August 23, 2006
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51849
JERUSALEM—As an uneasy truce between Israel and Hezbollah continues, millions of average men and women in the Holy Land are turning to the one simple comfort that has always seen them through the darkest days of their troubled history: the steadfast guidance of their religious faith.
"I take solace in knowing that my faith is a sanctuary, an escape from the bloodshed and turmoil," said Haifa resident Yigal Taheri, who last week lost his wife and newborn daughter when a Fajr-3 long-range rocket launched by Lebanese militants struck the synagogue where his family was attending services. "YHWH, Elohim, whatever you wish to not call Him—His love comforts all those who are willing to open their hearts to Him. Praise be to G–d."
"Religion is the one thing that has never let us down," Taheri added over the low rumble of AK-47 fire emanating from the nearby home of a radical Israeli rabbi.
Taheri is not alone. In a time of seemingly unending conflict between Israelis and Arabs, a growing number of Middle Easterners are fervently embracing the unshakeable wisdom of Judaism and Islam.
Palestinian Omar Abdel-Malik, a resident of the Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis, credits his Islamic beliefs for preserving his sanity.
"The Israelis have fired missile upon missile on my neighborhood, but it has only made my trust in Allah that much stronger," Abdel-Malik said. "I cringe to think where the people of the Middle East would be right now if it weren't for our steadfast belief in one true, merciful, and loving Supreme Being."
Palestinian widow and mother of three Dareen Idriss agreed, citing the healing power of prayer as a way to cope with the relentless slaughter she and her family witness every day. "When the children cannot stop crying because of the bombs, we all gather our families in the rubble of the mosque to pray for justice," Idriss said. "During this calm meditation, we also pray for the annihilation of the Hebrew race."
West Bank settler Ari Chayat, whose neighborhood has also been ravaged by violence, echoed this profound reliance on faith. "The world is so brutal and unfair," Chayat said. "Many days, my uncompromising belief in a vengeful creator is all that gets me out of bed in the morning."
"If it wasn't for my faith that the God of Abraham has given these lands to Jews and Jews alone by divine decree, I probably wouldn't even be here today," Chayat added.
Lebanese militant Jawad Hamid, who recently lost his best friend to an Israeli helicopter attack while the two men were on their way to pick up a Katyusha rocket, said his faith in Allah was the only way he could cope with the tragedy.
"Every time I want to give up hope, I just open the Quran to my favorite passage, Surah 2:194: 'Whoever acts aggressively against you, inflict injury on him,'" Hamid said. "Whenever I read those words, I am immediately filled with inspiration and a renewed sense of purpose."
Even political leaders have tapped into the public's reliance on religion and used it as a way to encourage them to never give up.
"In this time of strife, the only way to endure the unending suffering is through an unwavering, uncompromising faith in one's religious beliefs," Israeli hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah went so far as to quote from the Quran in a speech delivered followers the same afternoon.
"It's always frightening to be reminded of your own mortality, as we all were this past Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday," Hezbollah commander Mahdi al-Zaidi said. "But rather than react irrationally, I looked deep within my faith, consulted the Quran, and by the mercy of Allah, I gained the resolve to oversee a massive airstrike against the enemy."
"We will get through this, so long as we have God on our side," he added.
© Copyright 2006, Onion, Inc. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
LET'S SEE, IF ISRAEL KIDNAPS A PALESTINIAN DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER DOES THAT GIVE THE RIGHT TO PALESTINE TO INVADE AND BOMB ISRAEL?
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA - Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education, Dr. Naser El-Deen El-Sha'er, [has been abducted] by Israeli Occupation Forces from his house in Ramallah. The abduction is a continuation of the campaign against Palestinian Government Ministers and members of the Palestinian Legislative Council from the pro-Hamas "Change and Reform List." PCHR's preliminary investigation indicates that at approximately 01:00 on Saturday, 19 August 2006, an IOF contingent moved into Ramallah and surrounded the residence of Dr. Naser El-Deen El-Sha'er in the Maysoon Quarter. Through loudspeakers, IOF ordered Dr. El-Sha'er to surrender to them. Immediately afterwards, IOF troops stormed the residence and detained Dr. El-Sha'er with his wife and children looking on. IOF took him to an undisclosed location. Dr. El-Sha'er's wife, Huda, stated that IOF conducted the arrest very quickly. She pointed that the whole siege and arrest operation lasted about 10 minutes.
Dr. El-Sha'er, who is originally from the town of Sabsateyya, northwest of Nablus, is a Ph.D. holder in comparative religion. He was the dean of Shari'a School at El-Najah University. He was detained by IOF two times prior to this abduction. The last detention was last October, where he spent four months under administrative detention.
On 6 August 2006, IOF detained Dr. Aziz Dweik, the PLC Speaker. And on 29 June 2006, IOF detained eight Cabinet Ministers and twenty-one PLC members from the pro-Hamas parliamentary bloc, as well as Hamas political leaders. And on 6 July 2006, IOF detained the second deputy speaker of the PLC, Dr. Hasan Khreisha. He was released on 30 July 2006 after posting a 10,000 New Israeli Shekel bail.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5594.shtml
Dr. El-Sha'er, who is originally from the town of Sabsateyya, northwest of Nablus, is a Ph.D. holder in comparative religion. He was the dean of Shari'a School at El-Najah University. He was detained by IOF two times prior to this abduction. The last detention was last October, where he spent four months under administrative detention.
On 6 August 2006, IOF detained Dr. Aziz Dweik, the PLC Speaker. And on 29 June 2006, IOF detained eight Cabinet Ministers and twenty-one PLC members from the pro-Hamas parliamentary bloc, as well as Hamas political leaders. And on 6 July 2006, IOF detained the second deputy speaker of the PLC, Dr. Hasan Khreisha. He was released on 30 July 2006 after posting a 10,000 New Israeli Shekel bail.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5594.shtml
CORPORATION WITH CLOSE BUSH TIES TRYING TO IMPLANT SPY CHIP UNDER SKIN OF ALL AMERICAN TROOPS
DC EXAMINER - A microchip company with powerful political connections is lobbying the Pentagon for the right to implant chips under the skins of the nearly 1.4 million U.S. military personnel. Verichip Corp., which is based in Florida and planning to offer its stock to the public soon, has been one of the most aggressive marketers of radio frequency identification chips. Company officials have touted the chips as versatile, able to be used in a variety of situations such as helping track illegal immigrants or giving doctors immediate access to patient's medical records.
Now the company is "in discussions" with the Pentagon, spokeswoman Nicole Philbin said. She added that Verichip wants to insert the chips under the skin of the right arms of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen. The idea is to be able to scan an arm and obtain that person's identity and medical history. . .
The company has political muscle in the form of Tommy Thompson. A former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Thompson is a partner at the lobbying law firm of Akin Gump and is a director of Verichip.
Thompson said he's sure that the chip is safe and that no one - not even military personnel, who are required by law to follow orders - will be forced to accept an implant against his or her will. He has also promised to have a chip implanted in himself. . .
Liz McIntyre, author of a book critical of the chips, said that VeriChip is "a huge threat" to public privacy. "They're circling like vultures for any opportunity to get into our flesh," McIntyre said. "They'll start with people who can't say no, like the elderly, sex offenders, immigrants and the military. Then they'll come knocking on our doors."
Article here...
Now the company is "in discussions" with the Pentagon, spokeswoman Nicole Philbin said. She added that Verichip wants to insert the chips under the skin of the right arms of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen. The idea is to be able to scan an arm and obtain that person's identity and medical history. . .
The company has political muscle in the form of Tommy Thompson. A former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Thompson is a partner at the lobbying law firm of Akin Gump and is a director of Verichip.
Thompson said he's sure that the chip is safe and that no one - not even military personnel, who are required by law to follow orders - will be forced to accept an implant against his or her will. He has also promised to have a chip implanted in himself. . .
Liz McIntyre, author of a book critical of the chips, said that VeriChip is "a huge threat" to public privacy. "They're circling like vultures for any opportunity to get into our flesh," McIntyre said. "They'll start with people who can't say no, like the elderly, sex offenders, immigrants and the military. Then they'll come knocking on our doors."
Article here...
Friday, August 18, 2006
The UK Terror plot: What's Really Going On?
by Craig Murray
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/08/the_uk_terror_p.html
I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.
So this, I believe, is the true story.
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.
The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.
For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.
Craig Murray was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004.
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/08/the_uk_terror_p.html
I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.
So this, I believe, is the true story.
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.
The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.
For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.
Craig Murray was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004.
MORE CHEMISTRY FOR THE AGE OF TERROR
THOMAS C GREENE, THE REGISTER, UK Making a quantity of TATP sufficient to bring down an airplane is not quite as simple as ducking into the toilet and mixing two harmless liquids together.
First, you've got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water. Only this is risky, and can lead to mission failure by means of burning down your makeshift lab before a single infidel has been harmed.
But let's assume that you can obtain it in the required concentration, or cook it from a dilute solution without ruining your operation. Fine. The remaining ingredients, acetone and sulfuric acid, are far easier to obtain, and we can assume that you've got them on hand.
Now for the fun part. Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drinks bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane. It's all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don't forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked "perishable foods"), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You're going to need them.
It's best to fly first class and order champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate - especially if you have those cold gel-packs handy to supplement the ice, and the styrofoam chiller handy for insulation - to get you through the cookery without starting a fire in the lavvie.
Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide - acetone mixture into the ice water bath (champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.
After a few hours - assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities - you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.
The genius of this scheme is that TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it's true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it's unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that's about all you're likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible.
http://www.theregister.com/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/
First, you've got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water. Only this is risky, and can lead to mission failure by means of burning down your makeshift lab before a single infidel has been harmed.
But let's assume that you can obtain it in the required concentration, or cook it from a dilute solution without ruining your operation. Fine. The remaining ingredients, acetone and sulfuric acid, are far easier to obtain, and we can assume that you've got them on hand.
Now for the fun part. Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drinks bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane. It's all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don't forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked "perishable foods"), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You're going to need them.
It's best to fly first class and order champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate - especially if you have those cold gel-packs handy to supplement the ice, and the styrofoam chiller handy for insulation - to get you through the cookery without starting a fire in the lavvie.
Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide - acetone mixture into the ice water bath (champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.
After a few hours - assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities - you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.
The genius of this scheme is that TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it's true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it's unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that's about all you're likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible.
http://www.theregister.com/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/
Monday, August 14, 2006
LEBANON INVASION PLANNED JOINTLY BY U.S. AND ISRAEL WEEKS BEFORE JULY INCIDENT
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Monday August 14, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1844021,00.html
The US government was closely involved in planning the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, even before Hizbullah seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross border raids in July. American and Israeli officials met in the spring, discussing plans on how to tackle Hizbullah, according to a report published yesterday.
The veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writes in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine that Israeli government officials travelled to the US in May to share plans for attacking Hizbullah.
Quoting a US government consultant, Hersh said: "Earlier this summer ... several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, 'to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear'."
The Israeli action, current and former government officials told Hersh, chimed with the Bush administration's desire to reduce the threat of possible Hizbullah retaliation against Israel should the US launch a military strike against Iran.
"A successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign ... could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations," sources told Hersh.
Yesterday Mr Hersh told CNN: "July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. Israel's attack was going to be a model for the attack they really want to do. They really want to go after Iran."
An unnamed Pentagon consultant told Hersh: "It was our intention to have Hizbullah diminished and now we have someone else doing it."
Officials from the state department and the Pentagon denied the report. A spokesman for the National Security Council told Hersh that "The Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack."
Hersh has a track record in breaking major stories. He was the first to write about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and has written extensively about the build-up to the war in Iraq. He made his name when he uncovered the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam war. Most recently he has written about US plans for Iran, alleging that US special forces had already been active inside the country.
Monday August 14, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1844021,00.html
The US government was closely involved in planning the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, even before Hizbullah seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross border raids in July. American and Israeli officials met in the spring, discussing plans on how to tackle Hizbullah, according to a report published yesterday.
The veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writes in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine that Israeli government officials travelled to the US in May to share plans for attacking Hizbullah.
Quoting a US government consultant, Hersh said: "Earlier this summer ... several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, 'to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear'."
The Israeli action, current and former government officials told Hersh, chimed with the Bush administration's desire to reduce the threat of possible Hizbullah retaliation against Israel should the US launch a military strike against Iran.
"A successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign ... could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations," sources told Hersh.
Yesterday Mr Hersh told CNN: "July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. Israel's attack was going to be a model for the attack they really want to do. They really want to go after Iran."
An unnamed Pentagon consultant told Hersh: "It was our intention to have Hizbullah diminished and now we have someone else doing it."
Officials from the state department and the Pentagon denied the report. A spokesman for the National Security Council told Hersh that "The Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack."
Hersh has a track record in breaking major stories. He was the first to write about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and has written extensively about the build-up to the war in Iraq. He made his name when he uncovered the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam war. Most recently he has written about US plans for Iran, alleging that US special forces had already been active inside the country.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
The De-Zionization of the American Mind
By JEAN BRICMONT
Americans are constantly told that they have to defend themselves against people who "hate them", but without understanding why they are hated. Is the cause our secular democracy? Our appetite for oil? There are lots of democracies in the world that are far more secular than the United States (Sweden, France ...) and lots of places that want to buy oil at the best possible price (China) without arousing any noticeable hatred in the Middle East.
Of course, it is true that, throughout the Third World, Americans and Europeans are often considered arrogant and are not particularly liked. But the level of hatred that leads a large number of people to applaud an event like September 11 is peculiar to the Middle East. Indeed, the main political significance of September 11 did not derive from the number of people killed or even the spectacular achievement of the attackers, but from the fact that the attack was popular in large parts of the Middle East. That much was understood by Americans leaders and infuriated them. Such a level of hatred calls for explanation.
And there can be only one explanation: United States support for Israel. It is indeed Israel that is the main object of hatred, for reasons we shall describe, but since the United States uncritically supports Israel on almost every issue, constantly praises it as "the only democracy in the Middle East" and provides its main financial backing, the result is a "transfer" of hatred.
Why is Israel so hated? The constant stalling of "peace plans" in favor of more settlements and more war aggravates that hatred, but the basic cause lies in the very principles on which that state is build. There are basically two arguments that have justified establishing the State of Israel in Palestine: one is that God gave that land to the Jews, and the other is the Holocaust. The first one is deeply insulting to people who are profoundly religious, like most Arabs, but of another creed. And, for the second, it amounts to making people pay for a crime that they did not commit.
Both arguments are deeply racist, with their claim that it is right for Jews, and only Jews, to set up a state in a land that would obviously be Arab, like Jordan or Lebanon, if not for the slow Zionist invasion. This is illustrated by the "law of return": any Jew, anywhere, having no connection with Palestine whatsoever, and not suffering from the slightest persecution, can, if he so wishes, emigrate to Israel and easily become a citizen, while the inhabitants who fled in 1948, or their children, cannot. Add to that the fact that a city claimed to be Holy by three religions has become the "eternal capital of the Jewish people" (and only them) and one should start to understand the rage that all this provokes throughout the Arab and Muslim world.
It is precisely this racist aspect that infuriates most Arabs, even if they do not have any personal connection to Palestine (if they live, say, in the French banlieues). This situation delegitimizes the Arab regimes that are impotent in the face of the Zionist enemy and, after the defeat of the region's two main secular leaders, Nasser and Saddam Hussein (the latter thanks to the US), leads to the rise of religious fundamentalism.
Now, people often find racism far more unacceptable than "mere" economic exploitation or poverty. Consider South Africa: under apartheid, the living conditions of the Blacks were bad but not necessarily much worse than in other parts of Africa (or even than in South Africa now). But the system was intrinsically racist, and that was felt as an outrage to Blacks everywhere, including in the United States. This is why the conflict over Palestine goes beyond the second class status of Israeli Arabs or even the treatment of the Occupied Territories. Even if a Palestinian state were established on the latter, and even if full equality were granted to Israeli Arabs, the wounds of 1948 would not heal quickly. Arab leaders, even religious ones, can of course sign peace agreements with Israel, but they are fragile so long as the Arab population considers them unjust and does not accept them wholeheartedly. Palestine is the Alsace-Lorraine or the Taiwan of the Arab world and the fact that it is impossible to take it back does not mean that it can be forgotten . (I am not arguing here in favour of « wiping Israel off the map », or in favor of a « one state solution » but simply underlining what seems to me to be the root and the depth of the problem. In fact, I am not arguing for any solution partly because none seems to me to be attainable in the short term, but, more fundamentally, because I do not think that outsiders to the Middle East should propose such solutions.)
There is no sign that any of this is understood in Israel by more than a few individuals; if Arabs hate them, this is just another instance of the fact that everybody hates Jews and it only proves that they have to "defend themselves" (i.e. attack others pre-emptively) by any means necessary. That is bad enough, but why isn't this understood in the United States either? There are traditionally two answers to that: one is that the population is manipulated into supporting Israel by the government, the arms merchants or the oil industry, because Israel is a strategic U.S. ally; the other answer is that the United States is manipulated by the Israel lobby. The idea that Israel is a strategic ally, if by that one means a useful ally (useful to, say, the oil interests, broadly understood), although widely accepted, specially in the Left, does not survive a critical examination. That may have been the case in 1967 or even during the Cold War period, although one could argue that, even then, the Arab states were attracted by the Soviet Union only because it might support them in their struggle against Israel, albeit ineffectively. But both in 1991 and in 2003, the United States attacked Iraq without any help from Israel, even begging Israel not to intervene in 1991, in order for its Arab coalition not to collapse. Or consider the post-2003 occupation of Iraq, and suppose that the goal of that occupation is control over oil. In what sense does Israel help in that respect? Everything it does (the currents attacks on Gaza and Lebanon for example) further alienates the Arabs, and U.S. support for Israel makes the control of oil harder, not easier. Even the Iraqi parliament, Malaki and Sistani, who are the closest to allies that the United States can find there, condemn Israel's actions.
Finally, just imagine that the United States would make a 180 turn and suddenly side with the Palestinians, as they did with the Kosovars against the Serbs--who, by the way, were, like the Israelis, richer and more "Western" than their Albanian adversaries . Such a change of policies is by no means impossible : when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, the US supported the invasion by providing most of Indonesia's weapons. Yet, 25 years later, the US supported, or at least did not oppose, East Timor's accession to independence.
What effect would that have? Can anyone doubt that such a change of policy would facilitate U.S. access to oil fields and help it gain strategic allies (if any were still needed) throughout the Muslim world? In the Middle East, the main charge against the United States is that it is pro-Israel, because it lets itself be "manipulated by the Jews". Therefore, if Washington switched sides, there would be no more basis for hostility to U.S. presence, including its control over oil. Thus the notion of Israel as "strategic ally" makes no sense.
This leads us to the "Israel lobby" answer, which is closer to the truth, but not the whole truth. To get a complete picture, one has to understand why the lobby works as effectively as it does, and that depends on factors lying outside the actions of the lobby itself. After all, the militant Zionists constituting the lobby are a minority among Jews, who themselves form a small minority of the American population. The Israel lobby does not work like other lobbies, for example, the arms and the oil industry lobbies (which is one of the reasons why it is easy to dismiss it as irrelevant, as long as one does not understand how it really exerts its influence).
Of course, like the latter, the Israel lobby does fund electoral campaigns and its power derives in part from its ability to target people in Congress who deviate from its "line". But if that was all, it could easily be defeated indeed, there are other sources of electoral funding, the big industrial lobbies for example, and if the pro-Israel candidates could be shown to be paid to serve the interests of another State, their opponents could denounce the people who receive money from the lobby as some sort of agents of a foreign power. Just imagine a pro-French, pro-Chinese or pro-Japanese lobby that would try to significantly influence the US Congress. Certainly, money alone cannot suffice.
What protects the Israel lobby is the fact that anyone who would denounce an opponent funded by the Lobby as a quasi-agent of a foreign power would immediately be accused of anti-Semitism. In fact, imagine that Big Business is unhappy with the current U.S. policies (as it well may be) and wants to change them--how could they do it? Any criticism of Lobby influence on U.S. policy would immediately trigger the anti-Zionism-is-anti-Semitism accusation.
So the strength of the Israel lobby resides in part in this second line of defense, which itself is linked to its influence on the media. But even that could easily be defeated -- not all the media are under the lobby's influence, and, more importantly, the media is not all-powerful: in Venezuela, it is anti-Chavez, but Chavez regularly wins elections. In France, the media were overwhelmingly in favour if the "yes" vote to the referendum on the European Constitution, yet the "no" won. The problem, and that is why the Israel lobby is so effective, is that it expresses a world view that is accepted too easily by too many Americans. After all, nothing could be more ridiculous than accusing someone of anti-Semitism because he wants or claims to put America's interests above those of Israel. Yet, the accusation is likely to be effective, but only because years of ideological brainwashing have predisposed people to consider U.S. and Israeli interests as identical -- although instead of "interests" one speaks of "values".
Associated with this identification comes a systematically hostile view of the Arab and Muslim world, which both increases the lobby's effectiveness and is in part the result of its propaganda. Despite all the talk about anti-racism and "political correctness", there is an almost total lack of understanding of the Arab viewpoint on Palestine, and, in particular, of the racist nature of the problem. It is this triple layer of control (selective funding, the anti-Semitism card, or rather canard, and the interiorization) that gives the lobby its peculiar strength. (And that is also why it is easy to dismiss its strength by saying, for instance, that, obviously, Jews don't control America. Sure, but direct control is not the way it works.)
People who think that it is the arms or the oil industry that are running the show in Washington as far as foreign policy is concerned, should at least answer the following question: how does it work? There is no evidence whatsoever that the oil industry, for example, pushed for the Iraq war, the threats against Iran or the attack on Lebanon . (There is a lot of evidence that the Israel lobby pushed for the Iraq war; see Jeff Blankfort, A War for Israel.They are supposed to act secretly, of course, but where is the evidence that they do? And if they is no evidence, even no indirect evidence, how does one know? Profits from the war, at least for major corporations, haven't materialized yet, and there are many indications that the U.S. economy will suffer a lot from war-related expenses and the associated deficits. On the other hand, it is enough to open any mainstream U.S. newspaper or TV and read or hear opinions expressed by Zionists calling for more war. War needs war propaganda and a supporting ideology, and the Zionists provide it, while none of this is offered by Big Business in general or the oil industry in particular.
One may also think of historical precedents, like the China lobby (made of post-1949 Chinese exiles and ex-missionaries, supported by their domestic churches) in the 1950's and 1960's. That lobby led the United States to maintain the ridiculous claim that a billion people were represented by a government (Taiwan) that had no control over them whatsoever. It was also very influential in bringing on the Vietnam war. Whose interests were they serving? The ones of the American capitalists? But the latter make huge profits in post-Nixon recognized China. And the same is true in Vietnam.
In fact both countries, as well as most of Asia, were anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist, as well as anti-feudal (partly because the feudal structures did not allow them to resist foreign invasions). But they were anti-capitalist (in the rhetoric, since capitalism barely existed there) mostly because their aggressors --the West--were capitalist. So that the main lesson to be drawn from the tragic history of the China lobby is that it held, during decades, the US policies hostage to revanchist feudal and clerical forces that were alien to mainstream America, and actually harmful to capitalist America. But they worked to the extent that their ideology-- mixing fear with racist contempt for the "Asian mind" -- was in sync with Western prejudices. Replace the China lobby by the Israel one and the Asian mind by the Arab one and you get a fair picture of what is going on right now in the U.S.-Middle East relation.
What should the Left do? Well, simple: treat Israel as it did South Africa and attack the Lobby. The reason Israel acts as it does is that it feels strong and that, in turn, is for two reasons: one is its "all-powerful army" (currently being tested in Lebanon, not conclusively yet); the other is the almost complete control over Washington policy-making, specially the Congress. Peace in the Middle East can only come when this feeling of Israeli superiority is shattered, and Americans have a great responsibility is doing half of the job, the one concerning kneejerk U.S. support.
Now, there are, in principle, two ways to do that: one is to appeal to American generosity, the other is to appeal to their self-interest. Both ways should be pursued, but the latter is not enough emphasized by the Left . (See Michael Neumann, What is to be said ?, for a discussion of the ethical aspects of that choice.) That's probably because self-interest does not appear to be "noble" and because the pursuit of the "U.S. national interest" has all too often been interpreted as overthrowing progressive governments, buying elections etc. But, if the alternative to self-interest is a form of religious fanaticism, then self-interest is far preferable: if the Germans had followed self-interested policies in the 1930's, even imperialist policies, but rational ones, World War II could have been avoided. Also, if the United States were to distance itself from Israel, it would pursue policies opposed to the traditional ones, and far more humane. The other problem is that a large part of the Right (from Buchanan to Brzezinski) correctly sees American interests as being opposed of those of Israel, and the Left (understandably) does not like to make common cause with such people. But if a cause is just (and, in this case, urgent) it does not become less just because unsavory people endorse it (the same argument applies to genuine anti-Semitic hostility to Israel). The worst thing that the Left can do is to leave the monopoly of a just cause to the Right.
The Left cannot expect the American people to change radically overnight, abandon religious fundamentalism, give up oil addiction or embrace socialism. But a change of perspective in the Middle East is possible: the strength of the lobby is also its weakness, namely the naked king effect-everybody fears it, but the only reason to fear it is that everybody around us fears it. Left alone, it is powerless. To change that, one should systematically defend every politician, every columnist, every teacher, who is targeted by the lobby for his or her views or statements, irrespective of their general political outlook (to take an analogy, act as civil libertarians do with respect to free speech).
When people in the antiwar movement divert attention from Israel by blaming Big Oil or Big Business for the wars (specially the one in Lebanon, or the threats against Iran) one should demand that they provide some evidence for their claims. Challenge all the apologists or excuse makers for Israel or its lobby within progressive circles. When politicians and journalists claim that Israel and the United States have common interests, ask what services exactly has Israel rendered to the United States recently. Of course one can always point to some (minor) services; but, then, ask them what a cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis would reveal and why such an analysis is impossible to undertake publicly. If they speak of common values (the fallback position), provide a list of discriminatory Israeli laws for non-Jews.
Rolling back the lobby would necessitate a change of the American mentality with respect to the people of the Middle East, and to Islam, like ending the Vietnam war required a change in the way Asians were looked at. But that alone would have a greatly humanizing effect on American culture.
It is true that a change in the U.S. policy with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict would change nothing about traditional imperialism-- the United States would still support traditional elites everywhere, and press countries to provide a "favorable investment climate". But the conflict in the Middle East, involving Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, has all the aspects of a religious war-with Islam on one side and Zionism as a secular Western religion on the other. And wars of religion tend to be the most brutal and uncontrollable of all wars. What is at stake in the de-Zionization of the American mind is not only the fate of the unfortunate inhabitants of Palestine but also unspeakable miseries for the people of that region and maybe of the rest of the world. The ultimate irony in all this is that the fate of much of the world depends of the American people exercizing their right to self-determination, which, of course, they should.
Jean Bricmont teaches physics in Belgium. He is a member of the Brussells Tribunal. His new book, Humanitarian Imperialism, will be published by Monthly Review Press.
He can be reached at : bricmont@fyma.ucl.ac.be
Americans are constantly told that they have to defend themselves against people who "hate them", but without understanding why they are hated. Is the cause our secular democracy? Our appetite for oil? There are lots of democracies in the world that are far more secular than the United States (Sweden, France ...) and lots of places that want to buy oil at the best possible price (China) without arousing any noticeable hatred in the Middle East.
Of course, it is true that, throughout the Third World, Americans and Europeans are often considered arrogant and are not particularly liked. But the level of hatred that leads a large number of people to applaud an event like September 11 is peculiar to the Middle East. Indeed, the main political significance of September 11 did not derive from the number of people killed or even the spectacular achievement of the attackers, but from the fact that the attack was popular in large parts of the Middle East. That much was understood by Americans leaders and infuriated them. Such a level of hatred calls for explanation.
And there can be only one explanation: United States support for Israel. It is indeed Israel that is the main object of hatred, for reasons we shall describe, but since the United States uncritically supports Israel on almost every issue, constantly praises it as "the only democracy in the Middle East" and provides its main financial backing, the result is a "transfer" of hatred.
Why is Israel so hated? The constant stalling of "peace plans" in favor of more settlements and more war aggravates that hatred, but the basic cause lies in the very principles on which that state is build. There are basically two arguments that have justified establishing the State of Israel in Palestine: one is that God gave that land to the Jews, and the other is the Holocaust. The first one is deeply insulting to people who are profoundly religious, like most Arabs, but of another creed. And, for the second, it amounts to making people pay for a crime that they did not commit.
Both arguments are deeply racist, with their claim that it is right for Jews, and only Jews, to set up a state in a land that would obviously be Arab, like Jordan or Lebanon, if not for the slow Zionist invasion. This is illustrated by the "law of return": any Jew, anywhere, having no connection with Palestine whatsoever, and not suffering from the slightest persecution, can, if he so wishes, emigrate to Israel and easily become a citizen, while the inhabitants who fled in 1948, or their children, cannot. Add to that the fact that a city claimed to be Holy by three religions has become the "eternal capital of the Jewish people" (and only them) and one should start to understand the rage that all this provokes throughout the Arab and Muslim world.
It is precisely this racist aspect that infuriates most Arabs, even if they do not have any personal connection to Palestine (if they live, say, in the French banlieues). This situation delegitimizes the Arab regimes that are impotent in the face of the Zionist enemy and, after the defeat of the region's two main secular leaders, Nasser and Saddam Hussein (the latter thanks to the US), leads to the rise of religious fundamentalism.
Now, people often find racism far more unacceptable than "mere" economic exploitation or poverty. Consider South Africa: under apartheid, the living conditions of the Blacks were bad but not necessarily much worse than in other parts of Africa (or even than in South Africa now). But the system was intrinsically racist, and that was felt as an outrage to Blacks everywhere, including in the United States. This is why the conflict over Palestine goes beyond the second class status of Israeli Arabs or even the treatment of the Occupied Territories. Even if a Palestinian state were established on the latter, and even if full equality were granted to Israeli Arabs, the wounds of 1948 would not heal quickly. Arab leaders, even religious ones, can of course sign peace agreements with Israel, but they are fragile so long as the Arab population considers them unjust and does not accept them wholeheartedly. Palestine is the Alsace-Lorraine or the Taiwan of the Arab world and the fact that it is impossible to take it back does not mean that it can be forgotten . (I am not arguing here in favour of « wiping Israel off the map », or in favor of a « one state solution » but simply underlining what seems to me to be the root and the depth of the problem. In fact, I am not arguing for any solution partly because none seems to me to be attainable in the short term, but, more fundamentally, because I do not think that outsiders to the Middle East should propose such solutions.)
There is no sign that any of this is understood in Israel by more than a few individuals; if Arabs hate them, this is just another instance of the fact that everybody hates Jews and it only proves that they have to "defend themselves" (i.e. attack others pre-emptively) by any means necessary. That is bad enough, but why isn't this understood in the United States either? There are traditionally two answers to that: one is that the population is manipulated into supporting Israel by the government, the arms merchants or the oil industry, because Israel is a strategic U.S. ally; the other answer is that the United States is manipulated by the Israel lobby. The idea that Israel is a strategic ally, if by that one means a useful ally (useful to, say, the oil interests, broadly understood), although widely accepted, specially in the Left, does not survive a critical examination. That may have been the case in 1967 or even during the Cold War period, although one could argue that, even then, the Arab states were attracted by the Soviet Union only because it might support them in their struggle against Israel, albeit ineffectively. But both in 1991 and in 2003, the United States attacked Iraq without any help from Israel, even begging Israel not to intervene in 1991, in order for its Arab coalition not to collapse. Or consider the post-2003 occupation of Iraq, and suppose that the goal of that occupation is control over oil. In what sense does Israel help in that respect? Everything it does (the currents attacks on Gaza and Lebanon for example) further alienates the Arabs, and U.S. support for Israel makes the control of oil harder, not easier. Even the Iraqi parliament, Malaki and Sistani, who are the closest to allies that the United States can find there, condemn Israel's actions.
Finally, just imagine that the United States would make a 180 turn and suddenly side with the Palestinians, as they did with the Kosovars against the Serbs--who, by the way, were, like the Israelis, richer and more "Western" than their Albanian adversaries . Such a change of policies is by no means impossible : when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, the US supported the invasion by providing most of Indonesia's weapons. Yet, 25 years later, the US supported, or at least did not oppose, East Timor's accession to independence.
What effect would that have? Can anyone doubt that such a change of policy would facilitate U.S. access to oil fields and help it gain strategic allies (if any were still needed) throughout the Muslim world? In the Middle East, the main charge against the United States is that it is pro-Israel, because it lets itself be "manipulated by the Jews". Therefore, if Washington switched sides, there would be no more basis for hostility to U.S. presence, including its control over oil. Thus the notion of Israel as "strategic ally" makes no sense.
This leads us to the "Israel lobby" answer, which is closer to the truth, but not the whole truth. To get a complete picture, one has to understand why the lobby works as effectively as it does, and that depends on factors lying outside the actions of the lobby itself. After all, the militant Zionists constituting the lobby are a minority among Jews, who themselves form a small minority of the American population. The Israel lobby does not work like other lobbies, for example, the arms and the oil industry lobbies (which is one of the reasons why it is easy to dismiss it as irrelevant, as long as one does not understand how it really exerts its influence).
Of course, like the latter, the Israel lobby does fund electoral campaigns and its power derives in part from its ability to target people in Congress who deviate from its "line". But if that was all, it could easily be defeated indeed, there are other sources of electoral funding, the big industrial lobbies for example, and if the pro-Israel candidates could be shown to be paid to serve the interests of another State, their opponents could denounce the people who receive money from the lobby as some sort of agents of a foreign power. Just imagine a pro-French, pro-Chinese or pro-Japanese lobby that would try to significantly influence the US Congress. Certainly, money alone cannot suffice.
What protects the Israel lobby is the fact that anyone who would denounce an opponent funded by the Lobby as a quasi-agent of a foreign power would immediately be accused of anti-Semitism. In fact, imagine that Big Business is unhappy with the current U.S. policies (as it well may be) and wants to change them--how could they do it? Any criticism of Lobby influence on U.S. policy would immediately trigger the anti-Zionism-is-anti-Semitism accusation.
So the strength of the Israel lobby resides in part in this second line of defense, which itself is linked to its influence on the media. But even that could easily be defeated -- not all the media are under the lobby's influence, and, more importantly, the media is not all-powerful: in Venezuela, it is anti-Chavez, but Chavez regularly wins elections. In France, the media were overwhelmingly in favour if the "yes" vote to the referendum on the European Constitution, yet the "no" won. The problem, and that is why the Israel lobby is so effective, is that it expresses a world view that is accepted too easily by too many Americans. After all, nothing could be more ridiculous than accusing someone of anti-Semitism because he wants or claims to put America's interests above those of Israel. Yet, the accusation is likely to be effective, but only because years of ideological brainwashing have predisposed people to consider U.S. and Israeli interests as identical -- although instead of "interests" one speaks of "values".
Associated with this identification comes a systematically hostile view of the Arab and Muslim world, which both increases the lobby's effectiveness and is in part the result of its propaganda. Despite all the talk about anti-racism and "political correctness", there is an almost total lack of understanding of the Arab viewpoint on Palestine, and, in particular, of the racist nature of the problem. It is this triple layer of control (selective funding, the anti-Semitism card, or rather canard, and the interiorization) that gives the lobby its peculiar strength. (And that is also why it is easy to dismiss its strength by saying, for instance, that, obviously, Jews don't control America. Sure, but direct control is not the way it works.)
People who think that it is the arms or the oil industry that are running the show in Washington as far as foreign policy is concerned, should at least answer the following question: how does it work? There is no evidence whatsoever that the oil industry, for example, pushed for the Iraq war, the threats against Iran or the attack on Lebanon . (There is a lot of evidence that the Israel lobby pushed for the Iraq war; see Jeff Blankfort, A War for Israel.They are supposed to act secretly, of course, but where is the evidence that they do? And if they is no evidence, even no indirect evidence, how does one know? Profits from the war, at least for major corporations, haven't materialized yet, and there are many indications that the U.S. economy will suffer a lot from war-related expenses and the associated deficits. On the other hand, it is enough to open any mainstream U.S. newspaper or TV and read or hear opinions expressed by Zionists calling for more war. War needs war propaganda and a supporting ideology, and the Zionists provide it, while none of this is offered by Big Business in general or the oil industry in particular.
One may also think of historical precedents, like the China lobby (made of post-1949 Chinese exiles and ex-missionaries, supported by their domestic churches) in the 1950's and 1960's. That lobby led the United States to maintain the ridiculous claim that a billion people were represented by a government (Taiwan) that had no control over them whatsoever. It was also very influential in bringing on the Vietnam war. Whose interests were they serving? The ones of the American capitalists? But the latter make huge profits in post-Nixon recognized China. And the same is true in Vietnam.
In fact both countries, as well as most of Asia, were anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist, as well as anti-feudal (partly because the feudal structures did not allow them to resist foreign invasions). But they were anti-capitalist (in the rhetoric, since capitalism barely existed there) mostly because their aggressors --the West--were capitalist. So that the main lesson to be drawn from the tragic history of the China lobby is that it held, during decades, the US policies hostage to revanchist feudal and clerical forces that were alien to mainstream America, and actually harmful to capitalist America. But they worked to the extent that their ideology-- mixing fear with racist contempt for the "Asian mind" -- was in sync with Western prejudices. Replace the China lobby by the Israel one and the Asian mind by the Arab one and you get a fair picture of what is going on right now in the U.S.-Middle East relation.
What should the Left do? Well, simple: treat Israel as it did South Africa and attack the Lobby. The reason Israel acts as it does is that it feels strong and that, in turn, is for two reasons: one is its "all-powerful army" (currently being tested in Lebanon, not conclusively yet); the other is the almost complete control over Washington policy-making, specially the Congress. Peace in the Middle East can only come when this feeling of Israeli superiority is shattered, and Americans have a great responsibility is doing half of the job, the one concerning kneejerk U.S. support.
Now, there are, in principle, two ways to do that: one is to appeal to American generosity, the other is to appeal to their self-interest. Both ways should be pursued, but the latter is not enough emphasized by the Left . (See Michael Neumann, What is to be said ?, for a discussion of the ethical aspects of that choice.) That's probably because self-interest does not appear to be "noble" and because the pursuit of the "U.S. national interest" has all too often been interpreted as overthrowing progressive governments, buying elections etc. But, if the alternative to self-interest is a form of religious fanaticism, then self-interest is far preferable: if the Germans had followed self-interested policies in the 1930's, even imperialist policies, but rational ones, World War II could have been avoided. Also, if the United States were to distance itself from Israel, it would pursue policies opposed to the traditional ones, and far more humane. The other problem is that a large part of the Right (from Buchanan to Brzezinski) correctly sees American interests as being opposed of those of Israel, and the Left (understandably) does not like to make common cause with such people. But if a cause is just (and, in this case, urgent) it does not become less just because unsavory people endorse it (the same argument applies to genuine anti-Semitic hostility to Israel). The worst thing that the Left can do is to leave the monopoly of a just cause to the Right.
The Left cannot expect the American people to change radically overnight, abandon religious fundamentalism, give up oil addiction or embrace socialism. But a change of perspective in the Middle East is possible: the strength of the lobby is also its weakness, namely the naked king effect-everybody fears it, but the only reason to fear it is that everybody around us fears it. Left alone, it is powerless. To change that, one should systematically defend every politician, every columnist, every teacher, who is targeted by the lobby for his or her views or statements, irrespective of their general political outlook (to take an analogy, act as civil libertarians do with respect to free speech).
When people in the antiwar movement divert attention from Israel by blaming Big Oil or Big Business for the wars (specially the one in Lebanon, or the threats against Iran) one should demand that they provide some evidence for their claims. Challenge all the apologists or excuse makers for Israel or its lobby within progressive circles. When politicians and journalists claim that Israel and the United States have common interests, ask what services exactly has Israel rendered to the United States recently. Of course one can always point to some (minor) services; but, then, ask them what a cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis would reveal and why such an analysis is impossible to undertake publicly. If they speak of common values (the fallback position), provide a list of discriminatory Israeli laws for non-Jews.
Rolling back the lobby would necessitate a change of the American mentality with respect to the people of the Middle East, and to Islam, like ending the Vietnam war required a change in the way Asians were looked at. But that alone would have a greatly humanizing effect on American culture.
It is true that a change in the U.S. policy with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict would change nothing about traditional imperialism-- the United States would still support traditional elites everywhere, and press countries to provide a "favorable investment climate". But the conflict in the Middle East, involving Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, has all the aspects of a religious war-with Islam on one side and Zionism as a secular Western religion on the other. And wars of religion tend to be the most brutal and uncontrollable of all wars. What is at stake in the de-Zionization of the American mind is not only the fate of the unfortunate inhabitants of Palestine but also unspeakable miseries for the people of that region and maybe of the rest of the world. The ultimate irony in all this is that the fate of much of the world depends of the American people exercizing their right to self-determination, which, of course, they should.
Jean Bricmont teaches physics in Belgium. He is a member of the Brussells Tribunal. His new book, Humanitarian Imperialism, will be published by Monthly Review Press.
He can be reached at : bricmont@fyma.ucl.ac.be
ISRAELIS THREATEN UN PEACEKEEPERS IF THEY TRY TO REPAIR BRIDGE
GUARDIAN - Lebanese officials said there were many reports of other casualties throughout southern Lebanon but rescue workers were not able to reach the sites because of continued Israeli air strikes. Israel also threatened to attack UN peacekeepers if they attempted to repair bomb-damaged bridges in southern Lebanon. UN officials contacted the Israeli army to inform them that a team of Chinese military engineers attached to the UN force in Lebanon intended to repair the bridge on the Beirut to Tyre road to enable the transport of humanitarian supplies.
According to the UN, Israeli officials said the engineers would become a target if they attempted to repair the bridge. Senior UN officials reacted angrily to the destruction of a temporary causeway over the Litani river overnight. "We must be able to have movement throughout the country to deliver supplies. At this point we can't do that," said David Shearer, the humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon. "The eliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure is a violation of international law."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1839442,00.html
According to the UN, Israeli officials said the engineers would become a target if they attempted to repair the bridge. Senior UN officials reacted angrily to the destruction of a temporary causeway over the Litani river overnight. "We must be able to have movement throughout the country to deliver supplies. At this point we can't do that," said David Shearer, the humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon. "The eliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure is a violation of international law."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1839442,00.html
ISRAELIS BLOCKADING RED CROSS AID
KATHY GANNON, ASSOCIATED PRESS - The Israeli military has denied permission for aid groups to move food and medicine to besieged villages in southern Lebanon for two days, the Red Cross said Monday. Without guarantees of safe passage, the Red Cross has been unable to move supplies beyond the port city of Tyre to towns and villages south of the Litani River, where thousands of people are believed trapped, said Richard Huguenin, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. . . "It is now a question of the humanitarian consequences of what is looking like a blockade," Huguenin told The Associated Press in Tyre.
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/world/15219903.htm
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/world/15219903.htm
INDIA BANS ARAB TV CHANNELS
ARAB NEWS - In a country widely referred to as the world’s largest democracy, the Indian government has succumbed to mounting Israeli pressure and ordered a nationwide ban on the broadcast of Arab television channels. The Indian government’s ban on Arab television stations is in complete contrast to the friendship that Arab countries imagine exists with their neighbor across the Arabian Sea.
Article Here...
Article Here...
BP'S ALASKAN PIPELINE WAS CORRODED YEARS AGO
GREG PALAST, GUARDIAN - Years ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan Natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding. Even then, courageous government inspectors and pipeline workers were screaming about corrosion all through the pipeline. I say "courageous" because BP, which owns 46% of the pipe and is supposed to manage the system, had a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems. . .
BP's suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shut-down of the line is the same corrosion Dan Lawn has been screaming about for 15 years. Lawn is a steel-eyed government inspector who has kept his job only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head. . .
Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22 a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and repairs a couple years back -- say, after Dan Lawn's tenth warning -- the oil market would have hardly noticed.
But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP's shut-down bonus. The Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big winner is Arco petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State. Arco is a 100%-owned subsidiary of … British Petroleum. . .
I don't want readers to think BP isn't civic-minded. The company's US CEO, Bob Malone, was co-chairman of the Bush re-election campaign in Alaska. Mr. Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's environment that he pushed again to open the state's arctic wildlife refuge to drilling by the BP consortium.
Indeed, you can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it: the crude oil still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill. Exxon took all the blame for the spill because they were dumb enough to have the company's name on the ship. But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the
grounding near Bligh Island. However, the reports were bogus, the equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned
BP's suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shut-down of the line is the same corrosion Dan Lawn has been screaming about for 15 years. Lawn is a steel-eyed government inspector who has kept his job only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head. . .
Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22 a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and repairs a couple years back -- say, after Dan Lawn's tenth warning -- the oil market would have hardly noticed.
But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP's shut-down bonus. The Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big winner is Arco petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State. Arco is a 100%-owned subsidiary of … British Petroleum. . .
I don't want readers to think BP isn't civic-minded. The company's US CEO, Bob Malone, was co-chairman of the Bush re-election campaign in Alaska. Mr. Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's environment that he pushed again to open the state's arctic wildlife refuge to drilling by the BP consortium.
Indeed, you can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it: the crude oil still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill. Exxon took all the blame for the spill because they were dumb enough to have the company's name on the ship. But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the
grounding near Bligh Island. However, the reports were bogus, the equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
ISRAEL DESTROYING LEBANON
LIZ SLY, CHICAGO TRIBUNE - The suburbs are now eerily deserted, their residents having fled in the first days of the war. Hezbollah's headquarters is a collapsed pile of masonry, the buildings housing the group's press office and TV station are gone, and the apartment block where Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah lived has pancaked into a single story of crunched concrete. Entire city blocks have been obliterated, along with the thousands of homes, shops and offices that they housed, by the tons of explosives dropped by Israeli warplanes in their effort to dislodge the Shiite militia. . .
All indicators suggest Hezbollah has survived relatively unscathed. Its guerrilla forces are still firing rockets into northern Israel and putting up stiff resistance in the town of Bint Jbeil, its leader routinely appears on television, and its media department conducts regular tours for journalists. Lebanon itself is not faring so well. As the conflict enters its third week, the country is teetering on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. More than 800,000 people, nearly a quarter of the population, have been displaced, the government says. In the war zone of the south, injured people are trapped in the rubble of the buildings that cascaded down on them. The death toll has passed 420 but is feared to be much higher. The attacks have pummeled the country's infrastructure, much of it newly built, turning the clock back on Lebanon's hopes of recovery in the aftermath of the civil war that engulfed the country from 1975 to 1990.
According to the government, 62 bridges--two-thirds of the country's total--have been destroyed, along with 85 percent of the main roads as well as 72 overpasses; 160 factories, farms and commercial ventures; 23 gas stations; 27 'vital points,' including ports, airports and power stations; and 6,200 apartments. The count probably is an underestimate, because officials say many areas are beyond reach of the government's limited resources.
http://www.topix.net/content/trb/2597422849124292037308159889560718647356
RIVERBEND, BAGHDAD - I woke up this morning to scenes of carnage and destruction on the television and for the briefest of moments, I thought it was footage of Iraq. It took me a few seconds to realize it was actually Qana in Lebanon. The latest village to see Israeli air strikes. The images were beyond gruesome- body parts and corpses being hauled out from under tons of debris. Wailing relatives and friends, searching for loved ones. . . We saw the corpses of the children on television, lifeless and twisted grotesquely, what remained of their faces frozen in expressions of pain and shock. I just sat there and cried in front of the television. I didn't know I could still feel that sort of sorrow towards what has become a daily reality for Iraqis. It's not Iraq but it might as well be: It's civilians under lethal attack; it's a country fighting occupation.
I'm so frustrated I can't think straight. I'm full of rage against Israel, the US, Britain, Iran and most of Europe. The world is going to go to hell for standing by and allowing the massacre of innocents. . . The UN is beyond useless. They've gone from a union of nations working for the good of the world (if they ever were even that), to a bunch of gravediggers. . .
And the world wonders how 'terrorists' are created. A 15-year-old Lebanese girl lost five of her siblings and her parents and home in the Qana bombing. . . Ehud Olmert might as well kill her now because if he thinks she's going to grow up with anything but hate in her heart towards him and everything he represents, then he's delusional.
Is this whole debacle the fine line between terrorism and protecting ones nation? If it's a militia, insurgent or military resistance - then it's terrorism (unless of course the militia, insurgent(s) and/or resistance are being funded exclusively by the CIA). If it's the Israeli, American or British army, then it's a pre-emptive strike, or a 'war on terror'. No matter the loss of hundreds of innocent lives. No matter the children who died last night- they're only Arabs, after all, right?
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
All indicators suggest Hezbollah has survived relatively unscathed. Its guerrilla forces are still firing rockets into northern Israel and putting up stiff resistance in the town of Bint Jbeil, its leader routinely appears on television, and its media department conducts regular tours for journalists. Lebanon itself is not faring so well. As the conflict enters its third week, the country is teetering on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. More than 800,000 people, nearly a quarter of the population, have been displaced, the government says. In the war zone of the south, injured people are trapped in the rubble of the buildings that cascaded down on them. The death toll has passed 420 but is feared to be much higher. The attacks have pummeled the country's infrastructure, much of it newly built, turning the clock back on Lebanon's hopes of recovery in the aftermath of the civil war that engulfed the country from 1975 to 1990.
According to the government, 62 bridges--two-thirds of the country's total--have been destroyed, along with 85 percent of the main roads as well as 72 overpasses; 160 factories, farms and commercial ventures; 23 gas stations; 27 'vital points,' including ports, airports and power stations; and 6,200 apartments. The count probably is an underestimate, because officials say many areas are beyond reach of the government's limited resources.
http://www.topix.net/content/trb/2597422849124292037308159889560718647356
RIVERBEND, BAGHDAD - I woke up this morning to scenes of carnage and destruction on the television and for the briefest of moments, I thought it was footage of Iraq. It took me a few seconds to realize it was actually Qana in Lebanon. The latest village to see Israeli air strikes. The images were beyond gruesome- body parts and corpses being hauled out from under tons of debris. Wailing relatives and friends, searching for loved ones. . . We saw the corpses of the children on television, lifeless and twisted grotesquely, what remained of their faces frozen in expressions of pain and shock. I just sat there and cried in front of the television. I didn't know I could still feel that sort of sorrow towards what has become a daily reality for Iraqis. It's not Iraq but it might as well be: It's civilians under lethal attack; it's a country fighting occupation.
I'm so frustrated I can't think straight. I'm full of rage against Israel, the US, Britain, Iran and most of Europe. The world is going to go to hell for standing by and allowing the massacre of innocents. . . The UN is beyond useless. They've gone from a union of nations working for the good of the world (if they ever were even that), to a bunch of gravediggers. . .
And the world wonders how 'terrorists' are created. A 15-year-old Lebanese girl lost five of her siblings and her parents and home in the Qana bombing. . . Ehud Olmert might as well kill her now because if he thinks she's going to grow up with anything but hate in her heart towards him and everything he represents, then he's delusional.
Is this whole debacle the fine line between terrorism and protecting ones nation? If it's a militia, insurgent or military resistance - then it's terrorism (unless of course the militia, insurgent(s) and/or resistance are being funded exclusively by the CIA). If it's the Israeli, American or British army, then it's a pre-emptive strike, or a 'war on terror'. No matter the loss of hundreds of innocent lives. No matter the children who died last night- they're only Arabs, after all, right?
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
CLUES THAT YOUR COUNTRY MAY BE TURNING INTO A FASCIST STATE
NOTE: Some of these symptoms are found in non-fascist countries where they should be treated as serious warning signs. On the other hand, fascist states - unlike democratic nations - have many, if not all, of these symptoms:
Your president asserts the right to ignore part or all of laws passed by the national legislature.
Massive warrantless searches
Your president and other officials regularly lie to you
Fraudulent election counts
Government monitoring of letters, emails, phone calls and checking accounts
Secret courts
A government subservient to the interests of the country's largest corporations.
Use of torture on prisoners
Courts that support presidential use of unconstitutional powers
Massive spying on citizens, especially those involved in political dissent
A government that uses words like democracy, freedom and peace while engaging in acts dramatically at odds with such words
Government agencies or officials declaring themselves exempt from portions of the law or constitution
Creation of watchlists, no-fly lists and similar exclusionary documents
National ID cards
Massive use of cameras to spy on citizens
A media supportive of, or obsequious towards, the government in covering its police state activities
Lack of legal recourse to stop illegal government actions
Prison without trial and arrests without charges
ADDITIONS ARE WELCOME
news@prorev.com
PERMANENT LINK
http://prorev.com/fascisthints.htm
Your president asserts the right to ignore part or all of laws passed by the national legislature.
Massive warrantless searches
Your president and other officials regularly lie to you
Fraudulent election counts
Government monitoring of letters, emails, phone calls and checking accounts
Secret courts
A government subservient to the interests of the country's largest corporations.
Use of torture on prisoners
Courts that support presidential use of unconstitutional powers
Massive spying on citizens, especially those involved in political dissent
A government that uses words like democracy, freedom and peace while engaging in acts dramatically at odds with such words
Government agencies or officials declaring themselves exempt from portions of the law or constitution
Creation of watchlists, no-fly lists and similar exclusionary documents
National ID cards
Massive use of cameras to spy on citizens
A media supportive of, or obsequious towards, the government in covering its police state activities
Lack of legal recourse to stop illegal government actions
Prison without trial and arrests without charges
ADDITIONS ARE WELCOME
news@prorev.com
PERMANENT LINK
http://prorev.com/fascisthints.htm
Bush Grants Self Permission To Grant More Power To Self
August 2, 2006
WASHINGTON, DC—In a decisive 1–0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers.
"As president, I strongly believe that my first duty as president is to support and serve the president," Bush said during a televised address from the East Room of the White House shortly after signing his executive order. "I promise the American people that I will not abuse this new power, unless it becomes necessary to grant myself the power to do so at a later time."
The Presidential Empowerment Act, which the president hand-drafted on his own Oval Office stationery and promptly signed into law, provides Bush with full authority to permit himself to authorize increased jurisdiction over the three branches of the federal government, provided that the president considers it in his best interest to do so.
"In a time of war, the president must have the power he needs to make the tough decisions, including, if need be, the decision to grant himself even more power," Bush said. "To do otherwise would be playing into the hands of our enemies."
Added Bush: "And it's all under due process of the law as I see it."
In addition, the president reserves the right to overturn any decision to allow himself to increase his power by using a line-item veto, which in turn may only be overruled by the president.
Senior administration officials lauded Bush's decision, saying that current presidential powers over presidential power were "far too limited."
WASHINGTON, DC—In a decisive 1–0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers.
"As president, I strongly believe that my first duty as president is to support and serve the president," Bush said during a televised address from the East Room of the White House shortly after signing his executive order. "I promise the American people that I will not abuse this new power, unless it becomes necessary to grant myself the power to do so at a later time."
The Presidential Empowerment Act, which the president hand-drafted on his own Oval Office stationery and promptly signed into law, provides Bush with full authority to permit himself to authorize increased jurisdiction over the three branches of the federal government, provided that the president considers it in his best interest to do so.
"In a time of war, the president must have the power he needs to make the tough decisions, including, if need be, the decision to grant himself even more power," Bush said. "To do otherwise would be playing into the hands of our enemies."
Added Bush: "And it's all under due process of the law as I see it."
"The president can grant himself the power to interpret new laws however he sees fit, then use that power to interpret a law in such a manner that in turn grants him increased power." -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez
In addition, the president reserves the right to overturn any decision to allow himself to increase his power by using a line-item veto, which in turn may only be overruled by the president.
Senior administration officials lauded Bush's decision, saying that current presidential powers over presidential power were "far too limited."
Laughing at the President
Bush, in his Saturday radio address: "This moment of conflict in the Middle East is painful and tragic. Yet it is also a moment of opportunity for broader change in the region. Transforming countries that have suffered decades of tyranny and violence is difficult, and it will take time to achieve. But the consequences will be profound for our country and the world."
Richard N. Haass, Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director who currently leads the Council on Foreign Relations, "laughed at the president's public optimism."
Ouch.
But rest assured, Bush is on the case. He's not about to sit on his laurels and not take advantage of this superb opportunity.
He's a real stunner, that Bush. It really casts into stark relief how much better he is than all our other presidents when he comes out with radically brilliant new approaches to a millennia-old conflict like "monitoring very closely" and "wanting peace."
And thusly I, too, laughed so as not to weep.
(The Swamp)
Richard N. Haass, Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director who currently leads the Council on Foreign Relations, "laughed at the president's public optimism."
"An opportunity?" Haass said with an incredulous tone. "Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"
Ouch.
But rest assured, Bush is on the case. He's not about to sit on his laurels and not take advantage of this superb opportunity.
"I'm monitoring the situation in the Middle East very closely," Bush said this morning, in a speech at the Port of Miami.
…"We want there to be a long-lasting peace, one that's sustainable."
He's a real stunner, that Bush. It really casts into stark relief how much better he is than all our other presidents when he comes out with radically brilliant new approaches to a millennia-old conflict like "monitoring very closely" and "wanting peace."
And thusly I, too, laughed so as not to weep.
(The Swamp)
Monday, July 31, 2006
Living Wage Mandate -- What Do You Think? (Satire - Duh!)
The Chicago City Council passed an ordinance last week declaring that "big box" stores like Target and Best Buy had to pay a living wage of $10 per hour. What do you think?
Dan Klessig, Systems Analyst
"Where does it end, Chicago? Huh?! A decent education? A protected citizenry? Health care? Where does it end, you mad city?!"
Rebecca Sanders, Physical Therapist
"I'm all for people making a living wage, but if I end up having to pay more than $1.99 for a gallon of mayonnaise, I'm going to be pissed."
Terry Hegel, Hardware Store Owner
"I’m just relieved that, as a small-business owner, I am still within the law to treat my workers like shit."
Dan Klessig, Systems Analyst
"Where does it end, Chicago? Huh?! A decent education? A protected citizenry? Health care? Where does it end, you mad city?!"
Rebecca Sanders, Physical Therapist
"I'm all for people making a living wage, but if I end up having to pay more than $1.99 for a gallon of mayonnaise, I'm going to be pissed."
Terry Hegel, Hardware Store Owner
"I’m just relieved that, as a small-business owner, I am still within the law to treat my workers like shit."
Sunday, July 30, 2006
How Much Longer?
by Eduardo Galeano; July 28, 2006
One country bombed two countries. Such impunity might astound were it not business as usual. In response to the few timid protests from the international community, Israel said mistakes were made.
How much longer will horrors be called mistakes?
This slaughter of civilians began with the kidnapping of a soldier.
How much longer will the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier be allowed to justify the kidnapping of Palestinian sovereignty?
How much longer will the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers be allowed to justify the kidnapping of the entire nation of Lebanon?
For centuries the slaughter of Jews was the favorite sport of Europeans. Auschwitz was the natural culmination of an ancient river of terror, which had flowed across all of Europe.
How much longer will Palestinians and other Arabs be made to pay for crimes they didn’t commit?
Hezbollah didn’t exist when Israel razed Lebanon in earlier invasions.
How much longer will we continue to believe the story of this attacked attacker, which practices terrorism because it has the right to defend itself from terrorism?
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon: How much longer will Israel and the United States be allowed to exterminate countries with impunity?
The tortures of Abu Ghraib, which triggered a certain universal sickness, are nothing new to us in Latin America. Our militaries learned their interrogation techniques from the School of the Americas, which may no longer exist in name but lives on in effect.
How much longer will we continue to accept that torture can be legitimized?
Israel has ignored forty-six resolutions of the General Assembly and other U.N. bodies.
How much longer will Israel enjoy the privilege of selective deafness?
The United Nations makes recommendations but never decisions. When it does decide, the United States makes sure the decision is blocked. In the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. has vetoed forty resolutions condemning actions of Israel.
How much longer will the United Nations act as if it were just another name for the United States?
Since the Palestinians had their homes confiscated and their land taken from them, much blood has flowed.
How much longer will blood flow so that force can justify what law denies?
History is repeated day after day, year after year, and ten Arabs die for every one Israeli. How much longer will an Israeli life be measured as worth ten Arab lives?
In proportion to the overall population, the 50,000 civilians killed in Iraq—the majority of them women and children—are the equivalent of 800,000 Americans.
How much longer will we continue to accept, as if customary, the killing of Iraqis in a blind war that has forgotten all of its justifications?
Iran is developing nuclear energy, but the so-called international community is not concerned in the least by the fact that Israel already has 250 atomic bombs, despite the fact that the country lives permanently on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Who calibrates the universal dangerometer? Was Iran the country that dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
In the age of globalization, the right to express is less powerful than the right to apply pressure. To justify the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, war is called peace. The Israelis are patriots, and the Palestinians are terrorists, and terrorists sow universal alarm.
How much longer will the media broadcast fear instead of news?
The slaughter happening today, which is not the first and I fear will not be the last, is happening in silence. Has the world gone deaf?
How much longer will the outcry of the outraged be sounded on a bell of straw?
The bombing is killing children, more than a third of the victims.
Those who dare denounce this murder are called anti-Semites.
How much longer will the critics of state terrorism be considered anti-Semites?
How much longer will we accept this grotesque form of extortion?
Are the Jews who are horrified by what is being done in their name anti-Semites? Are there not Arab voices that defend a Palestinian homeland but condemn fundamentalist insanity?
Terrorists resemble one another: state terrorists, respectable members of government, and private terrorists, madmen acting alone or in those organized in groups hard at work since the Cold War battling communist totalitarianism. All act in the name of various gods, whether God, Allah, or Jehovah.
How much longer will we ignore that fact that all terrorists scorn human life and feed off of one another?
Isn’t it clear that in the war between Israel and Hezbollah, it is the civilians, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Israeli, who are dying?
And isn’t it clear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the invasion of Gaza and Lebanon are the incubators of hatred, producing fanatic after fanatic after fanatic?
We are the only species of animal that specializes in mutual extermination.
We devote $2.5 billion per day to military spending. Misery and war are children of the same father.
How much longer will we accept that this world so in love with death is the only world possible? U
Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, is author of “Open Veins of Latin America” and “Memory of Fire.”
One country bombed two countries. Such impunity might astound were it not business as usual. In response to the few timid protests from the international community, Israel said mistakes were made.
How much longer will horrors be called mistakes?
This slaughter of civilians began with the kidnapping of a soldier.
How much longer will the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier be allowed to justify the kidnapping of Palestinian sovereignty?
How much longer will the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers be allowed to justify the kidnapping of the entire nation of Lebanon?
For centuries the slaughter of Jews was the favorite sport of Europeans. Auschwitz was the natural culmination of an ancient river of terror, which had flowed across all of Europe.
How much longer will Palestinians and other Arabs be made to pay for crimes they didn’t commit?
Hezbollah didn’t exist when Israel razed Lebanon in earlier invasions.
How much longer will we continue to believe the story of this attacked attacker, which practices terrorism because it has the right to defend itself from terrorism?
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon: How much longer will Israel and the United States be allowed to exterminate countries with impunity?
The tortures of Abu Ghraib, which triggered a certain universal sickness, are nothing new to us in Latin America. Our militaries learned their interrogation techniques from the School of the Americas, which may no longer exist in name but lives on in effect.
How much longer will we continue to accept that torture can be legitimized?
Israel has ignored forty-six resolutions of the General Assembly and other U.N. bodies.
How much longer will Israel enjoy the privilege of selective deafness?
The United Nations makes recommendations but never decisions. When it does decide, the United States makes sure the decision is blocked. In the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. has vetoed forty resolutions condemning actions of Israel.
How much longer will the United Nations act as if it were just another name for the United States?
Since the Palestinians had their homes confiscated and their land taken from them, much blood has flowed.
How much longer will blood flow so that force can justify what law denies?
History is repeated day after day, year after year, and ten Arabs die for every one Israeli. How much longer will an Israeli life be measured as worth ten Arab lives?
In proportion to the overall population, the 50,000 civilians killed in Iraq—the majority of them women and children—are the equivalent of 800,000 Americans.
How much longer will we continue to accept, as if customary, the killing of Iraqis in a blind war that has forgotten all of its justifications?
Iran is developing nuclear energy, but the so-called international community is not concerned in the least by the fact that Israel already has 250 atomic bombs, despite the fact that the country lives permanently on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Who calibrates the universal dangerometer? Was Iran the country that dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
In the age of globalization, the right to express is less powerful than the right to apply pressure. To justify the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, war is called peace. The Israelis are patriots, and the Palestinians are terrorists, and terrorists sow universal alarm.
How much longer will the media broadcast fear instead of news?
The slaughter happening today, which is not the first and I fear will not be the last, is happening in silence. Has the world gone deaf?
How much longer will the outcry of the outraged be sounded on a bell of straw?
The bombing is killing children, more than a third of the victims.
Those who dare denounce this murder are called anti-Semites.
How much longer will the critics of state terrorism be considered anti-Semites?
How much longer will we accept this grotesque form of extortion?
Are the Jews who are horrified by what is being done in their name anti-Semites? Are there not Arab voices that defend a Palestinian homeland but condemn fundamentalist insanity?
Terrorists resemble one another: state terrorists, respectable members of government, and private terrorists, madmen acting alone or in those organized in groups hard at work since the Cold War battling communist totalitarianism. All act in the name of various gods, whether God, Allah, or Jehovah.
How much longer will we ignore that fact that all terrorists scorn human life and feed off of one another?
Isn’t it clear that in the war between Israel and Hezbollah, it is the civilians, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Israeli, who are dying?
And isn’t it clear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the invasion of Gaza and Lebanon are the incubators of hatred, producing fanatic after fanatic after fanatic?
We are the only species of animal that specializes in mutual extermination.
We devote $2.5 billion per day to military spending. Misery and war are children of the same father.
How much longer will we accept that this world so in love with death is the only world possible? U
Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, is author of “Open Veins of Latin America” and “Memory of Fire.”
The Us Empire Makes Its Move To Take Over The Middle East
John Pilger, ZNet and The Guardian
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-07/27pilger.cfm
The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though the word itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a "great mission to rid the world of evil", to borrow from President Bush.
One of the museum's exhibitions is called "The Price of Freedom: Americans at war". In the spirit of Santa's Magic Grotto, this travesty of revisionism helps us understand how silence and omission are so successfully deployed in free, media-saturated societies. The shuffling lines of ordinary people, many of them children, are dispensed the vainglorious message that America has always "built freedom and democracy" - notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the atomic bombing saved "a million lives", and in Vietnam where America's crusaders were "determined to stop communist expansion", and in Iraq where the same true hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented precision".
The words "invasion" and "controversial" make only fleeting appearances; there is no hint that the "great mission" has overseen, since 1945, the attempted overthrow of 50 governments, many of them democracies, along with the crushing of popular movements struggling against tyranny and the bombing of 30 countries, causing the loss of countless lives. In central America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's arming and training of gangster-armies saw off 300,000 people; in Guatemala, this was described by the UN as genocide. No word of this is uttered in the Grotto. Indeed, thanks to such displays, Americans can venerate war, comforted by the crimes of others and knowing nothing about their own.
In Santa's Grotto, there is no place for Howard Zinn's honest People's History of the United States, or I F Stone's revelation of the truth of what the museum calls "the forgotten war" in Korea, or Mark Twain's definition of patriotism as the need to keep "multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries". Moreover, at the Price of Freedom Shop, you can buy US Army Monopoly, and a "grateful nation blanket" for just $200. The exhibition's corporate sponsors include Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer. The point is taken.
To understand the power of indoctrination in free societies is also to understand the subversive power of the truth it suppresses. During the Blair era in Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been embraced by the pro-war media. Inspired by America's Messianic claims of "victory" in the cold war, their pseudo-histories have sought not only to hose down the blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine and genocide that was British imperialism ("the Empire was an exemplary force for good": Andrew Roberts) but also to rehabilitate Gladstonian convictions of superiority and promote "the imposition of western values", as Niall Ferguson puts it.
Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous concept that covers both the barbarism of the imperial past and today's ruthless, rigged "free" market. The new code for race and class is "culture". Thus, the enduring, piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, especially those with natural resources, has become a "clash of civilisations". Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel about "the end of history" (since recanted), the task of the revisionists and mainstream journalism has been to popularise the "new" imperialism, as in Ferguson's War of the World series for Channel 4 and his frequent soundbites
on the BBC. In this way, the public is "softened up" for the rapacious invasion of countries on false pretences, including a not unlikely nuclear attack on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an executive dictatorship, as called for by Vice-President Cheney. So imminent is the latter that a supine Congress will almost certainly reverse the Supreme Court's recent decision to outlaw the Guantanamo kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the majority opinion - in a high court Bush himself stacked - sounded his alarm through this seminal quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an imperial tyranny. It is clear that the long-planned assault on Gaza and now the destruction of Lebanon are Washington-ordained and pretexts for a wider campaign with the goal of installing American puppets in Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran. "The pay-off time has come," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe; "now the proxy should salvage the entangled Empire."
The attendant propaganda - the abuse of language and eternal hypocrisy - has reached its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli soldier belonging to an invasion force was captured and held, legitimately, as a prisoner of war. Reported as a "kidnapping", this set off yet more slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before the capture of the soldier was of no interest. Neither was the incarceration of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many of them, as documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story cancelled any serious inquiry into Israel's plans to reinvade Gaza, from which it had staged a phoney withdrawal.
The fact and meaning of Hamas's self-imposed 16-month ceasefire were lost in inanities about "recognising Israel", along with Israel's state of terror in Gaza - the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a residential block, the firing of as many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the most densely populated places on earth and the nightly terrorising with sonic booms.
"I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza," declared the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, as children went out of their minds. In their defence, the Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and killed eight Israelis: enough to ensure Israel's victimhood on the BBC; even Jeremy Bowen struck a shameful "balance", referring to "two narratives". The historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. Try to imagine that described as "two narratives".
Watching this unfold in Washington - I am staying in a hotel taken over by evangelical "Christians for Israel" apparently seeking rapture - I have heard only the crudest colonial refrain and no truth. Hezbollah, drone America's journalistic caricatures, is "armed and funded by Syria and Iran", and so they beckon an attack on those countries, while remaining silent about America's $3bn-a-day gift of planes and small arms and bombs to a state whose international lawlessness is a registered world record.
There is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response to the atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for half a century, so Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against Ariel Sharon's murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000 people dead.
There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally and brutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine, having demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands, and families, and hospitals, and schools. There is never mention that the threat to Israel's existence is a canard, and the true enemy of its people is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an imperial America that guarantees the Jewish state as the antithesis of humane Judaism.
The epic injustice done to the Palestinians is the heart of the matter. While European governments (with the honourable exception of the Swiss) have remained craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to the Palestinians' aid. How truly shaming. There is no media "narrative" of the Palestinians' heroic stand during two uprisings, and with slingshots and stones most of the time. Israel's murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall have left them utterly alone. Neither is the silence of governments all that is shocking. On a major BBC programme, Maureen Lipman, a Jew and promoter of selective good causes, is allowed to say, without serious challenge, that "human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually . . ."
Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an Israeli bombing run, their parents petrified with grief. Let her watch as a young Palestinian woman - and there have been many of them - screams in pain as she gives birth in the back seat of a car at night at an Israeli roadblock, having been wilfully refused right of passage to a hospital. Then let Lipman watch the child's father carry his newborn across freezing fields until it turns blue and dies.
I think Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a tale of the ultimate empire:
"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . . . practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions . . . and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."
John Pilger's new book, "Freedom Next Time", is published by Bantam Press
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-07/27pilger.cfm
The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though the word itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a "great mission to rid the world of evil", to borrow from President Bush.
One of the museum's exhibitions is called "The Price of Freedom: Americans at war". In the spirit of Santa's Magic Grotto, this travesty of revisionism helps us understand how silence and omission are so successfully deployed in free, media-saturated societies. The shuffling lines of ordinary people, many of them children, are dispensed the vainglorious message that America has always "built freedom and democracy" - notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the atomic bombing saved "a million lives", and in Vietnam where America's crusaders were "determined to stop communist expansion", and in Iraq where the same true hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented precision".
The words "invasion" and "controversial" make only fleeting appearances; there is no hint that the "great mission" has overseen, since 1945, the attempted overthrow of 50 governments, many of them democracies, along with the crushing of popular movements struggling against tyranny and the bombing of 30 countries, causing the loss of countless lives. In central America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's arming and training of gangster-armies saw off 300,000 people; in Guatemala, this was described by the UN as genocide. No word of this is uttered in the Grotto. Indeed, thanks to such displays, Americans can venerate war, comforted by the crimes of others and knowing nothing about their own.
In Santa's Grotto, there is no place for Howard Zinn's honest People's History of the United States, or I F Stone's revelation of the truth of what the museum calls "the forgotten war" in Korea, or Mark Twain's definition of patriotism as the need to keep "multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries". Moreover, at the Price of Freedom Shop, you can buy US Army Monopoly, and a "grateful nation blanket" for just $200. The exhibition's corporate sponsors include Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer. The point is taken.
To understand the power of indoctrination in free societies is also to understand the subversive power of the truth it suppresses. During the Blair era in Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been embraced by the pro-war media. Inspired by America's Messianic claims of "victory" in the cold war, their pseudo-histories have sought not only to hose down the blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine and genocide that was British imperialism ("the Empire was an exemplary force for good": Andrew Roberts) but also to rehabilitate Gladstonian convictions of superiority and promote "the imposition of western values", as Niall Ferguson puts it.
Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous concept that covers both the barbarism of the imperial past and today's ruthless, rigged "free" market. The new code for race and class is "culture". Thus, the enduring, piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, especially those with natural resources, has become a "clash of civilisations". Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel about "the end of history" (since recanted), the task of the revisionists and mainstream journalism has been to popularise the "new" imperialism, as in Ferguson's War of the World series for Channel 4 and his frequent soundbites
on the BBC. In this way, the public is "softened up" for the rapacious invasion of countries on false pretences, including a not unlikely nuclear attack on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an executive dictatorship, as called for by Vice-President Cheney. So imminent is the latter that a supine Congress will almost certainly reverse the Supreme Court's recent decision to outlaw the Guantanamo kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the majority opinion - in a high court Bush himself stacked - sounded his alarm through this seminal quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an imperial tyranny. It is clear that the long-planned assault on Gaza and now the destruction of Lebanon are Washington-ordained and pretexts for a wider campaign with the goal of installing American puppets in Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran. "The pay-off time has come," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe; "now the proxy should salvage the entangled Empire."
The attendant propaganda - the abuse of language and eternal hypocrisy - has reached its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli soldier belonging to an invasion force was captured and held, legitimately, as a prisoner of war. Reported as a "kidnapping", this set off yet more slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before the capture of the soldier was of no interest. Neither was the incarceration of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many of them, as documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story cancelled any serious inquiry into Israel's plans to reinvade Gaza, from which it had staged a phoney withdrawal.
The fact and meaning of Hamas's self-imposed 16-month ceasefire were lost in inanities about "recognising Israel", along with Israel's state of terror in Gaza - the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a residential block, the firing of as many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the most densely populated places on earth and the nightly terrorising with sonic booms.
"I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza," declared the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, as children went out of their minds. In their defence, the Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and killed eight Israelis: enough to ensure Israel's victimhood on the BBC; even Jeremy Bowen struck a shameful "balance", referring to "two narratives". The historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. Try to imagine that described as "two narratives".
Watching this unfold in Washington - I am staying in a hotel taken over by evangelical "Christians for Israel" apparently seeking rapture - I have heard only the crudest colonial refrain and no truth. Hezbollah, drone America's journalistic caricatures, is "armed and funded by Syria and Iran", and so they beckon an attack on those countries, while remaining silent about America's $3bn-a-day gift of planes and small arms and bombs to a state whose international lawlessness is a registered world record.
There is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response to the atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for half a century, so Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against Ariel Sharon's murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000 people dead.
There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally and brutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine, having demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands, and families, and hospitals, and schools. There is never mention that the threat to Israel's existence is a canard, and the true enemy of its people is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an imperial America that guarantees the Jewish state as the antithesis of humane Judaism.
The epic injustice done to the Palestinians is the heart of the matter. While European governments (with the honourable exception of the Swiss) have remained craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to the Palestinians' aid. How truly shaming. There is no media "narrative" of the Palestinians' heroic stand during two uprisings, and with slingshots and stones most of the time. Israel's murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall have left them utterly alone. Neither is the silence of governments all that is shocking. On a major BBC programme, Maureen Lipman, a Jew and promoter of selective good causes, is allowed to say, without serious challenge, that "human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually . . ."
Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an Israeli bombing run, their parents petrified with grief. Let her watch as a young Palestinian woman - and there have been many of them - screams in pain as she gives birth in the back seat of a car at night at an Israeli roadblock, having been wilfully refused right of passage to a hospital. Then let Lipman watch the child's father carry his newborn across freezing fields until it turns blue and dies.
I think Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a tale of the ultimate empire:
"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . . . practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions . . . and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."
John Pilger's new book, "Freedom Next Time", is published by Bantam Press
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Judge Rules Against Constitution, Says Fourth Amendment Doesn't Apply To AT&T
ASSOCIATED PRESS - Citing national security, a federal judge Tuesday threw out a lawsuit aimed at blocking AT&T Inc. from giving telephone records to the government for use in the war on terror. "The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said. . . Kennelly's ruling was in sharp contrast to last week's decision from U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco, who said media reports of the program were so widespread there was no danger of spilling secrets.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/4071709.html
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/4071709.html
Monday, July 24, 2006
U.S. OFFICIALS SHOWN POWER POINT OF PLANNED ISRAELI ATTACK OVER A YEAR AGO
JUAN COLE, INDYBAY - Matthew Kalman reveals that Israel's wide ranging assault on Lebanon has been planned in a general way for years, and a specific plan has been in the works for over a year. The "Three Week War" was shown to Washington think tanks and officials last year on power point by a senior Israeli army officer: "More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving Power Point presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail." The Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the summer, in part because they know that European and American universities will be the primary nodes of popular opposition, and the universities are out in the summer. This war has nothing to do with captured Israeli soldiers. It is a long-planned war to increase Israel's ascendancy over Hizbullah and its patrons. . .
Israel is a regional superpower, the only nuclear power in the Middle East proper, and possessing the most technologically advanced military capability and the most professional military. Since Egypt opted out of the military struggle for economic reasons and since the US invasion broke Iraq's legs, there is no conventional military threat to Israel. Israel seeks complete military superiority, for several reasons. One impetus is defensive, on the theory that it has to win every contest and can never afford to lose even one, given its lack of strategic depth (it is a geographically small country with a small population, caught between the Mediterranean and potentially hostile neighboring populations). But the defensive reasons are only one dimension.
There are also offensive considerations. The right in Israel is determined to permanently subjugate the Palestinians and forestall the emergence of a Palestinian state. This course of action requires the constant exercise of main force against the Palestinians, who resist it, as well as threats against Arab or Muslim neighbors who might be tempted to help the Palestinians. Thus, Iraq and Iran both had to be punished and weakened. Likewise, the Israeli right has never given up an expansionist ideology. For instance, the Israelis have a big interest in the Litani River in south Lebanon. If and when the Israeli military and political elite felt they needed to add territory by taking it from neighbors, they wished to retain that capability. . .
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/07/23/18290729.php
MATTHEW KALMAN, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.
In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis.
SFGate Article
Israel is a regional superpower, the only nuclear power in the Middle East proper, and possessing the most technologically advanced military capability and the most professional military. Since Egypt opted out of the military struggle for economic reasons and since the US invasion broke Iraq's legs, there is no conventional military threat to Israel. Israel seeks complete military superiority, for several reasons. One impetus is defensive, on the theory that it has to win every contest and can never afford to lose even one, given its lack of strategic depth (it is a geographically small country with a small population, caught between the Mediterranean and potentially hostile neighboring populations). But the defensive reasons are only one dimension.
There are also offensive considerations. The right in Israel is determined to permanently subjugate the Palestinians and forestall the emergence of a Palestinian state. This course of action requires the constant exercise of main force against the Palestinians, who resist it, as well as threats against Arab or Muslim neighbors who might be tempted to help the Palestinians. Thus, Iraq and Iran both had to be punished and weakened. Likewise, the Israeli right has never given up an expansionist ideology. For instance, the Israelis have a big interest in the Litani River in south Lebanon. If and when the Israeli military and political elite felt they needed to add territory by taking it from neighbors, they wished to retain that capability. . .
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/07/23/18290729.php
MATTHEW KALMAN, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.
In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis.
SFGate Article
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