- The Israeli Agenda openly defended, publically practiced
and aggressively pursued by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) has greatly
influenced the US Presidential elections and the likely future course of
Washington's Middle East policy.
-
- The strategy of the Jewish state is the complete Zionization
of Palestine, the takeover of land, water, offshore gas (estimated to be
worth $4 billion dollars) and other economic resources and the total dispossession
of the Palestinian people. Tel Aviv's tactics have included daily military
assaults, giant walls ghettoizing entire Palestinian towns, military outposts
and controls undermining commerce and production to force bankruptcy, poverty,
severe deprivation and population flight. The second priority of the Israeli
colonial state is to bolster the Jewish state's political and military
supremacy in the Middle East, using preposterous arguments of 'survival'
and 'existential threats'. The key postulate of Israeli Middle East policy
is to destroy or intimidate the principle adversaries of its Zionization
of Palestine and its expansionist Middle East policy. In pursuit of that
policy, it invaded southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, bombing neighborhoods
and critical infrastructure in Beirut and other cities, bombed Syria as
a provocation. Earlier the Israeli state played a major role in directing
the ZPC in formulating US war policy toward destroying Iraq as a viable
nation. Recently Israel, through the ZPC in the US, has engaged in a comprehensive,
intense and highly charged political, diplomatic, economic and military
campaign to isolate and ultimately destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran
as a political counterweight to its ambitions in the Middle East ("Israel:
Iran building Nuclear Arms", Aljazeera February 12, 2008).
-
- The principal propaganda tool of the ZPC and its Israeli
patrons is to claim Iran represents a 'military threat' to Israel, Iraq,
the Gulf oil producers and the US. This outlandish charge is repeatedly
made by ZPC ideologues. According to the 2008 edition of the International
Institute of Strategic Studies Military Balance, Iran's total defense spending
for 2006 was nearly 55% less than Israel despite having ten times the population
of the Jewish state and facing hundreds of US- supported terrorist incursions
across its borders. Per capita, Israeli military expenditures were 17 times
more than Iran ($1,737 per Israeli not counting US direct military
assistance versus $110 for each Iranian citizen). It is widely acknowledged
that Israel has over 200 nuclear weapons capable of striking Iranian population
centers while Iran has none. Israel receives over $3 billion US dollars
a year in direct US military aid, including the most advanced offensive
military technology while Iran receives no foreign military aid and
has little defensive technology. According to US Budgetary Hearings, from
2009 to 2018 Israel will receive a $30 billion dollar package of direct
foreign military financing from the US, while Iran will receive nothing
from any foreign state.
-
- Contrary to Israeli and ZPC propaganda, the Gulf States,
Iraq and many US military commanders do not consider Iran a military threat,
but rather a factor in stabilizing the volatile situation. The Gulf States
invited Iran to their annual meetings; Iraqi government leaders meet with
Iranian officials on trade and security and Saudi Arabia is following a
similar course by inviting Iranian leaders to Mecca for the Hadj.
-
- After the destruction of the secular republic of Iraq,
the job of the ZPC has been to push for greater US military aggressin against
Israel's perceived adversaries Iran being the prime target
by massive falsification of the actual correlation of military forces between
Israel and Iran.
-
- Israeli and ZPC Intervention in the US Presidential Elections
and Economic Policy
-
- The second task of the ZPC in pursuit of Israel's agenda
is to ensure no major political candidate debates or questions Israeli
genocidal policies toward the Palestinians and its military ambitions in
the Middle East. In the US Presidential election of 2008, the ZPC's role
is to ensure that all major candidates endorse, support and promote the
Israeli political agenda, despite its genocidal policies (see Gideon Levy,
"The Lights have been turned off", Haaretz February 4, 2008)
and repudiation of international law. The ZPC has imposed on all Presidential
candidates Israel's bellicose posture toward Iran, and its explicit policy
of liquidating Hamas political leaders. According to Israeli Minister of
Housing and construction, Zeev Boim, "all members of Hamas political
leadership are involved in terrorist acts against Israelso they must be
liquidated." (Israeli Army Radio- Galei Tzahal, February 9, 2008 cited
in Haaretz).
-
- The third task of the ZPC is to use their strategic positions
in the White House, Treasury, Pentagon and State Department to undermine
Iran's economy, politically isolate it and provoke internal and external
confrontations.
-
- Israel 2008: The Theory and Practice of Genocide
-
- Israel has totally shredded any and all verbal commitments
made at the Bush-organized Annapolis Middle East Conference in November
2007. The Jewish state is building 1000 new housing units in "Palestinian"
East Jerusalem. It allows 100 new settler posts to occupy Palestinian land.
It has attacked and killed Palestinian civilians, police and supporters
of its 'negotiating partner' Abbas throughout the West Bank. Israel retains
its 300 checkpoints throughout the West Bank, undermining travel, transport,
trade and medical treatment. Jewish colonial settlements expand, further
encroaching on Palestinian land, under the flimsy pretext that the peace
process only precludes whatever the Jewish officials designate as 'new
settlements', in effect isolating and reducing Palestinian East Jerusalem
into a walled enclave.
-
- Israeli leaders have intensified their military assaults
on Gaza, killing nearly 800 and wounding over 1,000 Palestinians since
the democratically elected Hamas government took effective control over
Gaza in 2007 ('IDF to step up Gaza Assassinations' Haaretz February 13,
2008). Worse still they have imposed the genocidal strategy of starving
1.4 million residents of Gaza into submission, practicing the internationally
outlawed practice of collective punishment against civilians in order to
incite them into overthrowing their elected government. Israeli officials
have publicly embraced and defended their totalitarian policies of cutting
off electricity generation in the Gaza Strip, thus drastically reducing
or eliminating the supply of safe water, halting all sewage treatment,
electricity for hospitals, refrigerators, food and vaccine storage, home,
school and business lighting. The Israeli Supreme Court has approved this
policy of mass, brutal collective punishment of over 1.4 million civilians.
(Haaretz February 2, 2008). They have imposed a tight blockade on food
and medical supplies resulting in what the United Nations officials and
international human rights groups have called a humanitarian disaster of
unprecedented magnitude with widespread disease and famine becoming a reality.
The Israeli Army blocks even the movement of sick and critically injured
children. The Israeli judicial system led by its Supreme Court judges has
ruled in favor of the power cuts, bombing of generators and water treatment
plants and blockage of food, providing an unprecedented 'legal' framework
for genocide.
-
- The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations have publicly defended Israeli genocidal policies and the
ZPC has been successful in securing the support of both major US political
parties and presidential candidates for Israeli collective punishment against
Palestinian civilians.
-
- Deliberate State Genocide in the Service of Colonial
Aggrandizement
-
- Israeli policymakers claim that their totalitarian tactics
are a 'response to 'rocket attacks' by Palestinian 'terrorists'. In fact
there are no attacks from the West Bank not a single rocket attack
throughout the past two years. Even more significant, Israel has repeatedly
rejected Hamas offer to sign a joint comprehensive long-term ceasefire
involving an end to rocket fire in exchange for an end to Israeli military
air and tank assaults. All Israeli leaders have categorically rejected
Hamas cease-fire offers and have refused to even negotiate with or recognize
the duly elected Hamas leadership.
-
- The Jewish state has affirmed its policy of political
extraterritorial assassinations of democratically elected political leaders
irrespective of rocket or other attacks as part of its strategy of practicing
international state terrorism against the Palestinian people, in violation
of international law.
-
- In summary, genocide and state terror at the service
of ethnic dispossession and racial-ethnic colonial settlements is the openly
stated, judicially sanctioned practice of the Israeli state. There is no
basis for speaking of a Jewish, Zionist or Israeli 'conspiracy' against
the Palestinians. State terror is practiced openly and publicly defended
by the Supreme Court while international law is publicly dismissed as irrelevant
to the extent that it infringes on the freedom of action, expansion and
'security' of Jewish territorial ambitions, military superiority in the
Middle East and Israeli influence over US Middle East policy.
-
- As Israeli policy makers clearly embrace totalitarian
policies, engaging and justifying international assassination of adversaries
and the collective punishment of over 1.4 million civilians in Gaza, their
political, academic and journalistic apologists rely on unadulterated vituperation
and paranoid screeds against Israel's critics in the US. The now deceased
super-Zionist Congress-person Tom Lantos (Democrat California), accused
ex-President Carter of being filled with 'venom' for comparing the oppression
of the Palestinians to South African Apartheid. Zionist zealot, Eugene
Kontorovich, Professor of Law (sic) at Northwestern University, claims
that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to Israel's violent seizure and
settlement of Palestinian lands (Daily Alert February 15, 2008). Alex Safian
'refutes' Professors Walt and Mearsheimer's classic study of the Israel
Lobby in the United States as 'a fraud'. Israeli Ambassador to Canada,
Alan Baker, refers to Israel's privileging of Jews over Palestinians in
the Occupied Territories as 'the poisonous myth of Israel's Apartheid'
(National Post-Canada cited in the Daily Alert February 15, 2008).
- The violent vituperative language follows the deep frustration
that Zionist leaders feel in failing to stem the growing rejection of Israel's
totalitarian politics. Their belief that no one should ever attack Israel's
colonial and racist policies leads them to blind rage, blacklisting, censorship
and vicious character assassinations. Israel's expansionist and militarist
policies, in violation of international law, are accompanied by a powerful
tendency among mainstream Zionist leaders to reject international law,
vilifying the United Nations and insulting the International Court of Justice.
-
- Pro-Israel Western leaders adopt Israel's paranoid style
of politics and translate it into the American political discourse. Zionist
zealot and head of US Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, engages in widespread
internal espionage of US citizens in violation of constitutional protections.
Zionist fanatic, US Attorney General Michael Mulkasy, refused to investigate
the illegal, but widely acknowledged practice of torturing suspects in
US custody, including water-torture (water-boarding), considering this
internationally outlawed torture to be 'acceptable under certain conditions'.
The most egregious example of Israel's political and intellectual degeneration
is found in the logic of its chain of enemies. Israeli military targeting
starts with attacking the Palestinian armed resistance; then it extends
to their family members, neighbors, their homes, schools, workshops, offices
and fields. It implicates civilians, ambulances and food distribution outlets.
It proceeds to target the entire community, a whole people, with round-ups
of all males less than 45 years of ages. Paranoia leads to verbal assaults
of overseas European and US critics of Israeli crimes against humanity.
Israeli death squads cross borders and assassinate political leaders, train
terrorists in Iraq, Iran, Colombia and elsewhere to weaken countries, regimes
and groups, which politically support the Palestinian struggle for independence
and sovereignty.
-
- Accompanying the Israeli policy of permanent global war
and paranoia are the entire leadership of the Zionist Power Configuration
in the US. The ZPC's introduction of the Israeli paranoid style of politics
in our country becomes one of the biggest threats to American freedoms
and our desire to avoid Israeli entrapment in another brutal war in the
Middle East.
-
- The Zionist Power Configuration: 2008
-
- The ZPC is made up of all the major Jewish organizations,
pro-Israel plutocrats, media barons and government officials who are Israel
Firsters. In the face of the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe imposed
by Israel's food and energy blockade of Gaza, and its thorough repudiation
of the terms of the Annapolis peace negotiation the Zionist power configuration
had its work cut out for it in selling the Israeli genocidal agenda as
a defensive, justifiable policy of a peace-loving democracy. The second
task of the ZPC was to overcome the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) on Iran which refuted Israeli and White House propaganda painting
Iran as a nuclear threat. The Israeli state propaganda machine went on
an all out assault of the NIE, claiming to have superior knowledge of hidden
Iranian research programs without providing a shred of reliable evidence.
Once the Israeli state defined its position to the NIE, the entire leadership
of the Conference of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
(CPMAJO), all the major Zionist- controlled propaganda centers ('think
tanks') and an army of Israel-First academics (self-styled 'intelligence
experts') and ideologues deluged the print and electronic mass media with
attacks on the NIE report, echoing and citing the rhetoric and claims of
the Israeli state. The White House and Congress (with few exceptions) followed
the line of the ZPC, downplaying and distorting the NIE, escalating their
bellicose rhetoric and pressure for sanctions on Iran in the UN Security
Council and among the EU and NATO countries. The success of the ZPC in
sustaining US confrontational policies against Iran, and forcefully selling
the Israeli policy to the US political elite even against the findings
and report of all the US intelligence agencies is a measure of the decisive
power of the ZPC over US Middle East policy. Never in the entire history
of the US has a small and economically insignificant foreign power wielded
so much influence over Washington in a strategic region through its overseas
representatives over and against the advice of America's entire intelligence
establishment.
-
- The key to Zionist power is its ability to leverage and
multiply its influence through non-Zionist congressional, media, pension
fund managers, state and municipal officials and a host of trade union,
academic and other notables and civic organizations. Strategically placed
Zionists focused on the single issue of Israel, bring to bear the economic
and organizational resources of their 1 million affiliates, supporters
and media publicists on targeting policy makers in all relevant fields.
The targeted individuals and organizations representing many millions of
American Gentiles and non-Zionist Jews usually capitulate to the pressure
or payoffs or are persuaded to follow the lead of the aggressive focused
Zionist zealots. The propaganda value of having non-Zionists with a mass
organizational base carrying out Israeli policies is immense. Leveraging
the 'others' allows the pro-Israel liberal ideologues to obfuscate, downplay
and dilute the real power of Israel and the ZPC in the making of US Middle
East policy. As a consequence, we find what I call 'mish-mash' analyses
which argue that "The Zionist pro-Israel lobby (sic) is only one of
many groups and interests influencing US Middle East policy". In other
words, Zionist leveraged politicians are given a degree of autonomy and
attributed a set of interests, which effectively hides Zionist initiatives,
pressures and tactical leverage.
-
- In 2008 Zionist direct and leveraged power is manifested
in several decisively important areas of US politics, especially in foreign
policy.
-
- The ZPC and the Presidential Elections
-
- All of the major presidential candidates have slavishly
followed the most extreme pro-Israel positions promoted by the Presidents
of the Major American Jewish Organizations. John McCain, the Republican
front-runner declares his unconditional support for Israel's territorial
expansion, settlements and genocidal policy toward Gaza. According to the
Jewish weekly, The Forward (February 13, 2008), "On Israel,McCain
has been uncharacteristically conventional. He offers unqualified support,
expressed in years of public statements" The same article emphasizes
how in 2006 McCain capitulated to Zionist pressure in a matter of days
by recanting his position on Israel returning to its 1967 borders: "I've
never held the position that Israeli should return to the 1967 lines and
that is not my position today." On February 7, 2008 McCain defined
US-Iranian policy on strictly Zionist terms: "Those (Democratic) senators
won't recognize and seriously address the threat posed by an Iran with
nuclear ambitions to our ally Israel in the region." (McCain's speech
to the Conservative Political Action Conference, February 7, 2008, quoted
in Haaretz Februaru 10, 2008). In 2007, McCain happily echoed Israeli demands
to bomb Iran with the vulgar and sinister new refrain to an old Beach Boys
rock song "Bomb, Bomb, BombBomb-bomb Iran".
-
- Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have supported every
major position and demand of the ZPC: Both have pledged unconditional support
for Israel; they have backed Israel's genocidal policies against Gaza,
the expansion of settlements and the total takeover of Jerusalem. Hillary
Clinton urges recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital contrary
to the United Nations, the European Union and even the Bush Administration's
position. Zionist ideologues are among the top foreign policy and Middle
East advisers of all three top contenders for their party's presidential
nomination. The public record reads Zionist decisive influence over the
next US President's Middle Est policy. The only possible deviation is Obama's
statement that he is willing to negotiate with the Iranian government
a policy that the Bush regime, in part, already practices at a lesser official
level via meetings in Iraq. For his minor discrepancy from the Zionist
war rhetoric toward Iran, Obama was chastised by Malcolm Hoenlein, head
of the CPMAJO (Haaretz January 18, 2008). To compensate for talking too
much about 'change' which worries the paranoid Jewish leaders, like Hoenlein,
Obama went out of his way to blame the civilians living in Gaza for the
Israeli campaign to starve them into surrender and called on them to revolt
against their democratically-elected Hamas government. The ZPC is the only
major national political-social apparatus, which engages in a comprehensive,
persistent and intensive campaign to direct US foreign policy into a full-scale
(diplomatic, military and economic) confrontation with Iran.
-
- Silencing Potential Critics of the ZPC
-
- Almost every major centrist, leftist or progressive journal,
weekly magazine, radio and web site has refused to discuss the singular
influence of the ZPC over the Presidential candidates' Middle East policy
- a further indication of the reach and influence of the ZPC. The best
indication that the ZPC is not 'just another lobby' as Mearsheimer and
Walt claim, or a simply another bellicose neo-conservative current of opinion,
is found in their slavish adherence to the Israeli state's policies, even
when they blatantly defy and repudiate the rightwing policies of President
Bush. At Annapolis (November 2007) President Bush called on Israel to cease
building new settlements in order to further peace negotiations. Exactly
three months later Israel announced plans to build over 1,000 (1,250) new
Jews-only homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem (BBC News, February 12, 2008).
The Daily Alert propaganda sheet of the CPMAJO immediately endorsed the
Israeli position and set in motion its major lobbyists, op-ed ideologues
and media 'experts' to justify Israel's crass repudiation of its agreement
with President Bush.
-
- Rather than confront this flagrant, highly public, unilateral
and shameful Israeli repudiation of its agreement with the White House,
President Bush , Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice and Defense Secretary
Gates all played 'Mickey the Dunce'. White House press secretary, Dana
Perino, claimed she had not seen the report about Israel's plans to build
new apartments in East Jerusalem though it was 'news' in all the
mass electronic and print media. In fear of the ZPC, Perino responded as
if the entire affair was simply a problem for the Palestinians: "But
obviously, there is no doubt that an announcement of that sort (building
1,125 new Jews-only segregated apartments) would make the Palestinians
concerned" (Santa Barbara News-Press February 12, 2008).
-
- Zionist Power: Treasury Department
-
- Within the government, the principal architect and key
operative of the US worldwide campaign to strangle the Iranian economy
is a top Treasury Department official, Stuart Levey, a zealous Zionist
and key agent of the ZPC in the executive branch. Levey has successfully
browbeat the reticent, persuaded the gullible and teamed up with co-thinkers
who control state, municipal and private pension funds to withdraw investments
from any enterprise which deals with Iran. Levey is a major architect of
the Treasury's economic sanctions policy, which Washington has promoted
in the United Nations Security Council. Levey's policies have succeeded
in blocking Iranian private bank transactions. They have received the support
of the White House and the National Security Council despite the NIE report,
which found that Iran was not engaged in a nuclear weapons program. Mohamed
El Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency have confirmed the
position of the NIE (Associated Press, February 23, 2008). Unlike Levey,
the NIE and the IAEA are agencies, which are not influenced by the Zionist
power configuration.
-
- Nevertheless, the Israeli demands (pushed by the ZPC)
for further sanctions based on unfounded claims of continued nuclear arms
programs trumps the NIE and IAEA intelligence findings. The White House,
France, England and Germany demand new and harsher sanctions against Iran.
Never in the history of Israeli influence over US Middle East policy has
the pro-Israel power configuration so much influence as it has today: The
US government (President to Congress to Presidential hopefuls) repudiate
its own intelligence agencies in favor of the 'intelligence' claims of
a foreign power. Never has the US Treasury Department been so influenced
by Israel Firsters, like Stuart Levey, Daniel Glaser and their colleagues
in putting the interests of Israel above and beyond the interests of the
major US and European oil companies.
-
- At every AIPAC meeting since 2004, in every publication
of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations over the past
5 years, in each and every state and citywide conference of Jewish community
councils, every effort has been made to promote US military action or economic
sanctions against Iran. In fact, the ZPC escalated its campaign against
Iran after the NIE was published and intensified their campaign in favor
of Israel's fabricated 'intelligence claims' (Daily Alert, November 2007
February 2008). The dual power position of Israel Firsters in key
policy positions and civil society defines their influence over US Middle
East policy.
-
- The International Dimension
-
- The US ZPC has been immensely aided in securing its bellicose
anti-Iranian agenda by the appointments of prominent Zionists to key foreign
policy positions in England and France. David Milliband, the British Foreign
Minister, has close family ties with Jewish settlers from Britain colonizing
the occupied West Bank. During a visit to Israel, he spent several days
with Israeli officials and an evening with his relatives, while totally
ignoring the issue of the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza suffering from
Israel's genocidal blockade. Milliband has been a fierce defender of keeping
the 'military option on the table', heightening economic sanctions against
Iran and is an unconditional supporter of Israel's brutal policy preventing
the shipment of food and fuel from reaching the suffering people of the
Gaza strip.
-
- Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister is a lifelong
zealous Zionist who, upon taking office, pronounced himself in favor of
a military attack on Iran 'if negotiations fail'. As the new Foreign Minister,
Kouchner went to US occupied Iraq and praised the occupation and puppet
'government' despite the over 1 million civilian deaths and 4 million destitute
refugees which has resulted from the invasion and occupation. Kouchner
(appointed by French President Sarkozy under pressure from the Zionists),
like president Bush gave strong backing to any Israeli 'military pre-emptive
action' (offensive military assault), though a strong negative reaction
from the French public forced him to tone down his overt support of Israeli
military actions.
-
- With such powerful political allies and co-thinkers in
the American, French and British governments and the controlling role of
the ZPC over US policymakers in the United Nations, it comes as no surprise
that Israel received no reprimand for its daily murders and abductions
of civilians and Palestinian officials in Gaza and the West Bank. Zion
power prevents the UN from even applying its own basic international principles
to prosecute crimes against humanity, including torture and collective
punishment. Since its founding in the late 19th century and its spread
to the US, especially after WWII, organized Zionism has never been so influential
in so many spheres of government and had so much control over US Middle
East policy as it possesses today. Most major pro-Israel Jewish leaders
in moments of candor have publicly acknowledged that they are at the pinnacle
of influence, to the effect that 'we have never had an administration as
favorable to Israel as under President Bush.' Certainly this is an understatement
that speaks to an underlying truth : Never has the US engaged in a very
costly Middle Eastern war to benefit a foreign power; never has the US
deliberately prevented big oil companies from signing billion dollar oil
contracts by imposing economic sanctions on Iran in order to weaken a regional
opponent of Israel.
-
- The Show Must Go On
-
- Not only does the ZPC directly influence US policy against
Palestine, Iraq and Iran, but it has extended its campaign against 'third
parties', countries like China which have economic relations with Sudan
(a Muslim nation with an independent foreign policy which supports Palestinian
rights). To an overwhelming degree, the propaganda campaign behind the
so-called "Darfur genocide campaign' is the Israeli state and its
political apparatus in the US, namely the ZPC. Most of the media celebrities,
led by prominent Hollywood Zionist director Steven Spielberg, have engaged
in an exercise of selective moral indignation supporting Israel,
while ignoring its starvation blockade of Gaza, supporting the US occupation
of Afghanistan and Iraq while attacking China for its 'immoral' oil contracts
with the Sudan. The CPMAJO has focused on the Darfur 'genocide' because
by doing so it favors the brutal separatists in southern Sudan, armed and
advised by Israel, as a means of depriving pro-Palestinian Sudan of a large
oil rich region in the south of the country. The Darfur campaign deliberately
and systematically excludes any mention of the Israeli Supreme Court's
approval of Israel's food and fuel blockade and deliberate prevention of
the movement of medical personnel in Gaza and the West Bank, its approval
of Israel's practice of torture ('forceful interrogations'), armed assaults
on the vital infrastructure and civilian population centers of Gaza.
-
- Hollywood's Darfur sideshow is a sham propaganda effort
at selective humanitarian concern, which does not deviate a millimeter
from the official line promoted by the Israeli state and publicized in
the US by the Daily Alert, the principle bulletin of the ZPC.
-
- ZPC: Scorecard for 2008
-
- From January to the middle of February 2008, Israeli
had killed, wounded and arrested nearly a thousand Palestinians, mostly
but not exclusively from Gaza. Over half of those killed, arrested and
wounded were unarmed civilians, the rest include Hamas and PLO security
officials, militia members and anti-colonial resistance fighters. Of the
700 primitive rockets and shells launched from Gaza, not a single Israeli
Jew was killed and fewer than a dozen suffered serious bodily harm. Only
a contract farm laborer from Ecuador died on the Israeli side from the
rockets.
-
- In a speech to Jewish-American leaders in mid-February,
Prime Minister Olmert spelled out the gist of Israel's totalitarian strategy.
According to the BBC News (February 18, 2008) "Mr Olmert said, 'Israel
had a free hand to respond and attack anyone who has any kind of responsibility.
This applied to everyone, first and foremost Hamas," (my emphasis).
The entire leadership of the major Jewish organizations, whole-heartedly
approved the use of unrestrained and unlimited violence (a 'free hand')
against the entire Palestinian population ('any kind of responsibility'),
which would include individuals who transport, feed, educate, shelter,
vote for or interact with Hamas, their family members, friends, neighbors
99% of the residents of Gaza. Giving priority to targeting 'first
and foremost Hamas' includes several hundred thousand voters who elected
Hamas in free and democratic elections.
-
- The ZPC has succeeded in securing the near unanimous
US Congressional support for Israel's mass arrests and daily assaults on
Gaza, even when a few mass media outlets published photos of Israeli colonial
soldiers parading eighty arbitrarily arrested Palestinian civilians bound
and blindfolded to notorious Israeli interrogation centers (BBC News February
18, 2008) for unlimited detention with no legal guarantees against physical
and psychological torture.
-
- The ZPC has swamped the US mass media with praise of
Israel's cross border assassinations, such as the international political
murder of Hizbullah leader, Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, Syria (Daily Alert
February 15, 2008). Reproducing articles from the Israeli press (Jerusalem
Post, Haaretz) and Zionist think tanks and weeklys (Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, New York Jewish Week, YNET News, CAMERA, New York
Sun, and Middle East Strategy at Harvard) the Daily Alert has provided
legitimacy to international assassinations by official state-directed death
squads thereby extending the violence and counter-violence throughout the
world. This is a fact recognized by the US FBI and Israeli officials. Heads
of the Israeli international secret police, the MOSSAD, openly acknowledge
the role of Israeli assassinations in provoking terrorist reprisals by
putting a world-wide alert to Jews to avoid Islamic and Arab countries
as well as locations where "there is a high concentration of Israelis"
(Prime Minister's Office, reprinted in the Daily Alert February 15, 2008).
-
- The Israeli practice of staging international assassinations
of opposition leaders in major cities will not only invite retaliation
against Israelis and Jews but also endanger sites in the US and EU, for
tolerating these acts of state-sponsored terror. In other words, Israeli
terror invites terrorist counter attacks like September 11, 2001. Israel,
by provoking a new round in the Palestinian 'war through global terror'
and the US and EU by embracing an Israeli car bomb assassination in Damascus
endanger Western lives everywhere. The Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations, their publicists and op-ed ideologues in
the mass media are opening the entire Western world to terrorist attacks.
By supporting Israeli terror and increasing the chance of Muslim reprisals,
the ZPC strengthens the repressive structure of a growing police state
in the US. (The 'professional' killing by Israeli operatives of a major
figure in Damascus, Syria raises the question of the role of Israeli operatives
in the as-yet unsolved series of car bomb assassinations in Lebanon
given Israel's desire to maintain a state of internal tension in that country.)
The brilliant and precocious Ivy League academic apologists of each and
every act of official Israeli state-sponsored international terror apparently
dissociate these acts of assassination from likely reprisals in our country
and the consequent further destruction of our remaining precarious democratic
freedoms. Could it be that Zionist American intellectuals welcome more
US police state agencies and laws in order to prosecute a rising number
of Americans who are critical of Zionist influence over the American political
process? They might do well to recall that police state structures and
laws could be used against them in the future.
-
- Except for a small, courageous and isolated band of Anglo-American-Canadian
Jewish intellectuals and academics, all the mainline Jewish organizations
raised not a single question, let alone criticism regarding Israel's role
in instigating international terror.
-
- From the beginning of the year, the ZPC has intensified
its campaign to strangle the Iranian economy through US-promoted sanctions
in the UN. They raised the ante in demonizing Iran as a military-nuclear
threat to Israel, the US and the Gulf States. Almost a third of every issue
of the Daily Alert (from January 1 to February 20, 2008) is devoted to
reproducing propaganda pieces from Israeli officials claiming the Iranians
are a nuclear threat and are advancing toward nuclear war. They repeat
Israeli propaganda about an 'existential threat to the survival of Israel'.
The CPMAJO never mention that Israel has a current Middle East monopoly
of over 200 nuclear weapons and missiles. Since most leading US Zionists
believe that they will not have another President as servile to Israeli
interests as the current President Bush (a doubtful proposition) they are
pushing hard to find a pretext for a US attack or an Israeli strike backed
by Washington before Bush leaves office. While the White House has raised
its bellicose rhetoric and aggressively pursued new sanctions, Washington
and its backers in the ZPC have failed to isolate Iran. In late 2007 and
into 2008, Iran has met with top Iraqi politicians in Baghdad and Teheran,
reached agreements with US military officials to stabilize Iraq, addressed
the Gulf Cooperation Council at their annual meeting in Doha, while the
Saudi monarch invited Iranian President Ahmadinejad to fulfill the Hadj
pilgrimage in Mecca in December 2007 ( Al Jazeera, February 16, 2008).
In other words the ZPC's militarist anti-Iran strategy has succeeded in
isolating the US form its conservative Gulf allies, split US civilians
and military policymakers and cost major US and EU oil companies over $20
billion dollars in lost Iranian oil contracts. While the ZPC, via its influence
in the mass media and contributions to the leading presidential candidates,
has shaped elite opinion in defense of Israeli genocide in Gaza and war
policy toward Iran, it has failed to 'turn' the great majority of the American
public opposed to Middle East wars from favoring the prompt withdrawal
of US troops from Iraq and condemning the officially acknowledged use of
torture in detainee interrogations.
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- Cracks in the Zionist Monolith
-
- There are even some cracks in the ZPC monolithic control
of public debate on the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the disastrous
role of the pro-Israel power configuration in formulating US domestic security
and war policy. Despite the Daily Alerts reproduction of at least a dozen
vitriolic, histrionic, ad hominum attacks on Professors Mearsheimer and
Walt and their book on the Israel Lobby and former President Jimmy Carter's
book on the Israeli apartheid policy against Palestinians, the issues they
raise have circulated widely and continue to influence millions of Americans.
Jewish critics, both secular and religious, Zionist and anti-Zionist (especially
the younger generations), are publicly challenging the pretense of the
mainline Jewish organizations' claim to speak for the Jewish community
with regard to Israel and US Middle East policy.
-
- Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, a
primarily anti-Zionist Jewish organization, has joined with the province
of Ontario's biggest public sector trade union in denouncing Israeli colonial
policy in Palestine and challenging Zionist dominance of the Jewish community
and influence over the Canadian trade union movement.
-
- Major protestant denominations in the United States,
including the Presbyterians and Methodists are supporting divestment of
US companies aiding Israel's brutal colonial rule in the West Bank and
Gaza. In the first week of February, the student government at the London
School of Economics voted by an overwhelming majority in favor of divestment
campaign against companies supporting Israeli occupation. A growing number
of universities organized well-attended teach-ins throughout North America,
protesting Israel's apartheid regime and policy, despite vitriolic attacks
from prominent Jewish administrators and Zionist academics.
-
- Top US military commanders, active and retired, have
taken initiatives that directly contravene the ZPC dictates on Iran by
praising its cooperation in stabilizing Iraq and playing a critical supporting
role in overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan.
-
- The major intelligence agencies in the US report on Iran's
absence of a nuclear weapon development program, contradicting the propaganda
line of the Administration. This has struck a powerful blow against the
ZPC warmongers and their Israel-First agents in the Treasury Department
(Levey, Glaser), the National Security Council (Elliott Abrams), the White
House (Joshua Bolton), State Department (Wolfowitz) and Pentagon (Shumsky).
-
- We are engaged in a life and death struggle against war,
terror and genocide against Imperial and Zionist barbarism. As the
ZPC push for a military confrontation with Iran before Bush leaves office;
as the ZPC back Israel's policy of economic blockades to starve the people
of Gaza, assassinate its leaders and shred all public order in Gaza; as
the ZPC back Israeli state-sponsored extra-territorial murders (likely
to provoke new terror retaliatory attacks in the US and EU and the end
of democratic freedoms in America); and as the ZPC actively support the
shredding of constitutional and judicial liberties of American citizens
and residents and the expansion of a repressive security state, we should
recognize the following: In the final instance, in fighting the ZPC, we
should be aware of powerful enemies in high places, acting against the
interests of our country.
-
- However, we should recognize we also have enormous support
among the American people and even tactical allies among some officials
in the military and intelligence community. We have a new generation of
active dissident Christian, secular and Jewish critics of Israel and the
ZPC, as well as billions of supporters among Muslims world wide, among
secular Arabs and the majority of citizens in Europe, Latin America, Asia
and Africa. Above all, we are defending our own, hard-won democratic freedoms,
our own families' and communities' security from Israeli-provoked terrorist
attacks and, even more important, our right to develop policies in the
interest of the American people, free from the dictates of Israel and its
agents.
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