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19 Jul 08

Op-Ed Contributor - If Israel Attacks Iran’s Nuclear Sites, Iranians Should Hope It Succeeds. - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

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israel middle.east iran war

ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.

17 Jul 08

Joe Klein’s dual-loyalty assertion for Jews | The God Blog | Jewish Journal

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dualloyalty israel us usa middle.east perle middleeast

The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.
You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the “benign domino theory” that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about--off the record, of course--in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel’s security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel’s enemies in the region? As my grandmother would say, feh! Do you actually deny that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn’t, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel? Why the rush now to bomb Iran, a country that poses some threat to Israel but none--for the moment--to the United States…

05 Jun 08

YouTube - President Carter talks about AIPAC and Israel on C-SPAN

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aipac israel us-aid lobbying propaganda

YouTube - Inside USA - Lobbying for Israel - 05 April 08 - Part 2

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lobbying israel aipac politics propaganda

27 May 08

Why the presidential candidates won't talk about Israel | csmonitor.com

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israel propaganda political_correctness politics

Since its birth, Israel has received at least $114 billion from the US in direct foreign economic and military aid, says Shirl
McArthur, a retired US diplomat who periodically updates his Israel cost estimates for the Washington Report on Middle East
Affairs (WREMA), a magazine often critical of US policy toward Israel.
The late Washington economist Thomas Stauffer did that calculation several years ago. He found total official aid to
Israel, up to 2002, came to $247 billion. He added other costs of US support of Israel (interest on debt, higher oil prices,
etc.) to reach a highly controversial total of $1.6 trillion.
5 more annotations...
- In March, a Memorandum of Understanding from the White House to Congress urged an additional $30 billion in military aid to
  Israel, a sum spread at about $3 billion a year through fiscal year 2018. Currently, Israel ranks as the top recipient of
  American foreign aid ($2.4 billion in 2007 by an official calculation) if reconstruction money for Iraq is excluded. Next
  are Egypt ($1.8 billion) and Afghanistan ($1 billion).
- To Findley, the "most powerful instrument of intimidation" used by pro-Israel groups is the charge of "anti-Semitism." The
  meaning of that term has been expanded. It used to be applied to those hostile to a race or faith, that is, against Jews or
  Judaism. Now it's often applied to critics of Israel or US-Israel policy, says Findley.
- Another fear of politicians involves the campaign contributions of pro-Israel political action committees (PACs). Last week
  WREMA reported that more than 20 of these PACs have contributed $1.1 million to Washington politicians in the 2007-08 election
  cycle. That amount is dwarfed by what the three presidential candidates have raised for their campaigns.
- Since Israel now has a relatively prosperous per capita national income comparable to Cyprus or Slovenia, direct US economic
  aid to Israel has been replaced gradually by military aid. Since money is fungible, that would make little real economic difference
  to Israel as its government pays its high military bills. In fact, Congress allows Israel to use 26 percent of the aid it
  receives to buy arms outside the US, thereby helping build up its own weapons industry. "We are thus shooting ourselves [the
  US weapons industry] in the foot," charges Janet McMahon, managing editor of WREMA.
- Professor Walt maintains he's pro-Israel. The US refusal to put pressure on Israel to settle with the Palestinians on a two-state
  solution, he argues, is not helpful.
  
  "Giving any country unconditional backing encourages irresponsible behavior," he says. It could lead to an apartheid state,
  or as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it, Israel facing "a South African-style struggle."

25 Mar 07

The Dubliner || Justin Keating

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anti-semitism anti-zionism censorship israel media political_correctness

Three days after the magazine went on sale, David Golding, the press officer at the Israeli Embassy, wrote an email to express his disgust at what he called Keating’s “anti-semitic article.” “I am amazed,” he wrote, “you let this offensive and hurtful rant go in to what was up to now quite a decent magazine.” Had I missed something? I re-read the article several times. There was nothing in it that might warrant such a charge, and I was angry that Golding had conflated the terms anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic. So I sent him a terse reply: “It's called freedom of speech, David, and it’s one of the things that distinguishes a democracy from a dictatorship.”

“Does that,” he responded, “apply to Holocaust deniers as well?”

Instead of debating the substance of Keating’s argument, his accuser was throwing insults around, like a child hurling toys from a pram. But these weren’t toys; they were powerful, shocking words, and suddenly I sensed that something was very, very wrong.

A few hours later we started to receive abusive and often vulgar emails from people all over the world. Within the next seven days we received over 2,000 such letters. Some of the correspondents attempted to refute Keating’s arguments, but most just levelled the same lazy charge of anti-Semitism. Some even suggested that I also hate Jews, because I published the article. (At this point I should probably reveal that Justin Keating has Jewish children. And my own father is Jewish.)

Deception as a Way of Life: Israeli Myths, Counterpunch, 31 Aug 2006

www.jkcook.net/0277.htm - Preview

author:jonathan.cook israel jonathan.cook media propaganda

A clue
where Israel might be heading next emerged this week when Olmert's trusted
international ambassador, Shimon Peres, "revealed" that Iran is trying to
transfer its nuclear know-how to terrorist organisations. Peres did not name
Hizbullah but it is only time before the link is made and a new casus belli
established.
The members
of the committee who will be investigating Olmert have been handpicked by him.
All the judges approached to head the committee turned down the offer, as did
the country's foremost constitutional law expert, Amnon Rubinstein, apparently
aware that being party to a whitewash would permanently tarnish his reputation.
7 more annotations...
- Most
  Israelis are deeply unhappy about what one commentator has called Olmert's
  "committee of non-inquiry". Separate investigations mean that the remit of each
  committee will be very narrow, focusing on technical issues and failings, and
  unable to look at the wider picture.
- A related
  deception being promoted by the government is that it is committed to
  compensating workers and businesses in the north who lost income during the war.
  But the list drawn up by the finance ministry of areas eligible for compensation
  reveals that all Arab communities have been excluded, apart from four Druze
  villages (the Druze serve in the army and are treated by Israel as a national
  group separate from the rest of the Arab population). Most of the money,
  millions of dollars, is being made available only to Jewish citizens, even
  though Arab citizens comprise half the population of the north. What a contrast
  to Hizbullah's non-discriminatory policy of compensating all Lebanese harmed by
  the fighting, whether from its own Shia community or Christian, Druze and Sunni
  Muslims.
- Similarly,
  the environment minister Gideon Ezra has stated that Arab communities in the
  north should not receive money to rehabilitate their separate and grossly
  deprived education system, on the grounds that during the war "the residents
  there behaved as per usual, as if nothing had happened" -- a reference that
  sounds like they are being penalised because they did not flee. His reasoning
  appears popular, among the public and in the cabinet, because Arab citizens
  generally opposed Israel's war.
- It also
  conveniently glosses over the fact that most of the 300,000 (or fewer) Israeli
  "refugees" were staying with relatives or friends 100km or so further south in
  spare rooms and out of harm's way. They were not, as were the Lebanese, fleeing
  for their lives -- their convoys under fire from warplanes -- and living in the
  open air without shelter, food or water and still within range of missile
  attacks.
- It is also
  reported that 300,000 Israelis sought sanctuary in bomb shelters. Such shelters
  were open only in the north, and do not exist in the country's Arab areas, so
  those using the shelters must have been the north's Jewish citizens. Which means
  that if 300,000 of the 600,000 Jews in northern Israel were in shelters, there
  can have been at most -- assuming all other Israeli Jews fled -- 300,000
  refugees.
- Hizbullah's arming by Iran is entirely illegitimate, even though the weapons
  were used to defend Lebanon from a long-prepared Israeli attack, while Israel
  has an absolute and unchallengeable right to receive its arsenal from the US,
  even though those armaments have been used offensively, mostly against Lebanese
  and Palestinian civilian populations.
- In fact, it
  is impossible that one million Israelis could have been made refugees, as a
  quick calculation proves. There are approximately 1.2 million Israelis living in
  the north, with the population divided equally between Jewish and Arab citizens.
  Hardly any Arabs left the north during the Hizbullah rocket attacks, either
  through a residual fear that their homes might be taken by the state, as were
  those of Palestinians who fled or were terrorised away during the 1948 war, or
  because they had nowhere else to go. Most assumed, probably rightly, that the
  Jewish population in the country's centre would not welcome them as refugees.

From the new 'Anti-Semitism' to Nuclear Holocaust, Counterpunch, 23 Sept

www.jkcook.net/0280.htm - Preview

aipac anti-semitism israel politics propaganda usa

Netanyahu's implication was transparent: Iran is looking for another Final
Solution, this one targeting Israel as well as world Jewry. The moment of
reckoning is near at hand, according to Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister,
who claims against all the evidence that Iran is only months away from
posssessing nuclear weapons.
This
theory of a "free-floating" contagion of hatred towards Jews, being spread by
Arabs and their sympathisers through the internet, media and international
bodies, found many admirers. The British neo-conservative journalist Melanie
Philips claimed popularly, if ludicrously, that British identity was being
subverted and pushed out by an Islamic identity that was turning her country
into a capital of terror, "Londonistan".
12 more annotations...
- The
  third goal, however, had not seen before. It tied the rise of a new
  anti-Semitism with the increase of Islamic fundamentalism in the West, implying
  that Muslim extremists were asserting an ideological control over Western
  thinking. It chimed well with the post 9-11 atmosphere.
- In
  France, for example, peculiar anti-Semitic attacks were given plenty of media
  coverage: from a senior rabbi who was stabbed (by himself, as it later turned
  out) to a young Jewish woman attacked on a train by anti-Semitic thugs (except,
  as it later emerged, she was not Jewish).
- By
  suggesting that Europe in particular had become a hotbed of Islamic
  fundamentalism, it was hoped that Israeli Jews, many of whom have more than one
  passport, would be afraid to leave. A survey by the Jewish Agency taken as early
  as May 2002 showed, for example, that 84 per cent of Israelis believed
  anti-Semitism had again become a serious threat to world Jewry.
- McCarthyite organisations like CampusWatch helped enforce the reign of
  intimidation. Academics who stood their ground, like Columbia University's
  Joseph Massad, attracted the vindictive attention of new activist groups like
  the David Project.
- It is
  now clear that Israel and its loyalists had three main goals in mind as they
  began their campaign. Two were familiar motives from previous attempts at
  highlighting a "new anti-Semitism". The third was new.
  
  The
  first aim, and possibly the best understood, was to stifle all criticism of
  Israel, particularly in the US. During the course of 2003 it became increasingly
  apparent to journalists like myself that the American media, and soon much of
  the European media, was growing shy of printing even the mild criticism of
  Israel it usually allowed. By the time Israel began stepping up the pace of
  construction of its monstrous wall across the West Bank in spring 2003, editors
  were reluctant to touch the story.
- In the
  early stages of the campaign, the lobby's real motivation was not concealed: it
  wanted to smother a fledgling debate by American civil society, particularly the
  churches and universities, to divest -- withdraw their substantial investments
  -- from Israel in response to Operation Defensive Shield.
- as
  ever, the main target of the new anti-Semitism campaign were audiences in the
  US, Israel's generous patron. There, members of the Israel lobby were turning
  into a chorus of doom.
- Netanyahu proposed "lancing the boil" by beginning an aggressive public
  relations campaign of "self-defence". A month later Israel's president, Moshe
  Katsav, picked on the softest target of all, warning during a state visit that
  the fight against anti-Semitism must begin in Germany, where "voices of
  anti-Semitism can be heard".
- Like
  its precursors, argued Israel's apologists, the latest wave of anti-Semitism was
  the responsibility of Western progressive movements -- though with a fresh
  twist. An ever-present but largely latent Western anti-Semitism was being stoked
  into frenzy by the growing political and intellectual influence of extremist
  Muslim immigrants. The implication was that an unholy alliance had been spawned
  between the left and militant Islam.
- What distinguished the new anti-Semitism from traditional anti-Jewish
  racism of the kind that led to Germany's death camps, said its promoters, was
  that this time it embraced the progressive left rather than the far right.
- In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein documents the
  advent of claims about a new anti-Semitism to Israel's lacklustre performance in
  the 1973 Yom Kippur War. On that occasion, it was hoped, the charge of
  anti-Semitism could be deployed against critics to reduce pressure on Israel to
  return Sinai to Egypt and negotiate with the Palestinians.
- The
  trajectory of a long-running campaign that gave birth this month to the
  preposterous all-party British parliamentary report into anti-Semitism in the UK
  can be traced back to intensive lobbying by the Israeli government that began
  more than four years ago, in early 2002.

Will Robert Fisk tell us the whole story? Counterpunch, 5 Sep 2006

www.jkcook.net/0278.htm - Preview

author:jonathan.cook fisk israel jonathan.cook lebanon war

I am in no
position to challenge Fisk’s expertise and familiarity with Lebanese society and
politics. If the Independent’s reporter tells us Hizbullah is no simple puppet
of Tehran while noting that its weapons are supplied by Iran (and observing that
Israel’s are supplied by the US) I assume he is right. I also accept his reports
that on occasion he saw Hizbullah fighters taking shelter behind buildings in
south Lebanon’s towns and villages, and his parallel observations that Israeli
soldiers did the same as they struggled to invade the border areas.

Israel's Plan for a Military Strike on Iran, Counterpunch, 12 Oct 2006

www.jkcook.net/0286.htm - Preview

bbc iran israel media politics propaganda usa war weapons

Is the
Israeli government using Shalev, wittingly or not, and is he in turn using the
BBC, to spread Israeli propaganda? Propaganda that may soon propel us towards
the "clash of civilisations" so longed for by Israel's leadership.
It might
have occurred to someone at the BBC to wonder why Shalev gets these chances to
show things no one else is allowed to. Could it be that the "hasbara" division
of the Israeli Foreign Ministry has got far more sophisticated than it once was?
13 more annotations...
- Shalev's
  latest film, "Will Israel bomb Iran?", follows this well-trodden path. Arabs and
  Muslims are again deprived of a voice, as are non-Israeli experts.
- According
  to a profile of Shalev published in the Israeli media in 2004, his success
  derives from the fact that he has developed a "soft-sell approach", showing
  Israel in a good light without "the straightforward 'hasbara' [propaganda]
  efforts which explain Israel's case that Israel's Foreign Ministry is required
  to disseminate to European and American news outlets."
- Shalev's
  films always humanise his Israeli subjects, showing them as complex, emotional
  and caring beings, while largely ignoring the millions of Palestinians the
  Israeli government and army are oppressing.
- As should
  be clear by now, the Israeli government's fingerprints are all over this BBC
  "documentary". And that is hardly surprising because the man behind this
  "independent" production is Israel's leading film-maker: Noam Shalev.
  
  Shalev,
  a graduate of a New York film school, has been making a spate of documentaries
  through his production company Highlight Films, based in Herzliya, near Tel
  Aviv, that have been lapped up by the BBC and other foreign broadcasters. With
  the BBC's stamp of approval, it is easy for Shalev to sell his films around the
  world.
- Overlooked
  by the programme makers is the fact that "fragile" Israel is currently the only
  country in the Middle East armed with nuclear warheads, several hundred of them,
  as well as one of the most powerful armies in the world, which presumably make
  most of its neighbours feel "fragile" too, with far more reason.
- But, as has
  now been pointed out on numerous occasions (though clearly not often enough for
  the BBC to have noticed), Khomeini and Ahmadinejad were referring to the need
  for regime change, the ending of the regime occupying the Palestinians in
  violation of international law. They were not talking, as Netanyahu and co
  claim, about the destruction of the state of Israel or the Jewish people. The
  implication of the speech is that the current Israeli regime will end because
  occupying powers are illegitimate and unsustainable, not because Iran plans to
  fire nuclear missiles at the Jewish state or commit genocide.
- Binyamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and the current
  leader of the opposition. He claims repeatedly that the only possible reason
  Iran and its president could want a nuclear arsenal is for Israel's
  "extermination". "If he can get away with it, he'll do it." "Ayatollahs with
  atombic bombs are a powerful threat to all of us." A nuclear Iran "is a threat
  unlike anything we have seen before. It's beyond politics" -- apparently worse
  than the nuclear states of North Korea and Pakistan, the latter a military
  dictatorship and friend of the US barely containing within its borders some of
  the most fanatical jihadist movements in the world.
  
  Apart from
  a brief appearance by an Iranian diplomat, no countervailing opinions are
  entertained in the BBC programme; only Israel's military and political
  leadership is allowed to speak.
- But the
  programme's unequivocal main theme -- echoing precisely Israel's own agenda --
  is that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is hellbent on destroying Israel.
  The film-makers treat seriously, bordering on reverentially, preposterous
  comments from Israel's leaders about this threat.
- interviews with three former
  Israeli prime ministers, a former Israeli military chief of staff, various
  officials in Israeli military intelligence and a professor who designs Israel's
  military arsenal.
  
  All of them
  speak with one voice: Israel, they claim, is about to be "wiped out" by Iranian
  nuclear weapons and must defend itself "whatever the consequences".
  
  They are
  given plenty of airtime to repeat unchallenged well-worn propaganda Israel has
  been peddling through its own media, and which has been credulously amplified by
  the international media: that Iran is led by a fanatical anti-Semite who, like
  Adolf Hitler, believes he can commit genocide against the Jewish people, this
  time through a nuclear holocaust.
- BBC, decided this week that it should air
  a documentary entitled "Will Israel bomb Iran?". It is the question on
  everyone's lips
- there
  is no consideration of how in the longer term unilateral action by Israel, with
  implicit sanction by the international community, is certain to provoke a steep
  rise in global jihad against the West.
- It does not
  clarify that Israel's own large nuclear arsenal was secretly developed and is
  entirely unmonitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or that it is
  perceived as a threat by its neighbours and may be fuelling a Middle East arms
  race.
- The Middle
  East, and possibly the world, stands on the brink of a terrible conflagration as
  Israel and the United States prepare to deal with Iran's alleged ambition to
  acquire nuclear weapons. Israel, it becomes clearer by the day, wants to use its
  air force to deliver a knock-out blow against Tehran. It is not known whether it
  will use conventional weapons or a nuclear warhead in such a strike.

Israel's Minister of Strategic Threats, Counterpunch, 25 Oct 2006

www.jkcook.net/0287.htm - Preview

author:jonathan.cook iran israel jonathan.cook politics

Israel already has
legislation requiring all parties running for the Knesset to support Israel
remaining a "Jewish and democratic state". Technically, the only non-Zionist
parties -- two Arab parties and the small joint Jewish and Arab Communist party
-- could quite legally be disqualified from all general elections under the
current legislation. They expect that at some point in the near future they will
be too.
Even now
they do little to conceal the fact that such thoughts are uppermost in their
minds. Netanyahu, currently Israel's most popular politician and leader of the
opposition, has repeatedly called the 1.2 million Arab citizens of the country a
"demographic timebomb". Back in 2002, for example, he told an audience of
policymakers: "If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the
Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens We therefore need a policy that
will first of all guarantee a Jewish majority."
7 more annotations...
- they can let a Lieberman, the charismatic leader of a popular party who does
  dare to say these things, join the government with minimal damage to their own
  reputations.
- Neither
  Olmert nor Netanyahu can afford to say what is really on their minds: that they
  want to cleanse the region of as many Palestinians as they can manage -- most
  certainly those in the occupied territories, and later the even bigger nuisance
  of the ones who have citizenship and undermine Israel's Jewishness.
- But it was
  in breaking from Likud and founding his own party, Yisrael Beiteinu, in 1999
  that Lieberman finally found his voice outside the Likud's smoke-filled rooms.
  The audience for his message was as untutored in the deceits of Israeli
  politicking as Lieberman himself.
- He rapidly
  rose through the ranks to become director-general of Likud from 1993-96 and soon
  afterwards to head the office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For many
  years he was the darling of the Likud, a party that today exists in two halves:
  its original incarnation, once again led by Netanyahu; and the renovated,
  sleeker model, Kadima, founded by Sharon.
- From their
  political infancy, the latter three were schooled in the minor arts of Israeli
  diplomacy: feel free to speak plainly in the womb of the party; speak firmly but
  cautiously in Hebrew to other Israelis; and speak in another tongue entirely
  when using English, the language of the goyim, the non-Jews.
- So why are
  Israel's politicians, of the left and right, so comfortable sitting with
  Lieberman, the leader of Israel's only unquestionably fascist party? Because, in
  truth, Lieberman is not the maverick politician of popular imagination, even if
  he is every bit the racist -- a Jewish Jorg Haider or Jean Marie Le Pen.
- In the
  newly established post of Minister for Strategic Threats, Lieberman -- the
  avowed Arab hater -- will shape Israel's response to Iran, leading the chorus
  threats being made by Israel that the country is only a hair's breadth from
  dropping bombs, possibly nuclear warheads, on Tehran. After that, he will
  presumably help the government decide what other "strategic threats" it faces.

Israel's Purging of Palestinian Christians, Counterpunch, 9 January 2007

www.jkcook.net/0294.htm - Preview

author:jonathan.cook christian israel jonathan.cook journalism media middle.east palestinian

Christians have been at the core of the wider secular Palestinian national
movement, helping to define its struggle. They range from exiled professors such
as the late Edward Said to human rights activists in the occupied territories
such as Raja Shehadeh. The founders of the most militant wings of the national
movement, the Democratic and Popular Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine,
were Nayif Hawatmeh and George Habash, both Christians.
Many of the
Palestinian artists and intellectuals who are most critical of Israel are
Christians, including the late novelist Emile Habibi; the writer Anton Shammas
and film-makers Elia Suleiman and Hany Abu Assad (all now living in exile); and
the journalist Antoine Shalhat (who, for reasons unknown, has been placed under
a loose house arrest, unable to leave Israel).
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- The
  presence of Palestinian Christians reminds us that the supposed "clash of
  civilisations" in the Holy Land is not really a war of religions but a clash of
  nationalisms, between the natives and European colonial settlers.
- There is
  only one problem in selling this image to the West: the minority of Christian
  Palestinians who have happily lived under Muslim rule in the Holy Land for
  centuries. Today, in a way quite infuriating to Israel, these Christians confuse
  the picture by continuing to take a leading role in defining Palestinian
  nationalism and resistance to Israel's occupation. They prefer to side with the
  Muslim "fanatics" than with Israel, the Middle East's only outpost of
  Judeo-Christian "civilisation".
- Paradoxically, this vision of our future, set out by American and Israeli Jews,
  is steeped in fundamentalist Christian religious symbolism, from the promotion
  of a civilised West's crusade against the Muslim hordes to the implication that
  the final confrontation between these civilisations (a nuclear attack on Iran?)
  may be the End Times itself -- and thereby lead to the return of the Messiah.
- An alliance
  between the neocons and Israeli leaders was cemented in the mid-1990s with the
  publication of a document called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the
  Realm". It offered a US foreign policy tailor-made to suit Israel's interests,
  including plans for an invasion of Iraq, authored by leading necons and approved
  by the Israeli prime minister of the day, Binyamin Netanyahu.
- The clash
  of civilisations thesis is usually ascribed to a clutch of American
  intellectuals, most notably Samuel Huntingdon, the title of whose book gave the
  idea popular currency, and the Orientalist academic Bernard Lewis. But alongside
  them have been the guiding lights of the neocon movement, a group of thinkers
  deeply embedded in the centres of American power who were recently described by
  Ynet as mainly comprising "Jews who share a love for Israel".
- Such
  sensationalist misrepresentations of Palestinian life are now a staple of the
  local and American media. Support for Hamas, for example, is presented as proof
  of jihadism run amok in Palestinian society rather than as evidence of despair
  at Fatah's corruption and collaboration with Israel and ordinary Palestinians'
  determination to find leaders prepared to counter Israel's terminal cynicism
  with proper resistance.

Jonathan Cook's News Archive - Israel Palestine

www.jkcook.net - Preview

author:jonathan.cook independent israel jonathan.cook journalism media palestine palestinian-perspective

Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including
the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians
living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.
Geographically, I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli
Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict
live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West
Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in
these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the
conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West
Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far
too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’
-

a catch-all that
offers
Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under
international law.
1 more annotations...
- Why my
  reporting is different
  
  I
  have chosen to position myself in the region in two ways
  - one professional, the
  other geographical
  - that distinguish me from colleagues. This approach gives me
  greater freedom to reflect on the true nature of the conflict and provides me
  with fresh insight into its root causes.
  
  Professionally, I am one of the few journalists regularly writing about the
  region who work as an independent freelancer. I choose the issues I wish to
  cover, so I am not constrained by the ‘treadmill’ of the mainstream media, which
  require an endless flow of instant copy and analysis. I am also not tied to the
  mainstream agenda, which gives disproportionate coverage to the concerns of the
  powerful, in this case the Israeli and American positions
  -
  
  in the US media to a degree that makes much of their Israel/Palestine reporting implausible. I also
  rarely accept commissions, restricting myself to topics that I consider to be
  the most revealing about the conflict.

War on Lebanon Planned for at least a Year

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14159.htm - Preview

idf israel lebanon media politics propaganda subterfuge usa war

Because of their fetish for states, the Neoconservatives of the
Bush administration are unable to see that the Levant and points
east are now the province of militia-parties that dominate
localities and wield asymmetrical paramilitary force in such a
way as to stymie states, whether local host states, local
adversaries, or imperial Powers. Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas and
other groups in Gaza and the West Bank, al-Qaeda/ radical
Bedouins in the Sinai, the Muslim Brotherhood in some Sunni
areas of Syria, the tribes and gangs of Maan in Jordan, the
Peshmerga of the Kurds, the guerrilla groups of the Sunni Arabs
in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, Badr Corps and Marsh Arabs of the Iraqi
Shiites, the Basij and Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iran, the
party-tribes of Afghanistan--whether the Tajik Jami'at-i Islami
or the Pushtun Taliban--and the biradaris and ethnic mafias of
Pakistan, are all arguably as significant actors as states, and
often more significant.
At some
points, the Pentagon has even tried to blame Iran for the
radical Sunni Arab violence in Iraq, which makes no sense at all
(and thus that propaganda campaign has been put on the back
burner).
7 more annotations...
- For the Bush administration, Iran and Hizbullah are not
  existential threats. They are proximate threats. Iran is hostile
  to US corporate investment in the oil-rich Gulf,, and so is a
  big obstacle to American profit-making in the region.
  
  Rumsfeld is worried about Iran's admission as an observer to the
  Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is to say, that he
  is worried about a budding Chinese-Islamic axis that might lock
  up petroleum reserves and block US investments.
- The Right in Israel is
  determined to permanently subjugate the Palestinians and
  forestall the emergence of a Palestinian state. This course of
  action requires the constant exercise of main force against the
  Palestinians, who resist it, as well as threats against Arab or
  Muslim neighbors who might be tempted to help the Palestinians.
  Thus, Iraq and Iran both had to be punished and weakened.
  Likewise, the Israeli Right has never given up an expansionist
  ideology. For instance, the Israelis have a big interest in the
  Litani River in south Lebanon. If and when the Israeli military
  and political elite felt they needed to add territory by taking
  it from neighbors, they wished to retain that capability.
- Since Egypt opted out of the military struggle for economic
  reasons and since the US invasion broke Iraq's legs, there is no
  conventional military threat to Israel. Israel seeks complete
  military superiority, for several reasons.
- There was zero likelihood of
  Hezbollah launching such a strike unprovoked. But this capacity
  formed at least a slight drag on the Israeli ability to strike
  Iran and the Palestinians with impunity. The destruction of the
  Hizbullah arsenal may be the precursor of even more drastic
  action against the Palestinians and perhaps a bombing raid on
  Iran's nuclear research facilities near Isfahan.
- The Israelis have their own Domino
  Theory, which haunts them the way the original haunted Lyndon
  Johnson-- and just as foolishly.
- The Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the
  summer, in part because they know that European and American
  universities will be the primary nodes of popular opposition,
  and the universities are out in the summer. This war has nothing
  to do with captured Israeli soldiers. It is a long-planned war
  to increase Israel's ascendency over Hizbullah and its patrons.
- Matthew Kalman reveals that Israel's wideranging assault on
  Lebanon has been planned in a general way for years, and a
  specific plan has been in the works for over a year. The "Three
  Week War" was shown to Washington think tanks and officials last
  year on powerpoint by a senior Israeli army officer:
  
  "More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began
  giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis,
  to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks,
  setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing
  detail."

Jews for Justice for Palestinians

www.jfjfp.org/about.htm - Preview

israel middle.east middleeast peace politics resource source uk

We provide practical support to the Palestinian economy: planting olive
trees, supporting Zaytoun, a fair-trade organisation marketing Palestinian
olive oil and encouraging fact-finding trips to the area.
7 more annotations...
- We channel humanitarian aid through the British Shalom Salaam Trust, an
  independent grant-giving charity.
- We support Israeli peace and human-rights organizations morally
  and financially including:
  
  Bat Shalom (Women for Peace), Breaking the Silence,
  
  Courage to Refuse, Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc),
  
  the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD),
  
  Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch, Physicians for Human Rights,
  
  Rabbis for Human Rights, Ta'ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership),
  
  Yesh Gvul (There is a Limit) and Zochrot (Remembrance).
- The list includes Geoffrey Bindman, Stephen Fry, Eric Hobsbawm, Nicolas
  Kent, Mike Leigh, Miriam Margolyes, Jonathan Miller, Susie Orbach, Harold
  Pinter, Jacqueline Rose, Alexei Sayle, Antony Sher, Gillian Slovo, Tom Stoppard,
  Janel Suzman and Zoë Wanamaker.
- In mid 2006, our over twelve hiundred signatories included five rabbis;
  99 professors (including four Fellows of the Royal Society and two fellows
  of
  the British
  Association); 107 medical and academic doctors; three OBEs; several OBEs,
  CBEs and MBEs, three
  knights
  and
  one Member
  of
  Parliament.
- a founding member of European Jews for a Just Peace, a federation of Jewish groups in ten European countries whose principles include:
  
  condemnation of all violence against civilians in the conflict,
  no matter by whom it is carried out.
  recognition of Israel's 1967 'green line' borders;
  commitment to the Palestinians' right to a state in the territories
  currently occupied by Israel in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza;
  calling on Israel to acknowledge its part in the creation of the
  Palestinian refugee problem and its obligation to negotiate a just, fair
  and practical resolution of the issue.
- The Torah teaches: 'Justice,
  justice, you shall pursue' (Deuteronomy 16:20).
  
  To secure a lasting settlement to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis so they can live in peace and security, thrive side by side, and co-operate together, Jews today are obligated to pursue justice on behalf of both peoples.”
  
  RABBI ELIZABETH TIKVAH SARAH
- WHO ARE WE?
  
  Jews for Justice for Palestinians is a network of Jews who are British or live in Britain, practising and secular, Zionist and not. We oppose Israeli policies that undermine the livelihoods, human, civil and political rights of the Palestinian people.
  
  We support the right of Israelis to live in freedom and security within
  Israel's 1967 borders.
  
  As well as organising to ensure that Jewish opinions critical of Israeli policy are heard in Britain, we extend support to Palestinians trapped in the spiral of violence and repression. We believe that such actions are important in countering antisemitism and the claim that opposition to Israel’s destructive policies is itself antisemitic.
  
  We cooperate with other organisations on specific issues without necessarily endorsing everything they do.

This explains a lot

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israel map middle.east palestine palestinian-perspective

24 Mar 07

Robert Fisk: The Age of Terror - a landmark report - Independent Online Edition > Robert Fisk

news.independent.co.uk/...article1814843.ece - Preview

fisk iran iraq israel lebanon media security terrorism usa

Bin Laden doesn't matter any more, alive or dead. Because, like nuclear scientists, he has invented the bomb. You can arrest all of the world's nuclear scientists but the bomb has been made. Bin Laden created al-Qa'ida amid the matchwood of the Middle East. It exists. His presence is no longer necessary.
telling the world that things are getting better when they are getting worse, that democracy is flourishing when it is swamped in blood, that freedom is not without "birth pangs" when the midwife is killing the baby.
37 more annotations...
- when I addressed the American University of Beirut after receiving an honorary degree there this summer. I made my usual points about the Bush administration and the growing dangers of the Middle East only to find that a US diplomat in Beirut was condemning me in front of Lebanese friends for being allowed to criticise the Bush administration in a college which receives US government money.
- The case of the play about Rachel Corrie - the young US activist twice run over by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes - taken off the New York stage was one of the more deplorable of these. I was also surprised in the Bronx to find that Fieldston, a private school in Riverdale - was forced to cancel a college meeting with two Palestinian lecturers when parents objected to the absence of an Israeli on the panel. The fact that Israeli speakers were to be invited later made no difference. The school's principal later announced that the meeting would "not be appropriate given the sensitivity and complexity of the issue". Complex problems are supposed to be explained. But this could not be explained because, well, it was too complex and - the truth - would upset the usual Israeli lobbyists.
- Save for the indefatigable Seymour Hersh, there are still no truly investigative correspondents in the US press. But challenging authority should not be that difficult. No one is being asked to end the straightforward reporting of Arab tyrannies. We are still invited to ask - and should ask - why the Muslim world has produced so many dictatorships, most of them supported by "us". But there are too many dark corners into which we will not look. Where, for example, are the CIA's secret torture prisons? I know two reporters who are aware of the locations. But they are silent, no doubt in the interests of "national security".
- So, for that matter, was the US academics' report on the power of the Israeli lobby, until the usual taunts of "anti-Semitism" forced the American mainstream to write about it, albeit in a shifty, frightened way.
- Haaretz has reported an opinion poll in which 68 per cent of Israeli Jews said they would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab - 26 per cent would agree to do so - and 46 per cent of Israeli Jews said they would refuse to allow an Arab to visit their home.
- Benjamin Netanyahu even suggested the wall should be moved deeper into the West Bank. But the implications were obvious. A Palestinian state will be allowed, but it will not have a capital in east Jerusalem nor any connection between Gaza and the bits of the West Bank that are handed over. So there will be no peace, and the words "Palestinian" and "terrorist" will, again, be inextricably linked by Israel and the US.
- Why, for example, was there no front-page treatment of this year's Herzliya conference, Israel's most important policy-making jamboree? Most of the important figures in the Israeli government - they had yet to be elected - were in attendance. The conference was the place where Ehud Olmert first suggested handing over slices of the West Bank: "The choice between allowing Jews to live in all parts of the land of Israel" - the "land of Israel" in this context included the West Bank - "and living in a state with a Jewish majority mandate giving up part of the land of Israel. We cannot continue to control parts of the territories where most of the Palestinians live."
- a distinctly resurgent Taliban which is being helped - despite General Musharraf's denials - by the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI.
- It may well be that journalists in the "West" should feel a burden of guilt for much that has happened because they have, with their gullibility, helped to sell US actions much more effectively than Karen Hughes. Their constant references to a "fence" instead of a wall, to "settlements" or "neighbourhoods" instead of colonies, their description of the West Bank as "disputed" rather than occupied, has a bred a kind of slackness in reporting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
- A series of letters in The New York Times in April this year suggested that ordinary US citizens grasp the "democratic" argument better than their leaders. "Democracy cannot be easily imposed on people who are not prepared to accept it," one wrote. "Democracy cannot be exported," wrote another. "Changing a political culture happens only if the people embrace it. Iraqi society is too traumatised by the history of Saddam Hussein and the war to do more than survive both at this point." Spot on.
- The columnist Roger Cohen placed her problem in a nutshell. The problem are the facts. And they include the fact that, in the 65-year period between 1941 and 2006, the US has been at war in some form or another for all but 14 of them. And people around the world have got tired of this. They got tired of America's insatiable need for an enemy - and suspicious of all the talk of democracy, freedom and morality in which every war was cast. They stopped buying the US narrative. Hughes says that the vision followed by bin Laden's followers "is a mission of destruction and death; ours a message of life and opportunity." Well, yes. "If only it were that simple," Cohen wrote.
- Remarkably, however, the US still believes that it is increasingly loathed in the Arab world not because of its policies but because its policies are not being presented fairly. It's not a political problem, it's a public-relations problem. Curiously, that is what Israel thought when accused of killing too many Lebanese during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. What we do is right. We're just not selling it right. Hence, the appointment of Karen Hughes as US "Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy". Her line is straight to the point. "I try to portray the facts in the best light for our country," she said after her appointment. "Because I believe we're a wonderful country and that we are doing things across the world."
- The Palestinians went to the International Court in the Hague to have it declared illegal because much of its course runs through their land. The court said it was illegal. And Israel ignored the court's decision and, once more, the US supported Israel. Here was another lesson for the Palestinians. They went peacefully - without violence or "terrorism" - to our Western institutions to get justice. And we were powerless to help them because Israel rejected this symbol of Western freedoms.
- And so to "Palestine" - the inverted commas are more important than ever today - and its own act of democracy. Of course, the Palestinians elected the wrong people, Hamas, and had to suffer for it. Democratic Israel would not accept the results of Palestine's democratic elections and the Europeans joined with America in placing sanctions against the newly elected government unless it recognised Israel and all agreements signed with Israel since the Camp David accords of the 1970s. Even when Ariel Sharon was staging his withdrawal of 8,500 settlers from Gaza last year, he was shifting 12,000 more settlers into the West Bank, and George W Bush had effectively accepted this illegality by talking of the "realities" of the Jewish settlements still being enlarged there. And that was the end of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 upon which the "peace process" was supposed to be based - Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 Middle East war, in return for the security of all states in the area.
- it is outrageous that Muslims have not condemned the slaughter in Darfur or, indeed, in Iraq and, one might add, on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war where one and a half million Muslims killed each other over almost eight years. Self-criticism is not in great supply across the Muslim world where, of course, our spirited Western political conflicts and elections sometimes look like self-flagellation.
- the division between Shias and Sunnis - especially in Iraq - can reach stages of cruelty not seen since the European Protestant-Catholic wars;
- Muslims have learnt to remember. I still recall an Iraqi friend, shaking his head at my naivety when I asked if there was not any cup of generosity to be bestowed on the West for ridding Iraqis of Saddam's presence. "You supported him," he replied. "You supported him when he invaded Iran and we died in our tens of thousands. Then, after the invasion of Kuwait, you imposed sanctions that killed tens of thousands of our children. And now you reduce Iraq to anarchy. And you want us to be grateful?"
- What I suspect lies behind much of our hypocrisy in the Middle East is that Muslims have not lost their faith and we have. It's not just that religion governs their lives, it is the fact that they have kept the faith - and that is why we try to hide that we have lost it by talking about Islam's "difficulty with secularism". We are the good liberals who wish to bestow the pleasures of our Enlightenment upon the rest of the world, although, to the Muslim nations, this sounds more like our desire to invade them with different cultures and traditions and - in some cases - different religions.
- if we were really concerned about the spread of nuclear technology among Muslim states, we would be condemning Pakistan, most of whose cities are in a state of almost Iraqi anarchy and whose jolly dictator now says he was threatened with being "bombed back to the Stone Age" by the Americans if he didn't sign up to the "war on terror".
- In other words, it was the West which supported Iran's original nuclear programme and it was closed by the chief divine of George Bush's "axis of evil" and then reopened when the West stood behind Saddam (in the days when he was "our strongman" rather than our caged prisoner in a dying state).
- when Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution engulfed Iran, what did he do? He called the nuclear programme "the work of the devil" and closed it down.
- A different kind of alienation, of course, is reflected in our dispute with Iran. "We" think that its government wants to make nuclear weapons - in six months, according to the Israelis; in 10 years, according to some nuclear analysts. But no one asks if "we" didn't help to cause this "nuclear" crisis. For it was the Shah who commenced Iran's nuclear power programme in 1973 and Western companies were shoulder-hopping each other in their desire to sell him nuclear reactors and enrichment technology. Siemens, for example, started to build the Bushehr reactor. And the Shah was regularly interviewed on Western television stations where he said that he didn't see why Iran shouldn't have nuclear weapons when America and the Soviets had them. And we had no objection to the ambitions of "our" Policeman of the Gulf.
- a remark that TE Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - made of Iraq in the 1920s: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly... Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work may not be as good as, perhaps, you think."
- the same American Marine officer's description of the building of the Ramadi glass factory, a story that shows just how vacuous all the stories of our "success" there are. "The Division has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a glass factory. It does not work. It will take millions of dollars to rehabilitate and modernise. There are supposed to be 2,500 Iraqis employed there but they have nothing to do and no more than 100 arrive on any given day to sit in their offices as new computers and furniture are delivered with our compliments... It is like walking through a fictional business that physically exists. It may be Kafka's revenge. Most rooms are empty but are still preserved as they had been under a layer of dust. Some areas hold a man at a desk in a stark room too large for him. It is like Pompeii being slowly reoccupied, as if nothing had happened. I stood on a tall mound of broken glass outside. Shards of window panes shattered in the process of manufacturing them. The windows of the city were poured and cut here once... This glass was made from sand, desert made invisible until exposed by reflection. The bright sunlight makes little impression on the pile due to a dull coating of dust but the fragments fracture further and slide beneath my feet with the sound of ruin. Walking on windows and unable to see the ground."
- Some months ago, I received letters originally written to his family by a young Marine officer in Iraq who was trying - eloquently, I have to add - to explain how frustrating his work with Iraqis had become. "There is something culturally childish in their understanding of Western governance and management that will require immeasurable education and probably several generations to overcome if they find it of any interest," he wrote. "Our understanding of their tribal governance and its relationship to formal civil management is equally naïve and charges our frustration... The reality is that they cannot, culturally, comprehend our altruism or believe our stated intentions... Liberation will compete with invasion as our legacy but locally we are ideologically irrelevant... I share the American fascination with action and it has consistently betrayed us in our foreign policy."
- Had Bush - indeed Blair -- denounced Israel's claim that it held the Lebanese government responsible for the kidnapping and killing of its soldiers, and demanded an immediate ceasefire, then the disaster that is destroying Lebanon's democracy would not have happened. But no, Bush and Blair let the bloodshed go on and postponed hopes of a ceasefire for the Lebanese upon whom they had lavished so much praise a year ago.
- Walid Jumblatt, to abuse Nasrallah as a creature of Syria - there is speculation over the depth of his relationship with Damascus but his arms certainly come from Iran - and to say to him: "Sayed Nasrallah, rest your mind, I will not reach an agreement with you. When you separate yourself from the Syrian leadership, I will possibly hold a dialogue with you." Thus two more paper-thin links - between Lebanon's Druze community and the Christians and the larger population of Shiite Muslims - have been broken. And that is how civil wars start.
- remember our promise to honour the fledgling democracy of Lebanon, the famous "Cedars Revolution" - a title invented by the US State Department, so the Lebanese should have been suspicious - which brought the retreat of the Syrian army. Lebanon was then held up to be a future model for the Arab world. But once the Hizbollah crossed the frontier and seized two Israeli soldiers, killing three others on 12 July, we stood back and watched the Lebanese suffer. "If there is one thing this last war has convinced me of," a young Lebanese woman put it to me this month, "it is that the Lebanese are on their own. I can never trust a foreign promise again."
- it is a fact that "we" cannot take our armies and warships and tanks and helicopter gunships and para battalions for foreign wars and expect to be unhurt at home. This is the inescapable logic of history that Bush and Blair will not face, will not acknowledge, will not believe - will not even let us believe. All across the Middle East, we are locked in battle in our preposterous "war on terror" because "the world changed forever" on 11 September, even though I have said many times that we should not allow 19 murderers to change our world. So we live in a darker world of phone-taps and "terror plots" and underground CIA prisoners whose interrogators set about victims in secret, tearing to pieces the Geneva Conventions so painfully constructed after the Second World War.
- I once mourned the lack of titans in the modern world, the Roosevelts and the Churchills, blood-drenched though their century was. Blair and Bush, posing as wartime leaders, threatening the midget Hitlers around them, appear to have gone through a kind of "stasis", a psychological inability to grasp what they do not want to hear or what they do not want to be true. And they have lost the thread of history.
- And still - be certain of this - when the fire strikes us again, in London or New York or wherever, Blair and Bush will say that the attack has nothing to do with the Middle East, that Britain's enemies hate "our values" or our "way of life".
- the enraging thing about Blair's constant optimism is that, to prove it all a pack of lies, a journalist has to have his throat cut amid the anarchy which Blair says does not exist.
- Bush and Blair tell us it is all getting much better, that we can all be heartened by the spread of non-existent democracies, that the dawn is rising on Condi's "new" Middle East. Are they really hoping that they can distort the mirror of the world's reality with their words? There is a kind of new dawn rising in the lands from the old Indian empire to the tides of the Mediterranean. The only trouble is that it is blood red.
- The latest UN army in Lebanon, with its French and Italian troops, is moving in ever greater numbers to the south, young men and women who have already been threatened by al-Qa'ida and who will, in three of four months, be hit by al-Qa'ida. Which is one reason why the French have been pallisading themselves into their barracks in southern Lebanon. There is no shortage of suicide bombers here, although it will be the Sunni -- not the Hizbollah-Shiite variety -- which will strike at the UN.
- A few days after Lebanon's latest war came to an end, I went through many of the reporter's notebooks I have used in my last 30 years in the Middle East. Some contained the names of dead colleagues, others the individual stories of the suffering of Arabs and Kurds and Christians and Jews. One, dated 1991, is even splashed with a dark and viscous substance, the oil that came raining down on us from the skies over the Kuwaiti desert after Saddam blew up the wells of the Emirate. It was only after a few minutes that I realised what I was looking for: some hint, back in the days of dangerous innocence, of what was going to happen on 11 September 2001.
  
  And sure enough, in one notebook, part of a transcript of an interview I gave in Toronto in the late 1990s, I see myself trying to discourage the Middle East optimism of my host. "There is an explosion coming in the Middle East," I tell him. What was this explosion I was talking about? I find myself writing almost the same thing a couple of years later in The Independent - I refer to "the explosion to come" without locating it in the Middle East at all. What was I talking about? And then, most disturbingly, I re-run parts of a film series I made with the late Michael Dutfield for Channel 4 and Discovery in 1993. Called From Beirut to Bosnia, it was billed as an attempt to record "Muslims growing anger towards the West."
- With chaos stretching from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, we have never lived in a more dangerous time. Over the next 15 pages and 7,000 words, our man in the Middle East looks back over a lifetime of covering war and death, and lays out a bleak future for all of us - one that even those living in the comfort of the Home Counties cannot escape
- When Daniel Fried, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs visited Paris last year, he lectured European and Arab diplomats on what he called "the US-European imperative to support democratic reform and democratic reformers in the Middle East" - forgetting, it seems, that just such a man, Khatami, existed in Iran but had been snubbed by the US. His failure as a genuinely elected president produced his somewhat cracked successor. Fried, however, insisted that bringing democracy to the Middle East "is not for us a question of political theory, but of central strategic importance", something that clearly didn't matter less than a year later in Lebanon and certainly not when the Palestinians participated in genuine elections, of which more later.

22 Mar 07

About_B'Tselem

www.btselem.org/...Index.asp - Preview

human-rights israel

B'TSELEM - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories was established in 1989 by a group of prominent academics, attorneys, journalists, and Knesset members. It endeavors to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel.
B'Tselem is independent and is funded by contributions from foundations in Europe and North America that support human rights activity worldwide, and by private individuals in Israel and abroad.
2 more annotations...
- B'Tselem ensures the reliability of information it publishes by conducting its own fieldwork and research, the results of which are thoroughly cross-checked with relevant documents, official government sources, and information from other sources, among them Israeli, Palestinian, and other human rights organizations.
- B'Tselem regularly provides Knesset members with information on human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, and injustices caused by Israeli authorities. Several Knesset members, from various factions, assist B'Tselem in placing human rights matters on the public agenda and in safeguarding human rights.

21 Mar 07

Betrayal of the USS Liberty

www.realnews247.com/ss_liberty_betrayal_moorer.htm - Preview

adm-moore corruption israel lbj mcnamara politics ussliberty

The men of the USS Liberty represented the United States. They were
attacked for two hours, causing 70 percent of American casualties, and
the eventual loss of our best intelligence ship. These sailors and
Marines were entitled to our best defense. We gave them no defense.

Did our government put Israel's interests ahead of our own? If so,
why? Does our government continue to subordinate American interests to
Israeli interests? These are important questions that should be
investigated by an independent, fully empowered commission of the
American government.

The American people deserve to know the truth about this attack. We
must finally shed some light on one of the blackest pages in American
naval history. It is a duty we owe not only to the brave men of the USS
Liberty, but to every man and woman who is asked to wear the uniform of
the United States.

Admiral Moorer was joined in the independent
commission of inquiry by Gen. Ray Davis (recently deceased); Rear Adm.
Merlin Staring; former Judge Advocate General of the Navy and Ambassador
James Akins.

Home / Headlines / LBJ, Israel & the USS Liberty Massacre - Media Monitors Network (MMN)

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bias israel lbj mcnamara politics us usa ussliberty war.crimes

“Operation Cyanide,” the murderous Israeli attack was a set up to blame the Egyptians and bring the U.S. into the 1967 war on their side. The Liberty was a “sitting duck” for the Israeli jet planes’ missiles and rockets and their torpedo boats. The attack lasted at least 75 minutes, killing 34 brave Americans and wounding 172 others. Liberty survivor, Petty Officer Ernie Gallo, said, “I mean for a group of people, who are suppose to be the children of God, (the Israelis), they didn’t show any mercy for us.”
LBJ told Rear-Admiral Lawrence Geis of the Sixth Fleet, “I WILL NOT EMBARRASS OUR ALLY.”
5 more annotations...
- “Sinking the Liberty and blaming Egypt and the Soviets would have freed Johnson’s hand to do almost anything - even to drop an atomic bomb on Cairo. Trouble only arose when the Israel operation failed - and the damned ship stayed afloat.”
- within LBJ’s hawkish administration, there was shadowy clique that met under the rubric of the “303 Committee.” Richard Helms, the late CIA Director, said that entity was, “A device for examining covert operations of any kind and making a judgment on behalf of the President, so he wouldn’t be nailed with the thing, if it failed.”
- Out of the “303 Committee,” came a project labeled, “Frontlet 615,” which was furthered defined as, “A secret political agreement in 1966 by which Israel and the U.S. had vowed to destroy (Egypt’s Gamal Abdel) Nasser.” The military name for the operation was, “Operation Cyanide.” The U.S. also had a draconian plan, entitled, “Condition November,” a strategy for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. All of the above ended up being interwoven into the tragic saga of the Liberty.
- What kind of man was LBJ? Well, here is what the distinguished British statesman, Denis Healey, one of his contemporaries, had to say about him: “LYNDON JOHNSON WAS A MONSTER. He was one of the few politicians with whom I found it uncomfortable to be in the same room. He exuded a brutal lust for power which I found most disagreeable...”
- Here is how Hounam described Rostow, “A sinister, Svengali-like figure, or simply the biggest and best fixer? Of all the people in Johnson’s entourage, he was crucial in determining which way the U.S. might respond to the threatened hostilities in the Middle East... Rostow was a hawk who believed in the justness of the Vietnam War and, as a Jew, his Zionism was strongly felt and expressed...(He) had daily contact with the President. This gave him especially close access.” He had acquired enormous influence running the committee (303 Committee) that sanctioned covert operations by the CIA. He also knew in taking Israel’s side on most issues he was playing to the President’s tune. He described Johnson as the ‘most pro-Semitic man’ he had ever met.” Rostow was also an “advisor” to LBJ when he used the phony “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” in 1964, to launch the U.S. into the disastrous Vietnam War.