THE UNKNOWN BOOK

June 6th, 2009

The Fate of Author of “Fate”

By Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht

I am the unknown Jew. Just as there are monuments to the unknown soldier and the unknown political prisoner, there should be a monument to the unknown Jew. We are Jews who oppose Zionism, who deplore Israeli oppression and aggression, who fear that Judaism may not survive Israel. We are probably a majority of Jews, but no one knows this because we have been effectively intimidated and suppressed by the Zionist minority.

The degree of suppression is inconceivable in a democratic society. I wrote a book called The Fate of the Jews, which was published in August, 1983. It argues that Jewish ethics and Israeli power are incompatible; that Jewish obligations to love thy neighbor, do justice and love mercy, oppress not the stranger, are being obliterated by Israel; and that the Israelis are surviving, but not as Jews.

Attempts were made to bury the book even before publication. For example, a liberal magazine expressed interest in publishing an excerpt, the text of which apparently was given to a prominent liberal Jewish journalist. His reaction was vehement; the magazine changed its mind about the excerpt and the journalist wrote a personal letter to my agent trying to kill the book with one mighty blow. “It is a preposterous book,” he said, “easily the worst I’ve looked at in years.”

So much for Jewish liberalism. Shortly thereafter, Publishers Weekly, the bible of the publishing industry, offered a very different opinion in its prepublication review. “The book is an outcry right out of Jeremiah.” said the review. “Written with courage and clarity, Feuerlicht’s detailed analysis of what she sees as American Jewry’s embrace of a false god in the state of Israel is certain to place her book in the heart of a raging controversy.”

But I was not fated to be at the heart of a raging controversy, because you cannot hear silence. The publisher did not take out a single advertisement for the book. Many bookstores refused to carry it. In one major chain, where it had been ordered, it was on a list of books not to be reordered.

The least expensive way to promote a book is to put the author on television and radio. For a previous book on the Sacco-Vanzetti trial in the 1920’s, I was on 65 or 70 TV and radio shows in just four cities. For this more timely book on Jews and Israel—a story that is in the headlines almost every day—the publisher found no television and only eight minor radio shows in New York. Of the eight, two were cancelled and two that had been taped were not broadcast, at least not when they were scheduled.

Finally, I hired my own publicity person and though some shows did turn me down, I was booked on major TV and radio programs in Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, Boston, and Houston. I didn’t go any farther because I couldn’t afford to and because appearances cannot sell books that are not in bookstores.

I have written children’s books that received more attention than The Fate of the Jews. As far as I know, only three newspapers reviewed it, The Los Angeles Times, The Pittsburgh Press, and, under prolonged pressure, The Christian Science Monitor. The Washington Post praised the Sacco-Vanzetti book on the front page of its Sunday book review; The Fate of the Jews went unnoticed.

When all else failed, I told my story to several well known iconoclastic journalists. All were suitably indignant, all promised me their support, all were either voluntarily or involuntarily suppressed.

Jews are disturbed about Israel. I believe more of them would have read The Fate of the Jews if they knew it existed. Zionists feared the book because they were judged by Jewish standards and found wanting. They didn’t dare openly criticize or burn it because the noise or the smoke might have attracted attention. In the freest country in the world, with the aid and acquiescence of the freest press in the world, a zealous minority successfully suppressed dissent and stoned me to death with silence. The book is now out of print.

 Washington Report on the Middle east
American Educational Trust, 27 May 1985, p. 3

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JEWISH PORNOGRAPHY

June 6th, 2009

 

Jewish pornography questions the limits of assimilation.
by Joshua Cohen

 

A man gets drunk and lays down with his two virgin daughters. A man secures permission from his two wives to lay down with his two slave girls. A woman disguises herself as a whore and lays down with her father-in-law.

This is the original Jewish pornography, as found in the book of Genesis. But is it really Jewish Pornography? In typical Jewish fashion, the answer is yet another question: Would you masturbate to it?

Probably not. Why? The Tanakh—the Old Testament and the Jewish Scriptures—is full of incest and the taking of virgins. In a literature where the idea of “barely legal” has absolutely no meaning, scripture and pornography overlap more than you’d think.

But the Bible isn’t Jewish Porn. Philip Roth isn’t Jewish Porn, either. Al Goldstein isn’t Jewish Porn. Even Ron Jeremy—known to his proud mother as Ron Hyatt—isn’t Jewish Porn. Traci Lords—who would have been Nora Louise Kuzma at her bat mitzvah—is just another shaven screen starlet. She has nothing to do with Jewish Porn.

What of Playboy playmate Lindsey Vuolo? In the November 2001 issue, the 20-year-old Philadelphia-area co-ed identified herself as a Jew and included a photograph from her bat mitzvah. The media maydel became a joke for synagogue lobbies across America by inadvertently questioning the limits of assimilation in Jewish life. Playboy is not selling her religion, and neither is her religion selling magazines. Her tits are. Her ass is. Nobody’s jerking off to little Lindsey from the suburbs because she’s a Jewess, but because she’s hot.

JEwish Porn (JP) fetishizes Jewish women. In the Jew-run Vivid Video’s The Burning Bush… Hot, Jewish Babe Vivid, Sex Action, one can enjoy “4 Hrs. of Fiddling on the Roof!” Jeanna Fine, Sindee Cox, Melissa Monet, Nina Hartley (nee Hartman) and Alexandra Silk suck and fuck as in any film—the only difference is these girls are said to be Jewish.

But even this is a thin broth. For the real JP, head to the Web, where the pop-up windows accumulate thick like locusts. There you’ll find pornography about Jews made for Jews and their admirers to masturbate to, to enact the age-old sin of Onan, of the thirty-eighth chapter of Genesis.

In JP, as in other porn, large-breasted and well-tanned women pose and perform sexual acts. Except here, the women are Hebrews, recipients of the Law at Sinai, the women who sang with Miriam at the parting of the Red Sea, the women—brides and queens in religious imagery—who are metaphors for theShechinah, or Godhead, for the soul. At least that’s what they’re supposed to be.

The photos and movies emphasize the stereotype of heavy-breasted women with large noses, dark curly hair and unshaven genitals. They’re heavily made up and wear ostentatious jewelry—dangling amber necklaces and loud diamond rings. Their faces often twist into superior, snobbish sneers.

In some cases, these daughters of Sarah are screwed by uncircumcised men, and in bright-pink dialogue bubbles, they make much of how this religio-surgical fact would enrage their mothers. Their faux biographies profess a predilection for money. Consider the following website come-ons (inserting “[sic]” at will):

These babes are Pretty, Perky and Pareve
Young Yentas with big boobs
JAP’s getting down n’ dirty
Enough streaming video to make you PLOTZ
Rich New York chicks, raised in the lap of luxury, ready to feel a real man inside them.
Oy! Don’t tell their mommas what you see in here! 
These aren’t the kind of girls you’d invite over for passover, But I wouldn’t mind spending a high holy day with any of them.
Fresh from a summer on the Kabutz these pretty little Jewish Coeds are ready for a little action and it shows! If their Rabbi’s find out about this there would be more than a little Jewish guilt to dish out!

 

At the Jewish Twin Sister Incest website, twin Jewish sisters can be seen “Washing, Posing, Spanking, Undressing, Bondage, Master Bating.” All, it seems, without a trace of satire. The identical twins in question may be known to some New Yorkers—they’re Victoria and Marissa of the Sisters Grimm, the trash-rock band that appeared regularly at Coney Island High. Others may know them as Rocket and Leather from More Dirty Debutantes “88″ and other adult videos. In private, these nice Jewish girls—originally from Brooklyn—may smirk and giggle about their foray into porn, but there’s nary a wink on the site. They’re working the Jew angle hard, and make it clear that in order to see the goods, you must first sign up for Adult Check, the online porn industry’s standard pay system.

Does this contribute to anti-Semitism? Or is it just a convenient site for multi-fetishism? Where else can one find real twin Jewesses engaging in incestuous lesbianism with a touch of bondage and sadomasochism?

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the spiritual guru who wrote the bestselling Kosher Sex. He has an excellent reputa-
tion in matters both religious and secular and his specialty is sex, so he seemed like the logical guy to consult about Jewish Porn. When asked about JP, he responded that he was “strongly opposed to any such thing” and had no time to comment further on it.

I interviewed 11 rabbis, none of whom had any idea that Jewish Pornography even exists. When I explained JP to them, they requested that their names not be included in this article. My own rabbi was one of them. His only comment: “You worry about Jewish pornography when your people die in Israel?” My own mother was shocked: “Don’t people hate us enough?” Among my friends, the reactions were predictable. The ones who had heard of Jewish Porn shared their favorite sites with me, while those who hadn’t were surprised. “You mean something like that actually exists?” one female friend asked.

David, a good Jew, observed: “It’s a strange thing. It’s more funny than erotic. I laugh and then I jerk off.” But why does he choose it in the first place? Clues may be found in the Kabbalah, in which dualities of masculine and feminine are forever interpolated. Gershom Scholem, in Origins of Kabbalah, points out one of the most interesting dualities: the Double Sophia (represented ashokhmah), the bride and the daughter, one a “virgin of light” in the upper world of the pleroma. The other, lower Sophia “succumbed to the temptation of the hyle and fell from the pleroma into the lower worlds, where it is…in exile.”

The Upper Sophia is often referred to as the “Wisdom of God,” while the lower Sophia was known as the “Wisdom of Solomon”—or worldly knowledge. This is an interesting mirror of the Kabbalistic idea of Lilith and Eve. Lilith was the sinful temptress of Adam; she was the real first woman and she fell. She was replaced with Eve, a more innocent woman, whose “evil” was strictly an exterior matter—that famous piece of produce. Many Jewish men grow up assuming that they’ll fuck a Lilith and marry an Eve. Jewish Porn is the Lilith of the college Jew-boy.

JEwish Pornography is about Jewish women, and just as other specialty porn plays up stereotypes, so, too, does JP. Get beyond the JAP stereotypes (“Who says Jewish girls don’t give head?” asks more than one website), and you’ll find more subtle themes. For example, the modesty of the Orthodox.

On some websites, the women wear the single-female uniform of modern orthodoxy: ankle-length, dark-colored skirts and long-sleeved shirts, and sometimes wigs, or shaidels. This modesty is intended to render them more erotic than if they were naked. The Jewish idea of modesty, peeking through the mechitza of taboo, is related to another interesting subculture—Jewish submissives in the world of bondage and sadomasochism (BDSM). On one website, “m” writes: “as a Jewish female submissive I believe my worlds [Judaism and sex] still mesh quite well… Being and knowing I am submissive allows me to be more of me…and that is what being Jewish is about… For me, it is a pleasure and an honor to serve… And similar to Judaism, that is what BDSM is all about…respect.”

This literate website is part of JPEX, the Jewish Power Exchange, a website and mailing list owned by one Princess Laya, who offers this explanation: “When the Hebrews were asked by Hashem if they would accept the Torah, they responded, Na’aseh V’Nishma, we will hear and we will do. The ultimate form of submission is to be willing to do the bidding of one’s Master with trust before receiving instructions.”

Another recurring motif in JP is the idea of the Mikvah, the ritual bath, as it relates to a woman’s menstruation and the sacred purification process. One site suggests that a Mikvah is an excellent place to pick up Jew-girls. These aspects of Judaism are more than mere set pieces for masturbating. There is a deeper significance. If all male Jews died out, there would still be Jews, in a Talmudic sense. Jewish women are the hosts of the bloodline, the givers of the ethnicity. There are only more Jews because of Jewish women, so it’s not unnatural that they may be venerated and sexualized, admired as Jews first, women second. In consuming JP, are Jewish men driven by a fear of extinction?

From Upper West Side penthouses with views of the park to suburban living rooms, from hairy and bespectacled Jewish men to tanned, pre-rhinoplasty JAPs, Jewish Porn is a virtual homeland of neuroses, an Israel of the fetishized. One image that sticks in my head is a picture of Yarden Godowsky, one of the “Kosher Cuties” at cooldiggygirls.com who is “pretty, perk and pareve.” In her own words: “I was born in Russia and now live in Ashdod, Israel. The one universal in my travels is my love of big boobs. It’s great to have DD’s.”

She is pictured in what appears to be her Ashdod living room, crouching in a cutoff tank top and holding a hula hoop against patterned wallpaper. She has a boy’s haircut and lipstick as red as the first-plague Nile. She is a greenhorn, an immigrant, and this is her absorption. She is the classic intersection of laughter and seriousness in Jewish identity, updated for the new millennium.

JEwish Porn is hardly the only brand of religious smut on the market. Admirers of Catholic schoolgirls are legion, and Angry- White-Man-on-Muslim-Woman material has proliferated since the first Gulf War. The first has, for the most part, been stripped of its religious significance. They’re Catholic—so what? They’re being naughty—let’s hope they don’t tell Mother Superior. Most erotic is the discipline aspect and the recollection of childhood exploration. The second, anti-Muslim porn, is less about religion than it is the embodiment of directionless hate in the form of sexual violence. It’s about ripping off that burka to see what’s underneath. It’s about the myth of the Manifest White Dick exploring and Christianizing the heathens in Holy scrotum-water.

Likewise, Jewish Porn is not religious pornography. Despite the occasional use of ritual objects in the acts of sodomy, this is anethnic pornography. It fetishizes a small yet vital segment of the American populace. Catholic schoolgirls wait at their bus stop, skipping rope and doing whatever it is that Catholic schoolgirls do—a man watches from his wood-paneled sedan and masturbates. On the opposite corner, Jewish school girls wait for their bus to day school, doing whatever it is that Jewish girls do. They, too, have their masturbating man in the wood-paneled sedan.

I was wrong to ask the rabbis why JP exists. It exists because it exists. If goyim in Uncircumcised, Oklahoma can eat bagels and knishes and drink black cherry soda, then Jews have the right to indulge in something outside their Kollective Ken. If they can do it, we can do it.

The average JP consumer is my friend David who laughs and then jerks off. Harmless entertainment. Let him have his Lilith, and let the goyim have their JAP fantasies. In the larger scheme, full split shots of “hairy Hebraic vaginas” are hardly small steps to the railcars. Or are they?

At the extreme end of Jewish Porn, the terror of the concentration camps is re-enacted for sexual gratification. In Holocaust Porn, Jewish women are shown squatting and defecating in packed trains. They are shown having their heads shaved. They are emaciated, with their ribs poking out. They are incinerated in open ovens. They are gassed. They are sodomized with severed limbs, sometimes their own limbs.

One can find staged photographs of a naked and shivering woman under a showerhead in a tiled hygienic facility. I have seen photos of a man dressed as a stormtrooper emptying a tank labeled “Gasoline” into a woman’s mouth. The woman holds the funnel and masturbates the Nazi with her right hand. These photos are grainy black-and-whites, yet are clearly contemporary. And here things get dirty: The Holocaust Porn industry is based in Israel. The films are mostly made by Israelis, and they are also mostly purchased by Israelis. The actresses are overwhelmingly Israeli-Russian immigrants.

Is Israeli involvement in Holocaust Porn a sick manifestation of an addiction to persecution? Is it a reaction to assimilation—or a product of it? Is it the blackest form of satire? How different are these re-enactments from those rare bits of genuine Holocaust footage passed around for erotic consumption? In an essay on Holocaust Porn, Andrea Dworkin writes that the victims have become the victimizers. That’s not quite the point: the victims have become the victimizers while remaining the victims.

The level of victimization found in more mainstream forms of JP is open to debate. Some, like Dworkin, herself from a family of survivors, argue that it is, if not a direct line, at least a slippery slope. Maybe. But one thing is sure: Anyone who stars in Holocaust Porn, or directs it or does editing or contributes in any way in its production or facilitates its distribution, or has masturbated to it or watched it, or snickered after overhearing a fleeting reference at the urinals in the synagogue—all of these people are going to hell, gehinnon, that mythic valley outside of Jerusalem’s walls.

New York Press — Volume 16, Issue 10  -  3/5/2003

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CARLOS AND THE ANTI ZIONIST PARTY

June 3rd, 2009

By Benjamin Weinthal

 The imprisoned global terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez – better known as the notorious Carlos the Jackal – issued on Monday a campaign endorsement of the Anti-Zionist Party by telephone hookup from the French prison Poissy to 300 supporters in Paris. The anti-Israel party is fielding candidates in the June 7 elections for the European Parliament.

Carlos expressed his “solidarity” with the views of the head of the Anti-Zionist Party, French comedian Dieudonné Mbala Mbala. The Anti-Zionist Party platform, calls for an end to “Zionist interference in the nation’s public affairs,” and a rebuke of “politicians who apologize for Zionism.”  The radical anti-Israeli party demands that France “free our state, our government, our institutions from the possession and pressure of Zionist organizations; eradicate all forms of Zionism in the nation” and “prevent enterprises and institutions from contributing to the war efforts of a foreign nation, which does not respect International Law.”

Carlos and Dieudonné share a hatred of the Jewish state. Carlos, who joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1970, is serving a life sentence in the Poissy prison near Paris for a triple murder in 1975. He termed Israel “the first terrorist state in history” at his sentencing hearing in 1997 and blamed Israel for framing him in the assassination of two French intelligence agents and a Lebanese informant. Carlos is thought to be the mastermind behind the Palestinian terrorist group Black September murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, [They were in fact shot by the German Security forces] as well as of a grenade attack on an Israeli bank in the United Kingdom.

French courts have fined Dieudonné on five occasions for anti-Semitic statements. He called the Holocaust “memorial pornography” and last December he awarded the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, a prize for “non-conformity and impertinence.” Dieudonné had a performer dressed up as a concentration camp prisoner deliver the award to Faurisson.

With a view toward building, according to Dieudonné, “the only anti-Zionist movement” in France, his party has attracted a “Who’s Who” of anti-Semitic candidates from across the French political spectrum. [This is a typical lie and calumny spread by the press]. Among Dieudonné’s new political bedfellows is the extreme right-wing party of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Alain Soral, an ex-communist who served as an advisor to Le Pen, is running as a candidate for the Anti-Zionist Party. [Many others coming from the Left jumped onboard.] Le Pen, who described the Nazi death camps as “a detail of history,” is purportedly the godfather of Dieudonné’s daughter. [This wa a silly joke.]

Another Anti-Zionist candidate is Yahia Gouasmi, head of the Zahra Center, which is affiliated [= politically close to]  with Hizbullah and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Gouasmi said in late May the Zionists in France control “the media, the education of our children and our government,” in order to serve “Israeli interests.”

Ginette Skandrani, a former French Green Party member [founder] , is also running with the rabidly anti-Israel party. She was tossed out of the Green Party for denying the Holocaust [another lie]. 

Claude Guéant, the general secretary to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, told the France Radio J [J=Jewish] program that one should consider banning the “open anti-Semitism” of the Anti-Zionist Party. [But he miserably failed to find a good reason.] The French National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism [= Jewish Thought Police] asked the Interior Ministry to prohibit the party’s EU campaign. But Rachida Dati, France’s justice minister, said the ministry found no basis to legally ban the party. ”If the goal of this party would be to conduct an anti-Semitic and racist discourse, he [Dieudonné ] would not have been allowed to run in the election,” Dati said. [Dati is a staunch Zionist propagandist]

 Jerusalem Post  June 4, 2009

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1244034990738&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

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DEFENDING ZIONISM — DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE

June 3rd, 2009

by Stephen Lendman

 This article responds to a March 15 Los Angeles Times Judea Pearl one headlined: “Is anti-Zionism hate?” Pearl teaches computer science at UCLA, is the father of slain journalist[-spy]  Daniel Pearl, and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. It was “formed….to continue Danny’s mission and to address the root causes of this tragedy in the spirit” of the man it represents, including “uncompromised objectivity and integrity….and respect for people of all cultures….” 

Some of its honorary board member belie this purpose:

– former president Bill Clinton, an unindicted war criminal and backer of neoliberal plunder;
– Elie Wiesel, a shameless self-promoter, “Holocaust” exploiter, and apologist for the most outrageous Israeli crimes;
– Jordan’s Queen Noor, wife of King Abdullah II, who, like his father Hussein, rules with dictatorial police state powers; and
– Christiane Amanpour and Ted Koppel, two notables in the corporate media who never let facts conflict with their views and support for the powerful.

Pearl calls anti-Zionism “hate more dangerous than anti-Semitism, threatening lives and peace in the Middle East.” Zionism is precisely the opposite as numerous Jewish writers, including this one, have addressed. In his book Overcoming Zionism, Joel Kovel explained how it fosters “imperialist expansion and militarism (with) signs of the fascist malignancy;” that it turned Israel “into a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses” led by terrorists posing as democrats. Kovel’s book and his work got him fired from the Bard College faculty effective July 1 when his current contract expires – for daring to criticize Israel, its Zionist ideology, state-sponsored terror, and decades of lawlessness and egregious behavior.

Kovel expressed outrage that institutions like Bard aren’t bothered; that they grant Israel impunity, suppress dissent, then marginalize, punish, and remove the “heretics,” ones like Kovel who honorably and courageously write truths. Pearl railed about a UCLA Center for Near East Studies symposium invitation to “four longtime Israel bashers” so they could attack Zionism’s legitimacy and “its vision of a two-state solution….” — a scheme to consign Palestinians to isolated cantons and steal their most valuable land.

He equates legitimate Israeli criticism and anti-Zionism with “criminaliz(ing) Israel’s existence, distort(ing) its motives and malign(ing) its character, its birth, even its conception.” He cites “Jewish leaders (condemning) this hate-fest as a dangerous invitation to anti-Semitic hysteria” even though one has nothing to do with the other and conflating them masks the real issue –Zionism’s corrosive effects and the myths on which it’s based.

Ones Pearl ignores in stating “Anti-Zionism rejects the very notion that Jews are a nation — a collective bonded by a common history — and, accordingly denies Jews the right to self-determination in their historical birthplace. It seeks the dismantling of the Jewish nation-state: Israel, (what it) ‘grants’ to other historically bonded collectives (e.g. French, Spanish, Palestinians), the right to nationhood….”

Pearl can’t accept the hard facts that Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand documented in his important 2008 book When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? It exposes biblical nonsense comprising core Zionist beliefs about Jews:

 – that ancient Romans expelled them;
– their exodus from Egypt, then left to wander the earth rootless;
– enslaved, oppressed, and tormented for centuries; and
– the myth that God bestowed a “Greater Israel” for Jews alone — “A land without people for a people without land.”

 According to Israeli journalist Tom Segev and others: 

– there never was a Jewish people, just a Jewish religion;
– there was no exile, therefore no return, and much of the Jewish Diaspora was voluntary; and
– the story was a Zionist invention, a conspiracy to justify a future Jewish state, and now vilify Palestinian self-determination as a plot to destroy it.

 With regard to other “bonded collectives,” France, Spain, America and other states are nationalities, not religions. Israel is a Jewish state with rights for Jews alone. They matter. Others don’t, and therein lies the difference. Palestinians, in contrast, are occupied, impoverished, oppressed, driven from their land, vilified for being Muslims, and victimized by slow-motion genocide to destroy them and any hope for self-determination.

 ”Are Jews a nation,” asks Pearl? “Some philosophers would argue Jews are a nation first and religion second.” He cites the usual mythology:

 – the Exodus and return to the “promised land before they received the Torah at Mt. Sinai;”
– “the unshaken conviction in their eventual repatriation to (their) birthplace (since) the Roman expulsion;” and
– their “shared history, not religion (as) the primary uniting force behind the secular, multiethnic society of Israel” – favoring Jews alone in a quasi secular/religious state where practicing another one is dangerous.

 The “Jewish identity today feed(s) on Jewish history (more precisely folklore and myths) and its natural derivatives -

 – the state of Israel” despite its illegitimate birth and mythological roots;
– “its struggle for survival” in spite of being the world’s fourth most powerful military, nuclear-armed; with no enemies except the ones it makes; and having a history of aggressive wars; violence over conciliation; confrontation, not diplomacy; and claiming self-defense as justification when there is none;
– “its cultural and scientific achievements,” much of the latter involving militarism and hard line security; and
– “its relentless drive for peace.”

 Pearl like most others can’t accept the fact that Israel disdains peace, thrives on violence, and needs it as justification. The very notion of peace and conflict resolution terrifies it. What prime minister Yitzhak Shamir once admitted about Israel’s 1982 Lebanon war — that there was “terrible danger….not so much a military one as a political one” so a pretext was invented to attack when no threat or justification existed.

It took 18,000 lives and left South Lebanon occupied until Israel Defense Forces withdrew in May 2000, except for the 25 square km Shebaa Farms area illegally retained to this day.

Yet Pearl insists that “anti-Zionism targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the Jewish population of Israel, whose physical safety and personal dignity depend crucially on maintaining Israel’s sovereignty. Put bluntly, the anti-Zionist ‘plan’ to do away with Israel condemns 5.5 million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal defenselessness in a region where genocidal designs are not uncommon.”

He adds that “anti-Zionist rhetoric (shows) academic sophistication and social acceptance in certain extreme yet vocal circles. (It’s also) a stab in the back to the Israeli peace camp (and) gives credence (to) the hidden agenda of every Palestinian (for) the eventual elimination of Israel.”

Now some facts misrepresented, distorted, or unstated by Pearl and other like-minded apologists: 

– There never was nor is there now an “Israeli peace camp,” as explained above.
– Israel’s sovereignty isn’t the issue. It exists, is accepted, and anti-Zionists don’t dispute it. Further, since at least the late 1980s, Palestinian leaders (including Arafat and Hamas) have been willing to extend recognition. But Israel rejects all peace and reconciliation overtures, yet the dominant media and Zionists won’t mention it.
– Palestinians and other Arabs don’t target Israel and haven’t since the 1973 war. However, they justifiably defend themselves when attacked as international law allows.
– Anti-Zionists, like this writer, have no plan or desire to destroy Israel, harm its people, or render them defenseless. Demanded, however, is that Israel behave, act civilized, practice the democracy it preaches, observe international and its own laws, and be held fully accountable when it doesn’t, including its leaders for their crimes of war and against humanity to deter future ones from committing similar violations.
– Israel alone menaces Palestinians and other regional states, including Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Those nations, nor any others, threaten Israel, yet again media and Zionist propaganda say otherwise.
– Zionist ideology is extremist, undemocratic, and hateful. It claims Jewish supremacy, specialness, and uniqueness – God’s “chosen people.” It harms Jews and non-Jews alike. Former Israeli scholar, critic, and life-long human rights activist, Israel Shahak (1933 – 2001), explained the dangers of Jewish chauvinism, religious fanaticism, and its influence on America’s polity.

He called the notion of self-hating Jews “nonsensical” and explained the definition of a Jew: ….”if either their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother (or) great-great-grandmother were Jewesses by religion; or if the person (converted) to Judaism in a way satisfactory to the Israeli authorities, and on condition that the person has not converted from Judaism to another religion.” According to the Talmud and post-Talmudic rabbinic law, “conversion (must be) performed by authorized rabbis in a proper manner.” For females, it entails an outlandish ritual – “their inspection by three rabbis while naked in a ‘bath of purification’ ” to confirm it.

Shahak wrote extensively on how Israel discriminates in favor of Jews in most every aspect of life, including the three he called most important – “residency rights, the right to work (and to have) equality before the law.”

Zionist ideology demeans non-Jews and denies them equal rights in Israel. A body of law enforces it – to legally discriminate against non-Jewish Israeli citizens (for their religion) and Palestinians in the Territories, something unimaginable in all developed states and most others on every continent.

Shahak stated: “The obvious intention of such discriminatory measures is to decrease the number of non-Jewish citizens of Israel (to affirm its existence as a) ‘Jewish’ state” quite hostile to and demeaning of other religious faiths.

This is the Zionist message and why growing numbers of Jews and many others oppose it. Supporting Zionism is repugnant, indefensible, and equivalent to defending cancer, a malignancy relentlessly destroying its host. It must be exposed, denounced, and once and for all expunged from the body politic. A CIA study suggested the alternative – that beyond 20 years, Israel won’t survive in its present form.

The Agency predicts “an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947/1948 and 1967 (Palestinian) refugees. The latter (is) the precondition for sustainable peace in the region.”

According to international lawyer Franklin Lamb, “the handwriting….is on the wall….history will reject the colonial enterprise sooner or later.”

The report also predicts the return of all Palestinian refugees to their homeland and the exodus of two million Israeli Jews to America in the next 15 years. They’re fed up and want to leave. Omitted from the report, or at least unrevealed, is that short of an equitable resolution to the long-standing Palestinian conflict, Israel eventually will destroy itself. Nations that live by the sword, die by it, and Israel is no exception.

The alternative is peace and reconciliation, something Israel flatly rejects. Unless that changes, its very existence is at stake, what history teaches but Israel has yet to learn.

 

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday – Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

 

 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12928

March 30, 2009

 

 

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ISRAELI ATOMIC INDUSTRY

June 2nd, 2009

Tal Rabinovsky, YNet

Leftist Israeli website claims to expose nuclear secrets published by foreign sources 

July 10, 2008

 Are Israel’s nuke secrets available online? The Armageddon <http://www.armagedon.org.il/> website claims to sport vast amounts of information about Israel’s nuclear program and its manufacturing and storage facilities, as published by various foreign sources.   The site is the brainchild of a large group of Israeli intellectuals, journalists and philosophers affiliated with an Israeli group advocating a Middle East free of atomic, biological, and chemical weapons; the organization says Knesset Member Dov Khenin (Hadash) is among its supporters. According to the website’s owners, the site is registered on an Israeli domain and is hosted on Australian-based servers. Armageddon’s owners claim to be the proprietors of a second domain –armagedonz.org ?which they can use in case the Military Censor tries to take it off the air. The details of the second domain’s owner are kept confidential –unlike those of the Israeli domain owner. The group behind the website, backed by several organizations that oppose the distribution of weapons of mass destruction, decided that the topic of WMDs is not given its appropriate place in public debate and that its increasingly growing urgency in the Middle East calls for something to be done.   

‘Website not illegal’

According to the website, the venture is sponsored by British group CND <http://www.cnduk.org/> – the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and found its Australian host with the assistance of Enzyme <http://www.enzyme.org.nz/> – a New-Zealand group that supports various progressive groups.   Gideon Spiro, a journalist and one of the site’s contributing editors, told Ynet that “none of the information on the site is confidential, so we’re not breaking the law. We simply think that when it comes to the nuclear program, the public was brainwashed by the government and doesn’t have any credible information.”   MK Dov Khenin, rumored to be one of the site’s supporters, denied Wednesday ever being approached by the site’s editors: “I don’t know the site so I can’t relate to it. I’m an outspoken advocate for holding a debate on the nuclear (program) in both the political and public arenas. I believe that the longer these things get put off, the more difficult situation Israel <http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3284752,00.html> may find itself in. I welcome any debate on the subject.”   Israel, he added, has an honest interest in disarming the Middle East of any nuclear weapons. “One of our main needs is to demilitarize the region, Iran included. I think this should be one of the pivotal points in Israel’s defense and foreign policy.”   Spiro, on the other hand, is adamant about the fact the Khenin was indeed approached: “I spoke with him and got his consent to put his name on the site. Ideologically speaking, he opposes nuclear weapons, as does any environmentalist. The Hadash platform has a clause objecting to Israel having nuclear weapons. He must be committed to the idea.” Armageddon is not the only website detailing information about Israel’s supposed nuclear capabilities: Surfing the internet for such information results in numerous websites that offer information about top secret units, tactical weapons and strategic measures held by Israel. The majority of information, however, is not available in Hebrew.   The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit offered the following response: “The Military Censor is familiar with the website and is in the process of studying its content; it will make its decision in due time, regardless of the authenticity of the material posted on the website.” Niv Lillian contributed to this report. 

 

:: Article nr. 45597 sent on 10-jul-2008 21:58 ECT

 www.uruknet.info?p=45597 <http://www.uruknet.info/?p=45597> 

 

Link: www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3566189,00.html <http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3566189,00.html>

One year later, this is still valid.

ARMEMENT •  Les secrets du nucléaire israélien divulgués sur Internet

http://www.courrierinternational.com/article.asp?obj_id=87661

“Le site Armageddon soutient qu’il donne en ligne [en hébreu] de nombreuses informations sur le programme nucléaire israélien, ses sites de production et de stockage”, rapporte Yediot Aharonot. A l’origine de ce site se trouve un groupe d’intellectuels, de journalistes et de philosophes israéliens affilié à un groupe militant pour “un Moyen-Orient sans armes nucléaires, chimiques et biologiques”, précise le quotidien israélien. “Selon ce groupe, soutenu par de nombreuses organisations opposées à la prolifération des armes de destruction massive, le problème posé par ces armes n’a pas la place qu’il mérite dans le débat public alors qu’il est urgent de faire quelque chose à ce sujet au Moyen-Orient.” ”Le projet est sponsorisé par le groupe britannique CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) et le site, dont le nom de domaine est enregistré en Israël, est hébergé par un fournisseur d’accès australien lui-même assisté par Enzyme, un groupe néo-zélandais qui soutient divers groupes progressistes”, détaille Yediot Aharonot. Selon Gideon Spiro, un journaliste qui collabore à ce site, “aucune des informations publiées sur le site n’est confidentielle ; il n’y a donc aucune entrave à la loi. Seulement, quand il s’agit du programme nucléaire, le public est soumis à un lavage de cerveau par le gouvernement et ne possède de ce fait aucune information crédible.” Ainsi, Armageddon n’est pas le seul site d’information sur les capacités nucléaires d’Israël. “Les sites abordant ce sujet sur la Toile seraient même assez nombreux. Mais la majorité des informations n’est pas disponible en hébreu.” 

 

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THE SECRETS OF THE LONDON CAGE

May 30th, 2009

Beatings, sleep deprivation and starvation used on SS and Gestapo men
· POW camp in Kensington kept secret and hidden from Red Cross

by Ian Coblain

Kensington Palace Gardens is one of the most exclusive, and expensive, addresses in the world: its stately row of 160-year-old mansions, built on land owned by the crown, is home to ambassadors, billionaires and princes. One property bought by the Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal for a reputed £57m is said to be the most expensive house in London. Down the road, a pair of Manhattan tax lawyers are renovating No 6, while next door, No 7, is the London home of the Sultan of Brunei. Over the years No 8 has housed its fair share of dowagers and dukes.

Between July 1940 and September 1948, however, these three magnificent houses were home to one of the country’s most secret military establishments: the London office of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, known colloquially as the London Cage.

The London Cage was run by MI19, the section of the War Office responsible for gleaning information from enemy prisoners of war, and few outside this organisation knew exactly what went on beyond the single barbed-wire fence that separated the three houses from the busy streets and grand parks of west London.

Years later Tony Whitehead, a consultant psychiatrist in Brighton, recounted in his memoirs how, as a young aircraftsman delivering a belligerent SS sergeant to the Cage, he was shocked to see a German naval officer in full dress uniform on his hands and knees, cleaning the entrance hall floor. An enormous Guardsman stood with one foot on the prisoner’s back, casually enjoying a smoke. When Whitehead collected his prisoner three days later, the man was completely subdued, rarely looked up, and addressed him as sir. “I do not know what had happened to him at the London Cage,” Dr Whitehead wrote.

By examining thousands of documents stored at the National Archives, formerly the Public Record Office, as well as the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, the Guardian has established what happened to this prisoner, and many others like him.

The London Cage was used partly as a torture centre, inside which large numbers of German officers and soldiers were subjected to systematic ill-treatment. In total 3,573 men passed through the Cage, and more than 1,000 were persuaded to give statements about war crimes. The brutality did not end with the war, moreover: a number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948.

The Cage was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland, a forceful, outspoken man deemed to have the perfect background. Although English, the colonel had served briefly in the German army in what is now Namibia shortly after the turn of the century, and was later awarded the OBE for his work interrogating German prisoners during the first world war. In 1939, at the age of 57, he was recalled for service.

The Cage had space for 60 prisoners at any time, and five interrogation rooms. Scotland had around 10 officers serving under him, plus a dozen NCOs who served as interrogators and interpreters. Security was provided by soldiers from the Guards regiments, selected, one archived document asserts, “for their height rather than their brains”.

Among the documents stored at the National Archives at Kew is the manuscript of Scotland’s memoirs. In his first draft he recalled how he would muse, on arriving at the Cage each morning: “‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.’ For if any German had any information we wanted, it was invariably extracted from him in the long run.” There was pandemonium at the War Office when the book was submitted to be censored in June 1950. Officials begged Scotland to quietly lock the manuscript away, then threatened him with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Special Branch detectives were sent to raid his retirement home at Bourne End, Buckinghamshire. The Foreign Office urged suppression of the book, as it would assist “persons agitating on behalf of war criminals”. An assessment by MI5 pointed out that Scotland had detailed repeated breaches of the Geneva convention, with his admissions that prisoners had been forced to kneel while being beaten about the head; forced to stand to attention for up to 26 hours; threatened with execution; or threatened with “an unnecessary operation”.

The book was eventually published after a seven-year delay, and only after all incriminating material had been deleted. It is now clear, however, that Scotland could have tried to reveal far more.

Within the National Archives are documents from two official inquiries into the methods employed at the Cage, one which heard evidence that guards were under orders to knock on some prisoners’ cell doors every 15 minutes, depriving them of sleep, and another which concluded with “the possibility that violence was used” during interrogations.

There is also a long and detailed letter of complaint from one SS captain, Fritz Knoechlein, who describes his treatment after being taken to the Cage in October 1946. Knoechlein alleges that because he was “unable to make the desired confession” he was stripped, given only a pair of pyjama trousers, deprived of sleep for four days and nights, and starved.

The guards kicked him each time he passed, he alleges, while his interrogators boasted that they were “much better” than the “Gestapo in Alexanderplatz”. After being forced to perform rigorous exercises until he collapsed, he says he was compelled to walk in a tight circle for four hours. On complaining to Scotland that he was being kicked even “by ordinary soldiers without a rank”, Knoechlein alleges that he was doused in cold water, pushed down stairs, and beaten with a cudgel. Later, he says, he was forced to stand beside a large gas stove with all its rings lit before being confined in a shower which sprayed extremely cold water from the sides as well as from above. Finally, the SS man says, he and another prisoner were taken into the gardens behind the mansions, where they were forced to run in circles while carrying heavy logs.

“Since these tortures were the consequences of my personal complaint, any further complaint would have been senseless,” Knoechlein wrote. “One of the guards who had a somewhat humane feeling advised me not to make any more complaints, otherwise things would turn worse for me.” Other prisoners, he alleged, were beaten until they begged to be killed, while some were told that they could be made to disappear.

At the time Knoechlein made these allegations he was facing the death penalty, having been convicted of the murder of 124 British soldiers, including 98 members of the Royal Norfolk Regiment. These soldiers had been massacred by men under Knoechlein’s command after being taken prisoner on the retreat to Dunkirk in May 1940. He was in a desperate position, and may have been making desperate allegations in a bid to escape the hangman. Nevertheless, his complaint was taken seriously by War Office officials, who considered whether to convene an inquiry. They eventually decided against this, on the grounds that this would mean delaying Knoechlein’s execution. There was no legal precedent for this, one official noted, besides which “any court of inquiry into these allegations would be futile”.

Similar torture allegations surfaced in 1947, and again the following year, when 21 Gestapo and police officers were tried for the murder of 50 RAF officers who had been shot after tunnelling their way out of Stalag Luft III, the breakout recreated in the Hollywood film The Great Escape.

The court in Hamburg was told that many of the defendants had been starved and systematically beaten at the London Cage, confined in the cold water shower, and “threatened with electrical devices”. Among the defendants was Erich Zacharias, a sergeant in the Gestapo’s frontier police. The only evidence against him was his confession which, MI5 noted in its assessment of Scotland’s memoir, had been signed only because “being a prisoner in their hands, he had been worked on psychologically”. Zacharias insisted that he had also been beaten. Twenty of the defendants were convicted and 14 were hanged, Zacharias among them.

It is impossible to discern, from the War Office archives, whether Scotland was regarded by this time as a maverick whose methods were to be quietly overlooked, or whether he was acting with clear, official approval. It is clear, however, by late 1946 there was “disquiet about his methods” being expressed at the headquarters of the British army of the Rhine.

By then the Red Cross was aware of the existence of the Cage, although only because its location had inadvertently been included on a list of PoW camps sent to the organisation. A Red Cross inspector called twice at Kensington Palace Gardens in March 1946 but was turned away. In a lengthy memo to the War Office, Scotland explained that he had identified the officer responsible for disclosing its location, and that this man had promised “that this blunder would not be repeated”.

Scotland went on to argue that the Red Cross need not be admitted, because his prisoners were either civilians, or “criminals within the armed forces”, and neither, he said, were protected by the Geneva convention. Should the Red Cross be allowed inside the Cage, he added, he would instruct the RAF to stop sending him prisoners suspected of involvement in the Stalag Luft III murders. “The interrogation of these criminals must proceed in Germany under conditions more closely related to police methods than to Geneva convention principles.”

Furthermore, he wrote: “The secret gear which we use to check the reliability of information obtained must be removed from the Cage before permission is given to inspect the building. This work will take a month to complete.” It is unclear what sort of “secret gear” Scotland wanted to conceal from the Red Cross.

It was a further 18 months before the Red Cross could enter the Cage. Its inspector found little evidence of ill-treatment but, as he noted in subsequent reports, 10 prisoners in the worst physical condition appeared to have been moved to other PoW camps the night before his arrival, and there was evidence that any prisoner who lodged a complaint in his presence would suffer reprisals.

Despite the growing number of complaints it was receiving about the London Cage, the International Committee of the Red Cross eventually decided to do nothing “through official channels” as it had been assured that its closure was imminent, and because it feared such action would be against the interests of the men still detained there.

As the work of the Cage was wound down, the interrogation of prisoners was switched to a number of internment camps in Germany. And there is evidence that the treatment meted out in these places was, if anything, far worse. While many of the papers relating to these interrogation centres remain sealed at the Foreign Office, it is clear that one camp in the British zone became particularly notorious. At least two German prisoners starved to death there, according to a court of inquiry, while others were shot for minor offences.

In one complaint lodged at the National Archives, a 27-year-old German journalist being held at this camp said he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. And not once, he said, did they treat him as badly as the British.

The Guardian 12 Nov. 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/nov/12/secondworldwar.world

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TEHRAN’S BOOK FAIR

May 26th, 2009

It seems some Jews are unhappu with the last tehran’s Book Fair. Here is some grunting:

Tehran’s annual International Book Fair wound up on Saturday, ten days after it was inaugurated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Organizers hailed the book fair – dubbed the “Great Festival of Knowledge” – as the biggest in its twenty-two-year history, noting that some 1,982 domestic and 1,700 foreign publishers from 78 countries took part in it.

As in previous years, a constant feature of the fair was that several major Iranian publishers had devoted special sections to “Knowing Zionism”, with dozens of book titles dealing with a wide range of subjects ranging from Jewish history to Israeli politics and Holocaust denial.

At a special seminar organized on the sidelines of the fair, a new book in Persian, How Zionist Organizations in the World Are Organized, was unveiled by its authors, Mehdi Tarjomi, Salman Razavi and Ali Fekri, Iran’s Book News Agency (IBNA) reported. The book’s publisher, the NEDA Institute, is a state-run think tank that regularly brings out anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist literature in Persian and Arabic.

The state-owned Kayhan Publishing House, one of Iran’s largest publishers, brought out a number of new anti-Semitic books in time for the fair. The collection’s flagship, A Survey of Jewish Religion, written by Mohammad-Ali Hosseinzadeh, is a twelve-chapter diatribe of extreme violence against the Jews, using Nazi terminology to describe Jews as “seditious” and “inferior” and calling the Torah “a forgery.” [What they do not like, they call "nazi"...] 

Also on display at Tehran’s International Book Fair was the newly-released, twelve-volume Questions and Answers: A Dialogue with Students, published by the Representative Office of the Supreme Leader in Universities. In Volume 12: Religions and Denominations, the writer, Hamid-Reza Shakerin, calls Judaism “a fake belief” and the Bible “a corrupted book.”

“Jews are deviated and will never find salvation,” the author decrees.

Another state-owned publisher, Iran Publishing House, put on display a tome written by Hanif Arts Research Group, replete with anti-Semitic stereotypes. The book’s preface is a litany of hate: the Holocaust is a myth; Jews were the main lackeys of Russian and English imperialists in Iran; Jews set up the Free Masons in Iran; Jews were behind the deadly 19th century famine in Iran; Jews invented feminism…

A spokesman for a major Iranian publishing house, Mojtaba Shayesteh-Nia, told Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, that his company has brought out a number of new titles to shed light on Zionism.

“We are publishing a collection of works called Helal Books dedicated to familiarize readers with the West and Zionism,” IRNA quoted Shayesteh-Nia as saying. The publisher said new books such as How the Zionists Toppled the Ottoman Empire and Zionist Myths in Cinema: Hollywood and the Destiny of the World provide important reading materials, “because the media are important tools of Zionist indoctrination and among the media, cinema is the Zionists’ most effective tool.”

“They gain huge financial and strategic profits from cinema,” he added, noting that “if we get to understand how Zionists make films, it would help us analyse important political developments of the day.”

Of the book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Shayesteh-Nia said, “This book explores the methods used by Zionists to weaken and topple the Ottomans.” ”The book shows that when Zionists cannot topple a regime by military means, they resort to ’soft power’ to overthrow it in the long run,” he added.

http://projetaladin.org/en/homepage/in-focus/rampant-anti-semitism-in-tehran-book-fair.html

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THE TORTURE MEMOS AND HISTORICAL AMNESIA

May 22nd, 2009

By Noam Chomsky

May 19, 2009 “Tomdispatch” — The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law — a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration’s “black sites,” or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.

More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the “infant empire” — as George Washington called the new republic — extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers.

Accordingly, what’s surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to be “a nation of moral ideals” and never before Bush “have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for.” To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history.

Occasionally the conflict between “what we stand for” and “what we do” has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task at hand was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the U.S. has a “transcendent purpose”: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since “the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide.” But as a scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radically inconsistent with that “transcendent purpose.”

We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not “confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.” Reality is the unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.” What actually happened was merely the “abuse of reality.”

The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who concludes that the U.S. is “just one great, but imperfect, country among others.” Cohen agrees that the evidence supports Hodgson’s judgment, but nonetheless regards as fundamentally mistaken Hodgson’s failure to understand that “America was born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward.” The American idea is revealed in the country’s birth as a “city on a hill,” an “inspirational notion” that resides “deep in the American psyche,” and by “the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise” demonstrated in the Western expansion. Hodgson’s error, it seems, is that he is keeping to “the distortions of the American idea,” “the abuse of reality.”

Let us then turn to “reality itself”: the “idea” of America from its earliest days.

“Come Over and Help Us”

The inspirational phrase “city on a hill” was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation “ordained by God.” One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words “Come over and help us.” The British colonists were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of “the idea of America,” from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a “shining city on the hill,” while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of “humanitarian intervention,” to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the “humanitarian intervention” led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union” by means “more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.”

Long after his own significant contributions to the process were past, John Quincy Adams deplored the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty… among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement.” The “merciless and perfidious cruelty” continued until “the West was won.” Instead of God’s judgment, the heinous sins today bring only praise for the fulfillment of the American “idea.”

The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed that “individualism and enterprise,” so praised by Roger Cohen. Settler-colonialist enterprises, the cruelest form of imperialism, commonly do. The results were hailed by the respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898. Calling for intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record “of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century,” and urged that it is “not to be curbed now,” as the Cubans too were pleading, in the Great Seal’s words, “come over and help us.”

Their plea was answered. The U.S. sent troops, thereby preventing Cuba’s liberation from Spain and turning it into a virtual colony, as it remained until 1959.

The “American idea” was illustrated further by the remarkable campaign, initiated by the Eisenhower administration virtually at once to restore Cuba to its proper place, after Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959, finally liberating the island from foreign domination, with enormous popular support, as Washington ruefully conceded. What followed was economic warfare with the clearly articulated aim of punishing the Cuban population so that they would overthrow the disobedient Castro government, invasion, the dedication of the Kennedy brothers to bringing “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba (the phrase of historian Arthur Schlesinger in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who considered that task one of his highest priorities), and other crimes continuing to the present, in defiance of virtually unanimous world opinion.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of imperialism Bernard Porter calls “the saltwater fallacy,” the idea that conquest only becomes imperialism when it crosses saltwater. Thus, if the Mississippi had resembled the Irish Sea, Western expansion would have been imperialism. From George Washington to Henry Cabot Lodge, those engaged in the enterprise had a clearer grasp of just what they were doing.

After the success of humanitarian intervention in Cuba in 1898, the next step in the mission assigned by Providence was to confer “the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples” of the Philippines (in the words of the platform of Lodge’s Republican party) — at least those who survived the murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture and other atrocities that accompanied it. These fortunate souls were left to the mercies of the U.S.-established Philippine constabulary within a newly devised model of colonial domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped for sophisticated modes of surveillance, intimidation, and violence. Similar models would be adopted in many other areas where the U.S. imposed brutal National Guards and other client forces.

The Torture Paradigm

Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA’s “torture paradigm,” developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question of Torture. He shows how torture methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous photos at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury’s penetrating study of the U.S. torture record:Truth, Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang’s descent into the global sewers lament that “in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way.”

None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did not introduce important innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their own government-established torture chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: “What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture, which is done by foreigners under U.S. patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.”

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but “merely repositioned it,” restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. “[H]is is a return to the status quo ante,” writes Nairn, “the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.”

Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that U.S. aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,… to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.” Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, U.S. aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, commonly improved by the murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.

These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth studying because the correlations were so clear.

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward — a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.

Adopting Bush’s Positions

An argument can be made that implementation of the CIA’s “torture paradigm” never violated the 1984 Torture Convention, at least as Washington interpreted it. McCoy points out that the highly sophisticated CIA paradigm developed at enormous cost in the 1950s and 1960s, based on the “KGB’s most devastating torture technique,” kept primarily to mental torture, not crude physical torture, which was considered less effective in turning people into pliant vegetables.

McCoy writes that the Reagan administration then carefully revised the International Torture Convention “with four detailed diplomatic ‘reservations’ focused on just one word in the convention’s 26-printed pages,” the word “mental.” He continues: “These intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain — the very techniques the CIA had refined at such great cost.”

When Clinton sent the UN Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included the Reagan reservations. The president and Congress therefore exempted the core of the CIA torture paradigm from the U.S. interpretation of the Torture Convention; and those reservations, McCoy observes, were “reproduced verbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN Convention.” That is the “political land mine” that “detonated with such phenomenal force” in the Abu Ghraib scandal and in the shameful Military Commissions Act that was passed with bipartisan support in 2006.

Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in authorizing prima facie violations of international law, and several of his extremist innovations were struck down by the Courts. While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantially reinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important case of Boumediene v. Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush administration claim that prisoners in Guantanamo are not entitled to the right of habeas corpus.

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to “preserve the power to abduct people from around the world” and imprison them without due process, the Bush administration decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, treating “the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game — fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process.”

Obama adopted the Bush position, “filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue,” arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United Arab Emirates) “can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind — as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo.”

In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge “rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale ofBoumediene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo.” The Obama administration announced that it would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama’s Department of Justice, Greenwald concludes, “squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions,” in radical violation of Obama’s campaign promises and earlier stands.

The case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld appears to be following a similar trajectory. The plaintiffs charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials were responsible for their torture in Guantanamo, where they were sent after being captured by Uzbeki warlord Rashid Dostum. The plaintiffs claimed that they had traveled to Afghanistan to offer humanitarian relief. Dostum, a notorious thug, was then a leader of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan faction supported by Russia, Iran, India, Turkey, and the Central Asian states, and the U.S. as it attacked Afghanistan in October 2001.

Dostum turned them over to U.S. custody, allegedly for bounty money. The Bush administration sought to have the case dismissed. Recently, Obama’s Department of Justice filed a brief supporting the Bush position that government officials are not liable for torture and other violations of due process, on the grounds that the Courts had not yet clearly established the rights that prisoners enjoy.

It is also reported that the Obama administration intends to revive military commissions, one of the more severe violations of the rule of law during the Bush years. There is a reason, according to William Glaberson of the New York Times: “Officials who work on the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies.” A serious flaw in the criminal justice system, it appears.

Creating Terrorists

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information — the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua captured U.S. pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986, after shooting down his plane delivering aid to U.S.-supported Contra forces, they should not have tried him, found him guilty, and then sent him back to the U.S., as they did. Instead, they should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington, no small matter for a tiny, impoverished country under terrorist attack by the global superpower.

By the same standards, if the Nicaraguans had been able to capture the chief terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then U.S. ambassador in Honduras (later appointed as the first Director of National Intelligence, essentially counterterrorism czar, without eliciting a murmur), they should have done the same. Cuba would have been justified in acting similarly, had the Castro government been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what their victims should have done to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave al-Qaeda in the dust, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further “ticking bomb” attacks.

Such considerations never seem to arise in public discussion.

There is, to be sure, a response: our terrorism, even if surely terrorism, is benign, deriving as it does from the city on the hill.

Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards, if it were discovered that Bush administration torture had cost American lives. That is, in fact, the conclusion drawn by Major Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym], one of the most seasoned U.S. interrogators in Iraq, who elicited “the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq,” correspondent Patrick Cockburn reports.

Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation methods: “The use of torture by the U.S.,” he believes, not only elicits no useful information but “has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many U.S. soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11.” From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.

There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantanamo on the charge of “engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance.” He ended up in Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians.

After four years of brutal treatment in Guantanamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and 13 soldiers — “the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee,” according to the Washington Post, and according to his lawyer, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment.

All much as a reasonable person would expect.

Unexceptional Americans

Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the “war on terror” that Bush declared after 9/11. A crime that rendered traditional international law “quaint” and “obsolete” — so George W. Bush was advised by his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, later appointed Attorney General. The doctrine has been widely reiterated in one form or another in commentary and analysis.

The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique in many respects. One is where the guns were pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact, it was the first attack of any consequence on the national territory of the United States since the British burned down Washington in 1814.

Another unique feature was the scale of terror perpetrated by a non-state actor.

Horrifying as it was, however, it could have been worse. Suppose that the perpetrators had bombed the White House, killed the president, and established a vicious military dictatorship that killed 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured 700,000, set up a huge international terror center that carried out assassinations and helped impose comparable military dictatorships elsewhere, and implemented economic doctrines that so radically dismantled the economy that the state had to virtually take it over a few years later.

That would indeed have been far worse than September 11, 2001. And it happened in Salvador Allende’s Chile in what Latin Americans often call “the first 9/11″ in 1973. (The numbers above were changed to per-capita U.S. equivalents, a realistic way of measuring crimes.) Responsibility for the military coup against Allende can be traced straight back to Washington. Accordingly, the otherwise quite appropriate analogy is out of consciousness here in the U.S., while the facts are consigned to the “abuse of reality” that the naïve call “history.”

It should also be recalled that Bush did not declare the “war on terror,” he re-declared it. Twenty years earlier, President Reagan’s administration came into office declaring that a centerpiece of its foreign policy would be a war on terror, “the plague of the modern age” and “a return to barbarism in our time” — to sample the fevered rhetoric of the day.

That first U.S. war on terror has also been deleted from historical consciousness, because the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into the canon: hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the ruined countries of Central America and many more elsewhere, among them an estimated 1.5 million dead in the terrorist wars sponsored in neighboring countries by Reagan’s favored ally, apartheid South Africa, which had to defend itself from Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” as Washington determined in 1988. In fairness, it should be added that, 20 years later, Congress voted to remove the ANC from the list of terrorist organizations, so that Mandela is now, at last, able to enter the U.S. without obtaining a waiver from the government.

The reigning doctrine of the country is sometimes called “American exceptionalism.” It is nothing of the sort. It is probably close to a universal habit among imperial powers. France was hailing its “civilizing mission” in its colonies, while the French Minister of War called for “exterminating the indigenous population” of Algeria. Britain’s nobility was a “novelty in the world,” John Stuart Mill declared, while urging that this angelic power delay no longer in completing its liberation of India.

Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese militarists in the 1930s, who were bringing an “earthly paradise” to China under benign Japanese tutelage, as they carried out the rape of Nanking and their “burn all, loot all, kill all” campaigns in rural North China. History is replete with similar glorious episodes.

As long as such “exceptionalist” theses remain firmly implanted, however, the occasional revelations of the “abuse of history” often backfire, serving only to efface terrible crimes. The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the vastly greater atrocities of the post-Tet pacification programs, ignored while indignation in this country was largely focused on this single crime.

Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced incomparably worse crimes at home and abroad, including the FBI-organized assassination of black organizer Fred Hampton as part of the infamous COINTELPRO repression, or the bombing of Cambodia, to mention just two egregious examples. Torture is hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq was a far worse crime. Quite commonly, selective atrocities have this function.

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22659.htm

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TOO BIG TO SWALLOW — THEY CAN’T

May 20th, 2009

Here’s how Israel would destroy Iran’s nuclear program

Israeli government ministers and Knesset members who will help make the decision about whether to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities do not have to wait any longer for a preparatory briefing by the Israel Air Force. 

They can read about all the possible scenarios for a strike on Iran, and about the potential risks and chances of success, in a study by Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 
     Never before has such an open, detailed and thorough study of Israel’s offensive options been published. The authors of the 114-page study meticulously gathered all available data on Israel’s military capabilities and its nuclear program, and on Iran’s nuclear developments and aerial defenses, as well as both countries’ missile inventory. After analyzing all the possibilities for an attack on Iran, Toukan and Cordesman conclude: “A military strike by Israel against Iranian nuclear facilities is possible … [but] would be complex and high-risk and would lack any assurances that the overall mission will have a high success rate.”

     The first problem the authors point to is intelligence, or more precisely, the lack of it. “It is not known whether Iran has some secret facilities where it is conducting uranium enrichment,” they write. If facilities unknown to Western intelligence agencies do exist, Iran’s uranium-enrichment program could continue to develop in secret there, while Israel attacks the known sites – and the strike’s gains would thus be lost. In general, the authors state, attacking Iran is justified only if it will put an end to Iran’s nuclear program or halt it for several years. That objective is very difficult to attain.
     Intelligence agencies are also divided on the critical question of when Iran will deliver a nuclear weapon. Whereas Israeli intelligence maintains it will have the bomb between 2009 and 2012, the U.S. intelligence community estimates it will not happen before 2013. If the Israeli intelligence assessment is accurate, the window for a military strike is rapidly closing. It is clear to everyone that no one will dare attack Iran once it possesses nuclear weapons.
     Since Iran has dozens of nuclear facilities dispersed throughout its large territory, and since it is impossible to attack all of them, Toukan and Cordesman investigated the option of hitting only three, which “constitute the core of the nuclear fuel cycle that Iran needs to produce nuclear weapons grade fissile material.” 

     Destroying these three sites ought to stall the Iranian nuclear program for several years. The three are: the nuclear research center in Isfahan, the uranium-enrichment facility in Natanz, and the heavy water plant, intended for future plutonium production, in Arak. It is doubtful whether Israel would embark on an offensive with such major ramifications just to strike a small number of facilities, when it is not at all clear that this will stop Iran’s nuclearization for a significant length of time.

     The study analyzes three possible flight routes and concludes that the optimal and most likely one is the northern one that passes along the Syria-Turkey border, cuts across the northeastern edge of Iraq and leads into Iran. The central route passes over Jordan and is shorter, but would not be chosen for fear of political trouble with the Jordanians. Using the southern route, which passes over Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, might likewise lead to political entanglements.
     To prevent the aircraft being detected en route to Iran, the IAF would use advanced technology to invade and scramble communication networks and radar devices in the countries over which the F-15s and F-16s fly, so even though dozens of planes would pass through the countries’ airspace, they will not be detected. According to the authors, the IAF used this technology in the raid on the Syrian nuclear reactor in Dayr az-Zawr, in September 2007. A hacker system was installed on two Gulfstream G550 aircraft that the IAF bought in recent years.

     A strike mission on the three nuclear facilities would require no fewer than 90 combat aircraft, including all 25 F-15Es in the IAF inventory and another 65 F-16I/Cs. On top of that, all the IAF’s refueling planes will have to be airborne: 5 KC-130Hs and 4 B-707s. The combat aircraft will have to be refueled both en route to and on the way back from Iran. The IAF will have a hard time locating an area above which the tankers can cruise without being detected by the Syrians or the Turks.
     One of the toughest operational problems to resolve is the fact that the facility at Natanz is buried deep underground. Part of it, the fuel-enrichment plant, reaches a depth of 8 meters, and is protected by a 2.5-meter-thick concrete wall, which is in turn protected by another concrete wall. By mid-2004 the Iranians had fortified their defense of the other part of the facility, where the centrifuges are housed. They buried it 25 meters underground and built a roof over it made of reinforced concrete several meters thick.
     The Iranians use the centrifuges to enrich uranium, which is required in order to produce a nuclear bomb. There are already 6,000 centrifuges at the Natanz facility; the Iranians plan to install a total of 50,000, which could be used to produce 500 kilos of weapons-grade uranium annually. Building a nuclear bomb takes 15-20 kilograms of enriched uranium. That means that the Natanz facility will be able to supply enough fissile material for 25-30 nuclear weapons per year. Because the Natanz facility is so important, the Iranians have gone to great lengths to protect it. To contend with the serious defensive measures they have taken, the IAF will use two types of U.S.-made smart bombs. According to reports in the foreign media, 600 of these bombs – nicknamed “bunker busters” – have been sold to Israel. One is called GBU-27, it weighs about 900 kilos and it can penetrate a 2.4-meter layer of concrete. The other is called GBU-28 and weighs 2,268 kilos; this monster can penetrate 6 meters of concrete and another layer of earth 30 meters deep. But for these bombs to penetrate ultra-protected Iranian facilities, IAF pilots will have to strike the targets with absolute accuracy and at an optimal angle.

 Additional challenges 

But the challenges facing the IAF do not end there. Iran has built a dense aerial-defense system that will make it hard for Israeli planes to reach their targets unscathed. Among other things, the Iranians have deployed batteries of Hawk, SA-5 and SA-2 surface-to-air missiles, plus they have SA-7, SA-15, Rapier, Crotale and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Furthermore, 1,700 anti-aircraft guns protect the nuclear facilities – not to mention the 158 combat aircraft that might take part in defending Iran’s skies. Most of those planes are outdated, but they may be scrambled to intercept the IAF, which will thus have to use part of its strike force to deal with the situation.
     However, all these obstacles are nothing compared to the S-300V (SA-12 Giant) anti-aircraft defense system, which various reports say Russia may have secretly supplied to Iran recently. If the Iranians indeed have this defense system, all of the IAF’s calculations, and all of the considerations for and against a strike, will have to be overhauled. The Russian system is so sophisticated and tamper-proof that the aircraft attrition rates could reach 20-30 percent: In other words, out of a strike force of 90 aircraft, 20 to 25 would be downed. This, the authors say, is “a loss Israel would hardly accept in paying.” 

     If Israel also decides to attack the famous reactor in Bushehr, an ecological disaster and mass deaths will result. The contamination released into the air in the form of radionuclides would spread over a large area, and thousands of Iranians who live nearby would be killed immediately; in addition, possibly hundreds of thousands would subsequently die of cancer. Because northerly winds blow in the area throughout most of the year, the authors conclude that, “most definitely Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE will be heavily affected by the radionuclides.” The difficulty involved in an IAF strike would become a moot point if ballistic missiles wind up being used instead of combat aircraft. The Iranians cannot defend against ballistic missiles. The study lays bare Israel’s missile program and points to three missile versions it has developed: Jericho I, II and III. The Jericho I has a 500-kilometer range, a 450-kilogram warhead, and can carry a 20-kiloton nuclear weapon. Jericho II has a 1,500-kilometer range, and entered service in 1990. It can carry a 1-megaton nuclear warhead. Jericho III is an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 4,800-6,500 kilometers, and can carry a multi-megaton nuclear warhead. The study says the latter was expected to enter service in 2008. 

     The authors apparently do not insinuate that Israel will launch missiles carrying nuclear warheads, but rather conventional warheads. By their calculation it will take 42 Jericho III missiles to destroy the three Iranian facilities, assuming that they all hit their marks, which is extremely difficult. It is not enough to hit the target area: To destroy the facilities it is necessary to hit certain points of only a few meters in size. It is doubtful the Jerichos’ accuracy can be relied on, and that all of them will hit those critical spots with precision.
     The study also analyzes the possible Iranian response to an Israeli strike. In all likelihood the result would be to spur Iranians to continue and even accelerate their nuclear program, to create reliable deterrence in the face of an aggressive Israel. Iran would also withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which until now has enabled its nuclear program to be monitored, to a certain degree, through inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. An Israeli strike would immediately put a stop to the international community’s attempts to pressure Iran into suspending development of nuclear weapons. 

No Syrian response 

     Iran would also, almost certainly, retaliate against Israel directly. It might attack targets here with Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, whose range covers all of Israel. A few might even be equipped with chemical warheads. In addition, the Iranians would use Hezbollah and Hamas to dispatch waves of suicide bombers into Israel. The Second Lebanon War showed us Hezbollah’s rocket capability, and the experience of the past eight years has been instructive regarding Hamas’ ability to fire Qassams from the Gaza Strip.

      Hezbollah launched 4,000 rockets from South Lebanon during the Second Lebanon War, and their effect on northern Israel has not been forgotten: Life was nearly paralyzed for a whole month. Since then the Lebanese organization’s stockpile was replenished and enhanced, and it now has some 40,000 rockets. Israel does not have a response to those rockets. The rocket defense systems now being developed (Iron Dome and Magic Wand) are still far from completion, and even after they become operational, it is doubtful they will prove effective against thousands of rockets launched at Israel.

      An Israeli strike on Iran would also sow instability in the Middle East. The Iranians would make use of the Shi’ites in Iraq, support Taliban fighters and improve their combat capabilities in Afghanistan. They also might attack American interests in the region, especially in countries that host U.S. military forces, such as Qatar and Bahrain. The Iranians would probably also attempt to disrupt the flow of oil to the West from the Persian Gulf region. Since the United States would be perceived as having given Israel a green light to attack Iran, American relations with allies in the Arab world could suffer greatly. Toukan and Cordesman believe, however, that Iran’s ally Syria would refrain from intervening if Israel strikes Iran’s nuclear facilities.
      Regarding a possible time frame for an Israeli strike, the authors cited factors that could speed up the decision in this matter. By 2010 Iran could pose a serious threat to its neighbors and Israel, because it would have enough nuclear weapons to deter the latter and the United States from attacking it. Iran’s inventory of effective ballistic missiles capable of carrying nonconventional warheads could also be an incentive. The fear that the country will procure the Russian S-300V aerial-defense system (if it has not done so already) might also serve as an incentive for a preemptive strike.
     So what should Israeli policy makers conclude from this American study? That an IAF strike on Iran would be complicated and problematic, and that the chance of it succeeding is not great. That they must weigh all of the far-reaching ramifications that an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would have, and that they must not be fooled by promises, should any be made, by Israel Defense Forces officers who present the attack plan as having good odds for success. 

     One of the conclusions from Toukan and Cordesman’s study is that it is questionable whether Israel has the military capability to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, or even to delay it for several years. Therefore, if the diplomatic contacts the Obama administration is initiating with Iran prove useless, and if in the wake of their expected failure the American president does not decide to attack Iran, it is likely that Iran will possess nuclear weapons in a relatively short time. It seems, therefore, that policy makers in Jerusalem should begin preparing, mentally and operationally, for a situation in which Iran is a nuclear power with a strike capability against Israel. 

     This is the place to emphasize Israel’s mistake in hyping the Iranian threat. The regime in Tehran is certainly a bitter and inflexible rival, but from there it’s a long way to presenting it as a truly existential threat to Israel. Iran’s involvement in terror in our region is troubling, but a distinction must be made between a willingness to bankroll terrorists, and an intention to launch nuclear missiles against Israel. Even if Iran gets nuclear weapons, Israel’s power of deterrence will suffice to dissuade any Iranian ruler from even contemplating launching nuclear weapons against it.
     It is time to stop waving around the scarecrow of an existential threat and refrain from making belligerent statements, which sometimes create a dangerous dynamic of escalation. And if the statements are superfluous and harmful – then this is doubly true for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
     Of course, none of this contradicts the possibility of taking covert action to hamper the Iranians’ program and supply routes. When the IAF destroyed the Osirak reactor in Baghdad in 1981, the “Begin doctrine” came into being, which holds that Israel will not let any hostile country in the region acquire nuclear weapons. The problem is that what could be accomplished in Iraq more than two decades ago is no longer possible today under the present circumstances in Iran.   

     The continual harping on the Iranian threat stems from domestic Israeli politics and a desire to increase investment in the security realm, but the ramifications of this are dangerous when you analyze expected developments in Iran’s ballistics: It is impossible for Israel to ignore Iran’s capacity to hit it, and Jerusalem must shape a policy that will neutralize that threat.
      In another year, or three years from now, when the Iranians possess nuclear weapons, the rules of the strategic game in the region will be completely altered. Israel must reach that moment with a fully formulated and clear policy in hand, enabling it to successfully confront a potential nuclear threat, even when it is likely that the other side has no intention of carrying it out. The key, of course, is deterrence. Only a clear and credible signal to the Iranians, indicating the terrible price they will pay for attempting a nuclear strike against Israel, will prevent them from using their missiles. The Iranians have no logical reason to bring about the total destruction of their big cities, as could happen if Israel uses the means of deterrence at its disposal. Neither the satisfaction of killing Zionist infidels, nor, certainly, the promotion of Palestinian interests would justify that price. Israeli deterrence in the face of an Iranian nuclear threat has a good chance of succeeding precisely because the Iranians have no incentive to deal a mortal blow to Israel. Therefore, all the declarations about developing the operational capability of IAF aircraft so they can attack the nuclear facilities in Iran, and the empty promises about the ability of the Arrow missile defense system to contend effectively with the Shahab-3, not only do not help bolster Israel’s power of deterrence, but actually undermine the process of building it and making it credible in Iranian eyes. 

The time has come to adopt new ways of thinking. No more fiery declarations and empty threats, but rather a carefully weighed policy grounded in sound strategy. Ultimately, in an era of a multi-nuclear Middle East, all sides will have a clear interest to lower tension and not to increase it. 

Reuben Pedatzur. Ha’aretz 16 Mat 2009. The full report by Toukan & Cordesman may be had at:

http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/090316_israelistrikeiran.pdf

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DRAWNING CENSOR

May 16th, 2009

FROM THE WORLD CENTER FOR JEWISH CENSORSHIP SIMON WIESENTHAL :

Release of Simon Wiesenthal Center – Facebook, YouTube +: How Social Media Outlets Impact Digital Terrorism and Hate (New York Tolerance Center 5/13/09)

With over one and a half billion users (almost one quarter of the world’s population – 23.8% to be exact), the Internet is the prime means of communication and marketing in the world. The Internet’s unprecedented global reach and scope combined with the difficulty in monitoring and tracing communications make it the prime tool for extremists and terrorists. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has been monitoring these developments for over a decade through our Digital Terrorism and Hate Project. [They mean : all websites who are not totally in favor of Israeli politics of genocide.]

Facebook, YouTube +: How Social Media Outlets Impact Digital Terrorism and Hate confirm that as the Internet has grown, the escalation of extremist sites has kept pace in number and in technological sophistication. In April 1995, the first extremist website went online: Today, the Wiesenthal Center’s Digital Hate and Terrorism project identifies some 10,000 problematic hate and terrorist websites, hate games and other internet postings. Every aspect of the Internet is being used by extremists of every ilk to repackage old hatred, demean the ‘Enemy’, [= Zionism]  to raise funds and since 9/11, recruit and train Jihadist terrorists. [Those sites are probably police traps]  This user-generated material increases the viral spread of extremism online and aids in increasing the social acceptability of hate in mainstream discourse. By creating an environment where users are equal participants in the Web, all editorial functions are removed and expressions of hate can easily flow unchallenged. Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, gays, women and immigrants are some of the most targeted groups [They forget : Zionism and its nazifascist policies of colonial expansion, landgrabbing, tortures and assassination squads.]

The greatest increase of digital hate has emerged from Facebook and YouTube have seen a proliferation of extremist use, with 30% of new postings on Facebook alone—with the greatest increase coming from overseas, particularly Europe and the Middle East. Facebook officials have met with the SWC and pledged to remove sites that violate their terms of usage. But with over 200 million users, online bigots have to date outpaced efforts to remove them. Some sites have thousands of friends, thus enabling the message of hate to spread virally. These social networking sites have become so prevalent that some ‘traditional’ hate groups have begun to develop their own versions, such as New Saxon, “a Social Networking site for people of European descent” produced by a traditional American Neo-Nazi group (National Socialist Movement).

Another hate site, Stormfront (generally considered the first online hate site, starting in 1995) uses their Facebook page to connect thousands of visitors to their main website. The UK considers Stormfront’s founder Don Black so dangerous that he was recently among 16 extremists barred from entering Britain. The continued presence of games that perpetuate stereotypes and celebrate violence—aimed at young people– have begun to seep into the mainstream, where they are either hosted or reviewed on regular gaming sites (Nerd Nirvana, uGoto, Ubersite and more)..

Facebook Holocaust Denial Controversy

In recent days, Facebook has removed a number of Holocaust Denial sites. Perhaps the most outrageous includes a cartoon of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank, posted from Lebanon (which is in the Wiesenthal Center’s 2009 report) – [See the amusing color pamphlet (63 p.) released by the the Judeomaniacs of Wiesenthal :

http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/NY-RELEASE.PDF] 

Some of the extremist groups using Facebook include Stormfront, National Socialist Life, Libertarian National Social Movemen, Aryan Guard, FARC, Al Shabab Mujahideen, Hamas (Multiple), Hezbollah (multiple), Faloja Forum, Support Taliban, Support Taliban and scores of anti-Israel sites.

Facebook plans to continue working with the Center on this issue as indicated in a May 12, 2009 statement, “Many of the groups or pages that were shown to us by the Simon Wiesenthal Center earlier this year as part of their study had already been removed under Facebook’s rules. [They recognize they practice CENSORSHIP.] We are committed to continuing this practice, and to working with those who fight hate like the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

The cowardice and ass-licking practice of Facebook and others is without limits.

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