The Iranian Threat?

June 29, 2010: By Noam Chomsky

The Iranian Threat?

The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration. Congress has just strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies. The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding its offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the US could build the massive base it uses for attacking the Middle East and Central Asia. The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group. According to a US Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 “bunker busters” used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators,” the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans, and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London. “US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he said. “The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003,” accelerating under Obama.

The Arab press reports that an American fleet (with an Israeli vessel) passed through the Suez Canal on the way to the Persian Gulf, where its task is “to implement the sanctions against Iran and supervise the ships going to and from Iran.” British and Israeli media report that Saudi Arabia is providing a corridor for Israeli bombing of Iran (denied by Saudi Arabia). On his return from Afghanistan to reassure NATO allies that the US will stay the course after the replacement of General McChrystal by his superior, General Petraeus, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited Israel to meet Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and senior Israeli military staff along with intelligence and planning units, continuing the annual strategic dialogue between Israel and the U.S. in Tel Aviv. The meeting focused “on the preparation by both Israel and the U.S. for the possibility of a nuclear capable Iran,” according to Haaretz, which reports further that Mullen emphasized that “I always try to see challenges from Israeli perspective.” Mullen and Ashkenazi are in regular contact on a secure line.

The increasing threats of military action against Iran are of course in violation of the UN Charter, and in specific violation of Security Council resolution 1887 of September 2009 which reaffirmed the call to all states to resolve disputes related to nuclear issues peacefully, in accordance with the Charter, which bans the use or threat of force.

Some respected analysts describe the Iranian threat in apocalyptic terms. Amitai Etzioni warns that “The U.S. will have to confront Iran or give up the Middle East,” no less. If Iran’s nuclear program proceeds, he asserts, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other states will “move toward” the new Iranian “superpower”; in less fevered rhetoric, a regional alliance might take shape independent of the US. In the US army journal Military Review, Etzioni urges a US attack that targets not only Iran’s nuclear facilities but also its non-nuclear military assets, including infrastructure – meaning, the civilian society. “This kind of military action is akin to sanctions – causing ‘pain’ in order to change behaviour, albeit by much more powerful means.”

Such harrowing pronouncements aside, what exactly is the Iranian threat? An authoritative answer is provided in the April 2010 study of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2010. The brutal clerical regime is doubtless a threat to its own people, though it does not rank particularly high in that respect in comparison to US allies in the region. But that is not what concerns the Institute. Rather, it is concerned with the threat Iran poses to the region and the world.

The study makes it clear that the Iranian threat is not military. Iran’s military spending is “relatively low compared to the rest of the region,” and less than 2% that of the US. Iranian military doctrine is strictly “defensive,… designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities.” Iran has only “a limited capability to project force beyond its borders.” With regard to the nuclear option, “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”

Though the Iranian threat is not military, that does not mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US global designs. Specifically, it threatens US control of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since World War II, which yields “substantial control of the world,” one influential figure advised (A. A. Berle).

But Iran’s threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence. As the Institute study formulates the threat, Iran is “destabilizing” the region. US invasion and military occupation of Iran’s neighbors is “stabilization.” Iran’s efforts to extend its influence in neighboring countries is “destabilization,” hence plainly illegitimate. It should be noted that such revealing usage is routine. Thus the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace, former editor the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, was properly using the term “stability” in its technical sense when he explained that in order to achieve “stability” in Chile it was necessary to “destabilize” the country (by overthrowing the elected Allende government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship).

Beyond these crimes, Iran is also supporting terrorism, the study continues: by backing Hezbollah and Hamas, the major political forces in Lebanon and in Palestine – if elections matter. The Hezbollah-based coalition handily won the popular vote in Lebanon’s latest (2009) election. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election, compelling the US and Israel to institute the harsh and brutal siege of Gaza to punish the miscreants for voting the wrong way in a free election. These have been the only relatively free elections in the Arab world. It is normal for elite opinion to fear the threat of democracy and to act to deter it, but this is a rather striking case, particularly alongside of strong US support for the regional dictatorships, particularly striking with Obama’s strong praise for the brutal Egyptian dictator Mubarak on the way to his famous address to the Muslim world in Cairo.

The terrorist acts attributed to Hamas and Hezbollah pale in comparison to US-Israeli terrorism in the same region, but they are worth a look nevertheless.

On May 25 Lebanon celebrated its national holiday, Liberation Day, commemorating Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon after 22 years, as a result of Hezbollah resistance – described by Israeli authorities as “Iranian aggression” against Israel in Israeli-occupied Lebanon (Ephraim Sneh). That too is normal imperial usage. Thus President John F. Kennedy condemned the “the assault from the inside, and which is manipulated from the North.” The assault by the South Vietnamese resistance against Kennedy’s bombers, chemical warfare, driving peasants to virtual concentration camps, and other such benign measures was denounced as “internal aggression” by Kennedy’s UN Ambassador, liberal hero Adlai Stevenson. North Vietnamese support for their countrymen in the US-occupied South is aggression, intolerable interference with Washington’s righteous mission. Kennedy advisors Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorenson, considered doves, also praised Washington’s intervention to reverse “aggression” in South Vietnam – by the indigenous resistance, as they knew, at least if they read US intelligence reports. In 1955 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff defined several types of “aggression,” including “Aggression other than armed, i.e., political warfare, or subversion.” For example, an internal uprising against a US-imposed police state, or elections that come out the wrong way. The usage is also common in scholarship and political commentary, and makes sense on the prevailing assumption that We Own the World.

Hamas resists Israel’s military occupation and its illegal and violent actions in the occupied territories. It is accused of refusing to recognize Israel (political parties do not recognize states). In contrast, the US and Israel not only do not recognize Palestine, but have been acting for decades to ensure that it can never come into existence in any meaningful form; the governing party in Israel, in its 1999 campaign platform, bars the existence of any Palestinian state.

Hamas is charged with rocketing Israeli settlements on the border, criminal acts no doubt, though a fraction of Israel’s violence in Gaza, let alone elsewhere. It is important to bear in mind, in this connection, that the US and Israel know exactly how to terminate the terror that they deplore with such passion. Israel officially concedes that there were no Hamas rockets as long as Israel partially observed a truce with Hamas in 2008. Israel rejected Hamas’s offer to renew the truce, preferring to launch the murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in December 2008, with full US backing, an exploit of murderous aggression without the slightest credible pretext on either legal or moral grounds.

The model for democracy in the Muslim world, despite serious flaws, is Turkey, which has relatively free elections, and has also been subject to harsh criticism in the US. The most extreme case was when the government followed the position of 95% of the population and refused to join in the invasion of Iraq, eliciting harsh condemnation from Washington for its failure to comprehend how a democratic government should behave: under our concept of democracy, the voice of the Master determines policy, not the near-unanimous voice of the population.

The Obama administration was once again incensed when Turkey joined with Brazil in arranging a deal with Iran to restrict its enrichment of uranium. Obama had praised the initiative in a letter to Brazil’s president Lula da Silva, apparently on the assumption that it would fail and provide a propaganda weapon against Iran. When it succeeded, the US was furious, and quickly undermined it by ramming through a Security Council resolution with new sanctions against Iran that were so meaningless that China cheerfully joined at once – recognizing that at most the sanctions would impede Western interests in competing with China for Iran’s resources. Once again, Washington acted forthrightly to ensure that others would not interfere with US control of the region.

Not surprisingly, Turkey (along with Brazil) voted against the US sanctions motion in the Security Council. The other regional member, Lebanon, abstained. These actions aroused further consternation in Washington. Philip Gordon, the Obama administration’s top diplomat on European affairs, warned Turkey that its actions are not understood in the US and that it must “demonstrate its commitment to partnership with the West,” AP reported, “a rare admonishment of a crucial NATO ally.”

The political class understands as well. Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations, observed that the critical question now is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?” – following orders like good democrats. A New York Times headline captured the general mood: “Iran Deal Seen as Spot on Brazilian Leader’s Legacy.” In brief, do what we say, or else.

There is no indication that other countries in the region favor US sanctions any more than Turkey does. On Iran’s opposite border, for example, Pakistan and Iran, meeting in Turkey, recently signed an agreement for a new pipeline. Even more worrisome for the US is that the pipeline might extend to India. The 2008 US treaty with India supporting its nuclear programs – and indirectly its nuclear weapons programs — was intended to stop India from joining the pipeline, according to Moeed Yusuf, a South Asia adviser to the United States Institute of Peace, expressing a common interpretation. India and Pakistan are two of the three nuclear powers that have refused to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the third being Israel. All have developed nuclear weapons with US support, and still do.

No sane person wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons; or anyone. One obvious way to mitigate or eliminate this threat is to establish a NFWZ in the Middle East. The issue arose (again) at the NPT conference at United Nations headquarters in early May 2010. Egypt, as chair of the 118 nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, proposed that the conference back a plan calling for the start of negotiations in 2011 on a Middle East NWFZ, as had been agreed by the West, including the US, at the 1995 review conference on the NPT.

Washington still formally agrees, but insists that Israel be exempted – and has given no hint of allowing such provisions to apply to itself. The time is not yet ripe for creating the zone, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated at the NPT conference, while Washington insisted that no proposal can be accepted that calls for Israel’s nuclear program to be placed under the auspices of the IAEA or that calls on signers of the NPT, specifically Washington, to release information about “Israeli nuclear facilities and activities, including information pertaining to previous nuclear transfers to Israel.” Obama’s technique of evasion is to adopt Israel’s position that any such proposal must be conditional on a comprehensive peace settlement, which the US can delay indefinitely, as it has been doing for 35 years, with rare and temporary exceptions.

At the same time, Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, asked foreign ministers of its 151 member states to share views on how to implement a resolution demanding that Israel “accede to” the NPT and throw its nuclear facilities open to IAEA oversight, AP reported.

It is rarely noted that the US and UK have a special responsibility to work to establish a Middle East NWFZ. In attempting to provide a thin legal cover for their invasion of the Iraq in 2003, they appealed to Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), which called on Iraq to terminate its development of weapons of mass destruction. The US and UK claimed that they had not done so. We need not tarry on the excuse, but that Resolution commits its signers to move to establish a NWFZ in the Middle East.

Parenthetically, we may add that US insistence on maintaining nuclear facilities in Diego Garcia undermines the nuclear-free weapons zone (NFWZ) established by the African Union, just as Washington continues to block a Pacific NFWZ by excluding its Pacific dependencies.

Obama’s rhetorical commitment to non-proliferation has received much praise, even a Nobel peace prize. One practical step in this direction is establishment of NFWZs. Another is withdrawing support for the nuclear programs of the three non-signers of the NPT. As often, rhetoric and actions are hardly aligned, in fact are in direct contradiction in this case, facts that pass with little attention.

Instead of taking practical steps towards reducing the truly dire threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, the US must take major steps towards reinforcing US control of the vital Middle East oil-producing regions, by violence if other means do not succeed. That is understandable and even reasonable, under prevailing imperial doctrine.

John Mearsheimer, Israel: A Suicidal, Apartheid State

By John Mearsheimer

John Mearsheimer, Israel: A Suicidal, Apartheid State

Israel’s botched raid against the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla on May 31 is the latest sign that Israel is on a disastrous course that it seems incapable of reversing. The attack also highlights the extent to which Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. This situation is likely to get worse over time, which will cause major problems for Americans who have a deep attachment to the Jewish state.

The bungled assault on the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the flotilla, shows once again that Israel is addicted to using military force yet unable to do so effectively. One would think that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would improve over time from all the practice. Instead, it has become the gang that cannot shoot straight.

The IDF last scored a clear-cut victory in the Six Day War in 1967; the record since then is a litany of unsuccessful campaigns. The War of Attrition (1969-70) was at best a draw, and Israel fell victim to one of the great surprise attacks in military history in the October War of 1973. In 1982, the IDF invaded Lebanon and ended up in a protracted and bloody fight with Hezbollah. Eighteen years later, Israel conceded defeat and pulled out of the Lebanese quagmire. Israel tried to quell the First Intifada by force in the late 1980s, with Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin telling his troops to break the bones of the Palestinian demonstrators. But that strategy failed and Israel was forced to join the Oslo Peace Process instead, which was another failed endeavor.

The IDF has not become more competent in recent years. By almost all accounts – including the Israeli government’s own commission of inquiry – it performed abysmally in the 2006 Lebanon war. The IDF then launched a new campaign against the people of Gaza in December 2008, in part to “restore Israel’s deterrence” but also to weaken or topple Hamas. Although the mighty IDF was free to pummel Gaza at will, Hamas survived and Israel was widely condemned for the destruction and killing it wrought on Gaza’s civilian population. Indeed, the Goldstone Report, written under UN auspices, accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Earlier this year, the Mossad murdered a Hamas leader in Dubai, but the assassins were seen on multiple security cameras and were found to have used forged passports from Australia and a handful of European countries. The result was an embarrassing diplomatic row, with Australia, Ireland, and Britain each expelling an Israeli diplomat.

Given this history, it is not surprising that the IDF mishandled the operation against the Gaza flotilla, despite having weeks to plan it. The assault forces that landed on the Mavi Marmara were unprepared for serious resistance and responded by shooting nine activists, some at point-blank range. None of the activists had their own guns. The bloody operation was condemned around the world – except in the United States, of course. Even within Israel, the IDF was roundly criticized for this latest failure.

These ill-conceived operations have harmful consequences for Israel. Failures leave adversaries intact and make Israeli leaders worry that their deterrent reputation is being undermined. To rectify that, the IDF is turned loose again, but the result is usually another misadventure, which gives Israel new incentives to do it again, and so on. This spiral logic, coupled with Israel’s intoxication with military force, helps explain why the Israeli press routinely carries articles predicting where Israel’s next war will be.

Israel’s recent debacles have also damaged its international reputation. Respondents to a 2010 worldwide opinion poll done for the BBC said that Israel, Iran, and Pakistan had the most negative influence in the world; even North Korea ranked better. More worrying for Israel is that its once close strategic relationship with Turkey has been badly damaged by the 2008-09 Gaza war and especially by the assault on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship filled with Turkish nationals. But surely the most troubling development for Israel is the growing chorus of voices in the United States who say that Israel’s behavior is threatening American interests around the world, to include endangering its soldiers. If that sentiment grows, it could seriously harm Israel’s relationship with the United States.

Life as an Apartheid State

The flotilla tragedy highlights another way in which Israel is in deep trouble. Israel’s response makes it obvious that its leaders are not interested in allowing the Palestinians to have a viable state in Gaza and the West Bank, but instead are bent on creating a “Greater Israel” in which the Palestinians are confined to a handful of impoverished enclaves.

Israel insists that its blockade is solely intended to keep weapons out of Gaza. Hardly anyone would criticize Israel if this were true, but it is not. The real aim of the blockade is to punish the people of Gaza for supporting Hamas and resisting Israel’s efforts to maintain Gaza as a giant open-air prison. Of course, there was much evidence that this was the case before the debacle on the Mavi Marmara. When the blockade began in 2006, Dov Weisglass, a close aide to Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, said, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” And the Gaza onslaught 18 months ago was designed to punish the Gazans, not enforce a weapons embargo. The ships in the flotilla were transporting humanitarian aid, not weapons for Hamas, and Israel’s willingness to use deadly force to prevent a humanitarian aid convoy from reaching Gaza makes it abundantly clear that Israel wants to humiliate and subdue the Palestinians, not live side-by-side with them in separate states.

Collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza is unlikely to end anytime soon. Israel’s leaders have shown little interest in lifting the blockade or negotiating sincerely. The sad truth is that Israel has been brutalizing the Palestinians for so long that it is almost impossible to break the habit. It is hardly surprising that Jimmy Carter said last year, “the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than human beings.” They are, and they will be for the foreseeable future.

Consequently, there is not going to be a two-state solution. Instead, Gaza and the West Bank will become part of a Greater Israel, which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Israelis and their American supporters invariably bristle at this comparison, but that is their future if they create a Greater Israel while denying full political rights to an Arab population that will soon outnumber the Jewish population in the entirety of the land. In fact, two former Israeli prime ministers – Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak – have made this very point. Olmert went so far as to argue, “as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

He’s right, because Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state. Like racist South Africa, it will eventually evolve into a democratic bi-national state whose politics will be dominated by the more numerous Palestinians. But that process will take many years, and during that time, Israel will continue to oppress the Palestinians. Its actions will be seen and condemned by growing numbers of people and more and more governments around the world. Israel is unwittingly destroying its own future as a Jewish state, and doing so with tacit U.S. support.

America’s Albatross

The combination of Israel’s strategic incompetence and its gradual transformation into an apartheid state creates significant problems for the United States. There is growing recognition in both countries that their interests are diverging; indeed this perspective is even garnering attention inside the American Jewish community. Jewish Week, for example, recently published an article entitled “The Gaza Blockade: What Do You Do When U.S. and Israeli Interests Aren’t in Synch?” Leaders in both countries are now saying that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is undermining U.S. security. Vice President Biden and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of Central Command, both made this point recently, and the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, told the Knesset in June, “Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden.”

It is easy to see why. Because the United States gives Israel so much support and U.S. politicians routinely laud the “special relationship” in the most lavish terms, people around the globe naturally associate the United States with Israel’s actions. Unfortunately, this makes huge numbers of people in the Arab and Islamic world furious with the United States for supporting Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians. That anger in turn helps fuel terrorism against America. Remember that the 9/11 Commission Report, which describes Khalid Sheik Muhammad as the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks,” concludes that his “animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” Osama bin Laden’s hostility toward the United States was fuelled in part by this same concern.

Popular anger toward the United States also threatens the rulers of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, key U.S. allies who are frequently seen as America’s lackeys. The collapse of any of these regimes would be a big blow to the U.S. position in the region; however, Washington’s unyielding support for Israel makes these governments weaker, not stronger. More importantly, the rupture in Israel’s relationship with Turkey will surely damage America’s otherwise close relationship with Turkey, a NATO member and a key U.S. ally in Europe and the Middle East.

Finally, there is the danger that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, which could have terrible consequences for the United States. The last thing America needs is another war with an Islamic country, especially one that could easily interfere in its ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why the Pentagon opposes striking Iran, whether with Israeli or U.S. forces. But Netanyahu might do it anyway if he thinks it would be good for Israel, even if it were bad for the United States.

Dark Days Ahead for the Lobby

Israel’s troubled trajectory is also causing major headaches for its American supporters. First, there is the matter of choosing between Israel and the United States. This is sometimes referred to as the issue of dual loyalty, but that term is a misnomer. Americans are allowed to have dual citizenship – and in effect, dual loyalty – and this is no problem as long as the interests of the other country are in synch with America’s interests. For decades, Israel’s supporters have striven to shape public discourse in the United States so that most Americans believe the two countries’ interests are identical. That situation is changing, however. Not only is there now open talk about clashing interests, but knowledgeable people are openly asking whether Israel’s actions are detrimental to U.S. security.

The lobby has been scrambling to discredit this new discourse, either by reasserting the standard argument that Israel’s interests are synonymous with America’s or by claiming that Israel – to quote a recent statement by Mortimer Zuckerman, a key figure in the lobby – “has been an ally that has paid dividends exceeding its costs.” A more sophisticated approach, which is reflected in an AIPAC-sponsored letter that 337 congresspersons sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March, acknowledges that there will be differences between the two countries, but argues that “such differences are best resolved quietly, in trust and confidence.” In other words, keep the differences behind closed doors and away from the American public. It is too late, however, to quell the public debate about whether Israel’s actions are damaging U.S. interests. In fact, it is likely to grow louder and more contentious with time.

This changing discourse creates a daunting problem for Israel’s supporters, because they will have to side either with Israel or the United States when the two countries’ interests clash. Thus far, most of the key individuals and institutions in the lobby have sided with Israel when there was a dispute. For example, President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu have had two big public fights over settlements. Both times the lobby sided with Netanyahu and helped him thwart Obama. It seems clear that individuals like Abraham Foxman, who heads the Anti-Defamation League, and organizations like AIPAC are primarily concerned about Israel’s interests, not America’s.

This situation is very dangerous for the lobby. The real problem is not dual loyalty but choosing between the two loyalties and ultimately putting the interests of Israel ahead of those of America. The lobby’s unstinting commitment to defending Israel, which sometimes means shortchanging U.S. interests, is likely to become more apparent to more Americans in the future, and that could lead to a wicked backlash against Israel’s supporters as well as Israel.

The lobby faces yet another challenge: defending an apartheid state in the liberal West is not going to be easy. Once it is widely recognized that the two-state solution is dead and Israel has become like white-ruled South Africa – and that day is not far off – support for Israel inside the American Jewish community is likely to diminish significantly. The main reason is that apartheid is a despicable political system that is fundamentally at odds with basic American values as well as core Jewish values. For sure there will be some Jews who will defend Israel no matter what kind of political system it has. But their numbers will shrink over time, in large part because survey data shows that younger American Jews feel less attachment to Israel than their elders, which makes them less inclined to defend Israel blindly.

The bottom line is that Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state over the long term because it will not be able to depend on the American Jewish community to defend such a reprehensible political order.

Assisted Suicide

Israel is facing a bleak future, yet there is no reason to think that it will change course anytime soon. The political center of gravity in Israel has shifted sharply to the right and there is no sizable pro-peace political party or movement. Moreover, it remains firmly committed to the belief that what cannot be solved by force can be solved with greater force, and many Israelis view the Palestinians with contempt if not hatred. Neither the Palestinians nor any of Israel’s immediate neighbors are powerful enough to deter it, and the lobby will remain influential enough over the next decade to protect Israel from meaningful U.S. pressure.

Remarkably, the lobby is helping Israel commit national suicide while also doing serious damage to American security interests. Voices challenging this tragic situation have grown slightly more numerous in recent years, but the majority of political commentators and virtually all U.S. politicians seem blissfully ignorant of where this is headed, or unwilling to risk their careers by speaking out.

Related stories:

Blog Editor Note: To understand some of the history surrounding Israel, please read an excellent article by Robert Parry, The CIA Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter

In relation to 9/11:

March 19, 2010: Gordon Duff: Sabrosky Interview Ties Israel to 9/11

March 18, 2010: A True “All-American” Betsy Metz Exposes “Treason in America”! A Visibility 9-11 Podcast

December 20, 2009: The “Post-9/11 World” Is A Detriment To Humanity

December 14, 2009: Veterans Group Calls On Soldiers to Refuse Orders to Deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq

December 9, 2009: America’s Terrorist Ally: A Closer Look at Israel’s Role in Terrorism

November 27, 2009: 9/11: Flight 77 Aircraft Hijack Impossible

November 9, 2009: Swedish Member of Parliament: Leading Politicians Support 9/11 Truth Movement

Sirhan Sirhan: In His Own Words

By Steve Lendman

Sirhan Sirhan: In His Own Words

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot, The New York Times headlining:

“Kennedy is Dead, Victim of Assassin; Suspect, Arab Immigrant, Arraigned; Johnson Appoints Panel on Violence”

Sirhan Sirhan was the alleged assassin, convicted, and serving a life sentence at (no pun intended) Pleasant Valley State Prison, CA, despite convincing evidence of his innocence.

In his October 17, 2008 article “The Assassinations of the 1960s as ‘Deep Events,’ ” Peter Dale Scott discussed the killings of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, saying:

“The more that I look at these deep events comparatively, ranging over the past five decades, the more similarities I see between them, and the more I understand them in the light of each other.”

With respect to both Kennedys and King, official accounts obscured the events, suppressed key facts, enough to question the guilt of the alleged suspects, concealing the real culprits and why men of this stature were assassinated – what Scott called “some continuing and hostile force within our society…”

In his June 13, 2010 article titled, “JFK and RFK: The Plots that Killed Them, The Patsies that Didn’t,” James Fetzer debunked the official accounts, saying:

“we are looking at staged events that fit into a recurrent pattern in US and world history where innocent individuals (or ‘patsies’) are baited and framed for cover-up purposes,” RFK’s killing “in part intended to prevent a reinvestigation into his brother’s death….The assassinations of RFK and JFK were both conspiracies. Both involved the destruction of evidence. Both involved the fabrication of evidence. Both involved framing their patsies. Both involved complicity by local officials. Both involved planning by the CIA. Both were used to deny the American people (their) right to be governed by leaders of their own choosing.” Both put a myth to the rule of law, judicial fairness, and democratic freedoms.

Both crimes and MLK’s assassination eliminated figures dark American forces wanted silenced, blaming innocent “patsies” for the killings, Sirhan Sirhan for RFK’s. Fetzer’s article explains numerous important facts:

— multiple shots targeted him, more “than could have come from Sirhan Sirhan’s gun” that was also the wrong caliber;

— “RFK was shot behind the right ear from about 1.5 inches, but Sirhan was never that close and always in front of him;”

— the coroner and LAPD reports were contradictory;

— LAPD “engaged in massive destruction of evidence from the pantry of the hotel because ‘it would not fit into a card file,’ ” as part of an official cover-up to blame Sirhan for a state-sponsored assassination, evidence suggesting CIA involvement in both Kennedy brothers and MLK killings;

— Sirhan’s gun was a “.22 caliber, eight-round revolver (serial number H-53725);”

— he “emptied his weapon from a location in front of Bobby Kennedy;”

— Dr. Thomas Hoguchi’s autopsy “showed RFK was hit by four bullets, all of which were fired from behind at upward angles;

— five others were wounded by separate shots;”

— as many as 13 shots were fired;

— Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy “did not point to Sirhan as the killer;”

— an eyewitness, DeWayne Wofler, “testified that the bullets fired at RFK had come from an entirely different gun,” not Sirhan’s;

— a security guard, Eugene Cesar, standing right behind RFK, had a drawn gun of the same caliber as the murder weapon; it was never examined nor was he charged; and

— “a woman in a polka dot dress” left the scene hurriedly, “shouting, “We shot him! We shot him! We shot Kennedy!”

In their book, “The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy,” Jonn Christian and William Turner made a convincing case “indicting Cesar for the crime,” concluding “that Sirhan may have been firing blanks.”

Fetzer’s article has detailed information on both JFK and RFK assassinations, accessed through the following link:

http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/06/jfk-and-rfk-plots-that-killed-them.html

Below, Sirhan gives his own account of what happened that night and why he was at the Ambassador Hotel.

“My Morning with Sirhan”

On January 21, 2010, Academic Prison Teacher, Gerald B. Reynolds, spent time with Sirhan and wrote it up in detail. An account below follows.

At the Delta Facility library, a prison guard let him in. His ID said Sirhan Sirhan. “He looked at me in a calm way with a half-smile. I looked at him….There was an eerie, prolonged silence.” He’s now 66 years old, 42 of them in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

After another “calm silence….I swiveled in my chair to face Sirhan Sirhan and asked, ‘Did you do it?’ ”

“Did I do what,” he responded.

Reynolds: “You know.”

Sirhan: “What do you want to know?”

Reynolds: “Did you kill Robert F. Kennedy?”

Sirhan: “No, I did NOT kill Robert F. Kennedy!”

Reynolds: “I know you didn’t.”

Sirhan: “How do you know?”

Reynolds explained that he studied the details of his case, learned that RFK was killed at point blank range by a bullet to the back of his head.

“The real assassin appears to be Kennedy’s 26 year old Ace Security Company bodyguard….Thane Eugene Cesar. At least one eye witness claims to have seen Cesar with a smoking gun in his hand immediately after Kennedy fell to the floor. An audio recording made during the assassination indicates that there were at least 11 shots fired (perhaps more) from possibly three different guns.”

“The conclusion is that Kennedy was shot three times from behind with a fourth bullet passing through his suit coat. The fact that you (Sirhan) were standing in front of Kennedy is undisputed and yet according to the coroner’s report not one bullet entered Robert F. Kennedy from the front of his body.”

Sirhan: “Oh my! I knew this morning when I woke up that God was telling me he had something great in store for me today and this is it! God has sent you to me!….I was beginning to lose hope so you were sent to lift my spirits. Now I can be hopeful again. Thank goodness somebody else knows.”

Reynolds: “Have you ever talked to anybody else in prison that knows the truth of your case?”

Sirhan: “Yes. One person, that’s all….He was one who drives a truck around and empties the dumpsters….I had a job where I had to take the garbage out of the kitchen….to the dumpster….once in a while he would talk to me. He told me he believed I was innocent.”

Reynolds: “Did you talk to this guy often?”

Sirhan: “Actually no. He and I only talked maybe about three times and each time it was only for about five minutes or so.”

He explained that he never met anyone in prison, besides him, who knows. He said friends on the outside set up a web site for him – rfkmustdie.com, with information about him, RFK, and whether CIA operatives killed him, framing Sirhan for the crime.

Reynolds: “Do you have an appeal on file right now?”

Sirhan: “Not now. Everything has run its course. I had a great attorney named Lawrence Teeter….He was a wonderful man and a great attorney. He tried several times to win me an appeal and even just to get a new evidentiary hearing but the courts seemed biased against me. The judges wouldn’t budge….Teeter died in 2005, and I haven’t really tried to work on any appeal since then.”

Yet he feels, one day, he can be cleared and set free. “The truth will win out,” he believes. Earlier he was on San Quentin’s death row for three years. “They thought they were rid of me but then something happened they didn’t plan on.”

Led by Chief Justice Rose Bird, “the California Supreme Court intervened and ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional. The ruling was retroactive and my sentence was commuted to life in prison. They thought I was dead and yet after 41 and a half years I’m still alive!” Now it’s over 42.

But “they stole my life!….I’ve been rotting in that stinking prison for (over four decades) for nothing!….The bastards stole my life….I have been denied parole 13 times. I am scheduled for another parole hearing in 2011. (Against long odds), Maybe if there was a grassroots movement, like perhaps millions of people finding out how the authorities have buried me unjustly, and coming together in demonstrations all over the country they would have to reconsider and let me go.”

Saying to Reynolds, “You do it for me. Become a guest speaker at colleges and universities and speak on my behalf….I hereby give you my permission….I will notify the press of your name and mission.”

Reynolds: “Ah, no, not my name. My name can’t be attached to this. I could get in big trouble. You know the monsters that run this place.”

Sirhan: “OK, I understand. We will keep you anonymous.”

Reynolds offered to make this conversation available to anyone “responsible enough to appreciate it.” Sirhan suggested sending to magazines and newspapers. Reynolds said he’d try, sent it to one on the progressive left that wouldn’t publish it, one reason for discussing it here.

Sirhan also explained he’s Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1944, “alive during the turmoil that erupted when the United Nations stole our country and gave it to the Jews.”

In fact, its 1947 Partition Plan (General Assembly Resolution 181) gave them 56% of historic Palestine, placing Jerusalem (declared a corpus separatum, a separate body) under UN trusteeship as an international city, binding to this day. At the time, Palestinians comprised two-thirds of the population, owning 93% of the land, most of it now stolen. All of it occupied illegally.

Ever since, Israelis treated “my people….like dogs. (They) shoot rockets and tank fire into the West Bank (and Gaza) killing everyone, including women and children. They drop bombs and spray machine gun fire into crowded marketplaces. They are treating my people the same way they were treated by the Nazis….It breaks my heart to see how my people are suffering.”

Reynolds: “So, then, you’re a Muslim?”

Sirhan: “No….I am a Christian. My whole family is Christian….We have been Christians for at least 800 years. We are Palestinian Christians.”

He came to America at age 11, moved to Los Angeles, and settled in Pasadena, attending Altadena’s Eliot Junior High School, graduating from John Muir High School, then completing two years of junior college…”

Reynolds asked if he had any connections to Middle East or organized terrorists?

Sirhan: “No. No way! I am alone. I am by myself. I do have a few people in the West Bank that I correspond with but they are just regular people. I have a brother in Los Angeles. But I definitely do not have any terrorist connections and I am not a member of any groups, any groups at all.”

Spurious prison information circulated that on 9/11, he “gleefully clapped (his) hands and (was) delighted” to see the twin towers collapse, adding that he had confidential information of the impending attack “by a Middle Eastern terrorist organization whose members revere you as an icon and a hero and do everything they can to honor you.”

Sirhan: “Oh my God, that’s ridiculous. I’ve never had anything to do with any terrorist groups. Who said this about me?”

Reynolds: “It was Chief Deputy Warden James Mattingly.”

Sirhan said he’ll sue him for libel and slander, adding he wants to see his evidence. Reynolds asked what he thought of the incident, Sirhan explaining that he cried because his country was attacked and “felt sadness and anger and wanted to punish the people responsible….”

Reynolds: “Sirhan, what were the events that led up to you being in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel on the night” JFK was shot there?

Sirhan: “In the evening, I had something to eat at Bob’s Big Boy. Then later in the evening, I decided to drive downtown….The Jews were going to be having a big party to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Israel’s” Six Day War victory.”

Reynolds: “What did you intend to do once your got there?”

Sirhan: ” I don’t know exactly but I wanted to protest. The Jews should not have been allowed to fill the streets in celebration of stealing more of our land. I can remember driving down Highway 5 with my 22 caliber hand gun lying next to me on the passenger seat.”

Reynolds: “Why did you have a gun with you in the car?”

Sirhan: “I had been shooting at the range earlier that day.”

Reynolds: “Was the gun….out in the open?”

Sirhan: “No, it was in the plastic box it came in, you know, with the cloth, the cleaning rod, and oil.”

Reynolds: “and what did you do when you got downtown?”

Sirhan: “I realized that I was a day early and that the event was to take place the next night. So I just drove back up the freeway.”

Reynolds: “Why did you stop at the Ambassador Hotel?”

Sirhan: “I don’t know. I can’t remember parking and going in there but I must have because I was there.”

Reynolds: “What did you do when you got there?”

Sirhan: “It was hot that night and I was very thirsty. I remember that….I went to the bar and had four drinks within about 15 minutes. I couldn’t seem to get enough to drink….They were Tom Collins’s….(but) I wasn’t drunk. I felt drugged. I think somebody slipped something into my drinks. My legs and arms became rubbery. I remember standing by my car but I couldn’t drive so I went back inside and got some coffee.”

Reynolds: “How did you get downstairs to the pantry?”

Sirhan: “Somebody guided me. I don’t know who.”

Reynolds: “Did you have your gun with you?”

Sirhan: “Yes. When I was in the pantry, the gun was in my hand.”

Reynolds: “Did you know Robert Kennedy was going to be walking toward you?”

Sirhan: “No. I didn’t know where I was and I don’t know how I got there. I was in a state of blackout.”

Reynolds: “You were a Manchurian candidate….It’s something the CIA uses. They assassinate a president, or senator, or anyone they wish, and make it look like some crazed, lone-nut assassin did it. But he has been heavily drugged, possibly with LSD, and undergone intense brainwashing followed by reprogramming. Everything you’re saying about yourself follows the established pattern of the drugged, duped, CIA patsy.”

Sirhan: “They used me, framed me, and they set me up to die.”

Reynolds: “Do you remember firing the gun that was in your hand?”

Sirhan: “I can’t remember. I was blacked out. I remember feeling woozy and it felt like I was falling down….I don’t remember the things that happened that night.”

Reynolds: “Do you remember being led in handcuffs out of the Ambassador Hotel and made to sit in the back seat of a police car?”

Sirhan: “I remember being led away but I didn’t know why they were doing this to me. Nobody told me anything.”

He was interrogated by the police for about 24 hours, detectives telling him he murdered JFK. “They yelled at me. They kept shoving papers at me demanding that I sign…They were documents saying I killed Kennedy. Confession. They insisted I had murdered Robert F. Kennedy and they demanded I confess and sign the papers….At first I resisted, but later I confessed and signed the papers. They broke me down and I told them I would do anything they wanted me to do. I just wanted it to stop.”

After he confessed, he was taken to a cell and allowed to sleep. A court trial followed where his “interrogators convinced me to plead guilty and ask for the death penalty….I told the judge I was guilty and wanted the death penalty,” explaining he was ashamed.

“They made me believe I had murdered Robert Kennedy in cold blood and I was remorseful and ashamed. Everyone said I was guilty. They said I would get the death penalty….no matter what I said or did. They said it was an open and shut case and that I might as well give up. I just wanted to get the whole thing over with and if it meant me being dead, so be it. I didn’t have anything left to live for anyway.”

A trial followed, Sirhan represented by attorney Grant Cooper, a man he called “crooked. He had mafia and CIA connections,” Sirhan explaining what he knew and his mob involvement. “He was (picked) to make sure I was convicted and sent to my death, and Cooper complied because they were planning to kill him” otherwise.

Reynolds asked him to portray what he remembered doing at the Ambassador Hotel. Sirhan stood up, swayed, his arms gently rising, looked straight ahead, then made a gun shape with his right hand, his arm parallel to the ground pretending to shoot, saying:

“At a specific moment, and I can’t remember when or why, I shot my 22 caliber pistol three times. My arms were unsteady but level with the ground. Two of the shots missed. I saw them miss. One of the shots may have bounced off him like a BB. All of a sudden people were grabbing me. They were forcing me down….Did anybody say I reached around behind and shot Robert Kennedy in the back of the head?”

Reynolds: “Nobody.”

Sirhan: “But that’s what I would’ve had to do” to kill him….So, what do you think of me now? Do you think I am crazy like they say?”

Not at all, said Reynolds, Sirhan adding “I am just a man. I am a man just like you. I am trained never to allow an inmate to touch me.”

In parting, he embraced Reynolds, both of them now “secret friends in a desolate place.”

A Final Comment

Evidence strongly suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan were patsies, blamed for state-sponsored assassinations, likely carried out by CIA operatives or hired guns they enlisted.

Jack Ruby, with known mob and police connections, fatally shot Oswald on November 22, 1963. Incarcerated without trial, James Earl Ray died in prison on April 23, 1998, proclaiming his innocence. Sirhan Sirhan has been imprisoned since 1968, despite no evidence proving his guilt.

In these and hundreds more cases in US courts, justice was denied, revealing the myth of the rule of law, under a system absolving high-level crime, getting patsies punished for offenses they didn’t commit, the major media always going along, supporting official accounts without question.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

America Can’t Solve Crises Because It’s a Company-Owned Town

© unknown

By Glen Ford

America Can’t Solve Crises Because It’s a Company-Owned Town

The United States can no longer engage effectively in “nation-building” in the one place on Earth it has a right and duty to do so: at home. These are the lessons of the 2010 Gulf oil catastrophe, the 2008 financial meltdown and the 2005 Katrina horror – disasters that history will rightfully conflate as symptomatic of the fundamental crisis of the rule of Capital. The U.S. has become a company town of speculative and extraction enterprises whose social and physical geography the rulers relentlessly appropriate, monetize and despoil – all with obscene abandon.

At the core of the 100 or so activists that gathered in New Orleans for an Emergency Summit to Stop the Gulf Oil Catastrophe, last weekend, were veterans of the ravages of Disaster Capitalism following Hurricane Katrina. They had seen up close how Capital and its servants at all levels of government organized themselves as a public-private mob to drive Black and poor people from the city. They were witnesses to the crafting of a corporate consensus that the exiled poor should have no rights that conflicted with the imperatives of Capital – no right to return, no right to reclaim their lives, no rights that cannot be superseded by the claims and ambitions of the oligarchs. They had watched as finance Capital’s urban gentrification agenda was near-instantaneously put on fast-forward in New Orleans to ensure the permanent purging of the poor. A kind of perverse anthem seemed to rise from each corporate celebration of the city’s imminent and profitable rebirth: “Free the land – of Black people!”

Now the land and bayous and sea are made hostile to all life by the depraved indifference of voracious extractors who monetized, securitized and derivitaized the Gulf’s most deeply buried oil deposits years before the accursed Deepwater Horizon rig made its last, fatal thrust. The super-deep reservoirs of the Gulf were sold and their oil futures already leveraged to finance yet more assaults on man and nature, even before President Obama’s flip-flop on off-shore drilling in August, 2008, when he had the Democratic nomination in the bag.

Such world-shaping dealings have nothing to do with you and me, nothing to do with notions of democracy, because democracy does not exist in the United States, where finance capital and its extracting, hoarding, manipulating energy cousin, rule. There is no evidence of democracy anywhere that counts – not in the $14-plus trillion transferred directly to Wall Street, mostly by the quasi-public Federal Reserve, while the real economy in general and Black America in particular were stripped and gutted. No notions of an American social compact could deter the ruling class from acting out its pathologies on its own citizens when Katrina presented the opportunity. And no amount of public disgust at BP has moved Obama to behave as if he is beholden to the majority that elected him – for the simple reason that he is not.

Every element of the American political process is firmly in the hands of the oligarchy. The public only became aware of Barack Obama’s existence after he had been thoroughly vetted by corporate mechanisms of all kinds, including but by no means limited to the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council (see Bruce Dixon, Black Commentator, June 5, 2003). Obama’s informal – but quite binding – “contracts” with the oligarchs were concluded before he set foot in the U.S. Senate. The public was the last to know that the obscure politician Obama had become a “viable” prospect by corporate acclimation in the only “race” that counts – the early, business fund-raising contest. (The corporate consensus included BP, which gave Obama more money than any other candidate, and Wall Street, which was even more generous to the Nation’s First Black President.)

The U.S. government is divorced from the people because it is a creature of Capital. The three recent mega-crises are both the products and the illuminators of that wholly corrupt relationship. It is, therefore, quite logical that the activists of the Emergency Summit to Stop the Gulf Oil Catastrophe appear to direct their demands to both BP and Obama:

1. Stop oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Full compensation, retraining and new employment, including public works, for all affected,
2. The government and entire oil industry must allocate all necessary resources to stop and clean up the spill, prevent oil from hitting shore, protect wildlife, treat injured wildlife, and repair all devastation. Full support, including by compensation, must be given to peoples’ efforts on all these fronts and to save the Gulf.
3. No punishment to those taking independent initiative; no gag orders on people hired, contracted, or who volunteer; those responsible for this crime against the environment and the people should be prosecuted.
4. Full mobilization of scientists and engineers. Release scientific and technical data to the public; no more lying and covering up. Immediately end use of dispersants; full, open scientific evaluation of nature and impact of dispersants. Fund all necessary scientific and medical research.
5. Full compensation for all losing livelihood and income from the disaster.
6. Provide necessary medical services to those suffering health effects of the spill. Protect the health of and provide necessary equipment for everyone involved in clean up operations. Full disclosure of medical and scientific studies about the effects of the oil disaster.

No Nation-Building, Here

We are living in the late stages of overwhelming dominance (hegemony) of finance capital – and, secondarily, the oil and gas money-machines. It is a period characterized by destruction of the domestic manufacturing base and frenzied predation of the public sector. The mission of Capital’s servants in government is, therefore, to assist Wall Street and the energy sector in the fastest possible conversion of natural and social resources to private exploitation.

Those among the public and media that still harbor the illusion that government is there to serve the people, despite seeing so much evidence to the contrary, speak of a national “malaise,” a loss of purpose, a temporary failure or flaw in the national character. What nonsense! What we are witnessing is the destructive behavior of a predatory class that sees its future in trillion-dollar derivative bets; commodification of every conceivable resource (food, water, air?) and manipulation of every commodity market; privatization of every possible state function (schools, safety nets); constant expansion of the “market” in the maintenance of empire; and the “primitive accumulation” of the spoils of war.

For such a class, there is no room, rhyme or reason for anything resembling domestic nation-building, and they will not assign their servants in government to any such project. Worse than simply being on their own, the people face the same oligarchic enemy at the commanding heights of both the public and private sectors: the Democrat and the banks, the Republican and Big Oil, and vice versa – and all of them aligned with the military complex.

The pace of disaster-making is quickening in America, which indicates something very much like “the end is near.”

Maybe these overlapping pyrotechnics of horror – Katrina, the Crash of 2008, the Great Gusher in the Gulf – are necessary to teach Americans the nature of class war, that it is, indeed, hell. At any rate, the oligarchs can be counted on to accelerate the processes of their own demise. It is up to the people to save themselves, through organizing; there are no guarantees.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

US Fear Factory Kills Free Speech

By Yvonne Ridley

US Fear Factory Kills Free Speech

AMERICA is still embarrassed by the infamous McCarthy Hearings which ruined the lives of thousands of innocents during the Fifties.

Anyone then, suspected of being linked to communism was arrested, interrogated and either imprisoned or forced to give names of others suspected of communist tendencies. And so the fear and intimidation spread like a great plague across the USA.

Names were blacklisted, careers and lives ruined as the authorities ruthlessly traded on peoples’ fears, paranoia and weaknesses.

With little or no evidence people were found guilty and anyone daring to question any of the actions and the wild accusations also had suspicion cast upon them. But hey folks, that was back in the Fifties and various administrations resolved the same insane hysteria, hatred and fears would never again cast a dark shadow across the Land of the Free.

Sadly, the Salem-style witch hunts have returned, but the new villains are no longer communists. The Red Scare has been replaced by those who shout Viva Palestina!

From the very highest law-makers right down to ordinary John Doe there is an irrational fear so great that it holds many of them hostage in their homes, workplaces and schools.

Their vision has become so skewed they are unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not.

And so when they’re told that heavily armed Israeli soldiers shoot peace activists at near point blank range because they are defending themselves, few dare to question.

When they see babies dying on the Gaza Strip because of lack of medical equipment because of the Israeli-enforced blockade, they remain silent.

And even fewer dare to criticize Israel.

Millions upon millions of Americans wake up frightened, go to sleep frightened while others feed on the hatred and bile spewed out by politicians, preachers, academics and the media who tell them Israel is good and Palestine is bad.

There are some politicians who want to see the heroic Americans who took part in the Viva Palestina convoys and the recent Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla prosecuted as terrorists.

Today I trolled through some of the pages in the American media and there, among the column inches, are stories that perfectly illustrate the Zionist Fear Factory in operation.

The Los Angeles Times reveals that UC Irvine has told its university students that the Muslim Student Union will be suspended for one year because it dared to criticize Israel and protested during a speech given by the Israeli Ambassador. So there you have it – freedom of speech is now banned.

The unprecedented action also sends out a chilling message to students across the USA who might consider demonstrating, rallying or protesting against the Zionist state and its supporters. Free speech, it seems, is a thing of the past in Barack Obama’s America.

And should you be in any doubt, read a story about the latest decision to emerge from the US Supreme Court.

In a majority 6-3 ruling it becomes virtually impossible for anyone to put food into the mouths of malnourished babies in Gaza or to give money to a charity to do the humanitarian act for you.

Insane as it sounds, it is now a crime in America to work for peace and human rights in Gaza because the day-to-day running of The Strip is carried out by the democratically-elected Hamas government. Therefore it would be virtually impossibly to bypass Hamas to operate in Gaza.

In an astonishing McCarthy-like ruling any American who even offers advice to banned organizations like Hamas, including legal assistance and information on conflict resolution, will be prosecuted as terrorists. Be afraid, be very afraid … this is happening in the USA, here and now.

Barack Obama’s barmy administration reckons that even giving advice intended for peaceful purposes will amount to “material support” for terrorism. “The supreme court has ruled that human rights advocates, providing training and assistance in the nonviolent resolution of disputes, can be prosecuted as terrorists,” said David Cole, a Georgetown university law professor who argued the case before the court. In the name of fighting terrorism, the court has said that the first amendment [on free speech] permits congress to make it a crime to work for peace and human rights. That is wrong.”

The ruling is designed to intimidate Palestinian supporters and their fundraising activity. Some have already been prosecuted and jailed for raising cash for social groups dealing with issues such as housing and welfare in Gaza.

The government’s case was enthusiastically argued in February by Elena Kagan, who is now the Obama administration’s nominee to the supreme court. She said: “Hizb’Allah builds bombs. Hizb’Allah also builds homes. What Congress decided was when you help Hizb’Allah build homes, you are also helping Hizb’Allah build bombs. That’s the entire theory behind the statute.”

Well if that’s the case an interesting legal situation looms on the horizon – unless all of this legislation is purely designed for Palestinian supporters.

A Congressional subcommittee, led by Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, has uncovered evidence showing US tax dollars are funding the Taliban.

The source is a Pentagon-issued $2.1 billion dollar contract called Host Nation Trucking, which pays for the movement of food and supplies to some 200 American bases. It appears Afghan security firms have been extorting as much as $4 million a week and then funneling the spoils to warlords and the Taliban in return for a safe passage. In short, the US is financing the enemy and undermining international efforts to stabilize the country.

Hmm, isn’t this material support for terrorism? I think we need to have the Commander in Chief charged with immediate affect.

Yvonne Ridley is one of the founders of Viva Palestina and European President of the international Muslim Women’s Union

Related stories:

Blog Editor Note: See how the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews collects money for their terrorists. The following video details how the scam is run on innocent Americans and others.

Part one: Israeli Money Scam
Part two: Israeli Money Scam

America, Apartheid or Apocalypse?

By Gordon Duff

America, Apartheid or Apocalypse

IS DISSOLUTION, DISMEMBERMENT AND DELEGITIMACY INEVITABLE FOR AMERICA?

To millions of Americans, the “end times” seem to be on us.  The BP disaster in the Gulf may leave 25% of America virtually uninhabitable, eco-systems destroyed for sure but maybe much more, a destroyed sea floor, toxic gas clouds moving inland and warnings of something worse, a geological disaster of biblical proportions sitting offshore like a ticking time bomb.  Millions of American believe the president is a foreign born Muslim, a puppet of the terrorists while millions believe he is working for Israel.  Every speech, every state visit, everything done is seen to support one side or another, sometimes both.  The destruction of the American presidency is only part of it, part of a program of racial division, fear, hate and a descent into class warfare and violence.

The end result of the disasters, political infighting, religious extremism, the total collapse of trust in America’s system of government and the infiltration of terrorist elements into every institution, America’s military and political core, financial terrorists working to destroy America’s standard of living, its industrial base, its currency and, eventually the last of its freedoms will be the division of America, starting with an apartheid state and ending in “Balkanization” and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal being unleashed on the world.  This has been heard before, it is a story that faith based broadcasting has been sending out to the American people for the past thirty years.  The biblical flood began when the money disappeared.

ECONOMIC APOCALYPSE

The serious side is the economic meltdown.  Even with the hundreds of billions Americans borrowed to give to our “banksters” who our ”congress critters” decided were too big to allow to fail, we have no banks, simply depositories for stolen money while it waits to be shipped overseas.  Money is taken in, none loaned out, not for jobs in America anyway.  All the government did was to push the burgeoning debt left us by the Bush/Cheney failures even higher, topping $13 trillion dollars this month, money we owe to pay back money we never got from people who had no right to print it in the first place.

More and more Americans are becoming aware of the fact that our system, the Federal Reserve, is nothing but a racket where foreign bankers, all thinly disguised Rothschilds, sell us our own money while maneuvering us into debt, really a massive mortgage on America’s future, we can never keep up the payments on.  America has been systematically destabilized, the most powerful nation in the history of the earth, living on borrowed money and, frankly, borrowed time.

TOO MUCH TO STOMACH, BP BUYING OUR GOVERNMENT AND LIEBERMAN CONTROLLING THE INTERNET

When Americans look at television and see half their politicians crying about BP, a company that laid waste to more of the planet than any in history, they see a world upside down.  They know their politicians take money, everyone knows this, but to think they would be brazen enough to scream out “yes, we are crooks, what are you going to do about it?” is more than that.  It is an announcement that anyone in government can do anything they want, anything, and never answer for it, not even face reelection problems.  The more crooked a politician, the more favorable press he gets, the more the Israel lobby supports him, the more the Tea Baggers support him, the more “heroic” he is portrayed by the pundits and fear mongers.

Things have gotten so bad that Senator Josef Liebermann (I-srael) has introduced a bill that would allow the internet to be closed down in case of “emergency.”  Liberman talks about terrorism or espionage but the real problem was that the ”corporate press” got caught lying over the Freedom Flotilla massacre and millions of Americans have turned to the internet for the news, news sometimes bizarre, conspiratorial and fringe, often however, much more accurate and truthful than the newspapers and TV networks.  His bill, written in Tel Aviv, is designed to make Americans who depend on the internet for news and communication feel helpless, isolated and ready to turn to violence.

Picture yourself going to the computer.  Your email is blocked, nothing in, nothing out.  You are looking at one screen, the same thing on every computer in the country.  The logo, a simply, DHS, Department of Homeland Security.  In the middle of the screen is a new search engine, “Safety Friendly Family Approved Searches.”  Below that are approved news stories, linking you to ABC, CNN, FOX, CBS, MSNBC, the WSJ, NYT, WP and Family Security Matters.org.  Below that is a warning:

“Your microphone and webcam are in active mode.  Do not attempt to mute, shield or disable under penalty of law.”

Senator Lieberman is trying to start a civil war, more than just planting the seeds, this is a provocation, a clear and present danger to American freedom.

BUILDING THE MECHANISM OF APOCALYPSE, THE MOVE TO APARTHEID

Let’s talk about “social cohesion.”  Israel has shipped their five million Palestinians to Jordan, Lebanon or Gaza to have social cohesion, one country, one race, one religion, no room for outsiders, no matter how long they have been around.  America did the same thing with the Indians (Native Americans), eventually wiping most of them out in a series of wars, treaties and resettlement programs.  However, America’s problems with social cohesion are far greater than Israel’s or even those of America during the pioneering years.  Today, we are a society divided on, not only race and ethnicity but region, religion and, worst of all, extremist political views.  The government that is supposed to join us together and the constitution that is meant to guarantee our belief in equal justice for all have been ground into the dust, twisted, bought, obliterated and disfigured.

America is heading for a meltdown.  Another civil war is possible, even likely.  40% of states are bankrupt.  This means they can’t pay police or teachers or fix roads except with borrowed federal money.  It also means their pension plans, all that is meant to keep millions of Americans out of dire poverty in retirement, are gone.  The states lost their pension plans in the 2007  collapse.  Only federal bail outs, which aren’t going to happen, will cover this massive shortfall.  Eventually, workers, hundreds of thousands of families who worked and saved for financial security will be told it isn’t there anymore.  This isn’t the future, it happened, its real and it can’t be hidden very long.

There is no federal government to step in and carry the load.  Wars have left it drowning and political corruption has crippled America to where it is no more stable than many of the nations of Africa.  Hiding behind years of scare tactics, terrorism, tiny countries with nuclear weapons, or the real problem of Mexico’s collapse under the rule of drug lords and the millions flooding into our country, financial criminals have looted America and a worldwide criminal conspiracy of financial criminals, headquartered in Tel Aviv and New York, protected by congress and Mossad death squads traveling the world with German passports.  The press, something we generously call either the “mainstream media” or “corporate controlled press” isn’t just a mechanism for censorship, its part of a long term effort to destroy the faith Americans have in their own ability as people to rule themselves and trust, not the criminals presented to vote for in elections, but their own ability to reject the lot of them.

THE MANY FACES OF THE AMERICAN TALIBAN

Radicalization of America has been the goal all along.  Who would have ever believed that internet conspiracy theory would end up being, not only more believable, but more fair and certainly more balanced than traditional media sources that have been discredited to such a degree in recent months.  A key area of division in America has been religion.  For awhile, financed by the Israeli lobby and the “bankster” criminal elements, the “neo-cons” were able to build a bridge uniting Evangelical Christians with Christian Zionists, groups that are, from a scriptural standpoint light years apart.  To this, the abortion/women’s rights issue drew many Catholics to abandon their traditional values and join with these groups which had shared little in common with them.  Catholics are urban, typically well educated with a Euro-centric culture, while Evangelicals shun higher education for religious instruction.

The first American Taliban may have been the Puritans but they have been eclipsed in American history by the atavism of the Mormon Church, whose beliefs deeply parallel the most frightening and profound heresies of Islam, church over state, no rights for women and an undercurrent of violence unrivaled by any sect seen in a western society since the Albigensians.  Mormons, chased across America, seized much of the Southwest and set up a defacto government, one with little in common with the rest of America.  As the Mormon regions of America come into conflict with the massive Hispanic Catholic population, the roots of dissolution, border wars, draconian race laws and eventually full apartheid will take hold.  It will start in Arizona and spread through the American West.

Perhaps the largest threat is the religious theory of Zionism.  Originally a race theory based on Jewish racial superiority and political supremacy, offshoots of Zionism have entered Evangelical Christian belief systems creating the heresy known as Christian Zionism.  Original Zionism, a violent and radical offshoot of Judaism is more racial than religious or political in nature.  Though a minority of American Jews practice Zionistic beliefs, most are coerced into either financial support or even into sending children into military servitude in Israel in order to avoid social ostracism.

As the result of the founding of Israel in Judea or Palestine, a slow decline in social,cultural and intellectual traditions has infected the Jewish community in America, one known for the advancement of social causes and broad advocacy of American freedoms.  With the increased radicalization of America and her economic decline, many Jews have looked to Israel as an anchor, failing to take into account the role Israel has played in the onset of the entropy they fear.  This situation could be equated with burning down your home to save your garage.

Christian Zionists have only anecdotal similarities with the Judaic variety.  They tend to be rural, poorly educated, envious and resentful, not only of what they call “elites” but many other groups as well but primarily African Americans.  The basis of Christian Zionism is hatred of African Americans.  All other monikers or descriptions are a subterfuge to escape the labels these same groups had been associated with in the past, Klan, racist or bigot.

Hiding behind tortured and obscure biblical references and using bizarre stories of disaster and apocalypse, stories oddly well supported by current times, these simple rural people unable to grasp much of the complex modern world.  They have been melded into a political front serving the interests of Israel, a state they understand poorly, and the class of economic criminals, many associated with Israel but also with the movement in America called “conservatism.”  Their political role has been to serve as a vocal and sometimes violent front for the economic oligarchy, a very real monied elite, that has assumed broad control over America’s poliitical and social life.

THE DOOM SO MANY PRAYED SO HARD FOR IS HERE

America’s security has been tied, for 65 years, to NATO.  Today, our newspaper and TV gurus are telling us to dissolve NATO.  With the breakdown of the alliance between Israel and Turkey, Israel, who controls 444 members of congress and 50% of America’s wealth has demanded that America either throw Turkey out of NATO or leave herself.  As yet, Israel is allowing the United States to remain in the United Nations because America’s security council veto, used hundreds of times to save Israel from sanctions for war crimes or nuclear proliferation violations, is vital to the welfare of Israel.

This week, Israel was discovered on the verge of bombing Iran.  Little real damage would have been done.  Iran has no nuclear infrastructure tied to weapons manufacture.  The intent would be, as Israel had planned it, to enter Iran from the north where there are few defenses, bomb useless and remote targets, safe targets so all planes could return and claim a major victory, destroying that which did not exist.  As Saudi Arabia has already been set up as the fall guy, said to have allowed the attack in advance, something the Saudis deny, they would become hated among Muslim nations.

Israel’s plan is to force Iran to attack Saudi Arabia, close the Straits of Hormuz and push America and Western Europe into total collapse.  With 60% of the world’s oil supply eliminated, world financial and currency markets would collapse and the world’s armaments industry would explode with orders.  Israel is the third largest exporter of weapons.  Israel prides itself as the inventor of “game theory,” the method of strategic planning making use of deception, manipulation, “false flag attacks,” assassinations, bribery and blackmail in a complex chess match meant to bring the world to a chaotic state subject to their mathematical models.  Israel is filled with Nobel Prize winners.  This is what they work on.

The apocalypse that Christian Zionists prayed for, the “end times” though to begin with a series of natural disasters has been hurried along.  Pushing for a nuclear war has always been a part of it but the possibility, not yet proven, that the BP disaster in the Gulf could eventually turn the Gulf Stream and leave Europe uninhabitable is a continual subject of discussion with America’s religious broadcast community.

HOW DESTABILIZATION BECOMES APARTHEID

With collapse in the trust in America’s institutions, a Supreme Court with five neo-Fascist judges, congress with 444 “Israeli-firsters,” and millions of Americans believing the president is the Anti-Christ, one more economic disaster, the one Israel is attempting to stage right now, would make the 2007 collapse seem like a joke.  With the broadcast media having worked the country into fear, distrust and ready to pick up weapons to use against their neighbors, all carefully staged, the scripts have been passed out.

You will know when you see the face of Sarah Palin on every network, perhaps in a pantsuit with a military cut.  Do you think she will be wearing a beret?  There will be a flag behind her and the Star Spangled Banker will fade to silence as she makes the announcements.

Nuclear arsenals will be seized by patriotic groups from within our military, led by Israeli commandos and helped by our armies of private defense contractors.  Those secret “FEMA/UN” prisons will suddenly turn out to be real, with local police in riot gear, American flags on their cars and uniforms, hunting down journalists, activists and, eventually, the educated.

Senator Lieberman will pull the plug on the internet.  Private logins will carry arrest lists.

After the educated classes and politially progressive groups are rounded up, then the African Americans and Hispanics will be cataloged, given travel restrictions.  Pass laws will be enacted.

Then, surprise of surprises, they will start rounding up Jews.

Welcome to the hell of your own making.

In the Middle of Chaos

© Chris Bird

By Jon Bourn
Editor of Jerico Rendezvous Blog

In the Middle of Chaos

We live in a world where we must be able to put ourselves into the lives of others, like the old saying, “in someones shoes”, so to speak, in order to determine what one should do in respect to others. This empathic nature defeats what is perceived as the cooperative, which is really just corporatization, and the manifestation of the criminal state where power generated through empathy no longer exists, a system that has no ground level failsafe. It is historically thought that unions would heal the methodology, but the white house remains obstructing the flow of empathy for the existing hegemony.

Cooperation is presumably only sought up hill, a defective and dying method, already proven and elaborated to fail, as here by Tom Engelhardt.

John Kozy also describes this state in a recent article, “The Psychopathic Criminal Enterprise Called America” where the adjective “criminal” has been bound by the malefactor.

When corporations are accused of wrongdoing, they often reply that what they did was legal, but legal is not a synonym for right. When criminals gain control, they legalize criminality.

Unless the government of the United States changes its behavior, this nation is doomed. No one in government seems to realize that dissimulation breeds distrust, distrust breeds suspicion, and suspicion eventually arouses censure. Isn’t that failure of recognition by the establishment a sign of criminal psychopathology?

The obvious example of suspicion was recently exhibited in Destin, Florida in relation to the criminal state in specifically how it cooperates to suppress the damaging effects in bizarre fashion. Just as Noam Chomsky outlined in his elaboration of the middle, the sanity clause will not hold up. The same goes for examples in nature. Some insects destroy others of their own kind, they are referred to as pests. Today, they are your representatives who vote to destroy others, a feature that is unique to the criminal state.

Propagandists do their work in breaking down distrust where suspicion is aroused. Events like in Destin blow that out of proportion. This medium has been disrupted elsewhere to some degree, here are a couple of examples. In the midst of the left as in the matrix, we have this example at the Signs of the Times. However, on the right, the example is cooperatively arranged, it is called a tea party. Both of these examples are strongly attached to the system where suspicion is handled, and censure does not exist, the final and necessary element for empathy to blossom.

With that said, most still do not understand their innate pathos and its associations with that of the system. Most continue to turn their televisions on; continue to absorb the propaganda they do not recognize. They do not consider their feelings are their own and loose touch with their being and become an cooperative expression of the system rather then themselves. Labor is not nourished, the system is the baby to drill. Just think for a minute, has this not been the American way?

The system is consumption stipulated by profit alone as recently elaborated on the televised news where it was hinted in the reconstruction of Louisiana. Truly, the real problems are much more complicated and our continued global consumption must cease for the emancipation of the indigenous people. They are the true owners.

To break up the intelligence, pictures are painted as public affairs, such as the melting pot of conspriacy theories, to combat this esoteric element where a strong censure will begin to develop, and eventual freedom from that mental slavery. Oddly in the Gulf, the inept will accept that breathing deadly chemicals will suffice, and that living in its perpetual midst is acceptable. Some even believe we come from a supreme being, we are of the gods, and deserve our lands which have all been settled. All this without the blessing of nature, the systemic holy body is propped, and also without realizing the awful danger of god like productions that opposes the ability to discern reality, similarly expressed in the news where it is said that Obama will save the day in the Gulf disaster; these are thwarted with endless nonsense which serves as entertainment for the chaotic void.

This is also recently outlined in an interview with Peter Phillips of Project Censored with Boiling Frogs where a hyper reality is constructed effectively stopping the brain from functioning, and the ability to detect obstruction; the status quo of profits. Obstructively, the system provides the sales, and the means by which system value is made whether it is of real value or not. The nettlesome nature relieves the observer that a empathic social structure must exist, justice will come out of the blue, and one may comfortably keep shopping for more.

However, those in power know they are now in deep shit, and their bureaucratic response is to bury their greed with austerity in a last ditch effort to keep the demon alive, one that is now consuming the essence of nature whole.

These measures and escrows are like a snake who must shed its skin so that it may slip off to another yachting event. Many recognize the damage but are left helpless by the criminal enterprise.

Conclusively, our society must spread the funds on the ground level fairly, or eventually and inevitably, they will come for you, as expressed with imperialism.

With the elections quickly coming up, we can already sense an attempt to change nothing is at hand. It is time to censure those and to keep fighting to make others aware of the damage being done by the divisive political culture, a price our children cannot pay to those who have no empathy for mankind. It has come to the point of realizing that our children are much smarter than we are, as they would already tell you that war and hegemony are not approved. You can’t approve them in the current environment.

Numbers should make us strong, not destroy us or make us ill. We have lost our will to empathize with life through deviant methods set in place to obstruct justice. Our will to become one must prevail and to blow the whistle as loudly as possible, it’s in the spirit of the dancing bee.

Obama cuts deal to shield BP assets

By Tom Eley

Obama cuts deal to shield BP assets

President Barack Obama reiterated his defense of oil giant BP after a White House meeting with the company’s CEO Tony Hayward and board chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg.

After the meeting, Obama and BP announced the establishment of an independently operated escrow account, the Independent Claims Facility, funded by up to $20 billion paid out over the next four years. BP said it would delay dividend payouts over the remainder of the year estimated at $10 billion. Other details of the escrow account remain vague.

The US media presented the meeting and announcement as a humbling of BP. It was nothing of the sort.

In fact, the meeting was a choreographed event with two purposes: to diffuse popular anger against both BP and the Obama administration, and to assure the financial markets that BP is in no danger of bankruptcy or criminal prosecution. There will be no serious consequences for the disaster that killed 11 workers on April 20 and has since pumped upwards of 60 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Even were it clear that the $20 billion will really be made available to the blowout’s many economic victims—and it is not—this is a preposterously small sum for a catastrophe whose real cost will run into the hundreds of billions, if not trillions. All the costs of environmental cleanup are to be paid out of this fund, according to the Financial Times. There can be no doubt that this alone will far surpass $20 billion.

The deal ensures that the overwhelming burden of the costs of the disaster will be borne by the government, and ultimately the working class.

“I’m absolutely confident BP will be able to meet its obligations to the Gulf Coast and to the American people,” Obama said in a short press conference after the meeting. “BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all of our interests that it remain so.”

With these words, the Obama administration indicated that it would not seek to force a BP bankruptcy, let alone seize the company, and its goal is that BP continue to be a profitable concern, paying out dividends and gargantuan executive salaries for years to come.

The financial markets were cheered by Obama’s comments. In the hours after the press conference BP’s share price increased sharply, then finished the day up about 22 cents.

Though the administration had done nothing to punish BP, Obama had been under pressure from financial circles to throw it a lifeline. The preceding weeks had seen BP shares tumble by half and on Tuesday Fitch downgraded the company’s credit rating by six notches.

The escrow account is meant to shield BP from potentially hundreds of billions, or even trillions, in damages. While both Obama and BP promised that the account did not mean a $20 billion cap on liability had been put in place, the Independent Claims Facility is a preemptive blow against the tens of thousands of lawsuits BP is likely to face over the coming years.

While it remains extremely vague, the escrow account will be BP’s first line of defense in determining what are “legitimate claims,” a phrase both Obama and company executives have repeatedly used. Those claimants deemed “illegitimate” might turn to the court system for redress, but having been ruled unfounded by a supposedly neutral observer, they will have a black mark hanging over them, and US courts are already notorious for defending corporate privilege.

This is the fate that awaits the blowout’s financial victims. Millions of Gulf Coast residents are likely to suffer financially through layoffs which will ripple through the economy far beyond the fishing and tourism industries, through declining home values in a region already devastated by the real estate collapse, and through, in all probability, an epidemic of health problems.

If there are 10 million such victims—less than the combined population of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, the three states hardest-hit so far—the miserly $20 billion escrow account would mean a mere $2,000 per person.

The oil blowout’s victims on the Gulf Coast can take little comfort in Obama’s selection to oversee the fund, Kenneth Feinberg. Over the past ten years, Feinberg has become a favored “fixer” of the US government.

Feinberg was selected to distribute funds from an escrow account for the US victims of the September, 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. This financial settlement was viewed as a crucial component of a broader effort to block any inquiry into the still unexplained stand-down of the US military-intelligence apparatus leading up to the attacks.

And it was Feinberg who was given the role of Obama administration “pay czar,” tasked with putting on a show of limiting pay and bonuses for the multi-millionaire executives at Wall Street firms that had received Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout funding. The limits set by Congress on pay restrictions meant that Feinberg’s role was purely symbolic.

Obama’s statement that he intends to see to it that BP remain a viable company puts the lie to the claim that the escrow fund will be independent. Feinberg’s real task will be to protect BP and deny the just demands of the people. As an unelected appointee, Feinberg will be free from “political pressure”—i.e., he will face no consequences from popular anger when he turns down claims.

Like his Oval Office speech from the evening before, Obama’s remarks at Wednesday’s press conference might as well have been written by BP’s public relations department. There was nothing said that the firm could possibly have found objectionable.

Even his own rendering of the conversation with Svanberg—Obama did not meet privately with the widely-hated Hayward—revealed that this was no “showdown,” as it was presented in the US media.

Obama said in his press conference that he told Svanberg to remember those who have been devastated by the blowout. “Keep in mind those individuals, that they are desperate, that some of them, if they don’t get relief quickly, may lose businesses that have been in their families for two or three generations,” the president said, quoting his own plea. “And the chairman assured me that he would keep them in mind.”

In other words, Obama met with Svanberg, not as an advocate for an outraged population demanding justice, punishment or compensation, but as a supplicant, pleading with the chairman of the oil giant. It was, incredibly, Obama’s first meeting with any high-ranking BP official in the 58 days since the blowout took place. Perhaps it was the earliest he could get on their appointment calendar.

Obama also said that BP would put in place a $100 million fund to compensate oil rig workers who lost their jobs as a result of Obama’s six-month moratorium on deep-sea drilling, which BP had indicated last week it would oppose. Announcement of the measure was a political boost for Obama, who has been attacked by Republicans over the moratorium, which in fact applied to only a tiny share of the rigs operating the Gulf.

Svanberg was even allowed to present BP as a caring company. “I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are—are greedy companies or don’t care, but that is not the case in BP,” said the Swede, known in his homeland for eliminating tens of thousands of jobs at the mobile phone company Ericsson. “We care about the small people.”

In fact BP’s criminal disregard for the health and safety of “small people” and the environment is richly documented, before and after the blowout. Even as Svanberg was uttering these words, new reports were emerging from the Gulf Coast of private security guards and Coast Guard soldiers preventing media from visiting public beaches and waters.

Related stories:

Blog Editor Note: The figures being quoted for the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf have seemingly been inaccurate, so a word of caution is advised on believing those figures. It is more likely that these figures are under estimated.

June 17, 2010: Kick Ass or Buy Gas? How Taxpayers Are Subsidizing BP’s Disaster Through the Pentagon

June 17, 2010: US expands Gulf of Mexico no-fishing area

June 17, 2010: “You Should Be in Prison”: Protester Interrupts BP Hearing

June 17, 2010: BP’s $20 Billion Spill Fund Echoes in Bhopal Justice Cry

June 17, 2010: Four Ways BP and Officials Are Working to Suppress the Outrageous Facts About the Gulf Disaster

June 16, 2010: BP bows to Obama and cancels its dividends

Call the Politburo, We’re in Trouble: Entering the Soviet Era in America

By Tom Engelhardt

Call the Politburo, We’re in Trouble: Entering the Soviet Era in America

Mark it on your calendar. It seems we’ve finally entered the Soviet era in America.

You remember the Soviet Union, now almost 20 years in its grave. But who gives it a second thought today? Even in its glory years that “evil empire” was sometimes referred to as “the second superpower.” In 1991, after seven decades, it suddenly disintegrated and disappeared, leaving the United States — the “sole superpower,” even the “hyperpower,” on planet Earth — surprised but triumphant.

The USSR had been heading for the exits for quite a while, not that official Washington had a clue. At the moment it happened, Soviet “experts” like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (then director of the CIA) still expected the Cold War to go on and on. In Washington, eyes were trained on the might of the Soviet military, which the Soviet leadership had never stopped feeding, even as its sclerotic bureaucracy was rotting, its economy (which had ceased to grow in the late 1970s) was tanking, budget deficits were soaring, indebtedness to other countries was growing, and social welfare payments were eating into what funds remained. Not even a vigorous, reformist leader like Mikhail Gorbachev could staunch the rot, especially when, in the late 1980s, the price of Russian oil fell drastically.

Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military — and its military adventure in Afghanistan — when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it. In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating miscalculation. They mistook military power for power on this planet. Armed to the teeth and possessing a nuclear force capable of destroying the Earth many times over, the Soviets nonetheless remained the vastly poorer, weaker, and (except when it came to the arms race) far less technologically innovative of the two superpowers.

In December 1979, perhaps taking the bait of the Carter administration whose national security advisor was eager to see the Soviets bloodied by a “Vietnam” of their own, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan to support a weak communist government in Kabul. When resistance in the countryside, led by Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and backed by the other superpower, only grew, the Soviets sent in more troops, launched major offensives, called in air power, and fought on brutally and futilely for a decade until, in 1989, long after they had been whipped, they withdrew in defeat.

Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist. For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.” If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t. (And if you don’t already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the U.S., you should.)

In Washington, the Bush administration — G.H.W.’s, not G.W.’s — declared victory and then left the much ballyhooed “peace dividend” in the nearest ditch. Caught off guard by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington’s consensus policymakers drew no meaningful lessons from it (just as they had drawn few that mattered from their Vietnam defeat 16 years earlier).

Quite the opposite, successive American administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin. They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to U.S. global power still was the care and feeding of the American military and the military-industrial complex that went with it. As the years passed, that military would be sent ever more regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet.

This urge, delusional in retrospect, seemed to reach its ultimate expression in the second Bush administration, whose infamous “unilateralism” rested on a belief that no country or even bloc of countries should ever again be allowed to come close to matching U.S. military power. (As its National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter — and it couldn’t have been blunter on the subject — the U.S. was to “build and maintain” its military power “beyond challenge.”) Bush’s military fundamentalists firmly believed that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force around, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of its power and friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel as well. After all, as the president said in front of a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”

In this way, far more than the Soviets, the top officials of the Bush administration mistook military power for power, a gargantuan misreading of the U.S. economic position in the world and of their moment.

Boundless Military Ambitions

The attacks of September 11, 2001, that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” clinched the deal. In the space the Soviet Union had deserted, which had been occupied by minor outlaw states like North Korea for years, there was a new shape-shifting enemy, al-Qaeda (aka Islamic extremism, aka the new “totalitarianism”), which could be just as big as you wanted to make it. Suddenly, we were in what the Bush administration instantly dubbed “the Global War on Terror” (GWOT, one of the worst acronyms ever invented) — and this time there would be nothing “cold” about it.

Bush administration officials promptly suggested that they were prepared to use a newly agile American military to “drain the swamp” of global terrorism. (“While we’ll try to find every snake in the swamp, the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp,” insisted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz two weeks after 9/11.) They were prepared, they made clear, to undertake those draining operations against Islamic “terrorist networks” in no less than 60 countries around the planet.

Their military ambitions, in other words, knew no bounds; nor, it seemed, did the money and resources which began to flow into the Pentagon, the weapons industries, the country’s increasingly militarized intelligence services, mercenary companies like Blackwater and KBR that grew fat on a privatizing administration’s war plans and the multi-billion-dollar no-bid contracts it was eager to proffer, the new Department of Homeland Security, and a ramped-up, ever more powerful national security state.

As the Pentagon expanded, taking on ever newer roles, the numbers would prove staggering. By the end of the Bush years, Washington was doling out almost twice what the next nine nations combined were spending on their militaries, while total U.S. military expenditures came to just under half the world’s total. Similarly, by 2008, the U.S. controlled almost 70% of the global arms market. It also had 11 aircraft carrier battle groups capable of patrolling the world’s seas and oceans at a time when no power that could faintly be considered a possible future enemy had more than one.

By then, private contractors had built for the Pentagon almost 300 military bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny combat outposts to massive “American towns” holding tens of thousands of troops and private contractors, with multiple bus lines, PX’s, fast-food “boardwalks,” massage parlors, water treatment and power plants, barracks, and airfields. They were in the process of doing the same in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in the Persian Gulf region generally. This, too, represented a massive investment in what looked like a permanent occupation of the oil heartlands of the planet. As right-wing pundit Max Boot put it after a recent flying tour of America’s global garrisons, the U.S. possesses military bases that add up to “a virtual American empire of Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses, and gyms.”

Depending on just what you counted, there were anywhere from 700 to perhaps 1,200 or more U.S. bases, micro to macro, acknowledged and unacknowledged, around the globe. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was pouring money into the wildest blue-skies thinking at its advanced research arm, DARPA, whose budget grew by 50%. Through DARPA, well-funded scientists experimented with various ways to fight sci-fi-style wars in the near and distant future (at a moment when no one was ready to put significant government money into blue-skies thinking about, for instance, how to improve the education of young Americans). The Pentagon was also pioneering a new form of air power, drone warfare, in which “we” wouldn’t be within thousands of miles of the battlefield, and the battlefield would no longer necessarily be in a country with which we were at war.

It was also embroiled in two disastrous, potentially trillion-dollar wars (and various global skirmishes) — and all this at top dollar at a time when next to no money was being invested in, among other things, the bridges, tunnels, waterworks, and the like that made up an aging American infrastructure. Except when it came to victory, the military stood ever taller, while its many missions expanded exponentially, even as the domestic economy was spinning out of control, budget deficits were increasing rapidly, the governmental bureaucracy was growing ever more sclerotic, and indebtedness to other nations was rising by leaps and bounds.

In other words, in a far wealthier country, another set of leaders, having watched the Soviet Union implode, decisively embarked on the Soviet path to disaster.

Military Profligacy

In the fall of 2008, the abyss opened under the U.S. economy, which the Bush administration had been blissfully ignoring, and millions of people fell into it. Giant institutions wobbled or crashed; extended unemployment wouldn’t go away; foreclosures happened on a mind-boggling scale; infrastructure began to buckle; state budgets were caught in a death grip; teachers’ jobs, another kind of infrastructure, went down the tubes in startling numbers; and the federal deficit soared.

Of course, a new president also entered the Oval Office, someone (many voters believed) intent on winding up (or at least down) Bush’s wars and the delusions of military omnipotence and technological omniscience that went with them. If George W. Bush had pushed this country to the edge of disaster, at least his military policies, as many of his critics saw it, were as extreme and anomalous as the cult of executive power his top officials fostered.

But here was the strange thing. In the midst of the Great Recession, under a new president with assumedly far fewer illusions about American omnipotence and power, war policy continued to expand in just about every way. The Pentagon budget rose by Bushian increments in fiscal year 2010; and while the Iraq War reached a kind of dismal stasis, the new president doubled down in Afghanistan on entering office — and then doubled down again before the end of 2009. There, he “surged” in multiple ways. At best, the U.S. was only drawing down one war, in Iraq, to feed the flames of another.

As in the Soviet Union before its collapse, the exaltation and feeding of the military at the expense of the rest of society and the economy had by now become the new normal; so much so that hardly a serious word could be said — lest you not “support our troops” — when it came to ending the American way of war or downsizing the global mission or ponying up the funds demanded of Congress to pursue war preparations and war-making.

Even when, after years of astronomical growth, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began to talk about cost-cutting at the Pentagon, it was in the service of the reallocation of ever more money to war-fighting. Here was how the New York Times summed up what reduction actually meant for our ultimate super-sized institution in tough times: “Current budget plans project growth of only 1 percent in the Pentagon budget, after inflation, over the next five years.” Only 1% growth — at a time when state budgets, for instance, are being slashed to the bone. Like the Soviet military, the Pentagon, in other words, is planning to remain obese whatever else goes down.

Meanwhile, the “anti-war” president has been overseeing the expansion of the new normal on many fronts, including the expanding size of the Army itself. In fact, when it comes to the Global War on Terror — even with the name now in disuse — the profligacy can still take your breath away.

Consider, for instance, the $2.2 billion Host Nation Trucking contract the Pentagon uses to pay protection money to Afghan security companies which, in turn, slip some part of those payments to the Taliban to let American supplies travel safely on Afghan roads. Or if you don’t want to think about how your tax dollar supports the Taliban, consider the $683,000 the Pentagon spent, according to the Washington Post, to “renovate a cafe that sells ice cream and Starbucks coffee” at its base/prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Or the $773,000 used there “to remodel a cinder-block building to house a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant,” or the $7.3 million spent on baseball and football fields, or the $60,000 batting cage, or a promised $20,000 soccer cage, all part of the approximately two billion dollars that have gone into the American base and prison complex that Barack Obama promised to, but can’t, close.

Or what about the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, that 104-acre, almost three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar, 21-building homage to the American-mall-as-fortified-citadel? It costs more than $1.5 billion a year to run, and bears about as much relationship to an “embassy” as MacDonald’s does to a neighborhood hamburger joint. According to a recent audit, millions of dollars in “federal property” assigned to what is essentially a vast command center for the region, including 159 of the embassy’s 1,168 vehicles, are missing or unaccounted for.

And as long as we’re talking about expansion in distant lands, how about the Pentagon’s most recent construction plans in Central Asia, part of a prospective “mini-building boom” there. They are to include an anti-terrorism training center to be constructed for a bargain basement $5.5 million in… no, not Toledo or Akron or El Paso, but the combustible city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. And that’s just one of several projects there and in neighboring Tajikistan that are reportedly to be funded out of the U.S. Central Command’s “counter-narcotics fund” (and ultimately, of course, your pocket).

Or consider a particularly striking example of military expansion under President Obama, superbly reported by the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe in a piece headlined, “U.S. ‘secret war’ expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role.” As a story, it sank without a trace in a country evidently unfazed by the idea of having its forces garrisoned and potentially readying to fight everywhere on the planet.

Here’s how the piece began:

“Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials. Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year.”

Now, without opening an atlas, just try to name any 75 countries on this planet — more than one-third, that is, of the states belonging to the United Nations. And yet U.S. special operatives are now engaging in war, or preparing for war, or training others to do so, or covertly collecting intelligence in that many countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Fifteen more than in the Bush era.

Whatever it is or isn’t called, this remains Bush’s Global War on Terror on an expansionist trajectory. DeYoung and Jaffe quote an unnamed “senior military official” saying that the Obama administration has allowed “things that the previous administration did not,” and report that Special Operations commanders are now “a far more regular presence at the White House” than in the Bush years.

Not surprisingly, those Special Operations forces have themselves expanded in the first year and a half of the Obama presidency and, for fiscal year 2011, with 13,000 of them already deployed abroad, the administration has requested a 5.7% hike in their budget to $6.3 billion.

Once upon a time, Special Operations forces got their name because they were small and “special.” Now, they are, in essence, being transformed into a covert military within the military and, as befits their growing size, reports Noah Shachtman of the Wired’s Danger Room, the Army Special Forces alone are slated to get a new $100 million “headquarters” in northern Afghanistan. It will cover about 17 acres and will include a “communications building, Tactical Operations Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle Maintenance Facility… dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel to support working dogs… Supporting facilities include roads, power production system and electrical distribution, water well, non-potable water production, water storage, water distribution, sanitary sewer collection system, communication manhole/duct system, curbs, walkways, drainage and parking.”

This headquarters, adds Shachtman, will take a year to build, “at which point, the U.S. is allegedly supposed to begin drawing down its forces in Afghanistan. Allegedly.” And mind you, the Special Operations troops are but one expanding part of the U.S. military.

Creeping Gigantism

The first year and a half of the Obama administration has seen a continuation of what could be considered the monumental socialist-realist era of American war-making (including a decision to construct another huge, Baghdad-style “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan). This sort of creeping gigantism, with all its assorted cost overruns and private perks, would undoubtedly have seemed familiar to the Soviets. Certainly no less familiar will be the near decade the U.S. military has spent, increasingly disastrously, in the Afghan graveyard.

Drunk on war as Washington may be, the U.S. is still not the Soviet Union in 1991 — not yet. But it’s not the triumphant “sole superpower” anymore either. Its global power is visibly waning, its ability to win wars distinctly in question, its economic viability open to doubt. It has been transformed from a can-do into a can’t-do nation, a fact only highlighted by the ongoing BP catastrophe and “rescue” in the Gulf of Mexico. Its airports are less shiny and more Third World-like every year. Unlike France or China, it has not a mile of high-speed rail. And when it comes to the future, especially the creation and support of innovative industries in alternative energy, it’s chasing the pack. It is increasingly a low-end service economy, losing good jobs that will never return.

And if its armies come home in defeat… watch out.

In 1991, the Soviet Union suddenly evaporated. The Cold War was over. Like many wars, it seemed to have an obvious winner and an obvious loser. Nearly 20 years later, as the U.S. heads down the Soviet road to disaster — even if the world can’t imagine what a bankrupt America might mean — it’s far clearer that, in the titanic struggle of the two superpowers that we came to call the Cold War, there were actually two losers, and that, when the “second superpower” left the scene, the first was already heading for the exits, just ever so slowly and in a state of self-intoxicated self-congratulation. Nearly every decision in Washington since then, including Barack Obama’s to expand both the Afghan War and the war on terror, has only made what, in 1991, was one possible path seem like fate itself.

Call up the Politburo in Washington. We’re in trouble.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), will be published this week. To catch him discussing America in the “Soviet era,” as well as his new book, on the latest TomCast audio interview, click here, or to download it to your iPod, click here.

[Note on sources and readings: I regularly rely on the invaluable Antiwar.com, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog, Paul Woodward’s The War in Context, and Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room (for all things strange and military), as well as Katherine Tiedemann’s Daily Brief at the AfPak Channel, and recommend them often enough. Let me suggest another interesting place to visit: TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg’s Center on Law and Security at NYU has a new website, the CenterLine, which has just launched a daily round-up report on “war on terror” issues of every sort: “Today’s Terrorism News.” It’s well worth attending to. Finally, as ever, my special thanks go to Christopher Holmes, who patrols the borders of TomDispatchland, day and night, in search of error. He’s indefatigable.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

Looking Back at the Lexicon of Resistance

March 30, 2009: By Gilad Atzmon

Lexicon of Resistance

The following is an attempt to present my own personal dictionary of what seems to be the most charged terminology and concepts attached to the Palestinian solidarity and anti-war discourse.

Palestine– a piece of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. For many years Palestine was the home of the Palestinian people: Muslims, Christians and Jews who lived in peace and harmony for hundred of years. In the late 19th century, in the light of emerging European nationalism, a few Jews had decided that Jews should not be left out. They then invented the notions of: “Jewish people”, “Jewish history” and “Jewish nationalism”.  They decided to settle the majority of world Jewry in Palestine. Throughout the years the Jewish national project, i.e., Zionism, had become more and more sinister and ruthless. In 1949 70% of the indigenous Palestinian population had already been ethnically cleansed. Nowadays the majority of Palestinians are living behind barbed wire in a state of terror guarded by Israeli soldiers.

Jews– the people who happen to identify themselves as Jews. Jews are not a race, they do not follow a single belief system either. I made myself a rule. I categorically refrain from dealing with “the Jews” as a collective or an ethnic group. Instead I restrict myself to criticism of Jewish politics, Jewish ideology and Jewish identity.

Judaism– one of the many religions practiced by the Jewish people (Jews for Jesus, Jews For Buddha, Jews For Allah and so on). Though Judaism contains some non-ethical aspects and teachings, the one and only peace-seeking collective amongst the Jewish people is actually a religious orthodox sect, namely Torah Jews. This fact is enough to make me very careful when criticising Judaism as a religion. When dealing with Judaism, I would restrict myself to criticism of interpretations of Talmudic racism and the biblically orientated Zionist genocidal plunder of Palestine.

Jewishness– Jewish ideology, the interpretations of the meaning of being a Jew by those who regard themselves as Jews. Jewishness is the core of Jewish identity, it is a dynamic notion. It is hard to pin down.  While refraining from criticising Jews (the people) and Judaism (the religion), elaborating on Jewishness is a must, especially considering the crimes committed by the Jewish state in the name of Jewish people. As long as the Jewish state is shelling civilians with white phosphorous, it is our ethical duty to question: Who are the Jews? What does Judaism stand for? What is Jewishness all about?

Palestine vs Israel– Palestine is a country, Israel is a state.

Palestinians– currently the longest lasting sufferers of racist colonial abuse and state terrorism. Palestinians are the only true indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.  4,300,000 Palestinian refugees are scattered in the Middle East.  There are Palestinians who managed to hold onto their land yet are denied equal civil rights, others live under military occupation.  The Palestinian cause is largely the ethically grounded demand of the Palestinian people to return to their own land. The land that belongs to them and to them alone. The Palestinian cause is the demand to dismantle the Jewish state and to form a State of its Citizens instead.

Zionism– the national colonial practical interpretation of Jewish ideology.  It asserts that Jews are entitled to a national home in Zion (Palestine) at the expense of the Palestinian people. Zionism is a colonial racist philosophy that practices genocidal tactics. It is a biblically orientated precept. Although Zionism portrayed itself initially as a secular movement, from the very beginning it transformed the Bible from a religious text into a land registry.

Israel– the Jewish state is a racist political concept. It is a place where Jewish supremacy is celebrated in an institutional manner.  Israel is a place where 94% of the population supports dropping white phosphorus on innocent civilians. Israel is the place where Jews can pour their vengeance on the Goyim.

Palestinian resistance– the exercise of the ethical right to resist an invader, an ethnic cleanser and a racist.

Demographic bomb– Israel possesses many bombs, cluster bombs, petrol bombs, atomic bombs, WMD bombs, etc. The Palestinians have only one bomb, the demographic bomb. The Palestinians are the majority of the people between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. This fact itself defines the temporal quality of the Idea of Jewish state in Palestine.

Zionism vs Jewishness– it is difficult or maybe even impossible to determine where Zionism stops and Jewishness begins. Zionism and Jewishness establish a continuum. As it seems, Zionism has become the symbolic identifier of the contemporary Jew. Every Jew is identified by himself and others in reference to the Zionist compass (Zionist, anti-Zionist, oblivious to Zionism, love Zionism but hate Israel, love Israel but hate falafel and so on).

Secular Judaism and Jewish Secular Fundamentalism– secularity has been a very popular precept amongst Jews in the last two centuries. The Jewish form of secularity is very similar to rabbinical Judaism. It is fundamentally monotheistic, it believes in one truth (God is dead until further notice). It is supremacist, it is extremely intolerant of others in general and Muslims in particular, it even promotes wars in the name of enlightenment, liberalism, democracy and even in the name of the victims to come.

Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder– the kind of mental state that leads 94% of the Israeli population to support air raids against civilians.  Within the condition of the Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Pre-TSD), the stress is the outcome of a phantasmic event, an imaginary episode set in the future; an event that has never taken place. Within Pre-TSD, an illusion pre-empts reality and the condition in which the fantasy of terror is itself becoming grave reality. If it is taken to extremes, even an agenda of total war against the rest of the world is not an unthinkable reaction. Unlike the case of paranoia, wherein the sufferer is subject to his own symptoms, in the case of Pre-TSD the sufferer actually celebrates his symptoms while others are left with the role of the audience or even victim. The sufferers of Pre-TSD within the press and media lobby for global conflict. Once they are in power they just spread death around. They manage to see a threat in almost anything. The Pre-TSD sufferer would call to flatten Iran, he would defend the IDF military campaign in Gaza for his own existential fears. The Pre-TSD sufferer is rather predictable and for one reason or other always to be found in the non-ethical cause.

Jihad– the struggle to improve one’s self and society. Jihad is the attempt to reach a harmony between the self and the world. It is there to bridge the gap between self loving, loving self and the love towards others. Jihad is the answer to chosenness.

Holocaust– an overwhelmingly devastating chapter in recent Jewish past. It would be difficult to imagine the formation of the Jewish state without the effect of the holocaust. Yet, it is impossible to deny the fact that Palestinians ended up paying the ultimate price for crimes that were committed against the Jews by other people (Europeans). Hence, it would make sense to argue that if Europeans feel guilty about the Holocaust, they better take extra care of its last victims, i.e., the Palestinians.

It must be mentioned that due to some legislation that restricts the scrutiny of the holocaust in an open academic manner, the holocaust is no longer treated as an historical chapter.  Instead it is regarded by many scholars as a religious narrative (namely, Holocaust Religion). Those who do not obey the religion or follow its restrictions are chased, excluded and jailed. The failure to maintain the holocaust as a vivid historic chapter turned Jewish history into a Pandora’s box sealed by prohibitions, legal restrictions and different forms of threats. In an ideal “free world”, we would be able to look into the holocaust, to regard it as an historical chapter and to draw some lessons out of it.  That would mean also questioning its meaning. In an ideal (free) world, we may as well be allowed to wonder how come, time after time, Jews ended up despised and detested by their neighbours. In an ideal (free) world Jews may have a chance to learn from their mistakes in the past. For the time being, as long as we want to keep free, we better avoid questioning the past.

The Meaning of the Holocaust– the Holocaust provides the Jews and others with two obvious lessons. One is universal and almost simplistic, it says: “NO to racism”. As some Jewish intellectuals predicted after the war, Jews were supposed to lead the fight against racism. Seemingly, it didn’t happen. Not only did it fail to happen, but the Jewish state had become the ultimate form of racist practice. Three years after the liberation of Auschwitz the newly formed Jewish state brutally ethnically cleansed the vast majority of indigenous Palestinians. As time goes by, the Jewish state doesn’t try to disguise its racist agenda, i.e., Jews only state.

The second lesson that can be drawn out of the holocaust is far less abstract, it is actually very pragmatic. It suggests to Jews “to be aware of their deed”. It suggests to Jews “to act ethically, or at least to pretend to do so”.  Seemingly, this lesson is totally ignored. In the Jewish state young IDF soldiers wear T-shirts depicting pregnant Palestinian women caught in the crosshairs of a rifle, with the disturbing caption “1 shot 2 kills”.  In the Jewish state, civilians had been caught picnicking watching their army dropping unconventional weapons on their Palestinian neighbours. The Israeli reality and the forceful Jewish lobbying around the world portray a complete dismissal of any ethical judgment or moral conduct. Whether it is the genocidal practice against the Palestinian people or the lobbying for more and more global conflicts. If the meaning of the holocaust would have been internalised, different appearances of such inhuman behaviour would have been addressed and tackled.

However, within the prohibition to re-visit our history we may still be entitled to reflect over Nazi brutality towards Jews in the light of the Jewish state’s crimes in Palestine. Seemingly, there is no legislation that prohibits us from doing that as yet.

Hamas– political party that was elected in 2006 by the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Since then Israel has withheld payments owed to Gaza, causing the Palestinian economy to collapse. It has blockaded Gaza for months, starving the civilian population. And yet, Hamas proved once again that the Palestinian people are resilient. In spite of Israel’s genocidal tactics, in spite of the IDF targeting children, women and the elderly, Hamas’ popularity increases by the day and more so especially after the last Gaza conflict. It has now become clear that Israel does not possess the means of combating Islamic resistance. In other words. Israel’s days are numbered.

Gatekeepers– for many years the Palestinian solidarity discourse had been shattered by those who claimed to know what is right and what is wrong.  They also claimed to know what should be discussed and what subject must be dropped. Initially, gatekeepers tried to recruit the Palestinian movement to fight antisemitism. Another bizarre agenda was to use the Palestinian people as another Guinea pig in a dogmatic socialist exercise.

Due to the growing success of Palestinian and Islamic resistance, the power of Gatekeepers is now reduced to none. Though gatekeeping operators still insist upon exercising their powers, their influence is totally restricted to primarily Jewish cells.

Antisemites– in the old days, antisemites were those who didn’t like Jews, nowadays, antisemites are those the Jews don’t like. Considering the growing chasm between the Jewish state and its lobbies and the rest of humanity, we have good reason to believe that before not too long, the entirety of humanity will be denounced as antisemitic by one Jewish lobby or another.

Antisemitism– a misleading signifier. Though it refers largely to anti-Jewish feelings, it gives the impression that these feelings are racially motivated or orientated. It must be clear that Jews are not a race and do not establish a racial continuum. Thus, no one hates the Jews for their race or their racial identity.

Bearing in mind Israeli crimes and Jewish lobbying around the world, anti-Jewish feeling should be realised as a political, ideological and ethical reaction. It is a response to a criminal state and its institutional support amongst world Jewry. Though resentment to Zionism, Israel and Jewish lobbying is rather rational, the failure to distinguish between the “Jew”, and Zionism is indeed very problematic and dangerous especially considering the fact that many Jews have nothing to do with the Zionist crime. However, due to the extensive Jewish institutional support of Israel, it is far from easy to determine where the “Jew” ends and the Zionist starts. In fact, there is no such demarcation line or spot of transition. The outcome is clear, Jews are implicated collectively by the crimes of their national project. One obvious solution for the Jew is to oppose Zionism as an individual, another option is to oppose Zionism in the name of the Torah, it is also possible for the Jew to shun the tribal ideologist in himself.

Self loving– the belief that something about oneself is categorically and fundamentally right, moral and unique. This is the secular interpretation of being chosen.

Self Hatred– the belief that something about oneself is categorically and fundamentally wrong, immoral and ordinary. This state of being may also be a point of departure of a spiritual ethical quest.

Chicken Soup– is what is left once you strip Jewish identity of Judaism, racism, chauvinism, White Phosphorous, supremacy, cluster bombs, secularity, Zionism, Israel, intolerance, Nuclear reactor in Dimona, cosmopolitanism, genocidal tendency, etc. The Jew can always revert to chicken soup, the iconic symbolic identifier of Jewish cultural affiliation. The Jew is always more than welcome to say: “I am not religious nor am I a Zionist, I am not a banker, nor is my name Madoff. I am not a “Labour friend of Israel” nor I am a Lord or look like a cash machine.  I am just a little innocent Jew because my mama’le used to feed me with chicken soup when I was slightly unwell.”  Let’s face it once and for all, chicken soup is not that dangerous (unless you are a chicken). My grandmother taught me that it was very healthy. In fact I tried it once in winter 1978, I had the flu then. It helped, I feel better now.

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