Jenny Tonge, then a member of the UK’s Liberal Democrat party, was a dangerous British politician as far as Israel was concerned. She not only dared to use strong language while referencing Israeli actions in the occupied territories, she also demanded action from her government

For this she was subjected to the same, predictable verbal abuse by Israeli officials and media, by the pro-Israeli British lobby, and even by some of her peers. However, calling Tonge ‘anti-Semitic’ was never going to be convincing. The formidable woman has spent years of her life serving her community – as a doctor, MP and spokesperson for Health for Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords – and has amassed far too much credibility to be shaken by defamatory accusations.

Moreover, very few will agree that calling for “the immediate—and I mean immediate—establishment by the United Nations Security Council of an independent fact-finding commission to Palestine to investigate all breaches of international law” constitutes anti-Semitism in any way.

But for those who insist that Israel is above any criticism, the mere suggestion that Israel should be investigated for alleged war crimes is an unforgivable act. Any hint of criticism can easily be misrepresented to equal the questioning of the very existence of the state, and casually labeled as racism.

The Baroness is not easily intimidated, however. Speaking at Middlesex University on February 23, she stated that, “Israel is not going to be there forever in its present form,” a reference to the country’s current racially-based political identity as a ‘Jewish State,’ which leaves native Muslim and Christian Arabs vulnerable to institutional racism and discriminatory laws.

Many others have already warned from the increasingly anti-democratic nature of Israel, especially with the rise of religious and ultra-nationalist parties. Leading scholars, Noble Laureates, acclaimed anti-Apartheid figures and former US presidents have all made similar calls, targeting the skewed nature of the Israeli political establishment, which grants rights to people of Jewish lineage while denying basic civil rights to all others.

Tonge was not targeting any race, but rather the small, yet powerful cliques that have long infested both British and US politics in areas concerning Israeli and the Middle East. “One day, the American people are going to say to the Israel lobby in the USA: enough is enough,” she said. “Israel will lose support and then they will reap what they have sown” (The Guardian, Feb 9).

In stating the obvious, Tonge irked British politicians, including members of her own party, who speak of ‘peace in the Middle East’ while actively undermining any real efforts to achieve such peace. Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, said there was “no place in politics for those who question the existence of Israel.” Tonge, in fact, had done no such thing. Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, stated, “I asked Baroness Tonge to withdraw her remarks and apologize for the offense she has caused. She has refused to do so and will now be leaving the party.”

Since his sudden rise to close to the top of British political hierarchy, Clegg has moved substantially from his original stance regarding Palestine and Israel. In his article in the Guardian on December 21, 2009, he had articulated a strong position against the Israeli blockade on Gaza, and asked: “And what has the British government and the international community done to lift the blockade? Next to nothing. Tough-sounding declarations are issued at regular intervals but little real pressure is applied. It is a scandal that the international community has sat on its hands in the face of this unfolding crisis.”

Once in the government, Clegg changed his position. Tonge, on the other hand, remained consistently audacious, regardless of position or perks. Her stance in 2012 mirrored other stances she has taken in the past. In 2006, she uttered what few before dared to even speak in private: “The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the western world, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a grip on our party,” she said (BBC, Sep 21, 2006.) Then, as in now, her comments were manipulated by the media to imply something entirely different from what she had clearly intended. Her exit from the party was a testament to the will of this strong British woman, but also to the power of the very Israeli lobby she often criticized.

It is important to remember that Tonge’s battle is not a skirmish within the ranks of the political elites. Rather, it’s a war of narratives, where Israel and its ‘friends’ insist on silencing any meaningful debate on Palestine-Israel. The other side, encompassing Tonge and numerous others, is slowly encroaching on Israel’s well-guarded discourse, and making serious inroads.

A recent episode in the war of narratives involved Gunther Grass, German author of the widely acclaimed anti-Nazi novel, The Tin Drum. Grass has now done what many others, especially in Germany, never dared to do. He criticized Israel for its aggressive posturing towards Iran. Israeli officials responded by calling the man every bad word in the book of defamation.

The typical ‘storm’ created by Israeli responses has, however, not managed to enact a typical response this time. Nicholas Kulish wrote in the New York Times that judging by the ‘outpouring’ of comments by German politicians and media, “it would appear that the public had resoundingly rejected (Gunter’s) work… But even a quick dip into the comments left by readers on various Web sites reveals quite another reality” (April 13). According to Kulish, “Mr. Grass has struck a nerve with the broader public, articulating frustrations with Israel here in Germany that are frequently expressed in private but rarely in public.” He adds that “charge of anti-Semitism aimed at Israel’s critics is widely viewed as a blunt instrument that silences debate, and in the process prevents Mr. Grass from making a point…”

While Israel does occasionally succeed in silencing critics, the tried and true tactic of the past is becoming less effective. In the final analysis, neither Tonge nor Gunter have actually lost to the lobby. In the world of ideas, only the credibility of one’s views actually makes a difference. The rest is hasbara.

So it should not be surprising if the BDS movement itself experiences turmoil. For several years now, the UK Palestinian Soldarity Committee (PSC) has conducted a policy of calling leading activists such as Paul Eisen, Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir — all Jewish — anti-Semitic for daring to point out that those who persecute Arab Muslims and Christians are not just Zionists but are invariably Jewish. That the Jews who have opted to take Israeli citizenship are increasingly racist, belligerent settlers who use their new identity to dispossess, terrorise and murder Palestinians, with the intent of forcing them to leave even the remaining 12 per cent of the land once called Palestine.

These Jews have given Judaism a bad name, causing some “good Jews” to critique their own religious heritage and even disown it, such as American highschooler and winner of the 2012 Martin Luther King Jr Writing Award Jesse Lieberfeld, who came to realise, “I was grouped with the racial supremacists… I was part of a delusion.” For these Jews, Judaism today had been perverted by Zionism. Paying tribute to Jesse, ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon said, “Journeying from choseness is a life-struggle. From time to time you may feel lonely but you are never alone. Humanity and humanism are there at your side — for all time.”

Atzmon, born and bred in Israel, with holocaust victims in his family, is the latest victim of the UK PSC, which earlier ostracised Eisen for his Der Yassin Remembered group honouring martyred Palestinian Muslims and Christians of the 1948 Nakba, when thousands of Palestinians were killed and hundreds of thousands made permanent refugees.

After being ostracised, Eisen and Shamir dismissed the “gatekeepers” in the movement, and carried on with their analysis and organising from the sidelines, sidelines which are growing just as fast as, if not faster than the mainstream and are now firmly centred on popularising a one-state solution to solve the Palestine-Israel problem.

Atzmon continued to lock horns with the UK PSC establishment, hoping to change it, though it is dominated by the likes of Tony Greenstein with his J-Big (Jews boycotting Israeli goods). No doubt Atzmon’s Sabra heritage steeled him for battle with those supporters of the Palestinians who see the movement as more a way to fight anti-Jewish sentiment (caused by Zionism) than to actually achieve victory for the Palestinians. He decided to write an analysis of his Jewish heritage and how it was transformed over the past century entitled The Wandering Who?¹ His book became a bestseller and he has been touring America and Europe regularly, speaking out bravely and making his gilad.co.uk a must read for all who care about both Palestine and “the plight of the Jews”.

Jewish intellectuals such as Ilan Pappe are following Atzmon’s footsteps and leaving Israel, disgusted with the cynicism and duplicity of the entire Israeli establishment. Atzmon has attracted many admirers — too many, it seems — from among the more mainstream critics of Israel. Richard Falk and John Mearsheimer — both Jewish — endorsed Atzmon’s book, Mearsheimer recommending that the book “should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike”.

On 13 March, near the end of Atzmon’s latest tour of the US speaking to pro-Palestinian groups, Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abunimah published a letter at the US Palestinian Community Network (PCN) signed by 23 Palestinian activists, including Columbia University professor Joseph Massad and Omar Barghouti, a founder of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Committee for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (currently doing an MA in philosophy at Tel Aviv University). The letter called for “the disavowal of the racism and anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon”. Abunimah effectively excommunicated Atzmon from participating in pro-Palestinian activities of the US PCN, as he was by the UK PSC. Atzmon wound up his tour the next day with an interview with (Jewish) history professor Norton Mezvinsky of Connecticut State University, at Washington’s Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, where he rebutted the charges against him.

But just as Muslims are loudly called on to disown Islamic terrorists such as Al-Qaeda, so must Jews disown their own Judaic terrorists, reasons Atzmon, who has been leading the way in this politically incorrect battle. Now that the dust has settled, and support for Atzmon has poured in, the letter in retrospect looks like an exercise in hasbara gone wrong. Conspicuous in their absence among signatories are leading Israel critics Noam Chomsky, Norman Finklestein, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, The Progressive’s Matt Rothschild, Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, OpEd’s Rob Kall, and US Congress hopeful Norman Solomon.

It is possible to critique Atzmon for downplaying the imperialism behind Israel’s founding and support, which Abunimah does: “Our struggle is with Zionism, a modern European settler colonial movement, similar to movements in many other parts of the world that aim to displace indigenous people and build new European societies on their lands.” However, there is nothing wrong with critiquing the problem from a cultural point of view, and the guilty culture just happens to be Jewish. Sadly, there is more than one way to skin the Palestinian cat.

Shamir took the debate a logical step further by posing the question, “To disavow or debate Abunimah”. He was attacked by Abunimah a decade ago, when he “hunted me out of the pro-Palestinian movement, saying that without Shamir, they will win sooner.” After a decade of unrelenting Israeli crimes, Shamir advised Massad, Barghouti and other Arab signatories, “Our Arab brothers will do well if they will stand out of this debate: let the Jews fight out the battle for their identity. As it happens, Gilad is their strongest champion on the Jewish side, they should cheer, not discourage him.”

Perhaps what prompted the letter was fear that BDS was just not mainstream enough. This was the implication behind a dismissal of BDS by Finkelstein, who just a few weeks before the Abunimah screed, called BDS a “cult” and admonished Palestinians to limit their struggle to the “two-state solution”. While himself exposing the “cult” of the holocaust, calling it an “industry” used to promote Israel’s aggressive colonial agenda, Finkelstein disappointed many admirers by suggesting that BDSers are conspirators intent on wiping poor Israel off the tattered old colonial map. “What is the result? There’s no Israel!”

But ironically, Atzmon and Finkelstein are on the same side this time. They are both pro-Palestinian activists and believers in free speech and open debate, not afraid to point the finger at machinations of their co-religionists. Before writing his ill-fated missive, Abunimah, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israel-Palestine Conflict, would have done well to ponder Atzmon’s defence of Finkelstein’s criticism of BDSers for their cultishness. “Finkelstein’s criticism of the solidarity movement is largely valid. The recent expulsion of Palestinians and academics from the UK PSC proves that we aren’t just dealing with a ‘cult’ discourse as Finkelstein suggests, far worse, we are actually dealing with a rabbinical operation that exercises the most repulsive Judaic excommunication tactics.”

“Finkelstein is correct when he suggests that the achievements of the solidarity ‘cult’ operations are pretty limited,” continues Atzmon. He looks beyond the gatewatched BDSers and critics such as Chomsky, Finkelstein, and himself — two-state or one — and predicts “that the solidarity movement is already a mass movement … that the Palestinians and the Arabs will liberate themselves.”

The Lobby is no doubt patting itself on the back, having through obvious pressure on prominent activists helped to weaken its foes for the nth time. This tactic is part of the age-old strategy by those in power of “divide and conquer”. Just as Britian and then the US and Israel have worked to divide up the Muslim world to weaken and control it — even mobilising “Islamic terrorists” (not to mention “Judaic terrorists”) in their schemes — so the domestic representatives of imperialism do the same on the homefront, manipulating soft anti-Zionists.

The tactic was used in the Cold War, using liberals and ex-Communists to isolate Communists from movements critical of imperialism. Now as then, it is necessary not to boycott each other, but to work together without responding to provocation. It is to be expected that the bad guys are going to infiltrate progressive movements and try to split them.

When Saudi Prince Faisal grilled Hamas Chief Khaled Meshaal about his alliance with Iran, the Hamas chief explained: “Yes, we have relations with Iran and will do so with whoever supports us. We are a resistance movement, open to the Arabs, to the Muslims and to all countries in the world, and we are not part of any agenda for regional forces.” BDSers may have their differences, but the goal is the liberation of Palestine. Let a hundred flowers blossom.

1. See Al-Ahram Weekly “Jezebel’s Legacy”; Dissident Voice‘s “Into the Mentality of the Occupier/Oppressor” and “Who Is Gilad Atzmon… and, Who Are We?.”

The video demonstrates that the United States is not a democracy, it is a bribeocracy, largely controlled by Zionists.  But citizens of other nations need not be complacent, for there is much evidence to suggest that the same pressures are being brought to bear on their politicians and officials to support Israel’s excesses, and an Internet search will reveal that the first ever European Jewish Parliament held its inaugural meeting early in February, 2012; something that the mainstream media seemed reluctant to publicise.

From March 4th to March 9th, 2012, 13,000 militant Israel Firsters, took over “political Washington”¹ and imposed a foreign regime’s (Israel) political agenda to the rousing applause and appreciation of their captive vassal US legislators and executives who crowded the halls and platforms groveling for the imperious nods of their visiting Israeli overlords.²  The annual meeting of the American (sic) Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the most outrageous public display of Zionist-Jewish power as it shapes US foreign policy.  The sole purpose of AIPAC is to ensure Israel’s unchallenged military and political power over a huge region from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.  Over three-quarters of the US Congress members paraded themselves before the AIPAC, as well as President Obama and Vice President Biden, and any high ranking Cabinet members in any way related to US foreign policy (Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Defense Panetta included).  They all loudly parroted the political agenda and military priorities that the AIPAC has imposed on the United States.³

AIPAC:  A Launch Pad for Israeli Leaders

The AIPAC gathering is clearly not a meeting of “just another lobby”⁴ : It is the launch pad used by Israel’s top political and military leaders to drag the US into another major war in the Middle East – this time against Iran.⁵ Shimon Peres, Israel’s President, opened the conference, setting the militarist tone and political framework for US President Obama who followed, slavishly echoing the language and substance of the Israeli leader.⁶  The following day the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, spoke, and forcefully laid out the line for a US war against Iran⁷ with thousands of prominent and respectable Jewish Americans, Israel Firsters, leaping to their feet dozens of times in fanatic support for a US war – a war, in which few, if any, of them, their children, relatives or friends will suffer loss of life or limb.⁸ This was the same Bibi Netanyahu who once opined that the 9-11 attack on the US benefited Israel because it linked the US closer to Israeli interests.

Not since the War of 1812, which saw the British occupation and burning of Washington, has the US capital been so utterly humiliated by a foreign power.  Unlike the British crown, which then negotiated a peace settlement, allowing the US to regain its sovereignty and capital, the Israeli leaders and their rabid “fifth column” demand a military agreement, in which Israel dictates the terms under which the US goes to war with Iran.

Israeli leaders have not secured the submission of the US because of Israel’s military, economic or political superiority:  They have a puny economy, a fraction of the US nuclear weapons and have few allies and even less public approval in the international community.  But they do have at least a half million fanatical, unconditional Zionist militants in the United States, including thousands of loyal multi-millionaires and billionaires who fund the campaign of both Democrat and Republican parties⁹.  AIPAC is the vanguard of Israel’s shock troops in the US.  Highly disciplined and organized, AIPAC lobbyists invade the offices of every Congress person armed with a legislative script carefully prepared by, and for, the State of Israel¹⁰. They have secured the full commitment of most members of Congress for Israel’s agenda waving both dollar signs and stars (of David).  As past history has amply demonstrated, Congressional staff or legislators who dare hesitate or ask for time to reflect, rapidly find themselves on the receiving end of AIPAC’s political bullying and threats which usually secure acquiescence.  Refusal to capitulate to AIPAC means the end of a political career in Washington.

The Israeli (and therefore AIPAC’s) agenda is to pursue an unprovoked war, either initiated by the US or as part of a US-backed Israeli sneak attack, against the sovereign Islamic Republic of Iran¹¹. Iran is targeted today because the other opponents of Israel’s colonization of Palestine have been destroyed in previous Zionist-backed US wars; namely, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and the ongoing proxy war against the Assad regime in Syria¹².

Today Israeli leaders insist that Iran should be violently denied what over 120 other nations practice freely:  the legal enrichment of uranium for medical, commercial and scientific purposes.  Past Israeli propaganda, echoed by the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, falsely claimed Iran possessed nuclear weapons or … was in the process of manufacturing them and therefore posed an ‘existential’ threat to Israel.  Even the mere ‘capacity’ to enrich uranium for medical purposes (many times below the level needed for a weapon) is presented as a major threat to the Jewish State.   Meanwhile, the 27 US intelligence agencies (in their yearly ‘findings’) and even the US-influenced International Atomic Energy Agency have found no such evidence of an ongoing weapons program existential threat’.

Israel’s high command has now come up with a new flimsy pretext for war.  Iran’s potential (through its advanced scientific and technical manpower and research centers) for acquiring a ‘nuclear weapon capability’ may constitute a sufficient cause for war¹³. In other words, Israel has ordered its 13,000 AIPAC militants to demand every US Congress person vote for a war resolution on the basis of Iran’s current uranium enrichment program geared to medical uses and on its sophisticated scientific and intellectual potential!  Meanwhile, the Mossad has launched a not-so-secret program of terrorist assassinations of Iranian scientists – in their homes, offices and universities; with nary a protest from the ‘Zionized’ US press.

Israel’s Willing Executioners

Netanyahu’s newest criterion for war (Iranian capability) has the blind support of the major Jewish organizations in the US¹⁴.  American Zionists are the willing executioners promoting an aggressive, unprovoked, military attack against the homeland (and homes) of 75 million Iranians.  Let us be clear, there are naked genocidal impulses permeating some of the pronouncements of leading US Jewish religious leaders.  The executive vice president of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, Rabbi Herring, suggested that Israel should consider “the use of tactical nuclear weapons in areas that aren’t so populated or in the open desert  …to show the Iranians that their lives are on the line, that Israel won’t go quietly”.¹⁵ The rabbi did not specify whether population centers of a quarter of a million inhabitants or less qualify under his definition of “not so populated” and therefore are suitable targets for this educational display of thermo-nuclear destruction, “just to show the Iranians”….  Let us keep in mind that among the Zionist fundamentalists, “not a few organizational leaders … wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons right now”¹⁶.

When Netanyahu gave the command to the AIPAC delegates to invade the US Congress and secure a war commitment on the basis of Iran’s ‘capacity’ (for uranium enrichment), there was no debate and no dissention among the ‘shock troops’ – only blind unanimous approval among Jewish American citizens for their foreign master. These respectable Jewish-Americans marched lock-step in platoons right up to the Congress members on their lists, canned arguments in one hand and Israeli-ghost-written legislation in the other.  They boast of having rounded up a substantial majority of elected US representatives – for war!

If Israel’s power in the US depends on AIPAC’s tight control over the US Congress, the lobby, for its part, depends on the power of the wider Zionist power configuration permeating strategic political and administrative offices, political party structures and the electoral process itself.  This, in turn, depends on Zionist media influence linked back to economic and financial power.  The democratic and representative process has been totally crushed under this narrow-focused juggernaut for war on behalf of Israel.

AIPAC’s Congressional and Executive Collaborators

While much has been made of the influence AIPAC exercises over the US Congress and Executive via ‘lobbying’, better termed intimidation and pressure tactics, a great part of its success is based on the larger Zionist matrix of power operating within the government, civil society and the economy.  When AIPAC lobbyists approach Congress members with Israeli-dictated foreign policy priorities in hand, they coordinate and are given a major platform by the forty-plus elected Zionist legislators who, just happen, to occupy strategic positions, such as the chairpersons of Congressional committees dealing with foreign policy, especially policy related to the Middle East.  In other words, AIPAC’s conquest of Congress is ‘by invitation’.  The relation is ‘reciprocal’.  AIPAC and the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations and various fundraisers mobilize money and activists to help elect the reliable Zionists to office.  Once in place, they openly collaborate in writing pro-Israel legislation and ensuring that ‘majorities’ vote the ‘right way’¹⁷ .

Mark Dubowitz, executive director of “Foundation for Defense of Democracies” helped write the latest (Iran) sanctions bill … (Financial Times March 6, 2012, pg. 9).  The “Foundation” is better known as an unconditional and unquestioning promoter of Israel’s agenda.  Dubowitz is one of many un-elected ‘legislators’ who write and promote laws at Israel’s behest.  The legislation to impose sanctions on Iran, authored by Dubowitz, is designed to brutalize and starve 75 million Iranian citizens into submission to further Israel’s goal of unquestioned supremacy in the Middle East.

AIPAC’s operations are not confined to Congress or to the electoral process.  From the Reagan Administration to the Obama Administration, AIPAC has supplied committed Zionists to key positions in the Treasury, State Department, National Security Council and the President’s inner circle of advisors on the Middle East¹⁸.  AIPAC pressure ensures the appointment of Zionists to the executive branch and has led to the creation of special administrative posts designed specifically to pursue Israel’s agenda.  A good example of AIPAC’s success is the post of Undersecretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Intelligence.  The position was first held by Stuart Levey, a Zionist zealot, whose whole purpose was to design and implement US (and later EU) sanctions against Iran.  His replacement, David Cohen, a clone also from AIPAC, is the author of legislation pushing for punitive sanctions against Syria¹⁹.

Dennis Ross, widely known as ‘Israel’s lawyer’ and a former AIPAC leader, was appointed senior adviser to Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, was the architect of US support for Israel’s starvation blockade and criminal bombing of Gaza (1999), the murderous invasion of Lebanon (2006).  He has provided ‘cover’ for Netanyahu’s massive building of Jews only settlements on occupied Palestinian lands and his cynical ‘peace negotiations’ ploy.²⁰

Jeffrey Feltman, the current AIPAC front man in the State Department, is  the key official in charge of Middle East affairs, especially Lebanon, Syria and Iran.²¹ Obama’s own inner circle of advisers is dominated by unconditional Israel supporters, including David Axelrod as chief confidant and the former Presidential Chief of Staff, dual US-Israeli citizen and current Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel.²² What is striking is the constant cycle from leadership and activity in Zionist (Israeli-front) organizations, entry into powerful government posts, return to one or another pro-Israel think tank, ‘civic organizations’,  electoral office or lucrative private practice – all promoting the interests of Tel Aviv.

AIPAC and the 52 Grassroots Organizations

AIPAC’s power in Washington depends on the activism of hundreds of thousands of American Zionists affiliated with organizations under the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (MAJO).  While there is considerable overlap of membership,  MAJO leaders openly serve as a transmission belt for Israel: transmitting the political line from Tel Aviv to their membership, including activist doctors, dentists and stock brokers in New York, Miami, Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco and all points north, south, east and west.  When AIPAC has ‘trouble’ securing an elected representative’s sign-on to legislation for sanctions against whichever country is currently targeted by Israel, the reluctant legislator becomes a prime target for local Zionist notables and ‘fund raisers’, who pay them a ‘visit’ to persuade, if possible, threaten retaliation, if necessary.  If a legislator still refuses to hew to Israel’s line, or considers service to a foreign power to be harmful to United States, he/she will soon find that AIPAC has raised millions of dollars to fund a campaign of slander and electoral defeat.²³

Along with these upper middle class ‘grass roots’ activists there are the numerous highly politicized Zionist mega-millionaires and billionaires, like Adelson, Saban and scores of others, who make no bones about being fanatical Israel Firsters and donate  millions to Congress people willing to subordinate US interests to Israel’s quest for Middle East supremacy.²⁴

Besides this legal corruption of the political process, there is the issue of illegal espionage and thuggery on AIPAC’s part, most recently evidenced by the ongoing law-suit by one of two former top AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen caught spying for Israel (passing classified documents on US military policy towards Iran).   Rosen, who was acquitted in a highly manipulated ‘trial’, maintains that AIPAC routinely encouraged its officials to secure confidential US government documents for Israel.²⁵

And then there are the prominent free-lance Zionists, who engage in vicious, highly publicized, political thuggery, physical assaults and blackmail against critics of Israel.²⁶  The most prominent defamers, like Abraham Foxman of the Anti (sic) Defamation League, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, manipulate legions of respectable and wealthy thugs to pressure schools, universities and other employers to censor and fire critics of Israel.  These Zionist organizations far exceed the reach and effective blacklisting of an earlier generation of witch hunters, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who were rank amateurs in comparison.  The recent antics of Israel-Firster Andrew Adler, editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times, whose call for the Israeli Mossad to assassinate President Obama²⁷ led merely to his resignation as editor after several weeks of nervous outrage (but no federal investigation or charges).

What is striking here is that while most respectable Zionists dissociate themselves from AIPAC spies and verbal assassins, the power of the Israel Firsters ensures that such goons and thugs are rarely charged for their crimes and have never gone to jail.²⁸

The wider impact of Zionist influence and thuggery is evident in the timorous self-censorship of the majority of Americans who privately express fear and loathing at the confrontational, strident and abusive Zionist-Americans pushing a foreign agenda. ²⁹

Israel, Zionism and the Mass Media

The mass media is a key political resource, which the pro-Israel power configuration exploits to the full.  Not a single major print, television, film or radio outlet is willing to provide a balanced account of the Israel-Palestine conflict.³⁰  Israel’s dispossession of thousands of Arab families from their homes and the daily terrorist Zionist settler and military assaults against Palestinians protesting land seizures go unreported.³¹ The hundreds of nuclear weapons in Israel’s arsenal are never mentioned while the Jewish State’s hysterical claims that non-nuclear Iran represents an existential threat are repeated and magnified, ad nauseam.  The leaders of the 52 know their Goebbels:  A lie repeated often enough becomes an accepted truth.

Zionism and Leveraging Power

What is crucial in understanding the Zionist Power Configuration’s stranglehold over our government is how it leverages power.  For example, a tiny minority falsely claims to speak for all American Jews, who represent about 3% of the US population.  However, based on this claim, they mobilize and raise funds to elect the committed Zionists who hold about 10% of the seats in the US Congress and Senate.  These representatives, in turn, enjoy the support of a tiny cadre of super rich Zionists, whose promotion allows them to gain control over key committees dealing with Middle East policy and security.

Domestic security has been deeply influenced by the Zionist-Israeli agenda:  Former US Attorney General, Michael Mukasey and Homeland Security Tzar, Michael Chertoff, have been among the most prominent officials orienting US domestic security to focus on critics of Israel and the entrapment of Muslim citizens in bizarre webs of phony terrorist plots, while real domestic security has suffered and civil rights have been shredded.  The over-representation of Zionists on the US Supreme Court (3 out of 9) and the careful selection of recent justices, like Justice Sotomayor, underscore the profound nature of the process as it extends to the judiciary.³²

The Zionist Power Configuration controls the Mid-East policies of both Democratic and Republican Party and their Presidential nominees through their Congressional and political party power bases.  The US President, in turn, is leveraged, in order to secure key policy appointments for Zionists in the State Department, Treasury and Pentagon.  Their leverage in the foreign policy establishment allows Zionist officials to put pressure on allies and clients in the United Nations and European Union to support policies, such as Israel’s boycott and punishment of the elected Hamas government in Gaza and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Leverage is how Israel, an infinitely small and insignificant state with less than 1% of world GNP, exports and market shares and occupying .001% of the world’s territory, can play such a disproportionate role in the reconfiguration of power in the Middle East.  Through its American-Zionist influentials, Israel has manipulated the US into a quagmire of wars in the Middle East, costing the world’s consumers of oil untold billions of dollars and pushing the world economy into recession.

Israel’s “Petroleum Tax”: War Threats and the Price of Gas

During the first three months of 2012, the price of oil rose 15% (over 30% since the summer of 2011) largely due to Israel’s war mongering and threats to launch an offensive war against Iran.  Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Peres and Foreign Minister Lieberman have all repeatedly demanded the US bomb Iran, or failing that, they warn, Israel would launch its own offensive war against the Iranian people and drag the US into another war.

Almost all oil experts and political analysts agree that the spike in oil prices is a result of Israel’s war mongering, as major international oil speculators bet that an Israeli assault on Iran will provoke a major disruption in production and transportation of petroleum in the Middle East and provoke a global shortfall.³³

The 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations have added to the war hysteria by echoing and embellishing on Israel’s claims of an Iranian nuclear threat (or Iran’s “growing capacity” to threaten Israel in the future).³⁴

During the first three months of this year alone, the increased price of gasoline – or more accurately Israel’s war tax on the American consumers and drivers — costs an additional 60 cents a gallon, or $9 dollars more to fill a 15 gallon tank.  This represents the tribute the Zionist power configuration has imposed on the American consumers in their push for a new war on Israel’s behalf.  No US politician would dare discuss this issue, let alone speak up and tell the Zionist chattering classes and their “beloved leaders” to stop pimping for war or else risk the cutting off of Israel’s $3 billion dollar annual handout from the US taxpayers.

Leading economists have stated that the price hike in petroleum (caused by a bellicose Israel) is stunting growth and pushing the US and EU back into recession … costing millions more job losses.³⁵  If we add the consumer losses caused by high gas prices to the losses in world economic output, the mere war chants of Netanyahu, Lieberman, Peres and the AIPAC will cost the global economy hundreds of billions over the course of the year.

Any mention of Israel’s gas tax on the American family’s budget will elicit outraged accusations of anti-Semitism from respectable Zionists and ugly threats from their thug accomplices.  When Obama performed his infamous annual belly crawl to pleasure the AIPAC delegates and their Israeli guests, in the midst of cheers over his re-affirmation of America’s unconditional loyalty to the state of Israel, he also quietly asked Israel to lower the war cries at least until after the November elections because of its effects on the price of gasoline on the American voter.³⁶

The high price of oil is damaging Obama’s chances for re-election.  The American electorate may not understand the real cost of Obama’s submission to Israel and may not be aware of Israel’s gas tax, but they are holding their putative President responsible for their pain at the pump!  There is only one thing that Obama cherishes more than Zionist support and that is the votes of an economically squeezed American electorate, who are turning against him in droves as the price of gasoline soars.

Conclusion

The week of March 4 to 11, 2012 will go down in history as a week of national humiliation; a time when legions of fanatical American Zionists took over Washington; when the entire Cabinet, led by President Obama, groveled before the officials of a foreign state – in the heart of Washington DC.  When the President and Prime Minister of Israel directed their foreign legionaires to march on the US Congress and shove their flimsy pretexts for  war with Iran into the faces of cringing legislators, the simplistic and idiotic message was: Bomb Iran because it may soon have … a nuclear ‘capacity’.  If asked what constitutes capacity, they quote their beloved leaders in Tel Aviv, including the semi-literate (former nightclub bouncer) Foreign Minister Avi Lieberman, the morally corrupt Bibi Netanyahu and the quietly diabolic Shimon Peres that Iranians can ‘enrich uranium’ – a capacity long held by 125 other countries.

It is with supreme arrogance that the followers of AIPAC and the 52 Presidents penetrate the US government in order to serve a foreign government.  None bother to hide their past, present or future affiliations with the state of Israel.  They are backed by prestigious Zionist academics, whose tendentious justifications for war have already sent tens of thousands of US soldiers to an early grave or to the wards of military and veteran hospitals and clinics across the country: They have sold us the argument that by serving the interests of the State of Israel we serve the United States. From this, it only follows that to break the law and act as an unregistered agent for a foreign power, to transfer highly classified government documents to Mossad agents at the Israeli embassy and to threaten Americans who criticize or oppose Israel is a patriotic act.³⁷ Naval analyst Jonathan Pollard, the convicted US master-spy for Israel, is widely celebrated in Israel as an honorary Colonel in the IDF and a hero; the leaders of the major Zionist organizations are again pressuring Obama to release this traitor.

The documented performance of the leading Zionists in public office in the United States over the past two decades has been an unmitigated disaster. The self-proclaimed best and brightest have led the country into the worst economic and military catastrophes in a century.  It was Alan Greenspan, as head of the Federal Reserve, who de-regulated the financial sector and optimized conditions for the mega-swindles and speculative frenzy bringing down the entire financial system.  It was his replacement, Ben Bernacke, who pushed for trillions of US tax-payer dollars in bail-out funds to save his cronies on Wall Street and set them back on course, in the last 2 years, to repeat their speculative orgy – and allow such tribal compatriots as Stephen Schwartzman to reap $213 million in earnings in 2011.³⁸

It was Fred Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Libby, Abrams and Ross, as well as their less prominent lieutenants, who pushed the US into wars on Israel’s behalf in Afghanistan and Iraq, all the while confidently predicting ‘low cost, quick victories’ (even slam-dunks).  Never has such a cohort of Ivy League mediocrities collectively produced so many disastrous policies in such a brief historical time while never being held in any way, shape or form responsible or accountable for their performance.  It is obvious that these policy disasters did not result from faulty intellect or lack of an elite education.  Their apparent ignorance of historical, political, economic and military realities was a result of their blinding Zionist loyalties to the Israeli state whose real interests they embraced.  This lack of accountability guarantees that this process will continue until the US, as a republic, is destroyed for the masses of its misled citizens.

In order to justify a war against Israel’s regional adversaries, these blind mediocrities have distorted the realities of Arab nationalism.  It was with supreme tribal arrogance and racism that they assured themselves that Arabs could never sustain prolonged resistance to their imperial juggernaut.  They believed precisely what their tribal religion/ideology told them:  They were a chosen people (genetic studies aside).  They were the most financially successful investors or speculators.  They attended and taught at the most prestigious universities.  When, on occasion, a leading Zionist philanthropist, like Bernard Madoff, fell afoul—and actually went to jail– it was because, like his fellow tribalists,  Milken, Boesky and Pollard — he didn’t buy his one way ticket to Israel soon enough.

When a country, like the United States, is in decline, it is not because of external competition:  Declining competitiveness is only a symptom.  It is because of internal rot.  Decline results when a nation is betrayed by craven leaders, who crawl and humiliate themselves before a minority of thuggish mediocrities pledged to a foreign state without scruples or moral integrity.

1. For full coverage of the daily activities and the uncritical reportage of the major media see the Daily Alert, the official mouthpiece of 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, especially March 4 – 6, 2012.
2. See the AIPAC video reports and the list of speakers, 3/2/2012 and subsequent reports.
3. White House press release of Obama’s declaration that US subordinate relation to Israel is “sacrosanct”, March 4, 2012.
4. The reference is to Noam Chomsky whose laughable effort to downplay the influence of the Zionist power configuration is widely rejected and is once again refuted by the most superficial observation of the proceedings, pledges and  prostrations of all top US policy makers at the AIPAC meeting.
5. Netanyahu’s public pronouncements and AIPAC speech were duly recorded, amplified and supported by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and especially the Washington Post (2/6/2012). He explicitly called on the US to militarily attack Iran on behalf of Israel, on the basis of Teheran’s ‘capacity’ to make a nuclear weapon.  According to Netanyahu “we can’t afford to wait much longer …” Prime Minister’s Office 3/5/2012.
6. New York Times, 3/5/2012
7. Prime Ministers Office as quoted in the Daily Alert, 3/6/2012.
8. AIPAC video daily reports, 3/6/12
9. For example, just one of the numerous Zionist billionaires, the casino tzar, Sheldon Adelson has already contributed “tens of millions of dollars” to influence the current Presidential elections. Haaretz, 2/29/12.  Haim Saban, another Israel-Firster billionaire, bought the principle Spanish language TV outlet in the US, UNIVISION, and then proceeded to promote sensationalist Israeli propaganda about an Iranian-Islamist “takeover” of Latin America.
10. AIPAC press releases, 3/7/12 – 3/10/12.
11. A survey of the Daily Alert , from March 4 to March 9, reveals there is not one single article that discusses the alternative of a diplomatic settlement with Iran, while over a dozen articles feature calls for war.
12. For documentation and details on the decisive role of Zionist policy makers in launching the US war against Iraq see my The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta:  Clarity Press 2006).
13. New York Times, 3/1/12
14. The 52 Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations repeatedly endorsed Netanyahu’s pretext for war.  See Daily Alert, 3/6/2012
15. Quoted in Mondoweiss, 3/2/12
16. Ibid
17. Key Zionist Congressional operatives include Representatives Berman, Cantor, Harman, Lieberman, Ros- Lehtinen, and Levin as well as their Christian side-kicks, like McConnell and Pelosi among others who appeared at the AIPAC war fest. AIPAC promotional flyer 3/2/12.
18. See The Power of Israel in the United States (op cit),
19. See “On Bended Knees: Zionist Power in American Politics” in James Petras, War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column (Clarity, Atlanta 2010.
20. The Power of Israel in the United States, op cit.
21. Though Ross has formally resigned, he is still a key Obama adviser on the Middle East.  See Haaretz 1/27/12
22. One of the key Zionist operatives is Jeffrey Feltman, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.  He played a crucial role in support of Israel ‘s bombing  of Lebanon in 2006, during his term as Ambassador, calling Hezbollah a “terrorist organization”. He dictated policy to the US client ruler Fouad Siniora.  Feltman twice served in Israel.  He was stationed in Gaza where he collaborated with the occupying Israeli Defense Forces.  He worked with uber-Zionist US Ambassador Martin Indyk backing Israel’s position in the phony “Peace Process” from 2000 to 2001. Other Zionists in key positions include Jack Lew,  current Chief of Staff to President Obama; David Plouffe senior adviser, Dan Shapiro, Ambassador to Israel; Steven Simon, Head of Middle East/North Africa Desk at the National Security Council; and Eric Lynn, Middle East policy advisor. Jewish Virtual Library, a Division of the American-Israeli Enterprise 2012.
23. Prominent Zionists, who served in strategic positions in the foreign policy realm of the Obama regime, included Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to the President, David Axelrod, Senior Advisor;  James Steinberg Deputy Secretary of State; and  Richard Holbrooke Special Envoy to Pakistan/Afghanistan, deceased.
24. Several studies estimate that Jews make up about 25% of the Forbes 400 richest Americans; over half are contributors to Israel or Zionist organizations or causes.  J.J. Goldberg in his book on Jewish power estimates that 45% of Democratic fundraising comes from pro-Israel Jews.  (Jewish Power: Inside the Jewish Establishment, Reading: Addison-Wesley 1996).
25. Steve Rosen, a top policy director of AIPAC, along with his colleague, Keith Weissman, admitted to handing over confidential documents to the Israeli embassy.  Rosen later filed suit against AIPAC for firing him and Weissman and refusing to pay their legal fees; he claimed that the Lobby frequently condoned its employees’ receipt and illegal transfer of classified US government information citing numerous AIPAC documents to back-up his case.  The Jewish Daily Forward, 12/15/2010.
26. The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, urged Netanyahu to order the Israeli secret spy service, the Mossad, to assassinate President Obama,  Haaretz 1/21/12.  Rabbi Michael Lerner, a moderate Zionist critic of Israel, has been subject to four attacks on his home in the past two years, while accused of being a ‘self-hating Jew’ by Zionist fanatics.  Mainstream Zionist organizations dissociate themselves from physical violence, while slanderously labeling opponents and critics of Israel as “anti-semites”, which has created precisely the political climate that encourages the less balanced among their audience to violent activity. Leading Zionist ideologues have been extremely active in inducing colleges and universities to fire critics of Israel, as was the case in the failure of DePaul University to renew the contract of a widely published scholar like, Norman Finklestein.   Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, authors of an erudite study of The Israel Lobby, were subject to vitriolic attacks by American Zionist leaders, including A. Foxman of the Anti (sic) Defamation League as well as a superficial critique by left-Zionist Noam Chomsky.  The racist rantings of uber-Zionists like David Horowitz and Pamela Geller helped to detonate the Islamophobic and Zionophilic mass murderer, Anders Breivik, in Norway.
27. See the Atlantic Jewish Times editorial 1/20/12.
28. The editor of the Atlantic Jewish Times who called for Obama’s assassination was not charged with any federal security offense. The confessed Zionist spy, Colonel Ben-Ami Kadish, who stole secret US nuclear weapon plans for Israel, did not spend a single day in jail although he paid a $50,000 fine for handing over scores of documents to Israel. See Grant Smith Foreign Agents, Institute for Research Middle East Policy (IRMEP) Washington 2008. On AIPAC spying see IRMEP 2/6/12.
29. Not to be ignored, the rarified atmosphere in high level scientific research journals has been politicized – most outrageous is the censorship of a genetic-immunologic study (by a leading international team of scientists) showing the close genetic relationship, if not identity between Levantine Jews and Palestinians.  University libraries around the world were advised to ‘tear-out’ (eyes closed) the offending study from the pages of the journal, Human Immunology, lest such data might undermine the racist ‘raison d’etre’ for an exclusively Jewish State.  (See Journal axes gene research on Jews and Palestinians, Robin McKie, Guardian-Sunday Observer (London), November 25, 2001 and Hum. Immunol. 62 (9): 889–900).
30. A review of new reports and editorials of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, published by the Daily Alert during the AIPAC conference, reveals a close alignment with the extremist militarist position of the Israeli regime and AIPAC leaders.  See Steve Lendman’s  “‘New York Times Promoting War on Iran” 3/3/12.
31. During the month of February 2012, the Israeli Army and armed paramilitary Jewish settlers carried out 145 attacks on Palestinians, killing and wounding dozens, demolishing homes, seizing thousands of acres of land and uprooting scores of families: The Wall and Settlements Information Center, Palestinian Authority 3/1/12. Neither the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post reported on these Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians.
32. Among Chertoff’s current clients are the manufacturers of the intrusive and nationally detested ‘body scanners’ used at US airports.  He was also instrumental in the release and repatriation of a dozen Israeli Mossad agents arrested in New York and New Jersey within 24 hours of the 9/11 terrorist attack.  Three of the nine justices, Ginsberg, Breyer and Kagan, are Zionists unwilling to challenge the Executive usurpation of war powers and promotion of torture and rendition.  The others are all affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church.  Not a single Protestant-affiliated Justice (numerically the majority religion in the US) has been appointed to the Supreme Court since the 1990 appointment of respected constitutional scholar, David Souter (by George Bush the First), because of their ‘unreliability’ (code-word for upholding the Bill of Rights and Constitution).  The recent appointment of Justice Elena Kagan, whose lackluster academic career did not deter uber-Zionist Laurence Summers from appointing her Dean of the Harvard Law School, uderscores the mediocre criteria used in the high judiciary.  The most recent appointment of Sonya Sotomayor to replace the brilliant (and Zionistically ‘unreliable’) J.P. Stevens, was promoted heaviliy for the Supreme Court on the basis of her strong ties to Israel, starting with her first (of many) ‘leadership’ tours to Israel (see The Jewish Chronicle – Life story Israel trips tie Sotomayor to Jews, Ron Kampeas – May 26, 2009).
33. Financial Times 3/6/12, p. 9.
34. Howard Kohr AIPAC executive director, during his vitriolic war mongering speech at the conference exceeded even Netanyahu’s explicit call for an immediate military attack on Iran.  See AIPAC daily report, 3/16/12
35. Most experts agree that the oil price increase has stymied ‘economic recovery’ and if it continues to rise will plunge the world back into deep recession.
36. Obama’s speech to the AIPAC meeting pointedly called on the Israeli leaders to tone down on their military rhetoric, clearly linking rising oil prices to Israeli war mongering.
37. See Grant Smith, ‘AIPAC Directors Use of Classified Missile Data, Harmed National Security – US State Department’, Business Wire 2/6/12.
38. Financial Times 3/1/12, p. 17

I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.
– U.S. President Barack Obama, Sunday, March 5, 2012, speech to the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee)

There are about 50 countries in the world that have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon if they chose to do so, making Iran far from unique but for its persistence as a thorn in the side of Israel and Israel’s powerful lobby in the United States.
– Philip Giraldi, Council for the National Interest

The truth is there are very few members [of the U.S. Congress] who I could even name or could think of who didn’t at some level participate in that [system of bribery and corruption in Washington D.C.].
– Jack Abramoff, professional lobbyist and onetime power broker for the elite of Washington, D.C. (during a CBS’s 60 Minutes interview, Sunday November 6, 2011)

I’m against very wealthy people attempting to or influencing elections. But as long as it’s doable, I’m going to do it.
– Sheldon Adelson, casino magnate who has donated $11 million to Newt Gringrich’s super PAC Winning Our Future, suggesting that he might give as much as $100 million to support the GOP presidential candidate

The 2012 U.S. presidential election is the first one to be held under the new electoral financing rule decreed by a majority of one by the Roberts Supreme Court on January 21, 2010. With this fateful decision, the Roberts Supreme Court really changed the meaning of the Preambule of the U.S. Constitution that says “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…” and decided on its own to change it for “We, the rich corporations of America…”

Under the new Supreme Court rule, indeed, any legal entity can spend as much money as it likes to control propaganda channels in order to influence and even dictate the election of the U.S. president and of the members of Congress. That’s legalized corruption. Sooner or later, this nonsensical decision will be over-ruled, but not before it may have caused irreparable damage to the U.S. political system by violating two basic democratic principles, i.e. the equality of citizens and the principle of one citizen-one vote. There is no other democratic country where the dictum of French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), applies more concretely:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

From now on, Americans will not have the most competent and the most dedicated politicians, but the best political hacks that money can buy. Where are the men and women of value and of independent mind who would want to run for office in such a corrupt system?

People are not fooled. They know that the quality of candidates to public office is very low and declining. Recent polls, for example, indicate that even among republican voters, a majority–58%–say they want more candidate choices, and a whopping 46% have outright negative opinions about the current field of republican presidential candidates: devout Mormon, former missionary, and vulture capitalist Mitt Romney; extremist papal Catholic Rick Santorum who wants to ban contraception methods and who thinks that having a university education in this day and age is to be a snob; twice divorced Newt Gingrich, a former House Speaker ordered in the past to pay $300,000 for Ethics Violations and a dreamer who wants to send 13,000 people to live on the moon; and finally Texas congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian who would abolish Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly if he could, all modern programs that have lifted American retirees from poverty. And there you have it.

As of now, with the uncontrolled flow of money coming from corporations, casino owners and banks, and more specifically from defense lobbyists, from pro-Israel lobbyists and Israel Firsters, from bankers’ lobbyists, from oil lobbyists, and about 40,000 other registered paid lobbyists in Washington D.C., narrow special interests [http://www.thenewamericanempire.com/tremblay=1033.htm] have free rein to use the resources of the state as if they were their own and to threaten any individual candidate or office holder who dares to oppose them. Keep in mind that the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, the most powerful single political lobby in Washington D. C., was the main driving force behind the 2003 military invasion of Iraq by the Bush-Cheney administration, a war of aggression based on lies and false premises.

Indeed, in such a system, the party and the candidates with the most money can be expected to prevail and place their pawns and yes-men in position of power. This is a throwback to the corrupt “Robber Barons” era when a handful of rich capitalists formed a greedy political ruling oligarchy. Undoubtedly, there will be exceptions, but money and propaganda are bound to dominate American elections in the future.

It is not the first time that the U.S. Supreme Court has intervened massively in the American political process. As recently as December 9, 2000, by a one vote majority, the U.S. Supreme Court de facto elected Republican candidate George W. Bush President of the United States, by canceling the recounting of legally cast votes in the state of Florida. Nationally, Democratic candidate Al Gore had received roughly 500,000 more votes than his adversary.

The current Republican presidential campaign has also demonstrated what can be expected in the future under the new rule. The more money a candidate can raise, often from anonymous sources, the more he can buy time on TV and radio to air negative campaigns, not to advance positive proposals of his own, but to destroy the character and credibility of his opponents.

The leading Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as of now, is turning out to be the money candidate and he has outspent his competitors on negative campaigning by a wide margin. In his younger years, before becoming a corporate banker-raider, Mitt Romney was a Mormon missionary leader in France (1966-68) and, while a strong advocate of the military draft for others, he received a personal 4-D deferment from the draft exempting him from going to Vietnam because of his status as a Mormon “minister of religion”.

Unless the Republican convention in Tampa FL in August is in a deadlock, Romney, possibly with Santorum as his running mate, will be facing the incumbent Democratic ticket of President Obama and Vice-President Biden. Already, President Obama has decided to join the money game and has indicated that the political action committees (PACs) who support him will be allowed to accept unlimited donations to boost his re-election campaign, lest he be at a considerable disadvantage versus his well-financed Republican adversaries. Indeed, when there are no rules, the party that follows rules is doomed to defeat.

As a consequence, there is no doubt that the Obama-Biden ticket will have to bend to special interests to obtain money and support from wealthy donors. If re-elected, their administration will have its hands tied to special interests policies that would have been forced upon them. —Where are the common good and the public interest in all that?

Now Obama has to deal with him again one-on-one as Netanyahu visits Washington, pressing his demand that the U.S. bomb Iran or at least give him the green light to start something that will inevitably involve the U.S.  The Israeli prepared for the meeting by hosting powerful senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham in Israel last week. (McCain is the Ranking Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Graham also a member). Their visit followed February visits by U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both of whom warned Israel not to bomb, as this would compound U.S. difficulties in the region.

But McCain and Graham (who’d been prominent advocates of the war on Iraq based on lies) took Netanyahu’s side.  (“Senators Back Netanyahu in Pentagon Row” read one Israeli headline.) McCain told reporters in Jerusalem,  “There should be no daylight between America and Israel in our assessment of the [Iranian] threat. Unfortunately there clearly is some.” McCain told Netanyahu that Gen. Dempsey had, in discouraging an Israeli attack, been “serving the Iranians” and that  “there is very little doubt that Iran has so far been undeterred to get nuclear weapons.” Thus McCain rejected the conclusion of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies in 2007, reiterated in 2010, that Iran does not even have a nuclear weapons program. He rejected empirical reality in favor of Israeli histrionics, adding some of his own.

Senator Graham told reporters “obviously it’s not helpful if there is a well-publicized tension between the US and Israel. We would like to see the United States and Israel agree on a course of action that will lead us toward a goal we both share. People are giving Israel a lot of advice here lately from America. I just want to tell our Israeli friends that my advice to you is never lose control of your destiny. Never allow a situation to develop that would destroy the Jewish state.” (In other words: “Go ahead and bomb Iran; I will try to use my own political clout to insure that America will support you!”)

What an extraordinary public rejection, on foreign soil, of official U.S. policy, and deference to a foreign prime minister in conflict with a U.S. president!

Israeli Influence on U.S. Policy

It’s often charged that Israel controls U.S. foreign policy. I think this is untrue; it would not be possible for such a small country largely dependent on U.S. largess to totally control Washington’s policies towards itself, much less the world in general. If Israel truly controlled U.S. policy, Washington would endorse rather than deplore ongoing West Bank settlements. It would recognize Jerusalem as  Israel’s “eternal and indivisible capital” rather than maintaining its embassy in Tel Aviv.

The U.S. would have sided with Israel during the Suez Affair of 1956, when it attacked Egypt in collusion with Britain and France, rather than demanding it to back off. Ronald Reagan would have applauded Israel’s bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, rather than ordering the U.S. ambassador to the UN to support the resolution condemning it.

The pro-Israel position of the U.S. government is virtually unconditional (“unbreakable forever” says Joseph Biden, despite being repeatedly humiliated by Israeli officials during visits).  Hilary Clinton speaks of the “close, unshakable bond” between the two countries and pledges an “absolute commitment to Israel’s security.” Such statements of solidarity are virtually an article of faith in mainstream U.S. politics.

(Massachusetts Democrat and wannabe senator Elizabeth Warren— lionized by the Democratic liberal left, Michael Moore and even some in the Occupy movement—has just made a statement on Israel referring to the “unbreakable bond” between the US and Israel, “a natural partnership resting on our mutual commitment to democracy and freedom and on our shared values.” She adds that Iran is “a significant threat to the United States,” and declares that the “United States must take the necessary steps to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.”  This kind of slavish devotion to Israel and its policy-makers take on the world is near universal among people seeking to obtain and maintain political power in this country.)

Still, that does not mean Israel controls U.S. foreign policy. Yes, it’s true that former Israeli Prime Minister Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert boasted in January 2009 about how he’d forced Condolezza Rice to instruct the U.S. UN ambassador to abstain from a vote on the Israeli attack on Gaza. “In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favor,” Olmert told a crowd in Ashkelon.

I said get me President Bush on the phone.’ They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me.  I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor. She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favor.

And, yes, it’s true that Netanyahu told Haaretz in 2001,  “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in their way.”

But if Israel controlled U.S. policy, Obama would not have urged a freeze on the expansion of illegal settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Clinton would not have called the Israeli announcement of additional construction in East Jerusalem during Biden’s March 2010 visit  “insulting,” causing Israeli officials to assert that U.S.-Israeli ties were at their lowest point in years. The U.S. would not be able to force Israel, the world’s fourth-largest arms exporter, to back off on some arms deals with China.

That said:  Israel, consistently the largest recipient of U.S. aid (unless one considers, as some do, the costs of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq “aid”), has generally been able to count on U.S. support when it invades Lebanon (1986, 2006), bombs Syria (2007), unleashes a blitzkrieg over Gaza (2008), etc. even though such actions are often not in what policy wonks see as “U.S. national interests.”

Congress (consisting by and large of people remarkably ignorant of the Middle East) passes resolutions in enthusiastic support; the president and secretary of state voice understanding and support even when urging restraint “on all sides.” Most importantly, Israel continues to occupy and relentlessly settle the West Bank, and strangle Gaza, over formal U.S. objections.

The ability of Israel to do as it pleases, sometimes defying Washington’s stated objections while securely drinking from the tap, puzzles many.  Surely it reflects in part the power of the Israel Lobby, which is indeed (as many charge) the unregistered “agent of a foreign power.” Its offices have been raided by the FBI (2004) and some officials have even been arrested on espionage charges.  Those arrested, who stole U.S. intelligence on Iran, while Israeli officials were pressing the U.S. to bomb Iran, were freed on legal technicalities. But the very fact that those raids occurred indicates that there are some “contradictions” between the two countries.

Israel can count on the support of evangelical Christians (about one-third of the U.S. population) to support it, practically no matter what it does.  This is not lost upon U.S. politicians, who know they will pay a price for criticizing Israeli policy.

U.S. Jews hold a wide range of viewpoints, and include many appalled at Israeli policies and opposed to Zionism (and indeed in the forefront of opposition to the occupation).  But Israel does enjoy the support of the majority of U.S. Jews, and their support can be politically significant. (While 2% of people in this country are Jewish, 48% of U.S. billionaires are Jewish, many who are also citizens of Israel and avid Zionists. It would be naïve to suppose that U.S. politicians make decisions oblivious to such hard facts.)

The fact that one supports Israel (in terms of its right to exist, or even to do so specifically as “a Jewish state”—despite the fact that a quarter of the population is non-Jewish and subject to second-class citizen status) does not, of course, mean that one will support every Israeli action.  There are self-defined Zionists (perhaps including “Christian Zionists”) who seriously differ from Israeli policies from time to time.

But the combined clout of evangelical Christian support, AIPAC lobbying efforts, neoconservative propagandizing, and Israeli government pressure (manifest, for example, in Israeli prime ministers’ appearances before jubilant evangelical Christian groups) is impressive, and does create in many minds the impression that “Israel controls U.S. policy.”

Hyping the Iranian Threat

That’s why the current confrontation between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Obama concerning Iran is so interesting.

For years, the Israeli leadership echoed by neoconservative pundits in this country like Norman Podhoretz has been urging—indeed, demanding—that the U.S. bomb Iran to destroy (on their behalf) its nuclear program. That program, everyone should know, is a legal civilian IAEA-monitored program underway in a country that is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Agreement. The demand to destroy the Iranian facilities comes from the government of a country that refuses to sign that agreement, has produced around 200 nuclear weapons itself, and is the only nuclear power in the Middle East.

The demand rests on the assertion that Iran is on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon and that should it obtain one it would unacceptably threaten Israel. Netanyahu has been saying this from the early nineties. (He’s rather like Harold Camping—the Christian radio evangelist who predicted the End Times would come in1988,  then 1994, then 2011—and just as nuts). Production of a nuke would constitute, in the sensationalistic language the Chicken Littles like to use, the “existential threat” of a “nuclear Holocaust.”

The Israelis repeatedly misquote Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials to argue that Iran (1) wants to “wipe them off the map” out of Nazi-like anti-Semitism and (2) due to the regime’s irrationality (based on religious fanaticism) it does not care about the fact that any nuclear strike on Israel would result in a massive response that would wipe out millions of Iranians.

The fact is, the Iranian president (who does not head the military) in October 2005 quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s observation that—like the Soviet Union and the Shah’s regime—Israel will eventually be “erased from the page of time.”  He has since stressed that he is not anti-Semitic, and that Iran’s Jewish population (the largest outside of Israel in the Middle East) has disproportionate representation in the Iranian parliament. There are 30 synagogues in Tehran, six kosher butchers and a Jewish hospital supported by the government.

Ahmadinejad told an interviewer in 2007: “You know that according to the law in Iran, every 150,000 people have one representative in the Majlis [parliament]. But the number of the Jews is not even 20,000 people and they have a representative. We say that the life and belongings of all people should be respected.” Iranian officials have repeatedly stated willingness to accept any resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute suitable to the Jews, Christians and Muslims of the region. And they repeatedly not only deny any intention to develop nuclear weapons (despite the fact that they’re surrounded by nuclear China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel and U.S. aircraft carriers bearing nukes) but note that their supreme religious leader has issued a fatwa against their production or use.

But none of this means anything to Netanyahu, who insisted in 2007, “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs. . . [Ahmadinejad] is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state. . .  Iran could be the first undeterrable nuclear power. This is a Jewish problem like Hitler was a Jewish problem …” Israel’s President Shimon Peres has meanwhile compared the (imagined) Iranian nuke to “a flying concentration camp.” Always the Nazi-era imagery. This is either paranoia, shameless fear-mongering, or both.

It is simply inappropriate. Irrational. The Iranian regime is brutal, its Sharia-based laws severe. It is emphatically anti-Zionist, as is much of the world, given the devastating impact of Zionism on the indigenous people of Palestine. But Iran is not Nazi Germany.

There is no reason to suppose Iran would want to go to war with a country a thousand miles away out of sympathy for the mostly Sunni Palestinian Arab victims of Zionist occupation. The Iranian Shiites are different ethnically and religiously from the mostly Sunni Arabs. They bond more readily with Hizbollah in Lebanon, which is a Shiite organization with some Sunni and Christian allies, than they do with Hamas. In any case, Iranians certainly understand that any strike against Israel would kill Muslims along with Jews. And again, there is that fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons. Iran has not attacked any nation for hundreds of years. The entire case Netanyahu presents is ridiculous.

Presidents Ignore U.S. Intelligence

Still, two presidents in a row have failed to challenge and refute it. Bush and Cheney were upset by the 2007 NIE; Cheney’s office seems to have delayed its publication for a year. When the NIE report “strained U.S.-Israeli ties,” Bush practically apologized for it in his December 2007 visit to Israel, saying he didn’t agree with it and that anyway it “didn’t change anything.” (As though the inattentive cowboy president had greater insight than all his intelligence agencies, speaking with one voice!)

Similarly, Obama has not come out publically, saying, “Look, my intelligence sources assure me that there is no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program. And certainly no short-term threat to Israel, which as we know, has 200 nuclear weapons itself. We don’t like the Iranian government, and have rejected its diplomatic overtures because we would like to see it fall.

“But we realize that Iran is a complicated society with a complex political structure, and that Ahmadinejad far from being a Hitler does not even control the military. That’s controlled by the mullahs, ultimately by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei who has issued a religious edict banning the production of nuclear weapons. And Ahmadinejad’s party has suffered a big setback in the recent election in Iran.

“We see no advantage to bombing Iran and provoking it to attack our massive embassy complex in Iraq or retaliate against us or Israel using whatever conventional forces are at its disposal. So we counsel our Israeli friends to stop hyping what we believe to be a non-existent threat. And we ask you to stop intervening in U.S. politics to build the case for an unnecessary war with horrible likely repercussions.”

No, he cannot say such things.

Instead he must maintain the line: “no options off the table” while dispatching top officials to Israel to quietly discourage an Israeli attack on Iran. He must declare, “I don’t bluff” in a message to Israel and Iran—and the U.S. political circus— that he’s both strong and rational (he won’t threaten an attack he can’t successfully pull off, especially at the behest of another).

So here comes Netanyahu, armed with Congressional political support,  to meet with Obama, demanding that either the U.S. bomb soon or Israel will do it. Timing is important because (1) following the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (incomplete though it has been) the authorities in that country will be powerless to shoot down Israeli aircraft flying through their airspace, while the U.S. won’t have to take any responsibility for allowing that; and (2) before the November election Obama is politically vulnerable and will not want to appear weak or anything but supportive of Israel. In U.S. political discourse, the latter translates as “anti-Semitism.”

Netanyahu wants the U.S. to establish a “red line” requiring the bombing campaign he so keenly craves. That red line is not any evidence that Iran plans or wants to produce nuclear weapons. Rather, it’s the point at which Iran theoretically could (like Japan and Brazil) quickly produce nuclear weapons.

The argument is: the Iranians (unique in the world!) do not deserve the right to have even a civilian program, because they are so hostile to Israel. They must be punished for even trying to do what 30 other countries do, and what successive U.S. administrations urged Iran itself to do, with U.S. assistance, while the pro-U.S., pro-Israel Shah was in power in the 1970s!

Armenia, bordering Iran, produces 45% of its energy through nuclear power. Israel has no problem with that! But Iran must not continue its limited, closely monitored enrichment program…because, Netanyahu declares, this threatens Israel and the survival of the Jewish people.

If Obama caves in, agreeing to take joint action to prevent a sovereign state to do what international law permits—to produce nuclear energy for civilian purposes—it will show

who’s boss and settle this question of who controls whom.

A fine, exemplary specimen of war-monger’s art: James Phillips of the right-wing war-mongering Heritage Foundation in a March 2 piece entitled “The Obama–Netanyahu Summit: Time to Present a Common Front Against Iran.”

Phillips notes the “increasingly public spat” between Obama and Netanyahu and says the “two leaders need to forge a common understanding of how best to defuse Iran’s ticking nuclear time bomb…”

How typical! Just keep repeating the lie and people will believe it.

“The two leaders,” writes Phillips, “who reportedly have a poor personal chemistry, also have clashing worldviews. Netanyahu understandably perceives the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel and is determined to prevent another Holocaust—through military means if necessary. President Obama, who has consistently underestimated the ideologically based hostility of Iran’s Islamist dictatorship, puts more faith in diplomacy backed by sanctions. But the Obama Administration has exhibited a much weaker sense of urgency on the need to deal decisively with the growing potential threat (Italics added).”

So Netanyahu’s “worldview” is realistic, Obama’s naïve and appeasement oriented. No reference here to the NIEs, the unanimous opinion of the U.S. intelligence community, and the repeated IAEA assessments that Iran is not diverting nuclear fuel for military purposes.

Although sanctions have imposed an increasingly steep price on Tehran, sanctions alone are unlikely to halt Iran’s nuclear push any more than they halted North Korea’s. .. Obama Administration remains committed to its failed engagement strategy. . .

Again the (military) “nuclear push” merely posited, without evidence. And what is Obama’s “failure” but the failure to force the suspension of the civilian program, or to overthrow the Iranian regime, as Israel so urgently demands?

To make matters worse, the Secretary of Defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have also publicly warned against an Israeli military strike. This counterproductive behavior only reduces the chances of resolving the problem satisfactorily through diplomacy, because it reduces international leverage on Tehran.

Poppycock.  The Bomb Iran advocates are not interested in diplomacy. They see it as a threat to their objective of regime change. “We don’t negotiate with evil,” Cheney once said, having indignantly rejected a conciliatory overture from Iran in 2003, “we defeat it.” How is it “counterproductive” to discourage an Israeli attack? Counterproductive towards what worthy ends?

And why the disparagement of the highest level of U.S. professional military opinion as just “making things worse”?

The vicious illogic surrounding this issue is frightening. You’d think that people like Phillips, a supporter of the Iraq invasion, would be so discredited at this point that they’d slink off the stage in shame. But no, they continue to traffic in lies, hell-bent on transforming the Middle East to the advantage of Israel.

Here are ten reasons why AIPAC is so dangerous.

1. AIPAC is lobbying Congress to promote a military confrontation with Iran.  AIPAC – like the Israeli government – is demanding that the U.S. attack Iran militarily to prevent Iran from having the technological capacity to produce nuclear weapons, even though U.S. officials say Iran isn’t trying to build a weapon (and even though Israel has hundreds of undeclared nuclear weapons). AIPAC has successfully lobbied the U.S. government to adopt crippling economic sanctions on Iran, including trying to cut off Iran’s oil exports, despite the fact that these sanctions raise the price of gas and threaten the U.S. economy.

2. AIPAC promotes Israeli policies that are in direct opposition to international law. These include the establishment of colonies  (settlements) in the Occupied West Bank and the confiscation of Palestinian land in its construction of the 26-foot high concrete  “separation barrier” running through the West Bank. The support of these illegal practices makes to impossible to achieve a solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

3. AIPAC’s call for unconditional support for the Israeli government threatens our national security. The United States’ one-sided support of Israel, demanded by AIPAC, has significantly increased anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East, thus endangering our troops and sowing the seeds of more possible terrorist attacks against us. Gen. David Petraeus on March 16, 2010 admitted that the U.S./Palestine conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel.” He also said that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”

4. AIPAC undermines American support for democracy movements in the Arab world. AIPAC looks at the entire Arab world through the lens of Israeli government interests, not the democratic aspirations of the Arab people. It has therefore supported corrupt, repressive regimes that are friendly to the Israeli government, such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Events now unfolding in the Middle East should convince U.S. policy-makers of the need to break from AIPAC’s grip and instead support democratic forces in the Arab world.

5. AIPAC makes the U.S. a pariah at the UN. AIPAC describes the UN as a body hostile to the State of Israel and has pressured the U.S. government to oppose resolutions calling Israel to account.  Since 1972, the US has vetoed 44 UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s actions against the Palestinians. President Obama continues that policy. Under Obama, the US vetoed UN censure of the savage Israeli assault on Gaza in January 2009 in which about 1400 Palestinians were killed; a 2011 resolution calling for a halt to the illegal Israeli West Bank settlements even though this was stated U.S. policy; a 2011 resolution calling for Israel to cease obstructing the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees; and another resolution calling for an end to illegal Israeli settlement building in East Jerusalem and the occupied Golan Heights.

6. AIPAC attacks politicians who question unconditional support of Israel. AIPAC demands that Congress rubber stamp legislation drafted by AIPAC staff. It keeps a record of how members of Congress vote and this record is used by donors to make contributions to the politicians who score well. Members of Congress who fail to support AIPAC legislation have been targeted for defeat in re-election bids.  These include Senators Adlai Stevenson III and Charles H. Percy, and Representatives Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney, and Earl F. Hilliard. AIPAC’s overwhelmingly disproportionate influence on Congress subverts our democratic system.

7. AIPAC attempts to silence all criticism of Israel by labeling critics as “anti-Semitic,” “de-legitimizers” or “self-hating Jews.” Journalists, think tanks, students and professors have been accused of anti-Semitism for merely taking stands critical of Israeli government policies. These attacks stifle the critical discussions and debates that are at the heart of democratic policy-making. The recent attacks on staffers at the Center for American Progress is but one example of AIPAC efforts to crush all dissent.

8. AIPAC feeds U.S. government officials a distorted view of the Israel/Palestine conflict. AIPAC takes U.S. representatives on sugar-coated trips to Israel. In 2011, AIPAC took one out of very five members of Congress—and many of their spouses—on a free junket to Israel to see precisely what the Israeli government wanted them to see. It is illegal for lobby groups to take Congresspeople on trips, but AIPAC gets around the law by creating a bogus educational group, AIEF, to “organize” the trips for them. AIEF has the same office address as AIPAC and the same staff. These trips help cement the ties between AIPAC and Congress, furthering their undue influence.

9. AIPAC lobbies for billions of U.S. taxdollars to go to Israel instead of rebuilding America. While our country is reeling from a prolonged financial crisis, AIPAC is pushing for no cuts in military funds for Israel, a wealthy nation. With communities across the nation slashing budgets for teachers, firefighters and police, AIPAC pushes for over $3 billion a year to Israel.

10. Money to Israel takes funds from world’s poor. Israel has the 24th largest economy in the world, but thanks to AIPAC, it gets more U.S. taxdollars than any other country. At a time when the foreign aid budget is being slashed, keeping the lion’s share of foreign assistance for Israel means taking funds from critical programs to feed, provide shelter and offer emergency assistance to the world’s poorest people.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, which is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has influence on U.S. policy out of all proportion to the number of Americans who support its policies. When a small group like this has disproportionate power, that hurts everyone—including Israelis and American Jews.

From stopping a catastrophic war with Iran to finally solving the Israel/Palestine conflict, an essential starting point is breaking AIPAC’s grip on U.S. policy.

The station also fired 15 others on the same day but they were not controversial, high-profile individuals of Mr. Harris’ calibre.  Bell Media, of course, denies that he was fired because of his views and cites corporate restructuring as the reason for all the dismissals.   An examination of the facts indicates otherwise.  Two extremely right-wing talk show hosts were retained while Harris was fired;  one, Lowell Green, is 75 years old and in poor health and the second, Nick Vandergragt, is a recent hire and right-wing militarist who comes to the air waves with a strong background in truck driving.

John Counsell, another right-winger in the 10 p.m. to midnight time slot was also kept on.   It is doubtful that Counsel gets any ratings worth mentioning as he actually shouts through the whole two hour program.   Why fire a mid-day host and not a late night host?   Ten to midnight is a relatively unimportant time slot that on many stations is filled with syndicated programming.   Are we to believe that keeping three right wingers and firing the one balancing voice was purely a business decision?   No media organization will admit to firing someone for their views unless the individual made a blatantly racist statement (although Muslims and Arabs seem to be fair game these days).  In light of the facts, can anyone be blamed for believing that Harris was fired for speaking truth to power.

Being fired is not a new experience for Michael Harris.  His refusal to cease his investigative reporting into allegations of abuse at the Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland led to his firing from a St. John’s newspaper.   The resulting book,   Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel won the Book of the Year, Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters award in 1991.

More recently (April 2011) he was fired from the Sun newspaper chain, (owned by the right-wing Quebecor group with strong ties to the Prime Minister’s office) after writing a series of articles critical of the Harper government.  He suspects, that a column he wrote just before the May 2011 election titled “Harper no longer on high moral ground,” was the stimulus for his dismissal.

Mr. Harris has told this writer several times in correspondence over the years that he has been under attack for his support of Palestinian Human Rights. It was obvious to regular listeners who are well versed in the powers and tactics of the Zionist lobby that this was no doubt the case.   There would be bursts of discussion on the Middle East followed by periods where no matter what atrocity was being committed on the ground he would not raise the event as a topic and instead engaged in more typical talk show fare; Tiger Woods, cats, violence in hockey, Valentine’s Day etc.   Mr. Harris like the rest of us has to eat and pay the rent.

A year or so ago, after a particularly long silence on Palestine there was a change.  One day he opened his show with a lengthy monologue about standing up for the principals that one believes in and ending with a quote by  Martin Luther King, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”   Since that day, his shows, while maintaining balance and presenting a variety of opinion have been a right-wing ideologue’s worst nightmare.

Not only did he begin to talk about Israel Palestine again, but he also addressed with even greater intensity and more directly, topics of deep significance to our globalized world.   For example,  the  no strings attached bailout of US banks in 2008 , the 1% that would turn us all into “corporate serfs”, environmental issues – from declining fish stocks to the Keystone pipeline, Monsanto, food sovereignty and Stephen Harper’s multi-facetted and unrelenting attacks on democracy.

In the past weeks he spoke a great deal about Caterpillar’s shutting down of the Electro-Motive Diesel plant in London, Ontario using it as a spring board to highlight the general assault on unions and the betrayal of public interests by our government.  The Ontario and federal governments provided millions of dollars in incentives to Caterpillar just 18 months ago but are now taking the position that they can’t interfere with the company’s business decision and are not calling for a return of public funds.

His firing from CFRA takes place after a concerted attack from the Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), following a detailed article  he wrote last week in iPolitics highlighting Israeli human rights violations and lambasting the Harper government’s lack of balance on Middle East issues.

Was Harris’ most recent firing a result of pressure from CIJA?   We will probably never know but when a child is beaten in the school yard it is only normal to suspect the school bully.  Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has opined that Israel’s policies are a petri dish for anti-Semitism.   The Zionist lobby in Canada may someday find that their tactics have created some very unfavourable results.  Comment boards on the websites of major news organizations such as the Globe and Mail and the CBC clearly indicate that a very large number of Canadians are increasingly aware and aghast at the influence of the Zionist lobby on our media and government and refuse to be bullied into silent complicity with Israel’s daily crimes against Palestinians.

The silencing of Michael Harris is a tremendous loss of important information and debate in the Nation’s capital but the man has resurrected from two firings in the past.  While his light has been extinguished on the air waves, my bet is that we will see that bright spark rise again somewhere else soon.  My hope would be a book on the destruction of Canadian democracy by the Zionist lobby.

When I returned to Geogia, I wrote a friend in the UK about my hope to interview McKinney. My friend related a story about the Dignity ship, carrying food and medical supplies to Palestine, in 2008, rammed by the Israeli Navy in international waters. McKinney was on that ship, and when it was rammed, she turned to my friend’s brother and said, “David, I can’t swim.” Nothing I had ever heard about McKinney revealed her character more succinctly. This is a woman willing to put her life on the line in support of her principles. Missing from the Mainstream Media depictions were the human and humane aspects of her character. The MSM has too-often portrayed the struggle for justice as irrational, or even fanatical. I needed to know more.—Gary Corseri

Gary Corseri: Let’s start with a big one… about the day that changed everything—9/11.

[And, for a sense of the very sharp way McKinney performed her duties--and the People’s business--in the US House of Representatives, while on the Budget Committee, I recommend checking out this 9-minute 2006 YouTube video of her grilling Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, General Meyers, and Tina Jonas about 9/11 and related matters.]

In 2004, you signed the 9/11 Truth Movement statement, calling for new investigations of “unexplained aspects of the 9/11 events.” More than 7 years have passed since then. What would you say are some of the more egregious “unexplained events”?

Cynthia McKinney: … How is it that the people of the United States can invest trillions of dollars in the military and Intelligence infrastructure—and it failed four times in one day? … That singular question has never been answered.

GC: Staying with 9/11. … Distorted as they have been by the Mainstream Media, your views have caused uninformed Americans to question your patriotism. In 2005, you held Congressional briefings on the official 9/11 Commission Report—

CM: Yeah. … the only official briefing on that subject held on Capitol Hill, period!

GC: Well… The Atlanta-Journal Constitution editorialized that—

CM: Oh… you mean, The Urinal-in-Constipation!

[General laughter in the room. …]

GC: … They editorialized that—

CM: You call them legitimate? I won’t even legitimize them with a response! Whatever they say is bogus! You got another quote from somebody?

GC: No… well, hear me out. …

CM: I’m not going to respond to anything they say!

GC: Well… you did, in fact, respond to an editorial they wrote when they editorialized that the briefings you were holding were to determine whether the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the attacks. That was their editorial! You replied…, but they refused to publish your response. … So, how did you respond? Can you tell us now?

CM: Oh, I can’t even remember back that far…, but, I think the record now reflects what Bush knew… and I’m sure that part of what I said is that I would never try to go inside George Bush’s brain to see what’s there!

GC: Too many maggots?

[Laughter. …]

GC: So, your main question is: Where was our air force, why didn’t they prevent it—

CM: We know where they were. … The question is, Why didn’t they follow standard operating procedures?

GC: And the other questions about buildings free-falling into their footprints… Building 7—

CM: Look, I spent last September 11 in the home of a woman who is afflicted with cancer… because she lived near the World Trade center. And all of that dust came into her apartment… and she had to clean it up. … She will never figure into any of the statistics about who has been affected—her situation will never count… but it counts to me, and to all of the other memebers of the 911 Truth Community.

GC: Let’s explore another controversial issue linked to you. … Ms. McKinney, what does the number “88794” signify for you?

CM: That was the number that was assigned to me by the Israeli prison system when—on my second attempt to get into Gaza—I was kidnapped on the high seas in international waters and taken against my will to Israel and put in prison. … David Halpin, the UK physician, and I sat next to each other because the volunteers—the activists that were on the boat—were international and spoke different languages… so I sat next to the English doctor… and he railed, he railed, he railed as the warship came close to us…, then backed off…, then approached us again—very quickly and very quietly–in this cat-and-mouse game. … And he cursed my government… because it was with the assistance of the United States that those engines had been provided to the Israeli military so that they could do what they were doing to us. …

GC: Did you join him in the cursing?

CM: No. … In fact…, I do a lot of apologizing! I can say this: In the struggle for human rights, I consider prisoner # 88794 a badge of honor that I’ve acquired as a result of what I have chosen to do to assert my own right to recognize the human rights and the dignity of other people. …

GC: Let’s continue with this theme of recognizing other people’s human rights. … More recently, this past year, you were in Tripoli when NATO bombed Libya. What were you doing there… and can you describe that experience?

CM: I voluntarily went to Libya. … Any time the War Machine rolls—I have to oppose that! Libya was a special case, a personal case… because I had just been to Libya. … I had taken a delegation of independent journalists to go to Libya… because I did not believe the explanation that was given to the public about the necessity to bomb Tripoli and other cities in Libya. … While we were there… we experienced what “shock and awe” is all about. The individual who went to the UN with allegations of thousands dying at the hands of Colonel Gaddhafi and the Libyan government—when he was pressed to substantiate his claims, he couldn’t.

GC:That reminds me of the allegations made against the Iraqis in Kuwait, back in 1990–that they were taking babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor!

CM: It’s also a situation similar to that of the Cuban-American community congregated down in Miami… right after the Cuban Revolution in 1959 where we had a community of expatriates who were willing to unleash terror on their own country… and, a similar thing was happening in Libya… with the United States providing financing for these individuals willing to lie about what was happening.

This information is available on the Internet. Julien Teil interviewed the individual making these false claims at the UN. The interview can be found at www.laguerrehumanitaire.fr. …It’s on YouTube, as well. Julien also interviewed the woman at Amnesty International who had claimed that “African mercenaries” were supporting Gaddafi’s repression of his people; but, when challenged—and this was all after the devastation—she admitted that it was “just a rumor.”

My colleague, David Josue, and I had been in Libya to attend a conference for Africans on the continent as well as Africans in the diaspora. And what the Jamahariya government had devised was a call to Africans in the diaspora who were unhappy with their treatment at the hands of white Americans or white Europeans, etc.—to come back home to Africa and to help Libya rebuild Africa and rebuild itself.

[Interviewer’s NOTE: (from Wikipedia): “Jamahiriya” is a term coined by Gaddafi, usually translated as “state of the masses.”]

… That was the purpose of this conference I had attended. … And it was at that conference that the Jamahiriya committed 90 billion dollars to help in the creation of The United States of Africa. … That would also include a million-person army for continental Africa to drive back the attempts of AFRICOM and others to occupy the African continent. … That was in addition to the proposal for a gold-backed dinar for all of Africa. … The daughter of Kwame Nkruma was at that conference; the son of Patrice Lumumba was at that conference… the grandson of Malcom X was there. … The atmosphere was electric with the idea of the re-building, the re-kindling of the movement that these African leaders—or their forebears—represented. Well… that was all put to an end by NATO’s bombing. …

[Interviewer’s NOTE (from Wikipedia): The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) is one of nine United Combatant Commands of the United States Armed Forces.]

The attack on Libya was an attack on Africa! It was an attack on my aspirations as a person of African descent to have a free and independent Africa. That’s what was attacked!

GC: I’ve never had as complete a picture of that. … I’d heard that Gaddafi wanted to set up a gold-backed dinar. … In fact, people like Ron Paul even talk about using gold-backed currency… so I’ve heard that as a rationale for what we were doing there—trying to prevent any challenge to the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. … But…, nobody has described the situation as completely as you have.

My final question on Libya is this: You have praised Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book and the kind of “direct democracy” advocated therein. Can you give us a brief lesson as to how that “direct democracy” differs from our “representative democracy”?

CM: Our “democracy” is neither democratic nor representative! But… let’s start with what the Jamahiriya means to me. … The only stake that I have is that I want to see a free and independent Africa…, but the type of government that Libya has should be determined by the Libyan people. I don’t really have a say in that. … And I shouldn’t have a say in how they dispose of their governmental form. … Therefore, it’s inexcusable to ask another country to bomb your fellow countrymen if you really care about your country!

The Jamahiriya–which had the highest living standard in all of Africa–had free education up through the Ph.D. level; free health care; free utilities, subsidized—and free, if you were poor—housing; subsidized food; subsidized transportaion, including car expenses… and so, the necessities of life were paid for by the direct democracy known as the Jamahiriya.

Can you imagine…? I have a cousin who is $120,000 in student debt in the U.S. She has a Master’s degree as a social worker. Now, if she had been born in Libya—she would have no such debt. … I went to a university outside of Tripoli and asked the students about their tuition fees… and the word didn’t translate. I asked them about what they paid to attend the university. … It was $9.00 per year!

When I was in Congress, one of my allies was Senator Mike Gravel… and Senator Gravel’s initiative is about “direct democracy.” He had been to Libya… and he supported the establishment of the revolutionary committees which was the way Libyans determined how they would use their oil money.

A question under discussion when I attended the conference there was whether the subsidies for gas/petrol or the subsidies for education would be increased! (In the US, under “austerity” measures, people are being told which programs will be eliminated or eviscerated; in Libya, they were voting on which programs would get increased subsidization!)

What I have said publicly is that what we have been seeing is the Israelization of US policy. You know… the only reason the Libyans took any interest in me was that someone in Libya, looking at their television, saw me having all these problems trying to get into Gaza… and they said, “We want to know her!” That’s why I was invited to attend this conference on The Green Book—to explain what I was trying to do in Gaza. And what I observed in Libya was the same kind of collective punishment I observed in Gaza. People supporting their own governments were being punished by outsiders who opposed those governments!

This is the kind of thing that happens in the absence of ethics in jouralism. … Because… we don’t have journalists in the Mainstream—I call it the Special Interests Press–to educate and provide information to citizens so they can make a critical analysis of issues. That is absent. … We need ethics in scholarship; ethics in journalism, as well. …The journalistic community has gone along with the kind of death and destruction that has been visited upon Libya… and so many other countries. We’re setting up drone bases all over Africa… and people here don’t even know… don’t begin to understand. …

GC: You’ve mentioned many potent issues, including the “Israelization of US policy.” I’d like to explore that, and also explore the theme of alliances—even unlikely alliances. …

In the 2002 election to the House of Representatives, people like your father and the editor and commentator Alexander Cockburn alleged that your defeat by Denise Majette was a consequence of out-of-state Jewish organizations and Jewish money working against you—

CM: That’s not an allegation—that’s a fact! I was informed that I had been targeted by the pro-Israel lobby by the media. … I read about it in the papers! … and the evidence is readily available. …So, the fact of being targeted by the number-one special interest lobby in the United States means that there is an engagement in every aspect of one’s political life. …

GC: Well, ah, let’s tackle this head-on: Are you anti-Semitic?

CM: Well, I’m, ah… I’m no more anti-Semitic than than any of the anti-Zionist Jews who I work with on an almost-daily basis to correct US policy. And, I would suggest that the real Semites are the Palestinians. And, therefore, I would suggest that I’m not anti-Semitic, but that there are people who are anti-human rights, and there are some people who are anti-peace, and there are some people who are pro-war… and no matter who they are, I will always be against that… because I. … You see what my… my button says?

(She points to a button she is wearing on her blouse). My button says, “I’m a peace-keeper” And, this one says, “War is a crime!”

GC: “Blessed are the peace-keepers. …”

CM: When I was in Congress, I organized a Press Conference with organizations like “Jewish Workers for Peace,” “Not in My Name, Women in Black [www.womeninblack.org]—we had about ten organizations at that press conference… and it was fantastic. …

That night, the Atlanta news criticized me for associating with “fringe Jewish elements”! Now… what’s a “fringe Jewish element”? It was the Anti-Defamation League that was casting this aspersion!

Now, the Anti-Defamation League that I knew about is supposed to be a Civil Rights organization. But… the Anti-Defamation League, in practice, filed an amicus brief with five white racists to dismantle the district—my district!–that provided an opportunity for black people in the black belt of Georgia to have representation! Those are the people who sent me to Congress to represent them! … I stand on their shoulders, and I did my darnedest to represent them—and I was rewarded by the Anti-Defamation League filing an amicus brief and a lawsuit to dismantle that district and take representation away from those poor, black people.

GC: I can certainly understand your indignation. And I don’t want to hammer this issue. … But, this is on Wikipedia… and, as one researches you—this is what one comes across:

About that election with Majette, your father, a former state representative in Georgia, stated that “Jews have bought everybody… And then he spelled it, “J-E-W-S. …” Now…, personally, I always make a distinction between Jews and Zionists—and you just did. … I try to distinguish between people who follow a religious tradition and those who assert a political-nationalist ideology. … And, ah… I think writers like Gilad Atzmon, for example, have been very clear about making that distinction in his recent work like The Wandering Who?. …

CM: I haven’t read that, but—

GC: I haven’t read it, but I’ve read about it—

CM: Gilad is coming to Atlanta this month—

GC: Is he? I’d like to meet him. …

CM: Yes. … You must come—

GC: I will! But, ah, anyway… do you think, in retrospect, you might recommend changing the terminology a bit– just to broaden the dialogue and widen the base of opposition to inhumane practices?

CM: Well… let me tell you something. … I want to talk to you about. … The first time my daddy got into trouble was when he said, “racist Jew.” And, I had a Jewish friend who was trying to smooth things over. And I asked her, “Is Jew a bad word? I didn’t know “Zionist”—I didn’t even know that word at the time… because… here’s the thing: the Anti-Defamation League says that they represent all Jews—that’s what they tell us. AIPAC, also. So… I didn’t know that there was a word called “Zionist” until I became involved with the Betrand Russell tribunal on Palestine. … And there was a famous Jewish lawyer who was one of the leaders in that tribunal, and I went to him and I said, “Daniel, how does your family feel about your being in this tribunal?” and he said, “My family are anti-Zionist Jews.” And I said, “I don’t know what that is!” I was 50-something years old, and I’d never heard the language! Now, of course, I’ve been exposed… and I’m more sensitive that there’s a difference. … Now… I have marvelous Jewish friends… and I understand the difference between Judaism and Zionism. Whoever prays to whatever God is fine with me…, but, a political ideology is quite different. … I know I have a lot to learn when it comes to Zionism and Judaism. … I’m not very religious… but I am spiritual… and I’m very interested in people’s beliefs… but, I’m more interested in the way people behave. … So, I would always say, Judge me on what I do more than on what I say. … And, I acknowledge that I can be wrong about what I say. … And, my father can be wrong about what he said. …

GC: Thank you very much. … I think you’ve clarified that for a lot of people. …

Now… this idea of building alliances. … I’d like to discuss current events, namely, the Presidential election

CM: Um-ha. …

GC: First, a re-cap: In 2008, disgusted with the Democratic Party, you were the Green Party candidate for president. That same year, you joined a press conference held by 3rd party and independent candidates, including Ralph Nader and Ron Paul. The participants agreed on 4 basic principles:

1. An early end to the Iraq War, and an end to threats of war against other countries, including Iran.

2. Safeguarding privacy and civil liberties, including repeal of the Patriot Act, the Military Commisions Act and FISA legislation.

3. No increase in the National Debt.

4. A thorough investigation, evaluation and audit of the Federal Reserve System.

My question is this: If these different elements of Independent thought could come together on these 4 basic principles in 2008, why can’t they unite behind the same principles in 2012?

CM: They can. …

GC: Isn’t it possible to conceive a party that speaks for the majority of Independents, that unites Independents? The 4 principles that united Independents then are still very much with us—and in many ways the dangers are greater—the possibility of war with Iran looms larger now, and there’s the National Defense Authorization Act, as well as the other intrusions on privacy and civil liberties. More Americans classify themselves as “Independents” than as Republicans or Democrats. How can the varied strands of Independents work together to defeat the Republicrats?

CM: The answer to that question goes to the core of the kind of change we hope to initiate on a policy basis. … So… how do we do that? I think the first thing is that we have to be willing to talk to each other. We have to recognize that there’s commonality despite difference. So… the thing that allowed Nader and me and Paul to come together is that we were at least willing to see areas of commonality. We should be able to do that across the political spectrum. And, in fact, when I was in the Congress, I was forced to do that. … As a Southerner, I—and as someone who had to get votes—not lose them—I needed the endorsement of a leader in the community… and he was a Klan member… and I had no choice. … I asked him for his support—and I got it! (After I sat there for over an hour and he described to me how “confused” the people were because of the way they judged the Ku Klux Klan to be racist!)

[Here, CM gives a strong, hearty guffaw!]

And… I sat there and found a place where we could have a meeting of the minds—and I did it!

GC: Related question then: I’ve been criticized because I wrote an article, about a month ago–“The Lion and the Ox”–praising Ron Paul’s stance on ending the wars, ending the Empire, auditing the Fed. I also think his views on our antiquated, absurd and minority-punishing drug laws are far more enlightened than anyone else’s—with the exception of 2012 Green Party candidate, Jill Stein’s. Paul makes a distinction between Capitalism and Corporatism—an important distinction. Now, I’m not a Libertarian; I don’t agree with “unregulated” Capitalism to the extent Paul and Libertarians do. But, I wonder: Given various points of convergence, how can the Green Party and Libertarians work together to overturn what we have in America today—basically, a one-party system, a Corporate Party system, abetted by corporate media?

CM: Well, one thing is that the Libertarians and the Greens could join forces—kind of a united front. So… I’d like to see if those kinds of talks could get anywhere.

GC: A friend of mine suggested a Paul-McKinney ticket. …

CM: That was your friend, huh?

GC: Well, you know… when I first heard that, I thought, “That’s crazy!” But… I thought about it, and I thought, “Why not? We live in crazy times. …”

CM: Yeah… we do. …

GC: I mean… look what we have to choose from: Santorum, Michelle Bachman, Hermain Cain, Gingrich, Romney–all these crazy people. …

CM: Every time there’s a vote, it gets more outrageous, doesn’t it?

GC: It does! Well… what do you think about Paul-McKinney?

CM: Well… we’re not there yet, so I don’t have to think about it at all!

GC: Well. …

CM: Let me put it this way. … We do have overlapping constituencies. … So… it would be wonderful if the two circles could expand beyond their points of intersection. …And I’m not just talking about Paul. … I’m talking about people on the Left in general. … Because, there’s no more Left and Right. It’s only Right and Wrong now… and the old “Right” is Wrong… and the old “Left” needs to be more Right… does that make sense?

GC: Yes. …

CM: Yeah, because the Left is being co-opted. … So, the Left needs to be more Left!

GC: There needs to be a convergence where the Greens and the Libertarians can meet—

CM: And the militia! You know… I have to deal with the militia, too. I’m from Georgia, right? They participate in the political system—to the extent that they do—and somebody needs to be talking to’em… because, ultimately, they’re a part of the 99%. … And that’s the gift that the Occupy Movement has given to us—they’ve given us a way to self-identify. Now we know—it’s not about color, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation—all of those things. At the end of the day—if you’re part of the 99%, you’re part of us… and if you’re part of the 1%–you’re part of them!

GC: Related question: Okay…also about Current Events: this is about the Occupy Movement, then. …

CM: Okay. …

GC: We live in a Surveilance State. Our license plate numbers are routinely recorded; we’re finger-printed for jobs, our Social Security numbers serve as National I.D.’s, our e-mails are monitored for “code” words or phrases, our homes are surveiled by satellite mapping systems of Google, Yahoo, etc. Those who protest, as in the Occupy Wall Street movement, are arrested, booked, and more closely watched. Now they have “records” that affect their employment. … My question is: how do we battle this pervasive system? Do you get discouraged? What do you do when you are discouraged? Who are your “heroes”? To whom do you turn for inspiration?

CM: Do I get discouraged? Yes! What do I do when I’m discouraged? … find other people who are not yet discouraged!

Who are my heroes? Everybody! Everybody who has a tough row to hoe in life! Those are my heroes. Those are the people who give the most! When I was running for Congress back in 1992–for the first time–I was running to represent the second poorest district in Georgia… and, what I learned was that the poor people gave the most! The people who had… didn’t give as generously as the people who didn’t have! So… my first campaign theme was, “Warriors don’t wear medals, they wear scars!” So… my heroes are the community and neighborhood warriors who have a whole lof of scars, a whole lot of dignity.

GC: I’d like you to talk specifically about what used to be called the Black Liberation Struggle. As a young, white man, I was inspired by the works of black writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Leroi Jones (now called Baraka), Eldridge Cleaver, W.E.B. DuBois, and poets like Langston Hughes. Martin Luther King and Malcom X were inspirational leaders for all people; Rosa Parks was a woman of quiet, dignified courage. But, now, with the election of Obama, and with the prominence of people like Bill Cosby first, and Oprah Winfrey, the billionairess—the great struggles of the past almost seem quaint. What’s your take on this? Who are the great black leaders today? What is the struggle about today?

[Note:There are 7 million Americans now under “correctional observation.” More African-Americans’ lives intersect with our prison-industrial-surveillance complex than there were African-American slaves in 1850!]

CM: You asked me who are my heroes. … One of my heroes is Glen Ford, who writes for The Black Agenda Report. I view him as the most astute political observer of our times.

There’s a whole lot of pundits who are in our faces every Sunday morning who think they are political observers…, but they are not astute! And they’re also not independent. Glen Ford is independent, he’s been through the wars and he has no special interests to kow-tow to. … He just wrote a piece… “Can the Proud African-American Progressive Legacy Survive Another Four Years of Cowing to the Corporate Servant in the White House?” That’s strong stuff…, but right on point!

We have a situation now… it was the Black struggle that really defined morality in the United States. It defined the moral imperative. And the character of the country was measured by how well it answered the call of Black people for justice. But what happens when Black people stop asking for justice? I think you get exactly what we’ve got now—a President who is dropping bombs on Africa… which is un-thought-of; I mean, it would have been un-thought-of four years ago that Africa would be bombed—routinely! But it’s a routine matter now that the United States Africa Command [AFRICOM] would actively establish itself and militarize the US relationship with Africa. AFRICOM represents a kind of US imperial occupation of the continent that we haven’t seen since the days of outright colonialism of the Europeans. We are being told about issues that are “important”…, but we’re ignoring the real issues that are important! Henry Kissinger said that he couldn’t believe the amount of good will that was embodied in this president! But… what people like Kissinger don’t “get” is that this president sits on top of the historic Black struggle that characterized the United States to the world! People around the world thought that Barack Obama characterized the New United States! But… far from it! A lot of people got tricked and fooled and now… as philosopher Michel Foucault has observed—the every-day actions of ordinary people actually entrap them in “powerlessness”. … So, to break out of your powerlessness, you’ve got to break out of your existing paradigm. So, as long as Barack Obama is representative of the existing paradigm, this is what we’re going to get… because the existing paradigm is war and more war!

GC: How do we “break out”? How do we fight the Mainstream Media that’s constantly projecting that paradigm and hammering it into our brains?

CM: The literature suggests that people have to be confronted with a “disorienting dilemma” that causes them to reflect on what they’ve just experienced. …

GC: Cognitive dissonance?

CM: That’s right. … Reflect on what you always assumed… and what you’ve been confronted with that contradicts your assumptions. … For some people, it was the murder of JFK; for others, it was the murder of Malcom; for others, it was the murder of MLK; for a whole bunch of others, it was the murder of RFK; and for some people who began to look and pay attention like me… it was the murder of all of them and then add onto it the murder of the members of the Black Panther Party—who were attacked by our own government. …

You could say that for me, my first “disorienting dilemma” was when I realized that I was black. I realized that the world around me was not like me, and that it didn’t value my black skin! That, for me was when I began to pay attention and wake up!

GC: How old were you?

CM: Seven or eight. …You know… for some people it’s religion, it’s race, it’s gender, it’s, maybe, sexual orientation. … Everyone has their moment of reckoning.

I think, ultimately… it’s about the love we have for humanity and how we see something is wrong and we have to stop it!

So… by the time I got to Congress… I had had my “reckoning,” and I had had my “break-out” moments, and I guess this gave me strength and vibrancy… and there were people who didn’t like it. I wore my hair differently, I dressed differently from the other people in Congress. There was even a segment of the Capitol Hill police that didn’t like that. …

GC: What year was that?

CM: 1993. …

GC: Wasn’t there a much more recent incident with the Capitol Hill police?

CM: No, no, no. … It happened for twelve years! … Twelve years of harrassment from the Capitol Hill police! They considered it a “sport” to harass me! … It’s available on the Internet… if you go to YouTube and you put in “The Last Plantation.”

GC: The infamous incident is when you apparently struck back at the officer who was harassing you. … Is that correct?

CM: The officer had no business putting his hands on me! … And I reacted like any normal person would react when being attacked by some great big, huge guy from behind! … This was a “hit.” It was a “hit”–a “sport”–for the white officers. You’ll see if you go to that “Last Plantation” site that I had been targeted because I had written a letter of support for the Black Capitol Hill police officers.

GC: And this most infamous incident… that was the same day as House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted?

CM: That’s right. … The Mainstream Media didn’t want to lead with that indictment, did they? It was much more sensational and distracting to lead with the story of a black Congresswoman attacking a Capitol Hill police officer!

[Laughter]

GC: You’re a pretty brave woman, aren’t you?

CM: Everybody can be brave… they just need that break-out moment of recognition. … I’ve stood on some big shoulders. … As I said before–my campaign theme: “Warriors don’t wear medals… they wear scars.”

In October of 2001, Mr. Ghadry, along with several Syrian-Americans, formed the Reform Party of Syria. A constitution was written and a constructive and comprehensive program has been put in place to bring regime change to Syria. Today, the party is enjoying the tacit support from many organizations and people in the U.S. administration and think tanks in Washington.
Mr. Ghadry and the other co-founders of RPS are hoping to return to Syria one day to rebuild the country on the basis of principles of real economic and political reforms that will usher democracy, prosperity, freedom of expression, and human rights in addition to lasting peace with open borders with all of Syria’s neighboring countries.

Not mentioned but well-understood by the men from JINSA is that the well-connected Syrian “reformer” has been groomed to facilitate that unlikely democratic utopia by leading Iraq war architect Richard Perle, a prominent member of JINSA’s advisory board until a few weeks ago. But as the Prince of Darkness’s biographer wrote in a 2007 Los Angeles Times article:

Unfortunately for Perle, Ghadry is seen in many quarters as a front man for Israel. Not only is he a dues-paying member of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful Israeli lobby in Washington, but a recent column on his Web site, titled “Why I Admire Israel,” seems to play right into the hands of those who believe the Bush administration’s obsession with regime change in the Middle East is really all about protecting Israel. Did Perle, the savviest of Washington power players, believe that Ghadry’s tub-thumping for Tel Aviv would make him more popular in Syria?
“No,” Perle replied. “I don’t. But he’s his own man. I don’t always understand what he’s doing and why he’s doing it.”
So, in his quest for idealistic dissidents to do in the Middle East what the Walesas and Havels achieved in Eastern Europe, Perle and his acolytes have tapped the discredited Ahmad Chalabi for Iraq, the suspect Amir Abbas Fakhravar for Iran and the allegiance-challenged Fahrid Ghadry for Syria. They’re just not making heroes like they used to.

Perhaps Farid Ghadry’s pro-Israel image problem is why there appears to be no mention of his conference call briefing on the JINSA website. There is, however, one rather revealing reference to Perle’s Syrian Chalabi. In its Events & Programs section, under “New York Cabinet Meetings 2009, 2010 & 2011,” there is the following brief entry:

“The Role of Syria in the Middle East: Friend of Iran, Host to Hamas, and Patron of Hizbullah” – Farid Ghadry, President, Reform Party of Syria

To put all this into the broader context of the supposedly Israel-threatening “Arab Spring” — which the LA Times reference to Perle’s “quest for idealistic dissidents to do in the Middle East what the Walesas and Havels achieved in Eastern Europe” seems to prefigure — a seminal event, which I have previously written about, was held almost five years ago that brought together Israel partisans concerned with “rolling back Syria” among other regional rivals and their native collaborators:

Under the direction of Natan Sharansky, the former Israeli minister who resigned his cabinet seat in 2005 in protest over Ariel Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan, the [Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies] held a “Democracy and Security” conference in Prague in 2007. It brought together Israeli officials; their American neoconservative sympathizers with their favourite Middle Eastern dissidents in tow — most notably, Richard Perle’s Israel-admiring Syrian protégé Farid Ghadry; and the newly-installed Eastern European democrats swept to power in the wake of a wave of neocon-backed “color revolutions,” the latter group presumably serving to inspire the Arab and Iranian participants to emulate them.

So, if you want to know what’s going on in JINSA’s road to regime change in Damascus, please RSVP to gro.asnijnull@treblocj or call 202-667-3900, Ext. 224.

Men use thought only to justify their injustices, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

— Voltaire, Dialogue XIV, Le Chapon et la Poularde

Voltaire’s wit often illuminates truth. Consider this revealing “thought” as expressed recently in Alert, the voice of AIPAC, to its membership:

Some Americans believe if the Israelis strike Iran, the U.S. will pay the political costs anyway, so it would be better for the Americans to do the job and do it properly. Their clock is a bit different from the one the Israelis hear. Because of their vastly superior firepower, the Americans could strike Iran later, more devastatingly and more sustainably.

How just is it for AIPAC’s mouthpiece to declare that America should “devastate” Iran because it has “vastly more firepower” than Israel and could “do a better job” and “do it properly,” as though this were a clean-up “job” of a waste dump and not an illegal invasion of a member country of the United Nations that has done nothing under international law to threaten the U.S. much less attack it, while the Israeli government and its IDF look on happily content that it is American boys and girls suffering the consequences of the unwarranted attacks and not Jewish boys and girls? Has it come to this, that unnamed Israeli spokespeople, voicing AIPAC’s policies, determine what nation the U.S. should invade without consultation with the representatives of the American people?

Not that this sentiment has not been expressed before. Netanyahu told Piers Morgan the same thing in an interview last year, as I have quoted in previous articles, noting Israel’s Zionist government’s desire to use America’s military as their own claiming that what is good for Israel is good for America. That protestation completes the wit contained in Voltaire’s quote: because Israel is America’s only friend in the mid-east, and the only Democracy, and the only nation in that part of the world aligned with the west, it alone deserves America’s “unquestionable” and “unbreakable” support.

Speech that conceals fails to mention that being Israel’s “only friend” has made the U.S. a pariah among nations in the world and made its touted “Democratic freedoms” a laughing stock as the other nations in the UN watch America “support” the Zionists’ agenda to attack Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza, abort international law as it, like Israel, commits extrajudicial executions in foreign states, equips Israel when it invades its neighbors to the north and attacks peace activists aboard vessels from peaceful nations including Turkey, and, ironically sits silently by as Israel dismantles what little of a democracy existed in that nation by creating new laws that deny full citizenship to anyone not a Jew. Thus have we become a nation supportive of a militaristic Theocracy while we continue to mouth the principle of separation of church and state, a principle founded on tolerance, concealing the truth that there are more than 20 great religions with well over a billion people who accept no religion (Adherents.com) all of whom deserve recognition and, as necessary, support from America.

Clearly Israel’s needs are not America’s needs if we mean by that more war in the mid-east. Have we pulled our troops from Iraq just to move them into Iran? Does any sensible person believe that the Iranians have a “need” or desire to attack the people of the United States? Our forces completely surround Iran. We are the nation with atomic weaponry, not Iran. What possible good would Iran achieve by having a nuclear weapon? Hasn’t Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement while Israel, who damns Iran for its nuclear “ambitions,” has an arsenal of nuclear bombs and has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement. Which of these nations is to be feared? Iran has never attacked a neighbor; Israel attacks and occupies its neighbors at will.

Have the Iranians reason to fear control of the U.S. military by Israeli operatives using this nation as its power because Israel wants to devastate Iran the way Iraq has been devastated? Yes. Israel’s ultimate goal is control of the mid-east by surgically cutting it into small indefensible sections that can be dominated by Israeli money and American forces. It would appear, however, that Israel fears America does not desire to follow Israel’s advice to “take out” Iran the way they convinced the Bush administration to “take out” Saddam Hussein. Hence the constant barrage that characterizes Iran as a warlike state set on wiping Israel off the map and becoming the dominant power in the mid-east.

It’s time, I believe, for the U.S. and the UN to consider how to avoid yet more devastation in the mid-east, not by expanding military operations there but by seeking peace through negotiations and cooperative support for the people of the mid-east. Both Israel and the United States must confront the reality on the ground today that they no longer have control over the people of the mid-east, and recognize the colonial drives that Zionism had designed for Israel are no longer tenable.

While Israeli control of America in the form of Las Vegas billionaires buying the presidency continues in the United States, and Republican candidates crawl to the altar of Mammon to remove Obama, who has already sold his soul to the forces of Evil, the people of the world look on in disbelief, having witnessed for over sixty years the dominance of Zionist deceit, treachery, and manipulation of America as it savaged the mid-east in the name of friendship, democracy and shared values. But now, they have moved to take control of their own lives as they watch Israel corrode from within as it metamorphoses into a tribalistic, superstitious people further isolating themselves from the community of nations.

Can they not see that the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and, arguably, in Yemen and Saudi Arabia have had enough of dictators imposed by the U.S. and Israel to control their governments?  Can they not see that Turkey broke with the Zionist forces that demanded compliance with their rule regardless of international law and due respect for neighboring nations? Are they blind to the Jordanian efforts to take seriously their role as a Palestinian neighbor? Do they not see that the people of Egypt have made possible the opening of Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza, that the people of the world have given notice that they will not cease to break that siege with boats entering Gaza through international waters; that the Iraqi people have made clear they will not cave in to America’s continued control of their country by proxy power; that the peoples of Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia have openly condemned Israel’s injustices to the Palestinian people regardless of their governments paid presidents and prime ministers that claim otherwise?

Have they stood by blind to the French Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee issuing its recent report condemning Israel’s apartheid practices against Palestinians in the West Bank, blind to Secretary Ban’s clear call to Israel that it must withdraw from the occupied territories, blind to the European Union as it issued its recent report critical of the Israeli government’s on-going occupation and settlement of Palestinian land? Blind as Russia, China, Iran and numerous other mid-east nations put into practice what they have agreed upon by resorting to  currencies other than the dollar to be the international means of finance; unable to see that once the people of the world have had an opportunity to view the critically acclaimed, dramatically powerful, passionately presented film, The Promise, by director Peter Kosminsky of the United Kingdom, where the inhumane policies of the Zionist criminals erupts in all its unguarded ferocity, the veil of respectability will be removed from Israelis’ atrocities for all?  And blind, totally blind, to the United Nations as it acts upon a resolution to recognize the rights of the Palestinian people to a state of their own? Must they not see, both Israel and its people, as well as all Americans, that they must accept the reality that no single nation can force its will on all other nations with impunity? That time is over.

Clearly Israel’s militaristic approach to neighborliness does not work. Israel fears “delegitimization”.  It fears boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), and it fears total isolation from the world’s communities. Should the U.S. become financially incapacitated through the devaluing of its currency, should it not be able to create adequate jobs for its citizens, should its investment in Israel – estimated at $8.2 million per day for a population that is approximately 7 million – impair its stability, should the people of America awaken to the control AIPAC has over their President and representatives and the total disregard of America’s security as a result, then Israel could lose both the American veto that has protected it from world condemnation of its policies and America’s military support for its aggressiveness against its neighbors. That would leave Israel isolated, wrapped in fear, and psychologically unstable. Israel’s alternative can only be constant instability, never ending terror and war, hatred by their neighbors, innate, simmering self-hate, and mental anguish resulting from exclusionism that leaves open wounds of distrust and self-questioning, a state terribly close to insanity.

Is it not time for Israel to seek peace with its neighbors? Since no sensible person in the mid-east believes that the U.S. can act credibly as a broker for peace, Israel must seek other partners from the UN who can serve that purpose. It must be willing to accept as a premise for peace, justice as defined by the UN’s International Courts and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It must understand that the occupied territories must be returned to their native inhabitants, that the Partition Plan of November 1947 must be a basis for negotiations if only to provide a foundation for equitable land for both peoples. Modification of land distribution could follow as well as a means of providing for the rights of those displaced in the Nakba. The world peace body could serve to protect both peoples as generations come and go until a free movement of all is possible. Then perhaps we could say, men use thoughts to find justice and speech to communicate it.

A boycott bombshell in January was dropped by an 11th-grade American Jewish teenager, Jesse Lieberfeld, who won Dietrich College’s 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr Writing Award for his essay about his moral awakening when he realised his American Jewish culture was unavoidably identified with supporting Israel.

I once belonged to a wonderful religion,” says young Jesse. “I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. ‘Genocide’ almost seemed the more appropriate term… Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides… I felt horrified at the realisation that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists.” Finally, at the synagogue, he asked, “I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?” and was told by the rabbi, “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it? But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.” “I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back.

When American youth like Jesse are forced to give up being Jewish because of Israeli crimes, it cannot be long before Israel crumbles under the weight of its accumulated crimes.

2011 witnessed the rise of Internet attacks on Israeli government sites by public-spirited BDSers determined to enforce a kind of “cyber boycott”. While the Saudi government remains aloof from BDS support, an enterprising Saudi hacker disrupted several Israeli websites in January, prompting Israeli hacker Yoni (most likely a spin-off from the Israeli military’s IDF-TEAM, which brought down Saudi and Abu Dhabi financial exchange websites last year) to threaten war, including “mass credit card exposures, and denial-of-service attacks”.

“Yoni” piously told Ynet, “We do not operate against any specific nationality, and any person who operates against the group’s principles will be harmed, regardless of religion, creed or gender. In addition, I wish to note that the group regrets harm done to innocents and tries to avoid it as much as it possible.” Imagine if Israel adhered to such high standards in its relations with its neighbours — it would not need to hack and steal credit card information from anyone.

Another such anti-BDS feint is by the pro-Israeli Internet NGO Monitor, DPWatchDog and Israel’s Reut Institute, which called on Israeli government agencies to “sabotage” and “attack” the Palestine solidarity movement, and has claimed credit for “price tag” attacks on The Electronic Intifada by Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal, the Palestine Return Centre, the persecution of the Olympia Food Co-op, the Berkeley Daily Planet and the “Irvine 11”. In “2011: The Year We Punched Back on the Assault on Israel’s legitimacy,” Reut lauds the emergence of “our network” and gives credit to the Israeli government and “the Jewish world’s mobilisation against the political assault on Israel”.

This conflation of “Jewish” and “Israeli” is the Israel-firsters’ trump card, perversely stoking anti-Jewish sentiment where none exists, the so-called “new anti-Semitism”, a direct result of Israeli crimes. “Price tagging” is usually associated with Israeli settler terrorism, vandalism, tree-felling, mosque burnings and murder. A particular zealous advocate, Andrew Adler, suggested in the Atlanta Jewish Times in January that US President Barack Obama could be on the hit list. That the Reut Institute associates itself with such criminal activity is yet another sign of Israel’s drift towards outright pariah status, and fuel for the anger of the Jesse Lieberfelds “regardless of religion, creed or gender”.

Boycott activities are not just confined to Israeli products abroad or visits by Westerners to Israel, but are now taking place regularly on land, at sea and in the air, as activists surround Israel and invent ever new ways to break its siege of the Occupied Territories.

The Global March to Jerusalem held a conference in Beirut in January confirming 30 March, the 36th anniversary of Palestinian Land Day, as the date for their land action: “From all continents we will converge and gather along the Palestinian borders with Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in a peaceful march towards Palestine.”

Plans for “Sailing for Freedom” by French and other European activists are moving ahead, aiming for a September yachting regatta in the Mediterranean, starting in Marseilles and proceeding to Tunisia, Egypt and Gaza. Other flotilla organisers have been discussing a new strategy of sending isolated vessels from various ports instead of high-profile flotillas, with the intent of actually breaking the siege, as opposed to merely attracting world attention to Israel (and Greek and US) sabotaging of flotillas.

In April 2012 a Flytilla is scheduled to arrive at Ben Gurion Airport, to “again challenge the Israeli policy of isolating the West Bank”. “Welcome to Palestine” is a French-Belgian initiative, modeled on the Flytilla last July, when 500 people prepared to fly to Tel Aviv. Despite the nightmare that activists experienced both in European airports and in Ben Gurion Airport, 125 actually arrived, and this year, activists are determined to increase their numbers and continue to poke the Israeli watchdog.

“The Israelis have constructed enormous prisons for Palestinians. But prisoners have a right to visits,” says Adri Nieuwhof. The idea has spread to the UK, where towns are sponsoring people to risk Israeli wrath. European airlines are now more concerned with their image in the West than with Israeli authorities, and organisers predict that there will be less collusion to pre-screen flights arriving in Tel Aviv from Europe.

These particularly plucky activists continue the tradition begun in 2011 of a peaceful blitzkreig of Israel from all sides, risking life and limb, enforcing a kind of physical “citizens boycott” of Israel, complementing the spiritual one by the young Jesses. Their co-activists on the “homefront” are now combining the physical and spiritual by the now annual protest during the Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington DC. This year it is called OCCUPY AIPAC, scheduled for 2-6 March. Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters, declared: “The time has come for the Occupy Movement to demand an end to the Occupation of Palestine.” OCCUPY AIPAC will provide a sneak preview of “Roadmap to Apartheid” narrated by Alice Walker (roadmaptoapartheid.org).

Legal actions against BDSers continue to plague activists. But there are principled judges. Twelve French activists from Boycott 68 were acquitted 15 December on charges of “inciting discrimination and racial hatred” for calling on French shoppers at Carrefour supermarkets to boycott Israeli goods. The court judgment is expected to put the kibosh on further persecution of activists.

UK’s National Union of Students endorsed campaigns targeting divestment in Eden Springs and Veolia on 6 January. Veolia suffered considerably from a robust BDS campaign across Europe last year for its light-rail project in Jerusalem, but is defiant in expanding its activities in Israel without regard to their legality. Subsidiaries of Veolia own and operate Tovlan landfill which processes Israeli waste in the occupied Jordan Valley. To sweeten the tons of garbage it dumps illegally on Palestinian land, Veolia recently offered three containers for free waste collection to Palestinians in Jiftlik. Comments Omar Barghouti, “As Desmond Tutu said, we do not need anyone to polish our chains; we want to break them altogether. This is beyond humiliating; it is racist and criminal. Derail Veolia!”

Sanctions — and their removal, in the case of the Palestinians — require foreign governments to stare down the powerful world Zionist lobby. Few states dare to do this, but there are more and more cracks in the walls that Israel puts up.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniya launched a historic tour of Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Turkey, Qatar and Bahrain in January, welcomed throughout the region as a David to the Israeli Goliath.

Three Hamas politicians also left Gaza via Egypt to attend a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Switzerland in January, the first time since Hamas was democratically elected in 2006. Switzerland does not belong to the European Union, which put Hamas on its list of terrorist organisations to please Israel.

“We also met with the Red Cross in Geneva, the vice-mayor of Geneva and with Islamic organisations in different cantons,” Mushir Al-Masri said. A meeting at the University of Geneva to commemorate the anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in December 2008, was attended by 500. “All persons who were complicit in the war crimes committed in Gaza should be taken to court,” Al-Masri told the packed hall. Socialist MP Carlo Sommaruga told the audience, “I was an activist against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. Every person has a responsibility. Everyone can participate in the BDS movement.”

The world of science acknowledges matter-of-factly that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. There is simply no evidence for one. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, staffed by specialists on nuclear power and maintaining a tight watch on Iran’s civilian facilities, finds no evidence of a military program. Two successive reports (National Intelligence Estimates) produced (in 2007 and 2010) by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have declared with confidence that there is no operative weapons program. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and (even) Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both recently stated (or let it slip) that Iran is not currently attempting to build nuclear weapons.

But then there is the political world of systematic disinformation. The world of big, bold lies which, as they are constantly repeated, acquire a certain life of their own. Thus the mainstream press and the entire political class in this country refer routinely to “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” as though there obviously were one. As though any questioning of the charge were thoroughly naive.

(By the way: try doing an advanced Google search for the exact phrase “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” and you will call up 4,640,000 results. Try “Israel’s nuclear weapons program”—which we know exists—and you’ll get 533,000. What does this tell you?)

The proponents of the lie rest assured that it will resonate, since it pertains to a Muslim country, and people here are largely conditioned to believe the worst about Muslims and see them as all complicit in some sort of anti-U.S. movement. In a poll taken as late as 2007, 41% of U.S. citizens stated their belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks!

Similarly, misguided by well-funded and well-placed propagandists, people will believe anything about Iran.

Never mind that Iran has never in modern times attacked another country. Never mind that it had nothing to do with the 9/11 episode, and that thousands of Iranians rallied in solidarity with the people of the U.S. after the attacks. Never mind that the majority of its people and their leaders are Shiites, like the people of Iraq, and that they’re sworn enemies of the Salafists in al-Qaeda as well as the Taliban. To the masters of disinformation they’re purveyors of terror, holding the world hostage to the threat of nuclear attack and Israel to total annihilation.

This view is so patently idiotic than many bright people might just roll their eyes in bewilderment and, lacking McGovern’s capacity for moral indignation, simply give up trying to challenge the mendacity. It’s tiresome, year after year, to refute the ever-expanding web of lies. But this is serious, dangerous idiocy broadcast from the citadels of power. It has become integral to U.S. political culture.

One should—again and again—cite this telling little anecdote. In 2002, as the campaign of lies about Iraq began to pick up steam, an advisor of George W. Bush told New York Times columnist and Pulitzer prize winner Ron Suskind that “guys like” him were in (what the advisor disparaged as) the “the reality-based community.”  That is, people “who believe that solutions emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality.”

But no, this top operative (Karl Rove, perhaps?) insisted. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Part of “creating new realities” is lying through your teeth, and spreading fear to obtain your political ends. The mission in 2002 was to persuade the people of this country that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that it threatened us with weapons of mass destruction. No matter that Iraq had been subject to the most intrusive arms inspections regimen in history, was bleeding from sanctions, and wasn’t regarded by any of its neighbors (including Kuwait and Iran, which it had invaded) as a threat. Through coordinated statements (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) and leaks of (mis)information to complicit journalists, the Bush administration built a case for a truly criminal war (frankly pronounced “illegal” by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to the outrage of some U.S. diplomats).

If the Bush administration officials weren’t consciously taking their cue from the Nazis, they surely embraced a Nazi-like logic. As Hermann Goering stated before his suicide in 1946, “Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along… This is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in every country.”

And so we were told to fear an Iraqi nuclear attack on New York City. It worked beautifully. Most of the people were indeed dragged along. Neo-conservatives hell-bent on transforming the “Greater Middle East” to advantage Israel concocted their case through the secretive “Office of Special Plans” and scared a large section of the public into rallying for war. And when no weapons of mass destruction were found, and no evidence for Iraqi-al Qaeda links were found, they slinked offstage quietly (Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle) with no apology, embarrassment or explanation (to say nothing of prosecution).

Who is most responsible for this utter lack of responsibility? Barack Obama! He came to power through the support of antiwar voters. His own opposition to the Iraq war was timid and partial; it was, he thought a “strategic blunder” rather than a crime. (You simply cannot be a politician in the USA and speak honestly about the vicious criminality of its wars.)

The would-be harbinger of Hope and Change was all smiles when he met the outgoing president, and made it clear that there would be no embarrassing Justice Department investigations or prosecutions of Bush-era officials for war crimes. He wasn’t outraged that the highest officials in the land had approved a campaign to hoodwink the people into endorsing a horrific assault on a country that did not threaten us. He just wanted to put that all behind us, be reconciliatory, “unite the country” and move on…

Part of “moving on” meant embracing the neocons’ lies about Iran. In his very first press conference after the 2008 election, Obama signaled his intentions. He was asked about his response to Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s friendly letter congratulating him on his election. He sidestepped the question but used the occasion to grimly declare that the U.S. would not tolerate Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. It was a shameless sop to the Israel Lobby. And just as George W. Bush ignored the 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program, Obama ignores the 2010 NIE and presses on with a policy of vilification and confrontation.

There is some distance between Israel and Washington on the Iranian nuclear question. The Likud Party would happily involve the U.S. in another war (like the Iraq war based on lies) serving Israeli interests. But Obama apparently doesn’t want another war, and worries that an attack on Iran would jeopardize the U.S. project in Iraq. That Vatican-sized embassy compound could come under attack by pro-Iranian Shiite militias; its seizure would make the Iranian “hostage crisis” of 1979-81 appear a minor historical episode.

Obama can’t say what he must surely know: that the Israeli officials’ repeated references to Iran’s nuclear program as an “existential threat” to their state, echoed by neocons and the Lobby in the U.S., is sensationalistic fear-mongering of the sort Goering spoke of. The neocons have been bellowing “Bomb Iran!” for years hoping that the Christian Zionists and bought legislators will override “the judicious study of discernable reality.”

Dennis Ross, the leading Iran hawk in the Obama administration, may have left his National Security Council post last November out of chagrin at the fact that Obama had failed to carry out the attack Ross had advocated from at least 2008. (Described by Aaron David Miller, whom he’d served with as a diplomat during the Camp David negotiations of 1999-2000, as “Israel’s lawyer,” Ross had responded to the 2007 NIE by co-authoring a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece declaring that Iran was striving to become “a nuclear state” and that leaders needed to “mobilize the power of a united American public in opposition” and send aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf. He has long advocated crippling economic sanctions on Iran, precisely to provoke actions that might be used to justify a U.S.-Israeli attack.)

Still, Obama has acceded to the fundamental demand of the anti-Iran war-mongers: he has refused to respect the judgment of his own intelligence apparatus and relentlessly stepped up sanctions against Iran, arm-twisting allies to join in taking actions that many western legal scholars agree constitute acts of war. He does so ostensibly to derail a nuclear weapons program, but that is not the real reason. Nor is it because he believes that Iran truly constitutes an “existential threat” to Israel, which has its own 300 nukes. If he’s done his homework, he knows that the Iranian regime is not even an “existential threat” to Iranian Jews.

Doesn’t Iran have the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, a community tracing its history back two and a half millennia? And isn’t that community of maybe 35,000 protected by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa of 1979 and by representation in the Majlis far exceeding its numbers? (Jews are fewer than half of one percent of Iran’s population, but their one constitutionally mandated seat in the Majlis is over three percent of the total.)

Don’t synagogues operate legally (as they did, by the way, in Baathist Iraq)? And aren’t Hebrew schools funded by the Ministry of Education? Doesn’t Article 13 of the Iranian Constitution specifically allow Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians to “perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education”? Didn’t a judge last year determine that Christians drinking wine during Communion were innocent of violating the law banning alcohol citing that article?

(When you hear the wild charge that Ahmadinejad, who has very limited power in Iran’s complex political system, is another Hitler, ask yourself how Nazi policy compared to all this? Iran is a very oppressive place, without question. But it is not the same as fascist Germany, as the hysterical Norman Podhoretz suggested in his ridiculous 2007 column, “The Case for Bombing Iran.”)

Obama and his team want to topple the regime in power in Tehran. But not primarily because it oppresses its people; this is the norm in the Middle East (and most places), and Washington (and Israel) have been comfortable enough with dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and now in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain… Nor because it has allegedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” (That was a deliberate mistranslation of Ahmadinejad’s comment to a conference in 2005, indirectly quoting Khomeini, that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” He alluded in the same breath to the vanishing of the USSR and the regime of the Shah. He made no reference to Iran using force to make this happen.)

The real reason Washington wants regime change in Iran is that, in the most mass-based, genuine revolutionary upheaval in the modern history of the Muslim world, the Iranian people overthrew the brutal U.S.-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979. This deprived the U.S. of the services of the “Gendarme of the Gulf” serving U.S. oil interests, and intervening in Yemen (to support royalists against republicans) and Oman (to suppress a secessionist movement). It was a huge blow to Washington’s geopolitical interests, and the U.S. wants to reestablish its lost hegemony.

While there have been moments when the U.S. flirted with the mullahs who replaced the Shah (the Iran-Contra episode under Reagan, Colin Powell’s brief consideration of rapprochement in 2001-2) the neocon advocates of “regime change” have always won out.

Iran under the Shah was a virtual ally of Israel, maintaining diplomatic and military relations and supplying it with oil. Since the Islamic Revolution Iran has maintained close ties with Palestinian resistance groups (notably Hamas) and the Lebanese Shiite-based Hizbullah.  These are probably the two most popular political parties in Palestine and Lebanon respectively, but since they challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli settler-state, they are regarded by the U.S. and most of its allies as “terrorists.” Hence Iran is a “supporter of international terrorism” and its government (like those of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, etc.) should be destroyed—with no option left off the table.

The fact that there’s no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program is an inconvenient truth. And it would surely be inconvenient for the U.S. administration to state frankly that it’s trying to topple the Iranian regime—to either please the lying Likudists and enhance Israel’s power in the region, or to re-establish Anglo-American control of Iran’s oil production. Hence the ongoing campaign against discernible reality on behalf of another Big Lie.

A lot of people alarmed by the situation have been predicting an attack on Iran since 2002, the year of George W. Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” speech and the year when the neocons huddling around Dick Cheney came to dominate foreign policy. For a couple years I was convinced a strike was imminent, only to learn that during Bush’s second term he had rejected Cheney’s advice to bomb. But the neocons remain a powerful force in policy making; they have helped insure that Obama consistently condemns a program which the experts deny exists, and ratchets up pressure on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment through economic warfare.

The signals are so contradictory. The Bomb Iran advocates, including the Israel leaders, dearly hope that increasingly crippling sanctions (along with the—apparently—Israeli-sponsored program of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and sponsoring terrorm in the country) will provoke Iran into moves which will force a reluctant Obama administration to attack the nuclear facilities.

But as Jim Lobe of Inter-Press News observes, many “liberal hawks” who supported the Iraq War, including former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, Princeton professor Anne- Marie Slaughter, New York Times columnist Bill Keller, former Pentagon Middle East policy chief Colin Kahl, and former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden have recently warned of dire consequences should either the U.S. or Israel attack.  There is opposition within the foreign policy elite. But there was during the lead-up to the attack on Iraq as well.

On the other side are the Congressional leaders urging the stiffest, most provocative sanctions and even (in HR 1905) prohibiting any contact between U.S. diplomats and Iranian representatives without Congressional approval fifteen days in advance.  Presumably such contacts might derail the drive to war.

On the one hand, you have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visiting Israel this month to meet his Israeli counterpart, in a mission former Maj.-Gen. Gideon Shefer described as one to stop Israel from attacking Iran. On the other hand you have the Pentagon requesting funding from Congress for a more powerful, bunker-busting bomb.  (Having spent $ 330 million constructing 20 “Massive Ordnance Penetrators” they need another $ 82 million to make them more destructive.)

Perhaps the best outcome of the unpredictable course of events would be a serious falling out between Israel and the U.S., such as occurred during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. In the first, Israel, Britain and France tried to seize control of the newly nationalized Suez Canal. President Eisenhower, fearing an Arab  joined with the Soviets to demand an end to this tripartite aggression. In 1981, Ronald Reagan ordered his UN ambassador to vote with the rest of the world in condemning the utterly illegal “preventative strike.”

Since then the power of the Israel Lobby in league with politicized Christian fundamentalism and the neocon cabal have so sharply tilted U.S. policy towards Israel that a president cannot even press for a freeze on illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank without encountering a ferocious political backlash. One can’t be too hopeful about any “clean break” but it’s surely pleasant to imagine one.

Answer: When he or she is an Israeli Mossad agent or asset.

In the case of the assassination of Iranian scientists, the Mossad’s assets are almost certainly members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) also known as The Peoples’ Mujahedin of Iran, which is committed to overthrowing the regime of the ruling mullahs. Many of its activists are based in Iraqi Kurdistan where Mossad has a substantial presence. It does the training there, selects the targets in Iran and provides the bombs and other weapons, and MKO members do the actual killing.

It’s reasonable to presume that Mossad is more comfortable operating out of Iraqi Kurdistan with Iranian MKO assets than it was when its own agents were posing as CIA officers to recruit members of Jundallah, a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization, to carry out assassinations and attacks on installations and facilities in Iran.

Some of the essence of that Israeli false flag operation has been revealed by Mark Perry in an article for Foreign Policy. His report is based on information he acquired about memos buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services which were written in the last years of President George “Dubya” Bush’s administration, plus conversations he had with two currently serving U.S. intelligence officials and four retired intelligence officers who worked for the CIA or monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.

According to Perry’s sources, one of whom has seen the memos, the Mossad agents who were posing as CIA agents to recruit Jundallah operatives had American passports and were “flush” with American dollars.

The memos tell the story of an investigation which debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah. The investigation apparently showed that the U.S. “had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah.”

The memos also gave details of CIA field reports on Mossad’s recruitment of Jundallah operatives, mainly in London and “under the nose of U.S. intelligence officials.”

Perry’s sources confessed to being “stunned by the brazenness of Mossad’s efforts.” And one of them said:

It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with. Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn about what we thought.

I take issue with the first part of that statement. What is really amazing is not what Mossad and almost of Israel’s political and military leaders think they can get away with, but what they KNOW they can get away with because of the Zionist lobby’s control of Congress on all matters relating to policy for the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel.

And that in turn is why, generally speaking, Israel’s leaders don’t give a damn about what American administrations think, They come and go but the Zionist lobby’s control of Congress is a permanent fixture. (In private conversation with General Moshe Dayan when he was Israel’s defence minister, I once summed up Israel’s unspeakable but implicit message to the governments of the world in the following way. “We know we shouldn’t have done this but we’ve done it because we also know there’s nothing you can do about it.” Dayan didn’t comment but the look on his face said something like, “You’re right but I’m not going to say so.”)

Though Israel doesn’t usually comment on reports about Mossad’s activities, a senior government spokesman described Perry’s account of Mossad agents posing as CIA agents as “absolute nonsense.” As I was reading the denial I used a Jimmy Carter expression: “BS” (Bull Shit).

After the latest assassination of an Iranian scientist, Rick Santorum, the right-wing religious joker in the pack of Republican presidential hopefuls, said this: “On occasions scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing.”

A different view was offered by Jewish American journalist Richard Silverstein. For his weblog Tikun Olam he wrote this:

These are shameful acts by a shameful Israeli government exploiting Iranian terrorists for their own ends.  I find it disgusting that Israel can get away with such acts with impunity.

Disgusting it certainly is but there’s no mystery about why Israel can commit crimes including acts of naked state terrorism without fear of being called and held to account for them by the UN Security Council. When after the 1967 war it refused to label the Zionist state as the aggressor and require it to withdraw from the newly occupied Arab lands without conditions, it effectively created, at the insistence of the U.S., two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations – one set for all the nations of the world minus Israel and the other exclusively for Israel. That was the birth of the double standard which is the cancer at the heart of Western foreign policy.

Now let’s pause for a moment to imagine what the response would have been if Iranian agents or assets had assassinated an Israeli scientist (just one) in the Zionist state.

Led by America, Western governments would have bellowed their condemnation of the terrorism and pledged full support for all efforts to hunt the terrorists down and bring them to justice. And they would, of course, have blamed the government of Iran even if there was not one shred of evidence of its authorization. The assassination of an Israeli scientist might even have tipped the Washington decision-making balance in favour of the mad men who want the U.S. either to attack Iran or give Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu the green light to go, with or without nuclear tipped, bunker-busting bombs.

And Israel? How would it have responded? With or without a green light from President Obama it almost certainly would have bombed selected targets in Iran, even if doing so was likely to set the region on fire and do vast damage to Western interests in the region and the whole Muslim world. (As I note in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, in the chapter headed “The Liberty Affair – ‘Pure Murder’ on a ‘Great Day’,” the lesson of the cold-blooded Israeli attack on the American spy ship was that there is nothing the Zionist state might not do, to its friends as well as its enemies, in order to get its own way).

Now… At the risk of inviting a charge from some and perhaps many readers that I am naive in the extreme, I have to say I am inclined to the view that the Obama administration was telling the truth when it strongly denied any American complicity in the latest Israeli/MKO assassination. The New York Times put it this way:

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity… ‘The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,’ said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, categorically denying any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.

The NYT report then quoted Mrs. Clinton as saying this:

We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbours and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behaviour, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,

That in my opinion is code for something very like: “This administration is not completely mad. We know that an attack on Iran could have catastrophic consequences for the region and the world. Despite the mounting and awesome pressure we are under from Netanyahu and those who peddle his propaganda here in America, we know that the nuclear problem with Iran must be solved by jaw-jaw and not war-war.”

How catastrophic the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran could be for the region and the world has been put into words by Philip Giraldi, currently the executive director of the Council for the National Interest and a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer. The scenario he presents under the headline “What War With Iran Might Look Like” takes us all the way to World War III.

So I believe NYT reporter Scott Shane was on the right track when he wrote that the statements by U.S. officials appeared to reflect serious concern about the (Israeli/MKO) assassinations of Iranian scientists because they could “backfire” and make Iran’s leaders less willing to talk. And, I add, more willing to give in to those forces in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards in particular, who might well be saying that Iran must possess nuclear weapons for deterrence.

My guess is that U.S. officials are also concerned by the possibility that more assassinations could provoke an Iranian response which would give Israel the pretext to attack. (It’s by no means impossible that the main purpose of the assassinations is to provoke an Iranian response to give Israel the pretext for an attack).

That brings me to my own speculation about what is really going on behind closed doors in the Obama administration. At executive level it is, I think, in a state of something close to total panic about what to do to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran if Netanyahu is not bluffing.

My reading of Obama’s latest turn of the sanctions screw on Iran is that it’s his way of not only putting more pressure on the ruling mullahs. It’s also his way of saying to Netanyahu something like, “Give me more time to solve the Iranian nuclear problem by all means other than war.”

Obama needs more time not only to try to get serious and substantive talks with Iran going but also to establish beyond any doubt whether Israeli threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities are a bluff (to put pressure on the U.S.) or not. In an article for Ha’aretz under the headline “Israel and U.S. at odds over timetables and red lines for Iran,” Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel wrote:

Do Barak and Netanyahu really intend to attack on their own, or is Israel only trying to prod the West into more decisive action? That is the million-dollar question.  It has been discussed intermittently for the past three years and it seems that Washington does not have a satisfactory answer to it.

In a few days time General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, is scheduled to arrive in Israel for talks with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Chief of Staff Lt. General Benny Gantz and other senior Israeli defense and intelligence officials.

Dempsey knows that when U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta met with Netanyahu and Barak last November, they refused to give him a commitment that Israel would not attack Iran without informing America of its intention to do so.

If I am right about the panic in the Obama administration, my guess is that Dempsey will try to obtain the commitment Panetta failed to get. What if Dempsey does not succeed?

My guess is that whatever he may say in public after his meetings, Dempsey will tell the Israelis in private that if they go to war with Iran they will be on their own. The U.S., I can almost hear him saying, will not become engaged except to defend its own national interests if and as necessary “because the American people, most of them, are tired of war.” He could add “and we don’t have the money to pay for it.”

An interesting question for the coming days is something like this: What if Dempsey returns to Washington without being able to give behind-closed-doors assurance that Israel (despite what it might continue to say to the contrary in public for propaganda purposes) will not go it alone with an attack Iran?

In theory there is a card President Obama could play. He could put Israel on public notice that if it attacked Iran and if as a consequence America’s own bests interests were harmed, the U.S. would have to rethink its relationship with the “Jewish state”. A statement to that effect would imply that the days of America’s unconditional support for Israel right or wrong could be coming to an end.

But that’s not a statement Obama could make this side of November’s presidential election. So if Netanyahu is not bluffing, and if he was determined to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before November’s election, there’s nothing Obama could do to stop him, even knowing that the end game could be, as Giraldi speculated, World War III.

My own view has always been that Netanyahu is bluffing to the extent that even he is not crazy enough to order an Israeli attack on Iran without a green light from the U.S. and American cover and participation,

I hope I am right. If I am, it could be that General Dempsey will return to Washington with the news Obama wants and needs – that without a green light from the U.S, Israel will not bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu is exploiting the extraordinary influence his right-wing Likud Party exercises over the Republican Party and the U.S. Congress on matters related to Israel in order to maximise the likelihood that the United States would participate in an attack on Iran.

Obama, meanwhile, appears to be hoping that he can avoid being caught up in a regional war started by Israel if he distances the United States from any Israeli attack.

New evidence surfaced in 2011 that Netanyahu has been serious about dealing a military blow to the Iranian nuclear programme. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who left his job in September 2010, revealed in his first public appearance after Mossad Jun. 2 that he, Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) chief Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin had been able to “block any dangerous adventure” by Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak.

The Hebrew language daily Maariv reported that those three, along with President Shimon Peres and IDF Senior Commander Gadi Eisenkrot, had vetoed a 2010 proposal by Netanyahu to attack Iran.

Dagan said he was going public because he was “afraid there is no one to stop Bibi and Barak”. Dagan also said an Israeli attack on Iran could trigger a war that would “endanger the (Israeli) state’s existence”, indicating that his revelation was not part of a psywar campaign.

It is generally agreed that an Israeli attack can only temporarily set back the Iranian nuclear programme, at significant risk to Israel. But Netanyahu and Barak hope to draw the United States into the war to create much greater destruction and perhaps the overthrow of the Islamic regime.

In a sign that the Obama administration is worried that Netanyahu is contemplating an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta tried and failed in early October to get a commitment from Netanyahu and Barak that Israel would not launch an attack on Iran without consulting Washington first, according to both Israeli and U.S. sources cited by The Telegraph and by veteran intelligence reporter Richard Sale.

At a meeting with Obama a few weeks later, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Martin Dempsey and the new head of CENTCOM, Gen. James N. Mattis, expressed their disappointment that he had not been firm enough in opposing an Israeli attack, according to Sale.

Obama responded that he “had no say over Israel” because “it is a sovereign country.”

Obama’s remark seemed to indicate a desire to distance his administration from an Israeli attack on Iran. But it also made it clear that he was not going to tell Netanyahu that he would not countenance such an attack.

Trita Parsi, executive director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), who has analysed the history of the triangular relationship involving the United States, Israel and Iran in his book Treacherous Alliance, says knowledgeable sources tell him Obama believes he can credibly distance himself from an Israeli attack.

In a Dec. 2 talk at the Brookings Institution, while discussing the dangers of the regional conflict that would result from such an attack, Panetta said the United States “would obviously be blamed and we could possibly be the target of retaliation from Iran, sinking our ships, striking our military bases.”

Panetta’s statement could be interpreted as an effort to convince Iran that the Obama administration is opposed to an Israeli strike and should not be targeted by Iran in retaliation if Israel does launch an attack.

Parsi believes Obama’s calculation that he can convince Iran that the United States has no leverage on Israel without being much tougher with Israel is not realistic.

“Iran most likely would decide not to target U.S. forces in the region in retaliation for an Israeli strike only if the damage from the strike were relatively limited,” Parsi told IPS in an e-mail.

The Obama administration considers the newest phase of sanctions against Iran, aimed at reducing global imports of Iranian crude oil, as an alternative to an unprovoked attack by Israel. But what Netanyahu had in mind in proposing such an initiative was much more radical than the Obama administration or the European Union could accept.

When Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is closely aligned with Netanyahu’s Likud Party, pushed the idea of sanctions against any financial institution that did business with Iran’s Central Bank, the aim was to make it impossible for countries that import Iranian crude to continue to be able to make payments for the oil.

Dubowitz wanted virtually every country importing Iranian crude except China and India to cut off their imports. He argued that reducing the number of buyers to mainly China and India would not result in a rise in the price of oil, because Iran would have to offer discounted prices to the remaining buyers.

Global oil analysts warned, however, that such a sanctions regime could not avoid creating a spike in oil prices.

U.S. officials told Reuters Nov. 8 that sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank were “not on the table”. The Obama administration was warning that such sanctions would risk a steep rise in oil prices worldwide and a worsening global recession, while actually increasing Iranian oil revenues.

But Netanyahu used the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over Congressional action related to Israel to override Obama’s opposition. The Senate unanimously passed an amendment representing Netanyahu’s position on sanctions focused on Iran’s oil sector and the Central Bank, despite a letter from Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner opposing it. A similar amendment was passed by the House Dec. 15.

The Obama administration acquiesced and entered into negotiations with its European allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE on reducing imports of Iranian crude oil while trying to fill the gaps with other sources. But a number of countries, including Japan and Korea, are begging off, and the EU is insisting on protecting Greece and other vulnerable economies.

The result is likely to be a sanctions regime that reduces Iranian exports only marginally – not the “crippling sanctions” demanded by Netanyahu and Barak. Any hike in oil prices generated by sanctions against Iran’s oil sector, moreover, would only hurt Obama’s re- election chances.

In an interview with CNN in November, Barak warned the international community that Israel might have to make a decision on war within as little as six months, because Iran’s efforts to “disperse and fortify” its nuclear facilities would soon render a strike against facilities ineffective.

Barak said he “couldn’t predict” whether that point would be reached in “two quarters or three quarters or a year”. The new Israeli “red line” would place the timing of an Israeli decision on whether to strike Iran right in the middle of the U.S. presidential election campaign.

Netanyahu, who makes no secret of his dislike and distrust of Obama, may hope to put Obama under maximum pressure to support Israel militarily in a war with Iran by striking during a campaign in which the Republican candidate would be accusing him of being soft on the Iranian nuclear threat.

If the Republican candidate is in a strong position to win the election, on the other hand, Netanyahu would want to wait for a new administration aligned with his belligerent posture toward Iran.

Meanwhile, the end of U.S. Air Force control over Iraqi airspace with the final U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq has eliminated what had long been regarded as a significant deterrent to Israeli attack on Iran using the shortest route.

United States president Barack Obama has promised “hope,” “change,” comprehensive healthcare reform, shutting down the Guantánamo gulag, the redeployment of US troops in Iraq, to take on the “fat cats” of Wall Street, and a host of other unfulfilled, ignored, insincere utterances.¹ Obama is just one of many politicians throughout history who have learned that lies can sway masses of people. Republican presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich is no stranger to the persuasive power of the lie.

In an interview to be broadcast Monday on The Jewish Channel, Gingrich said that Palestininans [sic]² are an “invented” people without claim to their own state.

When asked if he is a Zionist, Gingrich replied: “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places.”

Dr. Ismail Zayid, who was born in Palestine, responded to me a few years ago on the topic of who the Palestinians are:

The Palestinian people of today are the direct descendents of the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites and other Arab tribes that lived in this land, of historic Palestine, since history began. Professor Maxime Rodinson, Professor of History at the Sorbonne University in Paris, and he is Jewish, stated in 1968: “The Arab population of Palestine was native in all the senses of the word, and their roots in Palestine can be traced back at least forty centuries.”

The British historian, H.G. Wells, responding to the Balfour Declaration, stated: “If it is proper to ‘reconstitute’ a Jewish state, which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.”

In essence, the Palestinian people of today are the indigenous people of this land and, hence, their right to self-determination and statehood in their native land is in complete accordance with international law and the UN Charter.

The Israelis are not the original inhabitants of Palestine. They came as invaders. The land of Palestine, because of its geographic location, was exposed, throughout history, to a variety of invaders including the Hebrew tribes, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Turks and the British and finally the Israelis of today. The Hebrew tribes [The Israelites], as invaders have no more legitimate claim to this land than the Greeks, Romans, Turks etc. If conquering invaders, in occupation for a period of time, have any legitimate claim to a territory or country, then the Romans should claim England as their land, and the Arabs should claim Spain as their land, and so on.

I don’t know where Gingrich gets his information from. It sounds like former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir: “There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”³ Or was it from Jane Peter’s From Time Immemorial which claimed that Palestine was an empty land. Peter’s work was revealed as a fraud by Norman Finkelstein.⁴ Or was it the plagiarized version of Peter’s fraud by Alan Dershowitz⁵ Chutzpah, whose academic transgression was exposed again by Norman Finkelstein.⁶

Where does the logic of Gingrich arise and where does it lead? It is also true that there also was no Israel as a state. Before European invaders came to Turtle Island there was no Canada or the United States. Indisputably, there were no Canadians or Americans. Does Gingrich, therefore, by the same token regard Canadians and Americans⁷ as an “invention.” Did Gingrich, perhaps, hit upon the use of the word “invention” from the title of a book by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand who had the academic fidelity and courage to write The Invention of the Jewish People. In his book, Sand delves into Jewish historiography and states that ethnicity is not a shared trait of Jewry and the claim to Palestine is not historically valid.⁸

Gingrich even surprised The Jewish Channel interviewer, Steven I. Weiss: “It’s a comment I’ve heard before because I’ve covered the far right in the Jewish community and the pro-Israel community. But I was surprised to hear a mainstream Republican figure say it…” Newt Gingrich is mainstream Republican? One wonders what the right wing of the Republican Party sounds like.

Gingrich appears to have read Mein Kampf wherein Adolf Hitler wrote, “… all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward..” In other words, it appears as if Gingrich and his pals believe that repeating the canard of “no Palestinians” will reify the lie.⁹

1. For more see “Promise Broken rulings on the The Obameter,” PolitiFact.com.
2. The right-wing, Zionist-supporting Washington Post can’t even get the spelling of P-a-l-e-s-t-i-n-i-a-n right one day after publishing. Amy Gardner, “Gingrich says Palestianians [sic] are an ‘invented’ people,” Washington Post, 9 December 2011.
3. Quoted in Sunday Times (15 June 1969) and Washington Post (16 June 1969). In Wikiquotes. Upon Meir’s death, her life-long friend Lou Kadar told journalist Alan Hart: “Golda made me promise to tell you, but not until she was dead, that as soon as those words left her lips, she knew they were the silliest damn thing she had ever said!” In Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews: Volume One: The False Messiah (Clarity Press, 2009; review.) This writer considers it extremely odd that someone would want to live the rest of her life with “the silliest damn thing” she ever said uncorrected. In the same book, Hart revealed the sinister side of Meir when he asked her on-air: “You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and even the whole world down with it?” Meir’s response: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
4. Famed scholar Noam Chomsky praised the rigor of Finkelstein’s research:

   … From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants … And it was very popular — it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there’s no moral issue, because they’re just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. … That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake. Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He’s a very careful student, and he started checking the references — and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency … Noam Chomsky, “The Fate of an Honest Intellectual,” Excerpted from Understanding Power (The New Press, 2002): 244-248.

5. Adding to the shame of having been caught citing from a work without proper attribution is that the book the Harvard law professor chose as his source, was noted by Chomsky in 2002 as having been dropped from discourse among American intellectuals because it was an “embarrassment.”
6. See Matthew Abraham, “Review Essay: Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, AARGH Reprints, December 2005.
7. And so on, all the way down to Tierra del Fuego for the rest of the European invaders in whoever’s territory they found themselves.
8. See review by Jack Ross, “Shlomo Sand’s ‘The Invention of the Jewish People,’” Mondoweiss, 10 October 2009.
9. Adolf Hitler, “War Propaganda,” Mein Kampf, Volume 1 (1925).

As William Blum documented in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1953′s CIA-organized coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, guilty of the “crime” of nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, may have “saved” Iran from a nonexistent “Red Menace,” but it left that oil-rich nation in proverbial “safe hands” — those of the brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Similarly today, a nonexistent “nuclear threat” is the pretext being used by Washington to install a “friendly” regime in Tehran and undercut geopolitical rivals China and Russia in the process, thereby “securing” the country’s vast petrochemical wealth for American multinationals.

As the U.S. and Israel ramp-up covert operations against Iran, the Pentagon “has laid out its most explicit cyberwarfare policy to date, stating that if directed by the president, it will launch ‘offensive cyber operations’ in response to hostile acts,” according to The Washington Post.

Citing “a long-overdue report to Congress released late Monday,” we’re informed that “hostile acts may include ‘significant cyber attacks directed against the U.S. economy, government or military’,” unnamed Defense Department officials stated.

However, Air Force General Robert Kehler, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) told Reuters, “I do not believe that we need new explicit authorities to conduct offensive operations of any kind.”

The Pentagon report, which is still not publicly available, asserts: “We reserve the right to use all necessary means — diplomatic, informational, military and economic — to defend our nation, our allies, our partners and our interests.”

Washington’s “interests,” which first and foremost include “securing its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia” as the World Socialist Web Site observed, may lead the crisis-ridden U.S. Empire “to take another irresponsible gamble to shore up its interests in the Middle East … as a means of diverting attention from the social devastation produced by its austerity agenda.”

Recent media reports suggest, however, that offensive cyber operations are only part of Washington’s multi-pronged strategy to soften-up the Islamic Republic’s defenses as a prelude to “regime change.”

Terrorist Proxies

For the better part of six decades, terrorist proxies have done America’s dirty work. Hardly relics of the Cold War past, U.S. and allied secret state agencies are using such forces to carry out attacks inside Iran today.

Asia Times Online reported that “deadly explosions at a military base about 60 kilometers southwest of Tehran, coinciding with the suspicious death of the son of a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, have triggered speculation in Iran on whether or not these are connected to recent United States threats to resort to extrajudicial executions of IRGC leaders.”

And Time Magazine, a frequent outlet for sanctioned leaks from the Pentagon, reported that the blast at the Iranian missile base west of Tehran, which killed upwards of 40 people according to the latest estimates, including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran’s missile program, was described as the work “of Israel’s external intelligence service, Mossad.”

An unnamed “Western intelligence source” told reporter Karl Vick: “‘Don’t believe the Iranians that it was an accident,’ adding that other sabotage is being planned to impede the Iranian ability to develop and deliver a nuclear weapon. ‘There are more bullets in the magazine,’ the official says.”

While Iranian officials insist that the huge blast was an “accident,” multiple accounts in the corporate press and among independent analysts provide strong evidence for the claim that Israel and their terrorist cat’s paw, the bizarre political cult, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) were responsible for the attack.

Richard Silverstein, a left-wing analyst who writes for the Tikun Olam web site, said that the blast was a sign that “the face of the Israeli terror machine may have reared its ugly head in the world.”

Citing “an Israeli source with extensive senior political and military experience,” Silverstein’s correspondent provided “an exclusive report that it was the work of the Mossad in collaboration with the MEK.”

Hardly a stranger to controversial reporting, Silverstein published excerpts of secret FBI transcripts leaked to him by the heroic whistleblower Shamai Leibowitz. Those wiretapped conversations of Israeli diplomats caught spying on the U.S., “described an Israeli diplomatic campaign in this country to create a hostile environment for relations with Iran.”

In a Truthout piece, Silverstein wrote that Leibowitz, a former IDF soldier who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories, “explained that he was convinced from his work on these recordings that the Israel foreign ministry and its officials in this country were responsible for a perception management campaign directed against Iran. He worried that such an effort might end with either Israel or the US attacking Iran and that this would be a disaster for both countries.”

Unfortunately, while Leibowitz sits in a U.S. prison, his warnings are all but ignored.

According to Silverstein’s latest account, “it is widely known within intelligence circles that the Israelis use the MEK for varied acts of espionage and terror ranging from fraudulent Iranian memos alleging work on nuclear trigger devices to assassinations of nuclear scientists and bombings of sensitive military installations.”

Silverstein noted that “a similar act of sabotage happened a little more than a year ago at another IRG missile base which killed nearly 20.”

Terrorist attacks targeting defense installations coupled with the murder of Iranian scientist, five “targeted killings” have occurred since 2010, aren’t the only aggressive actions underway.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that “a series of mysterious incidents involving explosions at natural gas transport facilities, oil refineries and military bases … have caused dozens of deaths and damage to key infrastructure in the past two years.”

According to the Post, “suspicions have been raised in Iran by what industry experts say is a fivefold increase in explosions at refineries and gas pipelines since 2010.”

With Iran’s oil industry under a strict sanctions regime by the West, maintenance of this critical industrial sector has undoubtedly suffered neglect due to the lack of spare parts.

However, “suspicions that covert action might already be underway were raised when four key gas pipelines exploded simultaneously in different locations in Qom Province in April,” the Post disclosed.

“Lawmaker Parviz Sorouri told the semiofficial Mehr News Agency that the blasts were the work of ‘terrorists’ and were ‘organized by the enemies of the Islamic Republic’,” hardly an exaggerated charge given present tensions.

Whether or not these attacks were the handiwork of Mossad, their MEK proxies or even CIA paramilitary officers and Pentagon Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) commandos, as Seymour Hersh revealed more than three years ago in The New Yorker, it is clear that Washington and Tel Aviv are “preparing the battlespace” on multiple fronts.

‘Collapse the Iranian Economy’

Along with covert operations and terrorist attacks inside the Islamic Republic, on the political front, a bipartisan consensus has clearly emerged in Washington in favor of strangling the Iranian economy.

Indeed, congressional grifters are threatening to crater Iran’s Central Bank, an unvarnished act of war. IPS reported that neocon Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), “a key pro-Israel senator,” has offered legislation “that would effectively ban international financial companies that do business with the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) from participating in the U.S. economy.”

“Dubbed the ‘nuclear option’ by its critics,” Jim Lobe reported that “the measure, which was introduced Thursday in the form of an amendment to the 2012 defence authorisation bill, is designed to ‘collapse the Iranian economy’… by making it virtually impossible for Tehran to sell its oil.”

However, “independent experts,” Lobe wrote, “including some officials in the administration of President Barack Obama, say the impact of such legislation, if it became law, could spark a major spike in global oil prices that would push Washington’s allies in Europe even deeper into recession and destroy the dwindling chances for economic recovery here.”

That amendment was introduced as tensions were brought to a boil over allegations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its latest report that Iran may be seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano claims the Agency has “identified outstanding issues related to possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme and actions required of Iran to resolve these.”

“Since 2002,” Amano averred, “the Agency has become increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile, about which the Agency has regularly received new information.”

However, despite the fact that the “Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities,” to wit, that such materials have not been covertly channeled towards military programs, Amano, reprising former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s famous gaff that “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” the IAEA “is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

Far from being an independent “nuclear watchdog,” the IAEA under Amano’s stewardship has been transformed into a highly-politicized and pliable organization eager to do Washington’s bidding.

As a 2009 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks revealed, U.S. Ambassador Glyn Davies cheerily reported:

Yukiya Amano thanked the U.S. for having supported his candidacy and took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77, which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.  (emphasis added)

Although the new report “offered little that was not already known by experts about Iran’s nuclear programme” IPS averred, “it cited what it alleged was new evidence that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ since 2003 — the date when most analysts believe it abandoned a centralised effort to build a nuclear bomb’.”

But as the United States, with the connivance of corporate media, bury the conclusions of not one, but two National Intelligence Estimates issued by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, it is clear to any objective observer that “nonproliferation” is a cover for aggressive geopolitical machinations by Washington.

Both estimates, roundly denounced by U.S. neoconservatives and media commentators when they were published, insisted that “in fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” a finding intelligence analysts judged with “high confidence.”

In contrast, the highly-politicized IAEA report is a provocative document whose timing neatly corresponds with the imposition of a new round of economic sanctions meant to crater the Iranian economy. Never mind that even according to the IAEA’s own biased reporting, they could find no evidence that Iran had diverted nuclear materials from civilian programs (power generation, medical isotopes) to alleged military initiatives.

Indeed, with sinister allusions that hint darkly at “undeclared nuclear materials,” the agency fails to provide a single scrap of evidence that diverted stockpiles even exist.

Another key allegation made by the Agency that Iran had constructed an “explosives chamber to test components of a nuclear weapon and carry out a simulated nuclear explosion,” was denounced by former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley as “highly misleading,” according to an IPS report filed by investigative journalist Gareth Porter.

With “information provided by Member States,” presumably Israel and the United States, the IAEA said it “had ‘confirmed’ that a ‘large cylindrical object’ housed at the same complex had been ‘designed to contain the detonation of up to 70 kilograms of high explosives’. That amount of explosives, it said, would be ‘appropriate’ for testing a detonation system to trigger a nuclear weapon.”

“Kelley rejected the IAEA claim that the alleged cylindrical chamber was new evidence of an Iranian weapons programme,” Porter wrote. “We’ve been led by the nose to believe that this container is important, when in fact it’s not important at all,” the former nuclear inspector said.

But as Mark Twain famously wrote, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This is certainly proving to be the case with the IAEA under Yukiya Amano.

Another player “solidly in the U.S. court” is David Albright, the director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington, D.C. “think tank” funded by the elitist Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

In an earlier piece for IPS, Porter demolished Albright’s “sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.”

“But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives,” Porter wrote.

“In fact,” Porter averred, “Danilenko, a Ukrainian, has worked solely on nanodiamonds from the beginning of his research career and is considered one of the pioneers in the development of nanodiamond technology, as published scientific papers confirm.”

“It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright … who was the source of the news reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed ‘Member State’ on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background.”

It is no small irony, that Albright, corporate media’s go-to guy on all things nuclear, penned an alarmist screed in 2002 entitled, “Is the Activity at Al Qaim Related to Nuclear Efforts?”, an article which lent “scientific” credence to false claims made by the Bush White House against Iraq.

As investigative journalist Robert Parry pointed out on the Consortium News web site, “Albright’s nuclear warning about Iraq coincided with the start of the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign to rally Congress and the American people to war with talk about ‘the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud’.”

“Yet,” Parry noted, “when the Washington Post cited Albright on Monday, as the key source of a front-page article about Iran’s supposed progress toward reaching ‘nuclear capability,’ all the history of Albright’s role in the Iraq fiasco disappeared.”

History be damned. Congressional warmongers and corporate media who cite these fraudulent claims, are “spurred by Israel’s whisper campaign to create a sense of urgency on Capitol Hill where the Israel lobby, acting mainly through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, exerts its greatest influence,” as IPS noted, and punish Iran for the “crime” of opening its nuclear facilities to international inspection!

That “whisper campaign” has now bloomed into a full court press for war by “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans alike, even as public approval of Congress’s work by the American people tracks only slightly higher than the popularity enjoyed by child molesters or serial killers.

As tensions are dialed up, the United States is spearheading a relentless drive to throttle Iran’s economy. The New York Times reported that “major Western powers took significant steps on Monday to cut Iran off from the international financial system, announcing coordinated sanctions aimed at its central bank and commercial banks.”

A strict sanctions regime was also imposed on Iran’s “petrochemical and oil industries, adding to existing measures that seek to weaken the Iranian government by depriving it of its ability to refine gasoline or invest in its petroleum industry,” the Times reported.

In a move which signals that even-more stringent sanctions are on the horizon, the U.S. Treasury Department “named the Central Bank of Iran and the entire Iranian banking system as a ‘primary money laundering concern’.”

That’s rather rich coming from an administration which slapped Wachovia Bank on the wrist after that corrupt financial institution, now owned by Wells Fargo Bank, pleaded guilty to laundering as much as $378 billion for Mexico’s notorious drug cartels as Bloomberg Markets Magazine reported last year!

Going a step further, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy called on the major imperialist powers “to freeze the assets of the central bank and suspend purchases of Iranian oil.”

The Guardian reported that Britain “went the furthest by, for the first time, cutting an entire country’s banking system off from London’s financial sector.”

Playing catch-up with war-hungry Democrats and Republicans, President Obama stated that the “new sanctions target for the first time Iran’s petrochemical sector, prohibiting the provision of goods, services and technology to this sector and authorizing penalties against any person or entity that engages in such activity.”

“They expand energy sanctions, making it more difficult for Iran to operate, maintain, and modernize its oil and gas sector,” Obama said.

“As long as Iran continues down this dangerous path, the United States will continue to find ways, both in concert with our partners and through our own actions, to isolate and increase the pressure upon the Iranian regime.”

Last summer, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a strong backer of punishing sanctions, echoed Richard Nixon’s vow to “make the economy scream” prior to the CIA’s overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and wrote in The Hill that “critics … argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.”

With a new round of crippling economic sanctions on tap from the West, “liberal” Democrat Sherman might just get his wish.

Targeting Civilian Infrastructure

While the Obama administration claims that their aggressive stance towards Iran is meant to promote “peace” and “help” the Iranian people achieve a “democratic transformation,” ubiquitous facts on the ground betray a far different, and uglier, reality.

Anonymous U.S. “intelligence officials” told The Daily Beast “that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran’s electric grid, Internet, cellphone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.”

According to Newsweek national security correspondent Eli Lake, “Israel has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cellphone signal that commands a cell network to ‘sleep,’ effectively stopping transmissions, officials confirmed. The Israelis also have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran’s emergency frequencies for first responders.”

But Israel isn’t the only nation capable of launching high-tech attacks or, borrowing the Pentagon’s euphemistic language, conduct “Information Operations” (IO).

The U.S. Air Force Cyberspace & Information Operations Study Center (CIOSC) describe IO as “The integrated employment of the core capabilities of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception and operations security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own.”

In this light, The Daily Beast disclosed that “Israel also likely would exploit a vulnerability that U.S. officials detected two years ago in Iran’s big-city electric grids, which are not ‘air-gapped’ — meaning they are connected to the Internet and therefore vulnerable to a Stuxnet-style cyberattack–officials say.”

The anonymous officials cited by Lake informed us that “a highly secretive research lab attached to the U.S. joint staff and combatant commands, known as the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), discovered the weakness in Iran’s electrical grid in 2009,” the same period when Stuxnet was launched, and that Israeli and Pentagon cyberwarriors “have the capability to bring a denial-of-service attack to nodes of Iran’s command and control system that rely on the Internet.”

But as Ralph Langer, the industrial controls systems expert who first identified the Stuxnet virus warned in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, the deployment of military-grade malicious code is a “game changer” that has “opened Pandora’s box.”

Among a host of troubling questions posed by Stuxnet, Langer said: “It raises, for one, the question of how to apply cyberwar as a political decision. Is the US really willing to take down the power grid of another nation when that might mainly affect civilians?”

But as we have seen, most recently during the punishing air campaign that helped “liberate” Libya — from their petrochemical resources — the U.S. and their partners are capable of doing that and more.

Future targeting of Iran’s civilian infrastructure may, in fact, have been one of the tasks of the recently-discovered Duqu Trojan, which Israeli and U.S. “boutique arms dealers” are suspected of designing for their respective governments.

And whom, pray tell, has the means, motives and expertise to design weaponized computer code?

As BusinessWeek disclosed in July, when one of America’s cyber merchants of death, Endgame Systems, pitch their products they “bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.”

According to BusinessWeek, “Endgame weaponry comes customized by region — the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and China–with manuals, testing software, and ‘demo instructions’.”

“A government or other entity,” journalists Michael Riley and Ashlee Vance revealed, “could launch sophisticated attacks against just about any adversary anywhere in the world for a grand total of $6 million. Ease of use is a premium. It’s cyber warfare in a box.”

Kaspersky Lab analyst Ryan Naraine, writing on the Duqu FAQ blog averred that Duqu’s “main purpose is to act as a backdoor into the system and facilitate the theft of private information. This is the main difference when compared to Stuxnet, which was created to conduct industrial sabotage.”

In other words, unlike Stuxnet, Duqu is an espionage tool which can smooth the way for future attacks such as those described by The Daily Beast.

As The Washington Post disclosed last May, while the military “needs presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later,” it does not need such authorization “to penetrate foreign networks for a variety of other activities.”

According to the Post, these activities include “studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate,” and can “leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses.”

Or more likely given escalating tensions, Iranian air defenses and that nation’s power and electronic communications grid which include “emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers” who would respond to devastating air and missile attacks.

Countdown to War

We can conclude that Israel, NATO and the United States are doing far more than placing “all options on the table” with respect to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Along with ratcheting-up bellicose rhetoric, moves to collapse the economy, an assassination and sabotage campaign targeting Iranian scientists and military installations, cyber warriors are infecting computer networks with viruses and “beacons” that will be used to attack air defense systems and civilian infrastructure.

After all, as Dave Aitel, the founder of the computer security firm Immunity told BusinessWeek, “nothing says you’ve lost like a starving city.”

As Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky warned last year, now confirmed by CIA and Pentagon leaks to corporate media: “It is highly unlikely that the bombings, if they were to be implemented, would be circumscribed to Iran’s nuclear facilities as claimed by US-NATO official statements. What is more probable is an all out air attack on both military and civilian infrastructure, transport systems, factories, public buildings.”

With the global economy in deep crisis as a result of capitalism’s economic meltdown, and as the first, but certainly not the last political actions by the working class threaten the financial elite’s stranglehold on power, the ruling class may very well gamble that a war with Iran is a risk worth taking.

As Chossudovsky warned in a subsequent Global Research report, “there are indications that Washington might envisage the option of an initial (US backed) attack by Israel rather than an outright US-led military operation directed against Iran.”

“The Israeli attack — although led in close liaison with the Pentagon and NATO — would be presented to public opinion as a unilateral decision by Tel Aviv. It would then be used by Washington to justify, in the eyes of world opinion,” Chossudovsky wrote, “a military intervention of the US and NATO with a view to ‘defending Israel’, rather than attacking Iran. Under existing military cooperation agreements, both the US and NATO would be ‘obligated’ to ‘defend Israel’ against Iran and Syria.”

This prescient analysis has been borne out by events. As regional tensions escalate, the USS George H.W. Bush, “the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, has reportedly parked off the Syrian coast,” The Daily Caller reported.

Earlier this week, the financial news service Zero Hedge disclosed that “the Arab League (with European and US support) are preparing to institute a no fly zone over Syria.”

“But probably the most damning evidence that the ‘western world’ is about to do the unthinkable and invade Syria,” analyst Tyler Durden wrote, “and in the process force Iran to retaliate, is the weekly naval update from Stratfor.”

According to Zero Hedge, “CVN 77 George H.W. Bush has left its traditional theater of operations just off the Straits of Hormuz, a critical choke point, where it traditionally accompanies the Stennis, and has parked… right next to Syria.”

In an earlier report, citing Kuwait’s Al Rai daily, Zero Hedge warned that “Arab jet fighters, and possibly Turkish warplanes, backed by American logistic support will implement a no fly zone in Syria’s skies, after the Arab League will issue a decision, under its Charter, calling for the protection of Syrian civilians.”

The BBC reports that the Arab League “has warned Syria it has one day to sign a deal allowing the deployment of observers or it will face economic sanctions.”

“Meanwhile,” BBC averred, “France has suggested that some sort of humanitarian protection zones,” à la Libya, “be created inside Syria.”

American moves towards Syria are fraught with dangerous implications for international peace and stability. As analyst Pepe Escobar disclosed in Asia Times Online the Arab League, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia and repressive Gulf emirates, dances to Washington’s tune.

“Syria is Iran’s undisputed key ally in the Arab world — while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated,” Escobar wrote.

“Russia’s one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident,” Escobar notes, “Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system — one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot — in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.”

“From Moscow’s — as well as Tehran’s — perspective, regime change in Damascus is a no-no. It will mean virtual expulsion of the Russian and Iranian navies from the Mediterranean.”

“In other words,” Zero Hedge warned, “if indeed Europe and the Western world is dead set upon an aerial campaign above Syria, then all eyes turn to the East, and specifically Russia and China, which have made it very clear they will not tolerate any intervention. And naturally the biggest unknown of all is Iran, which has said than any invasion of Syria will be dealt with swiftly and severely.”

Despite, or possibly because no credible evidence exists that Iran is building a nuclear bomb as a hedge against “regime change,” belligerent rhetoric and regional military moves targeting Syria and Iran simultaneously are danger signs that imperialism’s manufactured “nuclear crisis” is a cynical pretext for war.

The war in Libya is just the start of a new cycle of external military adventurism inside Africa. The U.S. now wants more military bases inside Africa. France has also announced that it has the right to militarily intervene anywhere in Africa where there are French citizens and its interests are at risk. NATO is also fortifying its positions in the Red Sea and off the coast of Somalia.

As disarray and turmoil are once again uprooting Africa with external intervention, Israel sits silently in the background. Tel Aviv has actually been deeply involved in the new cycle of turmoil, which is tied to its Yinon Plan to reconfigure its strategic surrounding. This reconfiguration process is based on a well established technique of creating sectarian divisions which eventually will effectively neutralize target states or result in their dissolution.

Many of the problems afflicting the contemporary areas of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Southwest Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America are actually the result of the deliberate triggering of regional tensions by external powers. Sectarian division, ethno-linguistic tension, religious differences, and internal violence have been traditionally exploited by the United States, Britain, and France in various parts of the globe. Iraq, Sudan, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia are merely a few recent examples of this strategy of “divide and conquer” being used to bring nations to their knees.

The Upheavals of Central-Eastern Europe and the Project for a “New Middle East”

The Middle East, in some regards, is a striking parallel to the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe during the years leading up to the First World War. In the wake of the First World War, the borders of the multi-ethnic states in the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe were redrawn and reconfigured by external powers, in alliance with local opposition forces. Since the First World War until the post-Cold War period the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe have continued to experience a period of upheaval, violence and conflict that has continously divided the region.

For years, there have been advocates calling for a “New Middle East” with redrawn boundaries in this region of the world where Europe, Southwest Asia, and North Africa meet. These advocates mostly sit in the capitals of Washington, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv. They envisage a region shaped around homogenous ethno-religious states. The formation of these states would signify the destruction of the larger existing countries of the region. The transition would be towards the formation of smaller Kuwait-like or Bahrain-like states, which could easily be managed and manipulated by the U.S., Britain, France, Israel, and their allies.

The Manipulation of the First “Arab Spring” during World War I

The plans for reconfiguring the Middle East started several years before the First World War. It was during the First World War, however, that the manifestation of these colonial designs could visibly be seen with the “Great Arab Revolt” against the Ottoman Empire.

Despite the fact that the British, French, and Italians were colonial powers which had prevented the Arabs from enjoying any freedom in countries like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, these colonial powers managed to portray themselves as the friends and allies of Arab liberation.

During the “Great Arab Revolt” the British and the French actually used the Arabs as foot soldiers against the Ottomans to further their own geo-political schemes. The secret Sykes–Picot Agreement between London and Paris is a case in point. France and Britain merely managed to use and manipulate the Arabs by selling them the idea of Arab liberation from the so-called “repression” of the Ottomans.

In reality, the Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic empire. It gave local and cultural autonomy to all its peoples, but was manipulated into the direction of becoming a Turkish entity. Even the Armenian Genocide that would ensue in Ottoman Anatolia has to be analyzed in the same context as the contemporary targeting of Christians in Iraq as part of a sectarian scheme unleashed by external actors to divide the Ottoman Empire, Anatolia, and the citizens of the Ottoman Empire.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it was London and Paris which denied freedom to the Arabs, while sowing the seeds of discord amongst the Arab peoples. Local corrupt Arab leaders were also partners in the project and many of them were all too happy to become clients of Britain and France. In the same sense, the “Arab Spring” is being manipulated today. The U.S., Britain, France, and others are now working with the help of corrupt Arab leaders and figures to restructure the Arab World and Africa.

The Yinon Plan

The Yinon Plan, which is a continuation of British stratagem in the Middle East, is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the Middle Eastern and Arab states into smaller and weaker states.

Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the Yinon Plan discusses.

The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, which the Biden Plan also calls for, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also all fall into line with these views. The Yinon Plan also calls for dissolution in North Africa and forecasts as starting from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.

This map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters and published in the Armed Forces Journal, June 2006. Map © Ralph Peters 2006. Click for larger image.

The Eradication of the Christian Communities of the Middle East

It is no coincidence that Egyptian Christians were attacked at the same time as the South Sudan Referendum and before the crisis in Libya. Nor is it a coincidence that Iraqi Christians, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, have been forced into exile, leaving their ancestral homelands in Iraq. Coinciding with the exodus of Iraqi Christians, which occurred under the watchful eyes of U.S. and British military forces, the neighbourhoods in Baghdad became sectarian as Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims were forced by violence and death squads to form sectarian enclaves. This is all tied to the Yinon Plan and the reconfiguration of the region as part of a broader objective.

In Iran, the Israelis have been trying in vain to get the Iranian Jewish community to leave. Iran’s Jewish population is actually the second largest in the Middle East and arguably the oldest undisturbed Jewish community in the world. Iranian Jews view themselves as Iranians who are tied to Iran as their homeland, just like Muslim and Christian Iranians, and for them the concept that they need to relocate to Israel because they are Jewish is ridiculous.

In Lebanon, Israel has been working to exacerbate sectarian tensions between the various Christian and Muslim factions as well as the Druze. Lebanon is a springboard into Syria and the division of Lebanon into several states is also seen as a means to balkanizing Syria into several smaller sectarian Arab states. The objectives of the Yinon Plan are to divide Lebanon and Syria into several states on the basis of religious and sectarian identities for Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Christians, and the Druze. There could also be objectives for a Christian exodus in Syria too.

The new head of the Maronite Catholic Syriac Church of Antioch, the largest of the autonomous Eastern Catholic Churches, has expressed his fears about a purging of Arab Christians in the Levant and Middle East. Patriarch Mar Beshara Boutros Al-Rahi and many other Christian leaders in Lebanon and Syria are afraid of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Syria. Like Iraq, mysterious groups are now attacking the Christian communities in Syria. The leaders of the Christian Eastern Orthodox Church, including the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, have also all publicly expressed their grave concerns. Aside from the Christian Arabs, these fears are also shared by the Assyrian and Armenian communities, which are mostly Christian.

Sheikh Al-Rahi was recently in Paris where he met President Nicolas Sarkozy. It is reported that the Maronite Patriarch and Sarkozy had disagreements about Syria, which prompted Sarkozy to say that the Syrian regime will collapse. Patriarch Al-Rahi’s position was that Syria should be left alone and allowed to reform. The Maronite Patriarch also told Sarkozy that Israel needed to be dealt with as a threat if France legitimately wanted Hezbollah to disarm.

Because of his position in France, Al-Rahi was instantly thanked by the Christian and Muslim religious leaders of the Syrian Arab Republic who visited him in Lebanon. Hezbollah and its political allies in Lebanon, which includes most the Christian parliamentarians in the Lebanese Parliament, also lauded the Maronite Patriarch who later went on a tour to South Lebanon.

Sheikh Al-Rahi is now being politically attacked by the Hariri-led March 14 Alliance, because of his stance on Hezbollah and his refusal to support the toppling of the Syrian regime. A conference of Christian figures is actually being planned by Hariri to oppose Patriarch Al-Rahi and the stance of the Maronite Church. Since Al-Rahi announced his position, the Tahrir Party, which is active in both Lebanon and Syria, has also started targeting him with criticism. It has also been reported that high-ranking U.S. officials have also cancelled their meetings with the Maronite Patriarch as a sign of their displeasure about his positions on Hezbollah and Syria.

The Hariri-led March 14 Alliance in Lebanon, which has always been a popular minority (even when it was a parliamentary majority), has been working hand-in-hand with the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the groups using violence and terrorism in Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood and other so-called Salafist groups from Syria have been coordinating and holding secret talks with Hariri and the Christian political parties in the March 14 Alliance. This is why Hariri and his allies have turned on Cardinal Al-Rahi. It was also Hariri and the March 14 Alliance that brought Fatah Al-Islam into Lebanon and have now helped some of its members escape to go and fight in Syria.

A Christian exodus is being planned for the Middle East by Washington, Tel Aviv, and Brussels. It is now being reported that Sheikh Al-Rahi was told in Paris by President Nicolas Sarkozy that the Christian communities of the Levant and Middle East can resettle in the European Union. This is no gracious offer. It is a slap in the face by the same powers that have deliberately created the conditions to eradicate the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East. The aim appears to be the resettling of the Christian communities outside of the region so as to delineate the Arab nations along the lines of being exclusively Muslim nations. This falls into accordance with the Yinon Plan.

Re-Dividing Africa: The Yinon Plan is very Much Alive and at Work…

In the same context as the sectarian divisions in the Middle East, the Israelis have outlined plans to reconfigure Africa. The Yinon Plan seeks to delineate Africa on the basis of three facets:

(1) ethno-linguistics;
(2) skin-colour;
(3) religion.

It seeks to draw dividing lines in Africa between a so-called “Black Africa” and a supposedly “non-Black” North Africa. This is part of a scheme to create a schism in Africa between what are assumed to be “Arabs” and so-called “Blacks.”

An attempt to separate the merging point of an Arab and African identity is underway.

This objective is why the ridiculous identity of an “African South Sudan” and an “Arab North Sudan” have been nurtured and promoted. This is also why black-skinned Libyans have been targeted in a campaign to “colour cleanse” Libya. The Arab identity in North Africa is being de-linked from its African identity. Simultaneously there is an attempt to eradicate the large populations of “black-skinned Arabs” so that there is a clear delineation between “Black Africa” and a new “non-Black” North Africa, which will be turned into a fighting ground between the remaining “non-Black” Berbers and Arabs.

In the same context, tensions are being fomented between Muslims and Christians in Africa, in such places as Sudan and Nigeria, to further create lines and fracture points. The fuelling of these divisions on the basis of skin-colour, religion, ethnicity, and language is intended to fuel disassociation and disunity in Africa. This is all part of a broader African strategy of cutting North Africa off from the rest of the African continent.

Israel and the African Continent

The Israelis have been quietly involved on the African continent for years. In Western Sahara, which is occupied by Morocco, the Israelis helped build a separation security wall like the one in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In Sudan, Tel Aviv has armed separatist movements and insurgents. In South Africa, the Israelis supported the Apartheid regime and its occupation of Namibia. In 2009, the Israeli Foreign Ministry outlined that Africa would be the renewed focus of Tel Aviv.

Israel’s two main objectives in Africa are to impose the Yinon Plan, in league with its own interests, and to assist Washington in becoming the hegemon of Africa. In this regard, the Israelis also pushed for the creation of AFRICOM in this regard. The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) is one example.

Washington has outsourced intelligence work in Africa to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is effectively involved as one of the parties in a broader war not just “inside” Africa, but “over” Africa. In this war, Tel Aviv is working alongside Washington and the E.U. against China and its allies, which includes Iran.

Tehran is working alongside Beijing in a similar manner as Tel Aviv is with Washington. Iran is helping the Chinese in Africa through Iranian connections and ties. These ties also include Tehran’s ties to private Lebanese and Syrian business interests in Africa. Thus, within the broader rivalry between Washington and Beijing, an Israeli-Iranian rivalry has also unfolded within Africa.¹ Sudan is Africa’s third largest weapons producer, as a result of Iranian support in weapons manufacturing. Meanwhile, while Iran provides military assistance to Khartoum, which includes several military cooperation agreements, Israel is involved in various actions directed against the Sudanese.¹

Israel and Libya

Libya had been considered as “a spoiler” which undermined the interests of the former colonial powers in Africa. In this regard, Libya had taken on some hefty pan-African development plans intended to industrialize Africa and transform Africa into an integrated and assertive political entity. These initiatives conflicted with the interests of the external powers competing with one another in Africa, but it was especially unacceptable to Washington and the major E.U. countries. In this regard, Libya had to be crippled and neutralized as an entity supportive of African progress and pan-African unity.

The role of Israel and the Israeli lobby was fundamental in opening the door to NATO’s military intervention in Libya. According to Israeli sources, it was U.N. Watch that actually orchestrated the events in Geneva to remove Libya from the U.N. Human Rights Council and to ask the U.N. Security Council to intervene.² U.N. Watch is formally affiliated with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which has influence in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy and is part of the Israeli lobby in the United States. The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), which helped launch the unverified claims about 6,000 people being slaughtered by Gaddafi, is also tied to the Israeli lobby in France.

Tel Aviv had been in contact simultaneously with both the Transitional Council and the Libyan government in Tripoli. Mossad agents were also in Tripoli, one of which was a former station manager. At about the same time, French members of the Israeli lobby were visiting Benghazi. In a case of irony, the Transitional Council would claim that Colonel Qaddafi was working with Israel, while it made pledges to recognize Israel to president Sarkozy’s special envoy Bernard-Henri Lévy who would then convey the message to Israeli leaders.³ A similar pattern (to that of Israel’s links to the Transitional Council) had also developed at an earlier stage in South Sudan, which was armed by Israel.

Despite the Transitional Council’s position on Israel, its followers still tried to demonize Gaddafi by claiming he was secretly Jewish. Not only was this untrue, but it was also bigoted. These accusations were intended to be a form of character assassination that equated being a Jew as something negative.

In reality, Israel and NATO are in the same camp. Israel is a de facto member of NATO. Had Gaddafi been conniving with Israel while the Transitional Council was working with NATO, this would mean that both sides were actually being played as fools against one another.

Preparing the Chessboard for the “Clash of Civilizations”

It is at this point that all the pieces have to be put together and the dots have to be connected.

The chessboard is being staged for a “Clash of Civilizations” and all the chess pieces are being put into place.

The Arab World is in the process of being cordoned off and sharp delineation lines are being created. These lines of delineation are replacing the seamless lines of transition between different ethno-linguistic, skin-colour, and religious groups.

Under this scheme, there can no longer be a melding transition between societies and countries. This is why the Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, such as the Copts, are being targeted. This also why black-skinned Arabs and black-skinned Berbers, as well as other North African population groups which are black-skinned, are facing genocide in North Africa.

What is being staged is the creation of an exclusively “Muslim Middle East” area (excluding Israel) that will be in turmoil over Shiite-Sunni fighting. A similar scenario is being staged for a “non-Black North Africa” area which will be characterized by a confrontation between Arabs and Berber. At the same time, under the “Clash of Civilizations” model, the Middle East and North Africa are slated to simultaneously be in conflict with the so-called “West” and “Black Africa.”

This is why both Nicolas Sarzoky, in France, and David Cameron, in Britain, made back-to-back declarations during the start of the conflict in Libya that multiculturalism is dead in their respective Western European societies.⁴

Real multiculturalism threatens the legitimacy of the NATO war agenda. It also constitutes an obstacle to the implementation of the “Clash of Civilizations” which constitutes the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. In this regard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor, explains why multiculturalism is a threat to Washington and its allies: “[A]s America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues [e.g., war with the Arab World, China, Iran, or Russia and the former Soviet Union], except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. Such a consensus generally existed throughout World War II and even during the Cold War [and exists now because of the 'Global War on Terror'].”⁵

Brzezinski’s next sentence is the qualifier of why populations would oppose or support wars: “[The consensus] was rooted, however, not only in deeply shared democratic values, which the public sensed were being threatened, but also in a cultural and ethnic affinity for the predominantly European victims of hostile totalitarianisms.”⁵

Risking being redundant, it has to be mentioned again that it is precisely with the intention of breaking these cultural affinities between the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region and the so-called “Western World” and sub-Saharan Africa that Christians and black-skinned peoples are being targeted.

Ethnocentrism and Ideology: Justifying Today’s “Just Wars”

In the past, the colonial powers of Western Europe would indoctrinate their people. Their objective was to acquire popular support for colonial conquest. This took the form of spreading Christianity and promoting Christian values with the support of armed merchants and colonial armies.

At the same time, racist ideologies were put forth. The people whose lands were colonized were portrayed as “sub-human,” inferior, or soulless. Finally, the “White Man’s burden” of taking on a mission of civilizing the so-called “uncivilized peoples of the world” was used. This cohesive ideological framework was used to portray colonialism as a “just cause.” The latter in turn was used to provide legitimacy to the waging of “just wars” as a means to conquering and “civilizing” foreign lands.

Today, the imperialist design of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany have not changed. What has changed is the pretext and justification for waging their neo-colonial wars of conquest. During the colonial period, the narratives and justifications for waging war were accepted by public opinion in the colonizing countries, such as Britain and France. Today’s “just wars” and “just causes” are now being conducted under the banners of women’s rights, human rights, humanitarianism, and democracy.

1. The Economist, “Israel and Iran in Africa: A search for allies in a hostile world,” February 4, 2011.
2. Tova Lazaroff, “70 rights groups call on UN to condemn Tripoli,” Jerusalem Post, February 22, 2011.
3. Radio France Internationale, “Libyan rebels will recognise Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Netanyahu,” June 2, 2011.
4. Robert Marquand, “Why Europe is turning away from multiculturalism,” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2011.
5. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books October 1997), p. 211.

The White House’s blatant parroting of Israel’s position to continue bilateral negotiations, while Tel Aviv continued to colonize Palestinian land and forcibly evict its residents, alienated the 1.5 billion Muslims throughout the world.  Obama’s refusal to even mention the return to the 1967 borders as a basis for a “peace settlement” totally undermined any pretext that the US could act as an “honest broker” in Mid-East peace negotiations, even in the eyes of its most slavish supporters in the PLO.  His one-sided reference to Israel’s minimal casualties in maintaining the Occupation, while omitting any mention of the 12,000 Palestinian political prisoners, thousands of assassinations, every day humiliation, routine torture of suspects and frequent defacement of Palestinian religious centers (mosques and churches, cemeteries and shrines), undermined any US effort to win favor among the millions of people involved in the pro-democracy social movements sweeping the Arab world from Tunisia, Egypt to the Gulf states.

Washington’s insistence that its NATO allies line-up with it in supporting continued “bilateral” negotiations, has led to the German government’s public humiliation when it followed Obama’s line of pressuring Abbas back to ‘negotiations’ only to have the Israeli Prime MInister Netanyahu announce the construction of 1,100 illegal Jews-only housing units in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem.

Obama’s blatant and overt pandering to Israel before the representative of 193 independent nations, which had followed the standing ovation for Abbas’ call for Palestinian recognition, highlights one of the greatest US diplomatic defeats since the founding of the UN over 60 years ago.

But was Obama’s groveling before Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu really a ‘failure’ in the eyes of the White House?  Or was his speech really a carefully crafted appeal to a domestic audience in order to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from pro-Israel billionaires to finance his re-election campaign?

There is a wealth of documentary evidence showing that Obama deliberately and forcefully sacrificed US international standing in order to satisfy the major American Jewish organizations who were demanding nothing less than total and unconditional backing for Netanyahu’s phony position of “peace negotiations” and colonization from Obama.

From the angle of satisfying the US Zionist power configuration (ZPC) and securing a massive flow of re-election financing, Obama’s UN speech was a smashing success.

Obama’s Rejection of World Opinion and the Zionist Payoff

Obama’s re-election campaign from April to the end of September has received tens of millions of dollars from wealthy pro-Israeli Jewish fund raisers and contributors, as well as endorsements from right wing US Jewish and Israeli politicians.

In the run-up to Obama’s UN speech, Zionist lobbyists adopted “good cop bad cop” tactics. Liberal Zionist Democratic Party advisers emphasized that he was “losing the Jewish vote and funding”, highlighting the recent resignation of a disgraced Democratic Congressman from a district of Orthodox Jews because of his internet porno-exhibitionism as a sign of Obama’s growing unpopularity among Jews.  Some campaign strategists emphasized the “crucial Jewish vote in swing states” like Ohio and Pennsylvania (where non-Jews, who represent well over 80% of the voters, are not “crucial” in the eyes of these election experts!).

The 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations took turns accusing Obama of “slandering Israel”, for disobeying Netanyahu and “backing the Arabs” for protesting Israeli land grabs, even as Obama raised US government aid to Israel to an un-paralleled $3 billion per annum, in the midst of a US economic recession with 18% of American workers unemployed or underemployed. Obama’s pro-Israel critics overlooked his $205 million gift to Tel Aviv to build the Iron Dome rocket defense system together with the US military’s latest fighter jets.  The Zionist power configuration demanded total surrender even as they extracted more political and economic concessions.  They ignored the enormous military imbalances in the Middle East in Israel’s favor and the degradation of US standing in the region.

Hardball threats to end Jewish financial support by the right wing Zionists was “complemented” by fund raising by liberal Zionists and promises of more to come if Obama ended his “public feuding” with Israel and vetoed Palestinian admission to the UN.  Obama performed his well-rehearsed shuffle and song routine of the “absolute defender”, now and forever, of every Israeli violation of Palestinian human rights.

Obama’s Rush for the Gold

On June 20, 2011, months prior to Obama’s speech opposing Palestinian admission to the UN, a pro-Israel Washington fund raising event for his re-election campaign raised over $1.5 million, assuring Obama that “Jewish donors” were not wavering, as long as he followed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s line of peace negotiations and land grabs (Forward, June 29 2011).  During the fund raiser Obama reiterated his unconditional support for Israel’s policies, including the settlements in the Palestinian West Bank. Following the dinner he met behind closed doors to elaborate on how far he was willing to go in opposing the Palestinian initiative at the UN, (Forward, June 29, 2011).  A month earlier on May 22, 2011, Obama spoke at the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), directly appealing for funds in exchange for the United States’ total submission to the AIPAC agenda.

Obama’s dependence on Zionist funding was evident between April to June 2011:  Of the $68 million raised for his campaign, $37 million was raised by 244 “big cash bundlers” – individuals who round up multi-millionaire contributors.  According to one count of the 244 bundlers approximately 120 were identified as pro-Israel Jews.  Among the Zionist “bundlers” are Penny Pritzker bagging contributions between $100,000 – $200,000, Jeffrey Katzenberg putting the touch on contributors for $500,000 plus; Mark Gilbert $500,000 plus, and Mark Stanley $100,000 to $200,000.

Obama’s fund raising and organizational success among Israeli right wingers and US Zionists multiplied following his UN speech opposing the recognition of Palestine.  As the New York Times (September 30, 2011) noted “. . . Democratic officials maintain that they do not think that Mr. Obama is in danger of losing the Jewish vote – particularly given the President’s muscular defense of Israel at the United Nations General Assembly last week”.

Following his UN speech Obama raised several million from wealthy Zionists in Manhattan and Hollywood at dinners ranging up to $35,800 a plate. The extremist right wing Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman (influential among billionaire US Zionists), signaled his enthusiastic support for Obama, as did Abe Foxman, the notorious Israeli Firster and head of the Anti-Defamation League, and former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, another fanatical Zionist (NY Times, September 30, 2011).  Thanks to pro-Israel  bundlers and hustlers, Obama had out-fund raised the leading Republican candidate, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, by more than a 4 to 1 margin by September 2011, (Reuters, Sept. 27, 2011).

The Consequences of Obama’s Embrace of Netanyahu and Rejection of World Opinion

Immediately following Obama’s UN speech, Netanyahu announced that Israel would build 1,100 new ‘Jews-only’ housing units in occupied Arab East Jerusalem with additional plans to displace tens of thousands of Bedouins from their villages to make way for new Jewish settlements.  With firm assurances that American Zionist Jews have the American Presidency and Congress in their pocket, Netanyahu feels free to advance his long-stated policy of ethnic cleansing. Violent extremist Jewish colonial settlers, funded by millionaire US donors to Obama, feel free to continue their practice of defacing and burning mosques and subjecting Palestinians to daily humiliations.  The US Congress and AIPAC wrote legislations eliminating S200 million dollars in funding to the Palestinian Authority because of its ‘crime’ of seeking admission for the Palestinian people to the United Nations.  Obama’s “muscular” knee bends for Israel at the UN have opened the door to more intense and brutal Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, new military threats toward Iran and increased pressure on Egypt’s military rulers.

The White House’s goal is to raise a billion dollars for the re-election campaign.  This involves keeping the spigot open for big bucks from Zionist millionaires in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, as well as from smaller contributors among lawyers, dentists, doctors, professors and local business people in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere.  Obama’s strategy at the UN is designed to maximize Zionist loyalty and fund raising for his re-election.  The White House has organized a campaign to delay any Security Council decision, removing the Palestinian issue from the limelight and putting it behind closed doors via procedural haggling.  At the same time, Washington is pressuring Security Council members, especially Bosnia and Colombia, to block a three-fifths majority vote, which would then force the US to use its veto.  If the White House does not secure the votes, Obama has promised Zionist fundraisers he will use the US veto to exclude Palestine from admission to the UN.

Obama will focus on his power to use the UN veto in order to increase fund raising among wealthy Zionists and to activate the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations to “get out the vote” among the electorate at large.  The re-election campaign will remind Zionist mass media pundits (CNN, FOX, CBS, NBC) of how Obama “courageously stood up to” world public opinion – including that of leaders representing 90% of the world’s population – in order to “defend Israel”.

If foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy, as is clearly illustrated by Obama’s truckling to Zionist fund-raisers by acting on behalf of Israel in the United Nations, so too is domestic policy an extension of foreign policy.  US overseas businesses cannot expect any “favored treatment” in Muslim countries. Increased political hostility to the US and Israel will result in greater military spending leading to more fiscal deficits and more painful cuts in domestic social programs for the American people.  This will increase domestic social and political polarization. In the short-run, Obama’s sell-out to the Zionist power configuration has succeeded in filling the coffers of his re-election campaign.  But in the near future it has raised insurmountable difficulties in dealing with overseas political conflicts and domestic economic crises.

Above all, Obama’s game of mutual manipulation with the Zionist Lobby has further degraded US democratic political institutions and our international standing as a free and independent country.

The Freeing of Jonathan Pollard and Obama’s Re-election: The Dirtiest Quid Pro Quo

In his gross servility to Israel and the American Zionist Lobby, President Barak Obama has surpassed all four of his predecessors with regard to the most egregious episode in Israel’s many violations of US security.  According to recent news reports, Vice-President Joe Biden announced that “President Obama was considering clemency for Jonathan Pollard” (New York Times, September 30, 2011; Jerusalem Post, October 2, 2011).  While Biden originally claimed to have initially opposed this move, a week later, under intense pressure from Obama, he agreed to meet and discuss Pollard’s release with American Jewish leaders, including the executive vice chairman of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein (Globe, October 8, 2011 – a major Israeli business publication.)

Reagan, Bush-Senior and Junior and Clinton, all refused to re-open the Pollard case because the confessed American spy for Israel (who was awarded Israeli citizenship and a high military rank while in US Federal prison) did more damage to US national security than any spy in our history.  At his trial, the FBI and Naval Intelligence revealed the Pollard, then a High Security Naval Intelligence analyst, had turned over tens of thousands of classified documents to his Israeli handler.  Many were ‘sold’ to the Soviet Union.  For his ‘service to the Jewish State of Israel’, a building, illegally built in occupied Arab East Jerusalem, is named Beit Yonatan.

All Israeli leaders, from Rabin to Netanyahu, have pressed US Presidents to free their spy.  But threats of mass protests and resignation from the US intelligence community prevented any serious discussion of releasing the traitor.  Now, the entire spectrum of Zionist opinion – from ‘left to right’ – from ‘liberal’ Congressman Barney Frank to extremist Israel Firster, Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, and including hundreds of Rabbis are pressuring Obama to free their ‘hero’.  Only a few prominent American Jews, like former US Navy Admiral Shapiro are outraged and chagrined by the ‘Jewish Community’s defense of a traitor”.

In a tight presidential election this 2012 we can expect Obama to trade on Pollard’s release, in exchange for a big cash injection by Zionist contributors to fund his last-minute media blitz.  After all, if Obama can sell out US integrity in front of the 193 nations of the UN, what is to stop him from freeing a master Israeli spy, who imperiled US security, in order to gain a few thousand sound bites and TV slots in the run-up to the November 2012 elections?

There is ample evidence to suggest that the publicity surrounding the killing of al-Awlaki has greatly exaggerated his political importance and is an attempt to cover up the declining influence of the US in the Islamic world.  The State Department’s declaration of a major victory serves to exaggerate US military capacity to defeat its adversaries.  The assassination serves to justify Obama’s arbitrary use of death squads to execute overseas US critics and adversaries by executive fiat denying the accused elementary judicial protections.

Myths About al-Awlaki

Al-Awlaki was a theological blogger in a small, poor Islamic country (Yemen).  He was confined to propagandizing against Western countries, attempting to influence Islamic believers to resist Western military and cultural intervention.  Within Yemen, his organizational affiliations were with a minority sector of the mass popular opposition to US backed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh.  His fundamentalist group was largely influential in a few small towns in southern Yemen.  He was not a militaryor political leader in his organization, dubbed by the West as “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP).

Like most of what the CIA calls “Al-Qaeda”, AQAP was a local autonomous organization, meaning that it was organized and controlled by local leaders even as it expressed agreement with many other loosely associated fundamentalist groups.  Awlaki had a very limited role in the Yemeni groups’ military and political operations and virtually no influence in the mass movement engaged in ousting Saleh.  There is no evidence, documented or observable, that he was “a very effective propagandist” as ex-CIA and now Brookings Institution member Bruce Riedal claims.  In Yemen and among the mass popular movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain or elsewhere his followers were few and far between.  One “expert” cites such intangibles as his “spiritual leadership”, which is as good a way as any to avoid the test of empirical evidence:  apparently a crystal ball or a tarot read will do.

Given the paucity of evidence demonstrating Awlaki’s political and ideological influence among the mass movements in North Africa, the Middle East or Asia, the US intelligence agencies claim his “real influence was among English-speaking jihadi, some of whom he groomed personally to carry out attacks on the US.”

In other words Washington’s casting Awlaki as an “important threat” revolves around his speeches and writings, since he had no operational role in organizing suicide bomb attacks – or at least no concrete evidence has been presented up to now.

The intelligence agencies “suspect” he was involved in the plot that dispatched bombs in cargo aircraft from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010.  US intelligence claims he provided a “theological justification” via e-mail for US army Major Nidal Malik’s killing of 13 people at Fort Hood.  In other words, like many US philosophical writers and legal experts like Princeton’s Michael Walzer and Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, Awlaki discussed “just wars” and the “right” of violent action.  If political writings and speeches of publicists are cited by an assassin as the bases for their action, should the White House execute, leading US Islamophobes like Marilyn Geller and Daniel Pipes, cited as inspiration by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Brevik?  Or does their Zionist affiliation provide them immunity from Navy Seal assaults and drone missiles?

Even assuming that the unsubstantiated “suspicions” of the CIA, MI 16 and the Al Qaeda “experts” are correct and Awlaki had a direct or indirect hand in “terrorist action” against the US, these activities were absurdly amateurish and abject failures, certainly not a serious threat to our security.  The “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s effort to ignite bomb materials on a flight to Detroit, December 25, 2009, led to roasting his testicles!  Likewise the bombs dispatched in cargo aircraft from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010 were another bungled job.

If anything, the Yemenite AQAP’s hopeless, hapless operational planning served to highlight its technical incompetence.  In fact, according to Mutallab’s own admission, published on NBC news at the time, Awlaki played no role in the planning or execution of the bomb attack.  He merely served to refer Mutallab to the Al Qaeda organization.

Clearly, Awlaki was a minor figure in Yemen’s political struggles.  He was a propagandist of little influence in the mass movements during the “Arab Spring”.  He was an inept recruiter of English-speaking would be bombers.  The claims that he planned and “hatched” two bomb plots (Financial Times, October 1 and 2, page 2) are refuted by the confession of one bomber and the absence of any corroboratory evidence regarding the failed cargo bombs.

The mass media inflate the importance of Awlaki to the stature of a major al-Qaeda leader and subsequently, his killing as a “major psychological blow” to world-wide jihadists.  This imagery has no substance.  But the puff pieces do have a very important propaganda purpose.  Worse still, the killing of Awlaki provides a justification for extra-judicial state serial assassinations of ideological critics of Anglo-American leaders engaged in bloody colonial wars.

Propaganda to Bolster Flagging Military Morale

Recent events strongly suggest that the US and its NATO allies are losing the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban:  top collaborator officials are knocked off at the drop of a Taliban turban.  After years of occupation, Iraq is moving closer to Iran rather than the US.  Libya in the post-Gaddafi period is under warring mercenary forces squaring off for a fight for the billion dollar booty.  Al Qaeda prepares battle against neo-liberal expats and Gaddafi renegades.

Washington and NATO’s attempt to regain the initiative via puppet rulers in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen is being countered by a “second wave” of mass pro-democracy movements.  The “Arab Spring” is being followed by a “hot autumn”.  Positive news and favorable outcomes for Obama are few and far between.  He has run out of any pseudo-populist initiative to enchant the Arab-Islamic masses.  His rhetoric rings hollow in the face of his UN speech, denying recognition of an independent Palestinian state.  His groveling before Israel is clearly seen as an effort to bolster his re-election campaign financing by wealthy Zionists.

Diplomatically isolated and domestically in trouble over failed economic policies, Obama pulls the trigger and shoots an itinerant Muslim preacher in Yemen to send a “message” to the Arab world.  In a word he says, “If you, the Arabs, the Islamic world, won’t join us we can and will execute those of you who can be labeled “spiritual mentors” or are suspected of harboring terrorists.”

Obama’s defense of systematic killing of ideological critics, denying US constitutional norms of judicial due process to a U.S citizen and in blatant rejection of international law defines a homicidal executive.

Let us be absolutely clear what the larger implications are of political murder by executive fiat.  If the President can order the murder of a dual American-Yemeni citizen abroad on the bases of his ideological-theological beliefs, what is to stop him from ordering the same in the US?  If he uses arbitrary violence to compensate for diplomatic failure abroad, what is to stop him from declaring a “heightened internal security threat” in order to suspend our remaining freedoms at home and to round up critics?

We seriously understate our “Obama problem” if we think of this ordered killing merely as an isolated murder of a “jihadist” in strife torn Yemen … Obama’s murder of Awlaki has profound, long term significance because it puts political assassinations at the center of US foreign and domestic policy.  As Secretary of Defense Panetta states, “eliminating home grown terrorists” is at the core of our “internal security”.