Category: Israel

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Coalition of the Gobbling vs Iran 11

While IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, urges concern and caution, warning that an attack of Iran would be catastrophic, the Israeli warmongers hustle for support for bombing hell out of it. They should be had up for inciting violence, yet get away with their belligerence as usual. The Israel lobby is sufficiently strong enough that Republicans crawl to it to help woo the fundamentalist rightwing vote.

In the words of the Prince of Darkness himself:

“Richard Perle, former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and a vocal advocate for military action to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, said voters should expect to hear a lot of hawkish foreign policy speeches from presidential contenders.”They’ll all sound like Romney,” said Perle, now at the American Enterprise Institute. “They’ll all talk tough about Iran.”

The sleazy Olmert, under investigation for corruption and rapidly becoming very unpopular with his electorate, ramps up the idea that Israhell will use any means at its disposal to defend itself against nuclear threat from Iran. Not that there is a existing threat. This is the Iraq WMD propaganda all over again.

Zionism sucks just as much as the tyrannical Saudi oligarchy.

Arab League secretary, Amr Moussa added to IEAE concerns in Davos:

“There is a 50/50 chance the United States will attack Iran and any such strike would risk spreading sectarian violence through the Middle East. It’s a 50/50 proposition, and we hope that it won’t happen. Attacking Iran would be counterproductive.”

Yet if sectarian violence engulfs the Middle East, the Israeli hawks won’t care – divide and conquer will suit them nicely as while others, further stereotyped as terrorists, battle – Israel will use the cover to grab more land. But the United Stupids will pay for this – oil prices will skyrocket. And their blood will be further spilled to protect the apartheidist land thieves.

One point of view in the above article and another in the Australian was interesting … the Saudis may cooperate with the United Stupids to put a squeeze on the oil price to crash the Iranian economy which is largely dependent on oil. This would also further Saudi fundo Sunni schemes to maintain their political control of the region. Thus, if the oil price drops radically, we will know the chances of Iran being attacked have increased.

Of course, when one is also aware that the Saudi dictators have been buying up gold bigtime lately, the story all starts to hang together. 😉 It’ll suit them just fine to drive the POO down – gold will follow. Will the United Stupids’ finances be presented in a rosy enough light to enable this in the week to come?

COMMENTS FROM THE OLD BLOG:

Fringe:

Here’s the Australian article:

http://tinyurl.com/3xzl5y

A senior British military source said yesterday that the Israelis were serious about the use of military force to stop Iran, and were now engaged in preparing public opinion for such a prospect. “They’re watering the turf. The Iranians are not under enough pressure,” the source said.

Israeli officials who spoke to the Independent this week refused to go into details about the possible catastrophic regional fallout from military strikes, although one source said that if they were restricted to Iran’s Natanz facility where its centrifuges are known to be enriching uranium, “there would be headlines in the papers for two days.”

But any military campaign would provoke retaliation by Iran which is expected to reactivate its Hezbollah allies on the border with Israel, who according to officials here have been rearming with missiles since the end of the summer campaign. The 140,000 American troops inside Iraq could be significant targets of the Iranians. Syria could also be drawn into a wider war, although the Israelis believe that both Syria and Russia would remain on the sidelines.

Other questions concern the Bush administration’s appetite for another war, already bogged down in Iraq and facing calls from the Democrat-led Congress for a phased withdrawal.

And the strength of the Israeli armed forces would be further tested after their flawed campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. “The IDF are not as good as they think they are,” said the British source. “It’â„¢s an army of conscripts, commanded by reserve officers. Do you want to send conscripts into a war for the national interest?”

Some analysts say that in any case, miitary strikes would be counter-productive as they would only delay, and not stop, Iran’s nuclear programme.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2183872.ece

Another thought about the oil price … if the United Stupids are going to double their strategic reserve, it would suit them nicely for the Saud tyrants to drive the POO down to help their disgusting buddies out. The topping up starts in 2 months – coinciding interestingly with the usual dip in POG every year.

The ghastly Woolsey goes even further:

“Woolsey also warned that the United States, Israel, and their allies could face an empowered threat if various extremist factions in the region align. “The Wahhabis, al-Qaida, the Vilayat Faqih in Teheran, although often lethally competitive with one another in the way the Nazis and communists were in the 1930s, are capable of unification,” Woolsey said, according to The Jerusalem Post.”

http://washtimes.com/upi/20070123-020613-4695r.htm

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The Coalition of the Gobbling vs Iran 1

According to commentator, Patrick Seales and others, it’s only a matter of time before the neoziocon nepotists attempt to whack Iran.

It is now clear that U.S. President George W. Bush has decided to confront Iran — politically, economically and militarily — rather than engage it in negotiations, as he was advised to do by James Baker and Lee Hamilton in their Iraq Study Group report.

Bush appears to have been influenced by pro-Israeli advisers such as Eliott Abrams, the man in charge of the Middle East at the National Security Council, and by arm-chair strategists at neo-conservative think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, who have long clamoured for regime change in Tehran.

Although Washington’s neo-cons have suffered some severe setbacks, notably because of the abysmal failure of their belligerent Iraqi strategy, they clearly continue to exercise considerable influence in the White House and in the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney.

On a recent visit to the Middle East, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought to mobilize the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, plus Egypt and Jordan, to join the United States in confronting Iran.

Leading Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are, of course, concerned by the rise of Iran and of militant Shi‘ism, but they are even more alarmed at the possibility of a United States/Israeli war against Iran, which would inevitably inflict heavy blows on their own societies.

The declared aim of the United States is to contain Iran and reduce its influence throughout the Middle East. But the danger of such a policy is that it runs the risk of escalating from verbal assaults and sanctions to armed clashes, and even to a war.

Some experts believe that if the United States were to attack Iran, Iran might respond by firing missiles against U.S. bases in Iraq and the Gulf, Hizbullah might attack Israel, and Israel might invade Syria, igniting a full-scale regional war with devastating consequences for all concerned.

Washington has long identified Iran as an adversary, part of Bush’s famous — or infamous — “axis of evil.” But, in the last few weeks, a decision appears to have been made to get tough with the regime in Tehran which, in the words of Vice President Cheney, is said to pose a “multidimensional threat” to the United States and its allies.

Meanwhile, the Dems fire a broadside at the chimp, claiming he does not have the authority to whack Iran.

Contemporaneously, Israhelli possible PM-to-be Tipsy Livni urges for stiffer sanctions against Iran.

Sanctions naturally increase poverty, extremism and fundamentalism – but these are tactical and familiar outcomes for Zionists.

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Charges Ring True

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and a frequent commentator on Middle East issues.

From http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-makdisi221206.htm:

Former President Jimmy Carter has come under sustained attack for having dared to use the term “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies in the West Bank. However, not one of Carter’s critics has offered a convincing argument to justify the vehemence of the outcry, much less to refute his central claim that Israel bestows rights on Jewish residents settling illegally on Palestinian land, while denying the same rights to the indigenous Palestinians. Little wonder, for they are attempting to defy reality itself.

Israel maintains two separate road networks in the West Bank: one for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers, and one for Palestinian natives. Is that not apartheid?

Palestinians are not allowed to drive their own cars in much of the West Bank; their public transportation is frequently interrupted or blocked altogether by a grid of Israeli army checkpoints — but Jewish settlers come and go freely in their own cars, without even pausing at the roadblocks that hold up the natives. Is that not apartheid?

A system of closures and curfews has strangled the Palestinian economy in the West Bank — but none of its provisions apply to the Jewish settlements there. Is that not apartheid?

Whole sectors of the West Bank, classified as “closed military areas” by the Israeli army, are off limits to Palestinians, including Palestinians who own land there — but foreigners to whom Israel’s Law of Return applies (that is, anyone Jewish, from anywhere in the world) can access them without hindrance. Is that not apartheid?

Persons of Palestinian origin are routinely barred from entering or residing in the West Bank — but Israeli and non-Israeli Jews can come and go, and even live on, occupied Palestinian territory. Is that not apartheid?

Israel maintains two sets of rules and regulations in the West Bank: one for Jews, one for non-Jews. The only thing wrong with using the word “apartheid” to describe such a repugnant system is that the South African version of institutionalized discrimination was never as elaborate as its Israeli counterpart — nor did it have such a vocal chorus of defenders among otherwise liberal Americans.

The glaring error in Carter’s book, however, is his insistence that the term “apartheid” does not apply to Israel itself, where, he says, Jewish and non-Jewish citizens are given the same treatment under the law. That is simply not true.

Israeli law affords differences in privileges for Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of the state — in matters of access to land, family unification and acquisition of citizenship. Israel’s amended nationality law, for example, prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel who are married to Palestinians from the occupied territories from living together in Israel. A similar law, passed at the peak of apartheid in South Africa, was overturned by that country’s supreme court as a violation of the right to a family. Israel’s high court upheld its law just this year.

Israel loudly proclaims itself to be the state of the Jewish people, rather than the state of its actual citizens (one-fifth of whom are Palestinian Arabs). In fact, in registering citizens, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior assigns them a whole range of nationalities other than “Israeli.” In the official registry, the nationality line for a Jewish citizen of Israel reads “Jew.” For a Palestinian citizen, the same line reads “Arab.” When this glaring inequity was protested all the way to Israel’s high court, the justices upheld it: “There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people.” Obviously this leaves non-Jewish citizens of Israel in, at best, a somewhat ambiguous situation. Little wonder, then, that a solid majority of Israeli Jews regard their Arab fellow-citizens as what they call “a demographic threat,” which many — including the deputy prime minister — would like to see eliminated altogether. What is all this, if not racism?

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Apartheid in the Holy Land

Excellent article by Bishop Desmond Tutu:

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.

What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.

On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?

I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: “Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews.”

My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?

Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured.

The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.

Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or – I hope – to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.

We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?

My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: “I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression.”

But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?

People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful – very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.

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The Israel Lobby vs The Iraq Study Group Report

When will Americans wake up to the subversion and manipulation of their country by the Israel lobby? when they wake up to their own manipulation by their ruling elite which benefits from the arms trade.

The power of think tanks to shape public discussion and ultimately public policy was demonstrated before the Iraq war when public perceptions concerning Iraq were informed by a well-funded network of think tanks connected in many intimate ways to a pro-Israel political lobby that actively supported Bush’s Iraq policy.

The same actors are already marshaling against the report and the report’s subdued yet explicit linking of wider Middle East problems with Iraq:

“There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.”

The report directly connects Israel to Iraq in a way that unsettles Israel’s supporters, stating,

“The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict…”

Because of this, we already see, among others, Israel and its foreign policy advocates in America piling on criticism. Some are starting to deconstruct the report as a defeatist document produced by a spineless liberal establishment.

The critics have something in common, a high regard for Israel and the notion that Israeli foreign policy objectives are always the same as US foreign policy objectives.

In the case of Iraq, this equation is patently false. The United States is suffering from Bush’s adventure in Iraq and Israel is benefiting from the chaos resulting from it.

This report deserves to be read and discussed rather than blithely dismissed. The critics may howl, yet none dare call it treason.”