But the latest report on Iran’s nuclear programme by the agency appeared to reject Iran’s account of how and when it had decided to build the Qom enrichment plant and implied that it believed Iran was hiding the construction of other facilities.

The report provides new evidence that the Qom enrichment facility was constructed on one of many sites where tunneling had been prepared as early as 2002 to protect various kinds of facilities from a possible U.S. air attack.

The apparent Iranian decision to begin preparations for a U.S. attack on Iran in 2002 came after President George W. Bush had declared in his Sep. 20, 2001 speech to a joint session of Congress that any nation that “continues to harbor or support terrorism” would be regarded as a “hostile regime” and then named Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” with Iraq and North Korea in January 2002.

The new evidence contradicts the U.S. charge that Iran had been working on constructing a covert enrichment plant for several years – well before March 2007, when Iran announced that it would no longer inform the agency of new facilities as soon as the decision had been made to construct them.

The Iranian account documented in the report puts the decision to build the Qom enrichment facility in mid-2007.

The report quotes from an Oct. 28 Iranian letter to the IAEA stating, “As a result of the augmentation of the threats of military attacks against Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran decided to establish contingency centers for various organizations and activities…[elipses in original].”

No date is cited for that decision, but the IAEA report refers to satellite imagery of the site indicating construction began at least as early as 2002. The agency said it had “informed Iran that it had acquired commercially available satellite imagery of the site indicating that there had been construction at the site between 2002 and 2004, and that construction activities were resumed in 2006 and had continued to date.”

The IAEA apparently intended to convey the idea that this was construction on a second enrichment plant. In a story published Nov. 13 – three days before the report was circulated to IAEA Governing Council members – Associated Press reporter George Jahn reported unnamed diplomats as saying Iran had started building the plant in 2002, that the construction had paused for two years in 2004 because of Iran’s suspension of enrichment and had resumed in 2006, when enrichment had been resumed openly.

Independent analysis of satellite imagery has shown, however, that those earlier images were of construction on the general purpose “contingency centres” rather than an enrichment facility. Paul Brannan, a satellite imagery analyst for the Institute for Science and International Security who has analysed imagery of the same site from 2004 and 2005, concluded in a Sep. 29 report that it was probably a tunnel facility for a purpose other than an enrichment facility.

Brannan noted that the Qom site was only one of “many throughout the country” with similar characteristics. Contrary to the IAEA’s account, he observed that construction had continued between June 2004 and March 2005, although it was at a slow pace.

Brannan’s analysis is consistent with the account in the Iranian letter of Oct. 28 of a decision to construct a whole system of “contingency centres” for various purposes in the event of a U.S. air attack.

The Iranian letter quoted by the IAEA said Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency had requested one of the already constructed centres for a “contingency enrichment plant”, which would assure continuation of enrichment should the Natanz Enrichment Plant be attacked. The Qom tunnel facility was made available for that purpose in the second half of 2007 and construction on the enrichment facility then began, according to the letter.

Contradicting the Jahn story, however, the IAEA report says “a number of Member States” have “alleged that design work on the facility had started in 2006″. If design work was only started in 2006, the construction work seen in the earlier years obviously could not have been on an enrichment facility.

A senior official of the Barack Obama administration charged in the Sep. 25 briefing on the Qom site that actual construction of the facility had begun before March 2007. The language of the new report indicates for the first time that the United States has taken a much more nuanced approach to the history of the Qom site in its communications with the IAEA.

The IAEA report seems to imply that it does not believe the Iranian account that construction began on the enrichment facility only in 2007. It said the agency has “indicated that Iran’s declaration of the new facility reduces the level of confidence in the absence of other nuclear facilities under construction and gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared to the Agency.”

Iran has told the IAEA it has no other nuclear facilities “currently under construction or in operation that had not been declared to the Agency”, according to the report. But it has not yet responded to a Nov. 6 letter from the agency asking whether it is planning to build any other nuclear sites.

The report, which is the last to be published under outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, appears to reflect his waning influence over the agency’s political position on Iran in relation to the director of the Safeguards Department, Olli Heinonen.

After IAEA inspectors had visited the Qom site and discussed the background of its construction, ElBaradei had commented Nov. 5 that they had found “nothing to be worried about” and that the facility was indeed a backup to the Natanz plant as Iran had maintained. “It’s a hole in a mountain,” ElBaradei said.

The spin in the report itself takes the opposite approach from ElBaradei’s suggestion that the Qom facility is not a threatening development.

It also appears to reflect a common Western view that treating the Qom site as evidence of a covert nuclear weapons-related programme is useful to increase the pressure on Iran to reach agreement with the West to give up the bulk of its low enrichment uranium (LEU) supplies until they could be replenished through more enrichment nearly a year later.

After senior officials of the Obama administration had briefed reporters Sep. 25 on the allegation that Iran had been working on the site secretly for several years, U.S. officials said the discovery of the site would give the United States “leverage” in the talks with Iran that were to start in Geneva Oct. 1.

Western governments proposed at the Oct. 1 meeting that Iran agree to ship up to 80 percent of its LEU to Russia in return for eventual shipments of 20 percent enriched uranium to fuel a small medical reactor in Tehran. That would have allowed the Obama administration to declare a diplomatic victory in regard to Iran’s nuclear capabilities and tamp down Israeli pressures to allow it to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

At negotiations in Vienna last month under IAEA auspices, outgoing IAEA Director General ElBaradei presented a draft agreement based on that Western proposal. Iran has effectively rejected that deal, however, and made a counterproposal that would allow it to husband its LEU supplies.

Pres. Obama warned Iran on Sunday, “We are now running out of time,” in regard to negotiations on the ElBaradei draft. The United States and other negotiating partners have ignored Iran’s counterproposal.

‘Daisy Cutters and Poppy Wearers.’ Some people may be wondering what this means.

The Daisy Cutter is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the American armoury.

Even larger bombs are currently being developed. The Daisy Cutter has an explosion similar to a small nuclear or atomic bomb. They say that when one was dropped in Iraq, the explosion lit up the entire front. Many Iraqi soldiers defected after seeing that bomb.

Several of these were dropped in Afghanistan, especially in the battles of Tora Bora.

Tony Blair is an example of a poppy-wearer. The poppy represents international peace. I got the idea for the title of this article from a cartoon I saw in one of the national newspapers. It was at the time when daisy-cutters were being dropped in Afghanistan and it was international peace day. The cartoon depicted a picture of Tony Blair wearing a poppy and an explosion behind him. The caption simply read: ‘Daisy-cutter…Poppy-wearer’.

We are entering an age where the visual media is gaining increasing influence on human societies, especially the 24-hour news channels, which have now become the most popular of all channels. A lot has been written about the shaping of public opinion.¹

I would like to mention some of the things that characterize the visual news media.

First, thought and emotion control. By relying upon the global news channels for information, the public tacitly allow themselves to be influenced in their thoughts and opinions about global events, on the spurious assumption that such information is unbiased and ‘independent’. A more ominous recent development, possibly, was illustrated by the case of Princess Diana’s death. The virtually unending media coverage generated the huge public outpouring of grief, so uncharacteristic of the British people. Individuals who would not normally have paid the story much of a second thought were influenced by the unceasing media coverage, repeatedly telling them how devastated they (the British public) were, that they found themselves believing it and even feeling it.

News channels have short memories. This was partly my reason for writing this article. The material we are currently seeing on the news channels about Afghanistan, the Taliban and the war — it is as if everything that led up to that point has been forgotten. The comments being made about the Taliban seem as if they come from a vacuum, as if everything that has led up to this point has been erased from the public mind.

When most people think about the Taliban and opium, they have the impression that the Taliban are heavily involved in the opium trade. That is in fact the message that is coming through from the media at the current time, sometimes through hints, and sometimes more explicitly. Whereas, in reality, as we shall see, the Taliban were responsible for stopping the opium production in Afghanistan and reducing it to zero.

The Pentagon now spends more than $550m on what it calls ‘public affairs’, not including personnel costs. So huge amounts of money are being put by the American military into what is referred to as ‘perception management.’ It involves manipulating and using the media to convey a certain message. I will present a couple of examples of this.

It is clear that the media is not a neutral institution. For example, Tony Blair met Rupert Murdoch three times in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Rupert Murdoch owns large sections of the western news media, including Fox News, Sky, the Times newspaper, the Sun, News of the World, at least one of the large American newspapers and much of the Australian news media.

Although ‘Muslim’ channels such as the Emirates’ Al-Jazeera, Pakistan’s Geo News, and others, may superficially give the impression of being pro-Muslim, this is certainly not the case. In fact, there is little difference between such channels and mainstream UK or US news channels. These Arab or Pakistani news channels represent the secular, westernised tier of those societies. Despite the differing national allegiances, they ultimately share common values with their ex-colonial masters, i.e., democracy, secularism and often a belief in a capitalist economy. However, it should be remembered that this West-imitating class is a minority in Muslim countries.²

An example of how the news media has been responsible for manipulating public opinion occurred prior to the war against Iraq, when Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Prior to the American and British led attack, there was a widely reported story of Iraqi soldiers killing Kuwaiti babies. At a congressional human rights caucus, a young woman called Nayirah relayed a shocking story of what she had allegedly witnessed. The press latched on to the story, and the initial account of fifteen babies was soon exaggerated in sectors of the press up to 312. Several members of congress said that this story had influenced their vote to approve the military action against Iraq. President Bush frequently mentioned it in the lead up to the war. In the Senate, six senators specifically cited the story in their speeches supporting the resolution to give Bush authorization to use American forces in Kuwait.³

Shortly after the war ended, it became clear that this story was fabricated. ABC News and Amnesty International amongst others reported that there was no evidence that this had occurred. Finally, the New York Times made the shocking revelation that Nayirah was in fact the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in America.

Similarly, before Iraq was invaded following the September 11th attacks, most Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was somehow behind 9/11 or that he was directly linked to Al Qaeda, despite the fact that no such link existed. In fact, Salafi jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda (supposing we assume that such an organisation substantially exists outside of its media construct) are ideologically vehemently opposed to secular leaders like Hussein, considering them to be apostates, worse than ‘disbelievers.’⁴

Some polls found that 7 in 10 Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in September 11th attacks. This public attitude was engineered by the state department. President Bush, Dick Cheney and co were hinting at links between the two in public speeches. The journal Perspectives on Politics published a study in which they looked at this issue. The authors mention: “Our analysis of Bush’s speeches reveals that the administration consistently connected Iraq with 9/11…” They go on to mention how the media colluded with the Bush et al.: “New York Times coverage of the president’s speeches featured almost no debate over the framing of the Iraq conflict as part of the war on terror. This assertion had tremendous influence on public attitudes, as indicated by polling data from several sources.”⁵

This eventually led to Iraq being invaded.

History of the Global Opium Industry

Now, going into the main subject of the article, I am going present you with two historical narratives and they interlink. One of them is the history of the global opium/heroin trade. The other is the story of the Taliban. Part of the intention of this presentation is just to remind people of historical facts. I will not indulge in conspiracy theory or anything of that sort; I simply wish to mention historical realities and allow people to judge the facts for themselves. The information about the Taliban is drawn from sources that are in not in any way pro-Taliban. The two main books to which I refer are The Taliban by Ahmad Rashid, which many western leaders were reading (it was said to be Tony Blair’s bedside reading leading up to the war), and Reaping the Whirlwind by a journalist called Michael Griffin. Neither author is a fan of the Taliban

I present the reader with historical facts which are often obscured or omitted from our dominant sources of news. People have a right to know the truth, and the British people have a right to know why their sons and daughters are fighting and being killed in a faraway land called Afghanistan. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “The best jihad is the word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler.”

The narcotics industry is amongst the largest international businesses in the world. The U.N estimates approximately $400 billion a year is involved.⁶ Kofi Anan, the ex-secretary general of the United Nations, claimed that the illegal narcotics industry is greater than the global oil and gas industry and twice as large as the overall automobile industry.

This gives us an idea of the scale we are dealing with. We know that the oil and gas or global energy industry is one of the largest industries in the world. Oil is so central to the global economy that it is referred to as an ‘oil-based economy’.

It is clear that this is a huge, highly organised and integrated international industry. There must be very powerful players where such vast amounts of money are involved. This is not about a few Pakistanis smuggling Afghan heroin and selling it in Bradford. That is just the very lowest point of the chain.⁷ There are far bigger players involved, and they are literally making billions.

The 18th and 19th centuries were the height of the British Empire. In the 20th century, America emerges as the major world power and proceeds to sideline Britain, France and the old colonial powers.

Let us examine the ‘Opium Wars’, also called the ‘Anglo-Chinese Wars.’

The East India Company was owned by British aristocracy and major British traders. It was a shareholder company and the names of all of the owners can be easily looked up. The East India Company is described as the mother of modern corporations and, interestingly, it had its own army.

The Mughal Empire was in decline when, in 1757, the East India Company conquered Bengal. This was a major opium growing region. The East India Company pursued a monopoly on the production and export of opium.⁸ It was only later, towards the end of the 19th century, that heroin was first synthesized from opium. Prior to that, it was the opium that was smoked.

In 1773, 75 tonnes were exported to China. The East India Company was selling the opium to China in exchange for Chinese commodities such as silk and tea.

This was against Chinese law. The Chinese had outlawed opium in their land because of the detrimental effects on their people. However Britain continued. By the 1830’s, England had become the major drug trafficking organisation in the world, through the East India Company. Many opium addicts were coming about in China. The British government gave the East India Company a monopoly on trade with China.

Heroin Destroys Lives

Opium is a devastating addiction. When people become addicted to opium or heroin, they will give all of their wealth to feed their addiction. When they run out of money they will start stealing, from their own family, from their neighbours. Many women will go into prostitution to pay for their habit. It’s a very, very addictive drug.

As a side note, many people of my generation did not get into hard drugs like heroin because of the public awareness campaigns that took place in the 1980’s when we were going through school. Many of my generation will remember the ‘Just Say No’ campaign that began in America and crossed over to the UK in the 1980s. The fact that we still remember it shows, firstly, how powerful the visual media is in our lives, and, secondly, how easily it can be used as a force for good if the will is there. It makes you wonder why such campaigns are not seen any longer and why steps are not taken to prevent the glamorisation of drug use in the media.

From a purely business point of view, this is the best commodity you can imagine. You sell this to someone and they will come back for more.

Many heroin addicts soon start injecting the drug so that it goes straight into the bloodstream. This often causes infections and abscesses.

When they keep injecting into the same veins, they clot up so they have to keep finding new ones. Many end up injecting into their groin or even the base of the tongue.

The Opium Trade in the Nineteenth Century

Moving now into the 19th century, the opium trade was increasing. By the 1820’s it had gone up to 900 tonnes of opium annually from India to China. Once again the Imperial Chinese government made the opium imports illegal, but Great Britain continued. By 1837, 2500 tonnes were being exported. This was more than all other British exports to China combined.

In effect, the opium trade was fuelling the East India company, and — considering that India was the richest and most productive region of the empire — was a major driver for the empire itself.

The First Opium War came about because the Chinese were resisting the import of opium into their country. Great Britain sent warships to face the Chinese. It has been described as “perhaps the most sordid, base and vicious event in European history.” The Chinese were defeated and were forced to sign a treaty in 1842. They were forced to pay 6 million dollars for the opium that the Chinese police had destroyed. Hong Kong was handed over to Britain, and access to Chinese ports was agreed.

Over the next 30 years the opium trade more than doubled.

France was Britain’s main colonial rival.

In 1856, because of the devastating effect on the Chinese people, the Chinese once again made attempts to resist. The Second Opium War broke out and Britain was again victorious. This time Great Britain demanded complete legalisation of opium and the free propagation of Christianity in China, to which the Chinese had no choice but to submit.

In 1858, the East India Company was dissolved and the British government itself took on the governance of India. Incidentally, John Stewart Mill, one of the fathers of modern capitalism, made a ‘valiant defence’ of the East India Company.

Following the second opium war, China gave up trying to stop the influx of opium and, to minimise the economic impact of the British trade, decided to grow opium itself,. By the end of the 19th century, 90 million out of 300 million Chinese were addicted to opium. Almost a third of the population were addicts.

The Opium Trade in the Twentieth Century

Let us move on to the 20th century which has been triumphantly described as “the American Century”. It seems strange for anyone to want to claim the 20th century, as it was, no doubt, the most bloody, horrific century known to recorded history, which witnessed two world wars and the slaughter of millions. One of the signs of the End Times according to the Prophet (may blessings and peace be upon him) is widespread bloodshed.

As Shaykh Hamza Yusuf⁹ has mentioned, the 20th century, especially the first half of it, can be seen in the light of the power struggle between the new American power and colonial rivals Britain and France, with the US emerging victorious. Many of the events of the 20th century can be looked at in that light.

Looking at America, let us examine actions rather than words.

As Noam Chomsky points out, “Britain can appeal to an imperial tradition of refreshing candor, unlike the United States which has preferred to don the garb of saintliness as it proceeds to crush anyone in its path.” In other words, the British were openly racist and imperial in their outlook. With the United States, we find a different approach. They always claim to be doing ‘good’ while, in fact, crushing anyone in their path to power and dominance.

If we concentrate on rhetoric and the public stances of politicians, we will simply be lost in circles of half-truths, avoidance, and illogicity. If we examine actions, we may arrive at a clearer understanding of reality.

Coming into the 20th century, China eventually managed to stop Britain exporting opium to it. Significantly, it only achieved this with the assistance of the USA. China had tried in vain for 150 years and fought two wars to stop Britain bringing opium into China, but it had failed.

In 1911, US president Theodore Roosevelt intervened to break up the British opium trade. This was, no doubt, a significant blow for Britain’s imperial economy. Of course, the American stance was that they were doing it for a good cause.

Through the forum of the Shanghai International Opium Conference, the US pressed for legislation aimed at suppressing the sale of opium to China. Britain and France had to agree.

By 1917 China had stopped producing and importing opium. In the 1950s, all opium production in China ceased with the communist regime. Before the Second World War, it was producing most of the world’s opium.

Opium production shifted away from China to neighbouring countries which became known as the golden triangle: Thailand, Laos, Burma, all bordering China on the south-west side. In the 1970s, 67 % of the world’s opium was coming from this area. In 1972, one third of US soldiers coming back from Vietnam were addicted to opium.

Wherever the United States intervenes, politically or militarily, in different opium producing regions, opium production invariably increases. The US, of course, will blame one factor or another for this, and often claims to be struggling valiantly to fight the drug problem. Once again, witness ‘the garb of saintliness’ that Chomsky describes.

For example, in the 1970s, Nixon launched his ‘war on drugs.’ He successfully shut down the heroin supply chain through Turkey and France (the so-called ‘French connection’), but “inadvertently” ended up creating a new market for the South-East Asian heroin. The long term consequence of this drug war was in fact increased global opium production and rising heroin consumption.¹⁰

In a well-referenced article by Peter Dale Scott, professor at the University of California, Berkley, under the sub-title, ‘Expanded World Drug Production as a Product of US Interventions,’ he shows that every time America becomes politically or militarily involved in any drug producing country, drug production multiplies.¹¹ Here are some examples he gives for opium production:

Burma: 40 tonnes in 1939 – 600 tonnes in 1970
Thailand: 7 tonnes in 1939 – 200 tonnes in 1968
Laos: Less than 15 tonnes in 1939 – 50 tonnes in 1973

In Columbia, US troops have been intervening since the late 1980s in another so-called ‘war on drugs,’ but in fact the coca production (which is what cocaine is produced from) has tripled between 1991 and 1999. Cultivation of the opium poppy has increased by five times in the region.

Once again, either you can look at realities on the ground or you can listen to the rhetoric. There are many reasons why they have been unable to curtail drug production, for example, “We were unable to control the situation here,” or “the insurgents are causing trouble so we are unable to control the drug trade,” etc.

However, with a repeated pattern, excuses start becoming a little lame, to use a colloquial expression. This is a huge cake, and people want part of the cake. The CIA has been widely implicated in the international drugs trade.¹² ,¹³ ,¹⁴

Afghanistan became important as it began producing a lot of opium. After the defeat of the communists in 1989, Afghanistan descended into chaos with multiple warlords, each commanding his own territory and establishing the rule of brute force.

The opium trade flourished. By the 1990s, half of the world’s heroin and 90% of European heroin was coming from Afghanistan. In 1996, the Taliban took power in Kabul. Initially the Taliban allowed the opium production to continue. Although opium is illegal in Shariah law, they justified their position by saying that stopping the opium trade would have a devastating impact on Afghanistan’s impoverished economy, and, secondly, that Afghan opium was being exported to non-Muslim lands, so it was not the Taliban’s concern.

Insight into the players involved in the international drug trade

In 1986, Major Zahooruddin Afridi of the Pakistan Army was caught driving to Karachi from Peshawar with 220 kilograms of high grade heroin. This was the largest seizure in Pakistani history. Two months later, Air Force officer, Flight Lieutenant Khalilur Rahman was caught with 220 kilograms of heroin on the same route. He calmly confessed that this was his fifth mission. The total value of just these two seizures was $600 million, equivalent to the entire US aid to Pakistan that year.¹⁵

This brings home the vast sums of money involved. If this is the value of just two seizures, it is perhaps not surprising, bearing in mind human nature, that top government officials and army personnel are involved. Both men were put in jail in Karachi but soon mysteriously disappeared.

Ahmed Rashid mentions that “western anti-narcotics agencies in Islamabad kept track of drug lords, who became Members of the National Assembly… Drug lords funded candidates to high office in both Bhutto’s PPP and Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League.”¹⁵ This is what money can do.

At the end of 2000, Mullah Omar, no doubt under pressure from other ulema, reversed the Taliban position and issued the fatwa to ban the opium poppy, despite the economic repercussions on his country.

The United Nations confirmed that by spring, which is the time of year for the opium harvest, opium production had gone down to almost zero.

Half of the world’s heroin had been stopped by that one act of Mullah Omar. Martin Jelsma, in the International Journal on Drug Policy, states, “The Taliban opium ban in 2000/2001 had, there is no doubt, the most profound impact on opium/heroin supply in modern history.”¹⁶

You can imagine that some very powerful people were not too happy about this.

Soon after this, the September 11 attacks took place in New York, leading, within months, to the invasion of Afghanistan. America and Britain brought back all of the old drug lords, the so called Northern Alliance. Opium production went straight back up to what it had been before the ban by the Taliban.

It is by no means clear who engineered the September 11 attacks. Iraq had nothing to do with September 11, but it was invaded as a direct result. September 11 led to America gaining direct control of Iraq, with its huge oil reserves, and Afghanistan, with its huge opium crop. American forces were extremely efficient in immediately seizing and securing the Iraqi oil fields, but are not organised enough to this day to provide basic amenities for the Iraqi people, or stop the opium/heroin production in Afghanistan.

An important point about the poppy growth in Afghanistan is that it is relatively simple for the US to eradicate it. All of it is well mapped out by satellite imagery. By satellite, you can read what is written on a cigarette packet so it is no problem identifying the massive opium fields. Sophisticated computer programs can map out exactly where the opium is growing.¹⁷ The US forces could destroy the crops using aerial spraying techniques. They do not even have to go on the ground, they can simply fly over, spray and destroy. This is not denied by the US and its allies, but other reasons are given to justify why opium poppies are not destroyed.

A recent development is that the media has started to portray the Taliban as the cause of the current explosion in heroin and opium production.

In 2002, following the American-led invasion, the United Nations drug agency issued an urgent warning that the allied forces need to act quickly to destroy the poppy crops before the end of spring. Otherwise the heroin that the Taliban had stopped would flood back. However, the Bush Administration-CIA decided not to destroy the poppy crop in Afghanistan, saying, “We decided not to destroy Afghanistan’s opium over fears that such an act may destabilise Pakistan.”¹⁸

Just $200 given to each Afghan poppy farmer would compensate for their opium crop. For just $20 million in total, America could get the farmers to stop growing opium by simply paying them off.

A significant point to note in this regard is the ease and rapidity with which the Taliban were able to eradicate opium production In Afghanistan, despite having none of the sophisticated technology or resources available to western agencies. The results of the Taliban opium ban shocked the world anti-narcotics agencies, including the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which have been operating for decades on a budget of billions to fight against the global illegal drugs trade. The only sensible conclusion we can draw from this is that there are powerful forces working to prevent easy and effective strategies from being implemented by anti-narcotics agencies. In view of the effectiveness of the Taliban opium ban, claims by anti-narcotics agencies that they have been unable to find effective means of fighting the ‘war on drugs’ despite the immense resources thrown at them by the US and other governments are implausible. Rashid mentions that several members of the US Drugs Enforcement Administration in Pakistan in the 1980s resigned from their posts or requested to be relocated as the CIA refused to allow them to do their job.¹⁹

In 2009, opium production has continued to escalate dramatically. Recent figures from the UN show that 90% of the world’s heroin now comes from Afghanistan.

History of the Taliban

It was 1989 that the Soviet troops finally left Afghanistan. America and Pakistan had been helping the so-called Mujahidin fight against the communists. The puppet communist government left behind by the Russians was overthrown by 1992.

Following that, Afghanistan descended into an anarchic state, and it was in 1994 that the Taliban emerged. Ahmad Rashid says, “Afghanistan was in a state of virtual disintegration just before the Taliban emerged… The country was divided into warlord fiefdoms… The warlords seized homes and farms and abused the population at will.”¹⁹ They were kidnapping boys and girls for sexual pleasure and robbing merchants in the markets.

Traditional the ulema mention that an hour of anarchy is worse than 40 years of a tyrant. You may have a tyrant ruler but he maintains law and order. People can go about their normal life. But when you have anarchy, a complete breakdown of authority, the poor and the weak in society are the ones who suffer most.

Ahmad Rashid is an Afghan himself. He met several of the original Taliban, friends of Mullah Omar. They told him that during the time after the communists were defeated, some of the mujahidin, like Mullah Omar, went back to their madrasas (schools) to continue studying and teaching. All of the anti-communist fighters were referred to as mujahidin but some were doing it for the sake of God, some evidently were not.

Mullah Omar himself had a school where he was teaching students in the south of Afghanistan. His companions mention that they used to sit and discuss what they could do about the state of the country. They agonised over the abuses taking place and the suffering of the people.

In the spring of 1994, the initial event that took place is quite widely reported and probably true. Two teenage girls were abducted by one of the commanders, taken to a military camp, their hair shaved, and they were repeatedly raped. Some of their family came to Mullah Omar and asked for his help. Mullah Omar took thirty students with sixteen rifles between them. They freed the girls and hung the commander from the barrel of a tank. Mullah Omar said later, “We were fighting against Muslims who had gone wrong. How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes being committed against women and the poor.”

Word got around of this incident. People started coming to Mullah Omar and asking for his help. A few months later, two commanders were fighting over a young boy that both wanted to rape. Several civilians were killed in that fight. Omar and the students freed him. This led, as Rashid describes it, to Mullah Omar emerging as a ‘Robin Hood figure,’ helping the poor against the warlords and druglords. From this beginning, the Taliban (or ‘Students’) eventually took control of Kandahar and then the south of Afghanistan. Within two years, they had marched into the capital, Kabul.

Mullah Omar Declared ‘Commander of the Believers’

In Kandahar, there is a museum which contains a burdah (a cloak) which is attributed to the Prophet himself, and is considered the most holy shrine in Afghanistan. The cloak is rarely taken out of the museum. For Mullah Omar, it was brought it out for the first time in 60 years. Draped in the blessed cloak, the ‘students’ pledged allegiance to him and declared him ‘Ameer al Mu’mineen’ (Commander of the Believers).

Strict Interpretation of Islam

The Taliban were criticised for was their strict interpretation of Islam. This aspect is routinely used as a justification for invading the country. Journalist, Michael Griffin mentions the following acts of the Taliban when they took Kabul:

They made an announcement on the radio ordering: “All those sisters working in government offices are hereby informed to stay at home until further notice”. They were probably concerned about unislamic free-mixing in government departments. This paralysed the government, of which 25% staff were women.

They made the full body covering (Niqaab) obligatory for women. Men had to wear shalwar kameez apparently, not western clothing, grow long beards and forced to go to the mosque five times a day. They prohibited toothpaste, insisting on the natural tooth-cleansing root, miswak. All of the following were forbidden: TV, kite flying, pigeons, dancing, music, singing, chess, marbles, cigarettes, and using paper as a wrapper in case it was printed with extracts of the Quran.

I don’t know what really happened. How many times have you seen Taliban ambassadors or representatives on television, explaining their point of view? You have to give people a chance to speak; this is a fundamental aspect of justice. One of the most effective techniques of media control is simply not to give the ‘enemy’ a voice.

One of the rare exceptions was when Taliban Envoy, Saeed Rahmatullah Hishami, was interviewed on the American radio station, Talk of the Nation, prior to the September 11 attacks.

He protested at the biased reporting and demonisation of the Taliban by western media: “If I had all my knowledge of Taliban from the media here, I would hate the Taliban as well.”

He was asked why the Taliban stopped girls going to school. He repeatedly said, “The Taliban have never said that girls should not go to school.” In fact, he stated that the Taliban had appealed to the international community to help Afghanistan provide facilities for girls to obtain a segregated education. The United Nations had responded by building several girls’ colleges there which had been running successfully under the Taliban. He also stated that contrary to the media depiction of the Taliban as misogynous zealots who did not allow women to leave their houses, the Taliban had respect for women and had improved the situation for Afghan women, making it safe for them to walk the streets. He said that women were working in several government ministries under Taliban rule.

He also claimed that the Taliban had offered the US to try Bin Laden in Afghanistan if the US provided evidence that he was involved in attacks on civilians in Tanzania and Kenya. Anyone convicted of killing civilians under Taliban rule would get capital punishment. The US rejected this offer. The Taliban made a further offer agreeing to an international monitoring committee to be present in Afghanistan to watch Bin Laden’s activities for the rest of his life, to ensure that he was not politically active. This was also rejected by the US.

Saeed Hishami emphasised that the Taliban had done what no one else had done for Afghanistan: bring law and order, disarm the people, establish peace and security, make it safe for women to walk the streets, and stop opium production, but, he lamented, “the world has only sent us cruise missiles, sanctions, isolation and criticism.”

From the limited information I have, I suspect the Taliban did have a strict interpretation of Islam. But one thing you can see from the list of prohibitions is that it is according to the traditional Hanafi school of law. If you read the later books of Hanafi jurisprudence, you will find that the Taliban rulings pretty much follow them to the letter. Was there wisdom in enforcing such a strict set of rules suddenly upon the people? That is debatable, but really the whole discussion about the Taliban’s interpretation of shariah obscures and deviates attention from the real issues at hand

Muslims are becoming a persecuted minority in the UK, sometimes living in an atmosphere of fear if they wish to speak the truth. One of the things we appreciate in this country is freedom of speech. There is an increasing tendency to see things in the ‘you’re either with us or with the terrorists’ fashion of George W Bush.

I do not support terrorism or attacks on innocent civilians in this country or any other, but does this mean I have to support an unjust foreign policy of the UK government? Do Muslims not have a right to express dissent without being labelled a ‘fifth column’ or ‘traitors in our midst’?

America’s War Against the Taliban

When the Taliban came into power, perhaps they had a strict interpretation of Islam, but they brought law and order to the country, and it was a widely popular movement, because the poor and the oppressed, who were suffering from the anarchy, drug lords, and warlords, welcomed them. The poor and weak were the ones who benefited because the Taliban brought justice and security. They brought strict punishments, but for people who wanted to be law abiding citizens, go out and work, earn their daily living and feel safe on the streets, they were heroes and saviours. They are aggressively demonised in the global media. It is difficult to see the reality through the propaganda, and they are certainly not a media-savvy group.²⁰

In 1996, the Taliban came into power in Kabul. In the beginning they were welcomed by the Pakistan and US administrations. People do not know this but there were Taliban ambassadors in America trying to work out a deal for a gas pipeline through Afghanistan. An American oil company and an Argentinean one were competing for this contract. So the US was dealing with the Taliban. At that time the Taliban were allowing the opium production to continue.

Pakistan was particularly pleased because the Taliban had made the roads safe, and Pakistani trade could transit through Afghanistan to Turkmenistan and other central Asian destinations. A few feminist voices objected to alleged abuse of women’s rights, but Pakistan recognised the Taliban government, as did Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

But in early 2001, they stopped the opium.

After September 11 2001, the USA delivered the following ultimatum to the Taliban: The Taliban should hand over all the leaders of al Qaeda, release all imprisoned foreign nationals, close immediately every terrorist training camp, and give the United States access to terrorist training camps for inspection.

The Taliban responded that if the US gave them evidence that Bin Laden was guilty, they would hand him over. They said that they had no evidence in their possession linking him to the September 11 attacks. The response was not unreasonable: give us evidence and we will hand him over.

On 4th October, it is believed that the Taliban offered to turn Bin Laden over to Pakistan to have a trial in an international tribunal according to Islamic Shariah. Pakistan refused. On 7th October, the military threat was building up, and the Taliban offered again to detain Bin Laden and try him under Islamic Law, if the United States made a formal request and presented evidence. This was also immediately rejected by the US.

When the American-led forces attacked Afghanistan, Pakistan entered into full cooperation with the American forces, allowing them to use her land and airspace. Faced with the full might of Washington and her allies, Pervez Musharraf committed one of the most treacherous acts in Islam’s history. Fellow Muslim neighbours and brothers whom Pakistan had supported were ignominiously forsaken to gain American favour.

If Pakistan had simply remained neutral, it would have saved some honour. Even Russia refused its airspace to be used by America until only a few weeks ago, when Barack Obama finally persuaded Putin and colleagues to allow it.

I was in Syria when Iraq was invaded. I attended Friday prayer at the mosque of Shaykh Said Ramadan al-Buti. In the sermon, he said, “Not one leader of the Arab countries has stood up. Not one voice has been heard from any Arab leader against the invasion of Iraq.” Baghdad has been bombed and Iraq has been invaded and not a voice heard from her Arab neighbours. Shaykh Buti said that it would have been better for us to die, for all of us to have been killed [referring to the Arab people], then to suffer such a humiliation and disgrace.

Whereas Musharraf capitulated, Mullah Omar remained steadfast. The Taliban were clearly desperate not to enter a conflict with America and her allies. They made offer after offer to the United States to try and resolve the issue, but they were not willing to hand over a man against whom they were given no evidence.

The Voice of America radio station conducted an interview with Mullah Omar through satellite phone just before the commencement of the war. The US National Security Council raised objections and it was never broadcast in America. However it was published in full in the UK in the Guardian newspaper — not front page news though. Most people probably missed it. This is a transcript of the interview:

VoA: Why don’t you expel Osama Bin Laden?

Mullah Omar: This is not an issue of Osama Bin Laden, it is an issue of Islam. Islam’s prestige is at stake. So is Afghanistan’s tradition.

VoA: Do you know the US has announced a war on terrorism?

Mullah Omar: I am considering two promises. One is the promise of God, the other is that of Bush. The Promise of God is that ‘My land is vast.’ If you start a journey on God’s Path, you can reside anywhere on this Earth and will be protected. The promise of Bush is that there is no place on Earth where you can hide and I cannot find you. We will see which one of these two promises is fulfilled.

VoA: But aren’t you afraid for the people, yourself, the Taliban, your country?

Mullah Omar: Almighty God is helping the believers and the Muslims. God Says He will never be satisfied with the infidels. In terms of worldly affairs America is very strong. Even if it was twice as strong, or twice that, it could not be strong enough to defeat us. We are confident that no one can harm us if God is with us.

VoA: You are telling me you are not concerned but Afghans all over the world are concerned.

Mullah Omar: We are also concerned. Great issues lie ahead but we depend on God’s Mercy. Consider our point of view. If we give Osama away today, Muslims who are now pleading to give him up would then be reviling us for giving him up. Everyone is afraid of America and wants to please it, but Americans will not be able to prevent such acts like the one that has just occurred because America has taken Islam hostage. If you look at Islamic countries the people are in despair, they are complaining that Islam is gone but people remain firm in their Islamic beliefs. In their pain and frustration some of them commit suicide acts. They feel they have nothing to lose.

VoA: What do you mean by saying America has taken the Islamic world hostage?

Mullah Omar: America controls the governments of the Islamic countries. The people ask to follow Islam but the governments do not listen because they are in the grip of the United States. If someone follows the path of Islam, the government arrests him, tortures him or kills him. This is the doing of America. If it stops supporting those governments and lets the people deal with them then such things won’t happen. America has created the evil that is attacking it. The evil will not disappear even if I die and Osama dies and others die. The US should step back and review its policy. It should stop trying to impose its empire on the rest of the world, especially on Islamic countries.

VoA: So you won’t give Osama Bin Laden up?

Mullah Omar: No. We cannot do that. If we did it means we are not Muslims, that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time we were threatened and attacked. So America can hit us again and this time we don’t even have a friend.

VoA: If you fight America with all your might, can the Taliban do that? Won’t America beat you and won’t your people suffer even more?

Mullah Omar: I am very confident that it won’t turn out this way. Please note this. There is nothing more we can do except depend on Almighty God. If a person does then he is assured that the Almighty will help him, have mercy on him, and he will succeed.²¹

Afghanistan Post-Invasion

By 2006, a few years after the invasion, the Washington Post reported that opium production in Afghanistan, now providing more than 90% of the world’s heroin, broke all previous records.²²

The United Nations office of drugs and crime in 2006 reported that the harvest in Afghanistan was going to be a world record, and up to 92% of the world’s heroin was now originating in Afghanistan.

The Daily Mail on 21 July 2007 carried an article by Craig Murray, British ambassador in neighbouring Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, entitled: “Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time”. He asks why British troops are being killed in Afghanistan. He says, “The Taliban had reduced the opium crop to precisely nil. That is an inconvenient truth that our spin has managed to obscure…”

“They were as unlikely to sell you heroin as a bottle of Johnny Walker” (alluding to the fact that they are strict Muslims). “They stamped out the opium trade and impoverished and drove out the drug warlords, whose warring and rapacity had ruined what was left of the country after the Soviet war.”

Murray says that since the invasion, Afghanistan has progressed from simple opium production to actually manufacturing heroin. Now, “opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.”
He goes on to say in the article: “The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government. This is the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect”.

Murray is vehemently anti-Taliban but he is willing to speak the truth, and his concern is that British soldiers are dying in an unjust war.²³ This is very relevant because recently there has been a new upsurge in fighting and the propaganda machine has been working in overdrive to provide fresh justifications for continued British involvement in Afghanistan.

Hamid Karzai is reported to have acted as a consultant for US oil company, UNOCAL, and is an ex-CIA operative. Following the invasion, he was made president of Afghanistan. George Bush was not a very subtle player.

Karzai’s brother has been linked to the heroin trade. The New York Times on October 4 2008 reported that an enormous cache of heroin was found under some concrete blocks. Karzai’s brother phoned the commander who had seized the heroin and instructed him to release the vehicle and the drugs. Two years later a similar incident took place. Once again his brother was involved.²⁴

In fact the article goes on to state that it is widely known that Karzai’s brother is heavily involved in the international heroin trade. It mentions that the White House ‘favoured a hands off approach’ toward Karzai’s brother. (This means they will not get involved). The White House justified its position by alluding to “the political delicacy of the matter”.

Current Situation in Afghanistan

As the British death toll escalates, the propaganda machine has gone into overdrive to keep the British public on board. According to the media, the Taliban are responsible for all of Afghanistan’s problems including the opium/heroin production. The Taliban are the enemies of the Afghan people and it has fallen to the valiant efforts of the allied forces to save them from them. If you look carefully, however, the facts do surface from time to time. On December 2 2006, the Washington Post admitted that the Taliban were not to blame for the record levels of opium: “…most experts believe it is largely an organized criminal enterprise. According to a major report on the Afghan drug industry jointly released last week by the World Bank and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, key narcotics traffickers “work closely with sponsors in top government and political positions.”,,,”²⁵

Barack Obama came into power with a lot of enthusiasm, even from sections of the Muslim world. The first major step he took, after visiting London to tackle the economic crisis, was to gather European leaders together in Paris to initiate a new offensive against the Taliban. As a direct result, two million people so far have been made homeless in the northwest frontier region.²⁶

Let’s keep an eye on what he does, not what he says.

1. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have done some of the pioneering work on the subversive role of mass media in western societies. For example, see the classic work: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. See also: Chomsky, Media Control, The spectacular achievements of propaganda [Seven Stories Press]
2. NASR, Islam and the Plight of Modern Man, [ITS], p. 207.
3. Douglas Harbrecht, “Another Clouded Clinton Appointee,” Business Week, 8 Nov 1993.
4. Bernard Haykel: “Radical Salafism,” Hindu Times, 1 Dec 2001.
5. Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kusher (2005). Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11-Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric. Perspectives on Politics, 3 , p. 525-537.
6. Calvani, S., “Eastern Horizons,” UN International Drug Control Programme, #1, March 3, 2000.
7. Kopp, Political Economy of illegal drugs, p. 23, “…we know almost nothing of the functioning of the segments of the chain that enable the drugs to move from the wholesalers to the final resellers…”
8. Many books have been written on the British Government-East India Company involvement in the opium trade, for example: Trocki, Carl A., Opium, empire and the global political economy [Routledge]
9. Director, Zaytuna Institute, California, and one of the leading traditionalist Islamic scholars in the West.
10. Detailed statistics on global drug production and use can be found in the annual ‘World Drugs Report’ of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
11. Scott, P., “Afghanistan: Heroin-ravaged State”, Global Research, 8 May 2009.
12. Rashid, A. Taliban: Islam, oil and the new great game in central Asia, [Pub: I B Tauris], p. 121: “The heroin pipeline in the 1980s could not have operated without the knowledge, if not the connivance, of officials at the highest level of the army, the government and the CIA.”
13. McCoy, A., The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade [Lawrence Hill Books]. McCoy discusses in detail how U.S. drug policies and actions in the Third World has created “America’s heroin plague.” McCoy notes that every attempt at interdiction has only resulted in the expansion of both the production and consumption of drugs.
14. Haq, I., ‘Pak-Afghan drug trade in historical perspective,’ Asian Survey, Vol. 36, No. 10 (Oct. 1996), p. 945-963: “During…the Cold War…CIA intervention provided the political protection and logistics linkage that joined Afghanistan’s poppy fields, through Pakistan’s land mass to heroin markets in Europe and America,” p. 945.
15. Rashid, p. 120-121.
16. Jelsma, M., ‘Learning lessons from the Taliban opium ban,‘ International Journal of Drug Policy, Vol. 16, Issue 2, March 2005, p. 98-103.
17. Deyoung, K., “Afghanistan Opium Crop Sets Record,” Washington Post, 2 Dec 2006.
18. Smith, C., “Bush Will Not Stop Afghan Opium Trade,” Newsmax, 28 March 2002.
19. Rashid, p. 121.
20. Chris Sands, “Afghans back Taliban, says abducted senator,” The National, 2 Oct 2008.
21. ”Mullah Omar — in his own words,” The Guardian, 26 September 2001.
22. Deyoung, K., “Afghanistan Opium Crop Sets Record”, Washington Post, 2 Dec 2006.
23. Murray, ‘Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time,è Daily Mail, 21 July 2007.
24. Risen, J., “Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade,” New York Times, Oct 4 2008.
25. Deyoung, K., “Afghanistan Opium Crop Sets Record,” Washington Post, 2 Dec 2006.
26. Walsh, D., “Swat valley could be worst refugee crisis since Rwanda, UN warns,” The Guardian, 19 May 2009, p. 16.

As a result, major media sources produce a daily propaganda diet and what Project Censored calls “junk food news,” and get most people to believe it. In their landmark book, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explained the “propaganda model” that controls the public message by “filter(ing)” disturbing truths, “leaving (behind) only the cleansed residue fit to print” or air.

Today the media is in crisis and a free and open society at risk at a time fiction substitutes for fact, news is carefully controlled, dissent marginalized, and on-air and print journalists support powerful interests as paid liars, or what famed journalist George Seldes (1890-1995) called “prostitutes of the press.”

As a result, imperial wars are called liberating ones. Civil liberties are suppressed for our own good. Major topics go unaddressed or are misrepresented. Government and business interests are endorsed wholeheartedly. America is always called “beautiful.” Beneficial social change is considered heresy. The market works best, we’re told, so let it, and patriotism means supporting lawlessness and corporate outlaws by shopping till we drop.

The New York Times: Its Lead Role in Distorting and Suppressing Truth

For many decades, the Times has been the closest thing in America to an official ministry of information and propaganda masquerading as real news, commentary and analysis.

Its unmatched clout once got media critic Norman Solomon to call its front page “the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA;” most everywhere, in fact, because its reports are widely circulated and followed globally.

The Paper of Record has a long history of:

• supporting the powerful;
• backing corporate interests;
• endorsing imperial wars;
• supporting CIA efforts to topple elected governments, assassinate independent leaders, prop up friendly dictators, secretly fund and train paramilitary death squads, practice sophisticated forms of torture, and menace democratic freedoms at home and abroad. For decades, in fact, some Times‘ foreign correspondents were covert Agency assets. Others today likely are as well as other prominent fourth estate members.

The Times management is also comfortable with:

• Washington and corporate lawlessness;
• an unprecedented and growing wealth gap;
• Wall Street banksters looting the federal treasury;
• a private banking cartel controlling the nation’s money;
• unmet human needs and increasing poverty, hunger, homelessness, and despair for growing millions in a nation run by rogue politicians who don’t give a damn as long as they’re re-elected;
• a de facto one-party state;
• deep corruption at the highest government and corporate levels;
• democracy for the select few alone;
• sham elections; and
• a deepening social decay symptomatic of a declining state, yet The Times management won’t use its clout to expose and help reverse it.

Of course, the same applies throughout the corporate media, the only variance being audience size, the ability to influence it, and the special impact of TV news and talk radio to arouse their faithful. Plus their power of round-the-clock persuasive repetition.

Examples of Journalism, New York Times Style

After a Washington staged February 29, 2004 middle-of-the-night coup ousted democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Times March 1 editorial lied by:

• stating he resigned;
• saying sending in Marines to abduct him “was the right thing to do;”
• claiming they only came after “Mr. Aristide yielded power;”
• blaming him for “contribut(ing) significantly to his own downfall (because of his) increasingly autocratic and lawless rule….;” and
• accusing him of manipulating the 2000 legislative elections and not “deliver(ing) the democracy he promised.”

In fact, he’s a beloved democrat first elected in 1990 with 67% of the vote, ousted by a US-supported coup months later, returned to Haiti in 1994, then, because he couldn’t succeed himself in 1996, ran in 2000 and was overwhelmingly re-elected with 92% of the vote. Today in exile, the great majority of Haitians want him back but paramilitary occupiers, under orders from Washington, won’t let him.

Following Hugo Chavez’s December 1998 election, the Times‘ Latin American reporter, Larry Roher, wrote:

Regional “presidents and party leaders are looking over their shoulders (concerned about the) specter (they) thought they had safely interred: that of the populist demagogue, the authoritarian man on horseback known as the caudillo (strongman)” taking power.

Ever since, Times writers consistently:

• turned a blind eye to Venezuelan democracy;
• bashed Chavez as “divisive, a ruinous demagogue, provocative (and) the next Fidel Castro;”
• said he “militarized the government, emasculated the country’s courts, intimidated the media, eroded confidence in the economy, and hollowed out Venezuela’s once-democratic institutions:” common conditions during decades of pre-Chavez rule that columnist Roger Lowenstein falsely said exist now in:
• calling him anti-capitalist for sharing his nation’s oil wealth with the people by providing essential social services, and for lifting the most needy out of poverty; and
• denouncing his making foreign investors pay their fair share.

Lowenstein backed the aborted April 2002 coup by calling Chavez’s ouster a “resignation,” then saying Venezuela “no longer (would be) threatened by a would-be dictator.”

Post-/911, the Times played the lead role in taking the nation to war by highlighting the “day of terror” and saying the “President Vows to Exact Punishment for ‘Evil.’ ”

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Judith Miller was a weapon of mass deception with her daily front page Pentagon press release columns masquerading as real news, later exposed as manipulative lies, but they worked.

Following the September 15, 2009 Goldstone Commission report, a same day Neil MacFarquhar column suggested that Israel’s “disproportionate attack” followed Hamas provocations, so perhaps it was justified. While the Times gave Judge Goldstone op-ed space, it:

– published scathing letters denouncing his “one-sidedness” and a September 18 piece saying “the Obama administration said (today) that a United Nations report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza was unfair to Israel and did not take adequate account of ‘deplorable’ actions by the militant group Hamas in the conflict last winter.”

The paper then imposed a near-blackout on its news and editorial pages to bury the story and kill it through silence – never mind its importance in documenting clear evidence of Israeli war crimes against a civilian population.

National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting (PBS)

Founded in 1970 as an independent, private, non-profit member organization of US public radio stations, NPR promised to be an alternative to commercial broadcasters by “promot(ing) personal growth rather than corporate gain (and) speak with many voices, many dialects.”

Having long ago abandoned its promise, and given its substantial corporate and government funding, NPR is indistinguishable from the rest of the corporate media, just as corrupted, and consider its former head, Kevin Klose.

He was president from December 1998-September 2008 and CEO from 1998-January 2009. Earlier he was US propaganda director as head of the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Worldnet Television, and the anti-Castro Radio/TV Marti, so he fit easily into his new role.

On January 5, 2009, Vivian Schiller succeeded him as president and CEO. Her official bio says she was previously with “The New York Times Company where she served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of NYTimes.com.”

She’ll oversea “all NPR operations and initiatives, including the organization’s critical partnerships with our 800+ member stations, and their service to the more than 26 million people who listen to NPR programming every week.” Most don’t know they’re getting the same corporate propaganda and “junk food news” or that NPR calls itself “public” to conceal its real agenda, and why critics call it “National Pentagon or Petroleum Radio” with good reason.

Created by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) calls itself “a private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress… and is the steward of the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting. It helps support the operations of more than 1,100 locally-owned and-operated public television and radio stations nationwide, and is the largest single source of funding for research, technology, and program development for public radio, television and related online services.”

Like NPR, it’s heavily corporate and government funded and provides similar services for them. Under George Bush, former Voice of America director Kenneth Tomlinson was chairman of CPB’s Board of Governors until an internal 2005 investigation forced him out for repeatedly braking the law.

On September 16, 2009, a CPB press release announced that “The board of directors (of the CPB) today elected Dr. Ernest Wilson III (as) chairman and re-elected… CEO Beth Courtney (as) vice-chair.”

Wilson previously held senior policy positions as Director of International Programs and Resources on the National Security Council. He was also Policy and Planning Unit Director for the US Information Agency and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Beth Courtney is a George Bush appointee, a past chairman of the board of America’s Public Television Stations and present CPB vice chairman. Currently she also serves on the boards of Satellite Educational Resources Consortium, the Organization of State Broadcasting Executives, the National Forum for Public Television Executives, and the National Educational Telecommunications Association along with other appropriate credentials for her re-appointment.

In its May/June 2004 “Extra” report, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) asked “How Public Is Public Radio? Writers Steve Rendall and Daniel Butterworth quoted past head Kevin Klose saying:

“All of us believe our goal is to serve the entire democracy, the entire country.”

Not according to FAIR on “every on-air source quoted in June 2003 on four of (NPR’s) news shows: All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition Saturday and Weekend Edition Sunday.” Each guest was classified “by occupation, gender, nationality, and partisan affiliation.” Combined, 2,334 sources from 804 stories were quoted.

FAIR found that NPR relies on the same dominant sources as the major media that include government officials, professional experts, and corporate representatives nearly two-thirds of the time.

Spokespeople for public interest groups accounted for 7% of total sources, and ordinary people appeared mostly in “one-sentence soundbites.”

Male guests outnumbered women about 4-1, and those quoted most often came from the same elite categories as men.

Overall, NPR represents the same dominant interests as the major commercial media — conservative, pro-business, pro-war, pro-Israel, and very much against the public interest while pretending to support it.

FAIR analyzed PBS’s flagship NewsHour guest list and drew similar conclusions. Like NPR, it’s ideologically right and usually censors progressive content and public interest programming. In a 1990 NewsHour evaluation, FAIR compared its content to ABC’s Nightline and found that it presented “an even narrower segment of the political spectrum.” It then conducted an October 2005-March 2006 analysis of all of its programs, got similar results, and determined that NewHour is even more ideologically right than NPR that tilts far in that direction itself.

FAIR concluded that NPR and NewsHour content “overwhelmingly represent those in power rather than the public” they’re obliged to serve. While masquerading as public programming, they betray their listeners and viewers by offering the same propaganda and “junk food news” as the dominant corporate media. Considering their funding sources, what else would they do.

An October 6 NPR story is typical of most others. It charged Hugo Chavez with “Targeting Opponents For Arrest.” Reporter Juan Forero claimed “dozens of university students” went on hunger strike outside OAS headquarters in Caracas on September 28 along with others “across the country… in support of Julio Cesar Rivas, a student who was arrested during an anti-government demonstration in August….”

Rivas is the coordinator and founder of Juventud Activa de Venezuela Unida (United Active Youth of Venezuela – JAVU). Earlier, he was part of a staged, violent street protest against Venezuela’s new Education Law. The government says JAVU acts as “shock troops” in opposition protests and is liberally funded by the National Endowment of Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), and US Agency or International Development (USAID) to disrupt internal Venezuelan affairs. It’s a familiar scheme, repeated numerous times in the past, to discredit and disrupt the Chavez government in hopes of eventually ousting it.

JAVU has about 80,000 members in most Venezuelan states, and its blog site calls for bringing down the government and supporting the Honduran military coup.

Rivas was released on September 29, but must appear for trial. He’s a Washington-funded provocateur, charged with resisting arrest, instigating crime, conspiracy, inciting rebellion, damaging public property, and using “generic” weapons.

While in custody, Venezuela Public Defender Gabriela Ramirez assured him in person that his full constitutional rights will be protected. Street protests still continue and have been countered by pro-Chavez ones calling for “peace and tolerance.” According to the Federation of Bolivarian students’ Carlos Sierra:

Opposition “students are being used and manipulated by the top leadership of the irrational opposition, which, via the (dominant) media, send them to generate violence and terrorism in the country” much like on previous occasions.

But according to NPR’s Forero, Rivas was “sent to one of Venezuela’s most infamous prisons” where other government opponents are held as political prisoners. Chavez “has been jailing dozens of key opponents – some of them students, some of them veteran politicians” in citing unnamed “human rights groups and constitutional experts (claiming) Venezuela is increasingly singling out and imprisoning its foes in politically motivated witch hunts.”

Forero didn’t mention that Rivas fomented violence. Others arrested also broke the law. No one is a political prisoner, and all Venezuelans get fair and equitable trials, unlike in America where real political arrests, prosecutions and convictions happen regularly against innocent targeted victims — a topic NPR and PBS won’t touch except to vilify them publicly on-air.

Nor do they report truthfully on Occupied Palestine. On October 12, 2009, on NPR’s Morning Edition, reporter Renee Montagne practically extolled Israeli racism in stating:

“There is a new enemy for some Israelis: romance between Jewish women and Arab men, (so) vigilantes have banded together to fight it.” She means from “Jewish settlements” that “have sprung up (in) traditionally Arab” East Jerusalem, but won’t admit they’re on stolen Palestinian land.

NPR’s Sheera Frankel joined a patrol, implied Arabs are inferior to Jews, and suggested they pose a danger to Jewish women and girls. She described vigilantes on the lookout for “Arab-Jewish couples (to) break up their dates,” suggesting it’s the right thing to do, but never questioning the legitimacy of settlements, vigilante violence in East Jerusalem, its lawless disregard for the law, or great harm to innocent people. Instead she called “mixed couples a growing epidemic” of miscegenation — typical of NPR’s racism and one-sided support for Israel.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)

The WSJ is Dow Jones & Company’s flagship publication, now a News Corp. one since Rupert Murdoch bought it in August 2007. Stating its ideology up front, it says it supports “free markets and free people” as well as “free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the ukases (edicts) of kings and other collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.”

In October 2007, FAIR bemoaned the Murdock takeover because of his “penchant for using his holdings as vehicles for his personal (views) and business interests.” Earlier FAIR and the Columbia Journalism Review criticized its editorial page for inaccuracy, extreme bias, and dishonesty.

The Journal is unapologetic in saying its philosophy “make(s) no pretense of walking down the middle of the road. Our comments and interpretations are made from a definite point of view…. We oppose all infringements on individual rights, whether (from) private monopoly, labor union monopoly or from an overgrowing government. (We’re) not much interested in labels but if we were to choose one, we would say we are radical.”

Radical can be revolutionary and beneficial when it backs fundamental progressive change and reform. Webster defines it as:

“marked by a considerable departure from the usual and traditional: extreme; tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions; of, relating to, or constituting a political (or perhaps business) group associated with views, practices, and policies of extreme change; (or) advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs” such the radical right represented by the WSJ’s management and editorial writers.

Critics agree that they’re on the far right extremist fringe, a supporter of voodoo economics, tax cuts for the rich, a staunch defender of executive privilege, and disdainful of anything to the left of their views as witnessed daily by some of the most outlandish, one-sided, pro-business commentaries countenancing no alternatives, with the rarest of rare exceptions showing up to make the paper look fair, which it’s not.

Consider editorial board member Mary O’Grady in her weekly Americas column on “politics, economics and business in Latin America and Canada.” Her extremism is unmatched. Her style is agitprop; her space a truth-free zone; her language hateful and vindictive; her tone malicious and slanderous; her style bare-knuckled thuggishness; and her material calculating, mendacious, and shameless. Yet she’s a WSJ regular and an award-winning op-ed writer, but surely no journalist according to Webster’s definition:

“writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation.”

O’Grady fails on both counts. She’s a kind of print version of Fox News‘ Glenn Beck, who promotes himself on glennbeck.com looking arrogant in a uniform reminiscent of the Nazi SS.

Consider O’Grady’s support for the Washington-backed June 28 Honduran coup ousting a democratically elected president. It was followed by months of mass arrests, disappearances, killings, targeting the independent media, suspending the Constitution, declaring martial law, and threatening the Brazilian embassy’s sovereignty where President Manuel Zelaya took refuge after returning.

In one of her many pro-coup articles, O’Grady (on July 13) headlined “Why Honduras Sent Zelaya Away.” In a “perfect world,” according to her, he “would be in jail in his own country right now, awaiting trial. The Honduran attorney general (part of the coup regime) has charged him with deliberately violating Honduran law and the Supreme Court (stacked with pro-coup justices) ordered his arrest in Tegucigalpa on June 28,” the day of the coup.

“But the Honduran military whisked him out of the country, to Costa Rica,” to save itself the embarrassment of jailing a democratically elected leader whose lawful actions were endorsed by the majority of Hondurans wanting progressive constitutional change and a president willing to give it to them.

Yet according to O’Grady, “Mr. Zelaya’s detention was legal, as was his official removal from office by Congress…. Besides eagerly trampling the constitution, Mr. Zelaya had demonstrated that he was ready to employ the violent tactics of ‘chavismo’ to hang onto power. The decision to pack him off immediately was taken in the interest of protecting both constitutional order and human life.”

In fact, Zelaya neither espoused or practiced violence, and his call for a public June 28 vote on whether to hold a referendum for a new Constitutional Convention at the same time as the November elections lawfully asked for a “yes” or “no” on one question:

“Do you think that the November 2009 general elections should include a fourth ballot box (the other three were for candidates) in order to make a decision about the creation of a National Constitutional Assembly that would approve a new Constitution?”

According to Article 5 of the 2006 Honduran “Civil Participation Act,” government officials may hold non-binding inquiries (referenda) to determine popular support for proposed measures. Gauging sentiment for a National Constituent Assembly for a new Constitution is legal.

Yet in her June 28 article titled, “Honduras Defends Its Democracy,” O’Grady falsely claimed Zelaya planned “a constitutional rewrite (following) a national referendum” only the Congress can approve. In fact, Zelaya called for a vote to assess public sentiment, pro or con, on whether Hondurans want a Constitutional Convention, an act no different from a public opinion poll that’s perfectly legal or should be anywhere. But according to O’Grady, Zelaya “decided he would run the referendum himself.” It’s typical O’Grady truth reversal that earns her weekly space on the WSJ’s op-ed page.

The BBC’s Long Tradition As An Imperial Tool

State-owned and funded, it’s tradition is long, unbroken, and disturbing as the world’s largest and most influential broadcaster reaching global audiences in 32 languages. From inception in 1925, it’s been reliably pro-government and pro-business, or as its founder Lord Reith wrote the establishment: “They know they can trust us not to be really impartial.” Neither he or his successors disappointed on topics mattering most, including war and peace, corporate crimes, US-UK duplicity, labor rights, democratic freedoms, human and civil rights, social justice, and Western imperialism.

They’re consistently distorted, suppressed, marginalized or ignored throughout decades of misreporting despite claiming “honesty (and) integrity (is) what the BBC stands for (because it’s) free from political influence and commercial pressure.”

As a propaganda service, its record is uncompromisingly anti-union, pro-business, and dependably safe for Whitehall and its allies. It moralizes Western aggression, bashes independent democratic leaders, and cheerleads for the powerful at the expense of providing real news and information for millions believing BBC is credible. For over eight decades, it’s record is solid and predictable — betraying the public trust to reliably serve the powerful. The tradition continues.

Prominent TV Demagogues

Among the many, consider a select few. For example, CNN’s Lou Dobbs, “Mr. Independent” he calls himself. Critics use more descriptive terms, yet according to his loudobbs.tv.cnn.com bio:

He’s “anchor and managing editor of CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight (and also anchor of) a nationally syndicated financial news radio report, The Lou Dobbs Financial Report….” In addition, he writes a weekly CNN.com commentary, is an author and award-winning “journalist,” most recently in 2005 when “the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded (him) the Emmy for Lifetime Achievement” for serving the usual special interests nightly on prime time TV.

In June 2004, he also won “the Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies for his ongoing series ‘Broken Borders,’ which examines US policy towards illegal immigration.” Little wonder in an August 2006 article, this writer called him CNN’s Vice President of Racism. He’s also a paid liar and in America wins awards.

In May 2008, a Media Matters Action Network report titled, “Fear & Loathing in Prime Time: Immigration Myths and Cable News” highlighted undocumented Latino hatemongering by Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, each claiming:

• an alleged connection between undocumented Latinos and crime; in fact, clear evidence shows they’re no more likely to break laws than American citizens;
• how they exploit social services and don’t pay taxes; in fact, undocumented immigrants are ineligible, without proof of legal status, for Medicaid, food stamps, State Children’s Health Insurance (SCHIP) and welfare; they do pay income, payroll, property, sales and other taxes and are entitled to public education; according to the National Academy of Sciences, immigrants provide a net annual gain of up to $10 billion to US GDP; according to Rand Corp. economist James P. Smith, the “net present value of the gains from those immigrants who arrived since 1980 would be $333 billion.”
• the “reconquista” myth about a supposed Mexican plot to take over the US Southwest; and
• an epidemic of Latino voter fraud that, according to Dobbs’ incessant drumbeat, puts America’s “democracy absolutely in jeopardy.”

He also propagates the myth that undocumented Latinos caused an increase in US leprosy (or Hansen’s disease). In an on-air April 2005 report (among others), correspondent Christine Romans quoted “medical lawyer” Dr. Madeleine Cosman saying:

“We have some enormous problems with horrendous diseases that are being brought into America by illegal aliens (including) leprosy….” Romans added that, according to Cosman, “there were about 900 (US) cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years.”

According to a May 2007 60 Minutes report, the National Hansen’s Disease Program (NHDP) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reported that “7,000 is the number of leprosy cases over the last 30 years, not the past three, and nobody knows how many of those cases involve illegal immigrants.” NHDP added that from 2002-2005 (the timeline of Cosman’s claim), only 398 cases occurred. To that, Dobbs responded: “If we reported it, it’s a fact.”

Founded in 1971, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is internationally known for its activism against hate groups and scoring legal victories against white supremacists. It says Dobbs regularly features inaccurate racist reports and features anti-immigrant hatemongers like:

• Glenn Spencer, head of the anti-immigration American Patrol, whose web site highlights anti-Mexican vitriol and the idea that Mexico plans a secret takeover of the Southwest;
• Joe McCutchen, head of the anti-immigration Protect Arkansas Now group, that Dobbs calls “a terrific group of concerned, caring Americans;”
• Paul Streitz, co-founder of Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control, who once denounced Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. for “turning New Haven into a banana republic;”
• Barbara Coe, leader of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform who routinely calls Mexicans “savages;” and
• Chris Simcox, co-founder of the Minuteman Project and a leading anti-immigration figure.

SPLC explains that Dobbs “doggedly explores and supports the anti-immigration movement (and) won’t report salient negative facts about anti-immigration leaders he approves of….”

Instead, he falsely claims that:

• “just about a third of the prison population in this country is estimated to be illegal aliens;”
• states have been “overwhelmed by criminal illegal aliens;” and
• US borders are “unprotected” allowing “criminal illegal aliens (to) murder police officers.”

In 2007 alone, the connection between illegal immigration and crime was discussed on 94 episodes of Lou Dobbs Tonight, and dozens more focused on an “army of invaders,” immigrants not paying taxes, draining social services, and threatening our white Anglo-Saxon culture.

CNN reporters Casey Wian, Bill Tucker, Kitty Pilgrim and others present a steady diet of subtle and overt racism to incite viewers to believe it. Through constant repetition, it propagates the myth, and according to the Media Matters Action Network report:

Dobbs “is hailed by the entire spectrum of immigration opponents, from the reasonable to the unreasonable. And the degree to which extremist elements see (him) as an ally indicates at the very least that they believe he is helping their cause” because they feel he’s a populist crusader.

Yet according to a July 30 New York Observer report, recent Nielsen data showed that after Dobbs began reporting (on July 15) that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent (an apparent stunt to increase ratings), his viewership dropped significantly — 15% overall and 27% in the valued 25-54 age category.

Fox News Channel (FNC)

When it debuted in 1996, one of its on-air hosts said:

The “Channel was launched (because) something was wrong with news media… somewhere bias found its way into reporting… Fox… is committed to being fair and balanced (covering) stories everybody is reporting — and… stories… you will see only on Fox.”

Later the Columbia Journalism Review said several former Fox employees “complained of ‘management sticking their fingers’ in the writing and editing stories to cook the facts to make a story more palatable to right-of-center tastes.” But it hasn’t hurt ratings.

As of Q 1 2009, FNC was the second highest rated cable channel in prime time total viewers. CNN ranked 17th and MSNBC 24th. The O’Reilly Factor has been #1 rated on cable news for 100 consecutive months and gained 27% more viewers year-over-year. Glenn Beck increased 90% over the previous year. Overall, FNC topped CNN and MSNBC combined in prime time total audience.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) said “Fox’s signature political news show, Special Report with Brit Hume (now with Bret Baier) was originally created as a daily one-hour update devoted to the 1998 Clinton sex scandal.” In the past year, it gained 39% more viewers.

As for accuracy and being “fair and balanced,” FAIR (in summer 2001) called FNC “The Most Biased Name in News,” yet according to Murdoch in March 2001:

“I challenge anybody to show me an example of bias in Fox News Channel.”

In FAIR’s Seth Ackerman article and later ones, FNC’s blatant manipulation of the news is exposed. For example, Bret Baier’s “Political Grapevine” is a right-wing “hot sheet” featuring a “series of gossipy items culled from other right-wing” sources. It and other reports are blatantly partisan propaganda against “liberal media bias,” progressives, environmentalists, anti-war activists, civil rights groups, and others to the left of their views.

According to FAIR, the commentary on political punditry programs like The O’Reilly Factor, the Sean Hannity Show, and The Beltway Boys is so slanted that it’s like watching “a Harlem Globetrotters game (knowing) which side is supposed to win.”

FNC’s Bill O’Reilly

His official bio calls The O’Reilly Factor “a unique blend of news analysis and hard hitting investigative reporting dropped each weeknight into ‘The No Spin Zone.” He also hosts a syndicated radio show, writes a weekly column carried in over 300 newspapers, and authored several books that according to New York Times writer Janet Maslin were “either (done) with a collaborator or (O’Reilly) was born with a ghostwriter’s gift for filling space with platitudes….” With good reason, Maslin called him “one of the most controversial human beings in the world….”

In an October 2008 report titled “Smearcasting,” FAIR called him an “Islamophobe” for spreading “fear, bigotry and misinformation” along with 11 other popular figures, including Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin (another FNC regular), David Horowitz, and Pat Robertson.

After 9/11, FAIR said O’Reilly proposed attacking a list of Muslim countries “if they did not submit to the US — starting with Afghanistan.”

On air he said:

“The US should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble — the airport, the power plants, their water facilities and the roads…. If they don’t rise up against this primitive country, they starve, period.”

Iraq must also be destroyed he said, and “the population made to endure yet another round of intense pain.” As for Libya, “Nothing goes in, nothing goes out…. Let them eat sand.”

FAIR called his penchant for attacking Muslim countries “an O’Reilly trademark”, and “his disregard for Muslim civilians is matched by the anti-Muslim sentiments he frequently expresses on both his nationally syndicated radio show, the Radio Factor,” reaching 3.5 million listeners, and his top-rated FNC show.

Some of his hateful comments include saying:

• areas of London are “just packed with just dense Muslim neighborhoods, which breed this kind of contempt for Western society. Why do they let them in;”
• “We’re at war with Muslim fanatics. So all young Muslims should be subject to (special) scrutiny, (saying it’s not racial, just) “criminal profiling;”
• “the most unattractive women in the world are probably in Muslim countries;” and
• in Iraq, he blamed killing on Islam: “They’re all Muslims, and they’re doing what they do. They’re killing each other. And they’re killing Americans.”

O’Reilly is equally racist about Latino immigrants with frequent comments like:

“The extreme elements in this country want open borders, blanket amnesty, and entitlement for foreign nationals who have come here illegally, and generally want to change the demographics in the USA so political power can be assumed by the left. That is the end game.” He also argues that “Low-skilled immigrant labor costs the taxpayers today $19,000 to (subsidize) people who are using the hospitals (and) the education system…. These are rock-solid stats,” but O’Reilly won’t say from where.

They’re blatantly false and may be from a May 2007 Robert Rector/Christine Kim (right-wing think tank) Heritage Foundation paper titled, “The Fiscal Cost of Low-Skill Immigrants to State and Local Taxpayers.”

O’Reilly spreads daily misinformation, innuendo, and hateful demagoguery to millions of his daily faithful. Like the others above, they’re paid liars delivering what passes for today’s major media journalism. It’s why so much of the public is misinformed and the reason more hate groups than ever proliferate.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), they numbered 926 in 2008, up from 602 in 2000 and are “animated by the national immigration debate.” Since Obama took office, they’re also driven by their hatred of a black president, exacerbated by a growing economic crisis that’s easy to blame on the undocumented and a non-white head of state.

These groups are ideologically vicious and extremely dangerous when motivated by racist right-wing media commentators reaching far larger audiences than more saner voices drowned out. It’s more evidence of social decay and the urgent need for change.

The Right-Wing Media Attack ACORN

Founded in 1970, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) “is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low and moderate income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in about 75 cities across the country.”

As the nation’s preeminent community organizing group, it backs a living wage, opposes predatory lending and foreclosures, supports affordable housing, better public schools, welfare reform, voting rights, rebuilding New Orleans, and other social and economic justice issues.

For many months as a result, right-wing extremists have tried to discredit its successes online and through the media. Led by Fox News, Lou Dobbs, and others, it’s accused of financial corruption, massive voter fraud, and other indiscretions, mostly fabricated to destroy the group’s credibility, cut off its funding, and harm other community organizing efforts. However, compared to corporate fraud and abuse scandals, ACORN’s occasional missteps are minor, insignificant, and undeserving of inflammatory media headlines.

Nonetheless recent news stories featured false accusations that ACORN engages in prostitution nationwide. The supposed evidence came from two right-wing filmmakers (Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe) posing as prostitute and pimp, conveniently videotaped for airing. In prime time especially, Fox News, Lou Dobbs and others featured it nightly.

On September 14, Dobbs reported “another pimp and prostitute scandal at the left-wing activist organization ACORN. For the third time, ACORN workers for the left-wing advocacy group (got) caught on hidden camera breaking the law. Now calls from Congress to investigate and cut off public funding are growing.”

According to Fox News‘ Bill O’Reilly, “With more than 30 criminal ‘convictions’ on its resume, the organization cannot be trusted.” Based on no credible evidence, other FNC reports accuse ACORN of “operat(ing) as a criminal enterprise,” including prostitution, running a prostitution ring, filing false documents with taxing and other government authorities, bank fraud, violating immigration laws, transporting women and children to America for immoral purposes, and impairing the welfare of minors.

More evidence of reprehensible innuendo, distortion, deceit, and misinformation from major media paid liars. It’s why web sites like this one gain followers.

This is the situation that the whole world faces. The major points of contact with the information that the world’s people require in order to make personal and societal decisions are primarily: TV, radio and print media, and internet sources that are driven by these sources; other internet sources are more correctly called propaganda tools regardless of their ideological position.

The primary “news” sources lay claim to some degree of neutrality and veridicality; but, they only pretend “neutrality” on issues that do not directly concern their owners or the self-interest of individual reporters and “news” departments. They use the cheap device of giving “equal time” and authority to positions whether or not there is any valid reason to assume equality; they always distort and ignore news that would negatively impact the economic and political elite.

The consequence is that there is no consistently reliable source for vital, informing descriptions of the conditions of our world. We cannot act with any confidence that the information upon which we must act is accurate. While we know we are being lied to, there is no source that stands as sufficiently honest and unbiased that we can use it as a reference to measure the maelstrom.

Of course, some people with enough time, experience and determination can often piece together descriptions of events in ways that they might reasonable trust as veridical, but there is little or no way that their efforts can be generally disseminated – or for that matter, separated from the propaganda that is boiling up as a substitute for real information. So, regardless of the motives, of which there are many (to be looked at more closely in moment), the result is the almost complete impossibility of the general public having the information that they require to act in response to the actual events and processes going on in the world. This is the loss of a most basic survival tool: accurate information to inform action in the environment.

Insidiously, the non-news part of media acts to set the base-line expectations for the “news” itself. ‘Every’ person in TV dramas carries a gun, drives a Land Rover, uses a satphone and lives in a million dollar house or condo; even if they have a 50K job doing what, in the real world, might be some form of accounting. ‘Everyday-people’ have al Qaeda sleeper cells in the house next door to them. Serial killers roam the streets of every neighborhood. And personal success and satisfaction is never ever seen as a moment of quiet reflection.

If we average the content of the lives we see portrayed on our “home theaters” and compare them to the actual modal lives of American citizens, the disconnect rises to the level of the pathological: the stories that we tell about ourselves have absolutely nothing – nothing – to do with the lives we lead, even as we attempt, as we always have done, to model ourselves after them. For every film like The Remains of the Day, there are hundreds where the moral choices are drawn in crayon and gratuitous blood.

People embrace the entertainment media, giving it 50, 80, even 100 % of their non-working life (and many times part of their working life) not so much to be entertained, but to be part of the common human experience. If people felt fully connected to flesh and blood people, then they would not spend 5 hours a day watching 2-dimensional electronic representations of people that they can’t know, can’t touch or ask a question. If people felt informed and competent in the execution of their lives, then they wouldn’t so desperately seek the slick and phony “competence” of media “heroes.”

The professional news media is now only an extension of this pattern. To a large extend it is competing with fictional stories, with the carefully rehearsed control of emotional content and production values, while at the same time purporting to discover and extract accurate descriptions of events and behaviors that talented and powerful interests wish to remain hidden. My critique in no way is intended to suggest that this social role and responsibility is easy, only that this vital role is being thoroughly mishandled and abused.

The reasons for the abuse run from the most mundane to the most violently draconian. Reporters and editors have often been the targets of the forces who wish not to be reported on. In 2006, 81 journalists were killed (other accounts give the number as 110) and 871 were put in jail worldwide. 2007 saw 86 (95) killed and hundreds more jailed. The assumption is made that the vast majority of the journalists so treated were acted on in response to their reporting things that someone really didn’t want to see made public. A message was being sent: speak and die; this would distort what is reported on.¹

But there are many other ways to motivate the distortion of information. Limbaugh is reported to have a 400 million dollar contract! Top TV “news” anchors are all in the 6 to 8 figure range. These amounts of money create organized interest groups deep within the media beast with a disproportionate voice in how stories are framed so that the “news” show can ‘get its story’ day after day. The self-interested corporate ownership of media has its own influence.

At the other extreme the public must be appealed to to watch and listen. This has become about polling and presentation, personality and production values, matching expectations and desires more than giving the most straightforward accounting of events no matter where the chips may fall – there must be no chips, though sparks are good, i.e., there must be no real consequences, just shiny things to distract attention. If real substantive stories with real consequences that led to human action were presented, people might come to expect, and eventually demand, substantive information…. And then there would be the danger of the numbers a couple of paragraphs above going up – it is a tough decision: package a dishonest product, have sycophantic fame and make lots of money… or tell the greatest truth that can be divined from the muscular digging of evidence and be ignored, rejected, threatened, fired, jailed or killed.

What matters, what gets lost in the wailing over this and that specific crime against the public good, is exactly that, the public good. Just as wind sailors died from the lack of specific vitamins, so societies die from the lack of accurate information on the vital details of life. A social order cannot sustain on lies. It is just so simple: the biophysical world in which we live requires that it be responded to from veridicality. The ‘vascular system’ through which is pumped the information necessary for societal and individual survival is diseased and failing. The informational nutrients of life delivered by it cannot be trusted and we accept them with reluctance even as we must, at some level, accept them.

What hope there is in this model of our informational dilemma comes from those who will not give up trying to organize, out of the cacophony, some bits of the real. So long as this impulse is alive there is always a corner to be turned. Like the creature that collects tiny drops of water, one at a time, from the morning dew in a rainless land, those who have the ability and inclination to organize some more truthful image of our present time must do so to stay mentally alive. As those people spread their efforts and share their methods for making sense of the intentional chaos perhaps, just maybe, a critical mass can demand even more.

1. For comparison, there are 50 to 100 teachers for every journalist. Teaching can be very dangerous in regions of deep social conflict and tyrannical governments, teachers are jailed and killed for their teaching, but the numbers are generally small and certainly far below the proportional rates for journalists. I couldn’t find a source that totaled the numbers of teachers killed or jailed for their professional activities, but a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation gives me numbers perhaps half those for journalists, almost all in the most troubled places. This would make journalism about a hundred times more dangerous given the smaller numbers.

As the year winds down and Hollywood gets busy creating Oscar buzz, one unlikely contender is The Hurt Locker, the widely praised Iraq movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and was released in the U.S. in June 2009.

“Just when I thought I’d seen enough of Iraq war movies, along comes (Hurt Locker),” an Access Hollywood film critic told USA Today in September. “If any movie about Iraq is going to break through to the academy, this is it.”

Indeed, the “megabuzz-spawning film” (to quote the Modesto Bee) was nominated for its first official honor last month, by the prestigious (if relatively obscure) New York-based Independent Filmmaker Project, which tapped it for Best Feature. According to the Los Angeles Times, which has started tracking Oscar favorites, The Hurt Locker has been tapped by no fewer than 16 leading film pundits as a serious Academy Award contender.

Even if it skipped your radar, you’ve probably heard some beaming reviews about The Hurt Locker by now.

The almost unanimous acclaim it attracted from mainstream reviewers focused mainly on director Kathryn Bigelow’s suspenseful action scenes, which make up the majority of the film’s run time, and prominent reviewers agree that it’s a masterfully crafted American combat epic about three deceptively simple-looking and courageous American men making sacrifices for their country while in unfamiliar, hostile territory.

At least partially thanks to clever marketing, the film produced over $12 million in box office revenue, making it the most successful movie made about the U.S. war on Iraq and its so-called war on terror to date. (Compare to films like Redacted, which earned $25,628, or Rendition’s $9.6 million.)

But there are some curious contradictions in the praise Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have received for their work.

Reviewers cite Boal’s brief stint as an embedded journalist following a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq as supporting evidence for the film’s alleged accuracy. But they fail to consider the inevitable bias of such a narrow perspective.

Would reviewers have lauded the accuracy of a story based on the experiences of a journalist who had been embedded with the “other” side — particularly if the portrayal of American soldiers had not been positive?

Some reviewers have praised Bigelow for allegedly not incorporating a political stance into the film. This is simply ridiculous: It’s being endorsed by military-recruitment sites as we speak. A link to military.com, the largest military organization in the United States, appears on the front page of the film’s official Web site.

A Realistic Portrayal of Iraq?

Filmed in Jordan, The Hurt Locker is supposed to have taken place in Iraq in 2004, where an American bomb-dismantling team visits various danger spots in unfriendly neighborhoods.

The first scene, ironically, opens with a quote from award-winning anti-war journalist and author, Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction for war is a drug.” Cue screen fade.

The display re-emerges from within the lens of a remote-controlled robot making its way across a rocky road toward a suspicious-looking pile of sacks laid out on the ground near an old railway track. The audience catches brief glimpses of destruction from this unsteady viewpoint, as well as a shaky camera (through which most of the film is viewed) that narrows in and out on people and objects, as though they are all targets.

From these two perspectives, we see old blown-up cars and destroyed buildings juxtaposed beside the U.S. presence, shown here through the existence of a crushed Pepsi can and U.S. military men. A man’s voice sounds in the background while Iraqi civilians are told to evacuate. Cars continue to drive down a road very nearby. The civilians are either frantic or annoyed that they are being asked to exit the area.

Other Iraqis are also portrayed as disaffected, their blank, suspicious faces watching from balconies, windows, stores. Shots of expressionless or menacing Iraqis staring at American soldiers appear throughout, especially during action scenes that make up the majority of this film.

The Hurt Locker may be winning critical acclaim for its cinematic artistry, but it’s Web site suggests a different target audience. The site bares striking similarity to shoot ‘em-up video game Web sites like Call of Duty and Halo.

Complete with eerie, adrenaline-inspiring sound effects, flash clips and graphics taken from the film, the Web site caters to thrill-seeking, pro-military, weapons enthusiasts who want to see destruction and the technology and methods that breed it.

Boal, whose work on In the Valley of Elah was superior in its depth and complexity, apparently spent two weeks embedded with an explosives-ordnance-disposal team (EOD) team in Iraq. (Thus the repeated claims that the film is a fair and realistic portrayal of the situation in Iraq.)

But Guy Marot, a former bomb-disposal officer who also served in southern Iraq, points out in the Guardian, the film is full of “numerous glaring inaccuracies,” not the least of which is Jeremy Renner’s character, an impulsive, thrill-seeking team leader who endangers himself and everyone else on his team several times throughout the story:

Staff Sgt. William James … is basically insane. He’s supposed to have dealt with some 870 devices, which is completely unbelievable — it would mean dealing with three improvised explosive devices a day — and he just rocks up near a device and puts on a bomb suit.

If a bomb-disposal officer started behaving like this, he or she would be shipped home in minutes. James makes us look like hot-headed, irrational adrenaline junkies with no self-discipline. It’s immensely disrespectful to the many officers who have lost their lives.

When asked indirectly whether he thought his screenplay was narrow in perspective, during an interview in Vanity Fair, Boal was somewhat defensive:

I take a tiny issue with the premise of your question. I think the film investigates an awful lot. The IEDs [improvised explosive devices] are the central feature of the war. It’s a war of bombs. They are the key tactic of the insurgency; the success or failure of entire Iraq war depends on the ability to deal with IEDs. The movie is about the guys that deal with IEDs. So to me there couldn’t be a more topical, down-the-middle-of-the-plate look at the war.

While Boal is correct that IEDs are the cause of more than half of U.S. casualties in Iraq, his claim that “the success or failure of the entire Iraq war depends on the ability to deal with IEDs” is simplistic and confused (not unlike like some of the justifications given to launch the war in the first place).

In fact, Bigelow and Boal, like the characters in the film, never factor into the movie the question of why Iraq was invaded and occupied by the U.S. More importantly, they also never define what success or winning involves. This lack of context explains why the few non-action scenes in the movie seem misplaced or forced, like they were sloppily incorporated just for the sake of it.

Time reviewer Richard Corlisse concurs:

Except for a few digressive scenes — a solo sortie of personal vengeance, a conversation about what it all means — that could easily be cut from the 2-hour, 11-minute running time, The Hurt Locker is a near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work.

Indeed, the film only provides the perspectives of three American men working in a very dangerous military unit, with the lead character being the most unrealistic character of them all — an assessment even lead actor Renner agrees with:

“I got to spend a lot of time with the guys at Fort Irwin, and off base as well — to get in their heads a little bit, get to know them personally, which was even more important. I had to learn all the rules so I’d know how to break them. That was one of the toughest things when I was hanging out with these guys. There’s no one really like the character of James.”

But if the lead character is unrealistic, then what was realistic about the film? Certainly the anxiety portrayed by supporting actor Brian Geraghty, playing the young and inexperienced Spc. Owen Eldrige, is closer to real solders’ testimonies. The trauma Eldrige suffers after losing his first team leader enhances the fear he experiences every day of losing his own life.

Less realistic perhaps, in contrast to the “insane” but nevertheless endearing, altruistic and deeply caring James who is Caucasian, is that the most racist character in the film is the African American Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who refers to James as a “redneck piece of trailer trash.”

Unlike Sanborn, James actually cares about the Iraqis and risks his own life many times to save theirs. He even goes on a rampage after he mistakenly thinks that an Iraqi boy who he had gone out of his way to befriend was savagely murdered by insurgents and made into a human bomb. His quest to find answers takes him into an Iraqi professor’s home where he is greeted with joy: “I am very pleased to see CIA in my home,” after his unexpected presence is discovered in the house.

Is this supposed to be another realistic portrayal of the situation in Iraq? Are we to believe that Iraqis welcome the presence of the CIA in their country?

In another scene, which was the most implausible event in the entire film, James risks his life until the very last minute trying to help an Iraqi man who somehow made it through U.S. security checkpoints alive while frantically yelling that he had multiple bombs attached to his body. (This is in direct contrast to Sanborn, who always only does the minimum and even hints that he would be willing to kill the unpredictable James and make it look an accident, since all he wants to do is finish his tour and go home alive.)

Racial misrepresentations are however most easily observed in the film’s portrayals of Iraqis. Aside from the Iraqi boy James becomes smitten with (even he is Westernized to the extent that he sells American DVDs and introduces himself as “Beckham,” after the British soccer player), there is no Iraqi that is given any meaningful character development in the film. They are either the anonymous, sneering or menacing Arabs who watch the American soldiers while they are in high-stress situations, the victims of other evil Iraqis who murder young boys to put bombs inside their bodies, or the voiceless snipers and aiders of those determined to harm Americans and other Iraqis.

That a film that does not include a single Iraqi perspective is being hailed as an accurate portrayal of the situation in Iraq is either indicative of the blatant bias and possibly hidden intentions of the film’s creators and reviewers, or representative of the flawed view that continues to resonate within people’s minds about the war in Iraq.

These views, are, in case they need repeating: that this war was waged with good intentions, that the continued U.S. presence is actually beneficial to the Iraqis, that Iraqis are either idiots or savages, and that the American presence there is composed of lost or lonely soldiers who are just trying to live another day.

This after a reported 1 million Iraqis are now dead, and after we have seen such atrocities committed by U.S. troops as the torture at Abu Gharib, the Al-Mahmudiyah killings and the Haditha slayings.

On The Hurt Locker Web site’s “Acclaim” section, the following quote is attributed to The New Yorker: “Quite a feat. A classic of tension, fear and bravery that will be studied 20 years from now.”

If this proves to be true, what a sad prediction it would make. Ironically, a different quote, taken from a review of the film on military.com, is actually far more honest:

“The Hurt Locker is both a gripping portrayal of real-life sacrifice and heroism, and a layered, probing study of the soul-numbing rigors and potent allure of the modern battlefield.”

Pay attention to the last part of that statement. Listening to the young men in front of me discuss it after watching the film for the third time in the theater, I’m also confident that many like them left with the impression that while war may not be pretty, it sure can be fun.

When the film ends with James marching defiantly toward yet another bomb in slow motion, one can practically hear the parody song, “America, Fuck Yeah!” playing in the background.

One of the most important of the more than 60 organizations that make up “the Lobby” is the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Jeff Blankfort, an American Jew who is one of the Lobby’s most trenchant critics, described the AJC as “the Lobby’s unofficial foreign office.” Extending its global diplomatic mission, the AJC opened an office in Brussels in 2004. Since then, according to Blankfort, it has held weekly meetings with a high official or the chief of state of EU member states. The meetings seem to be having the desired effect. As Blankfort wrote in 2006, “Over the past year the EU has moved away from relative support for the Palestinians to adopting one position after another reflecting Israeli demands.”

As part of its lobbying efforts in Brussels, the AJC founded the Transatlantic Institute (TAI) in February 2004. According to its mission statement, the institute functions as “an intellectual bridge between the United States and the European Union” with the aim of “strengthening transatlantic ties.” Although it describes itself as “nongovernmental, non-partisan and independent,” TAI’s publications leave little doubt that it intends to shift the EU in a more aggressively pro-Israel direction, as the neoconservatives succeeded in doing with the Bush administration’s Middle Eastern policy.

Like American neocons, the TAI’s executive director, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi, has a “special affinity for Israel.” Before moving to Brussels, the Jewish Italian academic taught Israel Studies (a discipline which Mearsheimer and Walt describe as “intended in large part to promote Israel’s image”) at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, after having received his PhD in political science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. And like the current Israeli government and pro-Israeli groups worldwide, Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons are Ottolenghi’s overriding concern at the moment – now that the threat of Iraq’s non-existent WMDs has promptly been forgotten. In his 2009 book, Under a Mushroom Cloud: Europe, Iran and the Bomb, Ottolenghi urges Europeans to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Despite his concern about the bomb, it’s unlikely that he would support a comprehensive ban on nuclear weapons in the Middle East – since Israel is the only country in the region that currently possesses them.

Israel’s crying wolf is nothing if not predictable though. As for the “mushroom cloud” that’s supposedly looming over Europe, who, bar the mainstream media, could forget Condoleezza Rice’s pre-Iraq invasion soundbite: “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”? It was Michael Gerson, Bush’s pro-Israel speechwriter, who thought up that one. Incidentally, Gerson was so incensed by Mearsheimer and Walt’s criticism of the Lobby that he accused them in his Washington Post column of “sowing the seeds of anti-Semitism.”

Anyone for World War IV?

Before European policymakers give too much credence to the prescriptions of Ottolenghi and his “non-partisan” institute, they should familiarize themselves with the geopolitical outlook of Commentary, the magazine for which Ottolenghi blogs. Like the Transatlantic Institute, which became “the flagship of neoconservatism” in the 1970s, it was also founded by the American Jewish Committee, a relationship that lasted from 1945 to 2006. But above all, Commentary has been dominated by the political views of Norman Podhoretz.

Podhoretz, who has edited Commentary since 1960, claims that September 11, 2001 marked the beginning of World War IV (he considers the Cold War to have been World War III). “We are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war,” declares the doyen of neoconservatism, “and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play.” Whatever about the incalculable cost in blood and treasure to the United States, presumably Israel won’t have any enemies left standing by the end of this bloody drama. Coincidentally or not, in 2007, the same year he published World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Podhoretz was honoured by Bar-Ilan University with its Guardian of Zion Award, bestowed on Jews who have been supportive of the State of Israel.

However, those who question the motives behind Podhoretz’s enthusiasm for World War IV, or believe that his belligerent Zionism poses a far greater threat to world peace than “Islamofascism” – a nebulous concept that lumps together disparate entities such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and Al Qaeda – are invariably smeared as anti-Semites. It’s not surprising, of course, that Zionists like Ottolenghi, in a transparent attempt to discredit their opponents, claim that “anti-Zionism is anti-semitism.” After all, “the charge of anti-semitism,” as Mearsheimer and Walt point out, is one of the Lobby’s “most powerful weapons.”

What is worrying, however, is that the EU now legitimates the deployment of that weapon by pro-Israelis against their critics. According to the definition given by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency, it seems that you’re an anti-semite if you agree with Mearsheimer and Walt that pressure from Israel and the Lobby played a “critical” role in the decision to invade Iraq, or if you suspect that the likes of Podhoretz and Ottolenghi may be more loyal to Israel than they are to their respective countries. Before coming up with their working definition of anti-Semitism in 2004, the EU consulted with Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee. If they were asked about the question of loyalty, the AJC probably forgot to mention the case of Jonathan Pollard.

Pollard, an American Jew, is now serving a life sentence for stealing thousands of documents while employed as an analyst for US naval intelligence during the mid-1980s. In Dangerous Liaison, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn write, “Though he always maintained that he was motivated purely by devotion to Israel, he was well paid for his services.” That money may have come from the US-Israeli Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD), according to Claudia Wright, the author of Spy, Steal, and Smuggle: Israel’s Special Relationship with the US. When Jordan Baruch, an adviser to BIRD’s board, was asked for an audit report, he replied, “Even if I did (have one), I couldn’t release it.” Interestingly, it was Baruch and his wife, “long-time AJC leaders,” who funded the Transatlantic Foundation.

In his address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, Benjamin Netanyahu portrayed Israel’s grievance against Iran as a conflict which “pits civilization against barbarism.” It’s tempting to dismiss the Israeli leader’s assertion as the hyperbolic trope of a demagogue, but there may be some truth to what he said. After all, what better word than “barbarism” to describe what Israel has done to the Palestinians for the past six decades? Or the havoc that Israel’s supporters in America have wrought on the people of Iraq? Or the untold devastation they have in mind for the Iranians? The influence the Israel Lobby wields in Washington has ensured that the United States has long been complicit in Israel’s barbarism. And if the Lobby gets it way in Brussels, so too will the European Union.

An October 21 FBI press release announced Tariq (mispelled Tarek) Mehanna as its most recent target saying:

“A Sudbury, Mass. man was charged today in federal court with conspiracy to provide support to terrorists.”

The FBI alleged that from “about 2001 and continuing until (about) May 2008, Mehanna conspired with Ahmad Abousamra and others to provide material support and resources for use in carrying out a conspiracy to kill, kidnap, main or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country and extraterritorial homicide of a US national.”

With no substantiating evidence, “Mehanna and coconspirators (were accused of having) discussed their desire to participate in violent jihad against American interests and that they would talk about fighting jihad and their desire to die on the battlefield. (They also) attempted to radicalize others and inspire each other by, among other things, watching and distributing jihadi videos. (In addition), Mehanna and two of his associates traveled to the Middle East in February 2004, seeking military-type training at a terrorist training camp (to) prepare them for armed jihad….including (against) US and allied forces in Iraq… (One) of Mehanna’s co-conspirators made two similar trips to Pakistan in 2002.”

…Mehanna and the coconspirators had multiple conversations about obtaining automatic weapons (from a Mr. Maldonado, now serving a 10-year sentence for training with Al Queda in Somalia) and randomly shooting people in a shopping mall, and that the conversations went so far as to discuss the logistics of a mall attack, including coordination, weapons needed and the possibility of attacking emergency responders.

Yet no attack occurred. None ever was likely planned, but according to the FBI, it was because no automatic weapons could be obtained even though legal semi-automatic ones are freely sold and illegal automatic ones easily gotten.

The web site eastcoastfirearms.com lists for sale numerous ones, including AK-47 (Kalashnikov) assault rifles, AR-15/M16 type rifles, Uzi assault weapons, LWRC M6A2s called the most modern carbine rifle in the world, and various others with considerable firepower.

“Mehanna was previously indicted in January 2009 for making false statements to members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI in connection with a terrorism investigation. If convicted on the material support charge, (he) faces up to 15 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine.”

Federal Judge Leo Sorokin ordered Mehanna held without bail pending his next court hearing on October 30. After his ruling, his attorney, JW Carney, Jr. said:

This is the type of case that challenges our commitment and faith in the United States Constitution. Our country is respected around the world because we presume people are innocent, and we require the government to prove its allegations in open court at trial.

Mr. Carney will soon discover how prosecutors use secret evidence, paid informants, and will go to any lengths to intimidate juries to convict, regardless of a defendant’s guilt or innocence, especially targeted Muslims charged with intent to commit or provide material support for terrorism.

According to the Bureau, Mehanna and his “coconspirators” used code words like “peanut and jelly” to mean fighting in Somalia and “culinary school” for terrorist camps, but perhaps they said precisely what they meant, and what proof suggests otherwise.

The FBI also claimed when they weren’t able to join terror groups in Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan, the 2002 Washington-area sniper shootings inspired them to attack shopping malls instead as well as two (unnamed) former executive branch members.

Mehanna is a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy where his father, Ahmed, is a professor. They reside in Sudbury, MA, an affluent Boston suburb.

Neighbors expressed shock by the news. Chafic Maalouf called Mehanna “very sweet (and) soft-spoken. He seemed so harmless. He has a beard and a dark complexion, so to the average American he fits the terrorist profile. But if you look in his eyes, he seemed to be a very genuine, kind, loving person,” not a jihadist.

Paul McManus called him “everyday normal. When he was out walking, he was friendly (and) neighborly.” Another supporter said the FBI is “painting the wrong picture of the Muslim community” by targeting one of its up and coming members. Still others cited his work with youths as a teacher at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, MA.

Abdul Cader Asmal, the Center’s former president, said he gave lectures at Friday services in Worchester, MA and translated poetic Arabic scriptures into English. Over time, he became dedicated to his beliefs as many people of all faiths do who plan no terrorist acts.

Ahmad AlFarsi defended Mehanna in a 2008 article following his previous arrest that’s pertinent to his current charges. At first, he hesitated “so as not to expose (his) privacy,” then felt he had to support his friend “since the media has already made his case and name public” and practically convicted him in the court of public opinion.

AlFarsi called him “one of the most gracious, kind, caring, thoughtful, and respectable people I have ever known… I have seen him go above above and beyond what most others would do to help others in need. Those who know him personally know exactly what I am talking about. I am sure any of his peers, Muslim or non-Muslim, would testify to his excellent character.”

He’s also been “very involved in the Muslim community. I remember many times that he would be giving halaqaat (Islamic lectures) in the local masjid (Muslim place of worship) on an Islamic text he was studying. And he helped many many other Muslims in the community come to the straight path… I’d also like to emphasize that he does not and never has supported nor been involved with terrorism, in any way whatsoever.”

Consider “the implications of this incident: we have another (Muslim man, an American citizen) with no previous criminal record of any kind, being held without bail (for now) in his own country….Such a tactic serves only to smear Muslims, and brings pain and suffering to him, his family, and his future,” and leaves all Muslims “fearful, marginalized, and unable to trust the authorities.”

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) October 20 Affidavit

JTTF Special Agent Heidi L. Williams assisted in the investigation of Mehanna, Ahmad Abousamra, and others, and presented alleged evidence to establish probable cause, but said “classified national security information” would remain secret, unavailable to the defense, and therefore beyond its capability to disprove.

Williams claimed Mehanna’s “Computer and its contents constitute evidence of the commission of a criminal offense, contraband, fruits of crime and things otherwise criminally possessed as well as property designed and intended for use, and that has been used, as a means of committing… criminal offense(s under US law).”

She also said “information set forth herein comes from two cooperating witnesses (’CW1′ and ‘CW2′ — aka commonly used FBI informants to entrap). Both CWs provided information that was based on personal knowledge, including actions and statements by MEHANNA and ABOUSAMRA.” Their trial testimony will show “corroborative evidence in the form of consensually recorded conversations” with defendants and others. “Further evidence is provided by Daniel Maldonado, who was a friend of MEHANNA and ABOUSAMRA, and is currently serving a 10 year prison sentence for Receiving Military-type Training from a Foreign Terrorist Organization (to wit: Al Qa’ ida….).”

“Additional information was obtained from a review of records of governmental agencies, such as Customs and Border Protection (”CBP”) and Department of State, Passport Office, as well as records of private entities, such as banks, airlines, telephone companies and internet service providers, and interviews of friends, relatives and acquaintances (of defendants).”

Williams cited more evidence from:

• Mehanna’s bedroom;
• a computer hard drive;
• “false information” he provided the JTTF with regard to his 2004 Yemen trip and knowledge of “Maldonado’s circumstances at the time of the interview;”
• recorded conversations in which “Mehanna admitted to other individuals that he lied to the FBI” regarding Maldonado;
• the November 2008 charge of lying about Maldonado during JTTF interrogations;
• the December 2006 charge that Abousamra lied during JTTF interrogations in claiming his 2004 Yemen trip was to study Arabic and Islam;
• Williams’ assertion that both defendants went to Yemen in 2004 “to learn how to conduct, and to subsequently engage in, jihad;” to Pakistan twice in 2002 for the same purpose;
• that defendants “continued in their efforts to train for jihad (and) received information and assistance from an individual (referred to) as Individual A, about who to see and where to go to find terrorist training camps in Yemen;”
• in February 2004, Abousamra also entered Iraq, stayed for about “15 days” and two months later went to Syria and Jordan before returning to the US in August 2004; he subsequently visited Syria “multiple times;” he “made fictitious and fraudulent statements to the FBI” that he went to Jordan to “look for colleges,” to Iraq “to look for a job” and to Syria “to visit his wife.”

The lengthy 55-page affidavit, plus attachments, also claimed:

• CW 2 was a coconspirator;
• Abousamra had “extremist views by citing Islamic teachings;”
• “the three men engaged in serious conversations about jihad;”
• they discussed “going to terrorist training camps in Pakistan (and) conducted logistical research on the internet pertaining to terrorist training camp locations and how to travel there, but no concrete plans materialized;” and
• extensive further allegations that defendants sought but never received terrorist training; that they wished to engage in jihad, but never did; and they subsequently “discussed logistics of a mall attack, including the types of weapons needed, the number of people who would be involved, and how to coordinate the attack from different entrances (but) Because of the logistical problems of executing the operation (and their inability to obtain the type weapons they wanted), the plan was abandoned.”

From all this, an observer might conclude there was no plan, no weapons, and no crime in what appears to be clear entrapment using a paid informant, a co-conspirator CW 2, offering testimony in return for leniency, and Maldonado (imprisoned for 10 years) promised it as well for his cooperation. Nonetheless, under US conspiracy law, if prosecutors can convince juries that defendants words implied actions they can get convictions, especially when they cite terrorism and the urgency to prevent it at all costs, even if innocent victims are imprisoned for offenses they never committed of planned.

Mehanna Friends, Supporters, and Family Express Doubts about the Charges

With no previous criminal record, his friends and family call him a maturing Muslim community leader, a passionate writer, and a young man wanting a career in Saudi Arabia as a pharmacist, not a jihadist, even though he supports the right of oppressed peoples to resist as international law allows. In the Kingdom, he was promised good pay, generous benefits, and free trips home. He was boarding a plane in Boston en route when he was arrested.

In a summer 2009 interview with the Boston Globe and subsequent statements through his lawyer, he denied FBI allegations and accused federal investigators of targeting him with bogus charges because they wanted him as a government informant, pressured him to accede, but he refused and wouldn’t cooperate. That made him suspect, an enemy, and got him targeted.

The Dominant Media’s Jihad against Muslims

Whenever Muslims are charged, the dominant media provides support without ever questioning the legitimacy of accusations. As a result, innocent victims are vilified. They’re presumed guilty unless proved innocent. Fear is instilled in the public, while law enforcement officials are portrayed as public defenders, working to keep us safe from bad guys. Below are some samples of media bias:

– The New York Times headlined, “Mass. Man Arrested in Terrorism Case….The authorities said he had conspired to attack civilians at a shopping mall, American soldiers abroad and two members of the executive branch of the federal government.”

* AP called Mehanna “an Incompetent Wannabe” and practically accused him of “plotting to shoot up a mall, kill US troops fighting overseas, and assassinate US officials” here at home;

* Fox News highlighted the alleged plot, called Mehanna “Defiant in Court,” and said he was only foiled by being “unable to get into terror camps for training and failed to get access to automatic weapons;”

* the Wall Street Journal headlined the “Plots to Shoot Up Mall, Kill Federal Officials” by a man “out on bail (from an earlier unsubstantiated charge and) awaiting trial;”

* the Washington Post reported about the: “Mass. man arrested on terror charges” (for) conspiring to support terrorists by seeking training from Islamic extremist fighters overseas….”

* Time magazine offered a “two-minute bio” about an “Alleged US Terrorist….plann(ing) to carry out a ‘violent jihad’ by killing US politicians, (and) attack(ing) US shopping malls;”

* the Christian Science Monitor headlined how the “FBI traced Tarek Mehanna in his quest to become a jihadi” and practically accused him of “try(ing) to become a terrorist for eight years following the 9/11 attacks….;” and

* Jihad Watch, an Islamaphobic web site, called Mehanna “a Misunderstander of Islam,” then accused him of “plotting ‘violent jihad.’ ”

Nowhere do major media or hate group reports suggest possible bogus charges, ulterior motives behind them, innocent people being targeted, secret evidence withheld to compromise a proper defense, intimidation of juries, or that everyone is presumed innocent unless proved guilty in fair and open proceedings with defendants having competent counsel.

According to muslimmatters.org after Mehanna’s 2008 arrest, the FBI was “Desperate for Results (so they) Arrest(ed a) US Citizen on Two-Year-Old (unsubstantiated) Charges” and got their usual scare headlines for support.

These comments followed his October 21 arrest:

All of us here at MM believe, based on the facts that we know, that Tareq is innocent of the crimes that he has been accused of… MM is often on the front lines against disinformation about Islam, and actively seeks to counter the radicalization of Muslims.

MM’s goal “is to educate readers about the fallacies and dangers of all types of extremism by promoting Orthodox Islam….we believe that Islamophobes are indirectly aiding and abetting terrorists’ recruiting efforts by fitting into their agenda and supporting their stereotypes.”

Many Muslims were shocked about the news on Mehanna. “It was generally thought (his 2008 charges were bogus) and that (he) had been falsely accused. After all, (post-9/11), the civil liberties of the Muslim American community had been slowly withered away by the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, the denial of the basic American right of habeas corpus, and unsavory tactics that targeted (Muslims) in general… we at MM” know his “reputation as a family man and a peaceful citizen” and presume he’s innocent “unless proven otherwise…. (We) remain highly skeptical that he was actually a ‘terrorist in disguise.’”

A Final Comment

More than any other ethnic-religious group, Western discourse has long portrayed Muslim/Arabs stereotypically as culturally inferior, dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy, religiously fanatical, and violent.

According to Jack Shaheen’s book, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, defaming them has been fair game throughout decades of cinematic history (from silent films to today’s blockbusters) as a way to foster prejudicial attitudes and reinforce notions of Western values, high-mindedness, and moral superiority.

Worse still are slanderous media characterizations of dangerous gun-toting terrorists who must rounded up and put away, never mind the rule of law, right or wrong, or whether those accused are guilty or innocent.

It’s no surprise why it’s dangerous to be Muslim in America at a time when we’re all as vulnerable as Tariq Mehanna.

I was advised before my journey that Shanghai is not exactly a ‘cultural shock’, quite the opposite; one seems to have met Shanghai in one’s urban fantasy a long time before landing there. Shanghai is in fact the incarnation of the Western urban dream: it is an astonishing materialisation of everything the Western metropolis is claiming to be. In parts it is the embodiment of the urban imagery; it is what New York was aiming at but somehow failed to reach. In other parts, it is the ultimate urban tranquillity of a Parisian tree-lined avenue with small bars and cosy cafés. It offers everything a big city can offer in terms of culture, entertainment, business and food yet it is totally sympathetic to its visitors and inhabitants.

I was teaching jazz in China this week and performed at the Shanghai Jazz Festival, Though I was pretty busy with my students, Jazz combos, concerts and other musical commitments, I tried to absorb as much as I could. I travelled around, tried to meet local people and to grasp this miracle. I, for instance, visited the Shanghai Music Fair, probably the biggest music fair in the world.

China is now the biggest producer of Western musical instruments. And guess what, they are making some unbelievably good saxophones out there. I have tried and reviewed Chinese saxophones in the past. For some reason I was always pretty convinced that the many Chinese brands were made by one or two manufacturers. Somehow, all contemporary Chinese saxophones and clarinets follow a very similar design and they are all equally good. In the music fair I realised that I was totally wrong. There are actually many small Saxophone manufacturers and they are all very good at it. The Chinese manufacturers whom I met were actually seeking criticism. In a very modest manner they would ask for your honest opinion of their different models. They just want to make it better. They want to improve.

China is a financial miracle. It is about to surpass Japan as the world’s second largest economy. It is expected to leave America behind within the next five years and to become the world’s largest economy. China is the largest producer of most industrial and agriculture products. In spite of the ongoing Western criticism of China’s political structure and its one party system, the success of China proves that its political system and economic model maybe far more efficient than anything Western democracies can offer. Unlike the crumbling English Speaking Empire and other Western service economies, China is a productive society and it is ruled by a single “People’s Party”. Rather than copying the Western economic model and value system, China adopted some Western advantages, modified them and integrated them into its own economic model and social system.

China and Israel

In my Shanghai visit I stayed in a rather fancy Western hotel. Already on my arrival just after checking in, while attending the tourist desk, a familiar golden Menora¹ shined at me from one of the tourist brochures. I picked it up, “The Jews in Shanghai”, it said: the story of 30.000 Jews who found shelter in Shanghai between 1933 and 1941. I guess that you can no longer imagine a metropolis on this planet unless it has some relevance to the Holocaust or the Jews. Visitors to Shanghai have a lot to choose from: temples, sight seeing, shopping, new developing markets, food, Chinese folklore and ofcourse even a bit of ‘Shoa business’. I honestly believe that no one, except a few Jews, is interested in the historical role of Shanghai in the Holocaust. And yet, the brochure was there for a reason. Many Israelis and Jews are visiting Shanghai in the last two decades, as China and Shanghai are the future and the Israelis know it very well.

In the breakfast at the hotel I could hear a lot of Hebrew. They were not Israeli tourists. They were actually ‘selling and buying’. They were meeting local businessmen already at 8.00 am. But it wasn’t just business. The Israeli infiltration is noticeable on every possible level.

In the bus that picked us up to go to the festival’s stage, we found an Israeli flag hanging under the driver’s front mirror. A quick inquiry with the assistance of our English speaking stage manager revealed that the band to play before us was an Israeli Dixieland band. I may as well mention that I myself have lived in Britain for 15 years, I travel around the world with musicians from many different parts of the world and I have never seen a single musician leaving nationalist souvenirs anywhere. For Israeli artists, so it seems, leaving their Star of David is apparently a common practice.

I soon realised that I knew those Israeli Dixieland musicians, they were actually my old friends from Israel. Some of them were my teachers and mentors others had been playing in my band. Two of them were very close friends of mine at the time. Needless to say that it was very exciting to meet them after so many years. In fact they were very good at what they were doing. They could play the music and they clearly mastered the Dixieland style. On stage I heard one of my old friends telling the Chinese audience, ‘here we are, 60 years for the People’s Republic of China, 61 years for the Jewish State and all we really want is peace.’ Such a simple message, we the Jews and you the Chinese all share one simple belief.

The Israeli horn player may not have realised that a few hours earlier the People’s Republic of China voted in favor of adopting the Goldstone report at the Human Rights Council. As far as China is concerned, Israeli war crimes should be further investigated.

However, it is common knowledge that most if not all Israeli art exports are sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Israeli artists are operating as messengers of the Zionist propaganda and Hasbara lies. It is a pretty simple concept: as the IDF drops White Phosphorous on Palestinians or starves others, Israeli artists travel the world spreading a 1960’s message of ‘Sex, Love and Peace’. Needless to say, the people around me didn’t really buy it.

Zionism, as we learn from Herzl and his too many followers, is all about tracing the bond between the Jewish national interests and world dominating powers. China is no doubt the rising power; it is in fact a rising sensation. In just one week in China I saw for myself the intensity of the Israeli activity on the ground.

As we all know, some naive peace activists around put all their cards on a possible growing rift between Israel and the USA. They forget that Israel can easily change its leagues as they did rather often in the past. Israel is always building relationships with rising powers. The Israelis have already invested some enormous energy on India and China.

A lot of China’s success story is because it is run by a very unique People’s party political system. It is a miracle because it somehow manages to restrain hard capitalism with a unique socially orientated system. It is a big question whether there is room in this system to accommodate Israel, a bourgeoisie nationalist philosophy based on racial supremacy and choseness in general.

1. Menora: a seven-branched candelabrum that is one of the oldest symbols of the Jewish people.

Consider the way Jewish and Palestinian children are educated. Segregation in the classroom is the rule so that Jewish and Palestinian children only rarely mix. This strict segregation exists despite the fact that the Palestinians are citizens of Israel, comprising 19.5 percent of Israel’s population–around 1.37 million people–and 25 percent of all school children. Unlike the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, these Palestinians vote and pay taxes like Jewish citizens.

Notwithstanding their incorporation into the citizen body, Palestinian citizens do not enjoy full equality. In comparison to their Jewish counterparts, Arab schools receive half the per capita budget. It is therefore not very surprising that Palestinian students have the highest dropout rates and lowest achievement levels in the country.

Equality in education is reserved to the uniformity of the school curriculum, particularly the texts dedicated to teaching the history of the Israeli state. The existing history textbooks adopt the Zionist historical narrative, erasing all trace of the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”, referring to the events of 1948, when approximately 750,000 Palestinians out of a population of 900,000 either fled or were expelled from their homes). Furthermore, these textbooks emphasise the significance of the Land of Israel for Jews and attempt to prove that the State of Israel could only have been created in historical Palestine, while simultaneously portraying the connection between the Arabs and Palestine as purely incidental. Along similar lines, the study of literature in the Arab schools is oriented toward Zionist portrayals and is conspicuously lacking in any patriotic or nationalistic Palestinian sentiments.

It is, no doubt, a truism that public schools in modern liberal democracies inculcate their students with the dominant national worldview. In the US, for example, children still recite the pledge of allegiance and in France children sing La Marseillaise. But while the public schools in these democracies are today more willing to provide students with a multicultural curriculum that includes the historical narratives of those who have been oppressed and marginalised over the centuries, Israel is arguably becoming less tolerant to any pedagogy that challenges the dominant Zionist national narrative.

This increasing intolerance does not bode well for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. It has therefore become more urgent than ever to consider alternative educational models.

Since educating for tolerant thinking within a conflict zone is no easy task, there are very few such projects in Israel. The bilingual Arab-Jewish Hagar School in Beer-Sheba is the only one of its kind in Israel’s southern region–a region that is home to over half a million people, 25 percent of whom are Palestinian citizens. While Hagar is a public school supported by the Ministry of Education, it is also the exception that proves the rule.

Hagar’s uniqueness stems from the fact that it has created a venue in which Jewish and Arab children not only mix (each ethnic group makes up 50 percent of the student body) but learn together in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Currently 67 children, nursery through first grade, attend this bi-lingual school, whose commitment to equality informs every aspect of its educational agenda.

To ensure that Hebrew and Arabic are awarded equal status, for example, two teachers, one Jewish and the other Arab, are present in every classroom. By creating a bilingual space that encourages direct contact with the heritage and customs of the different cultures, Hagar promotes tolerance, while being sensitive to nurture the personal identity of each child and each tradition. Thus, by the time the children are old enough to learn that there are two conflicting national narratives, both of which will be taught, they already have the necessary emotional and intellectual tools to deal with conflict through dialogue.

Hagar is an educational island that is expanding against all odds. Indeed, the school’s achievements within the current political context–especially following the assault on Gaza and the sporadic missile attacks on Beer-Sheba–are astonishing. But ongoing local support and international financial assistance are necessary to guarantee the future success of this educational space–a space that is actively translating a pedagogy of mutual respect into practice within a conflict zone.

A prisoner of war must not be left in captivity. A wounded soldier must not be left in the field. The state signs an unwritten contract with every person who joins the army, and most definitely with everyone who serves in a combat unit.

The behavior of the Israeli governments in these 1196 days, of the politicians and the generals who are responsible for this outrage, is a violation of this contract, a betrayal of trust. In short: an infamy. It enrages and infuriates every decent person, and not only combat soldiers.

The betrayal is already in the terminology used. In the words of the Book of Proverbs (18:21): “Death and life are in the power of the tongue”.

A soldier captured by the enemy in a military action is a prisoner of war – in every language, in every country.

Gilad Shalit was captured in a military action. He was an armed soldier in uniform. In this context, it does not matter whether the action itself was legal or illegal, and whether the captors were regular soldiers or guerrillas.

Gilad Shalit is a prisoner of war.

The denial started at the first moment. The Israeli government refused to call the capture by its proper name and insisted that it was an “abduction” or even “kidnapping”.

The disciplined Israeli media, marching behind the generals in lockstep like the Prussian guard, joined the chorus. Not a single newspaper, not a single radio or TV announcer ever spoke about the “prisoner of war”. All of them, almost without exception, from the first day on, spoke about the “abducted” or “kidnapped” soldier.

The words are important. All armies are familiar with exchanges of prisoners of war. Generally, this happens after the end of hostilities, sometimes while the war is still going on. The army releases the enemy fighters in return for the release of its own captured soldiers.

This does not apply to abducted persons. When criminals abduct a person and hold them for ransom, the question arises whether the price should be paid. Payment may encourage more abductions and reward the criminals.

The moment Gilad was defined as “abducted”, he was condemned to what followed.

He also lost his honor as a soldier. A soldier is not “abducted”. The millions of soldiers captured during World War II – Germans, Russians, Britons, Americans and all the others – would have felt insulted by any suggestion that they were “abducted”.

The greatest danger hovering over the head of Gilad since falling into captivity does not come from Hamas, but from our own army.

It was clear that, given an opportunity, the army would try to free him by force. That is deeply embedded in its basic ethos: Never give in to “abductors”.

If I were Gilad’s father and a praying man, I would pray every day: Please, dear God, don’t let the army find out where Gilad is being kept!

Our army commanders are prepared to expose prisoners to immense risks in order to free them by force, instead of exchanging them for Palestinian prisoners. For them it is a matter of honor.

In such an operation, the lives of the liberators are put at risk. But above all, it’s the life of the prisoner that is endangered.

One of the most celebrated operations in the annals of the Israeli Army took place in Entebbe in July, 1976. It freed the 98 passengers of a hijacked Air France plane, which had been forced to land at Entebbe airport in Uganda. The operation elicited worldwide admiration. Only one of the liberators lost his life – the brother of Binyamin Netanyahu.

In the ensuing intoxication of success, one fact was overlooked: in the daring operation, huge risks were taken. If even one detail of the complex action had gone wrong, it would have meant disaster for the abducted passengers. It could have ended in a bloodbath. Since it succeeded, nobody dared to raise questions.

The results of the operation to release the abducted athletes at the Munich Olympic games in 1972 were very different. When the German police, with the encouragement of the Golda Meir government, tried to free them by force, all the athletes lost their lives. Most of them were probably killed by bullets from the guns of the German policemen. How else to explain the fact that to this very day, the governments of Israel and Germany have both refused to release the post mortem results?

The same happened two years later when the Israeli army was ordered by Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan to free the 105 children who were being held by Palestinian commandos in the Northern Israeli town of Ma’alot. The action miscarried, and 22 children and 3 teachers lost their lives. In this instance, too, it seems that some – if not all – of them were killed by the bullets of the liberators. These post mortem reports also remain unpublished.

The same happened in 1994 when the army tried to free the “abducted” soldier Nachshon Waxman in the West Bank. The army had exact intelligence, the action was planned meticulously, something went wrong, and the prisoner was killed.

Lately it was learned that a senior officer had called on his soldiers to commit suicide rather than be captured. He has given orders to fire on the “abductors”, even when it means endangering the life of the captured soldier.

It may well be that one of the reasons for the prolongation of Gilad Shalit’s suffering lies in the hope of the army commanders to obtain intelligence about his whereabouts, so as to try to free him by force. It is no secret that the Gaza Strip is crawling with informers. The dozens of “targeted killings” and many of the actions of the “Molten Lead” operation would not have been possible without a dense network of collaborators, recruited during the long years of the occupation.

Incredibly – it borders on a miracle – the Israeli security service has been unable to fulfill this hope. It seems that Shalit’s captors are succeeding in maintaining rigorous secrecy. That, by the way, explains why his captors have adamantly refused to have him meet with the International Red Cross representatives and to convey letters by and to him, including parcels (that could well have contained sophisticated locating devices). That may have saved his life.

It can be assumed that the video that was conveyed yesterday by the German mediator, in exchange for the release of 21 female Palestinian prisoners, was meticulously prepared so as to prevent any possibility of identifying the place where he is being kept.

This affair also shows the absolute superiority of the Israeli propaganda machine over all competitors – if there are any.

The world media have adopted, almost without exception, the Israeli terminology. All over the world, they talk about the “abducted” Israeli soldier, rather than about a prisoner of war. British or German newspapers which use this word would not dream of applying it to one of their own soldiers in Afghanistan.

The name of Gilad Shalit was mouthed by the world’s leaders as if he were, at the very least, one of them. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel spoke about him freely, certain that the listeners at home knew who he was. Liberating the “abducted Israeli soldier” has become a declared aim of several governments.

This formulation is by itself a triumph for Israeli propaganda. The negotiations are about an exchange of prisoners between Israel and Hamas, with German and/or Egyptian mediation. An exchange of prisoners has two sides – Shalit on the one side, Palestinian prisoners on the other. But throughout the world, as in Israel, they speak only about the release of the Israeli soldier. The Palestinian prisoners to be freed are just objects, merchandise, not human beings. But don’t they also count the days, like their parents and their children?

The greatest obstacle to such an exchange is mental, a matter of language. If it had been about “Palestinian fighters” there would have been no problem. The release of fighters in exchange for a fighter. But our government – like all colonial governments before it – cannot recognize local insurgents as “fighters” who act in the service of their people. The colonial ethos – like the “ethical code” of our ethical Professor Assa Kasher – demands that they be called “terrorists” with “blood on their hands”, base criminals, vile murderers.

A touching Irish song tells of an Irish freedom fighters who, on the morning of his execution, asks to be treated like an “Irish soldier” and be shot, not “hanged like a dog”. His request was denied.

When one speaks about the release of “hundreds of murderers” in exchange for an Israeli soldier, one runs up against a huge psychological obstacle. Life and death in the power of the tongue.

In several respects, the Gilad Shalit affair can be seen as a metaphor for the entire historical conflict.

Charged words dictate the behavior of the leaders. The different and opposing narratives prevent an understanding between the parties even about minor matters. The psychological obstacles are immense.

The great propaganda advantage of the Israeli government, so clearly shown in the Shalit affair, is now also being tested in the matter of the Goldstone report. The efforts of the Israeli government to prevent the referral of the report to the UN Security Council or General Assembly, or to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are now supported by President Barack Obama and the European leaders. The inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, like the Palestinians in Israeli jails, have become mere tokens, objects without a human face.

And about Gilad Shalit: the negotiations must be speeded up so as to effect a prisoner exchange in the very nearest future. Until then, the mediators should be given an unequivocal undertaking that there will be no effort to free him by force, in return for an agreement by Hamas to let him meet with Red Cross personnel, and perhaps also with his family.

Everything else is manipulation and lip service.

But an analysis of the transcript of that briefing by senior administration officials that was the sole basis for the news stories and other evidence reveals damaging admissions, conflicts with the facts and unanswered questions that undermine its credibility.

Iran’s notification to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the second enrichment facility in a letter on Sep. 21 was buried deep in most of the news stories and explained as a response to being detected by U.S. intelligence. In reporting the story in that way, journalists were relying entirely on the testimony of “senior administration officials” who briefed them at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh Friday.

U.S. intelligence had “learned that the Iranians learned that the secrecy of the facility was compromised”, one of the officials said, according to the White House transcript. The Iranians had informed the IAEA, he asserted, because “they came to believe that the value of the facility as a secret facility was no longer valid…”

Later in the briefing, however, the official said “we believe”, rather than “we learned”, in referring to that claim, indicating that it is only an inference rather than being based on hard intelligence.

The official refused to explain how U.S. analysts had arrived at that conclusion, but an analysis by the defence intelligence consulting firm IHS Jane’s of a satellite photo of the site taken Saturday said there is a surface-to-air missile system located at the site.

Since surface-to-air missiles protect many Iranian military sites, however, their presence at the Qom site doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran believed that Washington had just discovered the enrichment plant.

The official said the administration had organised an intelligence briefing on the facility for the IAEA during the summer on the assumption that the Iranians might “choose to disclose the facility themselves”. But he offered no explanation for the fact that there had been no briefing given to the IAEA or anyone else until Sep. 24 — three days after the Iranians disclosed the existence of the facility.

A major question surrounding the official story is why the Barack Obama administration had not done anything — and apparently had no plans to do anything — with its intelligence on the Iranian facility at Qom prior to the Iranian letter to the IAEA. When asked whether the administration had intended to keep the information in its intelligence briefing secret even after the meeting with the Iranians on Oct. 1, the senior official answered obliquely but revealingly, “I think it’s impossible to turn back the clock and say what might have been otherwise.”

In effect, the answer was no, there had been no plan for briefing the IAEA or anyone.

News media played up the statement by the senior administration official that U.S. intelligence had been “aware of this facility for years”.

But what was not reported was that he meant only that the U.S. was aware of a possible nuclear site, not one whose function was known.

The official in question acknowledged the analysts had not been able to identify it as an enrichment facility for a long time. In the “very early stage of construction,” said the official, “a facility like this could have multiple uses.” Intelligence analysts had to “wait until the facility had reached the stage of construction where it was undeniably intended for use as a centrifuge facility,” he explained.

The fact that the administration had made no move to brief the IAEA or other governments on the site before Iran revealed its existence suggests that site had not yet reached that stage where the evidence was unambiguous.

A former U.S. official who has seen the summary of the administration’s intelligence used to brief foreign governments told IPS he doubts the intelligence community had hard evidence that the Qom site was an enrichment plant. “I think they didn’t have the goods on them,” he said.

Also misleading was the official briefing’s characterisation of the intelligence assessment on the purpose of the enrichment plant. The briefing concluded that the Qom facility must be for production of weapons-grade enriched uranium, because it will accommodate only 3,000 centrifuges, which would be too few to provide fuel for a nuclear power plant.

According to the former U.S. official who has read the briefing paper on the intelligence assessment, however, the paper says explicitly that the Qom facility is “a possible military facility”. That language indicates that intelligence analysts have suggested that the facility may be for making low-enriched rather than for high-enriched, bomb-grade uranium.

It also implies that the senior administration official briefing the press was deliberately portraying the new enrichment facility in more menacing terms than the actual intelligence assessment.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s offer the day after the denunciation of the site by U.S., British and French leaders to allow IAEA monitoring of the plant will make it far more difficult to argue that it was meant to serve military purposes.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that Iran never intended to keep the Qom facility secret from the IAEA but was waiting to make it public at a moment that served its political-diplomatic objectives.

The Iranian government is well aware of U.S. capabilities for monitoring from satellite photographs any site in Iran that exhibits certain characteristics.

Iran obviously wanted to make the existence of the Qom site public before construction on the site would clearly indicate an enrichment purpose. But it gave the IAEA no details in its initial announcement, evidently hoping to find out whether and how much the United States already knew about it.

The specific timing of the Iranian letter, however, appears to be related to the upcoming talks between Iran and the P5+1 — China, France, Britain, Russia, the United States and Germany — and an emerging Iranian strategy of smaller back-up nuclear facilities that would assure continuity if Natanz were attacked.

The Iranian announcement of that decision on Sep. 14 coincided with a statement by the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, warning against preemptive strikes against the country’s nuclear facilities.

The day after the United States, Britain and France denounced the Qom facility as part of a deception, Salehi said, “Considering the threats, our organisation decided to do what is necessary to preserve and continue our nuclear activities. So we decided to build new installations which will guarantee the continuation of our nuclear activities which will never stop at any cost.”

As satellite photos of the site show, the enrichment facility at Qom is being built into the side of a mountain, making it less vulnerable to destruction, even with the latest bunker-busting U.S. bombs.

The pro-administration newspaper Kayhan quoted an “informed official” as saying that Iran had told the IAEA in 2004 that it had to do something about the threat of attack on its nuclear facilities “repeatedly posed by the western countries”.

The government newspaper called the existence of the second uranium enrichment plan “a winning card” that would increase Iran’s bargaining power in the talks. That presumably referred to neutralising the ultimate coercive threat against Iran by the United States.

Unsaid, of course, is that guests do not come barging onto one’s house with their guns blazing, bombs dropping, and with the intention of arresting or killing the residents who do not want the guests there. Also unsaid is that as long as Washington and its ISAF are in Afghanistan they will be considered occupiers for the simple reason that they are occupying the country. In other words, the ISAF troops obey only those local laws they deem fit to obey and only when they feel it to be to their advantage to do so; they come and go at will, taking over villages and homes when it serves their needs; and their commanders in Washington decide who will lead the Afghan government. Those are some of the basic facts of Washington and ISAF’s presence in Afghanistan. They can not be explained away via a public relations campaign aimed at changing the Afghan people’s perception of the occupiers’ presence.

There is a sentence in the report that is laughably ironic and represents the fantastical foundation on which the report is built. That sentence reads: “We must never confuse the situation as it stands with the one we desire.” Yet, this is exactly what the paper does. Its primary impetus is one that targets the Afghan population’s perception of the foreign military presence in their land. It calls the US and NATO occupation of Afghanistan different from the previous Soviet occupation, as if the 2001 invasion and the subsequent eight years of Washington’s war had not killed thousands of Afghans, thereby stoking the resentment of the local population and consequently increase support for the resistance. In its comments about the insurgents’ strategies, McChrystal’s report states that the insurgents “wage a “silent war” of fear, intimidation, and persuasion throughout the year-not just during the warmer weather “fighting season” — to gain control over the population. As any student of counterinsurgency knows, these tactics are used by both sides in a war such as that being fought in Afghanistan. The failure to acknowledge this gives lie to the aforementioned statement that we must not confuse the reality of the situation with the reality we desire.

Throughout the paper, there is an undertone that suggests that the primary problem with the war is that the Afghan people are perceiving it the wrong way. Consequently, the need to change that perception is referred to over and over. Yet, as mentioned before, it is difficult to change the reality of the war when one lives with it daily, like the Afghans do. It seems to me that the paper’s authors actually believe that it is the population of the ISAF nations whose perception of the war and occupation needs to be changed, not the Afghan population’s. The Afghans’ perception is purely secondary, since Washington will do what it wants in that country no matter what the Afghan population thinks. However, if the US people began demanding a withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, the battle to escalate the Afghan war would become that much harder McChrystal and all those who stand to gain from it.

To its credit, the McChrystal paper describes the resistance to the occupiers as being composed of more than the Afghan Taliban. Indeed, three major groups are named and briefly described. In addition, the reader is presented with the Pentagon’s understanding of the various group’s goals and strategies. According to the paper, these strategies involve playing different tribes off each other, employing radical mullahs to encourage Afghans to support the campaign against occupation and capitalizing on vast unemployment by empowering the young and disenfranchised through cash payments, weapons, and prestige. If one examines the strategies of the US occupiers in Iraq, it is quite clear that Washington mirrored these same strategies, playing tribes off one another, selecting certain religious leaders to recruit support, and arming and employing Iraqi men to serve as militias. Similar strategies are underway in Afghanistan, including the development of militias working for the US-sponsored regime in Kabul.

In short, the strategy outlined in the McChrystal paper is just another remake of standard counterinsurgency strategies. Despite its newspeak regarding the need to change strategies and its occasionally dire tone in terms of the threat to Washington’s success in the country, its true conclusion is that in order for Washington to win its war is by increasing troops, stepping up covert and black ops, and changing the perception of the war on the homefront while trying to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.

The version of the classified McChrystal assessment published on the Washington Post website Monday has many redactions, indicating that it had been prepared especially for the purpose of leaking it the press.

What may be even more important about McChrystal’s assessment, however, is that it presents a highly discouraging picture of the situation in Afghanistan – and that the Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Afghanistan to which he had agreed just three weeks earlier was even more pessimistic than his “initial assessment”.

The integrated campaign plan, signed by McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry on Aug. 10, said that popular rejection of the Afghan government in the Pashtun region of the country is already so pronounced that “key groups” are supporting the Taliban as the only available alternative to a government they regard as abusive.

The integrated campaign plan is marked “Sensitive but Unclassified”, and has not been released to the public, but a copy has been obtained by IPS.

Both documents acknowledge fundamental socio-political realities that raise serious questions about the feasibility of the counterinsurgency programme that McChrystal outlines in his assessment, but McChrystal’s assessment altered or softened some central conclusions of the integrated campaign plan.

The most important difference between the two documents is their conclusion about how much popular support the insurgents have already gained. The McChrystal assessment suggests that the insurgents have been unable to obtain uncoerced popular support.

“Major insurgent groups use violence, coercion and intimidation against civilians to control the population,” the assessment says. It concludes that “popular enthusiasm” for the Taliban and other insurgent groups “appears limited, as does their ability to spread beyond the Pashtun areas”.

Pashtuns are by far the largest ethnic group in the country, with 40 to 45 percent of the population, and predominate across most of Afghanistan’s territory, from the far west across the entire south to the east.

While denying popular support for the insurgency, however, McChrystal admits that some factors, such as “a natural aversion to foreign intervention” and tribal and ethnic identities that are reinforced by “historical grievances” have resulted in “elements of the population tolerating the insurgency and calling to push out foreigners”.

The integrated campaign plan goes further, suggesting that the Taliban have gotten support because they are seen as the only feasible alternative to an abusive government. It notes that most Afghans reject the “Taliban ideology”, but concludes, “Key groups have become nostalgic for the security and justice Taliban rule provided.”

The two documents use different terms to describe the political failure of the Afghan government and its consequences. The McChrystal assessment refers to a popular “crisis of confidence” in the government. But the integrated campaign plan calls it a “crisis of legitimacy” and says the insurgents have “derived some legitimacy by appealing to ideological affinities and fears of ‘foreign occupation’ as well as in quick provision of local justice.”

The two documents also differ on what progress can be expected in carrying out an ambitious agenda for change outlined in the integrated campaign plan.

McChrystal’s assessment simply presents the broad strategy and the objectives that must be achieved in regard to providing security, increasing Afghan government security forces and reform of governance. It does not consider the risks or likelihood of failure in regard to any these objective.

The integrated campaign plan, however, does consider risks and the possibility of failure. It makes the identification of corrupt local officials and punishing them or changing their behaviour a priority objective, for example.

But it also warns that the Afghan government and its warlord allies in the provinces, who have no real interest in changing the status quo, may well be able to frustrate such efforts at reform. The plan even suggests Karzai might “replace several effective government officials with ineffective or corrupt individuals”.

It raises the possibility that “dashed hopes” about reducing Afghan government corruption could create a “backlash” against the ISAF.

Another risk anticipated by the plan is that the Afghan elections of Aug. 20 would be “widely viewed as unfair” and would lead to “a political crisis and/or increased perception of GIRoA [Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] illegitimacy”. Reporting during the month since the election suggests that such an expectation was quite realistic.

Although it clearly pulls its punches on some key issues, the McChrystal assessment nevertheless contains some remarkably candid language for an official document – let alone one clearly intended to justify the escalation of the war.

McChrystal acknowledges the problem of warlords – referring to them as “local and regional power brokers” – who have autonomy from the government and in some cases hold positions in the Afghan National Security Forces, particularly the Afghan National Police.

He also refers to the fact that ISAF has “relationships” with the warlords, these “individuals”, meaning that foreign military contingents have many contracts with them to provide security services and rely heavily on them for intelligence.

Those relationships, McChyrstal observes, “can be problematic”. For one thing, he observes, the Afghan public perceives the ISAF as “complicit” in official Afghan abuses of power.

This degree of realism about the fundamental socio-political conditions bearing on the success or failure of a counterinsurgency war found in both the McChrystal assessment and the integrated campaign plan is highly unusual, if not unparalleled, in U.S. military policymaking. In this case, it apparently helped precipitate a crisis in U.S. Afghan policy.

Along with the blatantly fraudulent election run by President Hamid Karzai’s regime and the sharp downturn in domestic U.S. political support for the war in Afghanistan, the fundamental obstacles to success discussed candidly in the two documents were part of the context of Obama’s scepticism about McChrystal’s troop request.

Thus they contributed to his decision to engage in what one senior administration official has called “a very, very serious review of all options”, according to the report by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung in the Washington Post Monday.

The United States and other Western states have cited Iran’s refusal to cooperate with the IAEA on resolving issues related to intelligence documents on a purported covert nuclear weapons programme as further evidence of its guilt.

“They’ve been asking for Shahab-3 drawings for about a year,” Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview. “We found out a year ago and that’s when we stopped the meetings with IAEA.”

A senior official of the IAEA familiar with the Iran investigation, who insisted on anonymity as a condition for being interviewed, confirmed to IPS that the agency had requested not only that Iranian officials discuss the details of the Shahab-3’s reentry system, but access to the actual engineering designs for the missile.

“We want them to explain to us that the design studies are not for nuclear weapons,” said the official. “We’re saying, you say you’ve done reentry vehicle reengineering [on Shahab-3], so show us some documentation.”

The latest IAEA report, dated Aug. 28, notes that the agency “has been unable to engage Iran in any substantive discussions about these outstanding issues for over a year”, but it does not link the Iranian disengagement to the demand for military secrets.

The Sep. 15, 2008 report said, however, that in a Sep. 5 letter Iran had “expressed concern that the resolution of some of these issues would require Agency access to sensitive information related to its conventional military and missile related activities.”

Asked whether this request would not compromise Iran’s national security secrets, the official conceded to IPS, “Yes there will have to be some compromise on their part, because the charges are serious. If someone is accused of nefarious crimes, it is in their interest to share a little of their security to show they are baseless.”

Defending the IAEA’s request, the official said, “All verification is a compromise of national security. Natanz [the Iranian uranium enrichment facility] is the most heavily verified enrichment plan in the world. It’s a compromise of national sovereignty.”

Soltanieh said he had protested the demand for such conventional military secrets at meetings of the IAEA Governing Board in 2008 and 2009. “They denied they asked for this information,” said Soltanieh.

The Iranian ambassador first expressed concern about being asked to give the IAEA access to national security secrets about its missiles and other conventional military technology in a letter to ElBaradei Sep. 5, 2008.

The September 2008 IAEA report strongly implied without saying so explicitly that the agency was seeking access to actual plans for the missile. It said the IAEA had “proposed discussions with Iranian experts on the contents of the engineering reports examining in detail modeling studies related to the effects of various physical parameters on the reentry body from the time of the missile launch to payload detonation.”

The most recent report of the IAEA, dated Aug. 28, 2009, referred to “the need to hold discussions with Iran on the engineering and modeling studies associated with the re-design of the payload chamber referred to in the alleged studies documentation to exclude the possibility that they were for a nuclear payload.”

In a letter to IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei Sep. 4, 2009, Soltanieh complained that the report which had just been released had “reflected the unjustified previous requests by your staff in Tehran [for] discussing with Iranian military staff the issue of missiles and explosives!”

He noted that the director general had on several occasions “emphasised that the Agency is not intending to enter into the domain of the national security of Member States”.

The agency also requested “additional information and documentation, and access to individuals, in support of [Iran's] statement about the civil and conventional military applications of its work in the area of EBW detonators,” according to the September 2008 IAEA report.

The IAEA further asked to meet individual scientists named in one of the intelligence documents as being part of the purported Iranian nuclear weapons research programme. The senior IAEA official acknowledged in the interview with IPS, however, that it would be relatively easy for an outside agency to identify individuals who belonged to an organisation.

“It’s not difficult to cook up such a document,” the official said.

In his letter to ElBaradei, Soltanieh said these IAEA requests represented “interference in confidential conventional military activities of a Member State, related to its national security…”

The IAEA has offered to “discuss modalities that could enable Iran to demonstrate credibly that the activities referred to in the documentation are not nuclear related, as Iran asserts, while protecting sensitive information related to its conventional military activities.”

But the senior IAEA official interviewed by IPS made it clear that such modalities would not preclude access to the documentation on the Shahab design.

Iran’s enemies, especially the United States and Israel, are eager for intelligence on the design of the Shahab-3’s reentry vehicle.

According to a detailed analysis by the Armed Combat Information Group (ACIG), the upgraded version of the Shahab-3 has an improved guidance system and warhead, as well as completely new re-entry vehicle with a different guidance system based on rocket-nozzle steering rather than a spin-stabilised re-entry vehicle.

The new reentry vehicle is smaller than the previous version, according to the former head of Israel’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation. That gives the improved version greater precision.

But the most significant feature of the new variant, according to the ACIG analysis, is the capability for changing trajectory repeatedly during re-entry and in the missile’s terminal phase. That capability allows the Shahab-3 to evade the radar systems associated with Israel’s Arrow 2 missile.

If Israeli and the United States were able to get more information on the design of the reentry vehicle, they would be able to make adjustments in the Arrow 2 system to increase its effectiveness against the Iranian missile.

The IAEA secretariat is well-known to be major source of intelligence on Iran for the United States and Israel. In the 1990s, 10 of the 35 members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Vienna were Central Intelligence Agency personnel, according to the 2007 book The Italian Letter, by journalists Peter Eisner and Knute Royce.

Ambassador Soltanieh told IPS that the IAEA safeguards department, to which the Iranians pass much sensitive information, has repeatedly leaked that information — usually out of context — to journalists for stories portraying the Iranian nuclear programme in a menacing light.

“Leakage of confidential information is a matter of serious concern,” said Soltanieh. “In many cases, we give information to inspectors and soon it is in the media.”

A Western diplomatic source in Vienna who insisted on not being identified said, “I don’t think it would help a lot to get the specific plans of Shahab-3.” For one thing, he observed, “They could be working on other studies and we wouldn’t know about it.”

The official admitted that it was “always difficult to prove that something is nonexistent”.

Nevertheless, it would be “much safer for Iran to compromise on these issues than to keep its present attitude,” the official said.

It’s a clever document

The manual teaches how to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and the blatant disregard for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of the aerosol of persuasive language. It is designed to hoodwink us ignorant and gullible Americans and Europeans into believing that we actually share values with the racist regime in Israel and that its abominable behaviour is therefore deserving of our support.

Israel is hoping for a PR massacre. The other side — the Palestinian Authority and the PLO — don’t take communications seriously and have neglected to correct Israeli distortion. They are happy, it seems, for Israel’s one-sided definitions to prevail, which of course makes the task for Israel so much easier. This latest propaganda offensive is potentially the ‘coup de grace’ to finish off the tormented Palestinians.

And the manual will no doubt serve as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks is recruiting to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet.

This quote at the beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

Top priority: demonise Hamas

The manual’s numerous messages are aimed at the mass of “persuadables”, primarily in America but also in the UK. The strategy from the start is to isolate democratically-elected Hamas and to rob the resistance movement and the Palestinian population of their human rights….

Clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas. There is an immediate and clear distinction between the empathy Americans feel for the Palestinians and the scorn they direct at Palestinian leadership. Hamas is a terrorist organization – Americans get that already. But if it sounds like you are attacking the Palestinian people (even though they elected Hamas) rather than their leadership, you will lose public support. Right now, many Americans sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians, and that sympathy will increase if you fail to differentiate the people from their leaders.

The plight of the Palestinians under Israel’s heel was an international concern long before Hamas appeared on the scene.

But this scorning of leaders is familiar ground. We scorned Bush and Blair and had to differentiate between them and their respective peoples. We now have to do the same with Barack Obama and Gordon Brown. We are tired of having to make that same differentiation between the Israeli people and the dreadful leaders they produce.

ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO DEFENSIBLE BORDERS: With more than three years of violent history since Israel’s agreement to withdraw from Gaza and portions of the West Bank, Americans have had time to take stock of the situation and form opinions. The big picture: they believe that Hamas’ leadership of Gaza has made Israel and the region less safe, while some are more receptive to what they perceive as a moderate approach in the West Bank by Mahmoud Abbas. Based on these experiences, they are willing to grant Israel more leeway in resisting calls to give more land for more peace.

Here we clearly see the motive for demonising Hamas….Israel wants more leeway to continue its land-grabs and other criminal activities.

If… If… If…Then.”: Put the burden on Hamas to make the first move for peace by using If’s (and don’t forget to finish with a hard then to show Israel is a willing peace partner). “If Hamas reforms… If Hamas recognize our right to exist… If Hamas renounces terrorism… If Hamas supports international peace agreements… then we are willing to make peace today.

How daft can you get? Substitute Israel for Hamas.

Words that work

The manual sets out numerous examples of “words that work” — supposedly.

We know that the Palestinians deserve leaders who will care about the well being of their people, and who do not simply take hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance from America and Europe, put them in Swiss bank accounts, and use them to support terror instead of peace.

No mention here of the billions of tax dollars Israel takes from the US and spends on munitions to obliterate and vaporize its neighbours.

Peace can only be made with adversaries who want to make peace with you. Terrorist organizations like Iran-backed Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are, by definition, opposed to peaceful co-existence, and determined to prevent reconciliation. I ask you, how do you negotiate with those who want you dead?

Hamas and Hezbollah are only regarded as terrorists by the White House and Tel Aviv and by US-Israeli stooges and flag-wavers at Westminster and elsewhere.

In Executive Order 13224 – BLOCKING PROPERTY AND PROHIBITING TRANSACTIONS WITH PERSONS WHO COMMIT, THREATEN TO COMMIT, OR SUPPORT TERRORISM – Bush used this definition: “The term “terrorism” means an activity that —

(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and

(ii) appears to be intended —

(A) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;

(B) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or

(C) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.”

It describes the antics of the US and Israel perfectly.

There is NEVER, EVER, any justification for the deliberate slaughter of innocent women and children. NEVER…. there is one fundamental principle that all peoples from all parts of the globe will agree on: civilized people do not target innocent women and children for death.

Fine words, but where does that leave Israel, which recently killed 320 children in Gaza and 773 civilians including 109 women? From the start of the second Intifada (uprising against the Israeli occupation) in 2000 to the end of last year Israel had slaughtered 4,936 Palestinians in their homeland, including 952 children, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. In the same period Palestinians killed 490 Israelis in Israel including only 84 children. So Israel’s kill-rate is at least 10 to 1, and rising since the blitzkrieg on Gaza.

Iran-backed or US-backed – take your pick

Use humility. ‘I know that in trying to defend its children and citizens from terrorists that Israel has accidentally hurt innocent people. I know it, and I’m sorry for it. But what can Israel do to defend itself? If America had given up land for peace – and that land had been used for launching rockets at America, what would America do? Israel was attacked with thousands of rockets from Iran-backed Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. What should Israel have done to protect her children?’

Palestinians too have a right to defend themselves. Hamas was the popular choice of Palestinians at the last election and is entitled under international law to take up arms against an illegal occupier and invader. If it is supported by Iran, so what? Israel is extravagantly funded and supplied by the US. Here’s part of their begging-bowl “Military Aid Speech”….

Israel makes the request for military assistance out of self-defense. As a democracy, they have the right and the responsibility to protect our borders. As a democracy, they have the right and the responsibility to protect their citizens.

Israel does not ask for U.S. troops to protect itself. It does not ask for a single American soldier to protect its borders. It only asks for the funds for them to protect themselves. They need the equipment so that their own troops can ensure the safety of their civilian population through this gathering conflict with the enemies of democracy.

They didn’t ask to have our nation built in range of Iranian missiles. They didn’t ask that their nation be a focal point for religious extremists who have declared war on the West and on democracy.

But they are, and they need your help.

And here’s the rationale behind it….

Americans fundamentally believe that a democracy has a right to protect its people and its borders. And while Americans don’t want to increase foreign aid in a time of significant budgetary deficits and painful spending cuts, there is one and only one argument that will work for Israel (in four easy steps):

1) As a democracy, Israel has the right and the responsibility to defend its borders and protect its people.

2) Terrorist groups, including Iran-backed Hezbollah and Hamas, continue to pose a direct threat to Israeli security and have repeatedly taken innocent Israeli lives.

3) Israel is America’s one and only true ally in the region. In these particularly unstable and dangerous times, Israel should not be forced to go it alone.

4) With America’s financial assistance, Israel can defend its borders, protect its people, and provide invaluable assistance to the American effort against the war against terrorism.

It’s evident that Americans don’t believe in democracy enough to allow Palestinian democracy to flourish.

“When the terror ends, Israel will no longer need to have challenging checkpoints to inspect goods and people. When the terror ends we will no longer need a security fence.”

There are no rockets coming out of the West Bank, so why is the security fence still there – and still being built? Why are the occupation troops still there? Why are hundreds of checkpoints still there? Why is Israel still stealing land, demolishing Palestinian homes and building settlements there?

Remind people – again and again – that Israel wants peace.

Reason One: If Americans see no hope for peace—if they only see a continuation of a 2,000-year-long episode of “Family Feud”—Americans will not want their government to spend tax dollars or their President’s clout on helping Israel.

Reason Two: The speaker that is perceived as being most for PEACE will win the

debate. Every time someone makes the plea for peace, the reaction is positive. If you want to regain the public relations advantage, peace should be at the core of whatever message you wish to convey.

Israel does NOT want peace. It has never met its peace agreement obligations. Every action is directed at keeping the conflict going until the Israelis have stolen enough land and established enough ‘facts on the ground’ – Jews-only settlements, highways, disconnected Palestinian Bantustans – to enable them to redraw the map to suit their expansionist agenda and make the occupation PERMANENT.

Gaza in a vice

Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses, and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process. Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.

Israel never left. It still occupies Gazan airspace, coastal waters and airwaves, and controls all borders except Rafah where it nevertheless exerts a veto. Israel has Gaza in a vice, which is crushing the tiny enclave’s economy, starving its 1.5 million citizens and creating a huge humanitarian crisis in an attempt to bring the elected government to its knees.

Draw direct parallels between Israel and America—including the need to defend against terrorism…. The more you focus on the similarities between Israel and America, the more likely you are to win the support of those who are neutral. Indeed, Israel is an important American ally in the war against terrorism, and faces many of the same challenges as America in protecting their citizens.

Note how Israel’s strategy is almost totally dependent on the false idea that they are victims of terror and western nations need to huddle together with Israel for mutual protection. Fortunately, level-headed people are beginning to realize who the terrorists really are.

It is surely obvious by now that allowing parallels to be drawn between Israel and America only serves to increase the world’s hatred of America. US citizens need to wake up to this, and British citizens should avoid falling into the same trap.

Inject with “core values” and repeat over and over again…

The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ’security,’ and ‘peace.’ These four words are at the core of the American political, economic, social, and cultural systems, and they should be repeated as often as possible because they resonate with virtually every American.

If so fluent in this language, why won’t Israel acknowledge their neighbours’ rights to democracy, freedom, security and peace and end their military oppression?

A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick—that is just about the time the public will wake up and say ‘Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!’ But don’t confuse messages with facts….

Never let facts get in the way of a good message!

How can the current Palestinian leadership honestly say it will pursue peace when previous leaders rejected an offer to create a Palestinian state just a few short years ago and now refuse to live up to their responsibilities as outlined in the Road Map?

This must be a reference to Barak’s so-called “generous offer”, another of the myths Israelis love to peddle. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip, seized by Israel in 1967 and occupied ever since, comprise just 22% of pre-partition Palestine. When the Palestinians signed the Oslo Agreement in 1993 they agreed to accept the 22% and recognise Israel within ‘Green Line’ borders (i.e. the 1949 Armistice Line established after the Arab-Israeli War). Conceding 78% of the land that was originally theirs was an astonishing compromise on the part of the Palestinians.

But it wasn’t enough for greedy Barak. His ‘generous offer’ required the inclusion of 69 Israeli settlements within the 22% remnant. It was plain to see on the map that these settlement blocs created impossible borders and already severely disrupted Palestinian life in the West Bank. Barak also demanded the Palestinian territories be placed under “Temporary Israeli Control”, meaning Israeli military and administrative control indefinitely. The ‘generous offer’ also gave Israel control over all the border crossings of the new Palestinian State. What nation in the world would accept that? The unacceptable reality of Barak’s offer, contained in the map, was hidden by propaganda spin.

Later, at Taba, Barak produced a revised map but withdrew it after his election defeat. Don’t take my word for it – the facts are well documented and explained by organisations such as Gush Shalom.

Why is the world so silent about the written, vocal, stated aims of Hamas?

Why is the world so silent about the written, stated aims of the racist regime and its political parties? Read their manifestos.

Successful communications is not about being able to recite every fact from the long history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is about pointing out a few core principles of shared values—such as democracy and freedom—and repeating them over and over again…. You need to start with empathy for both sides, remind your audience that Israel wants peace and then repeat the messages of democracy, freedom, and peace over and over again…. we need to repeat the message, on average, ten times to be effective.

Is democracy a shared value? Israel is an ethnocracy. Is freedom a shared value? The world is still waiting for Israel to allow the Palestinians their freedom.

The situation in the Middle East may be complicated, but all parties should adopt a simple approach: peace first, political boundaries second.

Renounce resistance while still under Israel’s jackboot? The correct approach is for the international community to first insist that Israel complies with international law and the many UN resolutions it has contemptuously ignored. The boundaries are already defined. Whatever issues remain to be decided, Palestinians should not have to negotiate under occupation or duress.

Rockets, bombs and atrocities: the language of peace

Bottom line: What will happen if we fail to get the world to care about the fact that Israeli parents in southern Israel need to literally dodge rockets when they drive their children to kindergarten in the morning? What will happen if the world allows Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, to get nuclear weapons? What will Israel do if bad press causes American citizens to ask [their] government to turn its back on Israel?

Why do I care so much about the success of your communications efforts? I care because I never want our children to live through what my family and yours lived through in the Holocaust.

Only one in 500 makeshift Qassam rockets causes a fatality, small beer compared to the devastation and carnage resulting from Israel’s state-of-the-art rocketry targeted on Gaza. How does it look when Palestinians are forced to pay a heavy price for the Holocaust in Europe? And how much does Israel care about the Palestinian holocaust it has caused?

The manual then gives a long glossary of terms. Here’s a sample….

“Deliberately firing rockets into civilian communities”: Combine terrorist motive with civilian visuals and you have the perfect illustration of what Israel faced in Gaza and Lebanon. Especially with regard to rocket attacks but useful for any kind of terrorist attack, deliberate is the right word to use to call out the intent behind the attacks. This is far more powerful than describing the attacks as “random.”

Israelis know all about bombarding civilian targets. And they are careful not to mention that Sderot, until recently the only Israeli township within range of Gazan rockets, is built on the ruins of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village whose inhabitants were forced from their homes by Jewish terrorists.

“Economic Diplomacy”: This is a much more embracing and popular term than the current lexicon of “sanctions.” It has appeal across the political spectrum: the tough economic approach appeals to Republicans, and the diplomacy component satisfies Democrats.

This is a game we can all play. Israel is now beginning to suffer “economic diplomacy” in the form of worldwide boycotts.

“Economic Prosperity”: Whenever Israel talks about the “economic prosperity” of the Palestinians, it puts Israel in the most positive light possible. After all, who can disagree?

What sort of prosperity is it when nothing can be imported or exported without Israel’s approval and fisherman can’t even put to sea in their own waters without having their boats shot up by the Israeli navy?

“Human to Human”: “We know that the average Palestinian and the average Israeli want to come together and make peace. They want to live in peace. Israeli leaders have come together with Arab leaders to make peace in the past. But how do you make peace with Hamas and Hezbollah?

Simple. You get off their land and stay off. There can be no peace under occupation. You have to be very stupid not to understand that.

“Humanize Rockets”: Paint a vivid picture of what life is like in Israeli communities that are vulnerable to attack. Yes, cite the number of rocket attacks that have occurred. But immediately follow that up with what it is like to make the nightly trek to the bomb shelter.

Would Israel care to tell the world how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited variety) its F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats have poured into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza?

Still more advice….

“Living together, side by side”. This is the best way to describe the ultimate vision of a two-state solution without using the phrase.

Sounds cute but is worn out. Who would want to live alongside bigots and extremists who have made your life a misery for 61 years?

When talking about a Palestinian partner, it is essential to distinguish between Hamas and everyone else. Only the most anti-Israel, pro- Palestinian American expects Israel to negotiate with Hamas, so you have to be clear that you are seeking a ‘moderate Palestinian partner’.

Where are the moderate Israeli partners?

The fight is over IDEOLOGY – not land; terror, not territory. Thus, you must avoid using Israel’s religious claims to land as a reason why Israel should not give up land. Such claims only make Israel look extremist to people who are not religious Christians or Jews.

If the fight isn’t about land, why did Israel steal it at gunpoint? And why won’t they give it back when told to by the UN?

Think PRO-PALESTINIAN. While I have spoken about Israeli casualties, I want to recognize those Palestinians that have been killed or wounded, because they are suffering as well. I particularly want to reach out to Palestinian mothers who have lost their children. No parent should have to bury their child.

Israel won’t even allow cement into Gaza to build the graves.

And so I say to my Palestinian colleagues … you can stop the bloodshed. You can stop the suicide bombings and rocket attacks. If you really want to, you can put an end to this cycle of violence. If you won’t do it for our children, do it for your children.

This is recommended to activists as “an effective Israeli sound bite”.

I want to see a future where the Palestinians govern themselves. Israel does not want to govern a single Palestinian. Not one. We want them to govern themselves. We want them to have complete self-determination.

Israel is desperate to snuff out Palestine’s fledgling democracy and destroy the remnants of its government. For decades Israel has dismissed the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

The big picture approach is this: You must isolate Hamas as:

– A critical cause of the delay in achieving a two-state solution
– The biggest source of harm to the Palestinian people, and
– The reason why Israel must defend its people from living in terror.

Read from the Hamas Charter. Now, here’s how to attack Hamas: indict them with their own indoctrination materials. Yes, people know Hamas is a terrorist organization – but they don’t know just how terrifying Hamas can be. The absolute best way to heighten their awareness is to read from the Hamas Charter itself. Don’t just “quote” from it. Read it. Out loud. Again and again. Hand it out to everyone.

At last Israel makes a good point. After 3 years of ‘government’ Hamas must be mad to persist with its ill-advised charter. They have been severely tested. They have matured. They have earned credibility in many eyes. Israel’s behaviour makes Hamas look good. But all that will count for nothing if they don’t re-write their charter as a matter of urgency.

Regev’s pearls of wisdom. But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes?

It’s not just Israel who refuses to speak to Hamas. It’s the whole international community… Most of the democratic world refuses to have a relationship with Hamas because Hamas has refused to meet the most minimal benchmarks of international behavior.

Isn’t that a little cheeky, Mr Regev, coming from a regime widely condemned for war crimes, piracy and mega-lawlessness.

It was the former U.N. secretary general Kofi Anan that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community … That if Hamas reforms itself … If Hamas recognizes my country’s right to live in freedom … If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians … If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process … then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas.

Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?

Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear program. And for good reason. Iran’s President openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles. We only saw, last week, shooting a rocket to launch a so-called satellite into outer space and so forth. The Iranian nuclear program is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.

Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Mr Regev? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Would you also like to comment on why Israel hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention? What proof do you have of Iran’s nuclear weapons plans?

And why do you persist in misquoting Mr Ahmadjinadad?

The Holy City is not up for grabs

The toughest issue to communicate will be the final resolution of Jerusalem. Americans overwhelmingly want Israel to be in charge of the religious holy sites and are frankly afraid of the consequences should Israel turn over control to the Palestinians. Consider:

• 71% of Americans trust Israel most to protect the holy sites in Jerusalem, compared to 6.1% who trust the Palestinian authority most. 8.5% percent trust neither.

• 54% of Americans believe that “Jerusalem must remain united under Israeli sovereignty” while just 23.9% believe that ‘Jerusalem should be divided into Israeli controlled and Palestinian controlled areas’.

Given the choice between the two, Americans of all political and demographic stripes trust Israel to protect and have sovereignty over Jerusalem.

Israel is in control right now and prevents Muslims and Christians from outside the City visiting the holy places. No way can Israel be trusted. The UN’s partition plan decreed that Jerusalem should become a ‘corpus separatum’ under international management. It is unlikely that the UN would wish to see its resolutions torn up or international law re-written for Israel’s sole benefit, regardless of America’s misinformed opinion.

Get the name-calling right

I’ll close with the following extract….

Many on the left see an “Israel v. Palestinian” crisis where Israel is Goliath and the Palestinians are David. It is critical that they understand that this is an Arab-Israeli crisis and that the force undermining peace is Iran and their proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. You must not call Hamas just Hamas. Call them what they are: Iran-backed Hamas. Indeed, when they know that Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah, they are much more supportive of Israel.

By the same token we must call the racist regime what it is – US-backed Israel.

Iran’s support for Hamas is difficult to quantify and probably less than we think. It is likely that more funding has come from Sunni Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In any case it is peanuts compared to America’s support for Israel.

Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhhod and was founded in 1987 during the first Intifada. Hezbollah came into being in 1982 in response to US-backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. So the territorial ambitions of US-backed Israel provoked the rise of both. Israel’s problem is entirely self-inflicted and shouldn’t concern the rest of us.

It’s no surprise that Hamas’s election manifesto in 2006 called for maintaining the armed struggle against US-backed Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

Our obligation to respect and promote human rights

The Israel Project describes itself as “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. It provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”.

However its propaganda manual, which runs to 116 pages, is an unpleasant piece of work which recycles many of the discredited techniques used by the advertising industry before standards of honesty, decency and truthfulness were brought in to protect the public.

And it serves to undermine with clever words the inalienable rights pledged by the UN and the world’s civilized nations to all peoples, including the Palestinians.

When you have to stoop this low you simply don’t have a case.

Everyone should bear in mind the following, written nearly 61 years ago:

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

It would seem that Israel has not read or understood the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration, which all nations signed up to. There can be no excuse. Attempts to wipe out the rights of people who happen to be in the way of the bulldozing Zionist vision of a ‘Greater Israel’ deserve no support whatever.

Meanwhile the Palestinian side needs to de-bunk this Zionist handbook and re-frame the Holy Land situation in the language of truth. If the PA and the PLO won’t do it, who will?

Maybe it’s a job for the churches and mosques.

But the IAEA has refused to acknowledge publicly significant evidence brought to its attention by Iran that the documents were fabricated, and has made little, if any, effort to test the authenticity of the intelligence documents or to question officials of the governments holding them, IPS has learned.

The agency has strongly suggested in its published reports that the documentation it is supposed to be investigating is credible, because it “appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent”.

IAEA Safeguard Department chief Olli Heinonen signaled his de facto acceptance of the “alleged studies” documents when he presented an organisational chart of the purported secret nuclear weapons project based on the documents at a February 2008 “technical briefing” for member states.

Meanwhile, the IAEA has portrayed Iran as failing to respond adequately to the “substance” of the documents, asserting that it has focused only on their “style and format of presentation”.

In fact, however, Iran has submitted serious evidence that the documents are fraudulent. Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Vienna, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview he had pointed out to a team of IAEA officials in a meeting on the documents in Tehran in spring 2008 that none of the supposedly top secret military documents had any security markings of any kind, and that purported letters from defence ministry officials lacked Iranian government seals.

Soltanieh recalled that he had made the same point “many times” in meetings of the Board of Governors since then. “No one ever challenged me,” said the ambassador.

The IAEA has never publicly acknowledged the problem of lack of security markings or official seals in the documents, omitting mention of the Iranian complaint on that issue from its reports. Its May 26, 2008 report said only that Iran had “stated, inter alia, that the documents were not complete and that their structure varied”.

But a senior official of the agency familiar with the Iran investigation, who spoke with IPS on condition that he would not be identified, confirmed that Soltanieh had indeed pointed out the lack of any security classification markings, and that he had been correct in doing so.

The “alleged studies” documents include purported correspondence between the overall “project leader” in Iran’s Defence Ministry and project heads on what would have been among the regime’s most sensitive military secrets.

Even though the official conceded that the lack of security markings could be considered damaging to the credibility of the documents, he defended the agency’s refusal to acknowledge the issue.

“It’s not a killer argument,” said the official.

The official suggested that the states that had provided the documents might claim that they had taken the markings out before passing them on to the IAEA. It is not clear, however, why an intelligence agency would want to remove from the documents markings that would be important in proving their authenticity.

“We don’t know whether the original letters were marked confidential or not,” he said, indicating that the IAEA had not questioned the United States and other states contributing documents on the absence of the confidential markings.

The IAEA’s apparent lack of concern about the absence of security markings and seals on the documents contrasts sharply with the IAEA’s investigation of the Niger uranium documents cited by the George W. Bush administration as justification for invading Iraq in 2002-2003.

In the Niger case, the agency concluded that the documents were fabricated based on a comparison of the “form, format, contents and signature” of the documents with other relevant correspondence, according to IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s Mar. 7, 2003 statement to the U.N. Security Council.

Iran has also provided the IAEA with evidence that the handwritten notes on a May 2003 letter, which supposedly link a private Iranian contractor to the “alleged studies”, were forged by an outside agency. The letter was from an engineering firm to the private company Kimia Maadan, which other documents in the collection identify as responsible for part of the alleged covert nuclear weapons programme called the “green salt project”.

The letter itself has nothing to do with any “green salt” project, but handwritten notes on the copy of the letter given to the IAEA by an unidentified government referred to individuals who are named in other intelligence documents as participants in the “alleged studies”, according to the latest IAEA report.

But the original letter, which Iran has provided to the IAEA, has no handwritten notes on it. Amb. Soltanieh recalled that he showed that original letter to an IAEA team led by the deputy director of IAEA’s Safeguards Department, Herman Nackaerts, in Tehran Jan. 22-23, 2008.

He said the IAEA team was able to compare the original document with the copy that they had been given as part of the alleged studies documents and that Nakaerts declared that his team accepted the authenticity of the original they were shown.

The IAEA confirmed in its Aug. 28, 2009 report that it had been given access to the original letter. But the report suggested that the existence of the original letter supports the authenticity of the alleged studies documents, because it “demonstrates a direct link between the relevant documentation and Iran”.

That argument appears to have deliberately conflated the original letter, which the agency admits has nothing to do with the alleged studies, and the copy with the allegedly incriminating handwritten notes on it.

The senior official sought to discredit the original letter by suggesting that the Iranians might have “whited out the handwritten notes”. But the official then offered an alternative theory, asserting that there were two original letters, one of which was kept by the sender, and that the handwritten notes had been found on the second original.

But the IAEA could have checked with the engineering firm that sent the letter to ascertain whether a second original exists and whether the Iranian government had obtained the letter from it.

The senior IAEA official gave no indication that the IAEA had done so.

Iranian officials have also claimed other inaccuracies in the documents, involving technical flaws and names of individuals who they say do not exist.

The IAEA has not referred in its reports to any specific efforts to subject the “alleged studies” documents to forensic tests or to get data about such tests from governments holding the documents.

The senior IAEA official recalled that Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer had written that the documents had been sent to three different labs, and that two had said they were credible, whereas the third had expressed doubt about their authenticity.

But Linzer’s February 2006 story reported only that the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico had run computer simulations on the studies of a Shahab-3 reentry vehicle — which suggested that they were aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon — and had concluded that none of the plans would have worked.

Contacted by phone last week, Linzer, now a senior reporter for the public interest journalism organisation Pro Publica, told IPS she had never reported that two other labs ran tests on the documents.

Linzer expressed doubt that any other national labs would have had the capabilities to do the kind of tests carried out at Sandia labs.

When asked if the IAEA had sought to obtain the Sandia simulation results, the official refused to comment, except to say, “Our people follow up.”

As I circulated around and throughout the crowd for the next hour and a half, I heard someone say that CNN was giving a figure of 2 million. People were excited. Was this the beginning of the right-winger revolution?

That question remains to be answered—almost certainly it’s a “no”—but one thing is clear: there weren’t anywhere near 1 ½ or 2 million people at this coming together of the ideological super-rightists of the USA. When your crowd only goes from the West Capitol steps to 3rd St., 100 yards or so past the reflecting pool, not even on the mall, and with big holes in the ranks of Obama haters within that real estate, 100,000 is more like it, and that may be generous.

To compare, I checked out a picture of the 1995 Million Man March organized by the African American community. Estimates of that march ranged from a ridiculously low 400,000 by the National Park Service to a BBC estimate of 1.9 million. Here’s a link to a picture of that event. Note the reflecting pool in the front that the “taxpayers” today barely got past.

But hey, 100,000 people is nothing to sneeze at. I’d take a peace demonstration, or a climate, or a healthcare, or a jobs, or one linking all four issues right now that had that many people, hands down. That’d be a political jolt to the system that is very much needed.

Today, however, was the day of the right-wing tea baggers.

Here are some of the things that I was struck by as I observed the signs (mostly hand-made, it should be pointed out), heard the speeches and listened to the comments and discussion of those around me:

* Though the efforts in Congress to pass climate and health care legislation were put forward by the organizers as the two motivating issues, this was very much a “multi-issue” crowd. Indeed, more than those two issues, what seemed to be most dominant was overt hatred for Obama and the (currently liberal) government. There were signs with Obama with a Hitler mustache. “ObamaCare Makes Me Sick” was a popular one. Others included “Get the Dictators Out of the White House,” “No to Obama’s Radical Agenda,” “Worst Marxist President Ever,” “One Big Ass Mistake America (put together the first letters),” and the delusional “I’m More Afraid of Obama than Osama.”

* The anti-government ones included, “Kick Out Marxist Czars” (there was a lot of talk from the stage and lettering on the signs about “czars” in government, apparently the influence of radio-talk-hater-racist supreme Glenn Beck), “Free Markets Work, Big Government Doesn’t,” “No to Government Spending, Health Care, Interference,” and “Debt, Corruption, Loss of Freedom.”

* Other signs of note: “Freedom and Democracy, Not Socialism,” “Abolish ACORN” (there were a number of anti-ACORN signs), “Uphold the Constitution” (also repeated a number of times), “We Don’t Redistribute Wealth, We Earn It,” “Joe Wilson: A Politician with Courage,” and “Cap and Trade Congress.” There were relatively few signs about the cap and trade/climate issue, surprisingly.

* There was also a 100%, complete and total absence from either the stage or people’s signs of any negative words about banks and corporations. Given that the right wing historically is not generally a fan of bankers and monopolies, and given the widespread unpopularity of the recent multi-trillion dollar handouts to banks, this seemed significant. It may be that the hatred of our first African American President was so strong that it crowded out this “economic royalist” issue. Or maybe the well-connected organizers used their influence to prevent this issue from being raised.

* At one point a speaker from the stage led the crowd in a chant of “universal health care is a big fat no.” More often chanted, however, was the good old patriotic standby, “USA, USA, USA.”

* A person handing out small American flags got a lot of knowing smiles as he said that people should get them before they’re outlawed. Yeah, that’s really going to happen.

* For a city that is majority African American, this was an incredibly mono-chromatic demonstration. After seeing a black person about a half-hour after arriving, I began counting, one by one. I saw about a dozen over a period of 2 ½ hours. It was similar as far as people with Asian and Latin features.

* There were also relatively few young people, perhaps, at most, 5% of the crowd. It was a middle-aged and older crowd.

* Finally, there was a lot of anti-two-party sentiment expressed from the stage, not so much via the homemade signs, but when speakers castigated both Democrats and Republicans, they got a rousing response. One speaker said that the Republicans of today are like the Democrats of 20 years ago, and the Democrats of today want to “take over all of our lives.”

So is there political significance to today’s demonstration?

I’m not sure there is. What it felt to me was that it reflected, more than anything else, the current minority status of the Republicans in Congress and their loss of the White House. This was a delayed reaction to the results of the November, 2008 elections. It was the use of a tactic used repeatedly by the Left during the eight years of the Bush/Cheney gang because we had little governmental power and very limited options when it came to the federal government until 2006 when the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress. And we didn’t have too much then.

This reality of relative powerlessness is currently the situation of the right-wingers.

They’ve clearly gotten some political traction from the way that the Democrats handled the health care issue, at least up until Obama’s Wednesday evening speech, as well as from all of the angst about the House cap and trade bill. Whether they are able to continue to do so going forward from today’s action will to a large extent, short term, depend upon how the Democrats follow up from Obama’s speech, and beyond that how they handle the climate, Wall Street regulation and other issues.

There was one other political dynamic —speakers and signs about the U.S. as a “Christian nation.” One sign said, “Proud Christian American.” More than one speaker got a good response from the crowd by calling upon them to stand up for Christian values.

As we interact with this movement in the coming months and years, we need to call them out on this lie. It is not Christian to oppose universal health care as an objective, which these people do. It is not Christian to oppose all efforts to address the climate crisis, to deny that it exists. Talk about a “right to life” issue! It is not Christian to demonize low-income people from south of the U.S. border who come here to try to find work to keep themselves and their families alive, as speakers did from the stage.

Ultimately, many of the sentiments expressed by the tea-baggers are deeply dishonest, deeply un-American. We need to keep them in their rightful place as a distinct, if sometimes loud, sometimes dangerous, political minority. We will do that to the extent that we out-organize them at the grassroots, engage in creative and mass action, and pressure the federal government to pass genuinely progressive legislation. That’s the way we’ll keep down the supporters of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

The phrase from Tacitus comes to mind with only a slight modification. “They make desolation,” he wrote, “and call it peace.” In Afghanistan, they make desolation and call it freedom. Enduring freedom. This is the lesson the Afghans must learn. When you are the occupied, the native, the wog, you are subject to the occupier’s definitions. He will kill your wives and children and call it pacification. He will choose your leaders, tell you to vote and call it democracy. He will kick in the doors to your home, arrest you and your sons, and call you insurgents. Of course, it is this very practice which turns many of your men into said insurgents.

If the leaders he chooses for you oppose the more murderous of the occupier’s actions, that leader will be subverted. Some, like Mr. Diem in Vietnam and Patrick Lumumba in the Congo, will be murdered outright. Others, like those that came before al-Maliki in Iraq, will merely disappear from the scene, often with a newly expanded bank account. Mr. Karzai of Afghanistan may or may not make it through the show election he is currently fixing. If he does, Washington will install a newly-created executive in Kabul whose role will be to undermine any attempts by Mr. Karzai to actually rule in the interests of his nation as he sees it instead of how Washington prefers. If he doesn’t win, he will retire somewhere where deposed friends of Washington go.

The citizenry on the US homefront are quiet. Allowing themselves to be fooled by the myth of a new day, the old order continues. Now they wait for the new strategy to unfold. A strategy that is no newer than the last war to be sure and probably as old as the first, but the citizens’ historical memory is intentionally short. If the civilized nations of the world can finally pacify the restless occupied, then the world can truly move to the next new frontier. A new frontier with energy capturing and transporting facilities located wherever the corporate executives of the frontier believe them to be useful and defensible by the cavalry. If the citizenry at home continue to receive the fuel necessary for their lifestyle, those dead and maimed children have even less meaning in their lives. It is, after all, the price they pay so we can (in the words of an earlier president), “recreate however we want.”

Recreating has become a challenge for may citizens who wonder where their money went while they cheer the wars that provide the answer. One trillion plus for the wars and occupations and children live in shelters in the land of plenty. Still, the believers in their vote for change refuse to see the change for what it is. Nothing changed here, only the family in the Great White House. While the right wing leads its unthinking nincompoops towards fascism, the rest of the mainstream political populace refuses to examine the cause of their problems–modern day capitalism–and continues to bet their lives on it despite the ever-diminishing returns.

We’ve been told there is no alternative for so long that those who suggest that there might be are excluded from the conversation. Their opinion is not only unimportant, it is a non-opinion because it doesn’t fit into the box designed by capital. So, like those who are dying in the non-wars of capital, those who oppose them are non-existent. Is there a solution to this enforced irrelevance? Yes, but it doesn’t lie in being polite. Indeed, it doesn’t exist within the rules of the game. Are those of us who oppose capital and its wars willing to take the risk required to turn the aforementioned box upside down and thereby empty the world of capital’s illusions? Or will we settle for standing outside it and wishing it away?

Thus say both Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. And the public believes them. How come?

It all began in March. In the first televised interview by any sitting Fed chairman in 20 years,¹ Bernanke used the term, “green shoots” for the first time. He pointed out that the Dow Jones index had recovered from 12 year lows in 2008 and the banking system had stabilized. No more big banks would fail, he predicted.²

Two months later, His Timness echoed Big Ben. Geithner cited reduced spreads on corporate and muni bonds, the reduction in costs in credit protection at the big banks, and smaller risk premiums in the interbank market. He too said the economy was recovering.³

In June, World Bank President Robert Zoellick joined the ’shooters.’

Zoellick is a former US trade representative notorious for forcing US government subsidies and trade policies inimical to small farmers onto emerging markets. Zoellick noted “signs of global recovery,” but cautioned that they might be killed off if protectionism were adopted.⁴

Translation: foreigners had better not object to US government-managed trade policies…or the global recovery will fold.

Put out… or look out.

Zoellick added his own revealing metaphor to the shooter lexicon: “Right now there is a low-grade fever; it isn’t full influenza, but we need to keep a close watch…” [my emphasis]

Oddly, Zoellick’s own employees at the World Bank contradicted their boss’s assessment in a report only a couple of weeks later. (See “World Bank Global Economic Outlook” below.)

By then billionaire hedge-fund manager George Soros was also seeing green. And in July, chief wonk of the Obama economic team Lawrence Summers detected greenery in remarks to the Peterson Insitute for International Economics.

Green shoots were now being sighted by everyone:

• In July the International Monetary Fund published its World economic outlook update. The Fund revised expected global growth in 2010 upward to 2.5%. The main source of the improvement, it claimed, was a brightening outlook for Asia.
• Simon Johnson, IMF economist–turned-Peterson-Institute-spokesman-turned green-shooting-star even went on PBS to announce, “we are turning some sort of corner.” (August 20, 2009)
• Surveys of economists and business leaders in the summer showed that, in contrast to only a few months earlier, slightly more than half thought that the economy had bottomed.

Question: How can a depression heralded as equal to or worse than the Great Depression, a depression described as a ‘reckoning’ for over a quarter of a century of economic misdeeds, correct itself in less than a year?

Answer: It can’t.

Yet, by mid-year, that’s exactly what pundits were telling the public. And that’s exactly what the public was beginning to believe. Not surprisingly, by mid-year, stock markets the world over had rebounded sharply.

White Hats and White Lies

But the economy hadn’t really turned any corners. What was unfolding was a giant sleight-of-hand. The “good guys” of the liberal corporate-state were pulling a fast one, doing two contradictory things at the same time.

On one hand, Team Obama had to admit the enormity of the crisis, in order to justify the size of its own rescue efforts. Thus Tim Geithner in his statement to the banking committee in May took care to note the following:

1. The economy had lost 2.1 million jobs from December to February ‘09, the largest three-month decline since 1945. (the second-largest three-month decline in 1975 was only half as big).

2. GDP fell at an average annual rate of 5.9 percent in Quarter 4 ‘08 and Quarter 1 ‘09 — the fastest six-month rate of decline since 1958.

3. Even before policy changes, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting a budget deficit for 2009 well in excess of a trillion dollars because of the weak economy.

4. The US faced economic problems of such a “unique character” that Congress had had to adopt the largest fiscal stimulus package in the nation’s history, at 5% of GDP.

On the other hand, Team O also had to pretend that the rescue had improved things dramatically or people would ask what the point of it was.

The Obamites managed to pull this off with a slew of white lies.

Some of the biggest ones:

Fudge One: Goldman Sachs had a great quarter, making a profit of $3.5 billion and the government made $1.4 billion on its investment in Goldman Sachs. The government also got a 15% return on its investment in the eight biggest banks.

Truth: Goldman had a great quarter only because it moved its reporting calendar to cut out December 2008, when it had a loss. And the goverment only made a profit on the TARP money it gave to Goldman because

• It funnelled more money via the bail-out of insurance giant AIG to AIGs counterparties, including Goldman (which took in $13 billion of the AIG money).
• Warren Buffett made a pre-TARP financial investment in Goldman.
• Goldman got the benefit of exceptionally low interest rates from the government at the expense of savers and to the benefit of borrowers.
• Goldman was issued FDIC-guaranteed bonds.

Without that extra welfare thrown at it, Goldman would actually be broke, not showing a profit. Ditto for the other banks.

Fudge Two: The labor market is getting better because jobs are growing. The unemployment rate fell from 9.5% in June to 9.4% in July.

Truth: That number only shows a slowing in the growth of unemployment. And even that small improvement has been offset by other aspects of the labor market that are worsening quite sharply:

• The duration of uemployment is increasing.
• Temporary jobs are declining.
• The percentage of the eligible population receiving unemployment insurance has increased (0.1 percentage point to 4.7%. by September).
• The four-week moving average of initial claims has moved to its highest level in a month⁵

Even when jobs have been added, they’ve been created by government spending and they’ve been in areas like education, health, and government. In the purely private economy, in manufacturing, construction and retail, job losses have been huge.”⁶

Note: Recent improvement in the ISM (Institute of Supply Management) Index that signals expansion of production (and thus hiring) also needs to be discounted against the huge price inflation an increasingly pressured dollar will entail. That’s beside the effects of a hike in the Federal Funds rate that’s bound to follow a dollar crashing scenario.

Note also: The ISM is a leading indicator of executive expectations for future productions, orders, inventories hiring, and deliveries.

Fudge Three: Increases in real personal income in April and May will increase consumer spending.

Truth: The increases were caused by tax-rebates and unemployment benefits kicking in, and most of it was saved, not spent (80 cents on the dollars). There was a temporary lift in consumer spending, but it petered out quickly. And as unemployment rises, benefits decline, and credit tightens in the future, consumption will decline even further

Fudge Four: The bank stress tests came out better than expected.

The bank stress tests led Ben Bernanke to conclude that nearly all of the banks had enough capital to absorb higher losses should the economy worsen, and that the Treasury stood ready to provide more.⁷

Truth: The bank stress tests used an unemployment figure of 10.3% (the most adverse case). But unemployment is likely to be 11% and above by next year. If you take into account discouraged and partially employed workers, some economists suggest the figure is more likely to be 16%.

Another point. The stress tests overlooked all the other ways in which the government was paying for the banks, through FDIC guarantees and cheaper loans, for instance.

Fudge Five: The housing market is improving.

In July, the Pending Home Sales Index was up 3.2%.

Another improvement was in the value of U.S. homes. In the second quarter that number fell year-on-year (the 10th consecutive quarterly decline), but it fell by a smaller amount than in the previous quarter, for the first time since 2007.

Truth: The improvement in home sales has been mostly in the lower end of the market and it largely reflects foreclosure sales and government credit, not real improvement in the market.

The slow-down in price decline has been offset by negatives in other areas:

• 23% of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth.
• 22% of all home sales nationwide in June were foreclosure resales.
• 29.2 percent of all homes sold in June were sold for less than the owners originally paid.⁸

Loan problems aren’t confined to subprime. Prime mortgages are going underwater too.

Meanwhile, the market also has to deal with the decline in commercial real estate, which is undergoing one of the greatest contractions in retail in decades. Rents, even in the best urban shopping districts, have been declining.⁹

Beyond commercial real estate, there are also all the other plagues about to visit us, when personal loans, auto loans, and student loans tighten over the coming years.

Bottom line? There is no real basis for sustained optimism about the economy yet. Simon Johnson’s relatively upbeat assessment reflects only temporary inputs:

• the government’s reflation effort (that created cheaper credit)
• business write-downs (that created better balance-sheets)
• the business cycle (that leads to restocking and inventories rising)

Johnson cites low inflation as another positive factor. However, with all the money pumped into the economy (including the latest cash-for-clunkers scheme), that’s also unlikely to be anything more than temporary.

This harsh reality is reflected in the World Bank Global Outlook Report of June 22, 2009. It notes the following for 2009:

• Global growth is set to fall by 2.9%
• World trade is likely to shrink by nearly 10%
• Industrial production in rich countries will drop by 15% from August 2008
• Developed economies will contract by 4.5% in 2009 and grow only in 2010 and 2011
• The US economy will decline by 3%
• Private capital flows to developing countries are likely to be halved, from $US 707 billion (2008) to $US363 billion (2009)
• Industrial production in developing countries, excluding China, is set to fall by 10%
• GDP growth in developing countries will fall from 5.9% (2008) to 1.2%.

A Verbal Pandemic Infects the Economy

Given this underlying reality, the media’s success in manipulating market sentiment has been nothing short of astounding.

And all it seems to have taken was the viral proliferation of a single meme. Call it a verbal pandemic.

Go back to March, when there was a second rescue of AIG and Citi in the offing, the Madoff investigation was expanding, and the US had a face-off with China.¹⁰ Fear was widespread and consumer and business confidence were at multidecade lows.

To take one indicator, Google searches for “economic depression” were four times what they were before the crisis broke in 2008.

Then Bernanke came out with the phrase, “green shoots.” After he introduced it, it showed up 3,123 times in news articles that month. Compare that to 436 in February (according to Nomura Holdings Inc. research).

Bulls and bears both used it. It was applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to the Iranian demonstrations.

In four months, ‘green shoots’ had grown seven-fold. Today, a Google search for the meme fetches 3.31 million hits.

As the phrase spread across the media, Bloomberg noted that business and consumer confidence spread with it. Sentiment changed. People stopped panicking and started talking about buying opportunities. It was that change in mood that let administration economists build their flimsy case for economic recovery.

Take a look at Summers’ list of improving indicators in his speech at the Peterson Institute on July 17. You’ll see the proof. At least five of the metrics Summers cites relate to sentiment. I’ve highlighted the relevant words.

• Most businesses are now expecting better times, not worse, as they’d expected 6 mths earlier.
• Consumer sentiment is improving.
• Options are showing a less than one percent chance of the Dow falling below 5000 in 2009 (they were once showing a better than 15% chance).
• Private forecasters are expecting positive growth at the end of 2009.
• Google searches for economic depression are back to normal. (Yes, that’s on Summers’ list).

Let me repeat this.

It took two simple syllables, neither beyond the reading ability of a pre-schooler, for people to discount the hard evidence of the numbers and the harder evidence on the streets in favor of a sales pitch by the government.

We might even go a bit further. The stimulus by itself can have done no more than buy time for the banks and take the pressure of the interbank market. It’s taken sustained propaganda for banks and businesses to regain enough confidence to operate.

And they’ve regained confidence not in the economy, but in the government.

In brief, a story-line two words long shows up rational man of for a fiction and a fraud. Economic man, the maximiser of his self-interest, turns out not to exist.

Of course, outside economic text books, he had never existed. Man, as we find him in the world, adds up numbers as an afterthought to his feelings. When he feels good, he massages his numbers upward. When he feels bad, the numbers are downcast with him.

Economists who have caught on to this know that what they practice is no science of enlightenment. It is a black art. The knowledge keeps them humble.They stick to describing things the way things actually work. They look just ahead of their noses and count themselves lucky if they can balance their check books at the end of the day.

But government economists labor under the delusion of omnipotence. To a man, they believe they can make bull frogs sing in tune and bats bathe in the sunshine. It isn’t enough that their theories blew up the market. For that alone, lesser men would have cut open their veins or thrown themselves under a passing tram.

Now the delusion is they can fix it. And that is where the meme of ‘green shoots’ figures. It’s task was not so much to boost confidence in the markets as it was to boost confidence in the ability of government experts to fix markets.

For that, visible success.. or even marginal competence.. is no longer needed. The old rain-men had to make rain or they were fed to the lions. The rain-men of today can produce drought… or famine, or even plague and they become lions.

The more they fail, the more they are believed. When they have been completely refuted, they become Nobel laureates. They may not know what ails the market, but they know for certain it takes a village of economists to fix it.

Or, as economist Robert Samuelson put it in a sharp criticism of Summers’ speech at the Peterson Institute: “If the president and his allies claim often enough that their policies have succeeded, most Americans may believe them.”¹¹

1. CBS, 60 Minutes
2. AFP, March 15, 2009.
3. Tim Geithner, Statement before the Senate Banking Committee, May 20, 2009.
4. Reuters, June 8, 2009.
5. Thomson Reuters, September 3, 2009.
6. Brown manure not green shoots,” Nouriel Roubini, Forbes, July 9, 2009.
7. AFP, “Hope is alive for ‘green shoots’ as stress tests trigger optimism,” May 11, 2009.
8. Portfolio.com August 11, 2009.
9. Colliers International Spring 2009 Retail Report, May 14 2009.
10. ”Nightmare on Wall Street,” Lew Rockwell, April 1, 2009.
11. ”Summer’s Spin: We Did It,” Newsweek, July 17, 2009.

The one-day stoppage is due to take place on October 1, a date heavy with symbolism because it marks the anniversary of another general strike, in 2000 at the start of the second intifada, when 13 Arab demonstrators were shot dead by Israeli police.

The Arab leadership said it was responding to a string of what it called “racist” government measures that cast the Arab minority, a fifth of the population, as enemies of the state.

“In recent months, there has been a parallel situation of racist policies in the parliament and greater condoning of violence towards Arab citizens by the police and courts,” said Jafar Farah, the head of Mossawa, an Arab advocacy group in Israel. “This attitude is feeding down to the streets.”

Confrontations between the country’s Arab minority and Mr Netanyahu’s coalition, formed in the spring, surfaced almost immediately over a set of controversial legal measures.

The proposed bills outlawed the commemoration of the “nakba”, or catastrophe, the word used by Palestinians for their dispossession in 1948; required citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a Zionist state; and banned political demands for ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Following widespread outcries, the bills were either watered down or dropped.

But simmering tensions came to a boil again late last month when the education minister, Gideon Saar, presented educational reforms to mark the start of the new school year.

He confirmed plans to drop the word “nakba” from Arabic textbooks and announced his intention to launch classes on Jewish heritage and Zionism. He also said he would tie future budgets for schools to their success in persuading pupils to perform military or national service.

Arab citizens are generally exempted from military service, although officials have recently been trying to push civilian national service in its place.

Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of the parliament, denounced the linking of budgets to national service, saying that Mr Saar “must understand that he is the education minister, not the defence minister”.

The separate Arab education system is in need of thousands of more classrooms and is massively underfunded – up to nine times more is spent on a Jewish pupil than an Arab one, according to surveys. Research published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem last month showed that Jewish schools received five times more than Arab schools for special education classes.

Mr Netanyau, who accompanied Mr Saar on a tour of schools last week, appeared to give his approval to the proposed reforms: “We advocate education that stresses values, Zionism and a love of the land.”

Mr Barakeh also accused government ministers of competing to promote measures hostile to the Arab minority. “Anyone seeking fame finds it in racist whims against Arabs – the ministers of infrastructure, education, transportation, whoever.”

Mr Barakeh was referring to a raft of recent proposals.

Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced last month that training for the diplomatic service would be open only to candidates who had completed national service.

Of the foreign ministry’s 980 employees only 15 are Arab, a pattern reflected across the civil service sector according to Sikkuy, a rights and coexistence organisation.

The housing minister, Ariel Atias, has demanded communal segregation between Jewish and Arab citizens and instituted a drive to make the Galilee, where most Arab citizens live, “more Jewish”.

The interior minister, Eli Yishai, has approved a wave of house demolitions, most controversially in the Arab town of Umm al Fahm in Wadi Ara, where a commercial district has been twice bulldozed in recent weeks.

The transport minister, Israel Katz, has insisted that road signs include placenames only as they are spelt in Hebrew, thereby erasing the Arabic names of communities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nazareth.

Arab legislators have come under repeated verbal attack from members of the government. Last month, the infrastructures minister, Uzi Landau, refused to meet Taleb al Sana, the head of the United Arab List party, on parliamentary business, justifying the decision on the grounds that Arab MPs were “working constantly here and abroad to delegitimise Israel as a Jewish state”.

Shortly afterwards, Mr al Sana and his colleague Ahmed Tibi, the deputy speaker of parliament, attended Fatah’s congress in Bethlehem, prompting Mr Lieberman to declare: “Our central problem is not the Palestinians, but Ahmed Tibi and his ilk – they are more dangerous than Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad combined.”

Mr Tibi responded: “When Lieberman, the foreign minister, says that, ordinary Israelis understand that he is calling for me to be killed as a terrorist. It is the most dangerous incitement.”

Israel’s annual Democracy Index poll, published last month, showed that 53 per cent of Israeli Jews supported moves to encourage Arab citizens to leave.

Mr Farah said the strike date had been selected to coincide with the anniversary of the deaths of 13 Arab citizens in October 2000 to highlight both the failure to prosecute any of the policemen involved and the continuing official condoning of violence against Arab citizens by police and Jewish citizens.

Some 27 Arab citizens have been killed by the police in unexplained circumstances since the October deaths, Mr Farah said, with only one conviction. Last week, Shahar Mizrahi, an undercover officer, was given a 15-month sentence for shooting Mahmoud Ghanaim in the head from point-blank range. The judge called Mizrahi’s actions “reckless”.

This week, in another controversial case, Shai Dromi, a Negev rancher, received six months community service after shooting dead a Bedouin intruder, Khaled al Atrash, as the latter fled.

Mr Farah said the regard in which Arab citizens were held by the government was illustrated by a comment from the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, in June. During an inspection of police officers working undercover as drug addicts, the minister praised one for looking like a “real dirty Arab”.