephen Rosen, who is in charge of the National Security Studies Program of which Kramer is a fellow.

Naturally and as expected the Directors of WCFIA reversed their assessment from "appalling" to defending the "appalling" speech.

http://www.michaelheart.com/songforgaza.htm
PLEASE WATCH this Song by an American Humanitarian Songwriter on GAZA

http://vodpod.com/watch/122002-the-israel-lobby-the-influence-of-aipac-on-us-foreign-policy
Important Dutch Video on Influence of AIPAC on US Foreign Policy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H88gVDrIlPs
UK Channel 4 Video: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby

http://quicksilverscreen.com/watch?video=34545
BBC Panorama Video: THE WAR PARTY, the Neocons Behind Iraq War

http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/011001_hedges.html
Chris Hedges, "A Gaza Diary", Harper's Magazine, October 2001

* Mohamed Khodr M.D., M.P.H. is a political activist who frequently writes on the plight of Palestinians living under the brutal occupation of Israel, U.S. Foreign Policy, Islam, and Arab politics.

The Washington Times publishes story questioning official account.

Newly released photos of New York on September 11, 2001 by the NY Police Association

The mainstream press is showing interest in a taboo, however glaring subject; the inconsistencies in the Bush White House 9/11 account.

As The Washington Times reports today, "A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center."

The problems with the official federal stories are endless and according to some of the world's top minds, the suggested account is impossible^[1].

When we first began to write about these seemingly pressing questions, our Web Designer Matt Lintz caught the U.S. Air Force attempting to hack into Salem-News.com^[2].

One person who has never let the matter fade away is Richard Gage. He's a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Gage told The Washington Times, "In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards."

The federal government wants you to believe that fires brought the buildings to the ground, yet in all recorded history, no fire has ever toppled a skyscraper. They burn to the framework but they don't fall down.

Even if it was possible, the World Trade Towers were the least likely candidates. The steel core design of these buildings would not have come down, even if the building collapsed.

Even when you get past that, perhaps finding ways to justify the impossible "official" circumstances, how on earth could any logical explanation account for Building 7?

This is curious, I would suggest that half of all living Americans still don't realize that a third building also came down that day, and it wasn't hit by an airplane. But it did contain a lot of records that certain members of the financial industry didn't miss. Then there are the billions of dollars in missing gold evacuated just before Building 7 pancaked to the ground.

The words of Gage are reflected all over the nation in universities and engineering firms. The Trade Tower buildings were specifically designed to withstand the impact of a jet liner, specifically. Jet fuel is similar to diesel and it doesn't burn very hot. Firefighters, talking on radios, talked about how the aircraft crash fire in one building were going to easily be extinguisher by a few firefighters.

One of our writers, Jeff Gates, suggested that the only country that benefited from the ensuing wars is Israel.

"For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 911-type mass murder, "the mark" (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq-not to avenge 911 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel^[3].

Enforcing that thought, our writer Maidhc Ó Cathail wrote, "The day after 9/11, Benjamin Netanyahu let slip that the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans was 'very good' for Israel. In particular, the mass murder was very good for an emerging sector of the Israeli economy. In Laboratory for a Fortressed World, Naomi Klein detailed the post-9/11 "explosion of Israel's homeland security sector."^[4]

Another Salem-News.com writer, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, wrote about the connection between 9/11 and Israel in the article, Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: The Road to 9/11 and Beyond, "Second, only two intelligence agencies had the expertise, assets, access and political protection to execute 9/11 in the air and on the ground: our CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Only one had the incentive, using the 'who benefits' principle: Mossad."^[5]

The answers remain tangled up. Many Americans believe questioning the government over this is unpatriotic, then they turn around and burn effigies of Obama at tea bagger parties. I say it is highly unpatriotic and even disingenuous, to not question facts about the integrity of this nation.

I won't even start on Shanksville and the Pentagon; those stories are packed with more holes and in your face inconsistencies than there is time for in this report, but I have written about the Pentagon in particular, at great length^[6].

The tragedy of September 11th 2001 is so far reaching that we could never truly describe it. The event was the reasoning to launch two very costly, ongoing wars. The very notion of Arab terrorists selecting the day that is synonymous with emergency response in the U.S. is as hard to believe as the "terrorists" passports recovered so conveniently on the sidewalks in New York that day.

The Washington Times cites how Gage, a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than a thousand of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry.

"The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials."

Gage says technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers have prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule.

The article cites how he is particularly disturbed by the fall of the 47-story skyscraper, Building 7. This engineer says, like the other two buildings, tower 7 fell in "pure free-fall acceleration."

He also talked about how more than a hundred first-responders observed flashes and explosions during the fall of the towers.

Even more disturbing evidence Gage says, are "multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft. at 60 mph". He also talked about the "mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking."

Firefighters and Trade Tower employees en mass reported explosions before the buildings came down. They also talked about building closures in the weeks preceding 9/11, and men carrying large amounts of equipment into the elevator shafts.

Most experts agree that the buildings could only have come down the way they did if they were imploded. Experts who perform this type of work, common in places like Las Vegas, at least before the nation's economic downturn, place the main explosives in the elevator shafts, but also in many other strategic locations in a building's structure.

If you watch the World Trade Towers fall in slow motion, it is easy to observe what appear to be a series of planned explosions, running essentially the length of each building.

Gage says evidence of "advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material" was found in the World Trade Center dust. Of course Rudy Gulliani, mayor of New York at the time, had all of the building evidence shipped away from the state almost immediately.

There is a long list of federal investigators who say they were not allowed to do their jobs or complete the investigation. Tie this to the revelations in 9/11 Commissioner John Farmer’s book: “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11″, where the author builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version is almost entirely untrue, according to our writer Gordon Duff, and you just might be lifting a corner of the dirtiest rug that ever was used to suppress truth^[7].

Gage says the group's petition at ae911truth.org is already on its way to members of Congress.

He Told The Washington Times, "Government officials will be notified that 'Misprision of Treason,' U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382), is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act."

"The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial."

For me, the biggest story here is that a mainstream member of the press published this article, I am amazed and encouraged. It is hard to suggest that we have perhaps been had in the biggest and worst way possible, but honesty is the only thing that matters.

Israeli Espionage – Part 1 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEOecRtBU7U

Israeli Espionage – Part 2 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17SSuuZDkA

Israeli Espionage – Part 3 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VclAeKYYvBc

Israeli Espionage – Part 4 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVRsmodmCTE

Also, this video from CoreofCorruption.com which was released just over a year ago, details the information regarding four alleged "art students" who had free access to the Trade Towers, including construction passes, in the immediate weeks preceding 9/11:

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA9MvV-SrCo

References:

[1] Apr-07-2006 : Huge Contradictions in Official Theories on 9/11 Crash at Pentagon – Tim King Salem-News.com

[2] Apr-16-2006: U.S. Air Force Hackers Caught in Their Tracks by Salem-News.com – Tim King Salem-News.com

[3]Oct-20-2009: How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare – Jeff Gates Salem-News.com

[4] Jan-20-2010: The Merchants of Fear: Israel's Profiting from Homeland Insecurity – Maidhc Ó Cathail Sabbah.biz

[5] Sep-10-2009: Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: The Road to 9/11 and Beyond – Alan Sabrosky Sabbah.biz

[6] Mar-21-2006: What Really Hit The Pentagon? – Tim King Salem-News.com

[7] Sep-11-2009: The 9/11 Commission Rejects own Report as Based on Government Lies – Gordon Duff Salem-News.com

* Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com

Source: Salem-news.com

The Only Truth About US Justice is that Justice is in the Service of Empire!

Saturday, February 13, 2010 | Updated February 26, 2010 Turned down by all newspapers, from the New York Times to Pakistan's Dawn and Daily Times.

Yvonne Ridley's anguished opinion 'Truth about US justice' has appeared worldwide including in the Pakistani press. Ms. Ridley bemoans the travesty of justice in the US court's pronouncement of its guilty verdict on the frail, tortured daughter of Pakistan, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. The veteran journalist is perhaps unaware of the import of the following revealing words of a US Supreme Court justice which were uttered in 1951:

To those who would paralyze our Government in the face of impending threat by encasing it in a semantic strait-jacket, we must reply that all concepts are relative.

This lesser known utterance by the highest lawman of the United States came right on the heals of the victorious Allies administering the absolute victor's justice at Nuremberg to the defeated Nazis with these famous words of its chief prosecuting counsel for the United States, Robert H. Jackson:

… we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

Indeed, if there is one monumental statement made at Nuremberg, it was possibly this:

… the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

In other words, Justice Robert H. Jackson averred that all the destruction of civilian cities from Dresden, Hamburg, … to Tokyo in Allied fire-bombings which deliberately killed millions of innocent civilians, was not culpable crimes against humanity because its sin and criminality was absorbed by the Supreme International Crime of the first aggression!

Culpability for all the evil that follows is always solely apportioned by victors to the account of the first aggressor (the one who is defeated).

Even the aggressor's pretext for its first invasion of Poland as its own preemptive self-defense against terrorism (the Gleiwitz terrorist incident aka Operation Canned Goods), was outright rejected at Nuremberg as merely the self-inflicted inside-job to synthesize a Machiavellian pretext for extending German Lebensraum. As Hitler had put it to his Generals in Bavaria:

[I will] give a propagandist reason for starting the war [and don't] mind whether it was plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not the right that matters, but victory.

Justice Robert Jackson unequivocally affirmed that the Nazi quest for full spectrum dominance of Europe was illegal by international law, under any pretext:

The intellectual bankruptcy and moral perversion of the Nazi regime might have been no concern of international law had it not been utilized to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers. It is not their thoughts, it is their overt acts which we charge to be crimes.

And in order to ensure that these legal words of immense import were never re-semanticized for imperial mobilizations by future 'ubermensch' Reichs, but rather, that these concepts remained inviolably encas[ed] in a semantic strait-jacket, the very definition for the word 'aggressor' was ab initio proposed by Justice Robert Jackson as a state which first initiates:

invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State. … If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

That is quite an objective measure in international law for ascertaining who is the most guilty aggressor party, and who to fry first for crimes against peace, for monumental crimes against humanity.

So, even if Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is actually guilty as charged; is indeed the heinous mastermind of Al-Qaeeda (a Hegelian Dialectic which is examined elsewhere); or even if she was merely a dupe recruited by the Talibans/Al-Qaeeda as their waterboy (just as the CIA recruited Muslims from around the world to fight as the lauded Mujahideen against the USSR with proclamations of god is on your side); by the same yardstick as was used to hang the Nazis while awarding medals of bravery to the Allies who killed millions of innocent civilians in the defense of Europe against the aggressor, all the evil which has followed from the terrorist acts of an individual in aiding and abetting the militant-response against the invasion forces in Afghanistan is similarly legally subsumed by the monumental acts of state terrorism! The superpower's utilization of the 911 terrorist incident to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers is little different from the Nazis'.

Therefore, in any fair justice system interested in bringing real criminals closer to their day of accounting, before Dr. Aafia can be charged for her criminal conduct of responding to the invading forces in Afghanistan by her frail physical might, the leaders of the 'free world' and their financial supermasters seeking their own Lebensraum must be put on trial for their supreme international crime … [of] goosestep[ing] the Herrenvolk across international frontiers.!

To anyone with even half a brain, but one which is not entirely uncongenial to reflection, it must have been rather obvious from day-one that in the light of public revelations of the egregious circumstances of Dr. Aafia's bizarre capture and the subsequent orchestration of her show trial (instead of simply assassinating the accused if she was such a diabolical threat to mankind), any justice administered to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui would only be comparable to the proclamation of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: off with her head.

It must also have been apparent to those inclined to perusing statecraft rather than watching television or reading newspapers for their knowledge of current affairs, that the show trial of Aafia Siddiqui was designed primarily to serve an agenda of the state. Namely, one of calculatingly exercising the high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification deemed necessary for a sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. A careful reading of Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard makes the political science and the various mantras behind imperial mobilization abundantly clear.

Therefore, at least for these abnormal people who actually try to comprehend the forces which drive terrorism, both the pirate's as well as the emperor's, there is nothing surprising in the guilty verdict, nor in the conduct of the servile Pakistani rulers leading up to the verdict, and nor in the utterances of the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Ann Patterson. To have expected anything else after all the careful preparations that went into enacting this puppetshow, the show trial and its attendant media demonization of Dr. Aafia, only betrays immense naivetè of the inner-workings of empire.

In my view, the prima facie 'Truth about US justice' is that justice is in the service of empire, as it always has been! The madam Ambassador of the United States to Pakistan has only executed the core purpose of her diplomatic post rather faithfully in the service of her empire.

Justice in these times, like everything else, including science, politics, history, literature, cinema, news (which is often indistinguishable from cinema), and of course political-science, is continually put in the diabolical service of empire. The only veritable truths are the imperial proclamations of the white man -  from who did 911 to Global War on Terror to Global Warming to Global Epidemics to Global Financial Collapse to Global Governance. These history-constructions by incremental faits accomplis are the sine qua non for one-world government and cannot be constrained in any moral or legal semantic strait-jacket.

It's not like the beleaguered Pakistanis don't know it - we even have the East India Company's achievements to guide us - but apparently, we, the 'Untermensch', never quite seem to learn its lessons. And that's really the only pernicious secret of the enduring hidden strength of the golem behind all its guns and butter offerings to its victims before slaughtering them. The veritable strength of its 'Samson locks': our own price!

The former Director of the ISI, Brig. Tirmazi, narrated the following about us Pakistanis in his 1996 book Profiles of Intelligence:

'… It would be fair to ask what we [the ISI] did to counter the US machinations? Well we did not, and could not do any thing beyond reporting to the highest authority in the country. There are reasons for our inaction:

One, neither the ISI nor the IB is designed or equipped to counter the machinations of a Super Power.

Two, an important factor is our own price. A lot has been said and written by some of our American friends about the price of a Pakistani. Dr. Andrew V. Corry, US Counsel General at Lahore, once said, Price of a Pakistani oscillates between a free trip to the US and a bottle of whisky. He may not be too far wrong. We did observe some highly placed Pakistanis selling their conscience, prestige, dignity and self-respect for a small price.' (page 45, emphasis added)

That evergreen description however has not captured the grotesque reality of the English-enabled 'intellectual Negroes' flourishing in Pakistan today. Their �price� is not measured in such pecuniary terms. Read its full examination here:

http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-is-intellectual-negro.html

Given this tortuous backdrop of modernity, the point of the unsubtle resignation request made by the courageous Ms. Ridley to show some moral backbone among the errand boys and girls of empire, even as it is merely being rhetorical, is entirely meaningless even in its rhetoric for two reasons: 1) it is a moral request in a global governance system which is beyond good and evil, one which brazenly asserts hegemony is as old as mankind, and which puts morality itself directly in the service of empire; and 2) given that the highest-order-bit of the systemic disease among the 'untermensch' has apparently already been apportioned as our national destiny!

Crises are defining moments for nations, and for a people. Some rise to it. Others fall before it. Pakistan as a nation has evidently decided the latter course of action - and this is palpably apparent from the statements of Pakistan's own Ambassador to Washington:

'Foreign relations are not discussed in poetry, … Saddam Husain's last speech was also full of poetry but it could not save him or his nation', and that 'relationships between nations are based on ground realities'.

Read its full deconstruction here: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/11/bringing-back-thelost-zen-to-pakistan.html

While it is true that most in Pakistan are very upset by what has befallen Dr. Aafia Siddiqui as yet another victim of imperial mobilization - only one among the millions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan's Tribal-Belt, all along the 'arc of crisis' in the global zone of percolating violence, etc. - the handful who did publicly protest this latest visitation of empire's justice upon a frail tortured woman in a nation of almost 200 million, did so only symbolically. And many an English-enabled 'house Negro' only expressed faith in empire's Justice. The English language Pakistani press is full of their editorials which span the gamut of intellectual servitude from heaping scorn on any public expression of empathy with the victim, to outright blaming the victim. And this combined show of moral bravado despite the fact that Dr. Aafia has become the inextricable symbol of the summation of all the abhorrent injustices purveyed upon women in wars - from rape to rape - and no mere words can ever capture her indescribable agony! Yet, most Pakistanis among the 'field Negroes' daring to express a modicum of moral outrage only displayed our fine moral tenor from the comforts of our living room. Just as we did when Iraqi women were being raped, tortured, and disappeared in the service of empire not too long ago. Then we returned back to our daily grind.

Symbols of morality, like talismans, are no match for hard orchestrated events of imperial mobilization. And especially when arsonists are running all the fire brigades in a nation where its masses are more closely tied to their daily bread than to matters of state or national survival. The apathetic public well understands that many more arsonists eagerly await in the wings to take the place of their predecessors. The masses are well aware that the Pakistani elite, the ever patriotic praetorian guards, and their coterie of miserable sycophants have already learnt that while one's abject service to empire can sometimes be hazardous to one's existential wellness, it also routinely calls for new faces in many a chief's seat and presents the fabulous opportunity to loot and plunder anew in the name of patriotism.

Therefore, Ms. Yvonne Ridley's impassioned moral hint to the distinguished American Ambassador to Pakistan:

'She should then pick up the phone to the US president and tell him to release Aafia and return Pakistan's most loved, respected and famous daughter and reunite her with the two children who are still missing. Then she should re-read her letter of August 16, 2008 and write another … one of resignation.',

will only deprive madam Ambassador of a well-earned livelihood and comfortable retirement for no fault of her own. She merely faithfully discharged her service contract to her own empire. And it will do nothing for Pakistan either, for we, as a nation, are serving exactly the same interests. When these aren't even our own!

I humbly recommend instead that madam American Ambassador be the next in line to be awarded the glorious Freedom Medal by the White House. President Obama has already received his Nobel Peace Prize.

Zahir Ebrahim

Project Humanbeingsfirst.org

Author of: The Pakistan Decapitation Papers

http://humanbeingsfirst.wordpress.com/files/2009/11/pakistan-decapitation-papers-2nd-edition-nov042009.pdf

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Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org