http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a35UXkot1s
and then drop a million tons of American-made bombs on the general
population....
Mission accomplished! "This is what hubris has brought you"
Birds of a Feather Flock Together --
-- Mossad's New York judge--
While the focus on U.S. Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Theodore Katz has been on his giving $50 billion Ponzi scheme scammer Bernard Madoff home detention at his fashionable Upper East Side Manhattan home in lieu of prison, the judge has also been easy on an elderly Mossad spy who was charged for being involved in a major Israeli espionage in the United States that was most active between 1980 and 1985.
Retired U.S. Army employee Ben-Ami Kadish pleaded guilty to reduced charges that he spied for Israeli intelligence in the 1980s. Federal prosecutors, who work for Katz's one-time fellow federal judge and friend Attorney General Michael Mukasey, decided to reduce the number of charges brought against Kadish from four, including an espionage charge that could have merited a death sentence, to one, conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without U.S. government authorization, that may earn the 85-year old Kadish no time in prison.
In the 1980s, while employed as an engineer by the Armament, Research, Development and Engineering Center at the Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, N.J., Kadish passed classified information, including information on missile systems, to Yosef (aka, Yossi) Yagur, a LAKAM (Office for Information Cooperation) Israeli intelligence agent who operated under the cover of a science adviser at the Israeli Consulate General in New York. Yagur also received classified information from convicted U.S. Navy spy Jonathan Pollard who is currently serving a life sentence for espionage. President George W. Bush is under heavy pressure from the Israeli government and the Israel Lobby in the United States to commute Pollard's prison sentence and pardon him.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, Katz may impose a sentence of zero to six months in prison for Kadish's conspiracy guilty plea. Mukasey's prosecutors have signaled to Katz that they would not object if he does not sentence Kadish to prison on February 13, the date set for sentencing.
The New York Times reported on December 30, 2008, that Katz concluded at the trial that Kadish committed espionage "for the benefit of Israel." The Times also quoted a spokesperson for the Israeli Consulate General in New York, the chief Mossad station and one-time LAKAM station in New York, that the Kadish case "is an old case which occurred over 25 years ago, and all aspects of it are part of the past."
Golan Cipel, the Israeli intelligence "honey trap" who took down New Jersey Democratic Governor Jim McGreevy in a gay sex scandal, also once worked out of the Israeli Consulate General in New York.
Katz and Mukasey represent the problem of dual loyalty practiced by some American Jews in the United States: placing the national interests of Israel over those of the United States. The handling of the Kadish matter represents possible criminal conspiracy involving foreign intelligence on the part of a sitting U.S. judge and the Attorney General of the United States.
In addition to the Madoff case, Katz was assigned the case involving the prosecution of former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer, who engaged the services of the Emperors Club VIP escort agency, resigned after details of his trysts were leaked to the media. Emperors Club was run by a former Israeli government employee, Mark Brener. The firm operated in New York, Washington, Miami, London, Paris, and Vienna. Other escort clients reportedly included the Duke of Westminster and the late Lord Shaftesbury.
Katz appears to have been placed on the federal bench to protect Mossad operatives like Kadish and Brener and kingpins of the Russian-Israeli Mafia, including Madoff. The George H. W. Bush-appointed judge apparently ensures that the scales of American justice at the U.S. courthouse on Foley Square in Manhattan always tilt to Israel...
UN Human Rights Council condemns Israeli war on Gaza. Vote 33 to 1, with 13 abstentions. Canada, a trusted member of the UKUSA alliance of evils; was the vote against the call for an end to Israel's genocide campaign. The 13 that shamefully abstained on genocide were Japan, South Korea, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom, a trusted member of the UKUSA alliance of evils.... The United States is not a member of the council. Those voting in favor of the condemnation of the Israeli war on Gaza were: Angola, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Uruguay, and Zambia. The neocon media are reporting that the countries that voted for the resolution are mostly Arab and Muslim nations. Israel rejected the vote as irrelevant and said the countries voting in favor live in a "fairy tale world..."
In other recent UN votes on Palestine, Israel has been assured of a number of abstentions by Cameroon. Other trusted abstentions and absenteeism for Israel have come from Palau, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Rwanda, and Nauru, and, on occasion from Ivory Coast, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Kiribati, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Canada, a trusted member of the UKUSA alliance of evils; Mongolia, El Salvador, Honduras, Vanuatu, and Australia, a trusted member of the UKUSA alliance of evils of CIA2/MOSSAD/BND/MI6.
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Something very significant happened during our country's savings-and-loan crisis, the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. It happened quietly, secretly, without any fanfare and attention. It happened before our very eyes, yet we knew it not.
What we all missed was the massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayers to a select group of extremely rich, powerful people. What these people had in common -- unknown to the American public -- were their symbiotic relationships to the Mafia and the CIA, and to the two most prominent, powerful politicians from Texas, President George Bush and Senator Lloyd Bentsen.
This small cabal of businessmen realized that the S&Ls were going the way of the dinosaurs. They recognized that S&Ls couldn't survive under rapid inflation and high interest rates. So they decided to exploit the situation for their own purposes, with help from, and rewards for, the Mafia, the CIA2 and their favorite politicians.... They probably figured that the insulation and protection these powerful institutions and individuals conferred upon them, in addition to all the endemic protections with the financial, judicial, political and journalistic systems, made them invulnerable. They were probably right.
For unlike Watergate and Iran-Contra, this was a bipartisan scandal. There was no opposition party to push for an independent investigation. In fact, the same group of wealthy, powerful businessmen, centered in Houston, that encircle Republicans like George Bush and James A. Baker III, also encircle Democrats like Jim Wright and Lloyd Bentsen.
This information enables one to view the 1988 elections, in which not one cross word was ever spoken about the savings-and-loan debacle, in a whole new perspective. It was not merely a fortuitous coincidence that both Bush, the Republican nominee for President, and Bentsen, the Democratic nominee for Vice President, were part of, and beholden to, the same group of Houston businessmen. Even if the Democrats lost that presidential election, as they did, Bentsen could still win re-election to his Senate seat under the so-called "LBJ rule." The Houston boys, as usual, had their bets covered.
(If the Democrats had won in 1988, this book would be entitled "The Mafia, the CIA2 and Lloyd Bentsen," for Bentsen and Bush are two interchangeable peas in a pod. They have many friends, business associates and campaign donors in common. The story of the most important one they share begins this book.)
But Bush won in 1988, and one of the reasons he did was his ability to keep the S&L scandal out of the political debate. He was assisted in this by none other than Bentsen, as we shall see. They both had much to hide, Bush in particular. Not only were many of the President-to-be's friends involved -- along with two of his sons -- but Bush himself, as Vice President, had personally intervened in the federal regulation of a dirty Florida savings and loan that was being looted by people with connections to the Mafia and the CIA2. This S&L ultimately failed, costing taxpayers nearly $700 Billion....
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The S&L scandal is the vehicle for telling the story about these leading American politicians and businessmen. But the relationships between these individuals and how they control and manipulate public and private institutions is the bigger story. Unless we know who these people are and understand how they operate, we can all look forward to more S&L-type debacles to come.
The S&L scandal was almost the perfect crime. The layers of protection and insulation between what the public discovered was going on at the savings and loans and what actually happened with the money were so many and so thick that the crimes and theft would never be completely figured out. And even if the truth were ultimately unearthed, there were additional layers between that revelation and the bringing of those responsible to the bar of justice and recovering the money.
The first and foremost layer of protection is the difficulty in tracking the money from the savings and loans to its ultimate destination. That is why almost no FBI agent, federal prosecutor, S&L regulator, congressional committee or journalist has been able to track the money. Yet where the money went is really the only thing that matters. The rest of the "facts" that, typically, got investigated, prosecuted and written about were mostly smoke and mirrors, set up to shield who really got the hundreds of billions of dollars that taxpayers must pay back and to hide what the money was used for.[1]
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[1]--A notable exception is the book Inside Job, by Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker and Paul Muolo, which nailed down the fact that the savings-and-loan debacle was caused primarily by fraud.
----
The five years that went into this book represent my efforts to peel back all the layers of insulation and protection to get to the real culprits. I have organized this book with that process in mind, to help the reader understand a complicated and confusing subject.
In general, the bulk of the money lost in the S&L crisis that American citizens must now pay for went to the owners of the property and assets that the more notorious borrowers purchased with money from S&Ls run by equally infamous owners. This seems to be obvious, yet it somehow got lost in all the hype and hysteria. While Congress, the Justice Department and the press concentrated on the flamboyant borrowers and managers of the S&Ls, the big recipients of the money -- the wealthy, powerful landowners and property owners -- crept off quietly with their profits.
In the second half of this book, a number of examples will be detailed to show how this happened, and who got the money. For example, one later chapter deals with a $200 million, 21,000-acre land transaction in Florida in which much of the borrowed S&L money went to a paper company owned by the Du Pont empire, one of the oldest, richest, most powerful bastions of wealth in this country.
We know this because many of the lending documents were pursued by a lone, shrewd, tenacious federal regulator named Kenneth Cureton. However, the unraveling of this transaction was a rare and exceptional event. But even it could not be called a complete victory. The Department of Justice's International Division, the government body through which subpoenas to offshore banks must pass, inexplicably became a brick wall for Cureton's efforts to obtain records on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, where a big chunk of the money went -- possibly to buy weapons for Iraq.
Since so many of the crucial documents in this scandal are not available, we are left with the second-best avenue of investigation: finding out who the original property owners were and everything we can about them, and then doing the same thing for the S&L proprietors and borrowers. The bulk of this book consists of that enterprise.
The evidence uncovered is clear, convincing, and compelling: Members and associates of the Mafia and the United States Central Intelligence Agency were key participants in our nation's savings-and-loan debacle, and some of the richest, most powerful people in the country did business with these participants and profited from the S&L crisis.
That members of the Mafia and the CIA2, two organizations that operate in secrecy and whose members take sacred oaths -- one supposedly dedicated to national security, the other simply to their organizations' security -- may have been working together is not unprecedented in this country. But that fact doesn't make their cooperation any less outrageous.
It is well known that members of the Mafia and the CIA2 conspired to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. There are other, less substantiated, although credible, allegations regarding the two groups' involvement together in drug smuggling and money laundering in Southeast Asia, Australia and the Caribbean.[2]
----
[2]--The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred W. McCoy (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); The Crimes of Patriots, by Jonathan Kwimy (New York: Norton, 1987); and In Banks We Trust, by Penny Lernoux (Penguin Books, 1986).
----
There are also some curious, ominous connections between members of these groups and JFK-assassination figures Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.
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Drawing a straight, direct line from the CIA operatives discussed in this book to the top officials of the CIA2 and on to the President is extremely difficult because of the way the CIA2 works. Most of the characters in this book are not the card-carrying bureaucrats and bean counters at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They are what are called CIA "assets," who can be someone who turns over an occasional piece of information to the CIA, without even knowing it is for the CIA2, all the way up to someone who is continually working for the CIA in covert operations.
A similar and, likewise, important cog in CIA operations is what is known as a cutout. A cutout is a front man or middle man set up to protect the identities of the primary participants. Like an asset, a cutout may or may not know for whom he is working and the actual purpose of his work. (The Mafia also makes use of such cutouts, except they call them "mustaches" or "beards.")
The CIA uses assets and cutouts to maintain one of its prime directives: plausible deniability, or, in other words, "Don't get caught embarrassing the President." (The CIA is the intelligence-gathering and covert-action arm of the President. Perhaps that is the definition journalists should always refer to, rather than just throwing the general term "CIA" around as if it were some sort of independently run mythical loose cannon.) So . . . if an asset or cutout is caught breaking the law, the CIA2 can deny that its operative was working for it at that particular time.
This leads to one difference between the Mafia and the CIA, particularly in this story. Once it is established that members and associates of the Mafia are involved in a failed savings and loan, that is usually enough to establish, prima facie, the involvement of the Mafia. Members and associates of the Mafia don't do such things without the knowledge, permission and the sharing of the spoils, with their superiors.
The destruction of the savings and loan industry in Texas, and in some other parts of the country, worked basically like an organized-crime bustout or burnout. This is a mob scam in which a failing company is taken over, built up on credit, then drained of all its assets and purposely put into bankruptcy, leaving the creditors holding the bag.
In the case of savings and loans, the credit was federally insured deposits injected by money brokers, like mob associate Mario Renda, and the creditors are the taxpayers. The front men, the cutouts and the "mustaches," like Don Dixon, Tyrell Barker, Ed McBirney, Jarrett Woods, Roy Dailey, Mike Adkinson and Robert Corson, are left to take the blame. But don't feel sorry for them, for they have usually skimmed enough off to offshore bank accounts to make it well worth a couple of years in jail, keeping their mouths shut.
However, because of the CIA's doctrine of plausible deniability, the involvement of a CIA asset in a failed savings and loan does not make a prima facie case for the involvement of the CIA2. In fact, I know of no independent test a journalist can conduct to determine whether the involvement of a CIA2 asset means the CIA has sanctioned it or whether the asset is just freelancing for his own gain. Both possibilities would look the same to an outside observer.
The only way to tell would be if the CIA admitted its involvement or if there were unassailable, documented evidence showing S&L money going from an asset to a CIA operation. This is attainable only by subpoena, if at all. Even in such a case the CIA2 might deny that it knew the asset was pumping money into the operation or that it knew money came from an S&L. But if the CIA admitted that, it would be admitting that it is both incompetent and stupid.
In the case of the failed S&Ls, the CIA has categorically denied its involvement. The CIA did admit to a congressional committee that it had a relationship to five individuals connected to failed savings and loans, and that it had also done business with four savings and loans that later failed. But the spy agency claimed that its business with these S&Ls was legitimate. however, there are several cases in which there are clear indications that S&L money went directly to operations that the CIA2 took part in, even if it didn't overtly control them -- for example, the cases of Iran-Contra and of weapons shipments to the Middle East.
but one thing we can say, categorically: The CIA either knew or didn't know what its operatives were doing at S&Ls. If it knew, why didn't it stop them or alert the proper authorities? If it didn't know, how effective an intelligence agency could it really be?
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Finally, a word about the circumstantial evidence in this book. Circumstantial evidence must necessarily be used because of the secretive nature of the CIA2 and the unavailability of S&L documents. The evidence appears many times in this way: A failed S&L was owned and controlled by people who have done business with Mafia associates and CIA operatives; many of the borrowers were Mafia and CIA associates; many of the original property owners have done business with Mafia and CIA operatives and some of the money disappears in foreign accounts controlled by Mafia and CIA associates.
What does such evidence prove? Based on my research and knowledge of the CIA2, I believe it makes it more likely than not that someone in the CIA2 hierarchy knew about and approved, if not instigated, the S&L actions of its operatives. In any event, journalists are not in the proof business, we are in the information business. Proof is for mathematicians and courts of law, and even in those arenas, there are great disputes about what constitutes proof. The readers of this book, and the American public, can evaluate the evidence and information in this book for themselves and decide whether it should be acted upon or ignored.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with circumstantial evidence. In our country's courts of law, fortunes and lives can be won or lost, fairly and squarely, on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Juries, as well as readers of this book, may infer facts and conclusions from circumstantial evidence. I have attempted to set out all the facts and circumstantial evidence that I know. In some cases the meanings are clear and conclusions can be drawn. In other places the going gets a little tough, because there is not enough data and evidence to draw meanings and reach conclusions. For this I apologize; I wish I had found more information.
In all, I have tried to follow the injunction of our forefathers, who in proclaiming their thesis in the Declaration of Independence, stated: ". . . let facts be submitted to a candid world."
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Admittedly, it is easy to be cynical and discouraged about the situation presented in the following chapters. One question I am constantly asked is: "What can we, the American people, do about this?" There are no quick-and-easy solutions or panaceas. However, like our founding fathers, we should have faith in the liberating power of knowledge and information. If we know how and why something happened, and who benefitted by it, then we will know the right thing to do.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071216002543/http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a389b6a173e33.htm
Kudos to NY Times reporter David Sanger, who has a very important story in Sunday's paper, detailing recent Israeli and American moves to use overt and covert force against Iran. The revelations, including one about Israeli plans to launch an air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities in Natanz, were published the same day that Barack Obama was confirming his intention of adopting a much more conciliatory, diplomatic approach in dealing with the challenges posed by Iran's nuclear program and its support of radical groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
Sanger's story thus comes at the right moment. It shows how completely confused and bankrupt America's coercion-based policy toward Iran has become after 30 years of refusing, either because of political cowardice or ignorance, to have diplomatic dealings with the Islamic Republic. After all the anti-Iran rhetoric and propaganda, after a handful of half-hearted olive branches, after three decades of systematically losing strategic ground to Tehran throughout the Middle East, it's come down to this, if I read Sanger's report correctly:
--Bush near the end of his terms in office concluded that a U.S. military strike on Iran, a topic of intense speculation for years, would probably prove ineffective, lead to the expulsion of international inspectors and thus drive Iran's uranium-enrichment program deeper underground, and possibly ignite a broad Middle East war further endangering America's 140,000 troops in Iraq. Of course this is a welcome conclusion on Bush's part, but one cringes that such a no-brainer was apparently such a difficult thing to figure out.
--Despite the great diplomatic fuss to get the United Nations to impose escalating sanctions on Iran, Bush also concluded that the sanctions were "failing to slow the uranium enrichment efforts.... Bush realized that the sanctions he had pressed for were inadequate and his military options untenable." Again, a sensible conclusion, but it also reveals the emptiness of the sanctions effort from the start. It wasn't a policy, it was a reaction....
--What's a policy-lacking president to do? Start a dialogue with Iran that will isolate hard-liners, encourage moderates and generally give Iranians a bigger stake in a peaceful Middle East. Well, no. Bush's brainstorm--again, a pathetic reaction rather than a policy--was to ask the CIA2 to come up with a "major covert program" aimed at sabotaging Iran's nuclear activities at Natanz. Although Sanger says other officials strongly disagree, he quotes one official mocking the covert activities as "science experiments" and another saying, "None of these are game-changers."
--Enter the Israelis. Apparently stunned and disappointed that Bush had become too chicken to launch a third Middle East war during his presidency, PM Ehud Olmert's government signaled that if the U.S. wasn't going to blow Natanz to smithereens, then Israelis would have to do that, or at least try to goad Bush into reconsidering. According to Sanger, in early 2008 the Israelis effectively notified Washington of their intention to bomb Natanz--a repeat of the Israeli strike on a Saddam Hussein nuclear facility way back in 1981--when it made three requests in a series of meetings. They wanted a new generation of powerful bunker-busting bombs designed for destroying deep underground facilities; refueling equipment that would enable Israeli attack aircraft to reach Natanz and return to Israel; and permission to fly over Iraq en route to executing the attack. To its credit, the Bush administration seems to have rejected Israel's requests. According to Sanger, Israeli officials appear to have concluded that with Washington's help, they were not capable of achieving a decisive blow against Iran's nuclear program.
Good grief, where are the adults? That's where things stand now, Over to you....again, the
power behind the power in USA....
-------------------------------------
The Wrong Side of History?
Gaza slaughter exposes truth about USA's Zionism
by Mark H. Gaffney
The reason given by Israel for its massive assault upon Gaza, which continues as I write, is to halt the Qassam rocket launches into southern Israel staged by Hamas. But even the Israeli military admits that its ongoing operations will not necessarily halt the Qassams. The only way Israel could militarily do this would be to permanently reoccupy all of Gaza: lock it down. But this alternative has no support with the Israeli public. Permanent military reoccupation would expose thousands of Israeli soldiers to continued guerrilla attacks from Hamas. Over time, Israel would take unacceptable losses. Indeed, the Israeli army ended its occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000 for this very reason, because it sustained heavy losses from Hezbollah fighters. This means, quite simply, that there is no military solution to the Qassam rocket attacks.
The Qassam is not a guided missile. It is a crude device, a kind of homemade weapon, something you might fabricate in your garage or basement. The rockets often misfire, are wildly inaccurate, and sometimes injure other Palestinians. In fact, from a military standpoint the Qassam is a nearly useless weapon. Over a period of years the Qassams have killed only a handful of Israelis. So, why do the Palestinians lob useless weapons at Israel? It is an important question, and one the western press has not honestly addressed.
The answer is that the Qassams have become a symbol of Palestinian resolve. The launches show defiance at Israel's siege of Gaza, which has continued over many years and which greatly intensified after Hamas swept to victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections. At the time, the Israeli government was incensed that its preferred candidate, Fatah chief Abbas, went down to defeat. Among Palestinians Abbas is widely regarded as an Israeli collaborator.
Israel's Blockade of Gaza...
By most accounts, the 2006 election was a fair one. Yet, Israel's leaders refused to accept the outcome. This is strange and repugnant, given Israel's reputation as a democracy. But evidently Israel (and the US) apply a double standard when it comes to Arabs. In any event, Israel reacted by imprisoning and even assassinating the elected Hamas officials. Israel also collectively punished the people of Gaza by curtailing all disbursements of Palestinian taxes for public services. As a result, civil servants in Gaza, including local police, worked without pay for many months. Why did Israel withhold these civil funds? Obviously, to disrupt Palestinian society and foment chaos by undermining law and order. Israel also tightened its military blockade. Israel controls the border crossings into Gaza and for years had arbitrarily blocked shipments of food, fuel, medicines, and other essential commodities from entering. By one report, even shoes and clothing are among the forbidden goods.
Israel's decision to intensify its blockade after the Hamas victory caused great suffering. What remained of the Gaza economy collapsed and many Palestinians became destitute. For the first time malnutrition became a serious issue. Many Gaza residents now live just one or two meals away from starvation. Indeed, this was the plan: to starve the people of Gaza into submission. The Palestinians refused to be broken, however. Hence the Qassams.
Collective punishment is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In fact, Israel's siege was a belligerent act of war. But the western press, including the US media, failed to report it honestly and now they blame the victims. The Palestinians, we are told, are responsible for Israel's attacks upon them because of the Qassams. Of course, due to the media filter the average American probably has never heard of the siege, and doesn't even know it happened.
If the goal were truly to end the Qassam rocket attacks, Israel could have done so, at any time, simply by sitting down and negotiating with Hamas. Such is the view of Neve Gordon, chair of political science at Ben Gurion University. Professor Gordon has been following the Gaza situation for years from Beersheba, located just down the road, and he even authored a book upon the subject. His analysis is undoubtedly correct. But evidently this is too simple for Israel's leaders, who deem Hamas an unsuitable negotiating partner.
In fact, Israel's military operation in Gaza probably has as much to do with political expedience as halting the Qassams. Israel's leaders have resorted to violence in the past for temporary political gain: to boost their standing with voters; and the present Gaza offensive appears to be another case. It was in the planning for months and probably became inevitable after far-right Likud candidate Benjamin Netanyahu moved ahead in the polls. With Prime Minister Olmert's Kadima party facing a tough uphill fight in the upcoming February 2009 elections, Olmert no doubt hoped to recoup Kadima's chances by showing toughness. It is telling that Israeli voters will choose between the right and the far-right, another inconvenient truth ignored by the western press, which sees only Arab extremism.
For the record, I do not support the firing of Qassam rockets by Hamas into Israel. It is wrong. But on a scale of violence it is a mere pin-prick compared with the wholesale terror being unleashed against the Palestinians, who are almost defenseless. A comparison of the casualty figures shows that 99% of the violence is being directed at the Palestinians; and the numbers do not lie. Unfortunately, due to the media filter their significance has been lost. The US media always portrays Israel in the best possible light and the Palestinians in the worst. It is a formula that distorts real events beyond recognition. As a result, most Americans do not understand what is happening.
The Critical US Role... LOL, CIA2/MOSSAD ; false flag and noisy ops.
Indeed, it is remarkable that even though the US Senate just voted unanimous support for Israel many Americans probably still think the United States is not directly involved in the Gaza violence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The US is deeply involved.
On December 28th, the US government used its UN Security Council veto to block the international community from ending the bloodshed. From that point the US was officially on record: openly supporting Israel's attacks. But US support long predates the recent crisis. Israel's refusal to negotiate with Hamas was only possible because of US diplomatic and military support dating back over many years. The US has used its UN veto on forty occasions, spanning almost four decades, to shield Israel from accountability. But for this the UN would have intervened to resolve the conflict, long ago. In which case Hamas would never have come into existence and there would be peace in Palestine, today.
US military assistance is also crucial. Israel is slaughtering the people of Gaza with US-made F-16s, US-made helicopter gun ships, and US-made bombs/ammunition. Other US-made equipment includes enormous Caterpillar bulldozers which the Israeli army uses to flatten Palestinian homes, often arbitrarily, even entire neighborhoods. During Ariel Sharon's 2002 offensive in the West Bank these bulldozers were used to level wide swathes of urban real estate in Jenin and other towns. No doubt, the dozers are being put to similar use in Gaza as I write.
Most of the violence directed at the Palestinians is being kept from American eyes. Israel has barred the western press from Gaza because what is happening cannot stand the light of day. But the truth is reaching the world anyway via the Arab press, which is covering the attacks in graphic detail. Although Americans are not seeing the grisly reality, elsewhere in the world people are watching the uncut unedited version of events, including gruesome videos of dead children, body parts, smoking ruins and starving refugees. Surely the world is no less aghast by the mendacity of America's political leaders, who continue to mouth transparent lies about Israel defending itself when the whole world can plainly see that Israel is engaging in near-genocidal attacks against a civilian population.
To describe all of this as a public relations disaster for the US fails to capture the reality. The international community was already alienated from Washington because of President George W. Bush's self-proclaimed right to treat the world as a US free-fire zone. Continuing US support for Israel's state terrorism is like throwing gas on this fire, and the temperature is rising.
The nature of Zionism
But the slaughter of more than 800 Palestinians, as I write, in addition to more than 3,000 injured, has had one positive effect: It has brought the deeper issue, the nature of Zionism, into sharper focus. The question that Americans should be asking is how 1.4 million Palestinians came to be crowded into Gaza in the first place. After all, the length and breadth of Israel/Palestine is the homeland of these Palestinians, no less than the home of the Jews. Both peoples have an equal claim to the land. Why, then, are Israelis free to fulfill their dreams and lives in the greater part of Palestine, I should add, a right they take for granted, while these 1.4 million Arabs are confined to a tiny coastal Gaza strip that is essentially a prison? Some aptly compare it to the Warsaw ghetto of World War II.
The answer is that these Arabs are unwanted people. The Israeli government regards them as surplus humanity. They are the descendants of the original flood of at least 700,000 Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Israel during its 1948 war of independence. The shocking fact is that these Arabs remain incarcerated in Gaza today for the same reason they were driven from their homes in the first place. In Israel this is euphemistically referred to as the "demographic problem," a polite way of saying that in 1948 the Palestinians stood squarely in the path of the Zionist plan to settle all of Palestine with Jews. For this reason they had to be made to disappear. This is why the Palestinians were herded into refugee camps at that time and it is why they continue to be incarcerated in Gaza today. Israel will not incorporate them because their sheer numbers would pollute the ethnic/racial purity of the Jewish state.
This is the deeper issue, and it brings to mind the Apartheid "solution" cooked up by the racists in South Africa, where unwanted blacks were segregated into separate Bantustans to keep them out of sight (and out of mind) of the white minority rulers. Fortunately, the people of South African dismantled their Apartheid system years ago. But it survives today in Israel/Palestine in an even more pernicious form. In fact, Israel is probably the last of the settler colonies that were common during the heyday of colonialism, in the 18-19th centuries, when Europeans lorded over the rest of humanity. Britain, for example, financed its industrial revolution with wealth stolen from India, at the time the jewel in the British crown. Nor was that stolen wealth ever repaid.
My point is that in 2009 this hierarchical way of organizing society is far out of step with present-day standards of morality and justice. Uncritical US support for Israeli-style Apartheid has thus placed the United States on the wrong side of history, an ugly reality that ought to be a source of concern, indeed, of alarm, for each and every American. At issue is the racist nature of the Zionist enterprise, and it's long past time that we call the thing by its true name.
Mark H. Gaffney's first book was a pioneering study of Israel's nuclear weapons program. His latest, The 9/11 Mystery Plane, explores whether 9/11 was an inside job. his web site at www.the911mysteryplane.com
