Russian coincidences:
We seem to be looking at a battle royale between Boris Berezovsky and the Russian state. Gaidar is a mild critic of the regime, but an insider, and Kerimov, unlike Berezovsky and the crooks who are sheltered in Israel, remained in Russia and is a big shareholder in Putin’s baby, Gazprom.
Philip Zelikow, the prominent aide to Condoleezza Rice who advocated:
has, needless to say, been forced to resign (or saw the writing on the wall, and decided to quit). Zelikow, who also was the only prominent Bush Administration official to point out the stunningly obvious fact that the attack on Iraq was done for Israel (or here), marred his otherwise stellar record with his involvement in the 9/11 cover-up commission.
I raise this in case you thought the neocons were finished. On the contrary, with total control of Congress – something they never had in the first six years of Bush’s reign – they are now more powerful than ever.
Nancy Pelosi’s no dummy. She’s been outed as a crazed Zionist, so she can hardly go around placing other crazed Zionists in positions of power in order to finalize the Zionist Occupation Government. Total Israeli control over America can’t be allowed to be that obvious. Thus the head-fake over Murtha. By pretending to support John Murtha as majority leader, she managed to have crazed Zionist Steny Hoyer installed without a hint of Pelosi fingerprints on the maneuver. The American media bought the trick hook, line and sinker, describing the whole mess as a great embarrassment to her. Ha! A crazed Zionist would hardly want a staunch anti-Iraq-war guy like Murtha in power, even though Americans clearly voted for an anti-war position. Who cares what the voters want, if Israel wants something different? In one of the most bizarre instances in modern American political skullduggery, Murtha was disqualified because he was swiftboated as an alleged bribe recipient, on the basis of a videotape showing him refusing a bribe. In all the confusion Hoyer slid in, and nobody noticed the feint.
Now we’re seeing the same game played with respect to the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The obvious choice is Jane Harman, another rabid Zionist, but Pelosi has to keep her distance. The mainstream media is again cooperating, by inventing some kind of dissent between Harman and Pelosi, although no one quite seems to be able to put their finger on it. Of course, the topper is that Harman is under investigation for conspiring with AIPAC to have wealthy donors ‘encourage’ Pelosi to have Harman reappointed as the top Democrat on the committee, the position that now gives her dibs on the chairmanship! The idea that these two are enemies, instead of joined-at-the-hip Zionists, is some kind of joke. To further the joke, Pelosi is reportedly considering Alcee Hastings for the job, a guy who was offered and accepted a bribe while he was a judge! The joke alternative will fall away, and Harman will end up in place, as was always intended. The conspirators are taking all possible efforts to appoint Harman while making it seem that Pelosi had nothing to do with it.
Don’t forget Rahm Emanuel, and Hillary and Schumer in the Senate, and the key Senate swing vote held by ultra-Zionist Lieberman. How interested do you think (Jewish) Henry Waxman will be in investigating the causes of a war for Israel? The ZOG is being installed piece by piece, and the United States is doomed to sink with Israel.
Dr. Rick Warren, one of the leading American evangelical leaders and author of The Purpose Driven Life (according to Larry King citing Publishers Weekly, “the best-selling hard cover non-fiction book in American history”), visited Syria, and has nice things to say about it. From a press release:
“Dr. Warren’s visit to Syria was neither official nor political, but rather came out of a promise to his Muslim neighbor in California. While discussing over their backyard fence Warren’s frequent international travel, the neighbor asked him to visit his home country of Syria, with its many sites sacred to Christians and church history that date back 2,000 years.
Many Americans don’t realize that both Christianity and Judaism are legal in Syria. In addition, the government provides free electricity and water to all churches; allows pastors to purchase a car tax-free (a tax break not given to Muslim imams); appoints pastors as Christian judges to handle Christian cases; and allows Christians to create their own civil law instead of having to follow Muslim law. Every Christian with whom Dr. Warren’s team met - including those in the city of Malula, where they represent two-thirds of the population - expressed gratitude for the government’s protection of their right to worship.
‘Let there be no doubt about our support for President Bush, our troops in Iraq and the war on terror,’ he told the Mufti. When asked if American opinion had turned against the Iraq war. Warren replied, ‘Yes -The New York Times reported that 80 percent of Americans indicated in Election Day exit polls they now oppose keeping troops in Iraq.’ Later, Dr. Warren’s team was told by a Syrian official that it would be a mistake for American troops to immediately pull out.
Because Dr. Warren often meets with presidents of nations he visits, his neighbor also arranged a meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Dr. Warren sought counsel in advance from Syrian experts in Washington, and was told that Syria’s state-controlled media would likely distribute press releases after the meeting, which they did.
‘The Syrian government has long had a bad reputation in America, but if one considers a positive action like welcoming in thousands of Christian refugees from Iraq, or the protection of freedom to worship for Christians and Jews in Syria, it should not be ignored,’ Dr. Warren said from Rwanda. He further explained that in terms of religious freedom, Syria is far more tolerant than places like Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and nations identified in the U.S. Commission Report on International Religious Freedom. ‘Muslims and Christians have lived side by side in Syria for more than a thousand years, often with mosques and churches built next to each other,’ he added. ‘What can we learn from them?
‘I believe it is a mistake to not talk to nations considered hostile - isolation and silence has never solved conflict anywhere, whether between spouses or between nations,’ Dr. Warren concluded. He further shared his experience in Rwanda, a country that is experiencing peace after years of conflict by emphasizing reconciliation instead of retaliation. He noted that, as a pastor, he always urges couples in conflict to keep talking to each other - no matter how angry they are. As long as they keep talking, there is hope for a resolution; but if they refuse to even talk, divorce is inevitable.”
Predictably, the wing-nuts have gone ape-shit over this (but the Syrians are happy). Warren appears to be a half-decent guy: unlike his Christian evangelical brethren, he hates war and poverty, and, also unlike his Christian evangelical brethren, he isn’t a gay, drug-addicted embezzler. Perhaps more importantly, he is very close to Rupert Murdoch, and Warren’s sane statements on Syria may be seen as part of the new American view of the Middle East.
The increasingly obvious Human Rights Watch has officially come out against the Palestinian use of peaceful non-resistance against the daily attacks of Israel. It was becoming too effective, and had to be stopped.
Meanwhile, the Zionists have been kept busy rejecting not one, but two, peace proposals in recent days. The first, put forward by Spain, France and Italy, was rejected because it was not co-ordinated with the EU or Israel (i. e., they didn’t say ‘Simon says’ before proposing it). You'd think that a country supposedly preoccupied with ‘existential threats’ would jump at any peace plan, but you would be wrong.
The second proposal was from the Palestinians, who offered to stop firing rockets into Israel, if Israel ends attacks on Palestinians that have been justified on the basis of stopping the rocket attacks. Sounds like a perfect plan, doesn’t it? Needless to say, it was immediately rejected by Israel, no doubt loathe to give up its excuse for attacking Gaza. Hundreds of Palestinians have died in the ‘counter-attacks’, and two Israelis have been killed by the rockets. Needless to say, the Israeli deaths were all Americans saw in the mainstream media.
The vicious anti-Semites have been reduced to proposing Gandhian non-resistance and peace plans, but the Zionists are valiantly fighting back.
Bleier’s Blog, an excellent blog, reprints an interview with Jeffrey Blankfort conducted by San Francisco Indymedia (original here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Blankfort is one of those rare people who is right about everything (it is refreshing to read someone who is right about everything, when all we are normally allowed to read, from both the mainstream media and the traditional ‘progressive’ media, are people who are wrong about everything). Some quotes:
“The American labor movement is part and parcel of the Israel Lobby. Seventeen hundred unions own over five billion dollars worth of Israel Bonds. That obliges them to support Israel to make sure the investment of their members' dues, made without their members' knowledge, is secure.
Twenty three states have also invested in Israel Bonds as well. This is taking taxpayers' money and investing in the economy of a country that is dependent economically and politically on the United States. This makes all these people lobbyists for Israel. Very clever on their part.”
and, on philanthropy and the myth that Jews are progressive:
“The other reason is money. Jews, historically, are known for their philanthropy.
SF-IMC: Philanthropy is good.
Jeffrey Blankfort: Some is good. A lot of it is good. Historically, they have funded the Left. This even before Israel. They were the major funders of the Civil Rights Movement. They were the funders of the anti-war movement during the Viet Nam War. If people were arrested, and they needed bail, progressive Jews provided the bail, and the lawyers were mostly Jewish.
So what happens is you have all these pressures, and there's no countervailing pressure from the Palestinian community or the Arab American community or the Muslim community. There is no similar history of political struggle in those communities here. Going back into the thirties, you have Jews active in the unions, active in every radical movement. That's the tradition I grew up in. It no longer exists. As a matter of fact, it's been erased from Jewish history. Young Jews growing up in America today have no idea of the Jewish radical past in this country. That was the Jewish radical past I connected with. Since it no longer exists, I have no connection to the Jewish community. It's as simple as that. There is no radical Jewish community. There are some radical Jews, individuals that are anti-Zionist, but the community as a grouping, there isn't any. And this is a critical situation.”
and:
“I can't say it's a fact, but my belief that most Jews are anti-Arab at some level or another and protective of Jews at the same time, that they have been saddled with the baggage of anti-Semitism. They believe that for two thousand years, Jews have suffered, a tale that has been vastly exaggerated. Before the Holocaust, on a world scale, it wouldn't even appear. The people of the Congo have suffered more than the Jews have suffered, including the Holocaust. They're still suffering. Nobody here speaks about the Congo.”
and (my emphasis in red):
“. . . poor old US imperialism, it's bad enough as it is, but there are some things that it's not responsible for. And the influence of the Israel Lobby, of the Jewish Lobby in the Middle East is manifest. It's also manifest in that there is no debate in Congress on military spending. There's no debate.
Now why is there no debate? Why do the Democrats not object to it? Because the Democrats are a subsidiary of the Israel Lobby. They get most of their money from it. As has been published in many newspapers and magazines, at least sixty percent of the major large funding of the Democratic Party comes from wealthy American Jews. And they don't do this as an altruistic gesture. Politicians are given money to do someone else's bidding. And so the Democratic Party does not fight arms spending. They're as much for it as are the Republicans. And this, I believe, and I make the argument, this is part of the influence of the Israel Lobby.
Now the Christian Zionists are an important part of the Lobby. But this was happening before there were Christians Zionists. There are certain people, who happen to be Jewish, on the Left, who love the presence of the Christian Zionists, because now they can talk about the Christian Zionists as being more important than the Jewish Zionists, which is nonsense because they're important in the states where there aren't many Jews, and they do contribute some money, but they're not lobbyists in the same sense.”
and (extremely important; Begin gave Falwell a Lear jet as a gift, a jet which allowed Falwell to begin wholesale fundraising efforts which were the beginnings of Christian Zionist power, so it is fair to say that the Israeli right established Christian Zionism):
“The Israel Lobby was indomitable before the Christian Zionists were brought in. They were brought in, by the way, by Menachem Begin, who, when he got elected in '78, invited Jerry Falwell to Israel. This was also the time when they started talking about Israel as a strategic asset of the United States because before that, the US/Israel relationship was never questioned because the people who ran Israel, the Labor Party, were basically Democrats, and when Begin was elected, it created a real problem for American Jews because he had been identified as a fascist by people like Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and so on. So they had to find a rationalization for continued support of Israel. And as General Matty Peled, an Israeli general who was a friend of mine, said, this is when they introduced the idea of Israel being an asset, because they had to find a justification for Israel still getting the support from the United States.”
and (on the recruiting methods of AIPAC, and the use of blackmail):
“Money is very important, but it's the way they approach politicians. AIPAC, for example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is the only foreign lobby that isn't required to register as a foreign agent. They hold regional meetings around the country, at which they invite supervisors, mayors, city council people, public officials from the area, to come to these luncheons and dinners, where the speaker will be a US Senator or some very important government official, who will come into town, unknown to the media, with no notice to the media. He or she will make no other speeches, give no press conferences, and will leave. It will be reported in the local Jewish paper, but it will not be reported in the state where the person lives, except perhaps in the Jewish press there. And there's no interest in the media in following up why, for example, Senator Christopher Dodd, when he comes to San Francisco, or Mario Cuomo when he speaks out in Danville, why does he not have a press conference and talk to the media here.
In any case, they go to this meeting, and they, these Congress people . . I'm speaking from knowledge here because I joined AIPAC and I went to one of these luncheons . . .
SF-IMC: (laughs) Good for you.
Jeffrey Blankfort: . . . and I saw what was going on there. And I said, my god, this is brilliant!! They have all the leading political figures from Northern California at the meeting, from whose ranks will come the next member of Congress, no doubt.What happens after AIPAC leaves, then the Jewish Federation, or some local Jewish organization, maybe it's the Koret Foundation, will then send local supervisors, city council members, mayors, and so on, on all expense paid trips to Israel. They meet the Prime Minister, whoever it is, the Defense Minister, and so on, of both political parties, they take a trip to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, to Massada, where Jews supposedly committed suicide in Roman times, to the West Bank, where they may meet a House Arab, and they come back here knowing that they have good friends, important friends, in the Jewish community.
These people who go into politics, all of them are ambitious. So they know that if they want to run for office, it's not just a matter of money. It's a matter of personal acquaintances. And there are certain instances where I believe people are promoted to run for office by the Lobby, and so in a sense they become the Lobby's employee from the get-go. Take Sen. Daniel Inouye, the one armed bandit from Hawaii. His first job was selling State of Israel Bonds. He doesn't list that in his official biography, but the Jewish press has written about that. And he has been one of the foremost supporters of Israel. Tom Daschle from North Dakota is another. They seem to have been promoted into running for office.
You also have something else called blackmail, which the Left never considers as a reason for somebody doing something. But the Anti-Defamation League is a major spying organization, the largest private spying organization in the country.”
and:
“There are many people who think that in Britain, Tony Blair is being blackmailed to support the United States. There is no good reason for the British to support the United States. Materially, they gain nothing. Their corporations have made nothing from the war. And given the British public school education, photographs could have been taken . . . there's a very good likelihood that Blair might be being blackmailed. People try to find all kind of reasons for people's actions and there may be no other political reasons than self survival.”
and:
“The head of the Democratic Party Senate campaign, the one who determines where the money is going to go, is Charles Schumer, an open, leading, Jewish Zionist from New York. For the House, it's Rahm Emmanuel, who, when he was working for Bill Clinton as a high level staff member, took time off during the first Intifada to do volunteer work in Israel for the Israeli Defense Force. His family is Israeli. He says he's not. In any case, here you have two Jewish Zionists, one running the Democrats' House campaigns and one running the Senate campaigns, determining who is going to get the money in the 2006 election. It's flagrant. And yet you can't discuss this on the Left, because they'll say that sounds like anti-Semitism, or say that, ‘it's not important that they're Jewish,’ like it's not important that the Pope's Catholic. This is what we're dealing with.”
and (on Chomsky, who is now such an ingrained part of the Establishment that his own criticisms apply to himself; you’ll remember that in Rip van Chomsky’s famous article on the Lobby, his citations attempting to back up his cover-up of Lobby power are from the 50’s and 60’s):
“He is the most widely quoted person in the universe that's still alive. He makes statements that he does not have to back up with fact. He makes statements in a way that it sounds like he's talking about the day of the week. And who's going to argue with that? If he says that it's Tuesday and it's Tuesday, you say, well, of course, it's Tuesday. But much of what he says cannot be backed up in fact, and the examples that he uses, some of them are so ancient that if he was submitting a paper to a professor, the paper would be returned for more up to date, more substantial references.”
and, a reference to the Chomsky ploy of making us all helpless in the face of the Establishment (my emphasis in red):
“Now one of the criticisms I made of him, and made also by Israel Shahak, the late Israeli Holocaust survivor, and extreme critic of Israel, Zionism, Judaism, and the PLO, is that Chomsky focuses too much on the Executive while negating the role that Congress plays, which is what we have to deal with on a local level. If it's only the executive elite, and these elites are doing something in Washington, we, in California, are outside of Washington and essentially helpless. I wrote back in '91, in an exchange I had with Chomsky in the old National Guardian, that Chomsky makes us spectators when history demands we be participants.”
and:
“And what's happened with Chomsky is that he has become gospel. What happens if you criticize Chomsky, is that people's eyes glaze over. People have taken to channeling him. They quote him without even referring to him, they have so internalized his positions. And that you go on various web sites, Marxists web sites, Trotskyist web sites, their line on the Israel Lobby is Chomsky's line, that the Lobby is only powerful, only appears to be powerful when it's lined up with American foreign policy, or when there's some dispute among the elite.”
and (essential truths which Chomsky/Zunes are trying to hide from Americans; my emphasis in red):
“SF-IMC: Like what? What is going to wake up the grassroots, progressive Left?
Jeffrey Blankfort: I don't know. The war in Iraq was clearly a war for Israel. The oil companies want stability. They're going to make money. They look at the long run. High prices, low prices, they're going to make money. They control the market. Saddam Hussein would play ball with them. Why the United States would not play ball with him is because the Neo-Cons, which is part of the Lobby, didn't want that. It's interesting. Without the Lobby, and without the orchestrated incubator story, we might not have had an intervention in Kuwait because at the time the Senate was split down the middle, and when the incubator story came out, even Amnesty International believed it. People said, oh these horrible Iraqis, and then there was no debate anymore.
So we had that first Gulf War, not initiated, but supported by the Lobby. It's interesting that a number of Jewish organizations did not support it. But the key Lobbyists did because they were over in Israel and the Israelis told them, support it. And so they supported it. But they were very upset because they expected a regime change and George Bush Sr. disappointed them.
George Bush Sr., unlike what Chomsky has written, and Chomsky is totally and completely wrong on this, was anti-Israel from the get-go. When the Israelis hit Iraq's Osirak reactor, Bush was Vice President. He wanted sanctions against them. He was voted down by Reagan and Secretary of State Haig. When Israel invaded Lebanon. Bush wanted sanctions against it, as well. This is according to Moshe Arens, the Israeli Foreign Minister, writing in a book about this. When Israel had its pilots sitting in the planes, waiting for the co-ordinates to go attack Iraq in '91, after some Scuds had landed in Israel, Bush wouldn't give them to them. They hate this guy.
And then when Shamir sent over as an emissary, to ask for ten billion dollars in loan guarantees, Bush said no He said, what we'll do, we'll wait 120 days, but first I want certain agreements. Stop settlement building and agree to settle no Russians in the settlements that are there, and wait 120 days and see what happens. And Shamir went to Congress, and Daniel Inouye, who I mentioned before, said to Moshe Arens, ‘Where's my yamulka? This is war.’ This is an American, US Senator from Hawaii, speaking.
When 240 senators and congressmen wrote a letter to Bush, telling him to pass the loan guarantees for Israel, at a time when America's economic situation was terrible, Bush realized that if he vetoed the legislation, he'd be overridden. So what did he do? When a thousand Jewish lobbyists were on Capitol Hill, Bush went on national television, and he said there are a thousand lobbyists up here ‘against little old me. But I have to do the right thing.’ And he says, US boys are over in Iraq protecting Israel and every Israeli man, woman and child gets so much money from the American taxpayer. No one's ever done that before. What were the polls the next day? Eighty-five percent of the people supported Bush. A month-and-a-half, two months later, only 44% of the American public supported aid to Israel, while 70% supported aid to the former Soviet Union, and 75% to Poland.
Now these figures are totally erased from Left history thanks to Mr. Chomsky, who does not refer to them in all of his writing. He did refer to that press conference, right afterward, and he said, ‘It took slightly more than a raised eyebrow for the Lobby to collapse.’ Now a presidential press conference attacking the Israel Lobby is a little bit more than a raised eyebrow.
In fact, the Lobby had to retreat, because they realized the American public was not going to go for it. Senator Barbara McCloskey, a good liberal Democrat, was speaking to a group of Jewish lobbyists, when she's handed a piece of paper, and according to the Washington Jewish Week, her face ‘went ashen.’
She said, ‘I've just been informed that the President is taking the issue of the loan guarantees to the American people. The American people!?! The last people that the Lobby wants to have concerned with anything about Israel. If you want to put it on the basis of nationalism, we're talking about a nest of traitors. We're talking about a fifth column in the classic sense. You have Israel . . . it's Israel first. These people care nothing about the United States, or they do secondarily to Israel's interest or what they perceive as Israel's interests . . . there's a lot of Israelis who don't agree with that . . . but they are looking for a powerful Israel because its power gives them power as well.
Should there be a solution, any kind of agreement between Israel and Palestine, in which Israel could not be described as being threatened, the Democratic Party would disappear because they have so based their fundraising on money from wealthy Jews that it's like a Rube Goldberg designed contraption. Jews give them money because Israel is threatened, and they get power back from Israel's position, but if Israel is just another country in the Middle East, these Jews have no power. It's as simple as that. The Democratic Party would have no money.”
and (perhaps a little too hard on Arafat; my emphasis in red):
“ . . . Yasser Arafat was left alive because he was the only one who could deliver the people into the hands of Israel. Oslo was a betrayal of the highest order, and when Israel was negotiating with the Palestinians in Oslo, Arafat would not let any Palestinian lawyer go there because the Palestinians lawyers would have seen that this was a violation of international law, in which the leader of an occupied people is not allowed to give away territory to the occupying power, which is what happened in Oslo.
Also, technically, Israel, which is the occupying power, is responsible for the well being of the occupied population. What Oslo did, since it did not require Israel withdrawing from the occupied territory, would shift the responsibility, the economic responsibility, from Israel, onto Europe, the United Nations and so on, and this is what we have today. So this is aid to Israel in another form. If they are going to be there and be the occupier, they're supposed to pay.
So we have this phony "Palestine Authority," which is a joke. The whole thing was wrong. It's interesting. One of the people who negotiated for Israel was the former intelligence chief of Israel, named Shlomo Gazit A few months after Oslo he came to a synagogue in San Francisco, and I went to hear him speak. He's a very bright guy and he's speaking very calmly. During the question period, this crazy guy comes running down the aisle, screaming in a German accent . . . this was a German Jew . . . screaming, "Munich! Munich! It's another Munich!"
And Gazit said, ‘You know, my friend, I don't like to make this comparison, but if it's Munich, we're the Germans, and the Palestinians are the Czechs.’”
and (Blankfort is right that there will not be an attack on Iran; my emphasis in red; I don’t think all the neocons were fooled by the Israelis, as guys like Wurmser and Feith are Israelis):
“I have been saying for two years that there would be no attack. On the other hand, you have some people who are really insane in Washington. There are people in the Pentagon who know it's insane. You have those in the intelligence community who know it's insane. You have the old line establishment that sees capitalism being threatened by Bush as it never was by Russia. They're really concerned.
There was an ad in November, 2005, which many people didn't pay attention to, but I did. It showed a picture of a man blindfolded, and it said, ‘Torture is not an American value.’ And I said, ‘Whoa, this is the ACLU.’ But it wasn't. It was signed by all these former ambassadors, Madeline Albright, Thomas Pickering, Warren Rudmon, a whole bunch of former killers, former officials of the American government. For me, this was a message from the real establishment, the old line establishment, that these usurpers here were threatening America, the safeguarding of American capitalism and imperial interests. And that is what I think has happened.
The notion that the US was going to go in with Bush Jr. and the Neo-Cons and take over Iraqi oil, shows a total ignorance of how the industry functions, and the way oil is shipped. Oil needs peace in the region where it is produced. We have oil pipelines. I saw the oil pipeline that the PFLP broke back in 1970 in Jordan with a bulldozer. I saw a pool of oil in the desert there. You can't protect an oil line if people want to break that oil line. There's no question about it. And the people who think of it as a ‘war for oil,’ they don't answer the question of why was daddy Bush who is much closer to the oil companies and the Carlyle Group against it? And Carlyle Group dwarfs Halliburton.
Why was Frank Carlucci, of the Carlyle Group against the war, as well as Jim Baker, much closer to the oil companies than anybody in the administration, Brent Snowcroft, why were they against the war? First of all, they knew it would be a quagmire, and, second of all, they knew the Shia would come to power, and they didn't want that to happen.
So the Neo-Cons, I think, were conned by the Israelis. Whatever you say about these Israeli military people, they're tough. And they look at these Neo-Cons coming over and talking tough, and they have total contempt for them, in my opinion. My experience with Israelis across the board is that they have total contempt for American Jews, for a variety of reasons and all of them correct. You have Zionists there who talk about the ‘checkbook Zionists,’ here, and when you have Wolfowitz and Perle talking tough to Israelis who have been actually in the field, whatever they've done in the field, they look at these American Jews and they say, ‘What a bunch of punks!’ And so they sold them, I think, on the ‘cakewalk.’ Israel wanted Iraq dismembered. This is an old Israeli plan. They wanted Iraq broken into three confessional states. I really don't think this is a Neo-Con plan. It may have been for some of them, I don't know, but I thought the Neo-Cons saw themselves as gaining power through American ascendancy. They would have an Iraqi Mubarak in there. They did not want to have elections there. It's become much more complicated. These people really didn't know about the region. They didn't know the history of the region.”
and (my emphasis in red):
“The architects of it were Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Libby. There were some other Neo-Cons involved. You have PNAC calling for the overthrow of Saddam. You have these think tanks, all of them are Jewish-dominated. Brookings Institute was not, but then they had Haim Saban, an Egyptian born Israeli who gave 12.3 million to the Democratic Party in 2002, funding the Saban Center at the Brookings Inst., which was the last remaining think tank not under Zionist control. They had some good people there like William Quandt who actually looked at things from a realistic perspective, but now that's over. What is interesting that in 2002, the arms PACs, the weapons PACs, gave to both political parties about 14 million dollars, and Saban gave to the Democratic party almost as much as the arms PACs combined.
Now you have someone like Stephen Zunes, who keeps telling a lie, that the aeronautics industry gives more money to the political parties and the politicians than the Israel Lobby. He's just counting the Political Action Committees, which is a minor part, actually now. Most of that money that goes to the political parties comes from individual American Jews. And as I've said, ‘Mother Jones’ in 1996 and in 2000, put out something called the "Mother Jones 400," the top four hundred donors to both political parties. So I started looking at the 2000 political parties and found that seven out of the top ten donors to both parties are Jewish, twelve out of the top twenty, and a hundred and twenty five out of the top two hundred and fifty. And then I figure the rest is going to be like that, anyhow.
So anyone who tries to say that any group or lobby contributes more money to American political parties than do Jews is simply not telling the truth. People say, well, that's not necessarily Zionists, but according to Senator Bernie Metzenbaum, speaking some years ago to a Jewish organization, he said, ‘As far as Congress is concerned, there is only one issue for American Jews, and that's Israel’. And at that conference they proved it because by the time they finished talking about Israel, there was no time left to talk about anything left on the agenda.
Israel is the glue that holds the organized Jewish community together. They disagree on abortion, on all kinds of things, gay rights, but when it comes to Israel, they are in lock step, and this is . . . they have basically taken over the American political system.”
and:
“Since 1967, since June 8th, when Israel attacked the US intelligence ship the Liberty, and killed 34 sailors and wounded 171, and they got away with it, Israel knows that they can do anything to America and Americans and pay no price. And since the left has never brought up the issue of the Liberty, and has not brought up the issue of the Lobby, the Left is . . . I talked to Leni Brenner one day. We couldn't decide whether the Left is the rearguard or the front line of the Israel Lobby. It's one of the two.”
and (the scary part; my emphasis in red):
“SF-IMC: They have a nuclear gun pointed at the head of the world economy.
Jeffrey Blankfort: They have nuclear weapons, and they have what they call a ‘Masada Complex.’ As my sister's late brother-in-law. who took pride in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, said to my sister, and other Israelis have said the same thing, ‘We won't go by ourselves next time.’
It's what's called the ‘Samson Option,’ is what Seymour Hersch described it, and it is a mentality. This is what separates Zionism from any other ideology. It's an ideology of supremacy and of total disregard for the rest of the human species. Now there are other reactionary ideologies in the past. With Zionism . . . is one that is well thought out, over many years, by people who were not directly oppressed. Chaim Weizmann, Theodor Herzi were not directly oppressed. They were well to do. They could move around in international circles. The Palestinians were in their way. And they lied about their . . . they said one thing to the British privately, they said one thing publicly and one thing privately.
Chomsky still believes that Ben Gurion was serious about his statements that they don't want to play the role to the Arabs like the Poles played to them. They didn't want the Arabs to be the Jews, and that they did not want the Jewish state. Now despite the fact that Nahum Goldman, the former head of the World Zionist Congress, who was there at these meetings, said ‘this is merely for tactics. They want a Jewish state’, and Goldman later told Jimmy Carter he had to break the back of the Jewish Lobby.”
and, heavy duty stuff on fake-left publications like Mother Jones – remember the mysterious attack on Rachel Corrie? – and the education of Michael Moore, which explains all the silly emphasis on the Saudis in his movie:
“SF-IMC: It's not just Chomsky. Did you see Michael Moore's ‘Fahrenheit 91’? Did you hear the word ‘Israel’ mentioned in there?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Michael Moore learned his lesson. Michael Moore, when he was much more svelte, when I first heard about him, he became editor of ‘Mother Jones,’ and he announced in advance that he was going to run a picture of a Palestinian fedayeen on the cover. Adam Hochshield the publisher of ‘Mother Jones’ who was a Zionist, realized that this would be terrible . . .
SF-IMC: [laughs] Boy howdy.
Jeffrey Blankfort: . . . and Moore was naive, and so he fired Moore, without really giving him much of a chance as the editor, long before he could do that. And when ‘Mother Jones’ in 1984, when the Democratic party was having its convention in San Francisco, put out a special issue, timed to coincide with the convention, and there was a two page ad in it that I found just the other day, which showed a picture of Yassir Arafat and Hafez al-Assad in which it said that American foreign policy is really appreciated by these two guys.
The Republicans were in office in 1984 with Reagan. And it is an ad signed by five important Jews, saying that American foreign policy makes these guys happy. Now I had seen this ad before in a Jewish publication. That ‘Mother Jones’ was publishing this ad was outrageous. And so I wrote a letter saying the real Mother Jones would turn over in her grave, which they didn't publish. But I happened to know one of the editors at ‘Mother Jones’ and I ran into him, and he admitted that they had solicited the ad in order to show the Democrats at the convention what their politics was. And then, of course, this is the Left!?! And then when the ISM started, they ran a hit piece on the ISM, the International Solidarity Movement. And I had mentioned that ‘Lies of Our Times’ went out of business because, I believe, because when Ed Herman had me writing articles about aid to Israel and the Lobby and no other Left publication was writing articles like this, they lost their Jewish subscriber base. And since Jews contribute so much to the Left, it keeps, you know, newspapers like ‘In These Times’ which predictably attacked the Mearsheimer Walt paper . . . it keeps these magazines staying in business, they know better than to touch that third rail.”
and (again, deeply important, particularly in the light of all the lies told by the ‘progressive’ Zionist establishment; my emphasis in red):
“. . . advised President Ford to withhold aid from Israel until it disengaged, and Ford not only did that, he announced that he was going to make a major speech, calling on Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders, and there was going to be a reassessment, a major reassessment, of US/Israel relations. What happened? Within three weeks, AIPAC got 76 senators to sign a letter, a very strong letter to Ford, with people like George McGovern on the left and Teddy Kennedy and all the way to the right, on this issue. The fascist and the liberals lock arms, kind of threatening Ford not to change the US/Israeli policy. Ford backed off and never made the speech. And, of course, he was dead meat as far as the election went when Carter ran, the first Carter election. Now in 1976 . . . this really scared the Zionist Lobby. And it's well documented in several books.
Chomsky never mentions this because his position is that every American president supported Israel's occupation and the US is a rejectionist leader. So Nixon, who had the Rogers plan, wanted to get Israel out of the Occupied Territories. Chomsky frames his rejecting a Palestinian state, where it's apples and oranges. Nixon wanted Israel out of the Occupied Territories and a return to the status quo, without a Palestinian state. But they did not support Israeli occupation. Ford didn't either. Along came Carter, the most unpopular president the Jews have ever had, in which he forced Camp David on Israel. They did not want to give up the Sinai and that got him the hatred of the Lobby. He really pushed, as did Kissinger. They pushed this thing. Then, when Israel invaded Lebanon in '78, perhaps hoping that Egypt would do something, and they could break Camp David . . .
SF-IMC: '78?
Jeffrey Blankfort: In '78 Israel invaded Lebanon the first time and Israel set up a Potemkin village in Lebanon.
SF-IMC: In Haddadland?
Jeffrey Blankfort: It was in that area, yeah. An Israeli friend of mine, he was a soldier, talked about this. So after three months, Carter told Begin, ‘Withdraw, or face the loss of aid.’ And Israel withdrew. And then Carter talked about a Geneva peace conference to settle everything, including the Palestinian question, involving Russia. ‘My God! How much more can they do to betray us?’ said the Jewish leaders?
It was then that Donald McHenry, the UN ambassador made a mistake at the UN, and voted for a resolution censuring Israel, the only time this happened. He had to resign, and apologized, ‘It was a mistake.’ And so Carter ended up getting 48% of the Jewish vote in 1980 when Reagan won. So all this is eliminated from history by Chomsky, and the people on the Left who talk about it, but it's mostly Chomsky because if you read Chomsky, you're supposed to know everything that went on. But all these situations contradict Chomsky's theory. They wipe it out completely. It's not even an argument of interpretation. It's a recognition of fact. So you got Nixon, Ford, Carter, and then George Bush the First. And then it's interesting. The day after Bush made his press conference, the head of the AIPAC said . . . September 12th, actually it was September 12, 1991. September 12th will be a day that will live in infamy. From that time on, the Israeli Lobby, beginning with columnists in the papers like George Will, William Safire, started talking about the economy, and suddenly the economy became the issue, and Bush's failure to save the economy became the major target. He was dead meat.
By the time Shamir lost, Rabin was elected in Israel, Bush finally gave in, as the election was coming up. It was too late. That's was Moshe Aren's opinion.
Now . . we have George Will and Bill Safire . . . Safire supported Clinton. That's how far he went. Now jump ahead to 2002, Jenin. Israel goes into Jenin and is doing what it's doing. Shimon Peres is worried about reports of a massacre. He was the first person to use those words. And what does George Bush do? He orders Israel to withdraw. And what does he say? I was in Europe at the time. ‘Enough is enough.’ Big headlines: ‘Bush to Sharon: Enough is enough. I want you to withdraw immediately'. And I have all the newspapers.
What happens? Immediately, George Will, Bill Safire . . . George Will says, ‘George Bush has lost his moral clarity.’ Safire says, ‘Bush thinks Arafat is a better friend than Sharon.’ The Christian Zionists start their letters to the White House. And a week later, Sharon is ‘a man of peace.’ Bush Jr. blinked.
At one point Clinton was trying to make Israel make a withdrawal, and I'd forgotten about this, actually. I read somewhere in the paper that Jerry Falwell was bragging that the Monica Lewinsky affair was used to force Clinton to back off from bringing pressure on Netenyahu. And I thought, oh, that's nonsense. And you know what happened? I actually went and looked at the newspapers, before the Lewinsky scandal, and here was the Lobby warning Clinton against pressuring Netenyahu. And then, boom, we had Monica and that was it. And I said, my God, even Clinton tried to do it.
Every American president realizes it's in US interest to get Israel out of the Occupied Territories. The US has no vested interest in Israel settling the Occupied Territories and maintaining this confrontation. And every president has had to bend his knee to Israel. And this is the way it is, and it's easily shown.
It's a different policy when it comes to Israel than it is when it comes to the rest of the world.”
The interview is so consistently – and, I must say, uniquely – good I’ve gone and quoted almost all of it! The more I think about Chomsky/Zunes, and the way that Zionism has perverted the American left, the angrier I get.
Olmert’s just a ton o’ laughs these days. First, he confirms the existence and massive power of the Israel lobby, thus putting the last nail into Chomsky’s intellectual coffin (btw, it is not an exaggeration to note that Venezuela lost its bid for a security council seat the minute Hugo Chavez mentioned Chomsky’s name in his UN speech). Then, he informs us that the Iraq war was good for Israeli security, which, when coupled with his acknowledgment of Lobby power, means the attack on Iraq was about Israeli security (the Americans will now have something for which to give thanks). Finally (my emphasis in red):
“Prime Minister Ehud Olmert 's office denied allegations that the PM used classified information in order to censure Defense Minister Amir Peretz for a telephone conversation with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Former and current members of the defense establishment who spoke to Ynet Wednesday harshly criticized the use of classified information for personal political ends.
Wednesday morning, Yedioth Aharonoth reported that the prime minister used top secret intelligence information in order to censure Peretz for and, by doing so, exposed a number of Israeli intelligence capabilities, including the capability to listen to Abbas' conversations.”
As we work our way through blaming Putin (based on no evidence whatsoever), and then mafiya figures working for Putin (again, based on no evidence whatsoever), it is starting to appear that the ‘poisoning’ of Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was self-administered.
In all these cases, you have to ask yourself why anyone would attempt an assassination that would turn an almost completely unknown nuisance into an international celebrity, with the accompanying worldwide notoriety for whatever the victim had been claiming. It the assassins had done nothing, or even shot him dead or faked an accident or suicide (the real professional route), the story would have never appeared or quickly disappeared. Why would they pick an exotic poison with a long drawn-out death or recovery that serves to turn the affair into a publicity circus?
Swedish police have been given the gun that may have killed Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986. It was found by divers working for a newspaper, who searched based on an anonymous tip. The gun had been used in a 1983 robbery in a town near the lake (making it an unlikely weapon for a professional intelligence agency). Christer Pettersson, who was convicted of the murder, then acquitted on appeal, and subsequently ‘confessed’, has since died (in the middle of all this, he was seriously attacked himself, by a man said to be ‘under the influence of alcohol’).
The gun story is complicated. The bullets that killed Palme were from the same batch that were fired in the 1983 robbery. The gun is of the same type as used to kill Palme. The robbers claim they threw the gun used in the 1983 robbery in the lake in 1983, meaning that it would have had to have been retrieved from the lake, used to kill Palme, and thrown back in. Alternatively, they could have saved bullets from the 1983 batch, which somehow were used by the 1986 Palme murderers in a different gun. An odd story either way.
The Swedish police bungled the investigation, the only question being whether they did so intentionally (they followed the old trick, most recently used in the FBI anthrax investigation, of barking up the wrong trees). It seems likely that they were covering up for police involvement, other government involvement, or right-wing business involvement. The anonymous tipster would have presumably come forward earlier if Pettersson was the real killer, and must want to see the crime solved. I imagine some members of the Swedish establishment are a little nervous.
Remember the ‘Orange Revolution’? Whatever happened to that, anyway? And, by the way, what ever happened to the ‘Cedar Revolution’, when the fine people of America stood by the fine people of Lebanon in the Lebanese quest for freedom, and then the fine people of America stood by while the fine people of Lebanon had the shit bombed out of them by the fine people of Israel? Funny how these things happen.
Back to the ‘Orange Revolution’. Remember how the leader of that ‘revolution’ was elected largely on the platform that he had been poisoned by the dastardly Russians? After the election, the Russians grew tired of being called names, and shut off the gas taps for a while (gas which went right through to Europe, making the Ukrainians some giant transfer fees on the way), causing the Ukrainians to remember that they didn’t hate the Russians so much after all. The laughter doesn’t stop when you consider that the woman who largely funded the election of Viktor Yushchenko, Yulia Tymoshenko, made her billions from controlling the Ukrainian gas monopoly, a monopoly she was given by Yushchenko, back in the day when he was part of the corrupt government he was later to campaign against based on an anti-corruption platform (not to mention the poisoning)! Now the guy that Yushchenko beat, the ‘corrupt’ Viktor Yanukovych, is back as Prime Minister, and Yushchenko’s popularity is less than fifteen per cent.
Oh, and if all that wasn’t enough fun, Yushchenko probably wasn’t poisoned.
Now we have another poisoning victim of the dastardly Russians, together with the requisite elaborate back story about thallium poisoning, a method favored by no less than Saddam. The only problem is, the latest victim doesn’t have the right symptoms to have thallium poisoning. They are now musing about radioactive thallium, but obviously haven’t got a clue and are indicating they won’t ever know (bad sushi?). Oh well, it was a good story while it lasted. Putin was embarrassing the American so-called experts, like Dick Cheney, at the oil game, so he had to be taken down a peg. The poisoning story allowed the victim’s scuttlebutt about Putin to make the news.
Maronite Christian cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel was assassinated in Beirut. Needless to say, all blame immediately falls on Syria, despite the fact that such an assassination, particularly at this time, makes no sense from the Syrian point of view. Syria’s position in Lebanon hasn’t been this strong in years – it’s even stronger than when Syria still had troops in Lebanon - with the Lebanese government falling apart, and Hezbollah about to take the position it has earned as a result of its successful defense of the country (as opposed to the useless official government). Why would Syria pick this of all times to get rid of a fly speck of a botheration?
At the same time that Syrian influence is at a peak in Lebanon, Syria is about to be invited back into the world community by the American ‘wise men’, who feel they need Syrian influence to extract the United States from its Zionist-caused quagmire in Iraq. Why would the Syrians pick this, of all times, to screw themselves out of being ‘Gadhafied’ (i. e., brought back from being an international pariah; speaking of Gadhafi . . . .)? On the other hand, the Zionists are terrified that Iraq will mean that both Syria and Iran are returned to the fold. From Haaretz:
“The deadlock in the international community's diplomatic exchanges with Iran, and the American quagmire in Iraq, are transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the easier nut to crack: While Iran and global Jihad do not appear willing to reconcile with the ‘infidels,’ most of the Palestinian people are (still) interested in a diplomatic solution. Bashar Assad's pronouncements calling for renewed peace talks place the burden of proof on Israel. Syria, like the rest of the Arab League, supported the Beirut Declaration of 2002, which offers normalization with Israel in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines.
However, Olmert is foiling any possible progress on this track: On his way home from Los Angeles, the prime minister ‘calmed’ the reporters - and perhaps even himself - by saying there is no danger of U.S. President George W. Bush accepting the expected recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton panel, and attempting to move Syria out of the axis of evil and into a coalition to extricate America from Iraq. The prime minister hopes the Jewish lobby can rally a Democratic majority in the new Congress to counter any diversion from the status quo on the Palestinians.”
Olmert obviously isn’t as smart as Noam, as he apparently believes in the existence of a Lobby which Noam tells us, like Santa Claus, doesn’t exist and/or has no power. The Lobby could use a PR hand, and what better hand would there be than to assassinate a Lebanese anti-Syrian leader, and blame the whole thing on Syria? The Israeli spy rings in Lebanon are certainly capable of the assassination, and Israel, unlike Syria, has a good motive.
The Truth will set you Free proposes that the real target of the Beit Hanun massacre was the ancient mosque itself, and not the people around it. The consistent Zionist plan has been to remove all physical evidence of historic Arab occupation of any part of Greater Israel: buildings; archaeological sites; graveyards; public records, including records of land ownership (the last war crime particularly important these days, though of course all the settlements are illegal). The most telling example is the destruction of an Arab graveyard in Jerusalem in order to build a museum of tolerance! Yet another example of that famous Jewish sense of humor!
In a weird sense, the Israeli excuse, that the civilian deaths were as a result of a ‘mistake’, may be true. Purely to avoid bad PR (more ‘branding’ woes), the Israeli government would have preferred to destroy the mosque, and thus alter the ‘facts on the ground’, without actually killing innocent civilians as they slept. The dead people simply got in the way of an operation to remove a strategic liability, and, as Zionists don’t believe Palestinians to be human beings – how else to explain how Zionists like Dershowitz and former Canadian Justice Minister Cotler can call themselves ‘human rights’ lawyers? – the deaths of some Untermenschen is a small price to pay to clear away some Arab rubble.
Some days there is nothing to blog about, and other days, like today, there is too much. So I’ll start with a small but telling thing concerning the Israeli Foreign Minister (found via the Angry Arab News Service; my emphasis in red):
“Foreign Minister Tzipi Livini, who is also currently in Los Angeles, met with actor John Voigt, Angelina Jolie's father. Voigt told Livni that Israel is very dear to him and that he is willing to assist in any way he can.
During the tour of the Fox studios, the Foreign Minister also met with senior representatives from the American film industry, including Steven Spielberg.”
The Israelis, like the Americans (remember the quixotic battle of Karen Hughes, trying to make Arabs feel the love that Americans have for them, while the United States approves the predations of Israel against the Palestinians and Lebanese, and kills its own Arabs in Iraq), have come up with the brilliant idea that the perception of Israel held by the rest of the world – some little thing involving dead children and unprovoked attacks and stolen land – is entirely a PR problem, and can be corrected with the proper spin from a clever advertising program. Tzipi Livini is behind the ‘re-branding’ program. What better place to go for product placement than Hollywood? What Zionist propaganda is next on Spielberg’s agenda after Munich? There is an old expression in English that isn’t very Kosher: you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
From Seymour Hersh’s latest (my emphasis in red):
“Earlier this year, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert created a task force to coördinate all the available intelligence on Iran. The task force, which is led by Major General Eliezer Shkedi, the head of the Israeli Air Force, reports directly to the Prime Minister. In late October, Olmert appointed Ephraim Sneh, a Labor Party member of the Knesset, to serve as Deputy Defense Minister. Sneh, who served previously in that position under Ehud Barak, has for years insisted that action be taken to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. In an interview this month with the Jerusalem Post, Sneh expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of diplomacy or international sanctions in curbing Iran:
The danger isn’t as much Ahmadinejad’s deciding to launch an attack but Israel’s living under a dark cloud of fear from a leader committed to its destruction. . . . Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will . . . I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That’s why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs.”
Israel is like the alpha male in a herd of animals that can’t even tolerate the idea that there might be a challenger. The logic of Zionist colonialism is that Israel always has to be the top dog; if it loses that status, it disappears. Therefore, whether Iran has a bomb, or doesn’t – and it’s clear that it doesn’t and is in no way close to having one – is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that there is a Middle Eastern leader who dares challenge the Zionist plans. All other Middle Eastern leaders, and the entire American government, including the new Democrat leadership, have been co-opted by the Zionists using various schemes. In the Middle East, those schemes generally involve playing off Shi’ite-Sunni differences, or manipulating dictators through the insecurity of their respective holds over power. Iran is a danger to Israel simply because it won’t play the Zionist games. Since the entire concern over Iran’s bomb is phony, a ruse to disguise the more ethereal risk that Iranian testicular fortitude poses to Zionism, Americans have absolutely no strategic interest in playing Israel’s mind games concerning Iran. Wise Americans know this, which is yet another reason why there won’t be an American attack on Iran.
I’ve long thought that the Israeli settler movement is the most evil group of people in the world (emphasis in red):
“A 19-year old Swedish human rights worker had her cheekbone broken by an Israeli settler in Hebron today. Tove Johansson from Stockholm walked through the Tel Rumeida checkpoint with a small group of human rights workers to accompany Palestinian schoolchildren to their homes. They were confronted by about 100 settlers in small groups, who started chanting in Hebrew ‘We killed Jesus, we’ll kill you too!’, a refrain the settlers had been repeating to internationals in Tel Rumeida all day.”
Settler humor! I just wish some of the Christian Zionists who support these people were there to hear it, but I guess they are too busy taking meth and having gay sex. There’s more:
“One settler then hit Tove on the left side of her face with an empty bottle, breaking it on her face and leaving her with a broken cheekbone. She immediately fell to the ground and the group of settlers who were watching began to clap, cheer, and chant. The soldiers, who had only watched until this point, then came forward and motioned at the settlers, in a way which the internationals described as ‘ok… that’s enough guys….’
The settlers, however, were allowed to stay in the area and continued watching and clapping as internationals tried to stop the flow of blood from the woman’s face. Some settlers who were coming down the hill even tried to take photos of themselves next to her bleeding face, giving the camera a ‘thumbs-up’ sign.”
This is the gesture now known as ‘doing a Lynndie’. The story continues with the gory details, including, needless to say, that those settlers identified as responsible did not even have their names taken by the authorities.
Over the years, there has been a lot of disinfomation planted about Mafia involvement in the JFK assassination. The Mafia can hardly defend itself, and the feint serves to hide the real guilty parties. That same strategy is still being used, as witness this unconvincing posting by Peter Lance at The Huffington Post (you’ll note the commentators have no trouble recognizing bullshit when they see it).
Lance’s argument, as far as I can make sense of it, is that Patrick Fitzgerald ordered the lifting of surveillance over the New Jersey al Qaeda cell, surveillance that would have stopped the September 11 attacks, in order to protect a series of Mafia investigations which were imperiled by an internal affairs investigation of a possibly dirty FBI agent. This argument doesn’t make any sense, and Lance himself doesn’t seem very sure of himself (“That's the only explanation I've been able to come up with . . .”), but I guess whatever it takes to sell a book . . . .
Lance mentions Ali Mohamed, but treats the entire Mohamed story as if he was an al Qaeda agent who had infiltrated the Pentagon (thus following the Official Story of 9–11). It is much more likely, given his kid-gloves treatment since his arrest (and is he still in jail, or relaxing on a beach somewhere?), that Mohamed was a Pentagon agent who had infiltrated al Qaeda, and either:
The most likely reason why the New Jersey cell was not being investigated by the FBI is that the FBI was ordered to lay off, because an over-zealous FBI investigation might have buggered up an ongoing operation by a higher power (i. e., the Pentagon).
More fun from Tom Bower on the plight of Conrad Black. Black’s problem is that his self regard won’t allow him to make even the slightest admission that he might have done something wrong, making a plea deal impossible. The same ego makes it impossible for him to understand how inadvisable it is for him to take the stand in his own defense. The second he opens his mouth on the stand the jury will be slipping the judge a note asking if it would be possible to impose the death penalty.
Prosecutors love to tell the jury a good story. The story that led to the conviction of Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski was the lavish birthday party Kozlowski threw for his wife’s fortieth birthday party. The story that will finish Conrad is the birthday party he threw for his vile wife’s sixtieth birthday. These things are trivial in the larger context, but juries lap them up.
The Alliance of Civilizations group was established under the auspices of the United Nations to consider the state of relations between the Islamic world and Western societies. It has conclusively rejected the Zionist propaganda known as the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis, and concludes that the main basis for conflict is the lack of just resolution of the plight of the Palestinians. From the Report of the High-level Group dated 13 November 2001 (pdf; my emphasis in red):
4.4 The partition of Palestine by the United Nations in 1947, envisaging the establishment of two states - Palestine and Israel - with a special status for Jerusalem, led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, beginning a chain of events that continues to be one of the most tortuous in relations between Western and Muslim societies. Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territories and the unresolved status of Jerusalem - a holy city for Muslims and Christians as well as Jews – have persisted with the perceived acquiescence of Western governments and thus are primary causes of resentment and anger in the Muslim world toward Western nations. This occupation has been perceived in the Muslim world as a form of colonialism and has led many to believe, rightly or wrongly, that Israel is in collusion with "the West". These resentments and perceptions were further exacerbated by Israel’s disproportionate retaliatory actions in Gaza and Lebanon.
4.5 In another critical context, the Middle East emerged as a vital source of energy crucial for prosperity and power. Cold War powers vied for influence in the strategic and resource rich countries of the region, often in the form of military and political interventions that contributed to stunting those countries’ development and eventually backfired on the powerful countries with repercussions that continue to be felt today. One of these events was the 1953 coup in Iran, the aftermath of which demonstrated both the limitations and the dangers of foreign interference in a country’s political development.
4.6 The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 opened another line of confrontation. As part of the Western policy of supporting religious opposition to contain Communism, the US and its allies, including some Muslim governments in the region, bolstered the Afghan resistance - the "mujahedin" - eventually forcing the Soviet retreat in 1989. After a period of instability, the Taliban regime seized control of the country and supported Al Qaeda, fomenting deep hostility against the West and setting in motion a chain of events which were to scar the start of the new Millennium.
4.7 The terrorist attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda on the United States in September 2001 drew near universal condemnation irrespective of religion or politics and demonstrated the depth of this extremist group’s hostility. They provoked a forceful retaliation against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Later, these attacks were presented as one of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, whose link with them has never been established, feeding a perception among Muslim societies of unjust aggression stemming from the West.
4.8 In the context of relations between Muslim and Western societies, the perception of double standards in the application of international law and the protection of human rights is particularly acute. Reports of collective punishment, targeted killings, torture, arbitrary detention, renditions, and the support of autocratic regimes contribute to an increased sense of vulnerability around the globe, particularly in Muslim countries, and to a perception of Western double standards. Assertions that Islam is inherently violent and related statements by some political and religious leaders in the West – including the use of terms such as "Islamic terrorism" and "Islamic fascism" - have contributed to an alarming increase in Islamophobia which further exacerbates Muslim fears of the West.
4.9 Conversely, violent attacks targeting civilian populations in the West, including suicide bombings, kidnappings, and torture, have led to an atmosphere of suspicion, insecurity and fear in the West. Many in the West also perceive double standards on the part of Muslim leaders. Indeed, while Western military operations are widely condemned by Muslims, this is not the case with intra-Muslim conflicts. Sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis in certain Muslim countries and the atrocities committed against civilians in Darfur, for instance, has not led to widespread condemnation in the Muslim world.
4.10 These reciprocal perceptions of double standards contribute to the climate of suspicion and mistrust that undermines relations between Muslim and Western societies.”
and:
5.1 With regard to relations between Muslim and Western societies, we must acknowledge the contemporary realities that shape the views of millions of Muslims: the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the violence in Afghanistan, and the increasingly violent conflict in Iraq.
5.2 We must stress the increasing urgency of the Palestinian issue, which is a major factor in the widening rift between Muslim and Western societies. In this regard, it is our duty to express our collective opinion that without a just, dignified, and democratic solution based on the will of all peoples involved in this conflict, all efforts – including recommendations contained in this report – to bridge this gap and counter the hostilities among societies are likely to meet with only limited success.
5.3 Our emphasis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not meant to imply that it is the overt cause of all tensions between Muslim and Western societies. Other factors also create resentment and mistrust, including the spiraling crisis in Iraq, the continued instability in Afghanistan, issues internal to Muslim societies, as well as terrorist attacks on civilian populations in many countries. Nevertheless, it is our view that the Israeli– Palestinian issue has taken on a symbolic value that colors cross-cultural and political relations among adherents of all three major monotheistic faiths well beyond its limited geographic scope.
5.4 Achieving a just and sustainable solution to this conflict requires courage and a bold vision of the future on the part of Israelis, Palestinians and all countries capable of influencing the situation. We firmly believe that progress on this front rests on the recognition of both the Palestinian and Jewish national aspirations and on the establishment of two fully sovereign and independent states living side by side in peace and security.
5.5 Reaching this objective will require Israel not only to accept but to facilitate the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. The peace accords involving Israel, Egypt and Jordan demonstrate that such constructive steps taken in line with international law are workable. Moreover, the terms of reference agreed to by all parties at the Madrid Conference in 1991, the peace initiative by President Clinton in 2000, and the peace proposal by the Arab League in its meeting in Beirut, Lebanon in 2002, make it clear that the framework for a broad-based accord does exist and the political will can be generated.”
Simply based on the results of thinking based on the Clash of Civilizations thesis – Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Lebanon, Gaza, West Bank – you would have to conclude that the thesis is not just wrong – although it is unclear whether a thesis that is basically an incitement to hatred could ever be right – but insane. It is an idea created by specific Zionists with the sole purpose of concealing the real reason for the conflict - Israeli wrongdoing - behind a form of xenophobia masquerading as a legitimate political thesis.
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