All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

“The Palestinian’s Burden”. By Malcolm Evans, for the New Zealand Herald

I can understand the Jews demanding, after their experience at Nazi hands, that they should be given some piece of territory somewhere in the world, where they would be masters in their own house and where there would be an asylum for any Jews who, in future might be threatened with a repetition of what the Nazis did.

But, if the Jews had a claim to be given a piece of territory, this should have been done at the expense of the Western nation that had done its worst to exterminate the Jews..

If the creation of a new state of Israel was judged to be a legitimate form of compensation to the surviving Jews, the territory for this state should have been taken from the Europeans, not from the Arabs.

The new Israel should not have been carved out of Arab Palestine; it should have been carved out of Central Europe.

This point seems to me to be simple and obvious. But, once, when I made it in a lecture in a Western country, (not Germany, not Britain), it was received with shouts of laughter.

The people who laughed were not Jews; they were non-Jewish Westerners, and the country was one that has been traditionally opposed to colonialism.

Yet, they laughed because it seemed to them preposterous that a Western nation should be made to pay for its own crimes with its own territory, when the West’s moral debt to the Jews could, so it seemed to these Westerners, be settled by giving the Jews the territory of a non-Western people that committed no crime at all against the Jews.

This laughter shocked me because it revealed to me what seems to me a shocking persistence of the colonialist attitude of mind. A guilty Western people’s territory was to be sacrosanct, because, though guilty, they were Westerners.

An innocent non-Western people’s territory could, it was held, legitimately be given away to the Jews by the victorious Western powers.This amounts to the declaration of the inequality of the Western and the non-Western sections of the human race.

It is a claim that Westerners are privileged, however guilty they may be. It is a denial of those universal human rights that, in truth, are possessed by every man, woman, and child in the world, irrespective of differences in civilization; religion, nationality and race.

– Arnold Toynbee, Two Aspects of the Palestine Question, in Arnold Toynbee, Importance of the Arab World (1962).

Via Lawrence of Cyberia

The tale of a Palestinian journalist: Muhammad Omer.

By *Dahr Jamail, Le Monde diplomatique July 2008.

Muhammad Omer and I jointly received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in London on 16 June (1). Omer is a 24-year-old Palestinian with whom I feel honoured to have shared this award, as I told the audience at the prize-giving ceremony. His work from his Gaza homeland has been a beacon of humanitarian reportage; it is a model of peace, and an attempt at reconciliation with Israel.

But Omer’s journey to London to receive the award was almost impossible. When I heard about the prize, I booked my flight from San Francisco and boarded my plane. By contrast, Omer struggled even to get an exit visa: his home has been crushed by an Israeli bulldozer, and most of his seven siblings have been killed or maimed by the Israeli army of occupation. The veteran journalist John Pilger, who presented our awards, described Omer’s journey: “Getting Muhammad to London to receive his prize was a major diplomatic operation. Israel has a perfidious control over Gaza’s borders, and he was only allowed out with a Dutch embassy escort.”

Then, after the ceremony, there were our even more different return journeys. My biggest problem was an hour’s delay for the flight back to my home country, the United States, which last year gave Israel $2.38bn in military aid, and will give that amount in the coming fiscal year, along with an extra $150m. (By July 2006 direct US aid to Israel had reached $108bn according to conservative estimates.)

On his return home, Omer was badly beaten up and physically and psychologically abused by Israel’s security forces, Shin Bet. At the Allenby Bridge crossing, from Jordan to the West Bank, he was met by the Dutch official who was to ferry him back into Gaza. The official waited outside as Omer entered the Israeli building. Omer was told to turn off his mobile phone and remove the battery. When he asked if he could call his embassy escort, he was told sternly he was not allowed. A Shin Bet officer searched his luggage and rifled through his documents. “Where’s the money?” he asked Omer. “Where are the English pounds you have?” They wanted to confiscate his prize money, which Omer was wise enough not to carry on his person.

Omer was surrounded by eight armed Shin Bet officers. This is how he described what happened next. “A man called Avi ordered me to take off my clothes. I had already been through an x-ray machine. I stripped down to my underwear and was told to take off everything. When I refused, Avi put his hand on his gun. I began to cry: ‘Why are you treating me this way? I am a human being.’ He said: ‘This is nothing compared with what you will see now.’ He took his gun out, pressing it to my head, and with his full body weight pinning me on my side, he forcibly removed my underwear. He then made me do a concocted sort of dance. Another man, who was laughing, said: ‘Why are you bringing perfumes?’ I replied: ‘They are gifts for the people I love.’ He said: ‘Oh, do you have love in your culture?’

“I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours and, having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum. The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing it into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror.”

‘Moderate physical pressure’

The Israeli Supreme Court has allowed the use of “moderate physical pressure” in the questioning of prisoners. Israel holds more than 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of them under administrative detention (no charges filed, detention can be renewed every six months).

The fourth Geneva Convention (GC) (1949) states: (1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

The Israeli military regularly bombs and uses snipers to attack Palestinian ambulances. Article 20 of the 1949 GC states: “Persons regularly and solely engaged in the operation and administration of civilian hospitals, including the personnel engaged in the search for, removal and transporting of and caring for wounded and sick civilians, the infirm and maternity cases shall be respected and protected.”

Israel has blockaded Gaza, isolating and starving the 1.5 million Palestinians who live there. In 2006 Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Article 23 of the 1949 GC states: “Each High Contracting Party shall allow the free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital stores and objects necessary for religious worship intended only for civilians of another High Contracting Party, even if the latter is its adversary. It shall likewise permit the free passage of all consignments of essential foodstuffs, clothing and tonics intended for children under 15, expectant mothers and maternity cases.”

The Israeli government has threatened to close orphanages for Palestinian children in Hebron, which would be another violation of international law, for article 24 of the Geneva Convention states clearly: “The Parties to the conflict shall take the necessary measures to ensure that children under fifteen, who are orphaned or are separated from their families as a result of the war, are not left to their own resources, and that their maintenance, the exercise of their religion and their education are facilitated in all circumstances. Their education shall, as far as possible, be entrusted to persons of a similar cultural tradition.”

The Shin Bet violated many GC principles in the way it treated Omer. Part III of the 1949 GC, which covers the status and treatment of protected persons, section I, article 27, says: “Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity.” Article 29 of the same section states: “The Party to the conflict in whose hands protected persons may be, is responsible for the treatment accorded to them by its agents, irrespective of any individual responsibility which may be incurred.”

The gross imbalance of power Israel enjoys, thanks to US support, makes these atrocities possible. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. According to Alison Weir, the executive director of If Americans Knew, Palestinians receive 1/23rd of the amount of aid the US provides to Israel.

According to Defence for Children International, Israel has “engaged in gross violations of international human rights and humanitarian law”. Between 1967 and 2003, Israel destroyed over 10,000 Palestinian homes, and that continues.

Attacking journalists is not new. On 16 April Fadel Shanaa, a Palestinian cameraman working for the news agency Reuters, was killed by a rocket fired during an Israeli military incursion into the Gaza Strip. His assistant, Wafa Barbakh, was seriously injured. Both were in vehicle clearly marked “Press”. This appears to be part of systematic targeting of journalists by the Israeli military. Since the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, the Israeli military has killed at least nine journalists, including an Italian and a Briton. At least 170 other journalists have been wounded by the Israeli military during this period.

Former Dutch ambassador Jan Wijenberg said of what happened to Omer: “This is by no means an isolated incident, but part of a long-term strategy to demolish Palestinian social, economic and cultural life… I am aware of the possibility that Mohammed Omer might be murdered by Israeli snipers or bomb attack in the near future. . . [Omer] is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel.” Janet McMahon, managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, for which Omer writes, says he is still in hospital. “He may go home, or have an operation. He’s still in a lot of pain, and it’s hard for him to swallow, or to breathe deeply. He’s being fed intravenously.”

I cannot reconcile the disparity in our experiences. How can we reconcile something that is irreconcilable in the absence of all justice?

*Dahr Jamail wrote Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2007, after eight months in Iraq as an independent journalist. He also covered the 2006 war in Lebanon

(1) Dahr Jamail’s award was for his work on Iraq. See “US presidents-to-be in denial”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, May 2008.

This is an excellent article from Ismael Hossein-zadeh ( Are They Really Oil Wars? Another article he wrote at CounterPunch: Worried About the Price of Gas? End the Wars ) and shatters once and for all the myth of Oil Wars and the Chomskean propaganda. I am going to post excerpts from here:

[Start of excerpts ] It is true that for a long time, from the beginning of Middle Eastern oil exploration and discovery in the early twentieth century until the mid-1970s, colonial and/or imperial powers controlled oil either directly or through control of oil producing countries - at times, even by military force. But that pattern of colonial or imperialist exploitation of global markets and resources has changed now. Most of the current theories of imperialism and hegemony that continue invoking that old pattern of Big Oil behavior tend to suffer from an ahistorical perspective. Today, as discussed earlier, even physically occupying and controlling another country’s oil fields will not necessarily be beneficial to oil interests. Not only will military adventures place the operations of current energy projects at jeopardy, but they will also make the future plans precarious and unpredictable. Big Oil interests, of course, know this; and that’s why they did not countenance the war on Iraq: ‘The big oil companies were not enthusiastic about the Iraqi war,’ says Fareed Mohamedi of PFC Energy, an energy consultancy firm based in Washington D.C. that advises petroleum firms. ‘Corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco want stability, and this is not what Bush is providing in Iraq and the Gulf region,’ adds Mohamedi.

Big Oil interests also know that not only is war no longer the way to gain access to oil, it is in fact an obstacle to gaining that access. Exclusion of U.S. oil companies from vast oil resources in countries such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and a number of central Asian countries due to militaristic U.S. foreign policy is a clear testament to this fact. Many of these countries (including, yes, Iran) would be glad to have major U.S. oil companies invest, explore and extract oil from their rich reserves. Needless to say that U.S. oil companies would be delighted to have access to those oil resources. But U.S. champions of war and militarism have successfully torpedoed such opportunities through their unilateral wars of aggression and their penchant for a Cold War-like international atmosphere.

….

During the past few decades, major oil companies have consistently opposed U.S. policies and military threats against countries like Iran, Iraq, and Libya. They have, indeed, time and again, lobbied U.S. foreign policy makers for the establishment of peaceful relations and diplomatic rapprochement with those countries. The Iran-Libya Sanction Act of 1996 (ILSA) is a strong testament to the fact that oil companies nowadays view wars, economic sanctions, and international political tensions as harmful to their long-term business interests and, accordingly, strive for peace, not war, in international relations.

On March 15, 1995 President Clinton issued Executive Order 12957 which banned all U.S. contributions to the development of Iran’s petroleum resources, a crushing blow to the oil industry, especially to the Conoco oil company that had just signed a $1 billion contract to develop fields in Iran. The deal marked a strong indication that Iran was willing to improve its relationship with the United States, only to have President Clinton effectively nullify it. Two months later, sighting “an extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the U.S.,” President Clinton issued another order, 1259, that expanded the sanctions to become a total trade and investment embargo against Iran. Then a year later came ILSA which extended the sanctions imposed on Iran to Libya as well.

It is no secret that the major force behind the Iran-Libya Sanction Act was the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main Zionist lobby in Washington. The success of AIPAC in passing ILSA through both the Congress and the White House over the opposition of the major U.S. oil companies is testament to the fact that, in the context of U.S. policy in the Middle East, even the influence of the oil industry pales vis-à-vis the influence of the Zionist lobby.

ILSA was originally to be imposed on both U.S. and foreign companies. However, in the end it was the U.S. companies that suffered the most due to waivers that were given to European companies after pressure from the European Union. In 1996 the EU pursued its distaste of ILSA by lodging complaints with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the U.S. and through adopting ‘blocking legislation’ that would prevent EU companies from complying with ILSA. Meanwhile, the contract that Iran had originally signed with Conoco was awarded to TotalFinaElf of France for $760 million; the deal also left the door open for Total to sign an additional contract with Iran for $2 billion in 1997 with their partners Gazprom and Petronas.

In May of 1997 major U.S. oil companies such as Conoco, Exxon, Atlantic Richfield, and Occidental Petroleum joined other (non-military) U.S. companies to create an anti-sanction coalition. Earlier that same year Conoco’s Chief Executive Archie Dunham publicly took a stance against unilateral U.S. sanctions by stating that “U.S. companies, not rogue regimes, are the ones that suffer when the United States imposes economic sanctions.” Texaco officials have also argued that the U.S. can be more effective in bringing about change in other countries by allowing U.S. companies to do business with those countries instead of imposing economic sanctions that tend to be counterproductive.

Alas, Washington’s perverse, misguided and ineffectual policy of economic sanctions for political purposes - often in compliance with the wishes of some powerful special interests - continues unabated. ‘Even with the increased pro-trade lobbying efforts of the oil industry and groups like USAEngage, whose membership ranges from farmers and small business owners to Wall Street executives and oilmen, the lack of support from Washington and the Bush administration could not allow them [major oil companies and other non-military transnational companies] to overtake or counteract the already rolling momentum of AIPAC’s influence on Middle East policy or the renewal of ISLA.’

…

and (note how Noamian analysis follows the wishes of the real perpetrators by hiding their real motives):

The widely-shared but erroneous view that recent U.S. wars of choice are driven by oil concerns is partly due to precedence: the fact that for a long time military force was key to colonial or imperialist control and exploitation of foreign markets and resources, including oil. It is also partly due to perception: the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were ‘oil men’ before coming to the White House. But, as noted earlier, George W. Bush was never more than an ineffective minor oil prospector and Dick Cheney was never really an oil man; he headed the notorious Halliburton company that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon.

But the major reason for the persistence of this pervasive myth seems to stem from certain deliberate efforts that are designed to perpetuate the legend in order to camouflage some real economic and geopolitical special interests that drive U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. There is evidence that both the military-industrial complex and hard-line Zionist proponents of “greater Israel” disingenuously use oil (as an issue of national interest) in order to disguise their own nefarious special interests and objectives: justification of continued expansion of military spending, extension of sales markets for military hardware, and recasting the geopolitical map of the Middle East in favor of Israel.

There is also evidence that for every dollar’s worth of oil imported from the Persian Gulf region the Pentagon takes five dollars out of the Federal budget to “secure” the flow of that oil! This is a clear indication that the claim that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East is due to oil consideration is a fraud .

While anecdotal, an example of how partisans of war and militarism use oil as a pretext to cover up the real forces behind war and militarism can be instructive. In the early stages of the invasion of Iraq, when the anti-occupation resistance in Iraq had not yet taken shape and the invasion seemed to be proceeding smoothly, two of the leading champions of the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, often boasting of the apparent or pre-mature success of the invasion at those early stages, gave frequent news conferences and press reports. During one of those press reports (at the end of an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore in early June 2003), Wolfowitz was asked why North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found. Wolfowitz’s response was: ‘Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.

Many opponents of the war jumped on this statement, so to speak, as corroboration of what they had been saying or suspecting all along: that the war on Iraq was prompted by oil interests. Yet, there is strong evidence - some of which presented in the preceding pages - that for the last several decades oil interests have not favored war and turbulence in the Middle East, including the current invasion of Iraq. Nor is war any longer the way to gain access to oil. Major oil companies, along with many other non-military transnational corporations, have lobbied both the Clinton and Bush administrations in support of changing the aggressive, militaristic U.S. policy toward countries like Iran, Iraq and Libya in favor of establishing normal, non-confrontational trade and diplomatic relations. Such efforts at normalization of trade and diplomatic relations, however, have failed time and again precisely because Wolfowitz and his cohorts, working through AIPAC and other war-mongering think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) oppose them.

These think tanks, in collaboration with a whole host of similar militaristic lobbying entities like Center for Security Affairs (CSA) and National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), working largely as institutional façades to serve the defacto alliance of the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby, have repeatedly thwarted efforts at peace and reconciliation in the Middle East - often over the objections and frustrations of major U.S. oil companies. It is a well established fact that Wolfowitz has been a devoted champion of these jingoistic think tanks and their aggressive unilateral policies in the Middle East. In light of his professional record and political loyalties, his claim that he championed the war on Iraq because of oil considerations can be characterized only as demagogic: it contradicts his political record and defies the policies he has been advocating for the last several decades; it is designed to divert attention from the main forces behind the war, the armaments lobby and the pro-Israel lobby.

These powerful interests are careful not to draw attention to the fact that they are the prime instigators of war and militarism in the Middle East. Therefore, they tend to deliberately perpetuate the popular perception that oil is the driving force behind the war in the region. They even do not mind having their aggressive foreign policies labeled as imperialistic as long as imperialism implies some vague or general connotations of hegemony and domination, that is, as long as it thus camouflages the real, special interests behind the war and political turbulence in the Middle East.

The oil and other non-military transnational corporations’ aversion to war and military adventures in the Middle East stem, of course, from the logical behavior of global or transnational capital in the era of integrated world markets, which tends to be loath to war and international political convulsions. Considering the fact that both importers and exporters of oil prefer peace and stability to war and militarism, why would, then, the flow of oil be in jeopardy if the powerful beneficiaries of war and political tension in the Middle East stopped their aggressive policies in the region?

Partisans of war in the Middle East tend to portray U.S. military operations in the region as reactions to terrorism and political turbulence in order to ’safeguard the interests of the United States and its allies.’ Yet, a close scrutiny of action-reaction or cause-effect relationship between U.S. military adventures and socio-political turbulence in the region reveals that perhaps the causality is the other way around. That is, social upheavals and political convulsions in the Middle East are more likely to be the result, not the cause, of U.S. foreign policy in the region, especially its one-sided, prejudicial Israeli-Palestinian policy. The U.S. policy of war and militarism in the region seems to resemble the behavior of a corrupt cop, or a mafia godfather, who would instigate fights and frictions in the neighborhood or community in order to, then, portray his parasitic role as necessary for the safety and security of the community and, in the process, fill out his deep pockets. [End of excerpts]

One of the myths floating around is that the attack on Iraq was part of an operation intended to ’seize the oilfields’. This is preposterous from the point of view of oil company interests. Past experience, and the current situation in Iraq, prove that the only sensible way to obtain access to the oil is to have local officials run the situation. ‘Seizing the oilfields’ is a pure Zionist notion, first suggested by covert Zionist Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s, and is intended not to obtain American corporate access to the oil, but to remove the ‘oil weapon’ from the Arabs.

The article is inaccurate in putting responsibility for the attack on both Zionists and military contractors. Of course, military contractors want war. They always want war. If the desires of military contractors were determinative, we would always have war. There needs to be another, primary, reason for war. Military contractors just latch onto, and reinforce, the primary motivators. I reject all conspiracy theories based on some kind of James-Bond-style, super-Evil villains, running the world in order to arrange for a war of everybody against everybody. The world doesn’t work in this cartoon fashion. There was one and only one reason for the attack on Iraq: Zionism.

By Pepe Escobar (Asia Times Online)

(This is the first time I read from main street media that the Iraq was “fighting Israel’s wars” as Pepe Escobar writes. Also notice in the article that nobody buys the Chomsky’s propaganda that Iraq war was about oil. We have to give credit to Asia Time for having the guts to publish this article. Well done! And speaking of déjà vu also notice how the Zionists try to link the “War of Terror” to more wars for Israel. My emphasis in red. gess)

WASHINGTON - They’re all here - and they’re all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates - John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.

Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference this week in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.

Few books in recent years have been as explosive or controversial as The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, written by Stephen Walt from Harvard University and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, published in 2007. In it, professors Walt and Mearsheimer argued the case of the Israeli lobby not as “a cabal or conspiracy that ‘controls’ US foreign policy”, but as an extremely powerful interest group made up of Jews and non-Jews, a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations tirelessly working to move US foreign policy in Israel’s direction”.

Walt and Mearsheimer also made the key point that “anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite”. Anyone for that matter who “says that there is an Israeli lobby” also runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism.

All the candidates in the House say yeah
Republican presidential candidate McCain is opening this year’s AIPAC jamboree; Clinton and Obama are closing it on Wednesday. Walt and Mearsheimer’s verdict on the dangerous liaisons between presidential candidates and AIPAC remains unimpeachable: “None of the candidates is likely to criticize Israel in any significant way or suggest that the US ought to pursue a more evenhanded policy in the region. And those who do will probably fall by the wayside.”

Take what Clinton said in February at an AIPAC meeting in New York: “Israel is a beacon of what’s right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism.” A year before, Clinton was in favor of sitting and talking to Iran’s leadership.

And take what Obama said in March at an AIPAC meeting in Chicago; no reference at all to Palestinian “suffering”, as he had done on the campaign trail in March 2007. Obama also made it clear he would do nothing to alter the US-Israeli relationship.

No wonder AIPAC is considered by most members of the US Congress as more powerful than the National Rifle Association or the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

AIPAC has explicit Zionist roots. The founder, “Si” Kenen, was head of the American Zionist Council in 1951. The body was reorganized as a US lobby - the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs - in 1953-4, and then renamed AIPAC in 1959. Under Tom Dine, in the 1970s, it was turned into a mass organization with more than 150 employees and a budget of up to US$60 million today. Dine was later ousted because he was considered not hawkish enough.

The top leadership - mostly former AIPAC presidents - is always more hawkish on the Middle East than most Jewish Americans. AIPAC only dropped its opposition to a Palestinian state - without endorsing it - when Ehud Barak became Israeli prime minister in 1999.

AIPAC keeps a very close relationship with an array of influential think-tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Middle East Forum, the The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sprinkled neo-cons in these think-tanks can be regarded as a microcosm of the larger Israel lobby - Jews and non-Jews (It’s important to remember that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and five other neo-cons drafted the infamous “A Clean Break” document to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 - the ultimate road map for hardcore regime change all over the Middle East.)

The house that AIPAC built
AIPAC in the US Congress is a rough beast indeed. Former president Bill Clinton defined it as “stunningly effective”. Former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich called it “the most effective general-interest group across the entire planet”. The New York Times as “the most important organization affecting America’s relationship with Israel”. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, before his involvement in a corruption scandal, said. “Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world.”

AIPAC maintains a virtual stranglehold over the US Congress. Critics of the Israel lobby other than Walt and Mearsheimer also contend that AIPAC essentially prevents any possibility of open debate on US policy towards Israel. Compare it with a 2004 report by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, according to which “Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies”.

AIPAC should not be crossed. It rewards those who support its agenda, and punishes those who don’t. In the end, it’s all about money - specifically campaign contributions. From 2000 to 2004, according to the Washington Post, AIPAC honchos contributed an average of $72,000 each to campaigns and political committees. For pro-AIPAC politicians, money simply pours from all over the US.

Every member of the US Congress receives AIPAC’s bi-weekly newsletter, the Near East Report. Walt and Mearsheimer stress that Congressmen and their staff “usually turn to AIPAC when they need info; AIPAC is called upon to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes”.

Hillary Clinton has learned long ago she should not cross AIPAC. Clinton used to support a Palestinian state in 1998. She even embraced Suha Arafat, Yasser’s wife, in 1999. After much scolding, she suddenly became a vigorous defender of Israel, and years later wholeheartedly supported the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Clinton may have gotten the bulk of Jewish American donations for her 2008 presidential campaign.

Rice also learned about facts on the ground. She tried to restart the eternally moribund “peace process” when visiting the Middle East in March 2007. Before the trip, she got an AIPAC letter signed by no less than 79 US senators telling her not to talk to the new Palestinian unity government until it “recognized Israel, renounced terror and agreed to abide by Palestinian-Israeli agreements”.

AIPAC and Iraq
It has become relatively fashionable for some members of the Israeli lobby to deny any involvement in the build-up towards the war on Iraq. But few remember what AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun in January 2003: “Quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq was one of AIPAC’s successes over the past year.”

And in a New Yorker profile of Steven Rosen, AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the war on Iraqi, it was stated that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraqi war“.

Compare it with a 2007 Gallup study based on 13 different polls, according to which 77% of American Jews were opposed to the Iraq war, compared to 52% of Americans.

Walt and Mearsheimer contend “the war was due in large part to the lobby’s influence, and especially its neo-con wing. The lobby is not always representative of the larger community for which it often claims to speak.”

AIPAC and Iran
Now it is Iran time. Walt and Mearsheimer contend “the lobby is fighting to prevent the US from reversing course and seeking a rapprochement with Tehran. They continue to promote an increasingly confrontational and counterproductive policy instead”. Not much different from the embattled Olmert, who told Germany’s Focus magazine in April 2007 that “it would take 10 days … and 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles” to set back Iran’s nuclear program.

A measure of Walt and Mearsheimer’s power to rattle reputations is that the Zionist establishment had to bring out all its big guns to refute their argument, again and again.

Walt and Mearsheimer are no ideologues. They are realpolitik practitioners - very much at ease in the top circles of US foreign policy establishment. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their book is that they argued four points that the establishment never mentions in public. Essentially these are:

• The US has already won its major wars in the Middle East, against Arab secular nationalism and against communism, and does not need Israel quite as much.

• Israel is now so much more powerful than all Arab nations combined that it can take care of itself.

• The unconditional support for Israel, regardless of its outrageous deeds, does harm US interests, destabilizes pro-US regimes like Hosi Mubarak’s Egypt and King Abdullah’s Jordan, and plays into the hands of Salafi-jihadi radicals.

• Fighting Israel’s wars on its behalf is the surefire way to lead to the collapse of US power in the Middle East.

Walt and Mearsheimer also seem not to accept that oil, and rivalry with Russia and China, have also played a crucial part in why the US went to war in Iraq and may attack Iran in the near future. Anyway only insiders as themselves - with unassailable establishment credentials - could have started, at the highest levels of public debate, a serious discussion of extreme pro-Zionism in the public and political life of the US.

Meanwhile, the power of the lobby seems unassailable. In March 2007, the US Congress was trying to attach a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would have required President George W Bush to get congressional approval before attacking Iran. AIPAC was strongly against it - because it viewed the legislation as taking the military option “off the table”. The provision was killed. Congressman Dennis Kucinich said this was due to AIPAC.

AIPAC made a lot of waves in 2002, when the theme of the annual meeting was “America and Israel standing against terror”. Everyone bashed Arafat, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria at the same time - just as in PNAC’s letter to Bush in April 2002 claiming that Israel was also fighting an “axis of evil” alongside the US.

During AIPAC’s jamboree in 2004, Bush received 23 standing ovations defending his Iraq policy. Last year, the star was Cheney, making the case for the troop “surge” in Iraq. Pelosi was dutifully present. But it was pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement McCain recently refused, who really made a killing - even though Hagee maintains that “anti-Semitism is the result of the Jews’ rebellion against God”.

On Iran, Hagee definitely set the tone: “It is 1938; Iran is Germany and [President Mahmud] Ahmadinejad is the new [Adolf] Hitler. We must stop Iran’s nuclear threat and stand boldly with Israel.” He received multiple standing ovations. McCain may be sure to get the same treatment this year - and he’ll certainly have no trouble remaining on message.

(I wanted to post this post for long time ago, but luckily timing has nothing to do with it because there is never-ending non-stop hatred against Muslims on the media. My emphasis only in red, otherwise not mine. gess):

The recent human rights commission involvement in the activities of the Canadian minions of Zionism has revealed some contradictions between the Zionist propaganda developed in the 1960s, and the Zionist propaganda developed in the 1980s. The 1960s propaganda was developed to provide an excuse for the planned program of massive crimes against humanity and war crimes that it was anticipated would be required in order to build the Zionist Empire (the first concrete step of which was the annexation of territory in 1967, which is why Holocaust obsession started in the early 1960s). The unique nature of the threat to the Jews, reflected in the new cult of the Holocaust (and the ongoing preoccupation with ‘defamation’, i’e', anti-Semitism), was developed to explain how the Jewish State faced unique threats, requiring unique solutions, the most unique of which was an exemption from all of international law.

Equally important was the second propaganda message, now largely associated with lite Zionism (more on this in a later posting), that supporting Israel was in the real strategic interests of the United States. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became impossible for anybody to continue to believe that antagonizing the main sources of oil could possibly be in America’s interests, so it became necessary to create a new thread of propaganda, that supporting Israel was the best way to attack the real enemies of America, Islamist ‘terrorists’. This new propaganda message was developed in the 1980s in anticipation of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has gone into overdrive with the ‘luck’ of the events of September 11.

The human rights law attacks on those carrying the message of hatred of Muslims has revealed a major contradiction between the 1960s approach and the approach of obsessing about ‘Islamofascism’, and has created a rift amongst the Jewish Billionaires. The old crowd automatically focuses on ‘anti-Semitism’, and uses the machinery of hate crimes legislation to enforce the general concept that the Jewish people are under constant threat. The strict logic of Canadian hate crimes law means that the 1960s propaganda runs right over the 1980s propaganda, and the Jewish Billionaires are faced with a choice. Apparently, the importance of the program of hatred of Muslims is so vital to building the idea that supporting Zionism is in the real interests of Americans (the Zionists rightly fear that if Americans don’t think they have a real interest in supporting Israel, all the homilies about ’shared values’ and similar gag-inducing crap will not get them anywhere), that the time has come to cut support for the 1960s propagandists. The Jewish Billionaires have instructed their minions to make fun of the obsession with hate crimes, all in order to continue the program of inciting hatred against Muslims.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, as the old guys who have been milking the ‘defamation’ cow for decades are not likely to go down without a fight. With the spate of fake hate crimes against Jews, the increased economic and political power in the Jewish community, and the total implausibility that mighty Israel is under any serious threat, it may be time to hang up the ol’ anti-Semitism boxing gloves in favor of increasing hatred of Muslims.

Source

And this article confirms by Jonathan Kay from National Post (Canada) that whether the use of hate crime laws to battle anti-Semitism isn’t going to damage the more important issue of using Bibi’s ‘war on terror’, with its accompanying campaign of engendering hatred against Muslims, in achieving the Zionist goal of stealing land and water in the Middle East. Emphasis in red):

“Over time, the prosecution of anti-Semites such as Ernst Zundel, James Keegstra and Malcolm Ross created a legal template for Canada’s hate-speech jurisprudence. It created a moral template as well: Censorship advocates justified their speech codes by appealing to the horrors of the Holocaust. To oppose hate-speech laws, many human-rights types argue to this day, is to give comfort to fans of Mein Kampf.

It goes without saying that the battle against anti-Semitism is an important one. And those who’ve made it their life’s calling deserve our respect. That said, it is clear that Canadian Jews put their chips down on the wrong side of the hate-speech issue. On a purely gut level, it may seem comforting to have laws on the books that gag society’s bigots. But, as is always the case with ideologically motivated censorship, the long-run cost exceeds the benefit.

That cost includes the crippling of debate that inevitably arises when you declare any point of view — no matter how odious — be off limits. As the recent human-rights cases against MacLean’s and the Western Standard show, there will always be complainants and commissars willing to expand the definition of prohibited speech to encompass legitimate discourse. Ironically, the censorship regime that well-meaning Jewish intellectuals helped put in place to fight anti-Semitism a generation ago is now being applied to prosecute the pundits blowing the whistle on the one truly genuine threat that Jews are facing worldwide: militant Islam.”

Source

(Now to situation in Denmark (not much different than Canada other than their racism is more open)  Highly recommended to read this article before you continue: Freedom of expression and its limits by  Göran Rosenberg. My emphasis in red. gess):

1)There is an interesting relationship between racism and what people are prepared to say out loud.  As recently as thirty years ago, if you were a white visitor to a place like Atlanta, you could still hear the most outrageously racist things said by white people about black people, all based on the assumption that you would be a receptive audience as you were part of the general fraternity of white people.  As things have changed, the circle of people who could be safely spoken to on a general assumption of shared racism has shrunk dramatically.  Racists now have to look over their shoulders, and can no longer make an easy assumption that racist words are going to be acceptable.  When you make a racist statement out loud to someone in your own racial group, you are expressing the fact that you and your audience are in the racially superior group.  Your words have a political significance.  Of course, there are still racists and will always be - Nietzsche thought the only way to get rid of racism is if all the races interbred to create one race! - but the fact that spoken indications of racism are now socially unacceptable does have a real long-term effect on what people think.  Denmark is moving the wrong direction on this.   Publishing hurtful things in a daily newspaper in the context of a country where public quasi-racism is becoming more and more acceptable will only lead to more and more hatred.

2) There is a great deal of stress involved in immigration, both for the immigrants and for the immigrant-receiving country.  That stress leads to the kind of problems we are seeing in places like Denmark.  Three issues predominate:

• • White and racially homogeneous European countries have no history of receiving immigrants.  Places like Canada and the United States, which seem to accept immigrants easily, had the same kind of problems a hundred years ago, but have managed to get the knack of it with experience.
  • Plutocrats like immigration because it lowers the price of labor.  Americans are now in the middle of a struggle over this, with lower and lower middle-class people experiencing reduction in their standard of living which they associate with uncontrolled immigration.  They should be blaming the plutocrats, but it is easier just to be racist.
  • Denmark is a small place, and part of the attitude relates to something akin to claustrophobia. The United States and Canada have the illusion of space, although in fact most immigrant groups end up crammed into small enclaves in the same big cities.  Nevertheless, the fact that the space is out their reduces the stress levels caused by perceived over-crowding.

I have sympathy for people who are fearful of immigration, particularly when it seems to be out of control and intended to reduce the standard of living for the average person.  I don’t have any sympathy for politicians and newspaper editors who try to manipulate hatred to further their own agendas.

Source

The blood thirsty war warriors and propagandist due are back! Spielberg’s and Lucas’:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

A pathetic but an effective tool to dehumanize Non-Europeans.

And there is Iron Man film, a Pentagon Blockbuster.

Read the superb article by Nick Turse

By Dr. Steve Niva.

Excerpt:

This should not be surprising. The Israeli DNA in the new “surge” strategy is only the latest manifestation of a widely overlooked but unmistakable American predilection to increasingly draw from Israel’s urban warfare laboratory and its flawed efforts to devise fresh tactics in the service of rebooting its own military occupation of Palestinian lands. What we are seeing in Iraq today has much less to do with the declared shift in U.S. military doctrine than with a deeper and more far-reaching “Israelization” of U.S. military strategy and tactics over the past two decades that was only heightened by America’s misadventures in the Middle East after September 11, 2001. In the search for new means to confront urban insurgencies in predominately Arab and Muslim lands, there has been a complex institutional and cultural harmonization between these two militaries under the banner of fighting “the war on terror,” though the traffic is mostly in one direction. In light of the real lessons of counterinsurgency history, however, mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure.

Full text (more…)

Why I believe the real enemies of State Israel are no other than Zionists:

The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel.

Clinton adviser, Ann Lewis.

Latest issue from Le Monde on The ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestine . I re-post un-edited articles below. All the three articles [Israel faces up to its past, Judaism is universal and Judaism is universal]

Israel faces up to its past

By Eric Rouleau

With access to 60 years of official archives, Israel’s new historians have shed light on old myths. As a result, a new generation of writers, academics and artists is able to look afresh at the country’s past.

In the 1980s in Israel a new generation of men and woman who had not lived through the Holocaust or the creation of their country came of age intellectually and embarked on a remarkable period of change. This change is indicative of how Israel’s intelligentsia has gradually matured to a point where it is now able to judge the country’s past without hang-ups, and free itself from the myths and taboos propagated by the country’s leaders. (more…)

By Guy Dinmore in Rome, The Financial Times

Published: May 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 5 2008 03:00

Rome’s election last week of its first rightwing mayor since the time of Benito Mussolini has been celebrated by fascists as a historic victory over the left.

Packs of young, thuggish supporters of Gianni Alemanno greeted the new mayor’s appearance at the Campidoglio city hall with straight-armed “Roman” salutes, shouting abuse at communists and foreign immigrants.

“Before, if you were a fascist you had to pretend to be part of the mainstream to have respectability. Now they are coming out of the closet,” said an aide to defeated centre-left candidate Francesco Rutelli.

Debate over the significance of the National Alliance’s first election victory in a major city has been intense - especially among the capital’s small but important Jewish commun-ity, which is widely thought to have swung in Mr Alemanno’s favour. Rome’s Jewish voters, numbering about 9,000, explain their shift to the right in various ways, most often because they see the National Alliance as firmly pro-Israel.

Michel Bokhobza, whose family fled from Libya to Rome in 1967, says Italy’s centre-right is closer to Israel than the pro-Arab bias of the centre-left.

“Even if his past was very close to fascism, Alemanno belongs to the coalition guided by [Silvio] Berlusconi and [Gianfranco] Fini,” he said, referring to the People of Liberty alliance that swept national elections last month.

Times had changed, he said, since 1993 and the first open elections for Rome. The right’s candidate then was Mr Fini, now leader of the National Alliance, who then was part of its neo-fascist predecessor, the MSI, the direct heirs of Mussolini.

“Fini was then seen as a demon and neo-fascist,” said Sandro Di Castro, president of the Jewish community’s Bene Berith association. The “turning point” came in 1995 when Mr Fini became head of the new National Alliance and started to steer it towards the mainstream. That process was completed in 2003 when, as deputy prime minister in the second Berlusconi government, Mr Fini denounced fascism as an “absolute evil”.

Mr Alemanno’s personal journey is less certain. Leftwing commentators have called the 50-year-old former agriculture minister fascist, neo-fascist and post-fascist

Dominique Sicouri, from Egypt’s Jewish community, said her “heart is with the left” but she still decided to work with Mr Alemanno in building ties with France’s ruling UMP party, for which she acts as spokeswoman in Italy. She sees Mr Alemanno as intelligent, serious and a pragmatic moderniser. His Jewish supporters say that in power he will be better placed to rein in extremism. *Italy will take note of foreign concerns after Libya warned against appointing a far-right lawmaker as minister, but it will not accept interference in its internal affairs, the incoming Italian foreign minister said. A Libyan charity chaired by leader Muammer Gaddafi’s son warned of “catastrophic repercussions” to bilateral ties if Roberto Calderoli - known for his anti-Islam rhetoric - became Italy’s reforms minister.

Wolfgang Münchau, Page 11

It does give a different tone on what we were indoctrinated for many years; the so-called Never Again slogan. Schindler’s List comes to my mind right now. Waste of time, indeed, when you have Gaza city, without actors of course, 24hs on the news channels.

A very radical and bold move from Jewish diaspora in Rome, and expect more of this kind ‘love reunion’ in the future in different part of the world. I don’t think this reunion was done for survival of state Israel, consider it is the only country in the middle east that has nuclear weapons, but I think the answer is found that more and more people (thanks to internet & bloggers) are discovering and asking hard questions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and so to distract the real issue, the domestic policy (immigration, read Matt Carr’s You are now entering Eurabia) is linked to the state Israel.