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.

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

Palestine: The Enemy Within

By Stuart Littlewood*

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!"

A few weeks ago, on the annual Robert Burns Night, these immortal lines from 1786 were being recited all over the world, but probably not in Palestine. The leadership there aren't blessed with the gift of seeing themselves as the rest of the world sees them… a bit like the Israelis that way. The consequences for the Palestinians are tragic.

Fatah especially would do well to learn the lines off by heart. The next two go

"It would from many a blunder free us,
And foolish notion!"

The poem addresses a louse, which seems appropriate enough.

We've heard a great deal about Fatah spreading security chaos, almost provoking a civil war, then collaborating with the US to recruit sinister battalions of "security" thugs with orders to crush all opposition, silence dissent, destroy Hamas and the welfare structure it provides, and force Palestinians to bend to Israel's will.

This vile scenario is topped off with unjustified arrests, torture and lack of due process. It sounds like Fatah's brave "security" forces have been trained in terror tactics by the Gestapo and are working for the enemy.

Who is the enemy these days? Palestine's external enemy we know about. But the 'enemy within' is always more dangerous.

Since I first visited the Holy Land nearly 5 years ago I have tried to keep my promise to tell the story of those wonderful people struggling under cruel occupation. So I added my voice to the many that campaign for justice and freedom. But what exactly are we giving our support to?

The endless ordeal of the Palestinian people and their terrible loss tugs at the heart-strings of millions here in the West, but efforts to win over public opinion are continually undermined by the infighting between Fatah and Hamas.

This 2-rump division and the violent squabbles are what Israel prayed for. Mr Abbas, Mr Fayyad and the Palestinian National Authority are the 'Acceptable Face' of Palestine but only because they are propped up by the psychopaths in Washington and Tel Aviv. Abbas and Fayyad have power but little or no legitimacy and it's not clear whom they represent, which again is what Israel prayed for. They rule the West Bank in a game of footsie with Israel and with funding and support from the US, but are silent to the media, and the Israelis love that.

The PNA's embassies in the West have nothing to say, and Israeli propagandists are laughing themselves silly. The London embassy is deliberately starved of resources. Who but a raving lunatic – or a knave – would gag their communications outlet in the world's media capital?

This part of the Palestinian story just doesn't sell.

Israel meanwhile continues its bombings and abductions and its land-grabbing and water thieving and house demolitions and settlement building and blockades and check-points and collective punishment and general harassment, even ruins youngsters' education and forces Gazans to rebuild their blitzed homes and factories with mud bricks.

It is obvious that Fatah must face down threats from the US, forge unity with Hamas and agree clear objectives based on what has already been set out in UN resolutions and international law. Both camps need to behave impeccably, hold new elections instead of overstaying their term, and co-operate if they are to earn respect inside and outside Palestine. They need to become squeaky-clean and media-friendly. Everyone needs to sing off the same hymn-sheet.

Every day they delay, more damage is done to the cause.

But instead, the Palestinian National Authority (a misnomer if ever there was one) presents such an appalling image to the outside world that the long-suffering people it is supposed to represent are actually losing the sympathy they deserve. If any progress has been made recently it's by campaign groups and students in the West creating awareness and putting pressure on governments and business, and no thanks to Palestine's leaders.

Hamas charter an obstacle to peace

Democratically elected Hamas is the 'Unacceptable Face' of Palestine, according to the White House and the rest of Israel's hirelings. But even those who dislike Hamas have a sneaking admiration for their courage and single-minded determination against impossible odds. How many of their critics could have emerged from what they have been through with colours still flying? We in Britain owe a duty to Palestinians to talk to Hamas as well as Fatah instead of welcoming onto our streets Israelis wanted for mega war crimes.

Islam is only a problem to the West when it is corrupted and distorted by fanatics. The teachings of Christianity and Judaism are also a menace when distorted, and we don't have to look very far.

But don't you think, Mr Meshaal and Mr Haniyeh, that the Hamas Charter is an obstacle to peace? Can you appreciate that ordinary Westerners, who could turn the tide of opinion, see the Charter as threatening and are easily persuaded not to back your cause, while the enemies of Palestine – especially the 'Friends of Israel' and their stooges in the corridors of power – gleefully use it to make mischief and stoke up hatred?

OK, the Charter dates from 1988 and is basically an Intifada rallying call by a resistance group that never dreamed of being catapulted into government 18 years later. But the puzzle is why it wasn't torn up promptly in 2006 and why Hamas didn't seize the occasion to re-invent themselves.

A new Charter removing the West's objections would significantly improve chances of a just settlement. Right-thinking people will respect your unwillingness to sacrifice national constants and your reluctance to accept Israel's claims of legitimacy, but after 42 years you might consider formally accepting the reality of Israel within internationally agreed pre-1967 borders, as set out in UN resolutions and international law. This would show that Hamas is at least evolving and now worthy of being considered a potential partner for peace, if not among the West's present crop of corrupted leaders then at least among the people they answer to.

Israel of course will continue to demand "recognition" but on what basis? On the 57 per cent of mandated Palestine generously allocated to the Jews by the UN in 1947? Or the 78.5 per cent they had illegally expanded to by 1949?

Or are we all supposed to recognise present-day Israel occupying/blockading 100 percent and determined to keep it all, including Jerusalem? Their relentless drive to dispossess the Palestinians totally must be halted. Until it is who can reasonably be expected to recognise Israel, especially the Palestinians?

Enforce the law first. Negotiate afterwards, on a level playing field

No-one should be asked to agree peace with an occupier's jackboot on his throat. The UN and the International Court of Justice have already spoken and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is simple enough to understand. Justice can only be delivered when Israel conforms to international law and complies with UN Resolutions, yet the international community still funks implementation and takes the coward's way, urging "negotiations".

What is there to negotiate? Is international law negotiable? Or human rights? Is the US entitled to re-write these laws and conventions to suit its Israel lobby?

Negotiations should not even be mentioned until all outstanding legal issues are dealt with and a level playing field is prepared. That, one would have thought, is the unshakable precondition for any talks.

The question is, when will the US see to it? Answer: not until its pro-Israel lobby is purged, or the rest of the world runs out of patience and overrules America.

The same goes for the UK, where 'Friends of Israel' and their stooges now run foreign policy.

That stooge extraordinaire Tony Blair is now to step up his efforts as Middle East peace envoy by doing things "bottom-up" – more months/years of negotiations to improve freedom of movements, change living conditions, encourage investment, etc – which has been a recipe for failure for decades. The Israelis will love that too. Top-down enforcement of international law is what's needed before anything useful can be achieved.

Saeb Erekat, the PNA's chief negotiator, is urging the Palestinians to call for a new UN resolution that recognises a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders and builds upon the position established by numerous previous resolutions. That's more like it!

But good ideas and fine words are not enough. Palestine's 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' faces, both ugly as sin, must dissolve seamlessly into a single, likable, honest face that inspires confidence. The quarrelsome rumps must vanish for ever.

* Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

Illustration by Carlos Latuff

By Paul J. Balles*

If you indulge in ad hominem attacks (attacking the person rather than the issue), you can expect the same in return. The issues related to the anti-Semitic label are many.

First, the expression "anti-Semitic" is a misnomer. It's defined as "hating Jews or Judeophobia." The label "anti-Semitism" is wrong because not all Jews are Semites, and many Arabs are.

In 2004, the US Congress passed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act. The Act defines a person as being anti-Semitic for holding any of a number of beliefs. My comments follow each of the 14 items supposedly revealing anti-Semitism.

1) Any assertion, "that the Jewish community controls government, the media, international business and the financial world."

According to this, it doesn't matter whether the assertion is true or not. Truth is not an issue. Simply making such a statement violates the Act. In itself, that fact provides strong evidence of control of the US government.

2) The expression of "Strong anti-Israel sentiment."

Any criticism of Israel can thus be considered anti-Semitic. Israel can mangle Gaza and get away with it.

3) Expressing "Virulent criticism" of Israel's leaders, past or present.

Menachem Begin may have led the Irgun in the slaughter and dispossession of thousands of Palestinians, but it's anti-Semitic to say so.

4) Any criticism of the Jewish religion or its religious leaders with its emphasis on the Talmud and Kabbala.

It's perfectly acceptable, as free speech, to vilify Islam, but any criticism of Judaism violates the Act.

5) Any criticism of the United States Government and Congress for being under the undue influence by the Jewish-Zionist community, which would include Jewish organizations such as AIPAC.

Truth matters not to the ridiculous legislators who passed this ludicrous act.

6) Any criticism of the Jewish-Zionist community for promoting globalism or what some call the "New World Order."

When you can't criticise a propaganda machine for its promotions, both free speech and democracy are dead.

7) Placing any blame on Jewish leaders and their followers for inciting the Roman crucifixion of Christ.

In order to accommodate the anti-Semitism label, simply rewrite history.

8) Citing any facts that could in any way diminish the "six million" figure of Jewish holocaust victims.

I violate the act simply by citing the fact that five million non-Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. This goes beyond stifling free speech.

9) Claiming that Israel is a racist state.

That's not a claim. It's a fact. Israel is full of racist laws. It insists on preserving its racist character and its right to impose apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza.

10) Making any claim that there is a "Zionist Conspiracy."

A rational provision for such a claim would insist on evidence as proof of its validity. To disallow making such a claim is existentially (Israelis love that word) dictatorial.

11) Offering proof that Jews and their leaders created Communism and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

It just became illegal to offer proof. Minds are made up. Don't confuse them with the facts.

12) Making derogatory statements about Jewish persons.

Why limit it to Jewish persons?

13) Asserting that spiritually disobedient Jews do not have the Biblical right to re-occupy Palestine.

Why limit it to the spiritually disobedient?

14) Making any allegations of Mossad involvement in the 9/11 attack.

I just did in a column published a week ago.

The Act passed by the US Congress makes me anti-Semitic. It's an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. I'm a critic of Israel when they commit wrongs and a critic of America when it does wrong. Despite Congress, that's not anti-Semitic.

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

By Maidhc Ó Cathail*

Chutzpah, a Yiddish word meaning "shameless audacity," has been famously defined as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan." Considering Israel's increasingly outrageous behaviour, perhaps it's time for a new definition. The one that springs to mind is "that quality enshrined in a state, which having induced its 'allies' into a disastrous invasion of Iraq, then urges them to attack Iran."

At a recent dinner in honour of visiting Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took yet another rhetorical swipe at Tehran. "Humanity stands before one of its most difficult tests since World War II," Netanyahu intoned. "The radical Islamic regime threats [sic] the well-being of the state of Israel, the region, and all of humanity."

Sounding more like an Israeli envoy than the head of a sovereign nation, Berlusconi responded, "My job is to make sure that world leaders do not commit the same error of the past, the error of indifference that brought about the greatest tragedy in history."

In Defamation, a highly revealing 2009 documentary on anti-Semitism by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir, Professor Norman Finkelstein noted this strategy of invoking past Jewish suffering to justify future wars. "The irony is that the Nazi holocaust has now become the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression," said Finkelstein, the author of The Holocaust Industry. "Every time you want to launch a war of aggression, drag in the Nazi holocaust."

Or, to be more precise, every time Israel wants other countries to launch a war of aggression on its behalf, it drags in the Nazi holocaust. In the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu was one of many Zionists who did just that. In a September 20, 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "The Case for Toppling Saddam," Netanyahu laid on the guilt trip: "We now know that had the democracies taken pre-emptive action to bring down Hitler's regime in the 1930s, the worst horrors in history could have been avoided."

And as he and other Zionists are now doing with Iran, Netanyahu was in 2002 hyping a non-existent Iraqi nuclear threat. Saddam Hussein, he claimed, was "feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons." Moreover, "the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs," the then former Israeli Prime Minister speculated, could be produced "in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country-and Iraq is a very big country." To uncover Saddam's hypothetical "portable manufacturing sites of mass death," Netanyahu warned that "nothing less than dismantling his regime will do."

One might think that with over a million people dead and almost five million others displaced in Iraq-and not a weapon of mass destruction to be found-that Netanyahu might be showing some remorse. Instead, he's beating the drums loudest for an even more catastrophic war with Iran.

That should tell us a lot not only about the man but about the nature of the ideology that drives him. Zionism, like the fictional Jewish parenticide, shamelessly attempts to turn reality on its head.

Instead of acknowledging that it is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, Israel and its supporters focus the world's attention on imaginary threats from its regional rivals.

Rather than apologizing for their crimes against humanity-most notably, the dispossession and virtual imprisonment of the Palestinian people- Zionists arrogantly portray themselves as the defenders of humanity against Islamic aggression.

And instead of admitting that they lied about Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories, Iraqi yellowcake uranium from Niger, and Iraqi meetings in Prague, Zionist propagandists are busy concocting similarly brazen lies about Iran.

If world leaders are indeed committing an "error of indifference," it is hardly their supposed resistance to Zionist scaremongering. Rather, it is their indifference to the suffering of Arab and Muslim peoples. Foremost among them are the Palestinians-the ultimate victims of the shameless audacity of Zionism.

* Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan.

While Zionism is clearly a nationalist ideology, that narrow framing does the term an injustice as it is so much more.

Zionism is more accurately described as a strategy for targeting thought and emotion as a means to influence behavior. Naïve Jews were its first victims when induced to identify with an enclave in the Middle East that President Harry Truman, a Christian Zionist, was induced to recognize as a "state."

Zionism is first and foremost a mental state that manifests as a dispersed form of internalized nationalism-a Diaspora-that binds to an extremist enclave those who may never set foot there. After 1967, this "state" became the "Land of Israel" based on a more expansive area seized by Israel Defense Forces along with other occupied lands that Zionists claim a god gave them.

Zionism recruits by sustaining a shared sense of insecurity within the broader Jewish community. It progresses by marketing its perceived vulnerability and victimhood among those on whom it relies for financial, military and diplomatic support.

When, as now, policies of the Zionist state come under attack, media campaigns herald an outbreak of anti-Semitism and hatred-not for Zionism but for Jews, enhancing recruitment.

By choosing to identify their interests with those of Zionism, Jews choose to make themselves feel insecure. Zionism relies for its success not only on deception but also on self-deceit.

Many well-informed Jews opposed Israel's founding in 1948. By 1967, Jewish-Americans were active in the civil rights movement. With the Six-Day War, that activism became problematic. How could Jews back civil rights for Blacks while Zionism denied those rights to Palestinians?

That era marked a turning point both for Zionism and legitimate Judaism as many Jews abandoned civil rights activism when they could no longer reconcile their activism with Israeli oppression. Thus the present mental state of Barack Obama's many Jewish Zionist advisers.

The Six-Day War induced more Jews to identify with Zionism as a defender of Jews. Yet now we know that war was a long-planned land grab destined to outrage Arabs and Muslims. When combined with a murderous occupation, decades of Israeli provocations were guaranteed to evoke the violent reactions required to rationalize a "war on terrorism."

In terms of game theory war planning, today's results were perfectly predictable-mathematically model-able within an acceptable range of probabilities. Once again Zionism targeted thought and emotion to manipulate behavior by provoking antagonism and evoking extremism-the two key ingredients required to plausibly proclaim their insecurity.

When your numbers are few and your ambitions vast, what choice did Zionists have but to seduce and deceive a super power so that our military would wage their wars for Greater Israel?

Peace is the Opponent

Peace is a perilous 'state' to be avoided at any cost by a nationalist ideology that thrives on serial crises wed to a perpetual state of conflict and fear. To realize the Zionist goal of hegemony over the Middle East requires a series of plausible Evil Doers and a persuasive narrative. Could Zionism be the reason we segued so seamlessly from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism? (See: How Israel Wages War on the U.S.)

Instead of the anticipated post-Cold War "peace dividend, the U.S. finds itself waging what Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz calls The $3 Trillion War-all of it borrowed, including $700 billion in interest expense.

In hindsight, the phony intelligence that induced us to war in the Middle East was traceable to Israelis, pro-Israelis or assets developed for that purpose such as Iraqi liar Ahmad Chalabi.

Other than those sharing a Zionist mental state, who had the means, motive, opportunity and, importantly, the stable nation-state intelligence to conduct such operations inside the U.S.?

Yet even now those responsible elude accountability and even scrutiny as cries of "anti-Semitism" are deployed to intimidate and misdirect-by manipulating thought and emotion.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. claimed 50% of the world's productive power, ensuring we would have the world's top-rated government bonds for at least two generations. When the Cold War drew to a costly close in 1989, the U.S. had spent $15.9 trillion on defense since 1948 (in 2010 dollars). Now a potential war without end has taken its place.

Americans have been induced to believe that the Zionist state is an ally. We are not alone in viewing Israel as a legitimate nation and a noble experiment to provide a "homeland" for a victimized people. That alluring storyline victimized the broader Jewish community while also laying waste to the nation that was first deceived to extend to Zionists the hand of friendship.

To escape the ravages of Zionism requires that we concede its duplicitous nature and make its operations transparent so that its perpetrators become apparent. As a long-deceived global public grasps its costs in blood and treasure, this mental state will be seen for what it is: a criminal state.

The Psychopath Within

In the clinical psychiatric literature, this "state" features interpersonal traits such as superficial charm, pathological lying, egocentricity, lack of remorse, and callousness that are regarded as characteristic of psychopaths. In order to betray, psychopaths first befriend. In order to defraud, they first establish a relationship of trust. Sound familiar?

Those who share such a mental state will happily incite hatred to catalyze a reaction and then claim they are the victims of hate. For those inhabiting this mental state, it appears rational and even desirable to provoke a response and then claim to be a target of anti-Semites. Inside this internal state, self-absorption is all-encompassing with arrogance its most visible trait.

Law is irrelevant to those who consider themselves above the law. Morality and conscience are of no concern to those who consider themselves The Chosen-by a god of their own choosing. Such a nationalist ideology has no place in a system nation states dedicated to the rule of law.

Those sharing such a "state" pose too great a peril to be an object of pity or compassion. Accountability is the only appropriate response along with an initiative-deploying force as required-to secure any weapons of mass destruction that may be in their possession.

Such a state cannot be delegitimized because any legitimacy attained was integral to the fraud it inflicted on the community of nations. The issue at hand is how best to protect a peace-seeking world from a psychopathic ideology that assumed the appearance of legitimacy so that a Christian Zionist president could be deceived to recognize as a nation a criminal state.

* Jeff Gates is a widely acclaimed author, attorney, investment banker, educator and consultant to government, corporate and union leaders worldwide, Jeff Gates' latest book is Guilt by Association -How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War (2008) his first release in the Criminal State series. His previous books include Democracy At Risk and The Ownership Solution. See his website Criminal State

By Alan Hart*

Most Jews of the world (and probably many Gentiles) believe that Zionism is the return of Jews to the land promised to them by God. At the risk of offending some readers of all faiths for saying so, I must confess, and do so cheerfully, that I don't buy this concept because the Gentile me does not believe in the God of organized, institutional religions. So, I say to myself, no God, no promise to Jews (or anybody else). In my perception of the scheme of things, God is the potential for good inside each and every one of us. God so defined is a prisoner within each of us and our prime task is to liberate this prisoner. But let's put that to one side.

The Jews who "returned" in answer to Zionism's call had no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews. They were converts to Judaism long after the end of the Hebrew conquest and short-lived domination of much of Canaan, the name as in the Bible by which Palestine was first known to the world. They therefore had no legitimate claim on the land.

The Jews who did have a legitimate claim, probably not more than about 10,000 at the time of Zionism's first dishonest mission statement in 1897, were the direct descendants of the Israelites who stayed in place on the land through time. They regarded themselves as Palestinians, and they were fiercely opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise because they feared it would make them as well as the incoming alien Jews enemies of the Palestinian Arabs.

Also true is that prior to the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, most Jews of the world were not at all interested in Zionism's colonial enterprise and many were opposed to it. The most informed and thoughtful of those who did express their opposition believed that Zionism was morally wrong. They also feared that Zionism's colonial enterprise would lead to unending conflict. But most of all they feared that Zionism, if it was allowed by the major powers to have its way, would one day provoke anti-Semitism. Which is precisely what is happening today. (Hence the title of my book, ZIONISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS).

In reality it is how the Zionists created their state – a Zionist not a Jewish state – that best defines what Zionism actually is.

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.

Zionism asserts that its state was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. That is propaganda nonsense. The truth can be summarized as follows.

• 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.
• By the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, 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 (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine – after Britain had made a mess of it and walked away, effectively surrendering to Zionist terrorism – was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the U.S. was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that the Zionist state had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist UNLESS … Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those Zionism had dispossessed of their land and their rights. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved.

What is a Zionist today?

Short answer: One, not necessarily a Jew, who (to quote Balfour) supports the Zionist state of Israel "right or wrong" and who cannot or will not admit that a terrible wrong was done to the Palestinians by Zionism – a wrong that must be acknowledged and then corrected on terms acceptable to the Palestinians if there is ever to be peace and the countdown to catastrophe for all is to be stopped. The Arab word for the catastrophe of the original dispossession of the Palestinians is Nakba. In my view, Zionism's Nakba denial is as obscene and as evil as denial of the Nazi holocaust.

One thing nobody can deny is the effectiveness of Zionism's propaganda machine. Zionism's spin doctors probably learned from the Nazis that the bigger the lies and the more frequently they are told, the more likely it is that they will be believed in the mainly Gentile, Judeo-Christian or Western world; and all the more so when the mainstream media is terrified of offending Zionism either too much or at all.

The biggest of all of Zionism's propaganda lies is the one which asserts that Israel has lived in constant danger of annihilation, the "driving into the sea" of its Jews. As I document in detail in my book, Israel's existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Not in 1948. Not in 1967. And not even in 1973. Zionism's assertion to the contrary was the cover which allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most, in North America and Western Europe, with presenting its aggression (often state terrorism) as self-defense, and itself as the victim when actually it was, and is, the oppressor.

The companion propaganda lie is that Israel never had Arab partners for peace.

Zionism has two hallmarks.

One is self-righteousness of a most extraordinary kind. In 1986 this self-righteousness was described by Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former Director of Israeli Military Intelligence, as "the biggest real danger" to the Jewish state.

The other hallmark is a shocking and awesome arrogance of military and economic power and the influence the latter buys, most critically in the U.S. Congress where what passes for democracy is for sale to the highest bidders.

On the matter of truth as it relates to the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, I hope the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is right: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." If that's true, Zionism not only can be defeated but will be.

* Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor

Illustration By Carlos Latuff

By Jeff Gates*

"It's very good….Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)".
–Response of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when asked on September 11, 2001 what the attacks meant for U.S.-Israeli relations.

Game theory war-planners rely on mathematical models to anticipate and shape outcomes with staged provocations. For the agent provocateur, the reactions to a provocation-as well as the reactions to those reactions-thereby become predictable within an acceptable range of probabilities.

With ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan poised to expand to Iran and Pakistan, it is time to take a closer look at how conflicts are catalyzed-by way of deception.

When Israeli game theorist Robert J. Aumann received the 2005 Nobel Prize in economic science, he conceded from Jerusalem, "the entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel" has turned "Israel into the leading authority in this field." A professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality at Hebrew University, Aumann's Nobel lecture, titled "War and Peace," expounded on the rationality of war.

With a well-modeled provocation, a target's anticipated reaction can even become a weapon in the aggressor's arsenal. In response to the provocation of 9-11, how difficult was it to foresee that the U.S. would deploy its military to avenge that attack? With U.S. intelligence "fixed" by well-placed insiders around a predetermined goal, how difficult was it to anticipate that the reaction to 9-11 could be redirected to wage war in Iraq?

The emotional component of a provocation plays a key role in game theory warfare. With the nationally televised mass murder of 3,000 people, a state of shock, grief and outrage made it easier for Americans to believe that a known Evil Doer in Iraq was responsible-regardless of the facts.

For false beliefs to displace real facts requires mental preconditioning so that a targeted population can be persuaded to put their faith in fictions. That conditioning enhances the probability of a successful deception. Those who deceived the U.S. to invade Iraq in March 2003 began a decade beforehand to lay the "mental threads" and make the requisite mental associations to advance that agenda.

Notable among those threads was the 1993 publication in Foreign Affairs of a theme-setting article by Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington. By the time his analysis appeared in book-length form in 1996 as The Clash of Civilizations, more than 100 think tanks were prepared to promote it. The result created a widely touted narrative-a thematic storyline-supporting a "clash consensus" five years before 9-11 provided a plausible rationale for war.

Also published in 1996 under the guidance of Richard Perle was A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (i.e., Israel). A member since 1987 of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, this self-professed Zionist became its chairman in 2001.

As an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Perle's Pentagon advisory post provided a powerful insider position to shape the national security mindset around the removal of Saddam Hussein, a key theme of A Clean Break-released five years before 9-11. That same year Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress at the invitation of Newt Gingrich, the Christian Zionist Speaker of the House.

Murders, books, articles, think tanks and well-placed insiders are common components in a "probabilistic" model deployed by war-planning game theorists. Lawmakers are also a customary ingredient. They provide credibility and a facade of legitimacy-a critical element when inducing a nation to war with phony intelligence fixed around a preset agenda.

That role was eagerly filled by Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, a Jewish Zionist from Connecticut, and Jon Kyl, a Christian Zionist from Arizona, when they co-sponsored the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. By promoting Israel's 1996 agenda for Securing the Realm, their legislation laid yet another mental thread in the public mindset by calling for the ouster of Saddam Hussein-three years before 9-11.

The legislation also appropriated $97 million to promote their agenda. Distracted by mid-term Congressional elections and impeachment proceedings catalyzed by a well-timed presidential affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton signed that Zionist agenda into law in October 1998-4-1/2 years before a U.S.-led invasion removed the Iraqi leader.

After 9-11, McCain and Lieberman became inseparable travel companions and irrepressible advocates for the invasion of Iraq. Striking a presidential pose aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in January 2002, McCain-a son and grandson of admirals-laid another mental thread when he waved an admiral's cap and proclaimed, alongside Lieberman, "On to Baghdad."

By Way of Deception

The confidence with which this game theory strategy progressed in plain sight could be seen in the behavior of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another Zionist insider. Four days after 9-11 while in a principals' meeting at Camp David, he proposed that the U.S. invade Iraq. At that time, the intelligence did not point to Iraqi involvement and Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding in a remote region of Afghanistan.

On that same day, San Diego FBI Special Agent Stephen Butler interrogated Iraqi Munther Ghazal at his home near San Diego to determine if he was funding Mel Rockefeller, an American with whom Ghazal traveled to Baghdad in early 1997. After meeting for several days with a top nuclear physicist with oversight of Iraq's mothballed nuclear weapons program, Rockefeller returned to the U.S. with a practical proposal for removing Saddam Hussein without this war and without triggering an insurgency.

When regional specialists at the U.S. Department of State would not meet with him, he traveled to Ottawa in April 1997 where he met with Middle East specialists in the Canadian government to ensure a written record was made to confirm there was an alternative to war in Iraq-six years before the invasion. Instead of debriefing him, FBI agents sought to discredit him. Though FBI agents interviewed Ghazal many times, they have yet to meet with Mel Rockefeller.

Agent Butler cashed checks and paid rent for the two San Diego-based hijackers who piloted planes into the World Trade Center towers. The same Iman counseling Major Nidal Hassan (with FBI knowledge) before he was transferred to Fort Hood also counseled the San Diego-based hijackers-with FBI knowledge. As of December 1, 2009, no one from the FBI or national security had debriefed Mel Rockefeller-eight years after 9-11.

See: Ft. Hood: "Death By Political Correctness"? and Ft. Hood Tragedy: The Real Story of the Terrorist "Mad Doctor Hasan"

When President George H.W. Bush declined to invade Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, Pentagon Under Secretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz imposed a No-Fly Zone in northern Iraq. By the invasion of March 2003, the Israeli Mossad had agents deployed for a decade in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Intelligence reports of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda were also traced to Mosul-reports that proved false. Mosul again emerged in November 2004 as a center of the insurgency that destabilized Iraq. That reaction precluded the speedy exit of coalition forces promised in Congressional testimony by senior war-planner Wolfowitz in the lead-up to the invasion.

An Inside Job?

The common pro-Israeli source of the phony intelligence that induced war in Iraq has yet to be acknowledged even though intelligence experts agree that deception on such a scale required a decade to plan, staff, pre-stage, orchestrate and-until now-cover up. The leaders of the 9-11 Commission conceded they were thwarted by Commission members adamantly opposed to hearing testimony on the hijackers' motivation for 9-11: the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

The fictions reported as facts by mainstream media included Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraqi purchases of "yellowcake" uranium from Niger. Only the last claim was conceded as bogus prior to the invasion.

Only after the war began were the balance of the claims disclosed as false, flawed or outright fabricated. An attempt to punish former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Joe Wilson for his exposure of the phony yellowcake account led to a federal conviction of vice-presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby, another well-placed Zionist insider.

The multi-decade consistency of agent-provocateur fact patterns suggests that this game theory-modeled warfare includes the Israeli provocation that catalyzed the Second Intifada. An intifada is an uprising or, literally, a "shaking off" of an oppressor. The Second Intifada dates from September 2000 when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon led an armed march to Jerusalem's Temple Mount-one year before 9-11.

After a year of calm during which Palestinians believed that Israel was sincere about peace, suicide bombings recommenced. As Sharon conceded, his march was meant to demonstrate Israeli control over a site considered holy by Muslims worldwide. In response to this second failed attempt at "shaking off" Israeli domination, Sharon and Netanyahu observed that only when Americans "feel our pain" would they understand the plight of the victimized Israelis.

These Likud Party leaders commented that the requisite empathy ("feel our pain") would require a weighted body count of 4,500 to 5,000 Americans lost to terrorism-the initial estimate of those who died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center-one year later.

In other words, only with pain could we identify with the Israelis. Does that mean that only with a mass murder could we be induced to respond with our military to advance their agenda? Was the U.S. response mathematically modeled at the Center for the Study of Rationality? Seven months after 9-11, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech in a U.S. Senate office building where he was introduced by Senators Jon Kyl and Joe Liebermn.

American Valkyrie?

When successful, game theory warfare strengthens the agent provocateur while leaving the target discredited and depleted by the anticipated reaction. By game theory standards, 9-11 was a strategic success because the U.S.-by its response-was widely criticized for waging war on false pretenses. Only in hindsight did a deceived public realize that Iraq had nothing to do with that mass murder. However, that invasion had everything to do with "securing the realm."

Our response (predictably) triggered a deadly insurgency with devastating consequences for Iraqis, the U.S. and a "coalition of the willing" led to war by a successfully duped U.S. From a game theory perspective, that insurgency was a predictable reaction in a nation populated by three long-feuding sects: Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. A violent invasion led by a nation closely allied with Jewish nationalists only further fueled the flames of violence and extremism-another foreseeable outcome.

Until the U.S.-led invasion, peace was maintained by an unsavory dictator and former U.S. ally who was rebranded an Evil Doer in the lead-up to war. As the cost in blood and treasure from our "liberation" of Iraq expanded, the U.S. became overextended militarily, financially and diplomatically.

The sectarian violence unleashed in Iraq is precisely what Messrs. Rockefeller and Ghazal were cautioned against in early 1997 should Saddam Hussein be removed suddenly and violently. The 1.3 million Iraqi deaths from war-related causes exceeds the worst of Saddam Hussein's atrocities. As any competent game theory war-planner knew, the strategic winner in this war was certain to be Tehran as the U.S. neutralized its key foe-and is now urged by Israel to wage war on Iran.

As the U.S.-the primary target of this deception-emerged in the foreground, the agent provocateur faded into the background. But only after catalyzing dynamics that steadily drained the U.S. of credibility, resources and resolve. This "probabilistic" Israeli victory also ensured widespread cynicism, insecurity, distrust and disillusionment along with a steadily declining capacity to defend our real interests.

Meanwhile the American public came under a system of oversight and surveillance packaged and sold as "homeland security." This ominously titled operation includes rhetorical echoes of a WWII-era "fatherland" featuring a domestic security force completely alien to U.S. traditions. It is not yet clear whether this new agency was established to protect Americans. Or whether it is meant to shield from Americans those responsible for deceiving us to wage their wars.

In January 2003, Secret Service Agent Richard Sierze interrogated Mel Rockefeller at his home in Fresno, California after he sent an email to Florida Governor Jeb Bush. The email said, in effect, that if the governor's brother (President George Bush) did not interview him on a public record prior to invading Iraq, he would do his best to ensure that lawful means were deployed to see the president executed for treason by a firing squad.

When questioned by Sierze, Rockefeller offered to have the agent speak with Dr. Glenn Olds, an adviser to four presidents, his senior adviser since 1994 and a former U.N. Ambassador who assisted him in entering Iraq through Jordon at a time when Americans were prohibited from traveling there. Sierze declined.

He also repeated his intent to see the president executed for treason and insisted that he be charged and taken before a federal magistrate to present evidence that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that an alternative to war had been available since early 1997. Agent Sierze declined his demand to be arraigned in a U.S. Federal District Court-seven weeks before the invasion.

Agent Sierze should be interviewed to see if, in retrospect, he agrees that-had this advice been followed-the war in Iraq may well have been prevented. To date, no one with line responsibility has interviewed Mel Rockefeller on a public record. Why? The answer to that question would reveal those responsible for this ongoing deception.

The victims of these serial deceptions, including the families of those murdered in November at Fort Hood, may have a wrongful death cause of action against those with line responsibility who aided these operations by failing to engage the Rockefeller record in a timely fashion.

Foreseeable Futures

By manipulating the shared mindset, skilled game theory war-planners can wage wars on multiple fronts with minimal resources. One proven strategy: Pose as an ally of a well-armed nation predisposed to deploy its military in response to a mass murder.

In this case, the result destabilized Iraq while creating (predictable) crises that could be exploited to greater strategic advantage by expanding the conflict to Iran, another Israeli goal announced in A Clean Break-seven years before the invasion of Iraq.

Today's mathematically model-able outcomes undermined U.S. national security by discrediting our leadership, degrading our financial condition and disabling our political will. In game theory terms, this devastation was perfectly predictable-within an acceptable range of probabilities.

Pakistan is primed to emerge as the next battleground for game theory war-planners. When India, an ally of Israel, became the nation honored by the Obama administration's first state dinner, that occasion gave reason for concern due to the dynamics already at work in the background.

See "What Is Israel's Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?"

In the asymmetry that typifies modern warfare, those who are few in number have no alternative when pursuing an expansionist agenda but to wage their wars by way of deception. To maintain its perceived status as a perennial victim, Israeli aggression must proceed non-transparently. Its only option is to operate with duplicitous means, including leveraging the power of its insider influence to advance an agenda from the shadows.

Thus the strategic necessity that this extremist enclave befriend the U.S.-with the intent to betray that friendship to advance its geopolitical goals. Thus the strategic need to create a relationship of trust with a post-WWII super power-in order to defraud us. How else could Colonial Zionists wage their wars except with our military? How else could Jewish nationalists induce our aggression absent the widely shared belief that Israel is not an aggressor but a victim?

Winning Wars from the Inside Out

Game theory war-planners manipulate the shared mental environment by shaping the perceptions and impressions that become consensus opinions. With a combination of well-timed crises, fixed intelligence and a complicit media, policy-makers can be induced to support a predetermined agenda-not because lawmakers are Evil Doers but because the public mindset has been pre-conditioned to respond to manipulated thoughts, emotions and beliefs.

Without the mass murder of 9-11, would America's credibility be in tatters and its creditworthiness in jeopardy? By steadily displacing facts with false beliefs, those duplicitous few-within-the-few amplify the impact of their deceit. By their steady focus on the mental environment, game theory war-planners can defeat an opponent with vastly superior resources.

Today's intelligence wars are waged in plain sight and under the cover of shared beliefs. By manipulating consensus opinion, psy-ops wars can be won from the inside out by inducing a targeted populace to freely choose the very forces that imperil their freedom.

Thus in the Information Age the disproportionate power wielded by those with outsized influence in media, popular culture, think tanks, academia and politics-domains where Zionist influence is pervasive not only in the U.S. but also in other nations induced to war on false pretenses.

Germany offers a case study in manipulation of the public mindset in plain sight and under the banner of a free press. In 2003, Zionist media mogul Haim Saban acquired the second largest media conglomerate in Germany. Why? As Saban investment banker Steve Rattner explained his client's motivation: "Because Germany is important to Israel." Or, as Saban concedes: "I have only one issue and that issue is Israel."

By 2005, Saban had succeeded in electing Angela Merkel as German Chancellor. She quickly became the European Union's most reliable and forceful advocate for Israel. By November 2009, she was prepared to sponsor in Berlin an unprecedented joint session of the German and Israeli governments. Following his political success in Germany, Saban acquired in 2007 a controlling interest in Univision, a Latino-focused network serving the fastest-growing voting bloc in the U.S.

Media manipulation serves as an essential force-multiplier to wage intelligence wars from the periphery or, as with Haim Saban, in plain sight. At the operational core of such psy-ops are game theory war-planners skilled at personality profiling and masterful at anticipating responses to staged provocations and then incorporating those responses into their arsenal.

In the case of Iraq, our (mathematically) foreseeable response to 9-11 led, in practical effect, to Israel's deployment of our military to invade Iraq. For aggressors adept at psy-ops warfare, facts are only an inconvenience to be overcome when waging war by way of deception. Thus the key role played by consensus-shapers featured in mainstream media outlets who focus not on informing the public but on mental conditioning.

For targeted populations dependent on facts and informed consent to protect their freedom and preserve the rule of law, such treachery poses the greatest possible threat. Yet even now many Americans believe that Israel is not an aggressor but a victim and even an ally despite facts confirming a multi-decade pattern of expansionist nationalism and geopolitical deception.

Adhering to an Enemy

The U.S. is far less secure than before 9-11. Tel Aviv clearly intends to continue its serial provocations as evidenced by its ongoing expansion of settlements and its continuing blockade of Gaza. Israel has shown no willingness to negotiate in good faith. With few exceptions, Barack Obama has named as senior advisers either Zionists are those known to be strongly pro-Israeli.

The greatest threat to world peace is not Islam. The most fundamental threat that underlies all others is our "special relationship" with a skilled agent provocateur. Without U.S. support for an enclave of nuclear-armed religious extremists, the common source of this threat could long ago have been identified and steps taken to ensure its containment.

In the same way that lengthy pre-staging was required to induce the U.S. to invade Iraq, a similar strategy is now underway to persuade the U.S. to invade Iran or support an attack by Israel. Pakistan is also now on the agenda of those marketing The Clash narrative with its vision of a perpetual war against "militant Islam." Similar mental conditioning is again at work, including the high profile branding of the requisite Evil Doer: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad.

From its outset, the Zionist enterprise sought supremacy in the Middle East. To date, its alliance with the U.S. has enabled the deployment of American military might in pursuit of goals set by Jewish nationalists more than a half-century before a Christian Zionist U.S. president was induced to extend nation-state recognition. Harry Truman made that fateful decision despite his fears that Israel would become what Zionist lobbyists assured him it would not become-and what it immediately became: a racist and theocratic state.

Only one nation had the means, motive, opportunity and stable nation state intelligence required to take the U.S. to war in the Middle East while making it appear that Islam-not Israel-is the problem. When a long-deceived American public-especially the U.S. military-grasps the common source of this devastating duplicity, the response will shift the geopolitical landscape. The facts suggest that "sympathy for Israel" is not among the probable reactions.

If Barack Obama continues to cater to these extremists, this Nobel peace laureate can rightly be blamed when the next attack features the usual orgy of evidence pointing to a pre-staged Evil Doer. Should another mass murder occur, that incident may well be traceable to the U.S.-Israeli relationship and to the failure of our policy-makers to protect America-and world peace-from this enemy within.

* Jeff Gates is a widely acclaimed author, attorney, merchant banker, educator and consultant to governments worldwide; served for seven years as counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance. He is the author of Guilt by Association, Democracy At Risk and The Ownership Solution. See his website Criminal State

The recent Turkish decision to exclude Israel from an aerial military exercise over Turkish territory is another indication that Turkey will not allow itself to be blackmailed by criminal international Zionism.

Following the decision, Zionist officials and media sought to mitigate its impact on the increasingly troubled relations with Turkey by claiming that it had little to do with the genocidal blitz which the Israeli army carried out in winter against the Gaza Strip.
However, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, and other Turkish officials  have made  it amply clear that the cancellation of the military drill is consistent with the feelings of the vast bulk of  the Turkish masses vis-à-vis the Nazi-like atrocities in the Gaza Strip.

This week, Erdogan once again invoked the mass killings by the Israeli army of hundreds of Palestinian children, using white phosphorus shells and other weapons of death.
The Turkish premier argued convincingly that Turkey has an influential public opinion and that it was the government’s duty to take it into consideration.

His remarks have effectively silenced Zionist pretensions and attempts at self-assurance that Turkey would budge to Zionist pressure.

To be sure, Israel is unlikely to succumb to the new reality of Turkish-Israeli relations, namely that the quasi-Islamic leadership of  Turkish republic will not just play deaf and dumb and look the other way if the Zionist regime keeps up its genocidal crimes against the helpless and innocent civilians in occupied Palestine.

Zionist circles, incensed by their inability to intimidate or bully the Turkish leadership, are likely to be devising ways and means of retributions against Turkey.

These might include instigating the Jewish-controlled American congress to declare the anti-Armenian campaign of 1915 a “genocide” or even a “holocaust.” More importantly, Israel and its Zionist circles are likely to step up efforts to incite the traditionally secular Turkish military establishment to topple the democratically-elected government.

Israel has had a reputation of inciting the Turkish military against civilian governments that dared deviate from the Zionist line.

A classical example was the Zionist-envisaged coup against the first Islamic Prime Minister of modern Turkey, Necmittin Erbakan in 1997.

Moreover, Israel could still manipulate a vast network of Freemason agents to destabilize the Turkish government.

Zionism played a pivotal role in effecting the downfall of the Ottoman state after Sultan Abdul Hamid II adamantly refused repeated Jewish solicitations for a national Jewish home in Palestine.

Nevertheless, Israel would have to be extremely cautious about any provocative interference in internal Turkish affairs since this could boomerang badly on Israel and cause irreparable damage to Israeli-Turkish relations.

Also, the increasingly stable relations between the Turkish government and the military establishment are likely to make any Zionist-inspired conspiracies against the stability of Turkey more difficult than ever before.

The exclusion of Israel from the Anatolian Eagle exercise seems to be a popular measure for most Turks who are disquieted by recurrent efforts by government-backed Jewish extremists to arrogate a foothold at the Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sanctuaries.

In addition, the decision is manifestly morally right. After all, which country, let alone an Islamic country, would host warplanes that only a few months ago were raining death on helpless and unprotected children throughout the Gaza Strip, killing, maiming and incinerating thousands of innocent people, and utterly destroying thousands of homes, mosques and other civilian buildings?

The Zionists will always try to defend or cover up their evil crimes, now exposed by the Goldstone report, with obscene lies.

They would claim, as the former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni did this week, that the virtual genocide in Gaza was not an anti-Palestinian act but rather an “anti-terrorist act.”
But such claims are nothing short of a fornication with language.

After all, it is well-established that the vast majority of the victims of the Gaza blitz were innocent civilians. This fact is readily recognized by human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even Israel’s own B’tselem group which monitors Israeli army crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.

So could it be that the entire world is wrong about what happened in Gaza while the Judeo-Nazi thugs in Tel Aviv are right?

The Turkish leadership should therefore be applauded for its moral commitment toward  the helpless Palestinians, many of whom have Turkish ancestry, who are languishing under an unmitigated Nazi-like military occupation.

This Turkish approach to Israel, an entity whose very existence constitutes a gigantic war crime, or a crime against humanity, is the least any Muslim country can do to prevent a possible genocide against the Palestinians.

This is why, other Muslim (and non-Muslim) countries with diplomatic ties with the Israeli regime ought to learn a moral lesson from Turkey and stop having “business as usual” with the Nazis of our time.

I am saying this  because it is a Nazi act par excellence to employ the most advanced technology of death  to exterminate innocent civilians who are even denied access to food and fuel as well as  some of the basic amenities of life, on the ground that a few Israeli settlers were killed and injured by primitive projectiles fired by desperate Palestinian resistance fighters who found themselves very much in a situation resembling  that which faced the anti-Nazi resistance fighters in Europe during the Second World War.

I am sure that conscientious people around the world, including many Jews, know in the depth of their hearts that what Israel did in Gaza ten months ago, and what it has been doing to the Palestinians for decades, belongs to the same moral category under which Nazi atrocities are listed.

This is why it is a moral obligation of the highest order upon all people of conscience and honesty, irrespective of religion and race, to condemn, expose and isolate this nefarious regime that is trying to consolidate the law of the jungle in place of international law.

Failing to do so, God forbid, means that the law of the jungle will prevail.

In an unusual decision, the Norwegian Nobel Committee put an end to seven months of searching among the 205 nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize and conferred it upon Barack Obama.  The Norwegian committee's decision provoked very mixed international reactions: ranging from stupefaction to huge laughter.  The statement by the organization's president, Thorbjorn Jagland got straight to the point: "It's important for the Committee to recognize those people who are struggling and idealistic, but we cannot do that every year.  We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik.  It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world."  The problem with Obama is that his idealism remains at the level of rhetoric, while in the world of realpolitik, his initiatives could not be more antagonistic to the search for peace in this world.

Likewise, the stupid and disgraceful feat immensely serves the Israeli goal of covering up the Nazi-like crimes the Israeli occupation army committed during its manifestly criminal war on the Gaza Strip nine months ago. 

Endorsement of the report by UNHRC would probably have paved the way for the prosecution of Israeli war criminals before  the International Criminal Court (ICC) as well as International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. 

The PA has given a plethora of  mostly mendacious pretexts to justify the scandalous act which numerous Palestinians, ordinary people as well as intellectuals, have described as an expression of national treason. 

To be sure, the Palestinians had on their side a solid majority of  33-35 member-states out of the 47-member council, which means the Goldstone commission report could have been easily endorsed by the UNHRC and referred to ICC or ICJ. 

Hence, the only real interpretation of the PA decision to delay a vote on the report is that the Ramallah regime wanted only to appease Israel and the Obama administration irrespective of the disastrous effects and ramifications on the Palestinian cause, especially on the unwept victims of Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip. 

Well, if Israel can get away with murdering 1300 Palestinians and utterly destroying half of Gaza, the next holocaust would probably assume European proportions. After all, the world can’t be more Palestinian than the Palestinians themselves. 

Prior to the decision, there were reports that President Obama personally intervened behind the scenes, asking the PA leadership to stop pushing for the endorsement of the report since according to him doing so would undermine “diplomatic efforts.” 

Similarly, another report suggested  that the PA had reached  a deal with Israel whereby the apartheid  Zionist regime agreed to license a business venture partially owned by wealthy businessmen linked to the PA  in return for the latter agreeing to defer discussion of the Goldstone report at the UNHRC. 

The PA ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Ibrahim Khreishi, was quoted as saying that the Palestinian leadership was interested in a “compromise text.” 

“It will help us explain to the Israelis that the international community is with the Palestinians to achieve their hopes and dreams.” 

What a stupidity! After more than 42 years of a criminal military occupation, do we still have to explain our suffering to the Israelis? 

Does Mr. Khreishi really think that all the Israelis needed to desist from their Nazi-like crimes against our people was just a “convincing explanation”? 

Does the PLO ambassador think a “compromise text” would make the despicable thugs and war criminals in Tel Aviv reconsider their criminal approach vis-à-vis the Palestinians? 

And what does a “compromise text” mean anyway? Did Israel not commit war crimes and crimes against humanity knowingly, willfully and deliberately against innocent people in Gaza? 

Didn’t Israel rain death, using state-of-the-art of the American technology of death, on unprotected civilian neighborhoods, killing and maiming thousands of innocent men, women and children?  

Didn’t Israel rain white phosphorous on large parts of Gaza, incinerating innocent life all over the coastal territory? 

Didn’t Israel knowingly and deliberately rain bombs from high altitudes on homes, mosques, colleges, hospitals and schools all over Gaza? 

So, how could any human being with any semblance of honesty and morality try to make these crimes look less nefarious and less satanic by agreeing to adopting a  “compromise text”?

Of all people in the world, we Palestinians must call the spade a spade especially when we see that proverbial spade in the hands of our grave diggers,  tormentors and child killers. 

The Judeo-Nazi army, navy and air force  murdered our people en masse in Gaza and the West Bank. They committed their horrendous crimes in broad daylight and  in full view of the entire world. 

There were no extenuating circumstances or controversial accounts of what really happened. The so-called “Qassam rockets” are largely a red-herring and shouldn’t be used in the same phrase with the horrendous Israeli machine of death since the enormity and deadliness in both cases are totally incomparable.  

And above all, the person who prepared the report, Richard Goldstone, is a Jew, actually a Zionist Jew, who would never overplay and exaggerate these war crimes against a virtually completely unprotected people whose very physical survival has always depended and continues to depend on the good will of the international community.

Hence, the Palestinian people, the longest-lasting victims of genocidal racism,  and the entire free world around us would like to know what is it that makes the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and its disoriented ambassador in Geneva cringe so submissively in the face of Zionist pressure? 

Don’t you people have any modicum of honor and national dignity? After all, we are talking about real crimes and hundreds of children mercilessly murdered by the army of  these thuggish Zionist spokespersons who are now shamelessly bragging about swaying the PA ambassador into helping  the Israeli propaganda cause. 

Nevertheless, it is probably unfair to pin all the blame on Khreishi, a mere functionary who had to heed the stupid instructions from Ramallah. 

True, Khreishi should have resigned rather than be part to an ignominious act of national betrayal. But the ultimate villain is, of course, the Palestinian Judenrat in Ramallah which has become inured to sacrificing  Palestinian national interests for the sake of appeasing Israel and pleasing the Obama administration in the hope of getting a “payoff” of some kind.

Interestingly, however,  the “payoff” given to the PA  that we have seen so far is in the form of more Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank, more Jewish provocations at the Al-Aqsa Mosque esplanade, and more Jewish violence and terror against unprotected Palestinian citizens in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 

As to the Obama administration, it, too, has been “rewarding” the PA for its perfidy and betrayal of its own people by turning a blind eye to Israeli settlement expansion and by insisting that the PA resume talks with the arrogant government of Benyamin Netanyahu without any preconditions.

Well, people who don’t respect themselves don’t deserve respect from others. Moreover, an authority that torments, tortures and kills its own citizens in order to please the Israeli occupier and obtain from it a certificate of good conduct is utterly unqualified to be a true representative of the Palestinian people. 

Finally,  it is probably safe to assume that the PA dreads a thorough discussion of the Goldstone report as much as Israel does. 

According to certain sources, the PA had consistently urged Israel to pursue the criminal war on the Gaza Strip to the end. 

Israel is also believed to possess damning evidence showing some PA officials pleading with Israel to keep up the war on Gaza in order to crush Hamas. 

Hence, it is highly likely that the PA has found itself in an exceedingly embarrassing situation, which explains why it doesn’t want to see a public discussion of the Goldstone report take place anytime soon as this would reveal many shocking  and embarrassing secrets about  PA connivance with Israel in carrying out the Nazi-like onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

Illustration By Carlos Latuff

President Obama got the leaders of Israel and Palestine to shake hands this week. But a meeting in Midtown does not a Palestinian deal make. Here’s why.

By Zahi Khouri *

"Economic Peace Is Possible."

No. Neither sustainable economic development nor peace is possible without political freedom.

The idea of "economic peace" suggests an economic conflict, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is certainly not that. Although economic issues do figure into Palestinian concerns, they are not nearly as important as addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees, terminating Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, and establishing a viable, independent, and sovereign Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital. To suggest that economics are what this is about would be to sideline history and to willfully ignore the reality of Israel's occupation. This conflict is political and it calls for a solution that is political.

Besides, even if economic growth were issue No. 1, the greatest impediment to economic development and opportunity for Palestinians is not the absence of industrial parks as advocated by the Israeli government under its model of "economic peace." Rather, it is the denial of basic freedoms and rights to Palestinians under occupation and the myriad restrictions Israel imposes on the free movement of Palestinian goods and people within, and in and out of, the occupied Palestinian territory. It is the inability of Palestinians to access the 60 percent of the occupied West Bank under Area C (Israeli control), including the 40 percent that Israel claims for its settlement enterprise. And it is the forced isolation of occupied East Jerusalem, long the economic heart of the Palestinian economy, from the rest of the West Bank. All these economic constraints are fundamental to the architecture of Israel's occupation.

In short, "economic peace" is a slogan designed to give the appearance of positive movement while distracting from the real issues and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. It does not mean, nor does it promise, an end to Israel's occupation. Rather, it offers economic crumbs in an effort to normalize and better manage the occupation.

"As with Gaza, a West Bank Withdrawal Endangers Israel."

Wrong. Israel argues that its withdrawal from Gaza was rewarded with rocket attacks by Hamas. The attraction of such an argument lies in its simplicity. But just as "economic peace" is designed to divert attention away from the real issues, the argument that a Gaza withdrawal was dangerous for the Israelis is designed to mask the reality that Israel never stopped occupying the Gaza Strip.

Contrary to popular belief, Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 did not bring about an end to the occupation. Yes, Israel removed its settlers (who, in many cases, relocated to settlements in the West Bank). And yes, Israel withdrew its troops — though only as far as the border. From that close distance, Israel has imposed a medieval-style siege on Gaza that continues to this day. Israel remains an occupying power under international law because it retains effective control over Gaza's borders and its land, sea, and airspace, allowing it to suffocate and starve Gaza as it is doing today.

The scale of the humanitarian crisis that Israel has created in Gaza is hard to convey. Even before the election of Hamas in 2006, there were severe restrictions on the amount of food, water, fuel, and other essentials allowed to enter the Gaza Strip. In 2006, then-senior Israeli government advisor Dov Weisglass callously claimed that "the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger." The result was that by the end of 2007, well over 80 percent of Gaza's population lived below the poverty line. Authorities have also clamped down on Gaza's imports and exports, suffocating the Palestinian economy. By November 2007, the U.N. World Food Program was already warning that less than half of Gaza's food import needs were being met. Following the election of Hamas, Israel tightened these economic restrictions further to enforce a complete closure, further compounding the humanitarian crisis. It is within this context that Israel's disengagement from Gaza must be judged.

Of course, rocket attacks from Gaza are not a proper response to Israel's harsh policies. Palestine is a just cause fought for in the name of rights, universal principles, and international law; its actions must be faithful to that. The lesson that should be drawn from Gaza is that the only guarantee of security for Israel is a full end to its occupation and domination — not just an end in name. The only form of withdrawal carrying the promise of peace is a full withdrawal — from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with Gaza — that allows for the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

"Arab Intransigence Blocks Peace."

Four words: the Arab Peace Initiative. First proposed by Saudi Arabia in 2002 and subsequently endorsed by 57 Arab and Islamic states, the Arab Peace Initiative offers full normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for Israel's full withdrawal from all territory occupied in 1967, as well as a just and agreed upon solution for Palestinian refugees in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194. That resolution, in essence, says to Israel: Do what is required of you under international law and U.N. resolutions, and the Arab and Islamic world will normalize relations in return. Israel's response so far has been to ignore the Arab Peace Initiative, squandering what is a historic opportunity.

As for the Palestinians, President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are the most accommodating Palestinian leaders ever to hold office. Yet Israel is frittering away their time at the helm; Israeli leaders evidently feel no urgency to negotiate. Eventually, this window of opportunity will close. As settlers flock to the territories, Palestinians will determine that a Palestinian state is no longer viable. When the debated solution turns from two states to one state with equal rights for all, Israel may well regret it did not seize multiple opportunities to return all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as part of a peace deal.

"Settlements Are Not the Issue."

They are crucial. Israeli settlement activity is precisely the undertaking that is foreclosing the possibility of a Palestinian state. Recent U.S. efforts to restart meaningful negotiations have faltered around Israel's refusal to implement a comprehensive settlement freeze in keeping with obligations under both international law and the "road map." Israel's refusal to comply has undermined the credibility of the peace process and eroded Palestinian public confidence in the ability of negotiations to bring tangible results.

Rather than favoring Palestinians or Israelis, a credible peace process holds both accountable to commitments made in the name of peace. The true test of meaningful negotiations, as distinct from negotiations for their own sake, is what happens on the ground. The faux freeze Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now proposing — build units already in the pipeline and then implement a brief six-month freeze, all the while continuing pell-mell with construction in East Jerusalem — is powerful on-the-ground evidence that Netanyahu and his coalition intend to build greater Israel at the expense of Palestinians.

Israeli settlements pose the greatest threat to the two-state solution. Settlements and their related infrastructure, like settler bypass roads, account for more than 40 percent of the West Bank, fragmenting the territory, monopolizing freshwater resources, and confining Palestinians to a series of disconnected cantons where unemployment, poverty, and hopelessness have reached endemic levels. Settlements run counter to the very principle of "land for peace" on which the Middle East peace process is built, and they make a viable and sovereign Palestinian state a physical impossibility. Without a viable and sovereign Palestinian state, there is no two-state solution.

"Israel's Occupation Is Not Apartheid."

It is. In fact, it would be most accurate to call it occupation, colonialism, and apartheid all rolled into one. This is the conclusion reached in a recent report commissioned by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, titled "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?", that brought together a team of international scholars and legal experts to assess Israel's occupation vis-à-vis international law.

On apartheid, the report identifies a series of discriminatory laws, standards, and practices that Israel applies exclusively to Palestinians living under occupation — laws, standards, and practices which do not apply to Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank and that are intended to "maintain [Israel's] domination over Palestinians in the OPT [occupied Palestinian territories] and to suppress opposition of any form."

In particular, the report identifies three pillars of apartheid as it existed in South Africa, noting that they also exist in the occupied Palestinian territory today. The first pillar consists of laws and policies that "establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews." The ramifications of this include the massive disparity in terms of the rights and privileges enjoyed by Israeli settlers compared with Palestinians, such as the denial of the right of return for Palestinian refugees compared with the 1950 Law of Return allowing all Jews to immigrate to Israel or, since 1967, the occupied Palestinian territory.

The second pillar concerns Israeli policies intended to segregate the population along racial lines. These policies center on the confinement of Palestinians to areas that resemble "Bantustans" (the largest being Israel's complete closure on Gaza), policed by Israel using a network of walls, roadblocks, checkpoints, and a special permit regime. Meanwhile, the Israelis construct settlements and a separate road system to service them, all built on confiscated Palestinian land that Palestinians can no longer access.

The final pillar focuses on repressive measures initiated under the rubric of "security." For example, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary arrest, administrative detention, extrajudicial killings, torture, and an oppressive code of military laws and military courts that fall short of international standards for a fair trial. These measures are reinforced by restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly, association, movement, and so on, which are ultimately designed to suppress Palestinian dissent while reinforcing Israeli control.

In short, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who grew up in the Jim Crow South, has it right when he uses the term apartheid to describe Israel's policies in the occupied Palestinian territory. And the facts are increasingly on the table. Whether the Barack Obama administration, already saddled with a brutal fight over health care, has the courage to challenge Israel's "economic peace," siege of Gaza, intransigence, settlements, and apartheid remains to be seen.

* Zahi Khouri is chief executive of the Palestinian National Beverage Co. (a Coca-Cola franchisee), chairman of the Palestinian Tourism Investment Co., and chairman of the board of the NGO Development Center, a Palestinian nongovernmental organization.

But what does Holocaust denial really mean?  Begin with the word Holocaust.  The Holocaust[2] (spelled with a capital H) refers to the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.  It is supposed to be the German's "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem.  Much of the systematic extermination was to have taken place in concentration camps by shooting, gassing, and burning alive innocent Jewish victims of the Third Reich. 

People like Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, and Bishop Williamson who do not believe this account and who dare to say so in public are reviled as bigots, anti-Semites, racists, and worse.  Their alternate historical scenarios are not termed simply revisionist, but are demeaned as Holocaust denial.  Rudolf and Zundel were shipped to Germany where they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to three and five years, respectively. 

Politicians deride Holocaust revisionist papers and conferences as "beyond the pale of international discourse and acceptable behavior."[3]  Non-Zionist Jews who participate in such revisionism, like Rabbi Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta, are denounced as "self-haters" and are shunned and spat upon.  Even Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors and who wrote the book, The Holocaust Industry, has been branded a Holocaust denier.

But putting aside the virile hate directed against those who question the veracity of the typical Holocaust narrative, what is it that these people believe and say at the risk of imprisonment and bodily harm?  For most Holocaust revisionists or deniers if you prefer, their arguments boil down to three simple contentions: 

1.  Hitler's "Final Solution" was intended to be ethnic cleansing, not extermination.

2.  There were no homicidal gas chambers used by the Third Reich.   

3.  There were fewer than 6 million Jews killed of the 55 million who died in WWII. 

Are these revisionist contentions so odious as to cause those who believe them to be reviled, beaten, and imprisoned?  More importantly, is it possible that revisionist contentions are true, or even partially true, and that they are despised because they contradict the story of the Holocaust, a story which has been elevated to the level of a religion in hundreds of films, memorials, museums, and docu-dramas?

Is it sacrilegious to ask, "If Hitler was intent on extermination, how did Elie Wiesel, his father, and two of his sisters survive the worst period of incarceration at Auschwitz?"  Wiesel claims that people were thrown alive into burning pits, yet even the Israeli-trained guides at Auschwitz refute this claim.

Is it really "beyond international discourse" to question the efficacy and the forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers?  If other myths, like making soap from human fat, have been dismissed as Allied war propaganda, why is it "unacceptable behavior" to ask if the gas chamber at Dachau was not reconstructed by the Americans because no other homicidal gas chamber could be found and used as evidence at the Nuremburg trials?  

For more than fifty years Jewish scholars have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to document each Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust.  The Nazis were German, obsessed with paperwork and recordkeeping.  Yet only 3 million names have been collected and many of them died of natural causes.  So why is it heresy to doubt that fewer than 6 million Jews were murdered in the Second World War? 

"Holocaust Denial" might be no more eccentric or no more criminal than claiming the earth is flat, except that the Holocaust itself has been used as the sword and shield in the quest to build a Jewish state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, where even today over half the population is not Jewish.  

The Holocaust narrative allows Yad Vashem, the finest Holocaust museum in the world, to repeat the mantra of "Never Forget" while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin.  It allows Elie Wiesel to boast of having worked for these same terrorists (as a journalist, not a fighter) while refusing to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the war crimes his employer committed.  It makes Jews the ultimate victim no matter how they dispossess or dehumanize or ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinian people. 

The Holocaust narrative eliminates any comparison of Ketziot or Gaza to the concentration camps they indeed are.  It memorializes the resistance of Jews in the ghettos of Europe while steadfastly denying any comparison with the resistance of Palestinians in Hebron and throughout the West Bank.  It allows claims that this year’s Hanukah Massacre in Gaza, with a kill ratio of 100 to one, was a “proportionate response” to Palestinian resistance to unending occupation. 

The Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel in what the Jewish scholar, Marc Ellis, has called the ecumenical deal:  you Christians look the other way while we bludgeon the Palestinians and build our Jewish state and we won't remind you that Hitler was a good Catholic, a confirmed “soldier of Christ,” long before he was a bad Nazi. 

The Holocaust narrative of systematic, industrialized extermination was an important neo-conservative tool to drive the United States into Iraq.  The same neo-con ideologues, like Norman Podoretz, routinely compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler and Nazism with Islamofascism with the intent of driving us into Iran.  The title of the Israeli conference at Yad Vashem made this crystal clear:  "Holocaust Denial:  Paving the Way to Genocide." 

"Remember the Holocaust" will be the battle cry of the next great clash of good (Judeo/Christian values) and evil (radical Islamic aggression) and those who question it must be demonized if not burned at the stake.  

Daniel McGowan

Professor Emeritus

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Geneva, NY  14456

September 24, 2009 

Because of admonishment by the administration, it is hereby stated that the above remarks are solely those of the author.  Hobart and William Smith Colleges neither condone nor condemn these opinions.  Furthermore, the author has been instructed to use his personal email address of mcgowandaniel@yahoo.com and not his college email at mcgowan@hws.edu for those wishing to contact him with comments or criticisms.

[2] Holocaust. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Holocaust (accessed: February 09, 2007).

[3] http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=268474  (accessed: February 09, 2007)

Editor's note: This article is meant to contribute to the discussion of the question that opens cyclically every time Ahmadinejad makes a speech (that people run out of the room before it begins, but are able to respond afterward that it was "Holocaust Denial"). Regarding point 1 in the list, the utilisation of the ante-litteram term "ethnic cleansing" opens more questions than it resolves, as the term has been defined thus: 

"Despite its recurrence, ethnic cleansing nonetheless defies easy definition. At one end it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population exchange while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide. At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of an "undesirable" population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these."

Bearing in mind that genocide is included in this definition, it cannot be excluded that the "Final Solution" did not include extermination. That it was unsuccessful in what it set out to do is evident, and even in history, a trial of intention is impossible without "documentation" to substantiate it.

J Street or no J Street, the American Jewish leadership is winning and it is winning big with its support for the continued Israeli occupation, the expansion of Jewish settlements, funding criminal settlers, funding land and property thieves, keeping Congress hostage and under Zionist siege, continued funding of the Jewish Occupations, undermining the US peace efforts, undermining President Barack Obama's efforts towards peace between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arabs.

It is true there are a number of American Jewish organizations that have been working towards ending the Jewish Occupations and ending the ever expanding Jewish settlements among these group are; Not in My Name, Jewish Voices for Peace, Gush Shalom, American Council for Judaism, Americans for Peace Now, Muzzle Watch, Jews Against Zionism, O Zv’Shalom-Netivot Shalom, Bat Shalom and of course B’Tselem in Israel.

Not withstanding these organizations' commitments and dedication these organizations remain far short of the mark, they made little progress among the American Jewish community which continues in large part to support of the continued Jewish Occupations, expansions of the Jewish settlements, accelerating land and property theft, political and financial support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem, support for destructions of farms and uprooting of trees especially olive trees, targeted killings, and support for war crimes committed by past and present Israel leadership.

The American Jewish leadership continues to and remains in the driver's seat not withstanding the change in administrations from Republicans to Democrats and of course it was and remains in charge and in control of both houses, the US Senate and the House of Representatives, deciding on and even drafting legislations that have to do with US policy in the Middle East, and continues to dictate the level of funding Israel and its Occupation receive from US taxpayers.

For over 50 years American Zionists remain in charge and in the driver's seat when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict with notables such as Henry Kissinger, Arthur Goldberg, Justice Brandies, (played a key role in US decision to close its shores to escaping European Jews during WW2) Walter Rostow playing a key role in formulating US policies that made peace impossible, providing Israel with political coverage at the UN through the ever present US veto powers. And opening US arsenals wide open to Israel to grab whatever it wants even at the expense of and engenderment of US military power as Kissinger did in the 1973 War.

Adding to this long list are key decision and policy makers that made irreparable harm to the chance for peace to include the likes of Dennis Ross, Martin Indyke, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Edward Luttwak, Dov Zakkeim, Kenneth Adelman, I. Lewis Libby, Richard Haass, Robert Satlof, Elliot Abrams, David Frum, Joshua Bolton, Michael Chertoff among many others who are always in and out of government, yet remain influential decision makers.

To add to this list of key policy and decision makers we must not forget well-funded organizations such as AIPAC, American Enterprise Institute, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Heritage Foundation, Middle East Forum, Institute for Policy Studies, CAMERA, Campus Watch among the hundreds of well-funded and well-connected organizations, not to mention key executives in US media, in films and in business who are the main source of funding to these very influential American Jewish organizations.

Too bad for Israel, for the Palestinians, for the Arabs, certainly too bad for the United States that these leaders and organizations believe that when the blood flows, the money flows, certainly when Jewish and Israeli blood flows, that is the time to cash in and the time when American Jews open their checkbooks and write fat checks to these organizations that are able to orchestrate support for Israel in the media, in Congress and on campus. Of course they are also energized when Palestinian blood is flowing, when the Israeli army and armed settlers murder women and children, when bulldozers are working overtime to destroy Palestinian homes and building the Apartheid Wall.

In a sense, I do feel very sorry for the American Jewish community to have such bloodthirsty leadership that gives unconditional support for Israel right or wrong. It seems that when it comes to commitment to a criminal Zionism all Jewish values and traditions are out the doors, windows and certainly out of mind and heart.

Peace can happen only when the US Jewish community makes its decision whether it supports a secure Israeli at peace with its neighbors and the world within 67 borders and with Jerusalem as shared and open city or supports Israel at war with its neighbors and with continued Occupation. My guess is that the US Jews will continue to support the Israeli Occupation, because Israel at peace with its neighbors puts their leadership out of business and will dry up the source of money to fund the different lobbies and organizations. Peace for Israel will undermine the Jewish leadership stranglehold on US policy in the Middle East and of course it undermines its chokehold control over Congress.

source: http://www.jeffersoncorner.com/j-street-or-no-j-street-the-american-jewish-leadership-is-the-main-obstacle-to-peace-in-the-middle-east/ ]]> http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/09/23/sami-jamil-jadallah-j-street-or-no-j-street-the-american-jewish-leadership-is-the-main-obstacle-to-peace-in-the-middle-east/feed/ 1 http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/09/23/another-farcical-show/ http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/09/23/another-farcical-show/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:50:45 +0000 Khalid Amayreh http://palestinethinktank.com/?p=4540 WRITTEN BY Khalid Amayreh

This article was written a few hours before the New York meeting  

One doesn’t have to be a prophet to predict the outcome, or more correctly failure, of the three-way meeting between President Obama, the Israeli premier Benyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, which is to take place later today in New York. 

The meeting comes on the heels of two important events: First the nearly total failure of Obama’s personal Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, to convince the extremist Israeli leadership to freeze Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

Mitchell met numerous times with Israeli officials in the hope of convincing them to walk in the path of peace. However, instead of listening to Mitchell, who represents the President of Israel’s guardian-ally, Israeli leaders chose to announce fresh settlement expansion plans every time the American diplomat arrived in Jerusalem. 

Moreover, the numerous promises made to Mitchell with regard to a settlement freeze, even including the pledged dismantling of so-called illegal outposts, have all failed to materialize. 

Hence, one can assume that the New York meeting is actually a timely recognition by the Obama administration of the utter failure of  Mitchell’s shuttle diplomacy. 

Second, the three-way encounter comes a week after the publication of the Goldstone’s Commission report which asserted that Israel knowingly and deliberately committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the December-January blitz against the Gaza Strip. 

Needless to say, during the Nazi-like onslaught, the Israeli army, or Jewish Wehrmacht, murdered, maimed and incinerated thousands of innocent Palestinians. In addition, thousands of buildings, mostly civilian infrastructure such as homes, mosques and schools were utterly bombed and destroyed. 

This is not Arab propaganda. Any human being can travel to Gaza and see for himself or herself the huge magnitude of the shocking holocaust. 

For those who can’t travel to the  besieged coastal territory, they can have access to “Google Earth” and see for themselves. The important thing is not to succumb to the Zionist hasbara machine. These people lie as often as they breathe, to put it mildly. 

It is therefore shameful and immoral for the  American President, who had promised ad nauseam that decency and dignity would loom large in his administration,  to invite and welcome the leader of a criminal entity whose modus operandi continues to consist of murder, lies and land theft. 

This really forces many to pose the following question: What would it take to get the Obama administration to adopt an meaningful  stand against Israeli expansionism, racism and bellicosity? 

Obama is not a stupid man. He must be fully aware of the twisted modes of Israeli thinking. Even a brief argument with an Israeli leader or diplomat would reveal the striking morbidity of the Zionist mentality. 

This is why it is hard  to fathom how an intelligent man continues to believe that the fudge-and-compromise approach would still be working with such racist-minded Zionists who think that the entire universe was created for the sake of the Jew. 

My prediction of the New York encounter’s failure is not a matter of  soothsaying.  It is rather a careful reading into consistent Israeli political behavior since time immemorial. To put it simply, Israel will not give up the spoils of the 1967 war, unless it is forced to. Israel will not give up the bulk of Occupied East Jerusalem unless it is forced to. Israel will not allow the thoroughly-savaged refugees to be repatriated to their former homes and villages unless it is forced to. Finally, Israel will not remove these children of rape, otherwise known as “settlements” unless it is forced to. 

In light, it is perfectly legitimate to wonder if the US which has been utterly unable to get Israel to stop the construction  of even a few settler buildings in East Jerusalem, or even in the rest of the West Bank, would ever be able to compel the Zionist regime to undo the entire Zionist project. 

This is why one must always be cautious and realistic when appraising the inherently oblique American-Israeli-Palestinian axel. In particular, one must resist the temptation of thinking that the US is the dominant player in this scandalous  tripartite game of conspiracy, bullying,  betrayal, domination and compulsion. 

President Obama might be tempted to view with favor misleading Zionist arguments that the Palestinians would have to compromise and give concessions just as Israel is demanded to give concessions. 

But this argument is inherently mendacious and unfair. After all, Israel has been devouring rather gluttonously the contested piece of cheese for many decades, so much so that very little of it has been left anyway. 

Hence, the question that imposes itself on the conscience of conscientious men and women around the world, people who value honesty and justice, is whether it is fair and just to divide the remaining little of the proverbial cheese between Israel and the savaged Palestinians. 

In 1948, Zionist Jews usurped our country, committed hideous massacres, destroyed our homes and villages before deporting the majority of  native Palestinians  to the four corners of the globe. 

The Nakba was our national catastrophe and in a certain sense was our holocaust as well. The harsh impact of this cardinal  disaster remained relevant today as it was more than 60 years ago. 

However, instead of seeking genuine reconciliation with the Palestinians, if only by recognizing their basic human rights, successive Israeli leaderships constantly sought to consummate Zionism by trying to effect our national annihilation. 

Didn’t the infamous Gold Meir claim that the Palestinians didn’t exist? Don’t the shipyard dogs of Zionism continue to this day  to argue that a Palestinian state never existed  as if people not confined into a  nation-state structure didn’t have the right live on their respective homelands? 

As to the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, it is crystal clear he is not the best person to lead his people and represent their enduring aspirations for freedom of Justice. He is not an eloquent tongue that would fearlessly defend  our people’s cause nor is he a tough and principled leader who wouldn’t budge under pressure. 

Moreover, Abbas stands  at the helm of an entity whose very survival depends to a large extent on the “good will” and politically-motivated charity provided by western countries and their Arab puppet regimes. 

This is why it is extremely important that the Palestinian people must closely monitor Abbas’s behavior in the coming weeks and months. I am saying this because in the absence of a clarion, determined   and collective “NO” to any prospective concessions by the PLO leadership, especially with regard to our national constants,  Netanyahu and his criminal comrades could have their way of imposing de facto capitulation on an un-sovereign  leadership that is more concerned about defeating  Hamas than ending the Nazi-like Israeli occupation of our country. 

In the final analysis, people whose aspirations don’t go beyond owning a smart car and having a hefty salary at the end of the month can’t be entrusted to be honest representatives of the Palestinian people. 

And a final word to the new Fatah leadership. You repeatedly described yourselves as the new patriotic leadership of the Palestinian people. We listened to you with indifferent silence because we didn’t believe  a word of what you were saying. 

Now it is your turn to prove us wrong.

In recent weeks, there have been consistent reports indicating that a number of Arab regimes are voicing a willingness to normalize relations with the extremist Israeli government of Benyamin Netanyahu.  

According to these reports, some unspecified Arab regimes signaled to the Obama administration that they would be willing to take a number of “gestures” and “overtures” toward Israel, including allowing Israeli planes to fly over their territories, land and refuel at their airports as well as issue entry visas for Israeli officials, business people and ordinary citizens. 

The “gestures” and “overtures” are supposedly meant to encourage the apartheid state to walk in the path of peace and give American-led efforts a chance to succeed.

The latest development  in this unethical morass has been a secret visit by Netanyahu  to an unspecified Arab state, probably in the Gulf region. Some of these former British protectorates, now American satellite princedoms, have informed the Obama administration of their readiness to take daring steps toward normalizing with the Jewish state. 

However, it has been amply clear that all Arab “goodwill efforts” are having the opposite effect on Israeli government behaviors, especially with regard to Jewish settlement expansion and land theft in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

Indeed, in the past few days, the Israeli government has issued tenders for building hundreds of settler units all over the occupied territories, further corroding any chances for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. 

The decision is viewed not only as a flagrant defiance of the Obama administration but also as a naked contempt for Arab normalization “gestures and overtures.”

Well, the normalizing Arabs seem to deserve all the scorn they are getting from Israel. After all, people who don’t respect themselves and their peoples don’t deserve to be respected. 

Nonetheless, it seems that the slave-minded Arab regimes wouldn’t alter their scandalously disgraceful behavior vis-à-vis Zionist insolence no matter how much scorn and indignity is smacked onto their shameless faces. 

This is because these decadent self-worshipers relate to the US government, irrespective of the political color of the incumbent administration, as the ultimate pimp whose instructions and directions must be heeded without the slightest deviation. 

What else can be said of Arab leaders who claim to be followers of the Prophet Muhammed but rewards  Israel generously every time the Nazi-like entity steps up its oppression and persecution of the Palestinian people. 

Even whores are mindful of their interests, which shows that those  Arab despots harrowing to normalize with the Judeo-Nazi state don’t even have the morality of a whore. 

I don’t have the slightest doubt that these Kings, princes and presidents-for-life realize well that whatever they do to appease and please Israel will not make the criminal entity opt for peace and therefore put an end to decades of its Nazi-like occupation of Palestine.  

But, if so, why do they still blindly heed American orders to cheapen themselves and their respective countries and peoples when they know quite well that Israel will ignore them with utter contempt.

The answer is clear. These ignorant Arab tyrants are unelected by their people, don’t  feel answerable or even responsible  to the masses and, therefore, feel they can  behave according to their wild whims without having to worry about the consequences of their misrule and  abuse of power, even including treason. 

Besides,  we all know that “normalization with Israel,” which itself is skewed term lacking logical consistency, had been thoroughly tried during the Clinton administration’s reign  when Arab states from the Maghreb to Sheikdoms of the Gulf were herded like meek sheep to normalize with Israel. And what was the outcome of this silly game? 

Did Israel stop killing the Palestinians? Did Israel stop building colonies on stolen Arab land? Did Israel stop demolishing Arab homes? Did Israel stop narrowing Palestinian horizons? 

We know too well  the answers to these questions. Israel actually stepped up its oppression and repression of the Palestinian people, which culminated in the genocidal blitz in Gaza earlier this year, destroying the coastal enclave and mercilessly slaughtering, incinerating and maiming thousands of innocent people whose only crime was their “helplessness” and the non-existence of a powerful state that would shield them from the savagery of the Nazis of our time. 

Another point. We all know that Israel views the entire issue of normalization  with the Arab world as a diversionary tactic to divert attention from and have ample time for effecting more settlement expansion. 

Hence, it is just pointless that Arabs must always harrow aimlessly after Zionist illusions. 

Indeed, one wouldn’t exaggerate much by stating that even if the 300 million Arabs were to become willing weavers of skullcaps for religious Jews, Israel would continue to reject peace and look down on them as scum, vermin and dirty animals that ought to be exterminated.  

We, who have been living under the Israeli occupation rule for decades, know Israel like no other people do. Hence it would be a futile exercise in stupidity and vacuity for these late-day descendants of Omar Ibn al Khattab and Salahuddin to try that which has been tried ad nauseam, but to no avail. 

Israel is a combination of Nazi brutality and Zionist racism and, as such, respects only power and force. Hence, it is imperative that these so-called leaders realize that their stupid “gestures” and “overtures” won’t take them anywhere and that they will continue to be viewed by Israel as stupid imbeciles who have no will of their own and who are bereft of human dignity.  

Well, I don’t blame Israel for viewing you this way. 

When we went to elementary school, we learned that a  wolf shouldn’t be blamed for attacking the sheep if the shepherd is the flock’s enemy.

Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam, the custodian of its two holy mosques, the world's energy superpower and the de facto leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds — that is why our recognition is greatly prized by Israel. However, for all those same reasons, the kingdom holds itself to higher standards of justice and law. It must therefore refuse to engage Israel until it ends its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights as well as Shabaa Farms in Lebanon. For Saudis to take steps toward diplomatic normalization before this land is returned to its rightful owners would undermine international law and turn a blind eye to immorality.

Shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, during which Israel occupied those territories as well as East Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution stating that, in order to form "a just and lasting peace in the Middle East," Israel must withdraw from these newly occupied lands. The Fourth Geneva Convention similarly notes "the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

Now, Israeli leaders hint that they are willing to return portions of these occupied territories to Arab control, but only if they are granted military and economic concessions first. For the Arabs to accept such a proposal would only encourage similar outrages in the future by rewarding military conquest.

After the Oslo accords of 1993, Arab states took steps to improve their relationships with Israel, allowing for recognition in the form of trade and consular agreements. Israel, however, continued to construct settlements, making its neighbors understandably unwilling to give up more without a demonstration that they would be granted something in return.

Today, supporters of Israel cite the outdated 1988 Hamas charter, which called for the destruction of Israel, as evidence of Palestine's attitude toward a two-state solution, without considering the illegalities of Israel's own occupation. Israel has never presented any comprehensive formulation of a peace plan. Saudi Arabia, to the contrary, has done so twice: the Fahd peace plan of 1982 and the Abdullah peace initiative of 2002. Both were endorsed by the Arab world, and both were ignored by Israel.

In order to achieve peace and a lasting two-state solution, Israel must be willing to give as well as take. A first step should be the immediate removal of all Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Only this would show the world that Israel is serious about peace and not just stalling as it adds more illegal settlers to those already occupying Palestinian land.

At the same time, the international community must pressure Israel to relinquish its grip on all Arab territory, not as a means to gain undeserved concessions but instead as an act of good faith and a demonstration that it is willing to play by the Security Council's rules and to abide by global standards of military occupation. The Arab world, in the form of the Arab peace initiative that was endorsed by 22 countries in 2002, has offered Israel peace and normalization in return for Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories including East Jerusalem — with the refugee issue to be solved later through mutual consent.

There have been increasing well-intentioned calls for Saudi Arabia to "do a Sadat": King Abdullah travels to Israel and the Israelis reciprocate by making peace with Saudi Arabia. However, those urging such a move must remember that President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt went to Israel in 1977 to meet with Prime Minister Menachem Begin only after Sadat's envoy, Hassan el-Tohamy, Sadat's envoy, was assured by the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, that Israel would withdraw from every last inch of Egyptian territory in return for peace. Absent a similar offer today from Israel to the leaders of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, there is no reason to look at 1977 as a model.

President Obama's speech in Cairo this summer gave the Arab and Muslim worlds heightened expectations. His insistence on a freeze on settlement activity was a welcome development. However, all Israeli governments have expanded settlements, even those that committed not to do so.

No country in the region wants more bloodshed. But while Israel's neighbors want peace, they cannot be expected to tolerate what amounts to theft, and certainly should not be pressured into rewarding Israel for the return of land that does not belong to it. Until Israel heeds President Obama's call for the removal of all settlements, the world must be under no illusion that Saudi Arabia will offer what the Israelis most desire — regional recognition. We are willing to embrace the hands of any partner in peace, but only after they have released their grip on Arab lands.

Prince Turki al-Faisal is chairman of the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies. He has been director of Saudi intelligence and ambassador to Britain, Ireland, and the United States.

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

I am certainly not in the habit of defending Barack Obama against his detractors, but the controversy drummed up by rabid right-wing hysterics over President's back-to-school speech on Tuesday is quite simply bizarre and absurd. However, the manufactured uproar and outrage over the President's socialist/fascist/communitarianist (hey, pick an ideology, any ideology!) "brainwashing" of unsuspecting and impressionable students on one of their first days of school brings up very real and very serious concerns over both the potential and realities of aggressive government indoctrination and the abuse of open access to America's youth.

In the days leading up to Obama's fifteen-minute long, syndicated speech, the conservative netherworld was abuzz over what sort of cultish and dangerous hypnotism our Kenyan-born Commie Muslim commander-in-chief would dish out in classrooms all over the country. The paranoia and fear promoted by political and media demagogues and repeated thoughtlessly by their audience of ventriloquist dummies created a sort of dual-McCarthyism, equal parts Joe and Charlie.

Last week, Glenn Beck warned listeners of his radio show about the dangers of Obama's upcoming speech and "the indoctrination of your children," saying that the Presidential address was evidence of the "get 'em while they're young" approach of of big government's brainwashing tactics. Meanwhile, NewsBuster's contributing editor Mark Finkelstein repeatedly compared the address to Chinese communism, likened Obama to Mao Zedong, and even inquiring in one blog post whether "our MSM report on the interesting parallel between our president's plan for our children and the approach of another Great Leader from the past?" Then there was Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, who, while speaking on the Rush Limbaugh Show made extensive reference to Saddam Hussein’s cult of personality in Iraqi schools and warned against Obama's attempt to do the same here in the United States.

On September 2nd, Michelle Malkin accused Obama's classroom address (still six days away at that time) of serving as a government tool for recruiting "junior lobbyists" to serve as foot-soldiers for promoting his crazed liberal agenda, citing the "activist tradition of government schools" (I think they're called public schools, actually) as evidence:

"Zealous teacher's unions have enlisted captive schoolchildren as letter-writers in their campaigns for higher education spending. Out-of-control activists have enlisted their secondary-school charges in pro-illegal immigration protests, gay marriage ceremonies, environmental propaganda stunts, and anti-war events."

Yeah, if only.

In a recent article, Lauri Regan of American Thinker wrote that "Obama has turned his team of brainwashers on the task of indoctrinating America's youth…My children are off limits," whileTownhall.com's Meredith Jessup bemoans the loss of mandatory prayer and religion in public schooling as "big-government influence continues to be ushered in." Jessup thusly concludes that "This massive abuse of government power – reaching into our kids' classrooms – is unacceptable."

A OneNewsNow column from September 4th identifies Diane Jewell, a parent in Indiana, as worrying that "her daughter is being indoctrinated into socialism" by attending public Junior High School. Jewell believes that "it is not Obama's place to talk to children directly, without parental input" adding that she is "very concerned with the increasing involvement of federal government in education." Obviously, Jewell now "regrets her decision to quit homeschooling and in retrospect she wishes she had stayed at home in order to continue homeschooling her daughter."

In a September 1 post featured on her tellingly-titled "Atlas Shrugs" blog (and headlined "Obama in the Classroom: Keep Your Kids Home from School September 8"), Newsmax.com contributor Pamela Geller wrote,

The fascist in chief is taking his special brand of brainwashing to the classroom. Keep your kids home. I think this man is a threat to our basic unalienable rights. I don't want him indoctrinating my children. Seriously.

Ask your school what their participation is in this leftist indoctrination outrage. Keep politics out of the classroom. Keep communists and their propagandists away from small children.

Seriously?

Not to be outcrazied, American Family Association radio host and conservative activist Bryan Fischer wrote in a September 1 column that Obama's speech "is likely to be an exercise in nation-wide indoctrination…The capacity for mischief here is enormous." Then, echoing Geller's sentiments that parents should opt their children out of viewing the speech, Fischer continues,

Unless we get public assurances from the White House that the president won't address health care or global warming or the homosexual agenda (under the color of "human rights for people different than us") this might be a great time for parents to exercise their opt-out authority and give their students a biography of George Washington to read while the President turns the minds of an entire generation to mush.

WorldNetDaily news editor Bob Unruh floated the idea that Obama's speech to students has "been cited as raising the specter of the Civilian National Security Force, to which he's referred several times since his election campaign began, but never fully explained" while also pointing out how creepy it is for the elected President of the United States of America to speak directly to the nation's children about the importance of education. "Parents across the country are rebelling against plans by President Barack Obama to speak directly to their children through the classrooms of the nation's public schools without their presence, participation and approval," Unruh wrote, before quoting random insane rantings of conservative web-forum comments:

"He's recruiting his civilian army. His 'Hitler' youth brigade," wrote one participant in a forum at Free Republic.

"I am not going to compare President Obama to Hitler. We'll leave that to others and you can form your own opinions about them and their analogies. … However, we can learn a lot from the spread of propaganda in Europe that led to Hitler's power. A key ingredient in that spread of propaganda was through the youth," wrote a blogger at the AmericanElephant.com blog, where the subject of the day was a national "Keep-Your-Child-at-Home-Day."

"Totalitarian regimes around the world have sought to spread their propaganda and entrench their power by brainwashing the children. I guess it's easier to indoctrinate a six-year-old instead of fighting a 26-year-old or being challenged by a 46-year-old in the voting booth," the blogger wrote.

Brett Curtis, an engineer from Texas, told the New York Times that the idea of the speech "seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child," and would therefore keep his three children home from school that day since he doesn't "want our schools turned over to some socialist movement." Jim Greer, the Republican Party chairman in Florida, said he "was appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology," while Kansas City talk show host Chris Stigall, with thoughts of sugar plums and executive pedophilia floating in his head, stated that he "wouldn’t let my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I’m sure as hell not letting Barack Obama talk to him alone."

Never mind the sheer ignorance of all these people, especially the clear fact that none of them knows the definition of fascism or socialism, or could explain the difference between a democracy and a republic, for that matter. Nevermind the fear-mongering and hateful resentment of a recently beaten-up political party. Nevermind the fact that Obama's speech wound up being totally innocuous, completely devoid of politics whatsoever, and called upon this nation's students to take pride in their education, trying hard, and doing their best to achieve their goals. Nevermind that, as Time.com's Michael Scherer put it, "President Obama's speech to your kids reads like a paean to individual striving and free market capitalism, the sort of thing that Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater might have signed onto. At root, Obama's message is one of individual responsibility, a disquisition on the freedom of American youth to fail or succeed on their own tenacity and merits," and was anything but "lefty, neo-socialist, communitarian brainwashing." 

Never mind that this country's education system is already tailor-made to spread misinformation, entrench mythologies, and promote American exceptionalism to our young children. American history, as taught in schools, is generally nonsense meant to instill and preserve a sense of City-on-a-Hill nationalism, along with healthy doses of tall-tale founding myths, gung-ho militarism, and ethnic cleansing justification in the form of righteous Manifest Destiny. As James W. Loewen explains in his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, textbooks used to teach our children "leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character." More to the point, Helen Keller (y'know the deaf, mute, and blind kid who was actually a radical and progressive political thinker, one of the founders of the ACLU, and a staunch supporter of the NAACP and actual socialism) stated clearly why American history is made up of gross simplifications and hero worship: "People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions…Conclusions are not always pleasant." Anyone who has actually studied real American history knows this to be true.

Students in the United States are taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America and proved that the earth was round (not true); they are not taught that Columbus was a genocidal manic (true). Institutionalized racism and ethnocentrism is all but ignored in history class, Native Americans are demonized as savages (they weren't) and colonists (who were savages) are celebrated as civilized co-existers. (The reason the Pilgrims in New England had such bountiful crops is because all the Native Americans who planted them had either died from European-borne plague or had fled in fear of plague, which John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called "miraculous.") Students are taught that Albert Einstein failed his math class (he didn't, and was, in fact, a mathematical prodigy by the age of 12). They learn that Isaac Newton was hit on the head by a falling apple and "discovered" gravity (not true), Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a storm and "discovered" electricity (also not true), and that George Washington chopped down his father's prized cherry-tree and then didn't lie about doing it. (This is a fairy tale created by a man named Mason Locke "Parson" Weems, author of the "biography" The Life of George Washington, with Curious Anecdotes Laudable to Himself and Exemplary to his Countrymen, in which Weems recalled many fantastic, adulatory confabulations about a fabulously deified Washington, with particular emphasis on his overwhelming moral fortitude and infallibility. At various points in the work, Weems refers to Washington as a "hero," a "demigod," "the Jupiter Conservator" [or, "Jupiter, Savior of the World"] and, quite simply, the "greatest man that ever lived".) 

Perhaps it was Weems' Washington biography that Bryan Fischer wants children to read while they're busy skipping Obama's speech. Additionally, what makes Fischer's suggestion that the President's speech would turn "the minds of an entire generation to mush" especially ironic is that the school system in this country already is doing just fine pulverizing truth and stifling critical thought without Obama's help. 

Nevermind that in November 1988, President Ronald Reagan spoke directly to students on political issues via C-Span. During his address, Reagan even called taxes "such a penalty on people that there's no incentive for them to prosper…because they have to give so much to the government." Nevermind that in 1989, President George H.W. Bush spoke to America's youth about drugs via a live television feed. Then, in 1991, he delivered another speech on the value of education via a telecast on CNN and PBS. Media Matters for America reminds us that "while president, George H.W. Bush gave a speech to schoolchildren intended 'to motivate America's students to strive for excellence; to increase students' as well as parents' responsibility/accountability; and to promote students' and parents' awareness of the educational challenge we face.'" According to an article inThe Washington Postfrom October 2, 1991, the "White House sent letters to schools across the nation to encourage teachers and principals to allow students to tune in the speech, which was also carried live by the Mutual Broadcasting and NBC Radio Network. The live television and radio coverage was arranged at the request of the Education Department."

Nevermind that, as researcher Simon Maloy points out, George W. Bush posted a "teacher's guide" on the White House website intended to help students understand the "freedom timeline" and encouraged them to "explor[e] the biographies of the President, Mrs. Bush, Vice President, and Mrs. Cheney."

Nevermind that Obama tells our nation's children, "What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future," while Bush promoted an agenda to make the United States, in his own words, "a more literate country and a hopefuller country," especially by urging us, in a May 1, 2002 speech, to "take advantage of our fantastic opportunistic society." Whereas on Tuesday Obama spoke of responsibility and accountability, encouraging our young students to stay in school and to "develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country," Bush told a crowd in South Carolina on February 21, 2001 that if "you teach a child to read…he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” Bush also pointed out, in early January of 2000, that “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures” and philosophically mused that “Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?" Sure, Obama may have motivated whole classrooms full of young, inspired minds with his hopeful expectations when he concluded that "Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future," but Bush hit the nail on the head when, in LaCrosse, Wisconsin on October 18, 2000, he dazzled his audience with this deft word-smithery: "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." 

And yet, apparently it didn't seem dangerous for that man to be allowed to talk to children. In school.

Wow. 

But hey, regardless of everything else, one thing seems clear. The right-wing commentators attacking Obama's student address all seem to have something in common: they sure do love America's innocent children and want to protect them, at all costs, from the malevolent machinations (whether Fascist or Communist..or both, together, no matter how mutually exclusive they may be) of a nefarious federal government brain trust. How dare the commander-in-chief and his minions seek to manipulate, indoctrinate, and take advantage of our country's young people by luring them into blindly supporting and advancing the president's every whim? How can decent, freedom-loving, and patriotic citizens simply stand back and do nothing about the looming specter of brainwashed hordes of American students, duped and enlisted by an administration's imperial motivations and ideological agenda, pouring out of government schools as robotic, unthinking recruits and unwitting defenders of a terrifyingly authoritarian regime? 

It would come as no surprise that the very same people lambasting Obama for attempting to infiltrate America's school system in an effort to indoctrinate the malleable minds of our youth are staunch advocates of the United States' military might, planetary hegemony, who "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers on their American-made, gas-guzzling clunkers. The irony here is that the people who are apparently trying to "protect" our children from the grasp of "big government" have no problem with federally-mandated programs that, not only allow, but guarantee US military recruiters access to school kids. It seems that while they fear the multicultural commander-in-chief's motives for telling students to study hard, they are just fine with the military's invasion of those same students' privacy in an effort to condition them to kill indigenous people in foreign countries at the behest of that same commander-in-chief.

A recent piece by journalist David Goodman reveals:

"In the past few years, the military has mounted a virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans. Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students' GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect…the soldier may know more about the kid's habits than do his own parents."

Goodman, in his Mother Jones article, explains that a provision slipped into the No Child Left Behind act by Louisiana Republican then-Representative (now Senator) David Vitter and signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002, was a boon to military recruiters. The provision "requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding." As a result, Goodman continues, "this little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush's signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft. Students may sign an opt-out form — but not all school districts let them know about it."

But that's not all. 

Goodman reports that, in 2005, it was discovered that the Pentagon had spent the past two years amassing records from Selective Service, state DMVs, and data brokers to create a database of tens of millions of young adults and teens, some as young as 15, Goodman reports. The result of this massive data-mining project, overseen by the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program, is a recruiting database holding over 34 million names. The JAMRS database, run by credit report heavyweight Equifax, is described by its own website as "arguably the largest repository of 16-25-year-old youth data in the country."

Ari Rosmarin, Senior Advocacy Coordinator at the New York Civil Liberties Union and currently working on the NYCLU's "Project on Military Recruitment and Students’ Rights," explains how difficult, if not impossible, it is for students to opt-out of the JAMRS database. In an interview on Democracy Now!, Rosmarin said, "According to the Pentagon, the only way to what they call opt-out of the database is for your parent — a student cannot do this his or herself — a parent needs to send a letter to the Pentagon, asking the Pentagon to take their student out of the list. And even then, you’re not removed from the list; you’re put into what’s called a suppression file, which is a separate list within the JAMRS system and database system that keeps you away out of that list, but you’re never really removed from the list."

Even though the NYCLU filed and ultimately settled a lawsuit against the Pentagon in 2005, charging them with violating the Privacy Act and the Defense Act, which prohibits keeping information on students as young as fifteen, maintaining the information for over three years, the collection of Social Security numbers, and clarifying opt-out information, the military refused to cease the collection of racial and ethnic data.

This data is vital because the recruiters prey on poor and minority students. As a result, black and latino kids wind up in the military in disproportionate numbers to all other demographics. Eric Ruder reports, "In 1995, Tom Wilson, then a high-level official in charge of the Army's personnel department, let the truth slip out in an interview. He explained how the military targeted students "particularly in inner cities…I hesitate to use the term at-risk kids, but kids who would otherwise be called at-risk." Perhaps the war-crazy right-wing in this country was worried that if minority students are inspired by an African-American president's motivation to become writers, inventors, doctors, lawyers, or architects, there might not be enough soldiers left to invade and occupy more foreign countries.

The Pentagon spends roughly $600,000 every year collecting information from commercial data brokers such as the Student Marketing Group and the American Student List, which keep records on millions of high school students. The government also secretly gathers information from unsuspecting internet users, vocational test-takers, and even videogame enthusiasts. Goodman reports,

This year, the Army spent $1.2 million on the website March2Success.com, which provides free standardized test-taking tips devised by prep firms such as Peterson's, Kaplan, and Princeton Review. The only indications that the Army runs the site, which registers an average of 17,000 new users each month, are a tiny tagline and a small logo that links to the main recruitment website, GoArmy.com. Yet visitors' contact information can be sent to recruiters unless they opt out, and students also have the option of having a recruiter monitor their practice test scores. Terry Backstrom, who runs March2Success.com for the US Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, insists that it is about "good will," not recruiting. "We are providing a great service to schools that normally would cost them."

Recruiters are also data mining the classroom. More than 12,000 high schools administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a three-hour multiple-choice test originally created in 1968 to match conscripts with military assignments. Rebranded in the mid-1990s as the "ASVAB Career Exploration Program," the test has a cheerful home page that makes no reference to its military applications, instead declaring that it "is designed to help students learn more about themselves and the world of work." A student who takes the test is asked to divulge his or her Social Security number, GPA, ethnicity, and career interests—all of which is then logged into the JAMRS database. In 2008, more than 641,000 high school students took the ASVAB; 90 percent had their scores sent to recruiters. Tony Castillo of the Army's Houston Recruiting Battalion says that ASVAB is "much more than a test to join the military. It is really a gift to public education."

To put all its data to use, the military has enlisted the help of Nielsen Claritas, a research and marketing firm whose clients include BMW, AOL, and Starbucks. Last year, it rolled out a "custom segmentation" program that allows a recruiter armed with the address, age, race, and gender of a potential "lead" to call up a wealth of information about young people in the immediate area, including recreation and consumption patterns. The program even suggests pitches that might work while cold-calling teenagers. "It's just a foot in the door for a recruiter to start a relevant conversation with a young person," says Donna Dorminey of the US Army Center for Accessions Research.

The efforts of aggressive military recruiters are also aided by a number of popular videogames. One of them, "American's Army," was created by the Pentagon itself and is available to play free online. According to Goodman, "one in four males between the age of thirteen and twenty-four have played this game" and the users who play it are, according to the Army, "29% more likely to be interested in serving in the military." The other is the insanely popular Xbox game "Halo 3," which has sold more copies than the entire Harry Potter series. The Army spent over a million dollars to sponsor the game and, in turn, players can link automatically from the game to the GoArmy.com recruiting website. 

There have been endless stories about recruiting misconduct and lies military recruiters tell our nation's vulnerable youth, once the recruiting process begins in earnest. Recruiters lie about non-binding contracts, "no combat" clauses in contracts, and threaten young recruits who change their minds about joining the military after signing up for theDelayed Enlistment Program. 

But, it seems, that this stuff doesn't bother conservative commentators or lawmakers, few of whom have actually served in the military themselves. The inconsistency of right-wing attacks never ceases to boggle the mind. They fear big government infiltration of public schools and yet support the most appalling example of big government: endless war and aggressive imperialism. In order to stay at war and maintain the Empire, the United States needs soldiers, by any means necessary. It doesn't seem to matter that while some schools don't have adequate or appropriate learning materials or resources for their students and faculties and that vital programs like "music" are being cut from budgets due to lack of funding, the US government, under President Barack Obama, has a yearly defense budget of over $700 billion (which doesn't include the $100 billion per year that Iraq and Afghanistan cost). In fact, as Goodman tells us, "for every new GI it signed up last year, the Army spent $24,500 on recruitment. (In contrast, four-year colleges spend an average of $2,000 per incoming student.)"

On second thought, maybe Obama just wants our nation's children to stay in school so that military recruiters know right where to find them. Hey, Fischer, what's that cherry-tree story again?