Those dreams have been assassinated and we know the identity of the assassin.

For nine long months, we have witnessed an undeclared but unrelenting war of attrition against the Egyptian revolution. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces led by Field Marshall Tantawi has executed one of the most brilliant counter-revolutions in modern history. Even if Tantawi were to step aside today, history would have to accord him credit for accomplishing his mission and breaking the spirit of the revolution.

Like any war of attrition, the desired outcome is to vanquish your opponent by exhausting him to the point where you break his will to resist. The day Mubarak fell, it was hard to imagine that the collective will of the Egyptian people could be broken. But in hindsight, it’s clear that the SCAF put together and executed a brilliant blue print for wearing down the exuberance of the Egyptian masses.

On taking command of the ship of state, the SCAF promised to hold power for six months – just enough time to allow for free and fair elections. By that timeline, which passed unnoticed on August 11, Egypt was supposed to have a new president, a national assembly and a new constitution. That done – the army was to return to the barracks.

To say that the SCAF broke its promise would be a charitable understatement. The hated emergency laws that were used to enforce the dictates of Mubarak’s regime were briefly rescinded, then reinstated and zealously enforced. Fifteen thousand civilians have since been tried and sentenced before military tribunals. The judges who looked the other way and sanctioned Mubarak’s rigged elections continue to infest the court system. The vast media resources at the disposable of the state remain in the safe hands of the old guard. Censorship is back and every journalist knows that the freshly painted red lines are wider than the old red lines. And, once again, the unrestrained hands of a vengeful police force have been unleashed on peaceful protestors.

At every junction of this nine month odyssey, the military junta has defied the public will. The SCAF insisted on keeping Mubarak’s appointed Prime Minister, Ahmed Sahfiq. Only a show of force by millions of demonstrators managed to convince them to appoint ministers untainted by links to the former dictator. And there was one minister who insisted on keeping his position – Field Marshall Tantawi – the 76 year old Minister of Defense, a stalwart Mubarak ally for two decades.

It took concerted public pressure to convince SCAF that Mubarak’s criminal file deserved the attention of law enforcement. When the generals finally conceded to put their old boss and a few of his cronies on trial, they also promised to televise the proceedings. But for unexplained reasons, the cameras were turned off and the trials have been postponed for months at a time on the flimsiest of legal grounds.

At first, it seemed that the generals were simply out of touch with public sentiment and clueless in the art of governing. But with the passage of time, it became evident that they had a deliberate policy of wearing down the revolutionary spirit. Their tactic was to grant concessions only under the duress of mass demonstrations and the predictable result was that the public gradually tired of disruptive million man marches. Simultaneously, the public airwaves, owned and operated by the SCAF, were deployed in a calculated campaign to erode the revolutionary spirit. The talk shows and news programs delivered a not so subtle message that the only fruit of the revolution was economic stagnation and a breakdown in law and order. As part of the effort to undermine the public’s embrace of the uprising, the government media stopped airing the popular video clip music that hailed the sacrifices of the hundreds of young men and women who gave their lives for the revolution.

As if the SCAF needed any reinforcement in their war of attrition against the popular uprising, the political class entered the fray and splintered into sixty odd factions, the largest one being the divisive Muslim Brotherhood which was happy to make back room deals with the generals. A week before the elections, you would be hard pressed to find a single Egyptian who can name ten of the five dozen parties vying for a share of the political spoils.

One of the few tangible gains of the revolution was the public’s right to peacefully assemble and protest. Even that hard won concession has gone with the wind – first with the slaughter of Coptic demonstrators in Maspiro and now with the lethal show of force in Tahrir.

Today, Egyptians look to Tunisia’s recently elected government with envy. But in Egypt, under the skillful hands of a military dictatorship that has six decades of experience under its belt, the uprising has been contained, the old guard remains in charge and the revolutionary spirit has floundered.

As an eyewitness to both uprisings, I can testify that there is little of the euphoria or the universal public support that marked the overthrow of Mubarak. Once you exhaust a nation and cheat a people out of dreams as vibrant as the ones Egyptians shared on January 25, it’s hard to revive that revolutionary spirit again. That spirit was the essential fuel that could have propelled a democratic political renaissance, clean government and economic progress. Whether Tantawi stays or goes, he has to take full credit for assassinating Egyptian dreams.

There is no need for additional forensic evidence of what exactly transpired at Maspero, the site of a massacre that can only be called a crime against humanity. What started out as a peaceful march against religious persecution by Salafi vandals with a nasty habit of destroying Coptic churches turned into a blood bath. Two dozen demonstrators were murdered, the youngest of them 12 years old.

The only real question remaining is whether the slaughter was premeditated. From where I sit in Cairo, it sure looks that way. How else can one explain the outright lies and deceptions propagated by state owned media operatives?

The provocative coverage by State TV made it sound like Coptic gangs armed with machine guns had assaulted unarmed military police. And the public ate it up because they ‘saw’ it on their Telly. A call went out for ‘honorable’ citizens to go out and defend the army.

Of course, that story turned out to be a load of state manufactured manure. The online English language Al-Ahram website, also a government media outlet, gave a very different account.

A march of 10,000 Copts began today from Shubra to the State TV building in Maspero turned violent when protesters were attacked by stone throwing mobs from on top of the surrounding walls while they were trying to cross the Shubra tunnel. A 15-minute battle ensued as the Coptic protesters fought back and hurled stones at their assailants. Gun shots were fired in the sky, leaving terrified demonstrators wondering aloud if they were going to be shot.

During the attack, panic ensued as women protesters were told to stand under the bridge for safety as Coptic youth tried to contain the march. After the battle stopped the march, once again regained its peaceful nature and continued towards Maspero.

On their way to Maspero they stopped in the neighboring Galaa Street and were attacked once again. A car sped through the crowd and randomely shot at protesters. The march continued once again to Maspero where the protesters were attacked again with increased vigour and violence.

An Ahram Online correspondent at Maspero reports seeing glass being thrown down at protesters from inside the State Broadcasting building in Maspero while armoured personnel carriers were driven by the army through the crowds, hitting and running protesters over. Eyewitness accounts posted on Twitter detail people being shot by the armed forces and attacked by plain-clothed thugs, with fire consuming vehicles by the Nile.

So far confirmed as being among those killed are Mina Daniel, an activist and blogger; Wael Yunna, a journalist for Coptic TV; and Michael Mosaad, an activist and member of the Maspero Youth Coalition.

The protest was organised by the Maspero Youth Union, a group of young Coptic activists to protest against the recent violations against Copts. The protesters chanted, ‘raise your head high you are a Copt,’ and ‘no to burning of churches.’

The protesters also chanted against the army, shouting “the people want the fall of the Field Marshall Tantawi,” and chanted: “Tantawi, where is your army, our homes and churches are being attacked.”

The very next morning, the Arabic print version of Al-Ahram spared all of 150 words to report the story. The brief account didn’t even mention a clash or report on the casualties. This sanitary version of the events had Muslims and Christians marching peacefully chanting “Muslims and Copts are One Hand.” My best guess is that they didn’t want to squander all their recently acquired post-revolutionary virginity on a single story.

By Tuesday morning, Al-Ahram was back to usual form and reporting an eyewitness account from a wounded soldier who claimed he saw 14 of his comrades burned alive in an armored personnel carrier. The journalist who wrote that story is well-advised to invest a little money in a calculator. The official death toll is 25 killed. Of those, 21 have already been identified as Copts, two bodies are unidentified and it’s not exactly certain who the other two are. They could have been soldiers but then again they could have been Muslim activists who were marching in solidarity with their Coptic brothers. The army initially claimed that three of its soldiers had died and now refuses to confirm the exact count.

Usually, in similar circumstances, the soldiers who die in the line of duty are identified and their families are awarded compensation and press coverage to honor their sacrifice. So it could be that the military suffered no fatalities.

The bottom line is that the state owned press accounts were all over the place even though the reported events happened right under their noses. The site of the massacre was across the street from the State Television building at Maspero. State media, any state media, is always a suspect source of information. But when you get this level of confusion in Egyptian state media outlets, it is a sure sign of a cover-up.

The behavior of these ‘journalists’ – and I use that word very loosely – is very similar to what happened on February 2, 2011. That is exactly the same scenario that transpired during the infamous “Battle of the Camels” when armed thugs on horses and camels attacked demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

At the time, the army had already committed itself to protecting the demonstrators and volunteered to be a “custodian of the revolution.” But a curious thing happened – the army didn’t intervene and never bothered to explain how the hired goons had penetrated their lines or how they had manage to pass unnoticed through dozens of army checkpoints that were set up to enforce a curfew. That remains a taboo subject.

But there are some things we now know about the Battle of the Camel. It was a carefully orchestrated attempt by the Mubarak regime to abort the revolution and the plan included a very well-defined role for state media operatives. Their instructions were to ignore it and concentrate on reporting on ‘spontaneous’ outbreaks of support for the now deposed president. It’s fair to speculate that similar instructions were handed down to state media operatives on Bloody Sunday. For the record, these government salaried scribes are pretty much the same crowd that faithfully supported Mubarak for thirty years.

The massacre at Maspero came straight out Mubarak’s play book. Manufacture chaos, pose as a savior of the nation and extend the emergency laws or maybe go a bit further and declare martial law. Field Marshal Tantawi is already signaling the need to impose harsher measures against unidentified domestic and foreign provocateurs.

The Coptic demonstrators were not hooligans armed with machine guns; their ranks included women, children and sympathetic Muslim activists. And autopsies confirm that many of them were shot, stabbed, crushed by armored personnel carriers or beaten to death.

There is absolutely no need for a massive inquiry here. Just ask the soldiers and officers what their instructions were and who gave the orders. Pull in a few of the journalists on the state payroll and ask them the same thing. Round up a few of the thugs who attacked the demonstrators to determine if they acted ‘spontaneously’ or if they also had instructions. I’ll bet my last dollar that this was a False Flag operation to manufacture chaos and create enough sectarian tension to justify continued military rule.

Which gets me back to my initial thesis which is that there never was an Egyptian revolution. What happened in Egypt was a coup d’état that rode the back of a popular uprising, tamed it and now plans to re-establish six decades of military dictatorship. The generals were more than happy to get rid of Mubarak and his heir, a son who was not only a corrupt investment banker but also a draft dodger who never served a day in the military and was rumored to have a British passport.

The Copts who perished on Bloody Monday will go down as the last martyrs of the first Egyptian uprising or the first martyrs of the second Egyptian uprising. Either way, their blood will remain an indelible stain on Egyptian history. May God have mercy on their souls.

A lot of people felt genuine sorrow for Obama as he went through the motions of giving his speech at the General Assembly. He would pause, wait for applause and not hear the clap of a solitary pair of hands. The assembled delegates endured the president’s entire speech and only applauded politely when the farce was over and he stepped down from the podium. After the speech, the president groveled over to a pre-arranged press conference with Netanyahu and the supreme Israeli leader duly anointed him with a “badge of honor.”

Everybody — and I mean everybody — understood exactly what Obama was doing – he was capitulating to the Israeli Lobby to bolster his re-election campaign. It’s not easy to raise a billion bucks and the big Jewish donors had sent a clear message to the White House. They wanted to buy the American veto and the president was obviously willing to sell it.

Two days later, the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas brought down the house with a moving speech calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The contrast between the performance of Obama and Abbas was a rare spectacle. Abbas has been called a lot of things but no one has ever mistaken him for a charismatic leader. And there he was bringing tears to the eyes of millions around the world with an eloquent plea for justice for his down-trodden people.

There was something else in Abbas’s message – a lot of truth. I challenge anybody to fact check Abbas’s description of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. Obama is perfectly aware of the accuracy of Abbas’s depiction of the daily humiliations and privations visited on the Palestinians by their tormentors.    For one thing, POTUS gets daily CIA briefings. Unlike Bush, he reads books and newspapers and, as a lawyer, he is quite familiar with international human rights conventions.

Now, let’s go back to Obama’s disgraceful performance before the United Nations Assembly. Obama didn’t just sell Netanyahu the American veto, he deployed brigades of State Department ambassadors to arm twist members of the United Nations Security Council, including France, Great Britain and other NATO allies. What favors were promised? What price was paid? How much respect did he lose? How much American dignity and prestige was squandered to appease Netanyahu?

Obama didn’t stop there. He adopted the Likud’s narrative of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – the mythology of a ‘peace loving’ Israel surrounded by ‘hostile war mongering Arabs.’ Is that so? I think the British and French could enlighten the president on the 1956 Suez war and how they teamed up with Israel to attack Egypt. It was an American president, Eisenhower, who intervened to end the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt. Look it up.

How about the six-day war which started with an Israeli attack and resulted in the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, Sinai and the Golan Heights? The Israelis claimed it was a ‘pre-emptive’ strike and then immediately proceeded to annex Jerusalem and build settlements in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Gaza and Sinai with the explicit aim of changing the demographics of the region. It was a blatant land grab. The inhabitants of these exclusive Jewish settlements are not there for ‘security’ reasons – they believe God wanted them to ‘redeem’ the land from the Palestinian ‘squatters’ who just happen to be the indigenous people of the Holy Land. The irony is that the Palestinians are the only nation on earth that can establish a definitive link to the ancient people of the Holy Land – including the ancient Israelites.

And let’s not forget the 1973 war. It was fought on occupied Arab land. Egypt and Syria had every legal right to recover the lands stolen from them in 1967 by any means necessary. These were internationally recognized sovereign Egyptian and Syrian territories under belligerent Israeli occupation.

I imagine Obama was old enough to process the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. If he can’t recollect the details, he should Google “Sabra and Shatilla” and order up some old footage of the siege of Beirut. Even Reagan was outraged and that alone should give Obama a clue about who has been in on the attack for the last 63 years.

I’m sure the state department can give Obama casualty statistics on the 2006 war in Lebanon and the 2008 invasion of Gaza. They can also confirm that no Arab Army has ever breached the 1949 Armistice line. Since the end of the 1948 war, no Israeli city has ever been bombed by an Arab air force and, in the last 38 years, no hostile military actions have taken place on Israel’s border with Egypt, Syria or Jordan. The Israelis preferred to pick on the weakest and most fragile Arab country in the region – Lebanon.

Which takes us back to 1948 which actually started in 1947 with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns and villages. Contrary to Zionist mythology, the Arab armies did not intervene until hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been unceremoniously evicted from their homes and the battles they fought were largely confined to the areas allocated to the Palestinian state by the 1947 Palestinian partition plan. That’s the verifiable historic record that has been confirmed by dozens of Israeli academics and historians; everything else is Likudnik mythology. Consult the work of Israel Shahak for a complete list of the Palestinian villages and towns that were obliterated from the face of the map.

I’m not even going to go into the Israeli Lobby’s role in marketing the WMD scam and ensnaring Americans in the Iraq war or how they used their substantial influence in Washington to back up their favorite Arab dictator, Mubarak.

To coin a phrase, Israelis are the most dangerous people in a dangerous neighborhood. A tally of the amount of damage they have inflicted on the Palestinian people and other Arabs over the last six decades helps explain Arab hostility to their belligerent neighbor. In what was perhaps his most inflammatory remark, Obama vilified Arabs by claiming that the conflict was a result of Arabs teaching irrational hatred to their children. Anyone vaguely familiar with the roots of the conflict can explain to the president that Arab grievances are a natural result of their memories of the sons and daughters that were murdered, imprisoned, dispossessed and humiliated by the so-called Israeli ‘Defense’ Forces.   But Obama doesn’t need any explanations; he knew that already. He was just sending a coded signal to Netanyahu’s lobby that he had capitulated to all their demands.

The bottom line is that Israeli security issue is a bogus issue. It’s the Palestinians and Arabs who need security guarantees and American commitments to restrain a nuclear armed Israel from invading their lands and dispossessing their people.

Of course, Obama knew he was lying about the history of the conflict and so did every other knowledgeable delegate in the audience. Fortunately, these diplomats don’t get their information from FOX, CNN or the New York Times. They are very well versed in the historic roots of the conflict. In fact, there are professionals at the State Department who could very easily have fact-checked Obama’s Likudnik narrative and saved the President from making a sorry spectacle of himself. I suspect some of them tried but were overruled – by Obama and Netanyahu.

Why would Obama stoop to lie to a bunch of delegates who were too sophisticated to believe a word he was saying?  Because he wasn’t lying to them – he was talking to Americans – Jewish Americans. He was swearing allegiance to Netanyahu to raise cold cash for his second presidential campaign. What he really sold out was American national interests and that ought to be a crime.

Obama challenged the 193 nations of the General Assembly to “face the truth” and then proceeded to deliver a diatribe of half-truths and outright lies. You want the truth? The president can’t face the truth because the truth would strain his campaign finances.

This time we should reach for what’s best within ourselves. If we do, when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations — an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.

– Obama’s speech before the General Assembly, September 23, 2010

When Barack Obama uttered these lines, the assembled delegates rewarded him with a standing ovation. That was last year’s promise. This year, Obama is promising to veto a Palestinian state for reasons that he has yet to clearly articulate. The president could always come out and explain his dramatic change of heart in plain language – but that might prove a little embarrassing. When it comes to matters of state, plain language can have a disastrous impact on America’s standing in the world. In the midst of the great Arab awakening – this single veto will not be cost-free. Lest we forget, this is the same president who supported Mubarak before he supported the Egyptian revolution. So let it never be said that Obama is inconsistent. He’ll always do the right thing when it’s convenient.

But that’s neither here nor there. If Obama was to speak plainly, we know exactly what he’d say.

“I was for the Palestinian State before I was against it. What the world needs to understand is that I am not the president of AIPAC – I’m just POTUS and I want a second term. Before casting the first stone, compare my poll numbers to the reception Netanyahu got in Congress after he refused to halt the construction of illegal settlements.”

“Even after I cast my veto, I expect Republicans and members of my own party to accuse me of throwing Israel under the bus for not imposing sanctions on the 150 states that are likely to support the Palestinian state.”

“I’ve seen the BBC polls. I know that people around the world support the justice of the Palestinian cause. I’m also aware that most Americans favor universal recognition of an independent Palestinian state. To be honest, I share their sentiment. It’s a rational and sensible position to take – if it doesn’t affect your job security.”

“Unfortunately, I’m not a private citizen. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, acting on my conscience is not a privilege accorded the President of the United States. I share the pain and suffering of the Palestinian people and I yearn for their freedom but there is not a damn thing I can do about it. One way or the other, every president and every senator and every congressman has to answer to AIPAC.”

“As President of the United States of America, I have to do what I have to do which is pretty much what I’m told to do by the Israeli Lobby. I’ve got to parrot the line that direct negotiations must be given a chance knowing full well that after two decades of negotiations, Israel has done nothing but create obstacles to a two state solution. I’m obliged to feign Ignorance of the fact that the number of settlers in the West Bank have tripled since the Oslo agreement. My assigned duties require me to constantly raise a fuss about the illusionary security threats to an expansionist apartheid state that has a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the entire Middle East. Part of my job is to get along with psychotic dispensationalist congressmen and senators who believe that a ‘peace-loving’ Israel was doing God’s work when it murdered 1,500 Palestinians and demolished the entire infrastructure of Gaza in operation Cast Lead. And after doing the obligatory dog and pony routine, I’ve got to sign the annual three billion foreign aid check to a country that has a per capita income that earned it the right to join the Organization of Economically Developed Nations.”

“Seriously, what choice do I have in the matter? It’s part of my job description. If I don’t follow through with my marching orders, I won’t have to answer to the Republicans; my White House eviction orders will come from my own party.”

“Deep down, I’m hoping my veto will inspire responsible governments around the world to internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As long as America monopolizes and dominates the ‘peace process’ – there will be plenty of ‘process’ but there will never be peace. So to those of you who understand the dynamics of American domestic politics, I beg you – take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict off my plate before AIPAC sets the dogs on me. Call me a hypocrite if you must but don’t call on me to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; I’m not Jimmy Carter and I don’t want to change my address before 2016.”

The Syrian rebels are facing a diabolical regime that not only has a monopoly on violence but has forty years of experience in making liberal use of its exclusive franchise to torment its people. And if that isn’t enough of a deterrent against joining the uprising, a Syrian rebel also has to confront the reality that most of the regional players are more than willing to place their bets on the butcher of Damascus.

Arab regimes are like Mafia families and as a general rule they know the boundaries of their turf. Assad’s gang is in good standing with the Godfathers of the House of Saud, enjoys excellent relationships with the theocrats in Tehran and has secured an unofficial détente with Israel. Damascus can always depend on Hezbollah to do its bidding in Lebanon and Maliki of Iraq has expressed his support for ‘stability’ in Syria. Nabil Al-Arabi, the foreign minister of Egypt and the newly appointed secretary general of the Arab League, has also taken his place on the ‘stability’ wagon although he did take the extraordinary measure of recommending unspecified ‘reforms’ in Syria.

Even the Palestinians will look the other way for fear of incurring the wrath of the Damascus. If the slaughter in Hama still resonates with the Syrians, the Palestinians have not forgotten Hafez El Assad’s role in the Tel El Zaatar massacre.
The Assad clan has always had a talent for attracting the strangest of bedfellows. Just a few days ago, Walid Jumblatt, the uncrowned prince of the Lebanese Druze, showed up in Damascus to consult with the Syrian godfather on the formation of a Lebanese cabinet. Just for the record, the Jumblatt and Assad clans have a relationship that goes way back to when Kamal Jumblatt, Walid’s Father, was assassinated by none other than Hafez El Assad, Bashar’s daddy. It was nothing personal – just the banal business of a brutish dictatorship.

Even Turkey has to make allowances for Syria’s Machiavellian genius. It wasn’t so long ago that the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) had a safe haven in Syria. Perhaps that’s why Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, took three months to condemn the ‘savage atrocities’ of Assad’s goons.

Three months into the Syrian revolt and not a single Syrian diplomat has resigned to protest the carnage. Although there are credible accounts of a mutiny in Gisr Jisr al-Shughour, Syrian army officers remain loyal to the regime. Much of the slaughter is apparently the handiwork of the infamous Shabiha, a shadow militia of Baath Party goons that is a bit like Papa Doc Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes but operates with the discipline and ruthlessness of the East German Stasi.

As for the “international community,” they might work themselves into enough of a frenzy to pass some sort of Security Council resolution. But economic sanctions won’t deter the regime and there’s a very remote possibility of any kind of outside military intervention. Should Bashar suffer the fate of Sudan’s Bashir and earn himself a well-deserved indictment from the International Criminal Court, he might find a jail cell in The Hague a welcome back-up destination compared to the prospects of facing a lynch mob in Damascus. As for economic sanctions, the Syrian regime has already developed the requisite know-how for handling economic hardships – they just pass off the privations onto the Syrian masses.

Not a word of this will come as any revelation to any of the unarmed Syrian rebels bearing their chests to the guns of a despotic regime. Three months into the uprising, they know that the outside world has abandoned them and that they will have to finish this fight on their own. That takes raw courage – the unique madness that is born of utter desperation.
If we can’t join them in the fight, we can at least send them a little advice. This struggle will be won by the side that can endure the most pain for the longest period of time. While it’s true that the Syrian rebels have already succeeded in mauling the regime’s legitimacy, the Assad clan didn’t enter this battle with any legitimacy worth quibbling about. They will not abandon power out of embarrassment.

But none of this means that the rebels don’t have a few aces up their sleeves. Assad has only so many armed thugs and the rebels own a powder keg of twenty million disgruntled but unarmed citizens. So far, the regime has been able to mow down protesters in Deraa on Friday and then relocate them to Jisr al-Shughour a few days later. Their strategy is to make examples of the most rebellious towns. That also helps to explain why they detain demonstrators, torture them and release them to spread the message that Assad’s goons are demented psychos capable of all sorts of depravity.

For the Syrian uprising to succeed, new tactics are needed because Facebook pages and taking bullet wounds to the skull won’t do. I suggest turning out the lights every Thursday night at 9 pm and banging pots and pans till midnight. While you’re at it, ignore the messenger and kill the message by boycotting all state media, especially state owned newspapers. That’s phase one. Once you get a critical mass of participation, horde some pita bread, cheese and olives and start a one week strike. Don’t leave your homes. Don’t go to work. Close your shops and keep your kids out of schools. And, whatever you do, don’t go to mosques or church services. Leave your places of worship empty and make your homes citadels of liberty. Then take to the streets and see if Doctor Bashar still has any ammunition to confront the courage of a Syrian rebel.

The defection of journalists and TV personalities means that the regime has lost its ability to control the message. Until Monday, the coverage of the uprising by the government owned press has been scandalous. Now, the change in tone coming from the regime’s very own megaphone suggests that even state paid propagandists have read the writing on the wall and decided that the demonstrators have gained the upper hand.

One prominent headline in Wednesday’s issue of Al-Ahram, the official megaphone of the regime, demonstrated the dramatic tilt in coverage. “Fi Al Tahrir Hata al Raheel” translates into “We’ll Occupy Tahrir Square until Mubarak steps down” or in other words “We shall not be moved.” That would have been unthinkable a week ago.

What’s more astonishing about these developments is that a day earlier, Omar Suleiman, held a two hour meeting with the management of major government daily papers and privately owned opposition papers. I guess whatever message he was trying to deliver just didn’t sink in. It appears that even disreputable government employed journalists have bailed out on Mubarak because they understand the liability of being too closely identified with the dictatorial regime.

Every journalist in the country is suddenly howling about the mind boggling corruption of Mubarak’s government. The former minister of interior, Habib Adly, apparently amassed a fortune of $1.3 billion dollars. Not bad for a government employee. Other former ministers have amassed similar fortunes. According to Al-Ahram, the former Minister of Tourism, The former Minister of Housing and the former Minister of Health are all billionaires and the attorney general has already issued orders freezing their assets and barring them from leaving the country. In a country where the minimum wage was only recently raised to the equivalent of $70 a month, even a million dollars is considered surreal wealth. So you can only imagine how these revelations sit with the man on the street especially when they are confirmed by the government’s own media establishment.

Of course, the net worth of the Mubarak clan is still a taboo subject. There is speculation in the foreign press that the president is one of the richest men in the world with a fortune estimated at $40 billion. Al-Ahram won’t go there – not yet anyhow. But the disturbing news of the first family’s fabulous wealth has already reached Tahrir Square and it helps explain why the demonstrations are gaining strength.

With the sudden change in the sentiments of the scribes of the government press, all eyes are now focused on the army. So far, the army has maintained a neutral stance. The common wisdom in the western press is that the army will eventually tilt towards the regime because its senior officers are beneficiaries of many perks. That might be true, but they’re still Egyptians and they won’t easily give up their status as the single most respected institution in the country. While the generals are often handsomely rewarded by the regime for their loyalty, the vast majority of officers are middle class and their compensation has taken a downward dive even as Mubarak targeted his largess towards the police and the Republican Guards.  Anybody who knows anything about Egypt understands that the junior officers in the military will abandon their posts before accepting orders to abort a popular uprising. The military establishment has two choices – they can play a meaningful and constructive role in the Post-Mubarak era or they can prop up the faltering regime for a few months at the expense of losing the trust of their people.

As the uprising gains momentum, college professors, professional associations and trade unions are joining the fray. They know which way the tide is turning and so does the army’s rank and file.

The young people who led this uprising have a spirit and a love of country that no Egyptian can ignore. There is a surge of patriotism in the country that transcends anything seen since the 1973 war. Egypt has not experienced a popular uprising of this magnitude since 1919 when Egyptians became the first third world people to secure nominal independence from the British Empire. Those kids in Tahrir Square know their history and have seen three hundred of their finest shed their blood for freedom. They will honor their sacrifices by standing tall against any force that attempts to abort their uprising. A word to the wise – listen carefully to what these young men and women are saying – “we shall not be moved.”

One has to wonder why Hillary is straining herself to accelerate America’s declining reputation and influence in the region.  The Independent of London has just reported that Frank Weisner, Obama’s ‘envoy’ to Mubarak was “employed by an American lobbying and law firm, Patton Boggs, which works for the Mubarak regime and several leading Egyptian commercial families”.  If Hillary was aware of that conflict of interest, she needs to resign immediately. If she didn’t know, she needs to resign anyway after explaining why Citizen Weisner was hand-picked to negotiate an ‘orderly transition’ with a dictator he still does business with.

Unless Clinton is completely untutored in the Middle East, she had to know Weisner’s pedigree. The Weisner clan has a family tradition of supporting Middle Eastern Tyrants. His father, Frank Weisner Senior, was the Directorate of Plans at the CIA and was instrumental in supporting pro-American forces that toppled Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. Weisner Senior replaced Mossadegh with the Shah and we all know how that little episode ended.

Two weeks into the Egyptian uprising, Hillary is sending out confusing messages and the bill for her follies has been picked up by the 300 plus Egyptians who have so far perished at the hands of Mubarak’s thugs.

Let’s be very clear about what every policy maker knows about Hillary’s family friend. First off, Mubarak is a multi-billionaire – which is hard to explain given that the ailing dictator’s only legitimate source of income is his government paycheck. He’s a thug who has administered a police state for three decades. He’s an arsonist who recently disbanded his police force and opened the prison gates to create enough chaos to justify a curfew. He’s a gangster whose ruling party raised an army of hired goons to attack peaceful demonstrators. He’s a censor who unplugged the entire country from the internet and encouraged his security forces to assault foreign journalists so his state owned media could control the message. He’s a compulsive liar who promised the Egyptian people that he would only serve two terms but ended up lording over them for five consecutive terms. I could add more to his resume – but that’s a fair enough portrayal of Hillary’s family friend.

There is one other thing about Mubarak that’s worth mentioning – his people hate him.

It’s time for Obama to get a grip. He can’t be for Hillary and the Egyptian people. The president needs to make a choice. Egyptians are intent on taking control of their own destiny and Hillary appears to be out of control. Obama says one thing – Hillary says another. It’s not that Egyptians are going to wait for Americans to make up their minds. They know that Mubarak was a useful American ‘asset.’ They know that the United States is trying to come up with a ‘Plan B’ to accommodate their unscheduled uprising. And from where they stand in Tahrir Square, Hillary’s new policy is to ease out the old dictator and keep the dictatorship in place. That’s not going to happen. Egyptians have finally inhaled the sweet scent of liberty and they have paid for it in blood. I don’t think that message has gotten through to Hillary. Egyptians don’t just want to be free of their dictators – they want zero American meddling in their affairs. Americans have a history in this region and it’s not something they should boast about and it’s not something they should want to repeat.

What Hillary is attempting to do is abort the Egyptian revolution.  If she fails, they’ll be a price to be paid. Egyptians are going to remember the forces that stood against their struggle for liberty. If she succeeds, the price will be unbearable. The level of repression the regime will dole out to its adversaries will be something on the order of Pinochet’s Chile. But the response to repression will be radicalization in the entire region and Obama better get the CIA on the phone and get a little ‘blow-back’ assessment before he signs off on Hillary’s plan. That should be enough rope to reign in Hillary for having such nasty family friends.

There was something obviously different about the crowd that showed up to participate in what turned out to be the largest demonstration since the uprising began. For one thing, they came without their children and there were fewer women in the crowd. That was to be expected. Fear of violent attacks by the hired thugs of the Mubarak’s ruling party haunted the event and the square was littered with stones and debris from the battles on Wednesday. Many of the veterans of those attacks were limping or walking around with blood soaked bandages.

The few foreign journalists who came to cover the event were edgy and visibly concerned for their own personal safety. In a desperate effort to reduce coverage of the demonstrations, Mubarak’s goons had attacked them in their hotels and stolen or damaged their equipment. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 114 foreign journalists have been attacked or arrested in the last two days. The government blamed the intimidation campaign on unidentified rogue elements in the security forces but the harassment continues.

Neutering the foreign press was an essential tactic for a propaganda campaign by the organs of the State owned media which has been shameless in distorting the realities on the ground. The employees of Egyptian government newspapers and television stations are nothing more than ruling party hacks but they are not without their talents. While some of the rumors they were circulating were marginally plausible, others were off the wall.

Perhaps the most entertaining rumor was the “Kentucky Fried” allegation. According to one story circulated by the ‘national press,’ the million plus protestors came to the square in expectation of a platter of spicy chicken and 50 Euros. The fictional foreign agents serving the crowd came armed with tons of cash and the Colonel’s secret recipe. Whoever dreamed up that rumor forgot to mention that there is only one Kentucky Fried outlet in Tahrir Square and it’s been closed since the uprising began.

The general theme of the government’s propaganda assault has revolved around foreign agents organizing and deceiving the naïve anti-regime protestors. One concocted report in Al-Akhbar had 300 foreign saboteurs caught red handed in Suez. In government media accounts, alien provocateurs were everywhere to be found. The source of the mischief all depended on which hallucination you were reading. The agitators are apparently Israeli spies sponsored by Americans and Hamas activists financed by Iranians on a joint mission to turn Egypt into a striptease club ruled by a Shiite theocracy.

To give you an idea of how disgraceful Egyptian state journalism can be; it took ten days for Al-Ahram to notice that the demonstrator’s essential demand was for Mubarak to abdicate his throne. Until yesterday, the flagship of the government’s propaganda machine portrayed the demonstrations as rallies against high food prices and unemployment and in support of unspecified ‘reforms.’ The day after the slaughter at Tahrir Square, Al-Ahram boasted this headline “Millions demonstrate in support of Mubarak.” The reporting is so scandalous that many government employed journalists have quit in protest and others are simply refusing to write.

The regime’s efforts at damage control were not ineffective. The campaign hit a chord with the argument that Mubarak had already resigned and was just waiting for his term to expire in September. Egyptians are a sentimental people and the appeal to treat Mubarak as the father of the nation had some resonance. They failed to mention that Mubarak was the kind of father who devours his own children. So far, over 300 hundred have died because of his stubborn refusal to accept early retirement.

To date, the government owned papers have yet to raise or answer questions regarding the virtual disappearance of the police force. On the one hand, their editorials paint the soon to be deposed president as the only man on the planet who can insure internal security and prevent chaos. On the other hand, they can’t explain where or why his police vanished, who gave the orders to disband them or why Egypt even needs a police force. For over a week, the people have managed quite nicely without them and crime stats are probably at an all time low. Thanks to the citizen security committees that were set up to confront the criminal elements, no burglar in his right mind would brave the gauntlet of checkpoints set up on virtually every block. It’s always been safe to walk Cairo’s streets. It’s even safer now. After we toss the dictator out, the costs of Mubarak’s bloated security forces obviously needs to be addressed.

Another part of the propaganda campaign is to portray the uprising as an organized plot by the Muslim Brotherhood. The truth is that the uprising was spontaneous and unorganized. While the fuse was lit by a group of liberal-minded internet-savvy activists, it has evolved into a nationalist movement dominated by citizens unaffiliated with any group or party. They have all rallied around a single cause – bringing down the regime. All you have to do is walk around Tahrir Square and read the home-made signs. “The people demand the removal of the regime,” “He Goes – We Stay” “Go already, Have some self-respect, I’m tired of holding up this sign.” What you won’t find are “Death to America” signs or anyone burning an American flag. When the demonstrators in Tahrir square got the badly translated message that Obama had asked Mubarak to step down – they were ecstatic. Of course, Obama had done nothing of the sort. It’s now clear that the United States has decided to throw its weight behind Mubarak’s regime. With or without Mubarak, America wants a compliant dictator to rule over Egypt.

If history repeats itself in Egypt, it will lead to a new polity in the Turkish mold not a replay of the Iranian Revolution. Unfortunately, Hillary and Obama have apparently fallen victim to the canard that this uprising will lead to a power grab by mullahs. Egypt doesn’t have mullahs and Egyptians don’t do theocracy. Win or lose, the American betrayal of the Egyptian revolt against tyranny will not be soon forgotten.

Another bit of slander against the young rebels is that they are agents of chaos. Nothing could be further from the truth. It wasn’t the rebels who resorted to violence – it was Mubarak’s goons. The rebels didn’t throw open the prison gates – that was a chore left to Mubarak’s security forces who then abandoned their stations and betrayed their duty to maintain law and order. Had the regime allowed peaceful demonstrations, the tourists in Sharm, Luxor and Hurghada would have stayed put.

It wasn’t the rebels who turned off the internet and cell phones. Again, that was Mubarak. It wasn’t the rebels who enforced the curfew that paralyzed economic activity; that was Mubarak. To extend his thirty year dictatorship, the strongman canceled train service, blocked highway travel, closed the banks and brought the country to a virtual standstill. So aside from being a ruthless dictator, the man is an economic arsonist.

The last time Mubarak bothered to speak to his subjects was last Tuesday night – five days ago. To say that he has a tin ear would be the understatement of the year. He’s always treated Egyptians with utter disdain and he’s most likely in a vengeful mood. If he prevails, Egyptians will pay dearly for daring to rise up against his regime.

There is really only one story here and it is ever so uncomplicated. This is an uprising against an octogenarian dictator who could have done us all a favor by retiring two decades ago. After he goes, the remaining 84 million Egyptians can sort things out among themselves. Everything else is fiction.

Keep the faith – freedom is being born.

The octogenarian dictator is simply delusional if thinks he can hold onto power. By my estimates, he’ll be gone in a week or two – hopefully sooner. But before he gives up his throne, he means to dole out a severe dose of punishment to the 80 million ‘ingrates’ who have delegitimized his corruption infested regime.

Mubarak is a desperate and stubborn man. The disbanding of the police last Friday was a calculated attempt to manufacture chaos and terrorize the populace. It was supposed to be the perfect state crime. The police suddenly vanished abandoning even the prisons which are administered by the Ministry of Interior. With the gates thrown wide open, the criminal elements were let loose as the state controlled media started spreading false rumors of hysterical citizens being attacked in their homes. The crooks were joined by some members of the police force that were ‘on vacation.’ They obviously weren’t idiots. Instead of using the security void to attack apartments and homes, they targeted the national museum, upscale retailers, the gold market and malls.

Unfortunately for Mubarak, the Egyptian people disrupted the regime’s plan. All around the country, alert citizens immediately took control of security in their neighborhoods and within a few hours of the mysterious and still unexplained disappearance of the police, young men and old banded together to protect their families and their property. Defense committees were set up on virtually every block. It was a splendid show of community values and extremely effective. Put it this way – this was a bad week to be a burglar in Cairo.

The regime has yet to explain who gave the orders for the police to abandon their stations. When the plot fizzled, Mubarak fired Habib Adley, the interior minister and blamed the chaos on “foreign elements” – no doubt the diabolical Maltese Intelligence Agency working in coordination with Taiwanese drug cartels.

The objective of the government’s plot to foment chaos was to compel Egyptians to hide in their homes while “Daddy Mubarak” came to the rescue. The ensuing disorder was a great excuse to impose a curfew to disband the demonstrators in Tahrir Square and dissuade others from joining them. Mubarak and his henchmen might be creative but their attempt to spread panic was not exactly original. That’s pretty much what the American Army did when they invaded Iraq – they ordered the army and police to disband and unlocked the penitentiary gates.

A few days later millions of Egyptians ignored the curfew and took to the streets demanding that Mubarak step down. In Cairo alone, the crowd was estimated at a million plus and hundreds of thousands marched in Alexandria. Not a single policeman was there to ‘protect’ the peaceful demonstrators and there wasn’t a single casualty – not even a broken bottle. Demonstrators mingled freely with the army and even picked up the garbage. They had one basic demand – the immediate retirement of Hosni Mubarak.

But Mubarak wasn’t about to give up so easily. The next morning, ‘patriots’ from the disbanded police force, party loyalists and hired thugs started their own ‘demonstration’ and made their way to Tahrir square armed with clubs. They could have held a peaceful protest at some other location but they were hell bent on a violent confrontation. These ‘Hosnicrats’ were more or less the same elements that had intimidated voters and opposition candidates in the recent rigged parliamentary elections. Ominously, the Egyptian Army, which has so far played a neutral role, didn’t prevent Mubarak’s thugs from attacking the very same peaceful marchers that a day earlier had demonstrated that a million Egyptians could assemble and protest without throwing a single stone.

The night before, rumors of an organized attack by Mubarak’s mercenaries had circulated among the demonstrators camped out in Tahrir Square. Many decided to leave but those who stayed were determined not to be provoked. What followed was proof that the attacks in Tahrir Square were just another part of Mubarak’s plot to orchestrate chaos. The Army issued orders for both sides to clear the square and go home and refused to intervene to protect the anti-Mubarak protestors. As of this writing, dawn on Thursday, the Mubarak loyalists had started firing live ammo into the crowd. So far, eight demonstrators have been murdered and many more are wounded.

Mubarak despises his people more than they despise him. All he wants now is for his regime to survive and to restore a measure of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘stability’ – just enough to give his American patrons a fig leaf to allow Obama to turn a blind eye to what’s going down in Egypt. He now says he will step down at the end of his term and he promises to use his remaining time in office facilitating an orderly transition. The obvious danger is that he will also use the balance of his tenure to beef up his internal security apparatus, crack down on the opposition and roll out a red carpet for his party and his cronies to allow them to retain control by the time he leaves office.

At the very minimum, most Egyptians had expected Mubarak to make a conciliatory gesture and disband the National Assembly. Anyone who paid cursory attention to the last elections knows they were blatantly rigged; the National Democratic Party won something like 97% of the vote and virtually every seat in the chamber. The architects of the electoral fraud were absolutely shameless. The election was a farce and Mubarak and his cronies publicly flaunted their ability to fix the vote. There again, Mubarak didn’t care what Egyptians thought and neither did the Americans.

It takes a strong dose of repression and injustice to rile up a nation that abides by the law even when the laws are unjustly administered. If there is one thing all Egyptians fear more than a tyrant, it is chaos. And that’s precisely why Mubarak and his cronies are so determined to manufacture as much chaos as possible. The octogenarian dictator needs to be sent packing to Saudi Arabia before he causes more damage.

It all started innocently enough when I witnessed a peculiar spectacle while having a cup of tea in my balcony – a demonstration in suburban Cairo of all places. Heliopolis isn’t exactly a hub for Egyptian dissidents so I wasn’t the only one who was taken aback by the weirdness of the event. Folks were hanging out in their balconies to cheer the young marchers on and the young demonstrators responded by asking them to come down and join the festive procession. Because I didn’t have any other invitations on my calendar, I took them up on their offer and went down to try out a few improvised slogans of my own. That’s why I got tear-gassed.

Once I joined the crowd, I started mingling and asking a few questions – the kind of questions journalists are supposed to ask. Which balcony did you come from? Have you ever demonstrated before – 90% answered ‘no’ to that question. Demonstrations are still considered a novelty in Egypt. There were very few signs – just some flags – another indication that most people joined spontaneously. For the uninitiated, most Egyptians keep flags at the ready to celebrate any kind of victory against any kind of foreigners – especially Algerian soccer teams. Anyhow, my impression was that the vast majority of the marchers, who were overwhelmingly middle-class and politically unaffiliated, had impulsively decided to take part in what turned out to be a historic event.

If there were one single demand that the demonstrators seemed to agree on, it was the need for Mubarak to step down. Their favorite chant was “Al’shaab yourid isqat al nizam” which translates into “the people demand the downfall of the regime.” The phrase has more rhythm in Arabic and it seemed like a reasonable enough demand after thirty years of dictatorship. Every now and we would start singing the national anthem – “Bilady Bilady”. Since I only remember about half of it, I’d mostly just hum along.

As we moved towards Tahrir Square – a good seven mile walk – the crowd got bigger as more people came down from their balconies to join us. Along the way, people handed us water bottles, passed out goodies and wished us well. I saw grown men and women crying because very few Egyptians thought they’d ever see a day like Friday, a nationwide primal scream against dictatorship, corruption and mismanagement by the ruthless octogenarian clique that rules Egypt.

There was absolutely no leadership; this was not an organized event. But we all knew our ultimate destination – Tahrir Square. We didn’t think the powers that be would let us get that far and, as we inched closer, many turned back, discouraged by the clouds of tear gas and the black smoke you could make out at a distance of two miles. We would turn onto one street, find it blocked by riot police, and turn around and search for side streets to circumvent their barricades. One thing we all wanted to avoid was any kind of clash with the police. Every time we encountered dense concentrations of security forces, we would start shouting “Selmya” – keep it peaceful – and find another path to reach the Square. A few of us came armed with onions to alleviate the effects of the tear gas but we were all defenseless.

Some people hesitated to go on – especially the young women in the crowd. If I were to give a rough estimate, I’d say only one of three demonstrators who joined the marches went the distance and maybe the two that turned around made the right decision. Because what was waiting for us in Liberation Square was a liberal dose of American manufactured tear gas and rubber bullets. The security forces had some other exotic American-made riot control weapons in their arsenal. I saw injuries from small pellets that were from some kind of non-lethal cluster bomb – but I think those were reserved for demonstrators who got close to the American University or the road leading to the American embassy. The police did not constrain themselves to the use of non-lethal weapons. Thirty people around the country died from live ammo.

Mubarak’s police goons came prepared for a riot and when they encountered tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators, they decided to treat them as rioters anyway and they had ample stocks of American financed and manufactured riot control weapons to beat back the crowd. The government also took the precaution of interrupting internet services and cell phones went dead all over the country.

The demonstrators who made it to Tahrir Square were a determined if naïve bunch. Few of them were seasoned activists. They came unprepared; no onions – no vinegar – not even water. They knew less about tear gas than I did. But once we made it to the Square, most of them decided to stay put and camp over night and that’s when the riot police intensified their assaults. Mubarak’s goons were determined to take back the Square.

The tear gas was overwhelming and thousands scurried down side streets to avoid the noxious fumes. What we found there was more riot police firing more tear gas and rubber bullets. A few people fainted and a young man watching me cough took be my arm and led me into the dark foyer of a residential building. Like most refined young Egyptians, he called me “uncle.” We went up five flights and joined others who had been invited into an apartment overlooking the Square and the American University. From there, we watched the action below from the balcony – a cat and mouse game between the riot police and the young demonstrators who started picking up the tear gas shells and throwing them back at the security forces.

Things were starting to get a little bit ugly and I had an instinct what was coming next. I walked down the five flights, made my way back to the Square and started walking towards Ramses Square. It was a little before midnight and as I exited the Square, dozens of Army tanks and troop carriers started rolling in. The young crowd was ecstatic to see them. They flashed victory signs and chanted “The Army and the people are one hand” and “The police beat us but the army shields us.” Frankly, I didn’t know what to think. While the Egyptian Army is the most respected institution in the country, a military takeover isn’t exactly my idea of democracy. After enduring hours of assaults by the police, maybe the crowds were just happy to see somebody who wasn’t firing rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. So what started out as a peaceful demonstration turned into a police riot that necessitated the intervention of the Egyptian army.

Next time you hear Hillary and Obama wax eloquent about their support for ‘stability’ and ‘reforms’ in Egypt, ask yourself why a country that rarely witnesses a demonstration has so many riot control brigades armed with such a vast arsenal of American manufactured rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. Maybe it’s because Obama and Hillary share Mubarak’s assessment that any Egyptian demonstration must be a riot. Spare me the sanctimonious drivel and pass the onions.

Ben Ali counted on the enthusiastic support of Washington until the Tunisian people revolted and ran him out of town. The Tunisian dictator took refuge in Saudi Arabia – another one of those ‘moderate’ Arab oil plantations that Washington showers with affection.

In his recent State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama declared that “the United States stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.” He should have qualified that by noting that exceptions would be made for Egyptians. A day earlier, Hillary Rodham Clinton was reassuring Mubarak’s regime that it would continue to support the Egyptian government in its confrontation with pro-democracy demonstrators. The way Hillary sees things: “Egypt’s government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the needs of Egyptians.” I suppose those needs couldn’t possibly include democracy. After thirty years of dictatorship, Mubarak is feeding Egyptians subsidized bread. What more could they possibly ask for?

To be fair, America is not the only Western country that romances Middle Eastern despots. Three days before Ben Ali’s police state apparatus crumbled, France offered the Tunisian mafia chief assistance in putting down the uprising. So don’t just blame Washington; even the folks who invented liberty and egalitarianism don’t want the Arabs to be free.

Let it never be said that the gurus at the State Department and the National Security Council are inconsistent. The Washington foreign policy establishment cringes at the thought of Arabs lining up at ballot boxes. They’ve seen where that leads. Free elections in Algeria, Gaza, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq have all resulted in victories for the dreaded Islamic parties.

Mindful of that, the neo-con wizards had a plan worked out to circumvent any democratic hassles after the ‘liberation’ of Iraq. To avoid the risks of free elections, they set up the Iraqi Governing Council as an interim government. All twenty-five members of the council were appointed by Paul Bremer, the newly crowned emperor of Baghdad. Many of his appointees were Iraqi exiles like the infamous Ahmed Chalabi, the man groomed to be Iraq’s velvet-gloved dictator. When queried about the democracy promised by the American invaders, Bremer was dismissive. He famously said “elections that are held too early can be destructive.”

Even after the events in Tunisia, it’s unlikely that we will see any changes in America’s hostility towards political reform in the Middle East. Take Hillary at her word. The United States will continue to support the despotic regimes in the Middle East. It’s not just a matter of habit or perceived strategic and economic interests. It goes much deeper than that. There is a political culture that is deeply entrenched in the State Department, The national security apparatus, the Washington think tanks and the media. Simply put, Washington’s political establishment despises Muslims in general and Arabs in particular and they distrust their electoral choices.

When it comes to the Middle East, Washington is a Stalinist echo chamber where anti-Arab rhetoric has its rewards. Part of the reason is that the State Department and Congress are Israeli occupied territories. Regardless of who occupies the White House, one has to pass a Likudnik loyalty test to land a job as doorman at Foggy Bottom.

Just take a look at the resume of Jeffrey Feltman, the American diplomat dispatched to Tunis to sort things out. He’s a protégé of Martin Indyk, the Israeli lobbyist who was recruited directly from AIPAC to serve as American ambassador to Israel but never failed to perform his duties as an Israeli envoy to the State Department.  On any policy issue pertaining to the Middle East, Israeli lobby operatives have the last word.

It’s no secret that committed Likudniks like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were the driving force behind America’s trillion dollar misadventure in Iraq or that the same dark forces are braying for a confrontation with Iran. They even consider Turkey a mortal threat. American blood and treasure are of no consequence to these committed and disciplined Zionist ideologues. They march to the beat of an Israeli drum and as long as they remain entrenched in the State Department and the National Security Council, the essential acid test for American Foreign policy will be “Is it good for Israel?”

So take a moment and ponder what all the pundits and wizards in Washington have not lamented about the Tunisian revolt. Saddam could have very easily gone the way of Ben Ali. At the time of the invasion and due to the effectiveness of the no-fly zones, the Iraqi dictator’s security forces barely held sway over a third of the country and Saddam was so insecure about the sentiments of his people that he couldn’t risk sleeping in the same bed for two nights running. American and British planes bombed Iraq at will. I’m not only certain that Bush and Blair knew that Saddam had no WMDs; I’ve asserted before that if they really thought he had them, they wouldn’t have risked an invasion.

For all practical measures, Saddam was the mayor of Baghdad — a defanged delusional tiger who spent his last days in power penning love stories. Saddam was contained by brutal sanctions and the United States had already made contacts with Iraqi generals who agreed to stand down and offer no resistance. When he finally realized the end was near, Saddam used back channels and offered every conceivable concession to avoid an American invasion. Of course, after taking control of the country, the neo-cons stabbed the generals in the back and disbanded the army because of their obsession with de Ba’athication. Absent American military intervention, Iraqis might very well have managed to remove their despotic leader and resurrect a secular republic. It wouldn’t have been perfect but it would certainly not have turned into a failed theocratic state in Iran’s sphere of influence.

At the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, 4,500 American fatalities, two million refugees that include half of Iraq’s pre-war Christian population and a trillion dollars borrowed from the Chinese, George Bush rolled out the red carpet for Iranian allied sectarian parties. Why? Because his advisers — Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith — thought it would be good for Israel. The outcomes in Iraq obviously didn’t match the Likudniks’ wet dreams but had they removed their ideological blinders, the war party might have been more sober in doing their risk assessments and spared Americans a disastrous foreign policy fiasco and the enduring enmity of tens of millions of people in the Middle East and beyond.

So there should be no confusion about Hillary’s stand on Mubarak as opposed to Obama’s latent support of the Tunisian revolutionaries. The inconsistencies are in perfect harmony with the Israeli lobby’s traditional hostility towards the Arab people. It is a hostility that has very little to do with America’s national interests and everything to do with the Likudnik architects of America’s foreign policy in the region.

Make no mistake, the Arabs will soon reach the mountain top and taste the sweet wine of liberty but it will be not thanks to Hillary, Obama or the Israeli Lobby.

•  Ahmed wrote this article in Cairo, Egypt  “while inhaling the intoxicating scent of the Egyptian uprising in Cairo.”

Take a good look at the man who held the title of POTUS for eight years – he looks jittery and it’s worth speculating if he’s back on the bottle. I’m not suggesting that Bush is stupid. You need to be awful crafty to regurgitate the same WMD lies for eight years. I’m just saying that the ex-president was in no mental state to write a book – certainly not a book of this size. The entire book was probably farmed out to some Neo-con boiler room operation. The word is already out that Condi Rice vetted the doctored manuscript before it made its way to the printing press. I can see Bush now patting Rice on the back “Condi, you did a heck of a snow job.”

The ex-presidents Neo-con handlers and their entrenched operatives in the main stream media will do their best to cover up their crimes and as well as his. It’s not that they’re worried about their reputations. They’re worried about the legal consequences.

The real mystery is who really authored the fictional autobiography. I’ll grant that there’s a plausible possibility that if you give a zillion monkeys access to a computer, one of them will pound out a three page masterpiece. But if I’m not mistaken, George Bush doesn’t know how to use a word processor. Seriously, if Bush actually wrote a book, I’d be the first to buy it.

By all accounts, Deception Point is no Mea Culpa. Among Bush’s few regrets is a photo taken of him as he did a fly by to see what the Hurricane Katrina commotion was about and he’s still disgusted that some rapper said he ‘didn’t care about black people.’ But Bush professes not a shred of remorse over the millions of Iraqis that were killed, maimed and fled into exile as a result of his misadventures in MessOnPotamia. You can take this to the bank; George Bush doesn’t care about Iraqi people.

I expect the pundits will find it easy enough to pick through the weapons of mass deception fairy tales or pounce on the ex-president for being a self-confessed torturer who took the precaution of consulting a Dick Cheney appointed lawyer before approving water boarding and who knows what else. There’s no question that Bush and his accomplices lied about the phantom WMDs and that’s that. There was no intelligence failure and everybody with a lick of sense knows it.

Say what you will about the American intelligence community but never discount their capabilities. If Valerie Plame and Ambassador Joseph Wilson knew the WMD ‘evidence’ was fabricated, so did a whole bunch of other people in the CIA.

The decision to invade Iraq was a result of a failure of judgment not a failure of intelligence. Blinded by their ideological passions, Bush and his Likudnik neo-con advisers bet that their Iraqi venture would be a cake-walk and a slam dunk. WMDs or no WMDs, very few Americans would have complained about an easy and swift victory. And let’s give them credit; they were right – for a few months. Check out the president’s approval ratings in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Even when things started getting a little wobbly, Rumsfeld famously scoffed “we don’t do quagmires.”

By the time Bush realized he was wading neck deep in a quagmire, Rumsfeld started contemplating the “long hard slog ahead.” Seven years later, we have a clear idea of where the trillion dollar neo-con inspired slog led us. Iraq has emerged as a blood soaked chaotic landscape where Shiite theocrats and radicalized Sunnis going at each other. Today’s Iraq is ranked as one of the most corrupt and unstable countries in the world. So I’m just curious about something. When God told Bush to invade Iraq, did he mention anything about the potential decimation of one of the largest and most ancient Christian communities in the Middle East?

Moving on to the crazy decision to disband the Iraqi army – Bush’s phantom biographers are again pointing the finger at Paul Bremer for making that disastrous decision. If I recall, the neo-con praetorian guards tried to pull this off back in 2007. Fortunately, Paul Bremer refused to fall on his sword and turned around and handed documents to the New York Times proving that Bush knew in advance of the plan to dissolve Saddam’s military. The notion that the senior American envoy to Iraq would be left with the decision to disband the Iraqi Army was absurd on its face. When Bush was called out on it by Robert Draper, this was his response – “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, “this is the policy, what happened?’”

What else did Bush and his ghostwriters forget? I doubt the book mentions anything about Bush’s role in giving American occupation forces standing orders to turn a blind eye to Iraqi government death squads and ignore the torture dungeons operated by the vicious Wolf Brigades. That decision was in line with the Bush Administration’s policy of extraordinary rendition. No worries. Bush had Cheney’s lawyers sign off on that policy too.

There is no doubt in my mind that Deception Point is a hoax – a bit of revisionist neo-con history to fog our collective memories of Bush’s atrocities. And I’ll tell you who knows it’s a hoax – Random House, the publishers. Don’t boycott the book because there’s no book to boycott. Trust me – Bush didn’t write no damn book. Boycott Random House for their role in pulling off this hoax.

What if you were a Palestinian shell-shocked by decades of the world’s collective indifference? What would you tell your children? Is there any way to explain to a child why his people were ethnically cleansed to make room for a State as Jewish as England is English?

Why do pundits and politicians in the West get away with denying that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the Holy Land? Why do we allow Israelis and their supporters to denigrate the historic rights of the Palestinians to live in the only homeland they’ve ever known? How is it that we don’t notice that, even today, half the population of historic Palestine is of native stock?

Why do the treasonous intellectuals of the West routinely allow Zionists to unabashedly declare their ‘right’ to settle in the Holy Land? Are they really that ignorant of the ethnic cleansing that dispossessed the Palestinians in 1948 or have they been afflicted by the epidemic of anti-Palestinism? With or without a state, should we accord the Palestinians the right to exist and what kind of existence are they entitled to?

It’s one thing to talk about the facts on the ground and despair at the remote possibilities of a just solution for the Palestinian problem. Because we all know what it would take to accord Palestinians the full spectrum of rights that we all take for granted. We all have the right to leave and return to the places where we were born — to the sacred land where our forefathers are buried. But if the Palestinians make legitimate claims to exercise that most basic of rights, they are accused of denying the right of Israel to exist.

Simply put, if international law applied to Palestinians, we would have to restore their rights to live anywhere in their ancestral homeland. But that’s not in the cards — because they’re nothing more than Palestinians and anti-Palestinism is the law of the land. If we were of a mind to accord them their legitimate rights, we would be obliged to issue every Palestinian refugee a visa to return to the Holy Land and we all know where that might lead — a country where immigrant European Jews and their descendents would be ‘deprived’ of an exclusive Jewish state.

Heaven forbid we should even attempt to persuade Israeli Jews to grant equal rights to the indigenous population. See, that would be considered anti-Zionism which is now deemed indistinguishable from anti-Semitism. The whole notion that there ever was an indigenous population in the Holy Land is a taboo subject. When it comes to the Palestinians, we cast reason aside and conveniently forget history, demographics and DNA. Who died and gave the Israelis and their dispensationalist Armageddon worshiping allies a license to make the absurd claim that Ethiopian and Moldavian Jews are the original natives of Palestine? Who issued the Israeli Lobbyists a pass to substitute their scripture for international law? Who says Jews are chosen and the Palestinians are not? And tell me again; if you’re not chosen, I imagine that means you’re cursed. How derogatory is that?

If you probe Zionist theology, you’ll see the logic behind the core Zionist argument. Palestinian Christians and Muslims deserved to be ethnically cleansed because they abandoned the ‘right’ religious traditions. Think about that because it’s a real simple concept to digest. If the Zionists had shown up on the shores of Palestine and found the natives still practicing Judaism, they wouldn’t have evicted them from their homes or expropriated their lands. Every Palestinians understands that. They also understand that if they had obliged the Zionists and converted to Judaism, they might have been spared an eviction notice and all the carnage that has plagued them for two generations. You want to know the original sins of the Palestinians — some of them put their faith in Jesus and gave up Judaism for Orthodox Christianity and others went a step further and embraced Islam. Had they stuck to their ancient Jewish traditions, they would never have tasted the bitter fruit of exile and dispossession.

Today, we have six million nuclear armed Zionists in full control of the entire historical boundaries of Palestine and another six million Palestinian natives living under the military rule of a Jewish supremacist state. Even in Israel proper, 20% of the citizens are descendents of the indigenous people of the Holy Land. Just to give you a perspective, at the height of the civil rights movement, only 12% of Americans were of African descent. I challenge anybody to compare the worst excesses of the segregationist south to the draconian laws that apply to Palestinians living under military occupation.

The toll in the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland was 13. Last week, the British finally got around to apologizing for that crime but will they ever get around to making amends for the Balfour Declaration? Even the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa didn’t kill the way Israel kills. In 1976, five hundred Africans were slaughtered in the Soweto uprising. Not that the world paid much attention to the carnage — but compare that figure to the 1,400 civilians who were slaughtered in Gaza last year. Does the State Department keep a tally of how many Palestinians have been butchered since the Zionists came to build a ‘Jewish homeland’ on their native soil?

Did the Palestinians deserve what happened to them? If they had been left unmolested by the British and the Zionists, what kind of country would they have now? That’s what the world looks like from Palestinian eyes. Why us and why doesn’t anybody care? They’ve stolen our homeland — can’t the Israelis at least leave us with the memories of what was and what could have been? Before they set their covetous eyes on our towns and villages in the West Bank, can’t they take a deep breath, hang their head in shame and step back to the land they’ve already vanquished?

Why are the Israelis given a carte blanche to falsify history? Why is Nakba denial not considered beyond the pale? Indeed, why is the ‘Nakba’ not part of our daily vocabulary?

Why was Joseph Biden not taken to task when he publicly avowed his allegiance to Zionist ideology? Where was the public outcry? Why didn’t anybody call for his immediate resignation? What exactly did the Vice President of the United States mean to say? Those words have a very clear meaning; they are an expression of the vilest form of anti-Palestinism. When somebody utters them, every Palestinian understands their meaning. It means that Palestine never had a right to exist — that it was a disposable country that deserved to be eradicated off the face of the earth.

I know Joseph Biden is a despicable bigot for uttering those words; the problem is he doesn’t. Worst still, he feels righteous in saying them — as righteous as any true blue segregationist who applauded Jim Crow laws — as righteous as any Nazi German who believed that European Jews deserved to be incinerated — as righteous as any Zionist who believes the Palestinians should be ethnically cleansed to make room for Eretz Israel. By the way, did Biden mention if he was a Labor Zionist or a Likudnik? After getting bitch slapped by Netanyahu in Jerusalem, he ought to have figured out the difference.

The thing about Zionists who openly spew their anti-Palestinism is not their support of the right of Israel to exist but their subscription to the obscene notion that Palestinians deserved to lose their homeland. In formulating a resolution of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, it is one thing to accommodate current demographic and political realities and quite another to say that Israel had the right to come into existence over the carcass of Palestine. We can acknowledge and deal with the end result of the nauseating refuse of Israeli history without justifying the cruelty inflicted on the Palestinians. Tribes have eradicated tribes for centuries. But last I checked, this is the 21st Century. What might have been considered acceptable conduct at the peak of the European colonialism should not be condoned today. We’ve dealt with segregationist southerners and the radical Apartheid regime and we can work a humane resolution to the plight of the indigenous people of the Holy Land without cheering Zionist racists or denigrating their Palestinian victims.

Anti-Palestinism deprives us of the moral clarity that is essential to a resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We need to start recognizing anti-Palestinism for what it is: hate speech. That day will come when every pundit and every politician will rue the day they publicly flaunted their anti-Palestinism. Make no mistake, in the not so distant future, bigots like Joseph Biden will be obliged to eat their words and apologize for their blatant espousal of ethnic cleansing. When anti-Palestinism becomes a crime, Biden is the first person the Palestinians should sue.

Marketing hate speech is perfectly legal — at least in the United States — and, to put it mildly, the folks at Yahoo have cast aside their terms of use and stretched the letter of the law to allow their readers to post comments inciting violence and calling for genocide against certain ethnic groups.

It’s amazing what a decade can do to a news portal like Yahoo. Ten years ago when the internet was young and as fresh as the day it was born, Yahoo offered up diverse opinions from news sources that represented everybody from the right to the progressive left. Well as the old folks say — ‘those days are gone’ and you can kiss the new Yahoo goodbye when it comes to getting alternative points of view.

If you’re looking for international news, Yahoo publishes Associated Press content and almost nothing else.  But that’s neither here nor there; what really concerns me is that Yahoo and AP engage in a very unique practice which, in my opinion, is border line criminal and certainly unethical. The two media giants string user comments from old articles and port them to new AP articles.  In one instance, a string of over 50,000 comments was ported from one AP article to another for two months.  That contention is not in dispute. Both Yahoo and AP were apparently contacted by other journalists and neither denied the practice.

AP is now claiming that this is a Yahoo problem that they didn’t have a clue about it. Now how likely is that? I checked Yahoo’s home page a few days ago and they had a display of nine articles under the World News tab. Every single one of them was an AP article.  You wouldn’t buy a paper that was wall-to-wall AP press stories. But that’s a matter of taste and I won’t press the point.

Back to the comment strings that Yahoo and AP port from one article to another. First of all, they’re very selective about which articles they port comments to. The nine articles I mentioned have a comment count ranging from 69 to 17,268. Some AP articles have comments ported, but others don’t. So it’s not a software glitch. What exactly are Yahoo’s criteria for porting comments? That’s a question that deserves an answer. If you review the evidence presented below, it seems like they only ported strings of comments on AP articles related to the Middle East and Mexico — and the comment stings that are ported include a toxic dose of racist invective. When you set up a news portal for demented bigots — you need to keep the racist hordes entertained and recycled comments is Yahoo’s way of putting more red meat on the plate.         

All one can do to decipher Yahoo’s methodology is analyze the evidence presented below in Exhibit A. Notice that every single one of the stories is from the Associated Press. That makes for nine out of nine. Compare that to Google’s News feature which presents news from four thousand sources and you’ll have no doubt that Yahoo’s lack of diversity is an aberration.

But that’s not half the story. At any given moment, you can find thousands of obscenely racist comments attached to featured AP articles — some of them dating back two or three months. 

Don’t take my word for it. Just go out to Yahoo at any given time of the day and you’ll be obliged to digest a full portion of the hateful banter that has been screened and approved by Yahoo’s moderators. And you can’t help but notice that the articles are all AP articles.

I don’t have to go to too much effort to prove my point. It’s now 11 AM, Eastern Standard Time — Wednesday — June 16, 2010. I’m going to go pick up a quick sample to demonstrate that Yahoo has become the world’s single greatest purveyor of racist screeds. What follows is a small portion of the comments that were posted to a single AP article. So far, this particular string of comments has mushroomed to 11,944 comments. What’s interesting is that the article used in this example was posted only four hours ago (“Calderon asks for Mexicans’ support as toll rises by Olga Rodriquez, Wed Jun 16, 7:04 am ET).”   But the comment string stretches back three months to March 10, 2010. This is but a small sample of the user comments added to the string in the last 24 hours.  Excuse the spelling and punctuation — they only go to demonstrate the level of intellect you’re likely to encounter on a Yahoo message board.

“Let the brown-turds kill each other who cares.”
“ENGLISH only, no more Mexican crap. Don’t buy Mexico products. If you see them in the store–accidently on purpose knock the crap off the shelf.”
“I say let the Mexicans kill themselves – less roaches to worry about.”
“I say we nuke Mexico right along with the Middle East.”
“IF IT’S BROWN SHOOT IT.”
“Mexico is worse than a 3rd world country! It is one of the most disgusting places on earth!! It’s so bad even the roaches are leaving and invading our great country!”
“Keep the mexicana over in mexico let them kill each other, I don’t want them in USA there are too many here now. Ship them all back.”
“Let those savages kill each other! Those sub-humans deserve to die!!!!!!”
“MEXICO IS A BIG TOILET BOWL ,, FILLED WITH SH$#$#t AND IT KEEP S OVERFLOWING INTO THE USA,,,”
“Population control MUST be implemented. White people at least know not to have more and more babies when they CANNOT AFFORD them. WE reward these breeding@#$%roaches for having them, only to make the situation worse, and worse. Send them home, if it takes fear, violence, whatever. They are detrimental to this country.”
“The only problem with the US invading Mexico is that the b@st@rds breed faster than we can kill them!”
“Mexicans go home were you belong don`t come here and multiply like rats and take away the food stamps and cash aid that should go to the people live here leagally”
“keep the filth from coming into the U.S.A.!!! Go Arizona!!!!!!”
“Keep all Mexicans out of our Country – These are dangerous people who provide dope to our children.”
“The answer to the Mexican problem is as follows, and I quote: Exterminate the brutes”
“You can’t get rid of those Mayan bloodletting genes unless you exterminate the lot of them and start all over with new stock!”
“less mexicans is a good thing”
“AS long as it be WetBaks shootin WetBaks I can’t see a down side.”
“MEXICO IS FULL OF LOW-LIFE SCUMBAG ANIMALS. SEND ALL OF THE FILTHY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS BACK TO MEXICO ASAP!”
“mommas dont let youre babies grow up to like mexicans because they are vermin scum”
“CALDARON KEEPS BLAMING HIS ANIMAL POPULATION ON US. HIS PROBLEM IS THAT EVERYBODY IS IN THE POCKET OF THE CARTELS, INCLUDING HIM I SAY LETS NUKE MEXICO AND ALL ITS DIRTY UNEDUCATED PEOPLE. STAY AWAY FROM US AND STOP CAUSING PROBLEMS HERE.”
“Anybody want to vacation in Mexico? Tourism is their biggest money maker (besides drugs) I can’t imagine having anything to do with that barbaric country.”
“Mexico is a country for the dead. The people are scum and the government is bought by the drug lords.”

In a previous article, Suing Racist Yahoos, I gave a sampling of the derogatory comments one is likely to run into when reading virtually any article related to the Middle East.

“START CONFRONTING MUSLIMS AND INTIMIDATE THEM INTO LEAVING”
“72 VIRGINS AND A RIVER OF WINE IS WHAT THESE BONEHEADS ARE PROMISED OVER THERE, LMFAO. IF THEY DO IT HERE THEY GET 6 CRACKHEADS AND A CASE OF MAD DOG 20/20. LET’S JUST START ATTACKING THEM RIGHT HERE!!!!!”
“If this is not the greatest argument in favor of internment camps for all Muslims in the USA then we have no hope. We did it justifiably in WW2 for the Japs when needed and we NEED TO DO IT NOW FOR ALL MUSLIMS in the USA until we get this under control.”
“We should absolutely bring back the camps of WW2 where Japanese citizens and non-citizens in the US were isolated and placed in camps to ensure the safety of our great nation. Obviously the difference here is that the camps should be filled with the Muslim Scum that roam, take advantage of, and poison this once beautiful country. While we’re at it we should through all the dead beat system workers in their as well.”
“We let these these diaper heads become citizens and they terrorize us. We allow dirty Mexicans to walk across the border and commit crimes, steal jobs and impose filth and lower standards upon us and we ship American jobs to the @#$% overseas. America deserves what it gets for not taking care of its own. Seems like we get all of the trash from other countries. Won’t be long before we are a 3rd world country – just a matter of time. SPAY AND NEUTER MEXICANS!!!!!!”
“We are at war with and in the Middle East. All Muslims in the U.S. should be rounded up and placed in concentration camps until the wars are over!!!! If the republicans don’t insist that the president do something I will never vote republican again … ever!!!!”
“Until the U.S. stops allowing the dregs of society (Muslims) to come to our country and visit, study, work etc., we’ll continue to see things like this happen. Close the border to Muslims and deport all those currently living here. Otherwise, grab your flak jacket and helmet and hope you’re not in the path of the next attempted attack by Islamic scum.”

Conclusions

Like most major news portals, Yahoo has developed a well crafted business plan, and it appears that Yahoo is on some kind of mission to bring hate speech to Main Street.  What you’re seeing here is not just a result of Yahoo’s indifference to hate speech; it is the result of a shrewd business plan. With the exception of FOX, many of these comments would never make it past the moderators on other news portals. If it was just the occasional fluke comment, one could justify it by the sheer volume of user input. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Yahoo ports strings of comments from one article to another. It exaggerates user response to an article and creates the impression that controlling racist content from their readers would require immense resources.

The racist commentary and the porting of strings of comments only seem to be posted to select AP articles. Yahoo already has moderators in place and they obviously have instructions to give a pass to derogatory graffiti. This is a problem with easy and cheap solutions. Yahoo has already changed the default setting to show the newest comments first. Until a week ago, the default was oldest comments first which encouraged readers to wade through hundreds of these inane, deranged and derogatory postings without ever noticing that they were reading comments ported from ancient and unrelated AP stories.

The inescapable conclusion is that Yahoo is deliberately catering to a niche market of racists and bigots. To enhance their revenue, Yahoo is making the vilest forms of racism mainstream again. You’re unlikely to encounter much worse on a Nazi or KKK website. I challenge the Associated Press, which is posturing as an innocent party, to investigate whether this is a well formulated strategy orchestrated at the highest level of Yahoo’s management.  And while they’re at it, the Associated Press might want to explain why they haven’t noticed this Yahoo media strategy before I brought it to their attention and why the AP allowed so much racist graffiti to be ‘associated’ with AP content.         

Exhibit A – 9 out of 9 featured articles are from the Associated Press

The nine articles below were Yahoo’s featured ‘World’ news articles on June 9, 2010. Every single one of them was an Associated Press Article. Notice the date stamp on the first comment posted on each article. For example, the oldest comment on the first article was posted by “L.G.” on March 03, 2010 – which means it was a user comment that it is over three months old – 98 days to be exact. That helps explain why the comment string is 3,799 long. The deceptive and exaggerated comment count is due to the fact that comments have been aggregated from unrelated AP articles and ported. In some cases the articles are ported to multiple articles a day.

Yahoo puts a date stamp on comments that are more than 24 hours old. So notice that on some articles there is no specific date stamp. When oldest comment only lets you know how many hours ago it was posted, it means that Yahoo hasn’t ported any comments to this particular article.   

1.  Iran dismisses sanctions, but tried to avoid them
by Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press Writer

Oldest Comment:  “L.G.” Wed Mar 03, 2010 12:51 pm PST
3,799 Comments

2. Afghan ex-spy boss opposes talking to Taliban
by Matthew Pennington, Associated Press, Wed Jun 9

Oldest Comment: Kenny Sat Mar 06, 2010 09:22 pm PST
11,578 Comments

3. Analysis: Sanctions unlikely to stop Iran
by George Jahn, Associated Press Writer, Wed Jun 9,

Oldest Comment: Joe 4 hours ago
69 Comments

4. Israel lifts ban on some foods for Gaza
by Steven Gutkin, Associated Press, Wed Jun 9

Oldest Comment: Mohammed Fri Jun 04, 2010 07:01 am PDT
17,628 Comments

5. Gates: Progress in Afghan war must come this year
by Anne Gearan, AP National Security Writer, Wed Jun 9 

Oldest Comment: Harley Creel, Sun Jun 06, 2010 03:06 am PDT
170 Comments

6. FBI: Mexicans chased away US agents after shooting
by Christopher Sherman and Olivia Torres, Associated Press, 1 hr 12 min ago

Oldest Comment: Perry C, 7 hours ago

“I applaud the border patrol for finally standing up to the illegal invaders of our sovereign borders and the rock-throwers who defend them!”
3021 Comments

7. Pro-business, Labor deadlocked in Dutch election
by Arthur Max and Toby Sterling, Associated Press, 2 hrs 11 mins ago

Oldest Comment: Cpljt Tue Jun 08, 2010 07:07 am PDT
126 Comments

8. Canada derided for plan to build costly fake lake
by Rob Gillies, Associated Press, Wed Jun 9, 6:01 pm ET

Oldest Comment: Gary H 9 hours ago
334 Comments

9. France selling 1,700 buildings to help cut debt
by Angela Charlton, Associated Press, Wed Jun 9, 1:03 pm ET

Oldest Comment: Bullets In My Brain Old CT 12 hours ago
85 Comments

So far the Israelis have tampered with incriminating evidence, propagated doctored pictures and confiscated video tapes and cameras from the reporters who were on board.   Just to rub salt in the wound, Netanyahu intends to focus the investigation on whether the organizers of the flotilla had ‘terrorist’ connections. A campaign of slander orchestrated by the Israeli government has prejudiced the outcome by tainting the victims with having ties to Al-Qaeda. Those absurd accusations were later withdrawn but not before the damage had been done.

For the Israelis, the inquiry serves no purpose but to whitewash the crime and rehabilitate their image. To no one’s surprise, the Obama administration has volunteered a helping hand in the cover up. We’re not going to go into Washington’s rationale for bowing before AIPAC and their overlords in Jerusalem. Suffice it to say that the Senate leaders of both parties are passing around a letter condoning the murderous assault on the high seas.  I’m not an oracle, but I don’t expect much resistance to Harry Reid’s bipartisan initiative from an administration where the Vice President publicly avows his Zionism and the Chief of Staff boasts of his service with the IDF.

Let Washington and Israel play any game they want to play but let them play alone. The only viable response is an impartial Turkish inquiry with international representation. As a NATO ally, Ankara can extend a formal invitation to the United States, Britain and France to send observers. All three countries approved the UN resolution that called for an impartial and transparent investigation and there’s no plausible reason that Obama can concoct to rebuff a Turkish offer to participate in the proceedings.  Observer status should also be accorded to the European Union, the International Court of Justice and Israel.  Maybe the Israeli observer will be good enough to show up with the evidence his government confiscated from the 60 reporters who were on the flotilla.

There is no arguing that Turkey has jurisdiction in this case. This act of piracy on the high seas resulted in the death of nine activists, all of them Turkish citizens. One of the victims was a Turkish-American, but the Obama administration has shown little interest in investigating the murder of Furkan Dogan, the 19-year-old high school student who was killed with four bullets to the head at point blank range. One can only speculate on Washington’s indifference to the fate of the young activist. If I was to take a wild guess, I’d start with the victim’s name. It wasn’t Leon Klinghoffer and it wasn’t Daniel Pearl and he wasn’t Christian enough or Jewish enough or white enough or American enough. Case closed.

So while the United States government can also claim jurisdiction and initiate their own inquiry, only the Turkish Republic is likely to exercise its jurisdiction; and that alone should be reason enough for an impartial Turkish inquiry. But there are other reasons that are worth considering starting with the scope of the investigation, the admissibility of evidence, the availability of witnesses, the adherence to international law and the implementation of a Security Council UN resolution that called for a transparent inquiry.

The inquiry Netanyahu has in mind is a podium where he stands up and hails invective at the IHH, one of the many organizations that were involved in organizing the humanitarian convoy. It’s a Kangaroo Court where the Israelis get the privilege of lynching their victims a second time.  The Israeli verdict is already in — “they had it coming” and “we’d do it again.”

There is an unmistakable stench in the air. It seems to me that the Israelis are trying to cover up for more than just a ‘botched’ raid. They’ve killed tens of thousands of innocents before and gotten away with it. Jerusalem and its proxies in the American mass media didn’t even get this worked up over the Goldstone report that documented their criminal war spree in last year’s carpet bombing of Gaza. What gives? What is it about this single act of mass murder on the high seas that has Netanyahu and the Americans so concerned? Getting the answer to that question should be the focus of the Turkish inquiry. Did the Israeli cabinet give orders to use deadly force on the high seas and did they specifically target Turkish nationals? Was that the reason for the night attack? Is that why they confiscated evidence and kept sixty journalists incommunicado for two days? Is that why they don’t want their own officers to testify?  

If a couple of Israeli soldiers had killed one or two passengers, one might buy into the specious argument that they panicked. But they killed nine — with thirty-one bullets at close range.  When did they start shooting live ammunition? Does anybody expect straight answers from Netanyahu, Barak or the IDF?

What the Turks should mull over is this question: what if this raid was executed exactly as planned and achieved its stated objectives? What if it was tactically flawless from the point of view of the IDF assassins that carried it out? Anybody who knows Barak’s military record understands that this operation was carried out with meticulous precision. The Israeli Minister of Defense already stands accused of war crimes so he’s not exactly worried about his reputation as a cold blooded killer. What if the assault on the flotilla was meant to be this bloody?

We’ve all seen Israeli Hasbara propaganda campaigns before. But this time they were awfully well prepared for the consequences. Did they know the results a few weeks before the rest of us? Had the damage control media squads already dug their trenches and prepared their operatives for the anticipated international outcry?

One shouldn’t go around raising questions about premeditated murder without establishing motives. So let’s imagine Lieberman, Netanyahu and Barak drawing up the blueprints and assessing the political gains and the potential consequences. What were they rolling the dice for?

It’s fairly obvious that the Israelis wanted to maintain the siege around the world’s largest open air concentration camp and deter other humanitarian flotillas from delivering supplies to the 1.5 million incarcerated Palestinians. But it had to be more than that, because it’s unlikely that Netanyahu and Lieberman would risk such a gambit to prevent a few containers of cargo from being unloaded on the piers of Gaza.

What most observers and analysts seem to ignore is that there were a few other things going on in the background. This most right wing of Israeli Prime Ministers heads a coalition government of extremists and annexationists that are hell bent on derailing the peace process. Any meaningful movement towards a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would have cut short his term as Prime minister and his coalition partners have told him as much. Netanyahu was on his way to Washington and under pressure to come up with a few concessionary crumbs so Obama wouldn’t lose face after prostrating himself before the Israeli Lobby. The assault on the flotilla allowed Netanyahu to break his date at the White House. Was that the real objective of the raid?

Aside from shelving the Proximity Talks, it made absolute sense to attack Turkish citizens, because Ankara also had a prominent role in the peace process and was mediating talks between the Israelis and the Syrians. So Netanyahu was going to kill two peace doves by murdering nine Turks. One of the most promising things about this flotilla was seeing Greek and Turkish volunteers on a joint humanitarian mission. I imagine the Israelis don’t like those kinds of peace vibes in the Eastern Mediterranean.  They always rant on about being in a dangerous neighborhood; they just forget to tell you their role in making it so dangerous.

There is only one way to find out exactly what happened and why it happened, and it’s very unlikely that the right answers are going to emerge from an Israeli inquiry. There’s not even a chance that they’re going to ask the right questions. It’s going to take a Turkish investigation to unravel the political motivation behind this meticulously engineered act of piracy on the high seas. There are just too many eerie parallels between this murderous Israeli operation, the assault on the Liberty and the Lavon Affair.  A robust Turkish inquiry might uncover some uncomfortable truths for the derelicts in Washington, but it could also make the Eastern Mediterranean a safe neighborhood for one and all.

Meanwhile over at Reuters, another Israeli media colony, the editors splashed another promising headline — “Netanyahu says ready to testify in flotilla inquiry.” Was that a sign that Israel was responding to international demands for an independent inquiry? Once again, the Reuters article was little more than unabashed propaganda. As it turns out, Netanyahu was volunteering to give testimony on “who was behind the extremist group on the ship’s deck? Who sponsored its members?” The subliminal message is “they deserved to die.”

Israel’s ‘impartial’  investigation will not be an International inquiry and will not take any testimony from the soldiers involved in the slaughter. That means we’ll never know the exact nature of the orders Ehud Barak handed to the Israeli Navy’s death squads. And neither will any of the victims on the flotilla get to testify because they’ve already been deported but not before the Israelis confiscated their cameras and videos.

While the Associated Press was lauding Israel’s magnanimity and Reuters was busy burying the calls for an international inquiry, the Guardian was reporting that “Flotilla activists were shot in the head at close range.” What’s going on here?

What we’re witnessing at Reuters and AP is not just another display of the influence of Zionists in the mass media — it’s a coordinated frontal assault by Israel’s propaganda machine with its operatives at Reuters, AP and other mass media outlets. And if you think I’m exaggerating the extent of the collaboration, do yourself a favor and find out more about Israel’s Hasbara operation. Just today, the IDF released a mock musical parody of the assault that included derogatory language. The IDF is now dispensing that professionally produced video online along with doctored videos that for some unknown reason fail to record the crucial first minutes of the night attack on the humanitarian convoy. How long did it take to produce the video which was released by the IDF? Ask the folks at the Jerusalem Post – it was their handiwork.  

Reporters Without Borders has confirmed that at least 60 of 700 passengers on board the FG flotilla were journalists and slammed the treatment of the media.  Reporters and photographers were attacked, and journalists had their video, audio, and other communications equipment confiscated. Conveniently, the Israelis arrived fully armed with their own cameras. These aren’t allegations — they are well documented facts that just never found their way past Reuters or AP censors.

Over and beyond the skewed coverage, a question arises. Why did the Israelis have such a well coordinated ‘ready to launch’ media campaign before the assault? A plausible answer is that the Israeli Navy had instructions from the political leadership to use deadly force. That also helps explain why the sneak attack was carried out under the cover of darkness and why the Israelis cut satellite communication and confiscated the evidence in the hands of the reporters on board. It’s sort of curious why no AP or Reuters reporters were on board the flotilla. Did the Israelis give both agencies advanced warning of their intention to use deadly force in the operation?  

All evidence indicates that Reuters and AP reporters and editors were recruited as willing participants in Israel’s campaign to blame the victims. Either that or they simply failed to notice that the Israelis confiscated and tampered with evidence, held sixty of their colleagues incommunicado for two days after the assault on the flotilla and wouldn’t even allow incarcerated reporters access to their consulates.  While professional journalists with first-hand accounts were locked up, Reuters and AP was disseminating Netanyahu’s crazy accusations that the flotilla had associations with Al Qaeda. Because of the absurdity of that charge, the Israeli government later toned their defamation campaign, withdrew the Al Qaeda canard and accused the Turks who were murdered of having associations with terrorists. 

Over at Ha’aretz, there was another little report that the AP and Reuters crowd missed. Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, told a meeting of Labor ministers that there should be no hurry in establishing a panel to probe the affair. According to a person present at a closed meeting with the defense minister, Barak said he thought the committee should wait “another two-three weeks and everyone will forget and the pressure on us will dissipate.”¹ I can guarantee that the first people who will forget about it are the folks who own and operate the well oiled mind warping machinery at Reuters and the AP.

Lest we forget, Barak is a serial war criminal. The AP and Reuters omitted mentioning that the Israeli Minister of Defense who gave the orders for this criminal assault on the flotilla has already been investigated for war crimes by an internationally sanctioned inquiry which found compelling evidence that he was guilty as charged.

It seems to me that we’re not just witnessing willful misreporting and deliberate distortion by one AP reporter here or another Reuters’ correspondent there. It’s one thing to have this kind of blatant propaganda spewing from the foaming mouths of the likes of Charles Krauthammer, Daniel Pipes or other deranged card carrying members of the Israel First Press Association. But we’re talking about international news agencies that are tasked with gathering and dispensing verifiable well sourced information before handing it over to the cabal of pro-Israeli spinmeisters at CNN and the Washington Post.   

So far, the damage control is probably a bit more work than what the Israelis and their mass media operatives bargained for. They obviously expected a less vocal reaction. Regardless, the campaign to white wash this wanton slaughter goes on full steam. Who needs cement, steel, medical equipment and stationary. Let the Palestinians eat cake and potato chips. Now that they have junk food on the shelves — what more can they possibly ask for?  Call me an agitator, but I think the Palestinians would gladly give up potato chips for balanced news coverage.

1. Barak Ravid, Ha’aretz, June 7, 2010.

On further probing, I have uncovered even more damning evidence that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that this practice was not a software error as some of Yahoo’s defenders are claiming.

On June 3, Yahoo published an AP article titled “US-Turkish man killed in Israeli flotilla raid” by Matthew Lee and Robert Burns, Associated Press Writers. June 3, 4:35 pm ET.

By the time I checked the comment string on that article, the number of comments has reached 2911. So, I decide to go through the whole lot of them. The first one is posted by ‘John.’ You can see the date stamp is Mar 14 and the comment apparently relates to Biden’s trip to Jerusalem where Netanyahu snubbed him by announcing the construction of 1,600 units. As I strolled down the comments, none of the first 2800 comments had anything to do with Furkan Dogan, the 19 year old American who was murdered by the Israelis on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Not only that, the comments had been ported backwards and forward since March 14. But as you go through the exhibits, you’ll see that’s not even half the story.

Exhibit 1: The first comment is related to the Biden’s trip. You can’t find the original AP article, because while the comments get ported around, the AP articles get removed from Yahoo’s site after a week.

John Sun Mar 14, 2010 06:45 am PDT

I support Israel’s existence as a Jewish State, and remain committed to its security. But as a proud American, it’s refreshing to see the tail not wagging the dog for a change in this relationship.

Exhibit 2: By the time you get to comment 911-920, something interesting happens. There is a four day gap between comments. Check the break in the dates of the comments exhibited. Also notice that the subject matters changes to Iran’s nuclear program. Notice the abrupt break after the comment posted on March 18 which is apparently also connected to the spat between the Obama administration and Netanyahu’s treatment of Biden. By March 22, the date of the very next comment, the subject has been changed – and the discussion has turned to Iran’s nuclear program. What accounts for the 4 day gap?

Thu Mar 18, 2010 04:20 pm PDT

Israel flipped the middle finger at the US and now wants to make up?
Let them fight their own battles, let’s fix the US.

Michael Mon Mar 22, 2010 06:18 am PDT

IF YOU ARE NOT DONKEY LISTEN: Iran nuclear program is intended only to generate electricity.

Exhibit 3: As of this writing, the last comment on the ‘Furkan Dogan murder’ is a reader’s response to the breaking AP story about Israel’s rejection of a proposed international inquiry. It’s posted on June 5 and doesn’t have a time stamp because it’s less than 24 hours old.

Jane 1 hour ago

Why am I not surprised that Israel “rejects” an international investigation! The hell with Israel’s “rejection” of an investigation, let the investigation begin immediately.

I have no confidence of any findings from Israel after they investigate, any more than I do when the US begins an internal investigation of happenings here in the US

Exhibit 4: As I scroll through the comments, I notice that I’m not the only one aware of what’s going on. A poster notices that an AP story has just been posted and has this inquiry – “How come Yahoo and the AP always start a complete new story, with the same discussions from last week or even last month, like in order to keep current you have to start with message 2811”

Exhibit 5: Now, we will go to the first two comments related to the murder of Furkan Dogan. You have to wade through 2800 plus comments to get to them. They are comments 2810 and 2811.

Joe Thu Jun 03, 2010 08:16 am PDT

Good. The only good muzzie is a dead muzzie. Until they accept Christ as their personal savior and radiate his light-and-love, muzzies need to be treated as dangerous insects.

Partheneon Thu Jun 03, 2010 08:35 am PDT

American media is full of BIAS news. THIS BOY GOT KILLED BY 5 BULLETS IN HIS HEAD, from a very close distance. AMERICAN(in fact jew!sh) media is not talking about this. SEE THE PICTURES IN THE NEWS. ALL THE PICTURES TO IRRITATE AMERICANS, EXTREME DARK RELIGIOUS PEOPLE PICTURES FROM THE ARCHIEVE.

Exhibit 6: This exhibit displays the last two comments remotely related to the murder of the young Turkish-American activist. They are comment 2895 and 2896 and they both relate to the headline. The comments after them apparently relate to Israel’s refusal to accept a UN Inquiry. So the almost three thousand comments ported to this article on the killing to the Turkish-American teenager, only 85 of them had anything to do with the AP story. And those comments are now sandwiched between comments from a dozen unrelated AP stories relating to Netanyahu’s insult to Biden, the construction of 1,600 illegal housing units in Jerusalem, Netanyahu’s warm reception in Congress after humiliating Biden, and Iran’s nuclear bomb.

Guido Fri Jun 04, 2010 09:40 am PDT

19 year-old US-Turkish man ? He was here 2 years as a baby, his family has no allegiance to USA.

Fri Jun 04, 2010 01:35 pm PDT

Why does America need Israel? What are the benefits for the U.S. of backing and financing a jewish state in the middle east? When doe’s biblical loyalty end and real world responsibility begin?

Exhibit 7: Now here’s the killer. Take a look at the time stamp on comment 2809 and 2810. They date back to April 29, 2010. So yahoo found a string of comments dating back to April 29 and ported them to an AP story about Furkan Dogan which was published on June 03, 2010. Why would they do a thing like that?

BEAUTIFUL Thu Apr 29, 2010 06:07 am PDT

The underlying factor of all terrorism, wars and suffering of the people in the middle east is and has been the government of Israel. Think about it
Israel is by far the largest and the most inhuman terrorist organization sponsored by the government of the United States Of America.

America for Americans Wed Apr 28, 2010 02:30 pm PDT

Who gives a $%$% what they think, who died and put them in charge!

Conclusions: Based on the evidence I’m presenting, there can be no doubt that Yahoo is taking strings of comments from one AP article and porting them to completely unrelated AP articles. The murder of Furkan Dogan was not something the mainstream media wanted to dwell on. Compare the coverage of his death with Klinghoffer’s murder on the Achille Lauro. There has to be an explanation for why reader feedback on the murder of a Turkish-American citizen would be buried. As of this writing, you can still read the story. But it doesn’t really matter whether you read the last comments posted or start with the first post. None of them will have anything to do with the subject of the article.

The most disturbing thing about this is that Yahoo and AP had to reach in their old inventory of comment strings and dig up one that was last ported on April 28, brush it off and port it to this AP story. For one thing, why didn’t they take the time to scrub racist and offensive content before reposting them to other articles?

To date, AP has not responded to repeated attempts to get answers to my questions. They have this documentation in hand and if there is an innocent explanation – I’m sure I would have already heard about it.

First Email Sent to the Associated Press

Gentlemen: Regarding the allegations of Yahoo’s manipulation of user comments on AP articles. I would like to submit the following questions. If you would be kind enough to forward me the answers, I would greatly appreciate it.

1. How long has the porting of thousands of comments been going on?

2. Why is it going on?

3. Why does Yahoo only port comments on some AP articles? You don’t find this on articles from the AFP or Reuters or articles from any other source.

4. What it is Yahoo’s criteria for porting up to 50,000 comments from one article to another and does AP news staff get involved in the process?

5. Is this policy approved by Yahoo’s and AP’s managers or is it a rogue operation by individuals in the Yahoo News department?

6. Are there any kind of agreements between AP and Yahoo that promotes this kind of behavior?

7. Are the AP reporters named in the article aware of this practice and if not how could they have failed to notice?

8. Is it possible to give me contact information for the journalists named in the article so I can get personal feedback from them?

I look forward to hearing back from you.

warm regards

Ahmed Amr

Second Email Sent to the Associated Press

Gentlemen: Just so we’re clear about the evidence of my allegations. I have a couple of links to verify that tens of thousands of user comments have been ported from one article to the next and remain attached to the articles to which they were ported. On all these articles the first comment that appears is the oldest comment. In this case, a comment from a user identified as Robert. The date stamp on his comment is – Tue Mar 09, 2010 12:47 am PST. If you click on the responses to Robert’s one line comment, you will see that I have been placing an audit trail for a few days now by responding to Roberts comments from different articles. So my audit trail is being ported too. Thanks for the lift. Now please verify the accuracy of my allegations and provide me with a response to the questions I’ve already sent you. I would also like to make contact with your legal department and with some of the AP journalists I have identified in my recent article “Yahoo and AP Caught Manipulating User Content.”

1. Israel’s use of captured video draws criticism – AP article posted on June 3 9:58 EST – By Amy Teibel

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100603/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians_118

Comment Count as of this email – 50,474

2. Israel rejects international investigation of raid – AP article posted on June 3 8:09 Am EST – By Amy Teibel

Comment Count as of this email – 50,474

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100603/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians_117

3. Israel Trying To Limit Diplomatic Damage From Raid – AP article posted on 12:00 am EST – by Mark Lavie

Associated Press writers Karin Laub in Jerusalem and Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100603/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians_114

Comment Count as of this email – 50,474

4. Israel to Expel All Activists by Day’s End by Amy Teibel – AP article posted on June 2, 11:44 AM – By Amy Teibel

Associated Press Writers Dale Gavlak at Allenby Bridge, Jordan, and Karin Laub in Jerusalem, Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100602/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians_111

Comment Count as of this email – 50,474

5. Protesters march in Istanbul, denounce Israel AP Mon May 31, 5:40 am ET

Goldenberg reported from aboard the INS Kidon. AP writer Selcan Hacaoglu contributed to this report from Ankara.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100531/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians_53

6. Pro-Palestinian flotilla sets sail for Gaza AP Sun May 30, 9:27 am ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100531/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians_53

Comment Count as of this email – 50,474

7. Israeli airstrike kills 3 militants in north Gaza

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100601/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians_87

8. Masked men vandalize UN summer camp for Gaza kids AP Tue Jun 1, 9:54 am ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100523/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians_17

Comment Count as of this email – 50,474

I put in an Audit Trail to verify my allegations. I responded to the first comment from a number of articles and my comments were not only ported forward, they were ported backwards. And some of the comments that are being ported backwards just happen to be mine. And I have presented the audit trail as exhibits.

All my responses were to the oldest comment in the string, the one that appears first – given your default settings. It was posted by a user identified as ‘Robert.’ It is a one line comment (Hamas is now in control of the Gaza Strip after winning an election there against Abbas’ Palestinian Authority). Robert’s comment was posted on Tue Mar 09, 2010 12:47 am PST.

Note all the comments I placed in the audit trail were posted on or after Mon, May 31, 2010. But I am accessing all these comments from an AP article “Masked men vandalize UN summer camp for Gaza kids”. It’s time stamped AP Tue Jun 1, 9:54 am ET

Question: What is a comment like Robert’s which was time stamped March 09 doing on AP Article time stamped May 31 and June 1? And what is my Comment time stamped May 31, 2010 doing in an article published on the following day? I’m sure you’ll see what I mean as you review the following exhibits.

Audit Trail Exhibit 1:

Comment time stamped Mon May 31, 2010 09:49 pm PDT.

To the boys in the backroom. This is in response to the first comment in an article that was titled this comment was posted on an Associated Press article “Abbas Says No Need to Quit Peace Talks.” It doesn’t have a name on it but the dateline is Ramallah, West Bank. It was posted “20 minutes” ago and purported to be 1 out of 39,733 comments. The interesting thing about it is it is in response to a comment that was posted March 09, 2010, seven weeks before this article was published. The articles are completely unrelated.

Now we have a complete audit trail. Let’s see where you port it next. Tell your legal department I’m working over time today.

Associated Press Writers Tia Goldenberg aboard the Israeli warship INS Kidon, Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Rob Gillies in Toronto and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Seriously, what kind of bonus do you Hasbara guys get? I told you I was charming.

Audit Trail Exhibit 2:

Comment time stamped Mon May 31, 2010 10:25 pm PDT

To the boys in the back room. I just did a search and found the 40,000 comments had been ported to this article. See how it’s done. All you have to do to establish a trail is to comment on where you found the article. “Aide: Abbas says no need to quit peace talks”

Associated Press Writers Tia Goldenberg aboard the Israeli warship INS Kidon, Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Rob Gillies in Toronto and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Please inform the AP, your legal department and the journalists involved in this scam.

Audit Trail Exhibit 3:

Comment time stamped Mon May 31, 2010 10:32 pm PDT

To the boys in the back room. A few minutes later I find the same comments ported to this article. “Bloody Israeli raid on flotilla sparks crisis” by Steven Gutkin, Also of the AP.

Watch how I establish an audit trail.

Audit Trail Exhibit 4:

Comment Time stamped: Tue Jun 01, 2010 04:54 am PDT

To the boys in the back room. This comment was posted from another article titled “New boats headed to Gaza to challenge blockade” – an unattributed AP article published on June 1, 2009. So, the 40,000 comments were ported to this site.

So now we have documented evidence that these comments, with were ported to the following three articles. This comment was posted from the first article.

1. New boats headed to Gaza to challenge blockade – AP article dated June 1, 2010 posted 2 Am

2. “Aide: Abbas says no need to quit peace talks” – AP article dated May 31, 2010

Associated Press Writers Tia Goldenberg aboard the Israeli warship INS Kidon, Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Rob Gillies in Toronto and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

3. “Bloody Israeli raid on flotilla sparks crisis” by Steven Gutkin, Also AP, May 31, 2001, 2010

Audit Trail Exhibit 5:

This comment is time stamped – Tue Jun 01, 2010 04:59 am PDT

To the boys in the back room. This comment was posted from another article titled “New boats headed to Gaza to challenge blockade” – an unattributed AP article published on June 1, 2009. So, the 40,000 comments were ported to this site.
So now we have documented evidence that these comments, with were ported to the following three articles. This comment was posted from the first article.
1. New boats headed to Gaza to challenge blockade – AP article dated June 1, 2010 posted 2 Am
2. “Aide: Abbas says no need to quit peace talks” – AP article dated May 31, 2010
Associated Press Writers Tia Goldenberg aboard the Israeli warship INS Kidon, Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Rob Gillies in Toronto and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
3. “Bloody Israeli raid on flotilla sparks crisis” by Steven Gutkin, Also AP, May 31, 2001, 2010

Audit Trail Exhibit 6:

Comment time stamped: Tue Jun 01, 2010 05:34 am PDT

To the boys in the back room, just so we keep the audit trail in Sync – the 40,000 plus comments have now been ported to yet another article posted 6 minutes ago “Egypt lifts its side of Gaza blockade for aid.” It’s still June 1, 2010. And it’s yet another AP article.

Audit Trail Exhibit 7:

Comment time stamped Tue Jun 01, 2010 05:46 am PDT

To the boys in the back room. Now you’re deleting the audit trail. Well, more evidence that you know exactly what you were doing. Porting 40,000 – sorry 41,000 comments – dating back to March 09 from one AP article to another. This comment was posted on the message board of a story posted on June 1, 2010 – 17 minutes ago as of this writing. It’s the same comment stream that was attached to three other articles.

Now, I warned you a few days ago that I would be conducting a forensic examination. Delete my articles at will. But make sure you advise your legal department that I tried to establish an audit trail to prove how you port tens of thousands of messages from one article to another. Now I have concrete proof that you have been doing exactly that with this stream of comments and you’ve been doing it since March 09, 2010.

Audit Trail Exhibit 8:

Comment time stamped Wed Jun 02, 2010 01:04 am PDT

To the boys in the back room. The number of comments ported is now over 45,000. This comment is being posted from the latest article to which the comments were ported. It is titled – ‘Israel deports activists from Gaza-bound flotilla’ another AP article.

By AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press Writer Amy Teibel, Associated Press Writer – 36 mins ago

Audit Trail Exhibit 9:

Comment time stamped Wed Jun 02, 2010 07:33 am PDT

To the boys in the backroom, you’ve been porting these comments from one article to another since March 09, 2010. That’s going on two months. And the number of comments you keep attaching has grown to over 46,000. So the audit trail continues. Please advise your legal department that this audit trail is being documented.

This comment is posted to yet another AP article titled “Israel to expel all activists by day’s end”

By AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press Writer Amy Teibel, Associated Press Writer – 41 mins ago

Associated Press Writers Dale Gavlak at Allenby Bridge, Jordan, and Karin Laub in Jerusalem, Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

Audit Trail Exhibit 10:

To the Boys in the back room – this article is titled ” Israel’s use of ‘captured’ video draws criticism.”

This number of comments is now up to 50,056. This thread dates back to March 09, 2010. But you knew that already.

Check out an article titled “Yahoo and AP caught Manipulating User Comments.”

Tell your legal department I just placed another audit marker.

Conclusions: Yahoo has been porting tens of thousands of user comments on AP articles forwards and backwards. The question is why? I’ve sent you a number of questions in an earlier email and would appreciate a response. I think that the documented evidence I have accumulated clearly documents that Yahoo and AP have been selectively manipulating comments. The least you can do is offer a rationale for why you do this.

Warm Regards

Ahmed Amr

Forensic Analyst

Author of The Sheep and the Guardians – Diary of a SEC Sanctioned Swindle

Let’s begin with the record of Israel’s previous internal investigations of its criminal conduct. For a start, those investigations rarely take place. Even when their conduct is probed by outsiders, the Israelis disparage the findings. Most recently Israel went so far as labeling UN war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone a ‘self-hating Jew’ for concluding that the IDF and its leaders committed war crimes in “Operation Cast Lead” which leveled much of Gaza and led to the slaughter of 1,500 Palestinians.

It’s doubtful that Clinton is unfamiliar with Israel’s record. Ariel Sharon, the mastermind behind the Sabra and Shatilla Massacre and the butcher of Qibya, was mildly reprimanded for both ‘incidents’ and eventually became Prime Minister. Israelis elected another Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, even though he publicly admitted and even boasted about his role in the Deir El Yassin Massacre. And two other Prime Ministers, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livini, have yet to answer for their war crimes in last year’s assault on Gaza.

IIan Pappe, the Israeli historian, has documented the fact that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, was the architect of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. One of the men who helped carry out Ben-Gurion’s order was none other than Yitzhak Rabin who was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Lydda and Ramla. And let’s not forget that even the ‘moderate’ Shimon Peres has the blood of the Qana Massacre on his hands. Among her other war crimes, Golda Meir was the Prime Minister who ordered the shooting down of a Libyan passenger plane in 1973 and initiated the settlement policy that was a clear violation of international laws governing military conduct in occupied territories. Under her orders, Israel bombed Port Said and Ismalia to rubble and leveled the Syrian city of Quneitra.

That’s just a partial list of the Israeli Prime Ministers that have war crimes on their records. I must have missed a couple — because as far as I can tell — there never has been an Israeli Prime Minister who hasn’t committed a war crime. It must be something in their DNA. Tzipi Livni’s daddy was the Irgun’s chief operations officer who planned the terrorist attack against the King David Hotel in 1947. In orchestrating the murder of 1,500 civilians in Gaza, she was just acting out like a chip of the old block.

But aside from Israel’s long history of unexamined atrocities, there are other reasons why Israel can’t possibly conduct a neutral investigation of this act of piracy. For one thing, they’ve already destroyed evidence by confiscating cameras, videos and laptops from the 700 victims they kidnapped. And for another, they won’t have access to the witnesses who have all ready been deported. Any Israeli investigation would have to depend entirely on testimony from the very soldiers who committed the piracy and the military and political leadership that handed down the orders to assault the unarmed flotilla.

This was an act of piracy that happened on a ship flying a Turkish flag, and absent an international investigation, the only sovereign power that has a right to investigate Israel’s crimes is Turkey. And, being a highly trained lawyer, I’m sure Hillary Clinton can check the law and the legal precedents to verify that pesky little detail about jurisdiction.

In obstructing an international investigation, Clinton and Obama, both well trained lawyers, seem to be having a very convenient memory lapse. So let me remind them of how the United States reacted to piracy and the murder of an American citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, in the Achille Lauro incident back in 1985. As a result of that one fatality, the United States lobbied for tougher anti-piracy legislation and American diplomats were the driving force behind the Rome Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation. Under Article 3 of that convention, which was passed in 1988, it is an international crime for any person to seize or exercise control over a ship by force, and also a crime to injure or kill any person in the process. But Hillary knows that already.

Today comes word that Furkan Dogan, a 19 year old American citizen, was one of the victims of the vicious assault on the Marvi Marmara, a ship flying the Turkish flag. Now that should change Clinton’s calculations because when Klinghoffer was murdered; the United States did not just shrug its shoulders and leave the Italian government to exercise jurisdiction over how to deal with the matter. To secure the safety of the other passengers, the Italians had worked out a deal with the four Palestinian pirates to release the crew and the passengers in exchange for safe passage to Tunisia. But Ronald Reagan was going to have none of that. Because an American was killed by Palestinian pirates, he dispatched F-14 Tomcats and forced down the Egyptian plane carrying the pirates to safe haven. The civilian aircraft landed in a NATO airbase in Sicily and the United States got embroiled in a public spat with both Italy and Egypt to make certain that those who killed Klinghoffer were brought to justice. The Italians won the jurisdiction argument but it still demonstrated how far the United States would go to shelter its citizens from acts of piracy.

Even though one of the victims of this Israeli act of piracy was an American, The United States was the only member of the UN Security Council that fought tooth and nail to prevent the resolution from even mentioning Israel. Which isn’t a bit surprising; it is now common knowledge that the State Department that has been leased out to the Israeli Lobby for going on two generations.

America’s objections to an international inquiry might also be a bit self-serving because our leaders have also displayed utter contempt for international law and have gone out of their way to shield our own war criminals from accountability for their war of aggression against Iraq. So before we give Hillary Clinton the right to decide how and who should investigate Israel’s piracy and premeditated murder, someone needs to explain why Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney aren’t sharing a cell in The Hague.

If Israel and the United States have one common creed it is their casual callousness regarding the loss of Arab lives. Well I have news for them, this time Israel murdered an American and eight Turks. As Americans, we have every reason to demand that the Obama administration apply the ‘Klinghoffer’ standard to the Israelis — unless of course, some American citizens are less worthy than others.

The United States government has a long history of shielding Israel from accountability and is likely to continue doing so for years to come. The boys and girls in Washington simply can’t be trusted to do the right thing. When it comes to foreign policy, America’s spineless treasonous politicians align their policy to Israel’s agenda even at the expense of our own national interest and our own nationals. Does anybody remember the Likudnik AIPAC neo-cons who got us ensnared in Iraq at a cost of 4,400 lives and $700 billion dollars? Have we so quickly forgotten how the Bush administration white washed the murder of Rachel Corrie by Israeli thugs? I don’t think there is any need to bring up the USS Liberty but those who know the details understand the scope of Israel’s political clout in Washington.

Any country that has a Vice-President who openly professes to be a Zionist and runs around doing Israel’s bidding even after being publicly humiliated in Jerusalem is disqualified from making a call on what constitutes impartiality, neutrality and transparency. Obama, Clinton and Biden need to step aside, keep their traps shut and allow enough space for a Turkish or an international independent investigation to uncover the details of Israel’s piracy on the high seas.

I got a little curious about why Robert’s one liner had generated so much controversy. I’ve written hundreds of articles and never got anywhere near that kind of attention. Frankly, I was full of envy. How did ‘Robert’ pull this off with one miserly line? Then I noticed the strangest thing: it was dated March 09, 2010. The comment was two months old and was the lead comment of 40,000 responses. That seemed a little high considering the fact that the AP article I was reading had only been posted for thirty minutes.

What were Yahoo and AP up to? The answer is simple; they were porting comments from one article to another and, in this particular case, they’ve been doing it for two months. It took a little research till I realized that the first few hundred comments were related to Biden’s ill-fated visit to Jerusalem. It was an ancient story and quite unrelated to the posting I was reading which was a slanted AP article white washing the murderous Israeli assault on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.

So why is this important? Well, you see, the default setting on comments for Yahoo articles is that readers get to see the oldest comments first. To see the newest comments, you have to know enough to change the default to engage other readers. Otherwise, you have to wade through tens of thousands of comments to get to the ones relating to the story.

Just to make sure that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, I decided to do a little forensic analysis. I put an audit trail in and now have documented proof that Yahoo was porting tens of thousands of comments from one article to another including thousands of outrageously racist and derogatory comments that violated Yahoos terms of use. So I came up with an idea; I repeatedly responded to Robert’s one liner when I saw it appear on whatever AP article I happened to encounter. And sure enough, my comments were also ported from one article to another. Each of my comments specified the article I posted it from, the date, the title and the journalist who wrote it.

Now it’s time to name names. Among others, the AP journalists involved in this scam were Associated Press Writers Tia Goldenberg aboard the Israeli warship INS Kidon, Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Rob Gillies in Toronto and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations. Steven Gutkin and Amy Teibel also have their handprints on this scam. I haven’t come up with the names of the Yahoo participants yet but it’s unlikely that Yahoo management didn’t understand and approve the conduct of their news staff. If this article gets any traction, their names will hopefully be publicly disclosed.

Let there be no confusion, this was not a software glitch. Yahoo didn’t port comments to AFP or Reuters articles — only AP articles and as far as I can tell this practice was limited to selected content related to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Put aside that many of the ported comments were inane and blatantly racist. Some went so far as to incite violence and advocate genocide. But that’s not the issue here. We’re all believers in the First Amendment and, with the possible exception of comments that incite violence, Yahoo is entitled to propagate racist graffiti. After all, that’s one of the trademarks that distinguish the Yahoo brand name.

If this was merely a question of unethical behavior or slanted coverage, that’s par for the course. We’ve come to expect little more from Yahoo and AP or, for that matter, any other MSM outlet. But this is blatant fraud and it’s not just fraud against readers; it’s corporate fraud. Because the number of comments generated is one of the metrics Yahoo uses to cook the numbers to exaggerate user participation and it uses those numbers to defraud advertisers. The same goes for AP, which is obviously complicit in this racket.

What about the journalists involved in this scam, if you can call them journalists. Didn’t they notice that their articles were generating tens of thousands of comments the minute they appeared on Yahoo news? Is it possible that they didn’t keep reading Robert’s one liner over and over again?

Now, before the boys in Yahoo’s boiler room try to scrub their boards, let me go on record and advise them that I have documented evidence and an audit trail. I’ve seen my own comments ported from one article to the next and I’ve taken the liberty of putting the evidence in a safe place.

There is something else that’s worth bringing up. This pattern of media manipulation could very well be an Israeli Hasbara project coordinated with Yahoo and the AP. It’s no secret that Israel has ratcheted up its use of media operatives in the last few months. Are the boys in Yahoo’s boiler room working with AIPAC operatives and graduates of the Hasbara fellowship program? Have Yahoo and AP joined the ranks of the pro-Israeli activists that camp out on message boards to disseminate their canards and their venomous anti-Palestinian diatribes?

Just so we’re clear about this. I told the boys in Yahoo’s backroom that I would be writing about this but they didn’t seem to care. I gave them fair warning in a number of messages that are still being ported from one AP article to another.

I guarantee you one thing — those AP journalist involved in this racket know exactly how to get to the bottom of this. If they have a shred of integrity left, they might want to publicly reveal how they got ensnared in this racket. Because a lot of parties have a lot of explaining to do.