US training Syrian rebels in Turkey

Fri Dec 9, 2011 6:7AM GMT

Syrian rebels

A former employee with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has said that American and NATO forces are training Syrian rebels in southeastern Turkish city of Hakkari.

Sibel Edmonds also said that she had received information from Turkish and US sources indicating that training Syrian opposition forces, led by defected Syrian colonel Riad al-Assad, had started in May, the Turkish daily Milliyet reported.

Edmonds further added that the US is involved in smuggling arms into Syria from Incirlik military base in Turkey in addition to providing financial support for Syrian rebels.

Syria has been experiencing a deadly unrest ever since mid-March, with demonstrations being held both against and in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government.

Confessions by a number of Syrian rebels about foreign-sponsored plans to carry out armed operations and killing ordinary people as well as security forces prove that recent developments in the country are part of an attempt to incite a revolt in the strategic country neighboring the Israeli regime, aiming to overthrow the current government and replace it with a US-backed regime.

The Western-backed opposition in Syria accuses security forces of a bloody crackdown on protests. But Damascus has dismissed the accusation, arguing that the security forces have been given clear instructions not to harm civilians.

Damascus blames the violence on foreign-sponsored terrorist groups, with the Syrian state TV broadcasting reports showing seized weapons caches and confessions by terrorists describing how they obtained arms from foreign sources.

courtesy Press TV 

Many of the most serious dangers facing Americans today stem from our "special relationship" with Israel

Our uniquely massive support for Israel has cost trillions of dollars and multitudes of lives. It has diminished our moral standing in the world, lessened our domestic freedoms, and exposed us to unnecessary and growing peril.

The majority of Americans – as well as our diplomatic and military experts – oppose this unique relationship. Yet, the lobby for Israel continues to foment policies that are disastrous for our nation and tragic for the region.

If we are to have Middle East policies that serve the national interest, that represent the highest values of our founders and our citizens, and that work to sustain a nation of honor, decency, security, and prosperity, then it is essential that all Americans become active and informed. Below are the facts:

American taxpayers give Israel over $8 million per day

(See report from Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress):
This to a nation, at its peak, of 7.4 million people – smaller than New Jersey. Israel has received more American money than any other nation on earth. It is more than we give to all the starving countries of Africa put together.
From 1950-53 Israel’s financial influx from the U.S. was one billion dollars; Israel at that time had 1.6 million inhabitants

In the past ten years, American taxpayers have given Israel approximately $200,000 per family of five.
This costs us even more:

US aid to Israel is given in a lump sum at the beginning of the fiscal year.

Since the US is operating at a deficit, this means that we borrow the money, give it to Israel, and then pay interest on it long after it is gone.

Israel, on the other hand, makes interest from it. Congress has mandated that Israel’s aid be immediately deposited to an interest bearing account with the Federal Reserve Bank.

Additional financial costs: $3 trillion

* About $1.5 billion to Egypt and $843 million to Jordan is dispensed annually under arrangements made to induce these countries’ friendly relations with Israel.
* Billions of dollars have been lost to U.S. manufacturers because of the Arab boycott engendered by Israeli actions.
* Enormous and continuing costs to U.S. consumers of petroleum, which surged to such heights that it set off a world-wide recession during the Arab oil boycott imposed in reaction to U.S. support of Israel in the 1973 war.
There are a multitude of such costs.

A report by an economist commissioned by the Army War College in 2003 to analyze the situation in full found that the total cost to Americans over Israel’s 60+ years has been $3 trillion.

Americans have a higher unemployment rate than Israel and 10 million families are reportedly sliding into foreclosure; yet Americans continue to give tax money to Israel.

On top of this are the costs of the Iraq war:  hundreds of thousands of lives & over $3 trillion

The costs of the the Iraq war, which was promoted by Israel partisans, are almost incalculable and are still growing.
The war added trillions of dollars to the federal debt, and this doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans.
Economists report that the global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the Iraq war.
The same parties are pushing for a similar attack on Iran.

The Lobby for Israel overrules US experts

U.S. policies in the Middle East rarely reflect U.S. interests and values.
Instead, over the objections of a multitude of State Department and Pentagon analysts, they are largely driven by a variety of factors:

1. Special-interest lobbying.  Fortune Magazine rates one of the many lobby organizations working on behalf of Israel, AIPAC, as the second most powerful lobby in Washington. Many analysts consider the pro-Israel interest group the most powerful lobby in our nation.

By the late 1960s Senator William Fulbright found that U.S. aid to Israel was being secretly funneled back to lobbyists in the U.S., who would use it to lobby for still more U.S. money to Israel.

The U.S. justice department and other agencies have often attempted to enforce U.S. laws

2. Israel partisans in the U.S. government and media: The efforts of a growing number of individuals with close ties to Israel (some are neoconservatives, others are neoliberals) who often hold key positions in U.S. administrations, the State Department, Pentagon, and media.

The US Ambassador to Israel stated that all US Middle East policies are predicated on their effect on Israel. This is a highly inappropriate practice and one that is replicated in no other region. US policies should be based on American interests and priorities, not those of a foreign nation.

3. Campaigns by pro-Israel funders to engender Islamophobia: to create fear and hatred of Muslims, a highly diverse population of 1.5 billion people whose faith is one of the three Abrahamic religions and who worship the same God as Christians and Jews.

4. Israeli-centric news reporting by the U.S. media consistently misportrays the current situation and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

5. Hollywood movies and television shows, which often play a significant role in shaping attitudes and beliefs. These shows, frequently produced by individuals with ties to Israel, depict Arabs and Muslims almost always negatively, Jews and Israelis almost never negatively, and Christians both positively and negatively.

[Interestingly, the oil and weapons industries are not responsible for our relationship with Israel. In fact, at times these industries have lobbied against U.S. support for Israel, which undermines their ability to do business in the region.]  

Israel promotes its own interests, which is the right of any nation. 

 

However, this is done at the expense of Americans who fund it.

There is considerable evidence that Israel is not the close ally many Americans believe it to be:
* The GAO has reported that Israel conducts the most intense spying operation against the U.S. of any of our presumed allies.
* Intelligence experts consider Jonathan Pollard the most damaging spy in US history. For years Israel denied any connection to Pollard; now it actively lobbies for his release.
* Israeli forces have killed and injured numerous Americans. Rarely, if ever, have there been significant consequences.
* Israel has stolen U.S. technology, and passed it on to other nations, some of them U.S. adversaries.

The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty

In 1967 Israeli forces attacked a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Liberty, killing or injuring over 200 American servicemen.
An independent commission in 2003 by extraordinarily high-ranking U.S. military officers and officials found that
Israel had commited an act of war against the United States,
the US President had recalled rescue aircraft, and that
the President had ordered a cover-up on the incident.
These statements, recorded in the Congressional Record, were not reported by U.S. news media.

Israeli ethnic expansionism has caused regional misery, instability, and continual conflict.

Israeli aggression (Israel initiated all of its wars except one) and its violations of international law, human rights conventions, and UN resolutions, have created enormous hostility against it throughout the world. The US, as Israel's number one funder, is increasingly imperiled by hostility created by Israeli actions.
Israel's possession of nuclear weapons poses considerable danger both to the region itself and far beyond.

it has refused to sign the nuclear proliferation treaty and the British American Security Information Council has found that in Israel "nuclear weapons are being assigned roles that go well beyond deterrence."
While US intelligence agencies have so far found no indication that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, Israel's possession of these weapons, combined with its history of aggression, create a compelling motivation for other nations in the region to acquire them for deterrence.
Israel frequently uses American weapons in violation of US laws, killing and maiming large numbers of civilians, women, and children.
Since this is funded by American tax payers, and shielded by the U.S. government, it is causing dangerous hostility toward the U.S.

Damage to civil liberties and the American way of life

This dangerous and unnecessary peril (diplomats note that before Israel the US had no enemies in the region) has caused Americans to tolerate dangerous infringements on our liberty and violations of our Constitution.
This is causing deep damage to our character as a nation.


Deeply intrusive and potentially carcinogenic airport scanners, offensive "pat-downs" of our women and children, abrogations of our nation's most fundamental legal principles are just a few of the direct and indirect results of our Israel policies.

A secure, prosperous, and honorable America

We would be far safer and our nation far healthier by heeding the wisdom of George Washington, the father of our nation:
"...nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave."
#
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Courtesy The Council For The National Interest

Some Truth on Iran and The Bomb

Nuclear Pots Call Iranian Kettle Black

by Eric Margolis

Recently by Eric Margolis: Goodbye Greece

Here we go again. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) long awaited, much ballyhooed report on Iran’s nuclear activities has been thunderously greeted in North America as conclusive evidence that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.

Tehran has long denied such claims. So, more tellingly, did a 2007 US combined intelligence assessment that rudely pulled out the rug from under the feet of the Bush-era neocons who were trying to engineer war with Iran. Now, they are back, in full fulmination mode.

There’s little new in this IAEA report, and a lot of déjà vu. We read the old story floating around since 2002 about a mysterious laptop stolen from Iran and passed to US intelligence. It allegedly contains scientific material about explosive compression methods to trigger a nuclear explosion, and designs to shrink nuclear warheads to fit in missile nosecones.

The UN and western powers say this stolen computer’s contents conclusively proves Iran has violated the UN’s non-proliferation treaty, to which Tehran is a signatory. Israel and its American partisans are raising a hue and cry about an impending nuclear attack on the Jewish state by Iran’s "crazy" leaders.
Iran says the laptop was concocted by Israel’s intelligence agency, which has been busy trying to sabotage Tehran’s enrichment plants and murdering Iranian scientists.

Speaking of crazy, as we saw during last week’s debates, Republicans are baying for war against Iran, seemingly heedless of the political, financial or economic risks involved. Israel, they chorus, is in mortal danger. For the Republican right, Israel often seems to be a more important issue than the United States.


But they don’t explain why Iran would risk nuclear evaporation from Israel’s mighty air, land and sea-based nuclear forces to launch a few nuclear weapons (which they may not even have, and which may or may not work) at Israel. Suicide is not high on Iran’s priority list.

A new element in the UN is the claim that a Russian scientist who supposedly worked on Iranian nuclear weapons explosive technology has defected and revealed all to western intelligence.
But investigative journalists now assert that the scientist may actually have worked in Russia on explosive technology to produce industrial diamonds, not nuclear weapons. This would be very embarrassing for Washington’s war party and for media agitating for war against Iran.

Remember "Curveball," the key Iraqi defector whose phony claims were the basis for the US invasion of Iraq? Well, could this Russian scientist turn out to be "Curveballski? "

Last week, Israel launched a new missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead anywhere in Iran and Pakistan. Israel’s German-supplied submarines lie off Iran’s coast, ready to launch nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, again claimed last week that Iran was about to deploy nuclear weapons and threatened war. But Israel’s respected former Mossad intelligence chief, Meir Dagan, warned striking Iran would be a "stupid idea."

In 1992, Natanyahu claimed Iran would have nuclear weapons in 3-5 years. Shimon Peres, now Israel’s president, insisted Iran would have nukes by 1999.

In 1995, the New York Times claimed Iran was only 5 years from nuclear weapons. In 1998, US Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld claimed Iran was fielding a nuclear-armed ICBM that could hit the United States.
And so it has gone, a steady drumbeat of false claims.

This war hysteria comes on the heels of US charges of an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, a claim laughed at by many Mideast experts.

In fact, it’s possible the US FBI mixed up Iranians: the plot’s alleged mastermind may not have been a member of Iran’s elite military forces at all but of the violently anti-Tehran Marxist People’s Mujahidin, which Washington still calls a terrorist organization even though it is now in bed with the pro-Israel Republican hard right and Israel.

The IAEA tried to buttress its shaky claims against Iran by insisting, "nine other nations came to the same conclusion about Tehran’s covert nuclear efforts." We heard the exact same refrain in 2002-2003 from Washington over its false claims about Iraq’s non-existent weapons.

In fact, thanks to routine US intelligence sharing programs, faked documents about Iraq’s nuclear efforts were fed to other NATO members. Based on such forgeries, some of these nations concluded Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The same process is now happening over Iran’s alleged weapons program.
Washington has long worked to make the UN the "soft" arm of US foreign policy. The US is the UN’s biggest contributor; it pays 25.8% of the costs of the IAEA and has put its own men in positions of influence. 

Even so, the latest UN reports hedges conclusions with words like "suggests" and "appears."
If Iran is indeed trying to produce nuclear weapons – and it has good reasons for wanting them - why has it taken so long?

Initial work on nuclear weapons began in Iran the 1970’s under the Shah. Ironically, Israel was to supply Iran missiles and nuclear warheads. That’s four decades ago.


South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, and Switzerland could all produce a nuclear device within six months of making the decision to do so. A decade ago, I saw a plan for a nuclear weapon in Japan’s defense ministry.

Two decades ago, the director general of Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, told me that Iran had offered to pay for Pakistan’s entire defense budget for ten years in exchange for its nuclear weapons technology. Pakistan, said the ISI chief, refused.

If Iran really wanted nuclear weapons 20 years ago, why on earth has it taken so long to develop a 1940’s technology?

There’s no mystery to making nuclear weapons. Either Iran really ceased work on nuclear arms technology in the early 1990’s, as US National Intelligence Estimate says, or else- my view- there is a furious, long-going debate inside Iran’s ruling party over whether or not to acquire nuclear weapons.
Iran’s paramount leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is also commander of Iran’s armed forces, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, banning nuclear weapons.


Even so, in theory, Iran has some pretty strong reasons for wanting nuclear weapons for defensive purposes – the same reason used by existing nuclear powers, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea.

In 1941, the British Empire and Soviet Union invaded Iran to grab its oil fields, an aggression every bit as wanton and illegal as German’s 1939 invasion of Poland. They installed a puppet regime in Tehran.

In 1953, US and British intelligence overthrew Iran’s democratic leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, for trying to nationalize the nation’s oil and use profits there from for social projects. After the west put Shah Pahlevi back on the peacock throne, the US worked with the notoriously brutal Savak secret police to crush all dissent.

After revolution erupted in 1979, bringing to power an Islamic regime that vowed to devote the nation’s oil wealth to social projects, the US and Britain got Saddam, Hussein’s Iraq to invade Iran. After eight years of bloody trench warfare, in which Iraq was financed and armed by the western powers and their Arab oil allies, Iran suffered at least 500,000 casualties. Iran’s western cities were laid waste. Iraq showered poison and burning gas on the Iranians that was supplied by the western powers.

In Baghdad, I found British scientists who had been sent by Her Majesty’s government to fabricate germ weapons for Iraq. The germ feeder stocks originated from the United States.

Iran is surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors, all lusting for her vast oil and gas deposits. If France or Britain or India can have nukes for self-defense, then why not Iran? I’m surprised Iran has not raced to develop nuclear weapons long ago. A few even crude bombs would likely keep outside powers from attacking Iran.
What’s so crazy about all this is that Israel has a very large arsenal of nuclear and bio-warfare weapons while Iran remains under intense UN nuclear inspection.
The big nuclear powers – the US, Russia, China, Britain, France – are in violation of the 1995 UN nuclear non-proliferation treaty that mandated eliminating all nuclear weapons within five years. The US and Britain are planning to modernize their nuclear forces; the US is helping India build its large nuclear arsenal. No one in Washington dare’s even mention Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

So talk about the nuclear pots calling the Iranian kettle black.

November 15, 2011

 courtesy LewRockwell.com

Former Mossad Chief Halevy: Iran Attack ‘Will Impact Region for 100 Years’

By Richard Silverstein

Ynet reports (fuller Hebrew version) that Ephraim Halevy, a former Mossad director, said yesterday that Iran poses no “existential threat” to Israel and that attacking it must truly be a last resort.  Anyone considering such a strike must realize that it would impact not just Israel, but the entire region for the next 100 years.  If this was all Halevy said it would be important, but mere reinforcement of views already expressed forcefully by Meir Dagan, the most recent past Mossad chief.  What renders the former’s views even more interesting is that he identifies what he considers an even greater existential threat to Israel: the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox):

Haredi radicalism has darkened our lives.  It endangers us even more than Ahmadinejad.

His attack on Haredim is shorthand for an entire range of social developments within Israeli society that includes, but goes beyond merely the ultra-Orthodox.  Halevy, who himself was raised in the moderate Orthodox Bnai Akiva youth movement, refers to the increasing religious and political radicalization of the entire Orthodox movement in Israel.  There has always been friction between secular and religious within Israel.  But in the past, there were streams within the Orthodox movement which held moderate political and halachic views.  Parties like the National Religious Party were ones which accepted a separation between synagogue and state.  They participated in governing coalitions and were statist in orientation.  They didn’t believe the State should be subordinate to the Jewish religion or halacha.  Leaders like Josef Burg (Avrum Burg’s father) were also sober-minded and incorruptible.

Today’s Orthodox are increasingly extreme in their views.  The moderate religious parties are long extinct.  In their place are the ultra-Orthodox, who are much more socially separatist and militant.  They view Israeli secular society as a world–and a state apart from them.  They participate in politics because of the spoils it brings them in financial subsidies, and not for patriotic reasons.  For them, the State of Israel is not an end, but a means toward a successor regime that fulfills the tenets of Judaism as they see it.

Haredim generally don’t join the IDF and receive dispensation from military service as long as they are studying in yeshivot.  When Haredim do join the army they serve in military units which are among the most brutal in their treatment of the Palestinians.  Which brings us to Haredi political activism.  Many of them are the extreme among the settlers.  Their yeshivot and settlements produce the most virulent and homicidal of the Jewish terrorists in places like Yitzhar, Tapuach, and Itamar (among others).

So when Halevy calls the Haredim an existential threat the term is shorthand for a whole set of phenomena that have developed inside Israel over the past few decades and moved Israel from a place which suffered from a divide between secular and religious; into a society in which, while the secular still existed, they had been co-opted and subsumed into a state that moved more and more in the direction of racism, intolerance, and authoritarianism.  These noxious elements, while always present even among secular Israelis, became far more pronounced as Haredi culture did.

Though Halevy doesn’t mention this explicitly, I’m sure he’d liken the increasing militancy of the Haredim and their settler members with that of militant Islam.  Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda have their counterparts in Israel’s most violent settler rabbis and Kahanist MKs like Baruch Marzel, Michael Ben Ari, and a number of others.  While it is true that Jewish terror has not achieved the level of violence of the terror acts of Al Qaeda, that is because Jewish religious extremism has had to struggle against the secular, democratic values of Israel to find traction.  That’s why the process of radicalization has been gradual within the nation.  Within Muslim states like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, there were few countervailing influences to hold back this fundamentalist tide.

Going farther afield, the Ynet report noted Ehud Barak, while visiting London (yes, the British Parliament has removed any threat of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders possibly culpable for war crimes, thus enabling the Israeli defense minister to re-enter the global political marketplace), made some extraordinarily overblown, incendiary remarks about Iran.  Among them was his likening the Islamist regime to North Korea and his claim that an Iranian bomb would undo military arms treaties (which is ironic considering Israel has refused to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty).  He also posited an Iran whose hegemony ruled the region through military threat:

Which would force the local actors to bend under the influence of Iran.  It would spread terror–they already finance terror–throughout the region.  This would bring them a form of immunity of the sort from which North Korea benefits.  In fact, they’re not producing Barbie dolls, but rather nuclear weapons and heavy missiles capable not just of hitting Israel but central Europe.

What Barak neglects to mention that Israel isn’t producing many Barbie dolls either and that it is rolling out far more nuclear weapons and heavy missiles than Iran.  That little fact seems to have slipped his mind though I hope it hasn’t slipped the minds of his listeners.
The above quotation is a perfect example of the near pathological language of jihad, which Israeli commentators have attributed to Barak and Bibi lately (in numberous posts I’ve published here referring to them).  I’ve truly come to believe that this is no longer mere political rhetoric and jawboning to get Iran to stand down from its nuclear program, or to get the U.S. to supply its most advanced weapons system.  This sort of language goes beyond the rational.  It’s the rhetoric of a Caesar dreaming of his next conquest.  Though this Caesar hasn’t nearly as decisive and effective a fighting machine as a Roman legion at his disposal (though of course the IDF can wreak far more havoc on the world than any Roman army).
Though U.S. officials have been studiously nonchalant in commenting on any chance of an Israeli attack on Iran, this report by CNN’s Pentagon correspondent shows that the U.S. military is taking this possibility quite seriously:

The United States has become increasingly concerned Israel could be preparing to strike Iran’s nuclear program, a senior U.S. military official told CNN on Friday.
The U.S. military and intelligence community in recent weeks have stepped up “watchfulness” of both Iran and Israel, according to the senior U.S. military official and a second military official familiar with the U.S. actions. Asked if the Pentagon was concerned about an attack, the senior military official replied “absolutely.” Both officials declined to be identified because of the extreme sensitivity of the matter.
Both the U.S. Central Command, which watches developments in Iran, and the U.S. European Command, which watches developments in Israel, are “increasingly vigilant” in watching potential military movement in both countries. U.S. satellites are a crucial method of gathering intelligence in both arenas, though the official did not specify that was the method being used.
…The military official told CNN that the United States is watching any Israeli military movements closely as well as those inside Iran. In the past, the U.S. officials felt they had assurances from Israel that it would give warning to the United States of any attack.
“Now that doesn’t seem so ironclad,” the official said.

The article also adds that the U.S. military envisions an Israeli attack including not just F-16s, but Jericho III ballistic missiles, presumably equipped with conventional, rather than nuclear warheads.  If the missiles, which presumably could include cruises and other land and sea-based weaponry, were accurate enough, it would take some of the burden off the IAF’s manned airpower.  Finally, an attack would offer Shock and Awe Israel-style.
Let’s return to an Israeli voice of reason and sanity, Halevy’s who said:

…No one should believe that there is an [Iranian] existential threat because this is simply not true.

The tragedy for Israel is that Dagan and Halevy, retired from active duty, cannot personally stop such an attack.  They’ve left the field to the megalomaniacs like Barak and Bibi, and there’s no telling whether they can be restrained.

courtesy TIKUN OLAM

Book recommendation: "The Wandering Who" by Gilad Atzmon

A great book by a great thinker and musician. A customer review from Amazon:

"This book frightens me. It frightens me that such radical views on the Jewish people and nation are spoken of in polite company in 2011.
Atzmon has written that Jews are evil and a menace to humanity:

· "With Fagin and Shylock in mind Israeli barbarism and organ trafficking seem to be just other events in an endless hellish continuum."

· "The Homo Zionicus quickly became a mass murderer, detached from any recognised form of ethical thinking and engaged in a colossal crime against humanity."

· If Iran and Israel fight a nuclear war that kills tens of millions of people, "some may be bold enough to argue that `Hitler might have been right after all'" (179).

Atzmon regularly urges his readers to doubt the Holocaust and to reject Jewish history:

· "It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn't make any historical sense. ... If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich (Judenrein--free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war?"

Finally, Atzmon repeatedly declares that Israel is worse than the Nazis and has actually "apologized" to the Nazis for having earlier compared them to Israel:

· "Many of us including me tend to equate Israel to Nazi Germany. Rather often I myself join others and argue that Israelis are the Nazis of our time. I want to take this opportunity to amend my statement. Israelis are not the Nazis of our time and the Nazis were not the Israelis of their time. Israel, is in fact far worse than Nazi Germany and the above equation is simply meaningless and misleading." (...)

By 

Paul Finlayson

Gilad Atzmon is a former Israeli citizen, born of Jewish parents who rejected both the citizenship and the nationality.

How Zionism Infiltrated the United States of America [Exclusive Interview]

Mark Bruzonsky, a Jewish, American Scholar and Journalist, has been a key member behind the scenes of the Israeli Palestinian peace initiative in the 1980s, meeting with Former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and with Palestinian officials.

Interview with Scholar and Journalist, Mark Bruzonsky.

Courtesy VETERANS TODAY

ATZMON Says: Israel Worse Than Nazi Germany

February 19, 2011

 GILAD ATZMON

Three months ago, I briefly participated in a Palestinian solidarity conference in Stuttgart. The event was dedicated to the ‘One State Solution’. As it happened, I was touring in Germany at the time, and thus accepted an invitation by the organiser to say a few words.

Being primarily an artist, rather than a politician or an activist, I am committed to truth and beauty rather than a party-line or any given ideological doctrine. Yet, without my intending to do so, and in just a few sentences – I managed to cross every possible ‘red line’, and I bought myself a few more enemies.

In my speech, I said that as much as ‘universalism’ is a beautiful idea, it is incompatible with Jewish culture, since Jewish culture is tribally oriented. I also told the German Palestinian supporters that as much as ‘peace’ is a beautiful concept, associated as it is with harmony and reconciliation,  Shalom, the Hebrew word for peace, is actually interpreted by Israelis as ‘security for the Jews’.

I thought that the supporters of the ‘One State Solution’ should be aware of the complexities that lie ahead.

I also managed  to infuriate some, by suggesting that I was against the comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. Indeed, I believe that from certain ideological perspective, Israel is actually far worse than Nazi Germany, for unlike Nazi Germany, Israel is a democracy and that implies that Israeli citizens are complicit in Israeli atrocities.



Needless to say, a few of the attendants of the conference were angry with me.  Such ideas are hardly expressed on German soil. Some of the Jewish activists, and at least one Marxist, demanded that I should be removed from the protocol.

I was obviously sad about it — I believed that those who advocated the ‘One State solution’ should be able to support intellectual pluralism — But it turns out that a few of those who promote democracy in Palestine would be better advised to first confront their own Stalinist tendencies.

Later, I learned that one legendary German Jewish activist and speaker at the conference stood by me.  Evelyn Hecht-Galinski firmly announced that if I was to be removed from the protocol, then she also wanted to be removed. She argued in my defense that I was telling the truth about both Jewish and Israeli culture.

Read Entire Article

Israel (US best ally) Blackmails Sick Palestinians to Snitch

17. Feb.

A human rights group has blamed Israel for violating the rights of Palestinian patients leaving Gaza for medical treatment by intensifying interrogations against them.

Data collected by al-Meezan Center for Human Rights and its international affiliates indicate a rise in the number of Palestinian patients interrogated and forced to provide information in return for a permission to leave the Gaza Strip for medical treatment, a Press TV correspondent reported on Wednesday.

The center's Sameer Siqqout said that patients have refused to talk to the press for fear of reprisals by Israeli authorities. Many patients and their companions have been arrested after being interviewed by Israeli intelligence agencies, he said.

One patient said that he has cancer and was leaving with his son when he was stopped by Israeli agents who asserted that he could cross the border only if he would spy for them.

A crippling Israeli siege has led to acute shortage of necessary equipment and medicine in the impoverished Gaza hospitals that are faced with a relatively high number of seriously ill patients.

The situation is especially dangerous for chronically ill patients that have to be on medication for extended periods and those requiring emergency operations.

Hundreds of patients in the blockaded Gaza Strip risk an imminent death unless they are provided with badly needed medications.

According to Israeli rights group Betselem, the Tel Aviv regime denies the rights of Gaza residents to seek medical care inside Gaza and to access treatment outside the territory.

Many patients have said that the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) have interrogated and photographed them against their will. Experts say that the Israeli regime also blackmails Gaza patients due to its obsession with security.

Israeli Physicians for Human Rights Organization also blames the ISA for exploiting Gaza patients in exchange for an exit permit.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza has expressed alarm that the current shortage of medicine caused by the persisting Israeli blockade has resulted in a serious health crisis for Palestinian patients.

The ministry said that it has voiced concern and has called upon the international community to stand by the patients in the Gaza Strip.
courtesy PRESS TV

Israel Uses American Missiles To Destroy Medical Supplies From the US (video)

courtesy Truth Justice Peace

Conflict and Opportunity in Post-Mubarak Egypt - an Analysis

By BRIAN M. DOWNING

8. February 2011

B. Downing

Hosni Mubarak's thirty-year rule in Egypt is nearing an end and though the denouement of events there is still unclear, the new polity is almost certainly to be shaped by the military institutions and popular sentiments. This is causing considerable dismay in Jerusalem and Washington. National security institutions tend to think in worst-case scenarios, but recent events in Egypt present opportunities for the long sought after solution to the Palestinian problem.

Anti-Israel Sentiment

Public sentiments that erupted in Egypt, like those in Tunisia and Jordan and Yemen, are based on a large youth segment that sees only dismal opportunity in a country whose economy is sluggish, corrupt, and dominated by the regime and its coterie of supporters. This demographic bulge will not be easily mollified and its concerns and demands will shape the politics of the region for decades.

Not too far below the surface is anger over Mubarak's acquiescence to Israel's actions toward fellow Muslims. Israel, in the eyes of the Egyptian public, has brutalized the Palestinian people, expanded settlements ever deeper into the West Bank, and inflicted great casualties on the people of Gaza and Lebanon.

The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel – so highly prized in Israel and the US – has served not to further peace in the region but to give Israel a free hand in dealing with Muslims along its periphery. Once the matter of a new government is settled – a process that will take many months or more – attention will turn to the east.

Anger toward Israel is also plain in the Egyptian military. Owing to conscription, the military is not aloof from public sentiments. Indeed, the younger officers share the public hostility toward older elites, in and out of uniform. The Muslim Brotherhood is likely to have been placing adherents into the military for several decades now, where they are now reaching the higher ranks.

Generational dynamics are visible as well. Beneath the lofty heights of the general staff there is a brooding sentiment that sees political, military, and business leaders as an intertwined elite that has forsaken national interests in exchange for US subsidies and Israeli commerce. 

The officer corps and general staff are infused with institutional myths based on wars with Israel. It was then that Egyptian forces performed quite well attacking across the Suez Canal and driving well into Sinai. Israeli forces were in retreat, their leaders in near panic, until US assistance broke the Egyptian air defense system, leaving Egyptian infantry and armor columns at the mercy of Israeli airpower. 

The Egyptian military, though steeped in notions of power and defending the people, has had to sit by as Israel roughly imposed its will on Palestinians and Lebanese. Ongoing events may encourage them to reassert themselves on the world stage.

The Form of Conflict

Egyptian MIG 17 fighter shot down by the Israelis in 1967

Public anger directed toward Israel and a military pervaded by myths based on wars against Israel might seem to make another war inevitable. For all the emotion and momentum, however, an outright war along the lines of the ones in 1967 and 1973 is unlikely.

The new government in Cairo, military or Islamist or an amalgamation of both, will be charged with reforming the economy and providing opportunity for the energized young generation. War with Israel would end a considerable portion of the trade between the two nations and as well the large US subsidies that have come since the peace agreement of thirty years ago.

In any event, for all the US training and equipment, the Egyptian military – whether alone or in conjunction with Syria – is no match for the Israeli military. Though thwarted twice by Hizbullah guerrillas In Lebanon, the Israeli army remains a potent conventional force. It still enjoys advantages in cohesion, training, and technology.

Israel's airstrike on Syria in 2007 ably demonstrated its ability to defeat air defense systems and the Stuxnet virus that damaged Iranian nuclear facilities last year will give pause to any military commander, who can never know if his command and control system will be operable. Further, few can doubt Israel's willingness to use nuclear weapons should it face a crushing conventional defeat.

A more likely form of conflict will lie in providing limited material support to various groups in and out of Israel – Hamas in Gaza, Fatah in the West Bank, and Hizbullah in Lebanon. Such pressure will force greater Israeli defense spending, reduce foreign investment in Israel, and raise the specter of widespread emigration – especially by educated, secular Israelis so vital to the military and economy. Another form of support for the Palestinians will lie in increasing the diplomatic pressure on Israel to find an answer to the Palestinian issue.

Limited material support and more forceful diplomatic pressure will confer prestige and legitimacy on the new government in Cairo. This will provide time to embark upon far-reaching economic policies that must offer opportunity for the expansive, restive youth segment – a program that farsighted Israeli figures might well see as in their interests as well.

A New Approach To Peace

In recent years, peace talks come and go with little if any progress. Israel continues to expand its settlements on the West Bank, moving closer to a de facto annexation. US efforts to stop the settlements and bring about meaningful talks have failed once more. Mubarak's fall will bring about new forces that could well lead to meaningful peace talks.

Israel will soon face an ominous coalition along its periphery comprising a newly-strident Egypt, a Lebanon with Hizbullah on the rise in government, and Syria which has resisted efforts to divert it from its longstanding hostile stance. And of course Jordan could follow the Egyptian path in coming weeks.

Short of intermittent and possibly endless wars, there is only one way to counter this emerging coalition: settling the West Bank issue by forming a Palestinian state there. 

Arab pressure on the periphery will also cause Israel to rethink its clandestine operations in Iran. In recent years Israel has supported insurgencies, bombings, and assassinations throughout Iran in order to pressure Iran to give up its nuclear program and to stop its support of hostile actions by Hamas and Hizbullah. The former is probably unstoppable but the latter could readily be part of a regional peace agreement.

Israel will have to balance Iran against Arab powers, as it long did, or more likely, balance Arab forces against Iran, as it was attempting to do prior to the turn of events in Egypt. Otherwise, Israel will face a powerful Arab-Iranian coalition. Not even the vaunted Israeli military and intelligence service can take on so many foreign powers. Not even the once bottomless American military and fiscal assets will want to support that for an extended period.

* * *

The passions and fissures of the region make a transformation into a harmonious land unlikely, but with the new disposition of post-Mubarak Egypt, a significant easing of regional problems is within reach. This will benefit the entire Middle East and prevent Israel from degenerating into a new apartheid state presiding over a growing underclass. It will also prevent the moral principles that many Israelis still pride themselves on from being further supplanted by the ruthless principles of national security.

Brian M. Downing is the author of several works of political and military history, including The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at: brianmdowning@gmail.com

courtesy COUNTERPUNCH 

History of Israel in Quotes and Pictures

"Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." [Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.]



"Zionist colonization must either be terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, be continued and make progress only under the protection of a power independent of the native population - an iron wall, which will be in a position to resist the pressure to the native population. This is our policy towards the Arabs..." [Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall, 1923.]

"A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not difficult, not dangerous, but IMPOSSIBLE!... Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important... to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot - or else I am through with playing at colonizing." [Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of Likud), The Iron Wall, 1923.]



“We must expel Arabs and take their places." [David Ben Gurion, future Prime Minister of Israel, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.]


"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out’” [Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.]

Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" [Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.]


"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." [Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.]

 " It lies upon the people's shoulders to prepare for the war, but it lies upon the Israeli army to carry out the fight with the ultimate object of erecting the Israeli Empire." [Moshe Dayan (Israel Defense and Foreign Minister), on February 12 1952. Radio "Israel."]


"The only solution is Eretz Israel [Greater Israel], or at least Western Eretz Israel [all the land west of Jordan River], without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point ... We must not leave a single village, not a single tribe." [Joseph Weitz, Director of the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist agency charged with acquiring Palestinian land, Circa 194. Machover Israca, January 5, 1973 p.2.]

see the great quotes HERE

Egypt; Is a "Greater Israel" now a greater possibility than ever before? - Piper Report

For "Greater Israel" see WIKIPEDIA

Original map from the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"

" It lies upon the people's shoulders to prepare for the war, but it lies upon the Israeli army to carry out the fight with the ultimate object of erecting the Israeli Empire." [Moshe Dayan (Israel Defense and Foreign Minister), on February 12 1952. Radio "Israel."]

"The only solution is Eretz Israel [Greater Israel], or at least Western Eretz Israel [all the land west of Jordan River], without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point ... We must not leave a single village, not a single tribe." [Joseph Weitz, Director of the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist agency charged with acquiring Palestinian land, Circa 194. Machover Israca, January 5, 1973 p.2.]

" The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill -- From the Nile to the Euphrates." [Ben Gurion]

"The Lord reigns. The Lord has reigned. The Lord will reign forever and ever."

 

 

ca. 1930, Irgun terrorist organization