- In Israel, a country stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics
control the government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu. Last week Netanyahu called for "crippling sanctions"
against Iran.
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- The kind of blockade that Netanyahu wants qualifies as
an act of war. Israel has long threatened to attack Iran on its own but
prefers to draw in the US and NATO.
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- Why does Israel want to initiate a war between the United
States and Iran?
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- Is Iran attacking other countries, bombing civilians
and destroying civilian infrastructure?
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- NO. THESE ARE CRIMES COMMITTED BY ISRAEL AND THE US.
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- Is Iran evicting peoples from lands they have occupied
for centuries and herding them into ghettoes?
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- No, that's what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians
for 60 years.
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- WHAT IS IRAN DOING?
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- Iran is developing nuclear energy, which is its right
as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran's nuclear energy program
is subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
which consistently reports that its inspections find no diversion of enriched
uranium to a weapons program.
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- The position taken by Israel, and by Israel's puppet
in Washington, is that Iran must not be allowed to have the rights as a
signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty that every other signatory has,
because Iran might divert enriched uranium to a weapons program.
-
- In other words, Israel and the US claim the right to
abrogate Iran's right to develop nuclear energy. The Israeli/US position
has no basis in international law or in anything other than the arrogance
of Israel and the United States.
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- THE HYPOCRISY IS EXTREME.
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- Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty
and developed its nuclear weapons illegally on the sly, with, as far as
we know, US help.
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- As Israel is an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons
and has a fanatical government that is capable of using them, crippling
sanctions should be applied to Israel to force it to disarm.
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- PALESTINE: PEACE NOT APARTHEID
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- Israel qualifies for crippling sanctions for another
reason. It is an apartheid state, as former US President Jimmy Carter demonstrated
in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
-
- The US led the imposition of sanctions against South
Africa because of South Africa's apartheid practices. The sanctions forced
the white government to hand over political power to the black population.
Israel practices a worse form of apartheid than did the white South African
government. Yet, Israel maintains that it is "anti-semitic" to
criticize Israel for a practice that the world regards as abhorrent.
-
- What remains of the Palestinian West Bank that has not
been stolen by Israel consists of isolated ghettoes. Palestinians are cut
off from hospitals, schools, their farms, and from one another. They cannot
travel from one ghetto to another without Israeli permission enforced at
checkpoints.
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- The Israeli government's explanation for its gross violation
of human rights comprises the greatest collection of lies in world history.
No one, with the exception of American "christian zionists,"
believes one word of it.
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- THE UNITED STATES ALSO QUALIFIES FOR CRIPPLING SANCTIONS.
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- Indeed, the US is over-qualified. On the basis of lies
and intentional deception of the US Congress, the US public, the UN and
NATO, the US government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and used the "war
on terror" that Washington orchestrated to overturn US civil liberties
enshrined in the US Constitution.
-
- One million Iraqis have paid with their lives for America's
crimes and four million are displaced. Iraq and its infrastructure are
in ruins, and Iraq's professional elites, necessary to a modern organized
society, are dead or dispersed. The US government has committed a war crime
on a grand scale. If Iran qualifies for sanctions, the US qualifies a thousand
times over.
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- No one knows how many women, children, and village elders
have been murdered by the US in Afghanistan. However, the American war
of aggression against the Afghan people is now in its ninth year. According
to the US military, an American victory is still a long ways away. Admiral
Michael Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in August
that the military situation in Afghanistan is "serious and deteriorating."
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- MUNITIONS THE ONLY SAFE STOCK INVESTMENT
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- Older Americans can look forward to the continuation
of this war for the rest of their lives, while their Social Security and
Medicare rights are reduced in order to free up funds for the US armaments
industry. Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden have made munitions the only safe
stock investment in the United States.
-
- What is the purpose of the war of aggression against
Afghanistan? Soon after his inauguration, President Obama promised to provide
an answer but did not. Instead, Obama quickly escalated the war in Afghanistan
and launched a new one in Pakistan that has already displaced 2 million
Pakistanis. Obama has sent 21,000 more US troops into Afghanistan and already
the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is requesting
20,000 more.
-
- Obama is escalating America's war of aggression against
the Afghanistan people despite three high profile opinion polls that show
that the American public is firmly opposed to the continuation of the war
against Afghanistan.
-
- Sadly, the ironclad agreement between Israel and Washington
to war against Muslim peoples is far stronger than the connection between
the American public and the American government. At a farewell dinner party
last Thursday for Israel's military attache in Washington, who is returning
to Israel to become deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, Admiral
Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Undersecretary of
Defense Michele Flournoy, and and Dan Shapiro, who is in charge of Middle
East affairs on the National Security Council, were present to pay their
respects.
-
- THE US WILL ALWAYS STAND WITH ISRAEL
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- Admiral Mullen declared that the US will always stand
with Israel. No matter how many war crimes Israel commits. No matter how
many women and children Israel murders. No many how many Palestinians Israel
drives from their homes, villages, and lands.
-
- IF TRUTH COULD BE TOLD, THE TRUE AXIS-OF-EVIL IS THE
UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL.
-
- Millions of Americans are now homeless because of foreclosures.
Millions more have lost their jobs, and even more millions have no access
to health care. Yet, the US government continues to squander hundreds of
billions of dollars on wars that serve no US purpose. President Obama and
General McChrystal have taken the position that they know best, the American
public be damned.
-
- It could not be made any clearer that the President of
the United States and the US military have no regard whatsoever for democracy,
human rights, and international law. This is yet another reason to apply
crippling sanctions against Washington, a government that has emerged under
Bush/Obama as a brownshirt state that deals in lies, torture, murder, war
crimes, and deception.
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- MANY GOVERNMENTS ARE COMPLICIT IN AMERICA'S WAR CRIMES.
-
- With Obama's budget deep in the red, Washington's wars
of naked aggression are dependent on financing by the Chinese, Japanese,
Russians, Saudis, South Koreans, Indians, Canadians and Europeans. The
second this foreign financing of American war crimes stops, America's wars
of aggression against Muslims stop.
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- The US is not a forever "superpower" that can
indefinitely ignore its own laws and international law.
-
- The US will eventually fall as a result of its hubris,
arrogance, and imperial overreach.
-
- When the American Empire collapses, will its enablers
also be held accountable in the war crimes court?
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- ____________
-
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- Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally-syndicated
columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father
of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall
Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He is a
graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and he holds a Ph.D. from
the University of Virginia. He was a post-graduate at the University of
California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton
College.
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