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 

Brainwashing of Palestinian Kids

courtesy raymond942

Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany - short history lesson

The Economic Boycott of 1933 

By M. Raphael Johnson, Ph.D., assistant editor of TBR;

Article from The Barnes Review, Jan./Feb. 2001, pp. 41-45. 
The Barnes Review, 645 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Suite 100, Washington D.C. 20003, USA.

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Few people know the facts about the singular event that helped spark what ultimately became known as World War II - the international Jewish declaration of war on Germany shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power and well before any official German government sanctions or reprisals against Jews were carried out. The March 24, 1933 issue of The Daily Express of London (shown above) described how Jewish leaders, in combination with powerful international Jewish financial interests, had launched a boycott of Germany for the express purpose of crippling her already precarious economy in the hope of bringing down the new Hitler regime. It was only then that Germany struck back in response. Thus, if truth be told, it was the worldwide Jewish leadership - not the Third Reich - that effectively fired the first shot in the Second World War. Prominent New York attorney Samuel Untermyer (above right) was one of the leading agitators in the war against Germany, describing the Jewish campaign as nothing less than a "holy war."

Long before the Hitler government began restricting the rights of the German Jews, the leaders of the worldwide Jewish community formally declared war on the "New Germany" at a time when the U.S. government and even the Jewish leaders in Germany were urging caution in dealing with the new Hitler regime.
The war by the international Jewish leadership on Germany not only sparked definite reprisals by the German government but also set the stage for a little-known economic and political alliance between the Hitler government and the leaders of the Zionist movement who hoped that the tension between the Germans and the Jews would lead to massive emigration to Palestine. In short, the result was a tactical alliance between the Nazis and the founders of the modern-day state of Israel - a fact that many today would prefer be forgotten.
To this day, it is generally (although incorrectly) believed that when Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor in January of 1933, the German government began policies to suppress the Jews of Germany, including rounding up of Jews and putting them in concentration camps and launching campaigns of terror and violence against the domestic Jewish population.
While there were sporadic eruptions of violence against Jews in Germany after Hitler came to power, this was not officially sanctioned or encouraged. And the truth is that anti-Jewish sentiments in Germany (or elsewhere in Europe) were actually nothing new. As all Jewish historians attest with much fervor, anti-Semitic uprisings of various degrees had been ever-present in European history.
In any case, in early 1933, Hitler was not the undisputed leader of Germany, nor did he have full command of the armed forces. Hitler was a major figure in a coalition government, but he was far from being the government himself. That was the result of a process of consolidation which evolved later.
Even Germany's Jewish Central Association, known as the Verein, contested the suggestion (made by some Jewish leaders outside Germany) that the new government was deliberately provoking anti-Jewish uprisings.
The Verein issued a statement that "the responsible government authorities [i.e. the Hitler regime] are unaware of the threatening situation," saying, "we do not believe our German fellow citizens will let themselves be carried away into committing excesses against the Jews."
Despite this, Jewish leaders in the United States and Britain determined on their own that it was necessary to launch a war against the Hitler government.
On March 12, 1933 the American Jewish Congress announced a massive protest at Madison Square Gardens for March 27. At that time the commander in chief of the Jewish War Veterans called for an American boycott of German goods. In the meantime, on March 23, 20,000 Jews protested at New York's City Hall as rallies were staged outside the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American shipping lines and boycotts were mounted against German goods throughout shops and businesses in New York City.
According to The Daily Express of London of March 24, 1933, the Jews had already launched their boycott against Germany and her elected government. The headline read "Judea Declares War on Germany - Jews of All the World Unite - Boycott of German Goods - Mass Demonstrations." The article described a forthcoming "holy war" and went on to implore Jews everywhere to boycott German goods and engage in mass demonstrations against German economic interests. According to the Express:

The whole of Israel throughout the world is uniting to declare an economic and financial war on Germany. The appearance of the Swastika as the symbol of the new Germany has revived the old war symbol of Judas to new life. Fourteen million Jews scattered over the entire world are tight to each other as if one man, in order to declare war against the German persecutors of their fellow believers.       The Jewish wholesaler will quit his house, the banker his stock exchange, the merchant his business, and the beggar his humble hut, in order to join the holy war against Hitler's people.

The Express said that Germany was "now confronted with an international boycott of its trade, its finances, and its industry.... In London, New York, Paris and Warsaw, Jewish businessmen are united to go on an economic crusade."
The article said "worldwide preparations are being made to organize protest demonstrations," and reported that "the old and reunited nation of Israel gets in formation with new and modern weapons to fight out its age old battle against its persecutors."
This truly could be described as "the first shot fired in the Second World War."
In a similar vein, the Jewish newspaper Natscha Retsch wrote:

The war against Germany will be waged by all Jewish communities, conferences, congresses... by every individual Jew. Thereby the war against Germany will ideologically enliven and promote our interests, which require that Germany be wholly destroyed.  The danger for us Jews lies in the whole German people, in Germany as a whole as well as individually. It must be rendered harmless for all time.... In this war we Jews have to participate, and this with all the strength and might we have at our disposal.

However, note well that the Zionist Association of Germany put out a telegram on the 26th of March rejecting many of the allegations made against the National Socialists as "propaganda," "mendacious" and "sensational."
In fact, the Zionist faction had every reason to ensure the permanence of National Socialist ideology in Germany. Klaus Polkehn, writing in the Journal of Palestine Studies ("The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941"; JPS v. 3/4, spring/summer 1976), claims that the moderate attitude of the Zionists was due to their vested interest in seeing the financial victory of National Socialism to force immigration to Palestine. This little-known factor would ultimately come to play a pivotal part in the relationship between Nazi Germany and the Jews.
In the meantime, though, German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath complained of the "vilification campaign" and said:

As concerns Jews, I can only say that their propagandists abroad are rendering their co-religionists in Germany no service by giving the German public, through their distorted and untruthful news about persecution and torture of Jews, the impression that they actually halt at nothing, not even at lies and calumny, to fight the present German government.

The fledgling Hitler government itself was clearly trying to contain the growing tension - both within Germany and without. In the United States, even U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wired Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress and urged caution:

Whereas there was for a short time considerable physical mistreatment of Jews, this phase may be considered virtually terminated.... A stabilization appears to have been reached in the field of personal mistreatment.... I feel hopeful that the situation which has caused such widespread concern throughout this country will soon revert to normal.

This New York Daily News front page headline hailed the massive anti-German protest rally held in Madison Square Garden on March 27, 1933. Despite efforts by the German government to alleviate tensions and prevent the escalation of name-calling and threats by the international Jewish leadership, the rally was held as scheduled. Similar rallies and protest marches were also being held in other cities during the same time frame. The intensity of the Jewish campaign against Germany was such that the Hitler government vowed that if the campaign did not stop, there would be a one-day boycott in Germany of Jewish-owned stores. Despite this, the hate campaign continued, forcing Germany to take defensive measures that created a situation wherein the Jews of Germany became increasingly marginalized. The truth about the Jewish war on Germany has been suppressed by most histories of the period.

Despite all this, the leaders of the Jewish community refused to relent. On March 27 there were simultaneous protest rallies at Madison Square Garden, in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland and 70 other locations. The New York rally was broadcast worldwide. The bottom line is that "the New Germany" was declared to be an enemy of Jewish interests and thus needed to be economically strangled. This was before Hitler decided to boycott Jewish goods. It was in direct response to this that the German government announced a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany on April 1. German Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels announced that if, after the one-day boycott, there were no further attacks on Germany, the boycott would be stopped. Hitler himself responded to the Jewish boycott and the threats in a speech on March 28 - four days after the original Jewish declaration of war - saying:

Now that the domestic enemies of the nation have been eliminated by the Volk itself, what we have long been waiting for will not come to pass.       The Communist and Marxist criminals and their Jewish-intellectual instigators, who, having made off with their capital stocks across the border in the nick of time, are now unfolding an unscrupulous, treasonous campaign of agitation against the German Volk as a whole from there....       Lies and slander of positively hair-raising perversity are being launched about Germany. Horror stories of dismembered Jewish corpses, gouged out eyes and hacked off hands are circulating for the purpose of defaming the German Volk in the world for the second time, just as they had succeeded in doing once before in 1914.

Thus, the fact - one conveniently left out of nearly all history on the subject - is that Hitler's March 28, 1933 boycott order was in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership just four days earlier. Today, Hitler's boycott order is described as a naked act of aggression, yet the full circumstances leading up to his order are seldom described in even the most ponderous and detailed histories of "the Holocaust".
Not even Saul Friedlander in his otherwise comprehensive overview of German policy, Nazi Germany and the Jews, mentions the fact that the Jewish declaration of war and boycott preceded Hitler's speech of March 28, 1933. Discerning readers would be wise to ask why Friedlander felt this item of history so irrelevant.
The simple fact is that it was organized Jewry as a political entity - and not even the German Jewish community per se - that actually initiated the first shot in the war with Germany.

Placard text: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't shop at Jewish stores!" Photo not part of original TBR article - added by The Scriptorium.

Germany's response was a defensive - not an offensive - measure. Were that fact widely known today, it would cast new light on the subsequent events that ultimately led to the world-wide conflagration that followed. To understand Hitler's reaction to the Jewish declaration of war, it is vital to understand the critical state of the German economy at the time. In 1933, the German economy was in a shambles. Some 3 million Germans were on public assistance with a total of 6 million unemployed. Hyper-inflation had destroyed the economic vitality of the German nation. Furthermore, the anti-German propaganda pouring out of the global press strengthened the resolve of Germany's enemies, especially the Poles and their hawkish military high command.
The Jewish leaders were not bluffing. The boycott was an act of war not solely in metaphor: it was a means, well crafted, to destroy Germany as a political, social and economic entity. The long term purpose of the Jewish boycott against Germany was to bankrupt her with respect to the reparation payments imposed on Germany after World War I and to keep Germany demilitarized and vulnerable.
The boycott, in fact, was quite crippling to Germany. Jewish scholars such as Edwin Black have reported that, in response to the boycott, German exports were cut by 10 percent, and that many were demanding seizing German assets in foreign countries (Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement - The Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, New York, 1984).
The attacks on Germany did not cease. The worldwide Jewish leadership became ever the more belligerent and worked itself into a frenzy. An International Jewish Boycott Conference was held in Amsterdam to coordinate the ongoing boycott campaign. It was held under the auspices of the self-styled World Jewish Economic Federation, of which famous New York City attorney and longtime political power broker, Samuel Untermyer, was elected president.
Upon returning to the United States in the wake of the conference, Untermyer delivered a speech over WABC Radio (New York), a transcript of which was printed in The New York Times on August 7, 1933.
Untermyer's inflammatory oratory called for a "sacred war" against Germany, making the flat-out allegation that Germany was engaged in a plan to "exterminate the Jews." He said (in part):

...Germany [has] been converted from a nation of culture into a veritable hell of cruel and savage beasts.       We owe it not only to our persecuted brethren but to the entire world to now strike in self-defense a blow that will free humanity from a repetition of this incredible outrage....       Now or never must all the nations of the earth make common cause against the... slaughter, starvation and annihilation... fiendish torture, cruelty and persecution that are being inflicted day by day upon these men, women and children....       When the tale is told... the world will confront a picture so fearful in its barbarous cruelty that the hell of war and the alleged Belgian atrocities pale into insignificance as compared to this devilishly, deliberately, cold-bloodedly planned and already partially executed campaign for the extermination of a proud, gentle, loyal, law-abiding people...       The Jews are the aristocrats of the world. From time immemorial they have been persecuted and have seen their persecutors come and go. They alone have survived. And so will history repeat itself, but that furnishes no reason why we should permit this reversion of a once great nation to the Dark Ages or fail to rescue these 600,000 human souls from the tortures of hell....       ...What we are proposing and have already gone far toward doing, is to prosecute a purely defensive economic boycott that will undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends.       ...We propose to and are organizing world opinion to express itself in the only way Germany can be made to understand....

Untermyer then proceeded to provide his listeners with a wholly fraudulent history of the circumstances of the German boycott and how it originated. He also proclaimed that the Germans were bent on a plan to "exterminate the Jews":

The Hitler regime originated and are fiendishly prosecuting their boycott to exterminate the Jews by placarding Jewish shops, warning Germans against dealing with them, by imprisoning Jewish shopkeepers and parading them through the streets by the hundreds under guard of Nazi troops for the sole crime of being Jews, by ejecting them from the learned professions in which many of them had attained eminence, by excluding their children from the schools, their men from the labor unions, closing against them every avenue of livelihood, locking them in vile concentration camps and starving and torturing them without cause and resorting to every other conceivable form of torture, inhuman beyond conception, until suicide has become their only means of escape, and all solely because they are or their remote ancestors were Jews, and all with the avowed object of exterminating them.

Untermyer concluded his largely fantastic and hysterical address by declaring that with the support of "Christian friends... we will drive the last nail in the coffin of bigotry and fanaticism...."

The Biggest Secret of WWII? Why Germany Began Rounding Up Jews and Deporting Them to the East Why did the Germans begin rounding up the Jews and interning them in the concentration camps to begin with? Contrary to popular myth, the Jews remained "free" inside Germany - albeit subject to laws which did restrict certain of their privileges - prior to the outbreak of World War II.       Yet, the other little-known fact is that just before the war began, the leadership of the world Jewish community formally declared war on Germany - above and beyond the ongoing six-year-long economic boycott launched by the worldwide Jewish community when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933.       As a consequence of the formal declaration of war, the German authorities thus deemed Jews to be potential enemy agents.       Here's the story behind the story: Chaim Weizmann (above), president of both the international "Jewish Agency" and of the World Zionist Organization (and later Israel's first president), told British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in a letter published in The London Times on September 6, 1939 that:       I wish to confirm, in the most explicit manner, the declarations which I and my colleagues have made during the last month, and especially in the last week, that the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies. Our urgent desire is to give effect to these declarations [against Germany].       We wish to do so in a way entirely consonant with the general scheme of British action, and therefore would place ourselves, in matters big and small, under the coordinating direction of His Majesty's Government. The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements for utilizing Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources, etc. [Emphasis in red added by The Scriptorium.]

That his allegations against Germany were made long before even Jewish historians today claim there were any gas chambers or even a plan to "exterminate" the Jews, displays the nature of the propaganda campaign confronting Germany. However, during this same period there were some unusual developments at work: The spring of 1933 also witnessed the beginning of a period of private cooperation between the German government and the Zionist movement in Germany and Palestine (and actually worldwide) to increase the flow of German-Jewish immigrants and capital to Palestine.
The modern-day supporters of Zionist Israel and many historians have succeeded in keeping this Nazi-Zionist pact a secret to the general public for decades and while most Americans have no concept of the possibility that there could have been outright collaboration between the Nazi leadership and the founders of what became the state of Israel, the truth has begun to emerge.
Dissident Jewish writer Lenni Brenner's Zionism In the Age of the Dictators, published by a small press and not given the publicity it deserves by the so-called "mainstream" media (which is otherwise obsessed with the Holocaust era), was perhaps the first major endeavor in this realm.
In response to Brenner and others, the Zionist reaction has usually consisted of declarations that their collaboration with Nazi Germany was undertaken solely to save the lives of Jews. But the collaboration was all the more remarkable because it took place at a time when many Jews and Jewish organizations demanded a boycott of Germany.
To the Zionist leaders, Hitler's assumption of power held out the possibility of a flow of immigrants to Palestine. Previously, the majority of German Jews, who identified themselves as Germans, had little sympathy with the Zionist cause of promoting the ingathering of world Jewry to Palestine. But the Zionists saw that only the anti-Semitic Hitler was likely to push the anti-Zionist German Jews into the arms of Zionism.
For all the modern-day wailing by worldwide supporters of Israel (not to mention the Israelis themselves) about "the Holocaust", they neglect to mention that making the situation in Germany as uncomfortable for the Jews as possible - in cooperation with German National Socialism - was part of the plan.

Note to readers of this article who can also read German: a booklet discussing the emigration of Jews from Third Reich Germany, and the Transfer Agreement that facilitated their emigration, may be found here!

This was the genesis of the so-called Transfer Agreement, the agreement between Zionist Jews and the National Socialist government to transfer German Jewry to Palestine. According to Jewish historian Walter Laqueur and many others, German Jews were far from convinced that immigration to Palestine was the answer. Furthermore, although the majority of German Jews refused to consider the Zionists as their political leaders, it is clear that Hitler protected and cooperated with the Zionists for the purposes of implementing the final solution: the mass transfer of Jews to the Middle East.
Edwin Black, in his massive tome The Transfer Agreement (Macmillan, 1984), stated that although most Jews did not want to flee to Palestine at all, due to the Zionist movement's influence within Nazi Germany a Jew's best chance of getting out of Germany was by emigrating to Palestine. In other words, the Transfer Agreement itself mandated that Jewish capital could only to go Palestine.
Thus, according to the Zionists, a Jew could leave Germany only if he went to the Levant.
The primary difficulty with the Transfer Agreement (or even the idea of such an agreement) was that the English [!!!; Scriptorium] were demanding, as a condition of immigration, that each immigrant pay 1,000 pounds sterling upon arrival in Haifa or elsewhere. The difficulty was that such hard currency was nearly impossible to come by in a cash-strapped and radically inflationary Germany. This was the main idea behind the final Transfer Agreement. Laqueur writes:

A large German bank would freeze funds paid in by immigrants in blocked accounts for German exporters, while a bank in Palestine would control the sale of German goods to Palestine, thereby providing the immigrants with the necessary foreign currency on the spot. Sam Cohen, co-owner of Hanoaiah Ltd. and initiator of the transfer endeavors, was however subjected to long-lasting objections from his own people and finally had to concede that such a transfer agreement could only be concluded on a much higher level with a bank of its own rather than that of a private company. The renowned Anglo-Palestine Bank in London would be included in this transfer deal and create a trust company for [this] purpose.

Of course, this is of major historical importance in dealing with the relationship between Zionism and National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s. The relationship was not one merely of mutual interest and political favoritism on the part of Hitler, but a close financial relationship with German banking families and financial institutions as well. Black writes:

It was one thing for the Zionists to subvert the anti-Nazi boycott. Zionism needed to transfer out the capital of German Jews, and merchandise was the only available medium. But soon Zionist leaders understood that the success of the future Jewish Palestinian economy would be inextricably bound up with the survival of the Nazi economy. So the Zionist leadership was compelled to go further. The German economy would have to be safeguarded, stabilized, and if necessary reinforced. Hence, the Nazi party and the Zionist organizers shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany.

Thus one sees a radical fissure in world Jewry around 1933 and beyond. There were, first, the non-Zionist Jews (specifically the World Jewish Congress founded in 1933), who, on the one hand, demanded the boycott and eventual destruction of Germany. Black notes that many of these people were not just in New York and Amsterdam, but a major source for this also came from Palestine proper.
On the other hand, one can see the judicious use of such feelings by the Zionists for the sake of eventual resettlement in Palestine. In other words, it can be said (and Black does hint at this) that Zionism believed that, since Jews would be moving to the Levant, capital flight would be necessary for any new economy to function.
The result was the understanding that Zionism would have to ally itself with National Socialism, so that the German government would not impede the flow of Jewish capital out of the country.
It served the Zionist interests at the time that Jews be loud in their denunciations of German practices against the Jews to scare them into the Levant, but, on the other hand, Laqueur states that "The Zionists became motivated not to jeopardize the German economy or currency." In other words, the Zionist leadership of the Jewish Diaspora was one of subterfuge and underhandedness, with only the advent of German hostility towards Jewry convincing the world's Jews that immigration was the only escape.
The fact is that the ultimate establishment of the state of Israel was based on fraud. The Zionists did not represent anything more than a small minority of German Jews in 1933.
On the one hand, the Zionist fathers of Israel wanted loud denunciations of Germany's "cruelties" to the world's Jews while at the same time demanding moderation so that the National Socialist government would remain stable, financially and politically. Thus Zionism boycotted the boycott.
For all intents and purposes, the National Socialist government was the best thing to happen to Zionism in its history, for it "proved" to many Jews that Europeans were irredeemably anti-Jewish and that Palestine was the only answer: Zionism came to represent the overwhelming majority of Jews solely by trickery and cooperation with Adolf Hitler.
For the Zionists, both the denunciations of German policies towards Jews (to keep Jews frightened), plus the reinvigoration of the German economy (for the sake of final resettlement) was imperative for the Zionist movement. Ironically, today the Zionist leaders of Israel complain bitterly about the horrific and inhuman regime of the National Socialists. So the fraud continues.

courtesy The Barnes Review

How Zionism infiltrated the US

Sat Feb 5, 2011 6:41PM

Interview with Scholar and Journalist, Mark Bruzonsky.

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.

In this exclusive interview with Press TV's Autograph, Mr. Bruzonsky talks about the challenges and missed opportunities he witnessed first-hand, and how Zionist groups infiltrated American politics, US institutions and organizations.

He goes further to explain the specific time and day Obama sold out to the AIPAC lobby, and how President Obama would never dare oppose the stronghold of the Zionist, Israeli Lobby in the US.

Press TV: In 1982, Mr. Bruzonsky, you authored the Paris Declaration- a breakthrough event that greatly contributed to political developments of the time. Please tell us about that.

Bruzonsky: In the 1980s, in a sense, a lot of us knew there was this political cancer; it was very bad, it was eating up the patient and needed to be dealt with and cured. I was in Paris sitting in a hotel room, a big event in my life, with four very important people - I was there to do the work and write the document.

These people were the former president of France - Pierre Mendis France; the founder of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress - Nahem Goldman; his successor, who was the only Jewish leader in America who had ever been president of B'nai Brith and World Jewish Congress and Secretary of Commerce. The man who inspired it was the Palestinian Liberation Organization's (PLO) Isam Sartawi, the head of the PLO in Europe. They signed this document called the Paris Declaration, I wrote it and it was on the entire front page of Le Monde newspaper; Arafat responded and that was on the front page also.

But then we ran out of steam. The organizations that had founded were not willing to even entertain a discussion on what they had signed; they disassociated themselves from the people who founded their own organizations.

So then the Donahue show asked me to be on their show. The Donahue TV show was the only talk show in America at that time, there was no other competition and I went on it after no other Jewish leaders would accept to go on the program. The timing of the show was pre-intifada, pre-apartheid and there were very few Israeli settlements on Palestine occupied land at the time and the discussion was all about how to bring peace to the region. The two-state solution (with 'Solution' emphasized) was in fact a possible solution - it wasn't going to be totally fair, the Palestinians were going to get a small piece of territory compared to their homeland, but at least there was a lot of support from political people to make it happen. That world is gone. The two-state solution is now dead with the possible exception that you would have to roll back a tremendous number of things that have happened; that's not going to happen.

The reason that is not going to happen is not because President Obama is not a smart man, not because he doesn't know that cancer has gotten a lot worse; he knows all that. He also knows that politically he is totally blocked. There is no way in the world he can come up against the Israeli Jewish lobby and their great group of institutions, personalities and foundations - no way. He knows it.

So he continues to talk the language of two-state solution, but that's largely to keep Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) from being totally discredited.

Press TV: During his inaugural as US president reports were circulating that his administration was going to move away from the Bush doctrine of rejecting Hamas into talks. Where does Hamas stand in the equation? Can there even be talks with the Palestinians when Hamas is sidelined?

Bruzonsky: In my cable TV program that I ended in 2003 I interviewed Musa Abu Marsuk the No.2 leader in Hamas. He was in New York under arrest at the time. I think it was 1996 and the Israeli Jewish lobby got the congress to pass a law outlawing Hamas and so Abu Marsuk, who was living in America as a successful businessman, was imprisoned. I got permission to interview him and do three reality TV programs. I don't think the Obama people ever said anything positive about Hamas; I think they did say they were going to re-invigorate the peace process - but those are just words, slogans, the devil is in the detail and all that meant was that we (the US) are going to say they have to stop building settlements.

Well, Obama made a joke and a fool out of himself. Didn't anyone tell what was going to happen the moment he tried to get the Israelis to stop building settlements? There is a whole history that goes back to Camp David and US President Carter who also told the world that he had got the Israelis to agree to stop settlements and then the Israelis at that time made a fool out of that president by saying they had discussed freezing settlements, but only for 90 days. And then after that they escalated their program and we now live in the world we live in.

The story of how Obama became president, how he got support is important here. Obama is a different kind of president and we were all relieved. It was very embarrassing for eight years and more so for people throughout the world that suffered and were being killed by a US president who frankly (it's not said in Washington and it's not the kind of thing said at meetings, but many of us consider them as war criminals and we consider Chaney and Bush; they fit the definition of war criminals).

When Obama ran for president he stood for human rights, he was bright and principled, but then during the campaign certain things happened.

First of all the top financiers of the Democratic Party half of them are Jewish and almost all of those are quite Zionist and quite involved with the Israelis. At the time when Hilary Clinton and Obama were competing for support AIPAC had its annual convention. On that day Obama gave a speech and he gave more than what was expected. Lee Hamilton who was on Obama's advisory board said to me that he went too far - he shouldn't have said what he said about Jerusalem - we're going to be correcting it. After the speech, behind the scenes, he was taken to meet the Board of Directors of AIPAC. Rahm Israel Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff escorted him upstairs to the hotel room.

This is very unusual, presidency candidates don't usually get interviewed by boards of directors like this, but AIPAC is different. The way the Israeli community signaled that they were going to support Obama, without actually announcing that they had even had a meeting with him, was to have Rahm endorse Obama. So a few hours later Rahm came out in public and did that, which was the signal to the rest of us that Obama had made his peace with this lobby and that he wasn't going to be able to do anything they weren't going to approve of.

Press TV: You mentioned that it was well-known to you that the Arab-Israeli conflict will be political cancer if it was not resolved, and at this point it has become the cancer that you mentioned. What has been the main obstacle of not reaching a solution?

Bruzonsky: America is the super power - American money; American arms; American UN vetos; American military support at critical times. The Israelis took a decision way back in the 1940s - and it goes back to the holocaust and back to Jewish impotence; there's lots of factors it's not black and white. It was a powerless community, I was part of it - born into a family that my mother and father would tell me we lost all of our relatives nobody knows where they are or they were all killed or maybe some escaped to what had become Israel.

The US has prevented a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict because the Israelis set up such powerful institutions, lobbies, publications, personalities and control in various ways of political parties and of the media making it impossible for American leaders to do what they knew they should do to solve this cancer; and it goes way back to General Marshall the secretary of state. When President Truman told Marshall that he was going to accept a Jewish state, Marshall was going to resign saying it's not in the interests of the US it is going to be war, which we won't be able to end; it's going to get worse; it's going to unleash forces we won't be able to control - he was exactly right.

At every critical moment since: Eisenhower tried to do things in the 1950s, carter tried to do things in the 1970s, but they were blocked. There are plenty of books and academic information about this.

The Israelis then realized since they had control of the US, and Sharon said it bluntly back in 2001, he and Peres had a little debate in a cabinet meeting and the word that leaked out from that meeting was that Peres said that we've got to be careful, the Americans aren't happy with what we're doing and Sharon said stop worrying about the Americans we control things in America, I'll take care of things there don't worry about it. - And he was right.

I've been watching all this. I did a lot of travelling for a lot of years through the Middle East while the US has been my home base; and it's been outrageous.

Bruzonsky: I was a kid journalist just out of school. The Egyptian Embassy in Washington read something I had written. It was a movie review about a film called, “Children of Rage.” And they called me and said it was very interesting and asked if I would like to be the first Jewish journalist that has ever been invited by our government. Of course I said yes. So I went for three weeks and I met everybody: the Foreign Minister, the Minister of State, and then they said to me that they knew the three weeks were up but they wanted me to stay longer because the President wanted to meet with me. And they were so surprised when I said I could stay one more day, but I really have other places I have to go. So I said to thank him so much and it was a great honor and so nice to meet all of them, and I took off.

I went to Oman and then I went to Israel. There was going to be a big peace conference and you will see the connections in just a minute. There was going to be this big peace conference. So I get to Israel and I go to the new outlet magazine, which was sponsoring the conference and George Ball, the most important under Secretary of State, the man who helped resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis was going to be the speaker. And they said to me Mark where have you been. And I said I've just been to Egypt. I said I'm here because they wanted me to stay and meet the President but I'm at your peace conference. And they said oh my god don't you know what has happened. And I didn't because I had been traveling and it wasn't like you could tune in to Al-Jazeera in those days. They said the President gave a speech and said he is willing to go anywhere and do anything to bring peace. They said you were supposed to have a meeting with him, and I said yes.

I was in Israel for about six hours. They gave me a whole bunch of cash and wrote a letter and said Mark go back to Cairo and meet the President and invite him to come to our peace conference. So later I'm sitting with the President of Egypt and am given him this invitation, and he was asking me about my three weeks in his country. So there I am and it's a little hard for me to believe that I'm sitting with the President of Egypt all alone. Maybe forty to fifty feet away there is someone from the Minister of the Interior or somebody to protect, but he can't even hear he was so far away. And I was so disappointed because at the end of the meeting which was very nice he said I'm very sorry but I will not be able to come to your peace conference. Then I suppose I was just looking sad. I don't remember saying anything. But he said I have decided I will send a telegram to this conference. And I already knew that leaders in the Arab world do not send telegrams to Israel. I had never heard of such a thing. There wasn't a procedure. I figured it was just his way of being polite to me. I literally had to leave on the first flight in the morning, and I went to a travel agent that was recommended to me, but at the moment I whispered Israel it was don't say anther word about Israel.

We can't talk about Israel and there is no way we can get you to Israel. He said first flight in the morning goes to Athens and that is all I can do. So I said okay and I'm on my flight to Athens. I'm dog tired and I'm half asleep. I traveled so much in those days the moment anybody asked me anything I would say orange juice and English. When I woke up on the plane, there was this newspaper in front of me, The Egyptian Gazette. And I wasn't sure if was hallucinating or dreaming because as my eyes cleared I said good god that's me. There is this big picture of me and Sadat on the front page at the top of the paper. But there was no story. It was just Journalist Mark Bruzonsky meets President Sadat. There was no story; no nothing. A day later I'm called aside by the Chairman of the conference. He said Mark in one hour there is a press conference and all the media will be here.

You have to come sit up front and you have to tell everybody about your meeting with the President. And I said what's going on, what's going on. He said you know the office is closed but we are all at the hotel. We sent somebody back to get some papers and under the door is this telegram. It wasn't just oh, hope you had a nice conference. It was a whole page of the importance of peace to the region and what this conflict has done. It was a very long statement which I learned later was written for him. And for 24 hours I was the guy who met the President! It was I that had arranged this telegram and then on Thursday morning came the unbelievable announcement. The President of Egypt arrives to Israel on Shabbat (Saturday) as soon as the sun goes down. And it's like something out of some dream, as people starting arriving within hours. A press center was set up in almost minutes. There were free phones. Anybody could pick up a phone and call anywhere. And on Saturday night he arrived and I went to the airport with the Egyptian press delegation. We all thought the world was going to change now.

The Israelis would feel accepted, the Palestinians would have their homeland, for at the time it was called a homeland and we weren't even talking about a state. Then unfortunately everything started to deteriorate, and three years later Sadat was assassinated and it has been downhill ever since.

Press TV: So the postphonement on the decision on settlements led to the fact that it termed from an occupation issue in the eyes of the international community, and everyone who was observing the settlement issues thought it was a contested issue. At that point the issue of settlement could be contested after Oslo. Before that it was an occupation and it wasn't even discussed.

Bruzonsky: Once the Israelis got the PA (Abbas was the man who actually signed the document) at the White House. Once that got them to sign this agreement and become their collaborating regime without having to agree to stop the settlements. That's symbolic. If the Israelis weren't going to stop enlarging the occupation, how could we possibly consider this a major step on the way to a peace settlement? So it was the symbolism of it. Not the actual settlement here or there. The Israelis never intended to stop the settlements.

Rabin in my judgment never attended for what he was signing to end up being a Palestinian state. For them it was autonomy we packaged under different names and they were hiring Arafat and his people to control the Palestinian people. That of course is the origin of the growth of Hamas because many non-religious people and many who had been supporters of Fatah and of more secular things decided we are going to support Hamas. At least they are honest and dignified. At least they have principals and are not corrupt. And Fatah has sold us out. That's the origins of how in 2006 Hamas was elected.

Press TV: I'm going to dare ask this question to wrap up. Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

Bruzonsky: It's a very long, dark tunnel now but hopefully saner, wiser policies will prevail down the road. And we can't afford this anymore. Our own empire is collapsing financially, morally, and spiritually in terms of the credibility of American institutions. We don't feel it so much in Washington, but around the country, the Tea Party and the other movements is representative of a feeling that our future is dissolving in our place in the world, and our standard of living and what we are providing for our children. There is big conflict here and we don't have the resources to continue these policies even if you want to argue the policies are right.

Press TV: Mark Bruzonsky, thank you very much for joining us on the Autograph.

Bruzonsky: Thank you Susan.

NM/PKH 

courtesy PRESS.TV

U.S. at the Crossroads of History?

Who do we need most if America’s own real interests are to be best protected – the Arabs or Israel?
 Alan Hart

If more and more Arabs breach the wall of fear that has prevented them for decades from demanding their rights, expressing their rage at the corruption and repression of their governments and at regime impotence in the face of Israel’s arrogance of power, there’s one question above all others America’s policy makers will have to ask themselves. Who do we need most if America’s own real interests are to be best protected – the Arabs or Israel? And that, of course, begs the mother and father of all questions for them: Is Israel our most valuable ally in the region or our biggest liability?

Eisenhower was the first and last president to contain Zionism’s territorial ambitions. Kennedy might have been the second if he had been allowed to live. But from Johnson to Obama, and whether they really believed it or not (I think most if not all of them didn’t), every American president has paid extravagant lip-service to the idea that Israel is the U.S.’s most valuable ally in the Middle East.

 
Obama’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government has not been good to say the least, but there are informed and influential Israelis who think the manifestation of people power in Egypt could provide both men with the opportunity to change the relationship for the better. Writing in Ha’aretz under the headline For Obama, Eygpt protests may garner a new friend – Israel, Aluf Benn wrote this (my emphasis added):

“If Netanyahu plays his cards right, he could leverage the fall of neighbouring regimes into a significant improvement in Israel’s relations with the United States.

“Obama wants to be popular among the citizens of Arab states at the expense of their leaders, as he tried to do in his Cairo speech some 18 months ago. He is betting that the new regimes will be grateful and will continue to rely on Washington for diplomatic and military support. But he is taking a risk: What if the revolution doesn’t stop at the moderate interim stage and keeps going till it reaches Muslim extremism? And what will the United States do in the interim phase, when the Middle East is sunk in uncertainty?

“When Obama and his advisers look at a map of the region, they see only one state they can count on: Israel. The regime is stable, and support for America is well-entrenched. Obama may dislike Netanyahu and his policy toward the Palestinians, but after losing his allies in Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt, and with the uneasiness gripping his friends in Jordan and the Gulf, Washington can’t afford to be choosy. It will have to move closer to Israel, and for another reason as well: An anxious Israel is an Israel that is prone to military adventures, and that’s the last thing Obama needs right now.

“Now is the time for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak to justify their claim that Israel is a ‘villa in the jungle’, the West’s outpost in the Middle East.”
Netanyahu’s own contribution to fear mongering was the statement that “Egypt could follow the path of Iran”.

In my view it is not difficult to imagine the line the Zionist lobby in America was taking with the Obama administration. It might well have quoted a sentence from the National Security Network’s press release of 27 January. “The Obama administration seeks to encourage political reforms without destabilizing the region.” Then something like the following. “Your policy is failing. Your encouragement of political reforms is destabilizing the region, but what is happening is far more menacing than destabilization in the general sense. What we are witnessing is the beginning of a regional Arab intifada. The tide is turning in favour of the forces of violent Islamic fundamentalism in all its forms. If the war against global terrorism is not to be lost, America now needs Israel more than ever.”

In reality there is no evidence to suggest that change brought about by people power in Arab states would lead inevitably to rule by, or even popular support for, extremist and violent forces which use and abuse Islam in much the same way as Zionists use and abuse Judaism. From Tunisia and Eygpt in particular there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary (but as I will indicate later, everything will ultimately depend on whether or not policy makers in Washington D.C. put America on the right side of history).

The evidence to the contrary is in the fact that the manifestations of Arab people power the world has witnessed to date were not instigated by Islamist extremist groups They were spontaneous protests with demands by citizens from almost all sections of civil society, and very few were (or so it seemed) ideologically driven.

Given that policy makers in Washington D.C. say they want to see democracy alive and well in the Arab world, why, really, are they so alarmed by what is happening?

The answer is in this fact. What almost all Arab peoples want is not only an end to corruption and repression and a better life in their own countries. They also want an end to the humiliation caused by Israel’s arrogance of power, American and other Western support for it and the impotence of Arab governments, most of which are seen by their masses as agents of America-and-Zionism.

The implications are profound.

If change brings Arab governments which must and do reflect the wishes of their peoples, those governments will be under great and perhaps irresistible pressure to use their leverage in a serious effort to oblige the U.S. to use its leverage to cause Israel to end its occupation of all Arab land grabbed in 1967.

If Arab push came to American shove, Arab leverage options include withdrawing ambassadors from America; stopping assistance for propping up America’s ailing economy; and a credible threat to use the oil weapon. (As I have written in the past, the Arabs would not have to turn off the oil taps. A credible, behind-closed-doors threat to do would be enough. As I have also written in the past, if the boot was on the other foot – if the Zionists were in the Arab position, they would have played the oil card long, long ago).

If, in response to the wishes of the people, a new Arab Order did signal an intention to use its leverage, it would be crunch time for America in the Middle East; and its policy makers would have to answer the who do we need most question.

How they answered it would determine what side of history in-the-making America was going to be on – the right side or the wrong side.

The right side would see America using its leverage to oblige Israel to end its occupation. This would open the door to a real peace process (actually the first ever) and create an environment in which there would be no place for Muslim extremism.

The wrong side would see America continuing with the policy of support for Israel right or wrong and being complicit in its defiance of international law and war crimes. This would open the door to the forces of violent Islamic fundamentalism and set in motion a confrontation that could go all the way to a clash of civilizations.

Which option will America choose if crunch time comes?

Footnote

As I watched the drama unfolding in Eygpt, I found myself wondering why, really, Mubarak was clinging on. I entertained the thought that it was because Obama was telling him to do so in the hope either that the “protesters” would run out of steam, or because he, Obama, needed time for his people to fix the succession. I was entertaining such a thought because I had just re-read an excellent piece by Philip Stephens published in the Financial Times last October. In it he wrote: “Five years ago Mr. Bush promised a democratic transformation in the Middle East. The ambition of his second inaugural address was abandoned almost as it was spoken. Offering a voice to the Arab street, it was soon agreed, risked empowering extremists such as Hamas. Better to slip back into the comfortable cold war posture of cuddling up to friendly tyrants.”

The coming days, perhaps hours, will tell us if this American policy preference is sustainable.

courtesy ALANHART.NET

American Jewish Committee demands ouster of US Envoy over his remarks on 9/11

Incredible how nervous these people are getting over any mention of 9/11. They couldn't use their preferable anti-Semitism weapon this time - Falk is Jewish himself...

(...) Ambassador Rice has just demanded that Falk, the UN Human Rights Council's special rapporteur in the Palestinian territories, step down from his UN position. "In my view, Mr. Falk’s latest commentary [an entry in his blog about the media and 9/11] is so noxious that it should finally be plain to all that he should no longer continue in his position on behalf of the UN." (...)

(...) Falk’s crime was saying that the US administration’s reluctance to address the awkward gaps and contradictions identified by several scholars in the official explanations of 9/11, only fuels suspicions of a conspiracy. And he suggested that "what may be more distressing than the apparent cover up is the eerie silence of the mainstream media, unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials".

(...) The American Jewish Committee also called on the UN to immediately dismiss Falk for publicly endorsing "the slander of conspiracy theorists". Executive Director David Harris said: "We agree wholeheartedly with the US Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Susan Rice, who stated that Mr Falk’s comments are 'despicable and offensive’ and, like her, urge the UN to remove him from his position. Falk has long been a conspiracy-ridden and harmful figure who surely does not serve the best interests of the UN."

Read the whole thing at URUKNET

Giraldi: The Road to National Suicide

by Philip Giraldi, January 27, 2011

It is not often that one sees an entire nation marching in lockstep to go over a cliff into an abyss, but that is essentially what the United States is doing at the moment.

Not only have there been strong hints from the Obama Administration that the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will go on into the dim future, but there is also no sign of any necessary course correction in other areas.  Israel, backed by Washington, continues its reckless policies and may be cranking up for a new war against Lebanon and Syria with the ultimate objective of involving its American patron in fighting against Iran.  Clearly President Obama is unwilling to take any risks by challenging existing policies.  He is edging towards what he perceives as the political center and is preparing to ride the status quo to electoral victory in 2012.

Consider the central dynamic of what the United States is engaged in.  Washington is committed to a series of asymmetrical wars that are literally taking place all over the world.  This is what the Obamaites now refer to as "overseas contingency operations."  One might well ask contingent on what, but the words themselves quite likely are not considered to be really meaningful and are rather designed to constitute a reassuring euphemism.  One of these wars, in Afghanistan, is costing the US taxpayer $10 billion a month and is tying up more than 100,000 American soldiers.  Casualties are rising, most of Afghanistan has become insecure in spite of the effort, corruption and drug cultivation are rampant, and there is no end in sight.  To put the cost of the war in some kind of perspective, Afghanistan’s gross domestic product for 2009 was $22 billion, meaning that it is costing nearly six times more to "defend" each year than its total economic activity.  Asymmetrical indeed. Colonial empires of the past would have at least figured out how to turn a buck from their imperial endeavors, highlighting the cluelessness of Washington.  If there has ever been an example of a war that makes no sense, Afghanistan is it.

The stated purpose of fighting in Afghanistan is to keep the country from becoming a base for terrorism but the premise is deeply flawed.  Terrorists can literally go anywhere and do not necessarily need a geographic base.  If they choose, they can even disappear for a time, sitting quietly and waiting for the situation to change in their favor.  Also, fighting them in a foreign country is a fool’s errand, and not only because American soldiers and their leaders rarely grasp what is going on in any alien environment and nearly always make things worse rather than better.  No, the salient issue is that the militants will always have the upper hand in such an engagement because they benefit from three realities that give them a major advantage.  First, they are not bound to strategies coming out of a training manual and can actually learn and develop as they go along.  This has been described as "open source warfare."  If you need a better and simpler improvised explosive device (IED), instructions for making one will soon appear on the internet as militant groups refine their tactics and share information.  When the advanced IED appears, the US government and its military industrial contractors will panic and overreact to the threat by building a newer and heavier vehicle to resist it.  The new vehicle will cost three times as much as the old vehicle, will take two years to design, and will get 300 yards per gallon of gas, which has to be trucked over the Hindu Kush mountains, where it is subject to attack by the insurgents.  As is frequently the case, that means that the conventional army is always finding itself at a disadvantage fighting the last war with the last war’s weapons waiting for the new weapons that will be obsolete when they arrive.
The foreign army will also invariably adhere to standard doctrine, which is to defend itself as a first priority.  That means it will always overreact when it is attacked.  Given the nature of guerrilla warfare, it will unleash its power against areas in which militants have inserted themselves among civilians, leading to avoidable deaths that will be used to win the propaganda war.  This serves as a recruiting poster for the insurgency.  So in the long run, with the invader beggaring himself fighting the wrong war and killing civilians, who is going to win the exchange?

Second, militants do not have to waste manpower and materiel by defending anything that could be attacked by the overwhelming force possessed by the conventional army.  They can concentrate on conserving resources by taking the offensive to hit soft targets, secure in the knowledge that even 100,000 highly trained and well equipped foreign soldiers cannot be everywhere.  When some contractor hired by USAID builds bridges or schools at great cost, it is a lot easier to blow them up a week or a month later than it was to build them.  The ability to do that type of damage produces a disproportionate result, sending a message that the government and its foreign allies are ineffective and cannot provide security.  It also tells the local population who is going to win in the long run and it won’t be the boys from Washington.  They understand that eventually the Great Power will lose its will to fight, will go broke, and will go home.

Third is the issue of overall strategy.  Modern conventional armies are designed to inflict devastating damage on a concentrated opponent with the intention of causing mass casualties and ending the enemy’s ability to continue to resist.  When the enemy army is soundly defeated it surrenders, generally followed by the surrender of the national government that it represents.  But none of that applies in war against an insurgency or a group of militants, with the result that an aircraft carrier or a strategic bomber or a ballistic missile becomes worthless.  Such groups normally have only limited internal organization, operate essentially as "leader-less," and a militant who is killed is quickly replaced at the local level.  If an operating base is destroyed or overrun, it is a simple matter to pick up one’s weapons and move to another.  If the war spreads to another region or country, it is also relatively easy to replicate the insurgency and its structure in the new area.  That is why there is no worldwide al-Qaeda movement, only national and regional groups that share the philosophy and methods of the parent organization.  The local franchises are driven by their own national and religious agendas, are self funding, and generally locally recruited.  They fade away when the local government or the US comes after them and then resurface when the pressure eases.  That is why they cannot be defeated, even if the United States spends the next twenty years trying to do so.

So what is the solution to the tactical and strategic challenges posed by terrorists and other militants?  Well, we could leave Iraq and Afghanistan and eschew any interest in intervening in Somalia and Yemen.  Instead of telling half the world how to run their governments, we could wish them all luck and announce our intention to disengage from foreign entanglements as quickly as possible.  There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any terrorist group would then follow us back home to wreak havoc.  On the contrary, it is most likely that we would be left alone.  And we could be saving all that money we are spending accomplishing absolutely nothing overseas and begin to put our own economy back together by cutting defense spending by a half or even more.  Minus an international threat, we could also disband the Department of Homeland Security, starting with the odious Transportation Security Administration.  Yes, that would do it.  An America at peace with itself and putting its own house in order.  I rather suspect that the entire world would applaud such a change.  Of course, if we don’t do it, we can continue to be the lemmings charging over the cliff.

 Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and executive director of the Council for the National Interest. 

courtesy Antiwar.com

Gilad Atzmon on Zionism and Jewish Identity

Gilad Atzmon spoke at ArgusFest at the Mercury Cafe in Denver on July 1, 2010.

Gilad Atzmon on Zionism and Jewish Identity from Jason Bosch on Vimeo.

KINDERGARTEN OF HOPE (and Change too!)

courtesy FreewebsLeichik