497 Smuggling weapons into Syria. Libya faces disintegration

Smuggling weapons into Syria. Libya faces disintegration

(1) Smuggling weapons into Syria: on the job with Iraq's gun runners
(2) France, US arming Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft missiles – report
(3) France pulls out her agents ensconced in Syria
(4) The journalist-combatants of Baba Amr - Thierry Meyssan
(5) Baba Amr rebels leave Metis anti-tank missiles behind
(6) Mossad, CIA and Blackwater operate in Syria - report
(7) Syria: Clinton admits US on same side as Al Qaeda to destabilise
Assad Government
(8) Egyptian junta lifts travel ban on NGO operatives
(9) Libya faces disintegration as tribal leaders in Benghazi declare
semi-autonomous region
(10) Arab Spring is Arab Socialism's Fall - Wayne Madsen

(1) Smuggling weapons into Syria: on the job with Iraq's gun runners
http://www.niqash.org/articles/?id=3008

niqash | Special Correspondent

Niqash: briefings from inside and across Iraq

Mosul | 08.03.2012

A few short years ago, the Rabia border crossing between Syria and Iraq,
was being used to smuggle weapons from Syria into Iraq where they ended
up in the hands of Iraqis fighting each other and US troops. Now that
situation has been reversed, with guns being smuggled back into Syria,
ostensibly to arm Syrian revolutionaries embroiled in an increasingly
violent and bloody conflict against the regime led by Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad. NIQASH travelled to Rabia to join a group of young gun
runner, to see how the smugglers operate, why the border patrols don't
stop them and what the smugglers' motivations are.

After travelling around a hundred kilometres in a taxi, we finally reach
Rabia, the only international border crossing between Syria and Iraq,
here in the state of Ninawa. During the two and a half hour journey we
were stopped at 20 military checkpoints. And at those checkpoints,
security personnel always asked to see my identification. After doing
so, they would let me past – but not without a sceptical smile.

Before actually driving into the town of Rabia, where it's well known
that the main business is smuggling, the driver, Mohammed, takes a side
street to show us the border – we see part of the dirt barrier, two
meters high, that separates Syria from Iraq, which runs for 750
kilometres. A no man's land, marked by barbed wire and one kilometre
wide, separates the barrier from the street on which we are driving.

Eventually we drive into one of the tiny villages near the border – it
is about 130 kilometres west of Mosul and most of the families that live
there have relations and friends just over the border in Syria.

“Barbed wire has not managed to separate these people and it hasn't put
an end to the mutual interests that these bordering villagers have,”
Mohammed, who lives nearby, tells me. “A lot of people in this village
work as smugglers and they collaborate with their relatives across the
border, who are Syrian citizens. They don't really care at all about the
border police.”

Mohammed, who knows the smuggling scene here, then assists me in
observing the industrious traders. We wait until sunset, at which stage
literally hundreds of men start to cross the border using holes they've
made in the barbed wire as well in the dirt barrier. And it seems as
though there are hundreds of people waiting for them on the other side
of the border too.

Mohammed indicates to me what the various smugglers are carrying. Some
are carrying cigarette boxes, others are bringing cartons of alcohol
that they get from the Syrian side. Livestock also comes across the
border. And, he adds, all of those things are cheap in Syria compared to
Mosul, where a lot of these black market goods end up being sold.

Then, Mohammed pointed at another group coming toward the border. They
are a group of relatively young men, carrying what appear to be grain
bags. “Those bags will eventually reach the “hot” areas in Syria,”
Mohammed explained – and by hot, he meant where there was violence.

Indeed, it turned out that this was a group of gun smugglers. They were
being led by Hamid, a man in his 30s, who proudly told us: “I was the
first person to smuggle weapons into Syria, when the revolution there
began”.

Smuggling has become a major industry in small border villages such as
the ones where Hamid and his colleagues in crime live. And it seems that
the Iraqi authorities know this. Recently smuggling weapons into Syria
has become particularly profitable. As Abdul-Rahim al-Shammari, head of
the provincial council's security committee, says: “the smuggling of
arms is increasingly profitable and it's a growing business. Over the
last few months the prices for guns have doubled, and then re-doubled.”

And there are simply not enough resources to control the borders and
prevent smuggling. “The brigade in charge doesn't have enough soldiers,
or equipment,” a frustrated al-Shammari told NIQASH.

The border breaches are also cause for concern because one of the more
serious problems, al-Shammari says, is terrorism. “According to Iraqi
intelligence, members of al-Qaeda [Sunni extremists operating in Iraq]
are crossing the borders near Rabia, to go to Syria to fight the
Jihadist battle.”

Asking around though, the local people living near the borders couldn't
confirm this. They said they had only ever met and helped Syrian
soldiers who had deserted and fled over the border to Iraq.

Today, when the young men of the local villages sit and drink tea
together, they entertain each other with tales of derring-do in the
smuggling trade. I was told about one young man who made it all the way
to the dirt barrier in a pickup truck, carrying a ton of Kalashnikov guns.

We end up drinking tea in the garden of the modest house belonging to
Hamid, the leader of the small group of gun smugglers we encountered. He
tells me that he first smuggled guns into Syria in April last year. Then
there were only 20 guns. But since then things have changed.

“Since then,” Hamid says, “a huge amount of weapons has gone across the
border. That first time we smuggled the guns and we didn't tell anyone
what we were doing. But when the revolution got bigger and changed [it
has become more violent], almost everyone in our village – and the
villages nearby – have become involved.”

I ask Hamid if I can accompany him on a smuggling trip and he agrees, as
long as I don't tell anybody who I am.

Two days later, at sun rise, we begin our journey. We drive a dusty
Toyota pickup through arid agricultural land for ten minutes until we
sight a blue saloon car. The driver of this car motions to us, to park
beside him. Some tools are taken out of the vehicle and the two men
begin to act as if they are fixing the blue car, stretching out on the
ground and fiddling with various pieces of equipment.

While they are doing this they ask me, to my chagrin, to keep watch.
This was hardly dangerous; it was easy to do as all the land around us
was completely flat. However I definitely felt conflicted, as all of a
sudden, I had become complicit in the weapons smuggling business.

By now, the men are removing weapons, wrapped in plastic, from the blue
vehicle. By the time they are done, Hamid had hidden 40 Kalashnikovs and
50 containers of ammunition in his own vehicle. He asks me to help cover
the guns with a tarpaulin and together we fasten ropes around them.

We then began to drive back to the village. “So where do all these guns
come from?,” I ask Hamid. “And how do they get them through all those
military checkpoints?” Because often, security personnel at the
checkpoints will not just check IDs, they'll also search the vehicles.

“They come from Baghdad and from Erbil,” Hamid replied. But he said he
didn't really know much more than that. The driver of the other car was
Kurdish – when I tried to ask him the same question, he didn't answer.

Back in the village the rest of the day was relatively peaceful. However
at sunset, things started getting busy again, as the smugglers headed
toward the border crossing points by the dirt barrier and barbed wire.

Mobile phones are used to fix times for crossing the barrier and Hamid
and I, along with six other men carrying burlap bags filled with guns
and ammunition, head for the same area.

When we can't drive any further, we park next to the border zone. It's a
chaotic scene as large groups of people, carrying cartons of cigarettes
and bigger bags, rush around. There are also gunmen who fire their
weapons into the air. “That's to warn the border guards not to
interfere,” another smuggler told me.

After less than half an hour, we see the first of the smugglers
returning from the border. He is herding cattle! As he came closer,
Hamid was exuberant: “Tonight we're winning,” he exclaims.

Then together with the group of young men, we run across the dirt
barrier in the dark. The bags are handed over to Syrians on the other
side and they leave as quickly as we came. Not far from us, another
delivery is being made. I believe there were many others but because it
was so dark, I couldn't really see what was going on.

Later, I asked Hamid what he had meant when he had spoken about
“winning”. “Tonight we felt really safe,” he said. “Because there were
so many of us, and because people were firing warning shots, the border
guards didn't dare interfere. A few days ago the soldiers tried to stop
us and one of them was shot and injured. After that, they've been
avoiding us.”

Interestingly, like many weapons dealers around the world, Hamid and his
fellow smugglers were not particularly well informed about what was
going on in Syria. While discussing this with them, it was hard to tell
where their sympathies lay – or if they even had any sympathies for
either the Syrian revolutionaries or the current Syrian regime.

However when it came to weapons and money, they could tell me anything I
wanted to know.

“When the conflict in Syria changed, the prices increased,” one of the
other smugglers, Saeed, told me. “A year ago we were selling a machine
gun for US$450. Today they pay us US$800. We also smuggle medium sized
weapons from here. The price of an RPG-7 [rocket propelled grenade
launcher] is US$1,100. We also sell hand grenades, sniper guns,
silencers and ammunition and prices vary.”

Saeed estimates that during the past year, his group of smugglers has
traded around 1,500 Kalashnikovs, 1,000 boxes of ammunition and hundreds
of other weapons.

So how do they know that the guns are reaching the Syrian rebels, and
not ending up elsewhere? To answer my question, Hamid called Fawaz, a
Syrian smuggler, on his mobile phone, to ask him what he actually did
what the guns they traded. When he was asked that though, Fawaz
pretended he couldn't hear the question. But Hamid understood what Fawaz
was saying. “He's afraid to speak because the Syrian telephone are under
surveillance by the Syrian government.”

Hamid called back again, this time using the Iraqi telephone network.
And this time Fawaz answered the question: “Every piece, every gun, goes
to the Syrian rebels,” he stated.

(2) France, US arming Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft missiles – report

News | 29.02.2012 | 22:14

http://rt.com/news/syria-arms-us-france-531/
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2012/02/29/france-us-arming-syrian-rebels-with-anti-aircraft-missiles.html

A general in the opposition militia known as the Free Syria Army has
told journalists that the rebels have received French and American
military assistance, amid reports of worsening violence in the stricken
nation.

In Homs on Tuesday, a general claiming to be from the rebel group
appeared on camera and told a journalist from Reuters news agency that
“French and American assistance has reached us and is with us.” When
asked to elaborate on the nature of the assistance he added, "We now
have weapons and anti-aircraft missiles and, God willing, with all of
that we will defeat Bashar [President Assad]."

The international community maintains it is committed to finding a
political solution to the conflict and had rejected the idea of military
intervention. However, there are growing suspicions that it has been
supplying the opposition with weapons indirectly.

This is not the first report of the US covertly supplying the opposition
with arms. In December, FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel
Edmonds said she believed the US had been training the Syrian opposition
in neighboring Turkey and supplying arms to the country from Incirlik
military base close to the Turkish-Syrian border.

In addition, Qatar and Saudi Arabia reportedly held secret meetings to
offer financial support to the Syrian rebels to buy weapons.

Political foot-dragging

Thus far the international community has been unable to reach agreement
on a resolution to the Syrian conflict. At an emergency meeting called
by the UN in Brussels on Tuesday, the Syrian ambassador accused the UN
Security Council of purposely stalling and fueling the flames of
terrorism in the country.

The UN has shown consistent support for the opposition movement, with
both the Security Council and General Assembly repeatedly calling for
the ouster of President Assad.

RT

(3) France pulls out her agents ensconced in Syria

http://www.voltairenet.org/France-pulls-out-her-agents

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | 1 MARCH 2012

The Ambassador of France in Beirut, Denis Pietton, officially visited
last week the region of Baalbeck in eastern Lebanon. In fact, he
traveled with a French security team to northern Bekaa, a region
bordering the Syrian province of Homs.

On the Syrian side of the border, officers and experts from the French
military intelligence services, some posing as journalists, were
training Free "Syrian" Army fighters. They had all entered Syria
surreptitiously.

At an illegal crossing point, Ambassador Denis Pietton and his
companions retrieved the French intelligence officers leaving the
Islamic Emirate of Baba Amr where they had been teaching their
techniques in urban combat.

Under the Vienna Convention, diplomatic cars can not be searched. The
convoy was therefore able to drop off the French agents at the embassy's
doorstep under the nose of the Lebanese police.

With all the arrogance of the former mandatory power, the French
ambassador, once again, interfered publicly in Lebanese affairs by
declaring on 23 February to our colleagues from the Daily Star: "Lebanon
should keep out of the turmoil in Syria."

(4) The journalist-combatants of Baba Amr - Thierry Meyssan

http://www.voltairenet.org/The-journalist-combatants-of-Baba

THE INDEPENDENT ISLAMIC EMIRATE OF BABA AMR (PART 1)

The journalist-combatants of Baba Amr

by Thierry Meyssan

Is the crackdown on Baba Amr the biggest political masquerade since
9/11? This is what Thierry Meyssan sets out to prove in a exclusive
serialized account published by Voltaire Network. In this first
installment, he focuses on the alleged escape of Western journalists and
demonstrates that some of them were embedded with the Free "Syrian" Army.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK

4 MARCH 2012

Satellite view of the independent Islamic Emirate of Baba Amr. The
Atlanticist media interpret the smoke billowing from the neighborhood as
proof of bombings. ember States of NATO and the GCC were unable to
launch a conventional attack against Syria. However, for ten months they
have been laying the groundwork by waging a low intensity war coupled
with an economic and media assault. The city of Homs became the symbol
of the conflict. The Free "Syrian" Army seized the neighborhoods of Baba
Amr and Inchaat and proclaimed an Islamic Emirate that heralds its
political program.

With the backing of Russia - still traumatized by her experience with
the Islamic Emirate of Ichkeria - and China - eager to see the Syrian
government protect its citizens -, the Syrian National Army stormed the
stronghold on 9 February after all mediation attempts had failed.
Defeated, the Free "Syrian" Army soon entrenched itself in an area of
approximately 40 hectares, which was immediately sealed off by loyalist
forces; it steadily withered and eventually fell on 1 March. In
retaliation, the remaining armed elements of the Emirate massacred the
Christians in the two villages they ripped through on their way to exile
in Lebanon.

Throughout this period, major media have served to veil the sordid and
cruel reality of this Emirate, and to replace it with a made-up story of
revolution and repression. A special effort was made to create the
impression that thousands of civilians were being shelled by the Syrian
military artillery or the air force. At the heart of this propaganda
construct, we find a press center used by the satellite channels of the
Coalition: Al-Jazeera (Qatar), Al-Arabiya (Saudi Arabia), France24
(France), BBC (UK) and CNN (USA) under the coordination of Israeli
journalists.

Between the antagonistic versions of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and the Gulf Cooperation Council on the one side, and the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization on the other, public opinion in the
West and in the Gulf may well wonder which to believe. We will try to
provide key elements, enabling people to decipher and determine the
truth on their own. We will base ourselves on the videos broadcast by
Western and Gulf TV channels, the testimonies of survivors recorded by
the Voltaire Network office in Syria, and the documents which were found
in the Emirate's press center.

The two faces of Western reporters

The Western journalists trapped inside the Emirate posted distress call
videos on the Internet. Two of them seem to be wounded, while the third
one appears to be in good health. Their respective governments made of
their retrieval a matter of principle. France dispatched an official to
negotiate with the rebels. Several other states, including Russia, keen
to cool tensions in the Levant, offered their good offices.

I took part in this collective effort. In actual fact, a French
journalist declined the first opportunity to get out with the help of
the International Red Cross and the Syrian Red Crescent. Suspecting a
trap, she refused to accept the extended hand. My mission was two-fold.
In the first place, to establish contact with my compatriots, brief them
about the political and military context, and facilitate their hand over
to a French official to be placed under diplomatic protection. Secondly,
I had to report to those who are working for peace in this region
regarding the exact sequence of events and assess the good will of the
actors.

As we know, the negotiations failed. The intelligence service agents,
representing the various states involved, were in a position to observe
that the Syrian authorities and aid agencies had done their utmost and
that the hindrance was solely attributable to the Free "Syrian" Army.

What a surprise then - genuine or feigned - for the various mediators
when they suddenly learned that the three journalists whom they had
tried to extract from Homs, plus a fourth who had turned down our help,
were able to break through Free "Syrian" Army lines plus those of the
Syrian national Army and make their way to Lebanon.

After a moment of confusion and verifying that Russia's parallel efforts
were no more advanced than ours, it became obvious that a commando armed
by a major Western nation had spirited out the four journalists, and
possibly more, while we had put our lives at risk unnecessarily. In such
circumstances, there is no reason for me to keep silent on the underside
of this affair. I will only omit from this article any reference to the
officials and personalities involved, in order to preserve their ability
to continue to act for peace, although mentioning certain details would
have been of educational value for our readers.

There is no doubt in my mind that the survivors of Baba Amr will shape
their version of events to strengthen the Atlanticist propaganda. They
will continue to lie as they have lied all along. That is why, I am
eager to put on record what I have seen in an effort to forestall the
fabric of disinformation that is relentlessly being woven.

According to the current media rhetoric, a revolution was brutally
quelled. One would think that Western journalists supposedly driven by
their desire to inform, would normally have come on the spot to bear
witness and report. The insurgents entrenched themselves progressively
deeper into the Baba Amr district, where they survived for three weeks
under a deluge of fire. Their press center was bombarded with GRAD
missiles, coined "Stalin's organs" by the Germans, on Wednesday, 22
February 2012. During this assault, Marie Colvin (Sunday Times) and Remi
Ochlik (IP3 Press) were killed, while Edith Bouvier (Le Figaro Magazine)
and Paul Conroy (Sunday Times) were wounded. William Daniels (ex-Figaro
Magazine and Time Magazine) reportedly remained with them, while Javier
Espinosa (El Mundo) allegedly split from the group.

The survivors posted four videos online that tell a strange story.

The deaths of Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik

The images of two dead journalists were seen on a video provided by the
Free "Syrian" Army. Their bodies were found after the fall of the
Emirate and were identified by the ambassadors of France and Poland
(representing his United States counterpart).

  Mary Colvin was known for her chic outfits and the contrast, that she
used to juggle with, between the softness of her feminine attire and the
hardness of the bandage covering her lost eye. The video, which only
shows the back of the two bodies lying on the ground, is authentic and
was validated by many of the media that have aired it. The two
journalists are clad in battle dress. The question thus arises as to why
this detail, which contravenes the non-combatant status of journalists
in a battlefield, has been ignored by the public, and did not give rise
to any outrage on the part of the profession.

Injured Edith Bouvier and Paul Conroy at the clinic

On the second video, the Syrian Red Crescent representative working
inside the Emirate, Dr. Ali - a neighborhood dentist who courageously
looked after the wounded - introduces Edith Bouvier and Paul Conroy who
are lying on a bed in what appears be a kind of health center. Then, a
Free "Syrian" Army soldier, calling himself "Doctor Mohammed" and
donning a blue coat and a stethoscope, makes a revolutionary pronouncement.

  Three things must be noted: Edith Bouvier refuses to identify herself,
although her name is revealed to the audience, and tries to conceal her
face. Paul Conroy rolls his eyes both anxiously and disapprovingly.
"Doctor Mohammed" is a star of Syrian opposition videos. He acts as a
revolutionary doctor, while he is not a doctor. He expresses himself in
a broken language, devoid of medical terms, but sprinkled with
references Salafists.

Everything suggests that "Doctor Mohammed" took advantage of the
situation to involve the real doctor and the two journalists in the
staging of a grossly over dramatized situation.

New message by Paul Conroy from his room

In a third video, British photographer Paul Conroy is stretched out on a
couch, after receiving care. He asks for help and takes pains to clarify
that he is there as a guest and not as a prisoner.

He looks just as uneasy as in the first video and drops several hints to
the audience. He calls on "global agencies" to intervene because "they
are working towards the same objectives on the ground". Who are these
"global agencies" that supposedly have the power to pull him out of the
Emirate? It can only be public agencies, be they intergovernmental like
the UN, or national, such as intelligence agencies. What does "working
towards the same objectives on the ground" mean? He cannot be referring
to a UN activity, since they are not involved with journalism. The only
possible interpretation is that he is sending a message to Allied
intelligence agencies, hinting that he belongs to one of their British
counterparts.

Unlike Mary Colvin, her photographer for her Sunday Times reporting
assignments, Paul Conroy is not wearing a uniform on the battlefield,
but he does not need one to be recognized.

"Doctor Mohammed" intervenes to give us his diagnosis. Paul Conroy was
allegedly wounded in the leg the day before by a GRAD missile. He shows
us an immaculate leg bandage. Despite the extreme seriousness and
freshness of the wound, his leg is not swollen. "Doctor Mohammed" did
not steal his title: With no medical training, he manages to perform
medical miracles.

At the end of his speech, Paul Conroy butts in with a reassuring message
for "his family and friends in England": "I am perfectly well." Though
the hidden meaning may have escaped "Doctor Mohammed," those who know
that Paul Conroy is from Northern Ireland, and not from England, will
have no trouble deciphering it. The "photographer" is speaking to the
upper echelons of the British military agency he works for, and lets
them know that this pantomime should not be taken seriously: He is OK.

This time it is Paul Conroy who seems to have taken advantage of "Doctor
Mohammed"'s theatrics to get his message across, while immobilized by
his injury.

New message by Edith Bouvier and her companion

In a fourth video, filmed and broadcast the same day, Edith Bouvier,
supine in in her bed of misfortune, calls for help. She requests (1)
"the establishment of a cease-fire" and (2) a "medicalized car to drive
her to Lebanon," so that she may be treated quickly.

Since the requirements expressed are those of a truce that allow for the
circulation of an ambulance and transportation to a hospital for
treatment, such claims are totally incongruous. (1) A cease-fire is an
agreement to suspend all hostilities between the parties in the context
of political negotiations, while a truce is a military draw, in a
specific area and during a specified time frame, to permit the movement
of persons or humanitarian supplies. (2) Moreover, being taken to
Lebanon would first require an amnesty for the crime of illegal
immigration, Edith Bouvier having been smuggled into Syria to be with
the rebels.

Although these two requirements are not elaborated on, they correspond
to the creation of a "humanitarian corridor" in the sense intended by
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé.

Alain Juppe is unfortunately known for his ability to reverse roles and
his use of "humanitarian corridors." In 1994 he had obtained from the UN
Security Council a resolution authorizing Operation Turquoise, which is
to say the creation of a "humanitarian corridor" to prevent the Hutu
population of Rwanda from being slaughtered in turn in the wake of the
crimes committed mainly by the Hutu Power against the Tutsi population.
We now know that this corridor was more than just humanitarian. It
allowed France to smuggle out the genocide perpetrators intermingled
with the civilians, thus exempting them from having to answer for their
crimes. Alain Juppé has sought this time to smuggle out armed groups
responsible for killings in Syria.

It should be noted that Edith Bouvier is not voicing her own needs; her
requirements correspond to the interests of the Free "Syrian" Army, as
defended by France.

It is not surprising that the journalist should act as Alain Juppé's
spokesperson. She was hired to work for Le Figaro by Georges Malbrunot.
According to the Syrian authorities, in the 80's the latter was the DGSE
officer in charge of liaising with the Muslim Brotherhood. He was
arrested in Hama, then handed over to the French authorities at the
urging of President François Mitterrand.

In the next sequence, "Dr. Mohammed" explains the situation, while
Bouvier's companion, photographer William Daniels (freelance at Le
Figaro-Magazine, then for Time Magazine) underscores its urgency. The
statements in Arabic are translated into English by a fourth character
that cannot be seen on the screen. Finally a fifth participant, young
Khaled Abu Saleh, ends the video on a revolutionary note.

While in the first videos both Edith and Paul clearly refused to
cooperate with "Doctor Mohammed," this time she willingly tags along.

Young Khaled Abu Saleh is the head of the Free "Syrian" Army press
center. According to journalists who have used this facility, the
Center, located in a dilapidated building, was equipped with all the
necessary hi-tech material. Journalists could do their film editing, and
had satellite equipment for live broadcasts. Some ironically compared
the level of the computer center to that of the Syrian National Army,
which continues to use antiquated transmission systems.

There is no mention of the generous sponsors who supplied this
state-of-the-art installation. But Khaled Abu Saleh's professional
activities could give us a clue. The young revolutionary was himself a
journalist. He is permanent correspondent for Al-Jazeera, which features
his blog on its website, and freelances for France24, where he is listed
as collaborator on the "Observers" column. These two satellite TV
stations are spearheading NATO and GCC propaganda to justify regime
change in Syria, as they did to justify the one in Libya.

As an example of the ethics practiced by the French public station, on 7
June 2011, France24 had broadcast live a very moving telephone speech by
Syria's ambassador to France, Lamia Shakkour, announcing her resignation
in protest against the massacres in her country. Immediately the French
diplomatic machine started to put pressure on all the Syrian ambassadors
in the world to follow this good example. Alas! Although Renée Kaplan,
the deputy editor-in-chief of France24, swore that the voice on the
phone belonged to the Ambassador, whom she knew well, it was actually
that of journalist Fahd Alargha-Almasri's wife. The intoxication fizzled
out [1].

Spurred by Alain de Pouzilhac and Christine Ockrent-Kouchner, France 24
and RFI have ceased to be news organizations to become instruments of
the French military-diplomatic apparatus. Thus, on 5 July 2011, Alain de
Pouzilhac, as CEO of the Société de l'audiovisuel extérieur de la France
(AEF) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Shammam Mahmoud,
Information Minister of the Libyan rebels. He pledged to create
anti-Gaddafi media and to train the necessary personnel to facilitate
the overthrow of the Libyan "Guide." The announcement drew the ire of
France24 and RFI journalists, furious at being used for this propaganda
enterprise. Everything suggests that similar provisions have been made
to foster "citizen journalism" among "Syrian revolutionaries." If this
is the case, the role of Khaled Abu Saleh is not just limited to
corresponding and freelancing; he is a key player in the fabrication of
false information on behalf of the French military-diplomatic device.

As already seen, Edith Bouvier was at first reluctant to take part in
the stage-acting. This time instead she collaborated with her colleague
from France24, recording a call for help aimed at manipulating the
sympathy of the public to justify the establishment of a "humanitarian
corridor," in line with Alain Juppé's need to evacuate the mercenaries
of the Free "Syrian" Army and the Western instructors.

First conclusions

At this stage of my video-based analysis, I have formulated ?several
working hypotheses.

  The team from the Sunday Times (Mary Colvin and Paul Conroy) was
working for MI6, while Le Figaro Magazine correspondent (Edith Bouvier)
was sent by the DGSE.

  "Doctor Mohammed" seized the opportunity that the journalists were
bedridden to record two more videos, but Paul Conroy, in turn, used it
send a distress message to his allies. Ultimately, the France24
freelance, Khaled Abou Saleh, created the scenario for Alain Juppe's
objective.

Negotiation breakdown or negotiation shift?

Throughout the negotiations, I was able to provide various insights that
were taken into consideration. But whenever I broached the above
aspects, I was told that it was not the right time. It was clear that
the Free "Syrian" Army was refusing to release the journalists. The
priority was therefore to save them. Their actual status would be dealt
with later.

On Saturday evening, 25 February, the negotiations folded. To restore
contact with the Takfirists, the Syrians sought a moderate sheikh with
whom the group would agree to talk, but all the clergymen who were
approached stepped back one after the other for fear of the
consequences. Should we continue to camp on site waiting for discussions
to resume as soon as a sheikh could be found? Or was it better to return
to Damascus to rest in safety?

The answer came from the Syrian military authorities. We were asked to
return and to remain on stand-by for a new opportunity to emerge. Back
in the capital, an SMS informed us that negotiations had been suspended
for 48 hours.

Suspended did not imply that we could enjoy ourselves on Sunday and
Monday while our fellow countrymen were in danger of death, but that
during those 48 hours another negotiation was underway. At that moment,
I thought that our Russian friends had taken the relay.

On Tuesday morning I was awakened by a friend, a war reporter for a
major French media outlet, who called to inform me of the arrival of
Paul Conroy and, probably, other journalists in Beirut. I was shocked.
In turn, I woke up a senior Syrian official, who shared my perplexity.
 From phone call to call, nobody in Damascus knew anything, or would not
speak.

Ultimately, I discovered that an agreement had been worked out between
General Assef Shawkat and a highly placed French personality, whom he
knew as a friend, to find a political solution to the imbroglio.
Loyalist forces opened their lines to allow the French military advisers
and journalists to cross into Lebanon overnight. At daybreak, the Free
"Syrian" Army discovered they were gone. Realizing that they had been
left on their own, the mercenaries decided to give themselves up,
leaving their arsenal behind, while the Islamists refused the heed the
final warnings. General Assef Shawkat gave the final assault and took
the Emirate within hours, delivering the trapped civilians from the
tyranny of the Islamists.

 >From its headquarters abroad, the Free "Syrian" Army - now reduced to
a shadow of itself - announced its "strategic withdrawal." Since nature
abhors a vacuum, the Syrian National Council, also based abroad, has
meanwhile announced the creation of a Military Committee composed of
Syrian and, especially, foreign experts. In four days, the military
question has moved from the Syrian battlefield to posh lounges of the
great Parisian hotels.

To be continued ...

Thierry Meyssan

[1] "L'Ambassadeur de Syrie en France victime d'une tentative de
déstabilisation," by Frédéric Lacastille, InfoSyrie, 7 June 2011.

French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the
Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international
relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic,
Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the
Big Lie and Pentagate.

(5) Baba Amr rebels leave Metis anti-tank missiles behind

Thierry Meyssan

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | 1 MARCH 2012

After the flight of 35 military advisers and Western journalists, the
2000 fighters of the Free "Syrian" Army clustered in the Islamic Emirate
of Baba Amr lost all hope of seeing the promises of the West come true.

Wednesday, 29 February 29, hundreds chose to surrender before the Syrian
National Army penetrated the rebel area.

The Islamic Emirate of Baba Amr occupied less than 40 acres when it was
cordoned off by loyalist forces. It comprises only part of the Baba Ams
district itself, and some adjacent streets.

Syria is a country of 185,000 km2, inhabited by 23 million people.

The insurgents gave themselves up, leaving their weapons behind. Their
arsenal included shooting stations and AT-13 / 9K115 Metis anti-tank
missiles. This Russian equipment being already outdated and quite
widespread in the region, it is difficult at this time to pinpoint via
which trafficking ring it was actually delivered.

At the start of the Battle of Homs, the rebels were also in possession
of anti-tank Milan firing stations.

(6) Mossad, CIA and Blackwater operate in Syria - report

http://rt.com/news/cia-blackwater-mossad-syria-037/

Published: 07 March, 2012, 13:28

A security operation in Homs reveals Mossad, CIA and Blackwater are
involved in the military violence in this part of Syria, as over 700
Arab and Western gunmen and Israeli, American and European-made weapons
were detained in Baba Amr district.

Syrian security forces got yet further proof of Western powers’ military
involvement in Syria’s internal conflict, reports Al-Manar, a news
agency, affiliated with Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group and
political party.

Around 700 gunmen were recently arrested in the former rebel stronghold
of Babar Amr.

“The captured gunmen held Arab nationalities, including Gulf, Iraqi, and
Lebanese. Among them were also Qatari intelligence agents and non-Arab
fighters from Afghanistan, Turkey, and some European countries like
France,” the agency quotes Syrian expert in strategic affairs Salim
Harba as saying.

Harba also confirmed to the agency that “a coordination office was
established in Qatar under American-Gulf sponsorship. The office
includes American, French, and Gulf – specifically from Qatar and Saudi
Arabia – intelligence agents, as well as CIA, Mossad, and Blackwater
agents and members of the Syrian Transitional Council.”

The Syrian expert also added the security forces have also seized
Israeli-, European- and American-made weapons.

“The Syrian army also uncovered tunnels and equipments there,” he told
to the agency, “advanced Israeli, European, and American arms that have
not yet been tested in the countries of manufacture, in addition to
Israeli grenades, night binoculars, and communication systems were
confiscated by the security forces.”

Salim Harba however said the Syrian authorities are not planning to
reveal all the obtained information now, but assured all the evidence is
of high value.

“The Syrian security forces have documents and confessions that could
harm everyone who conspired against Syria, and could make a security and
political change, not just on the internal Syrian level, but also on the
regional level,” he said.

The recent Stratfor leak and hacked email of the company’s director of
analysis also suggest undercover NATO troops are already on the ground
in Syria.

There have been previous allegations of a Western presence on the side
of the rebels as 13 French officers were reportedly captured by the
loyalist forces earlier in March.

President Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly claimed his regime is fighting
not with peaceful protesters as claimed by the West, but with the
military gangs supported by the West.

Western powers however have categorically denied any military
involvement in Syrian internal conflict.

(7) Syria: Clinton admits US on same side as Al Qaeda to destabilise
Assad Government

From:   Ken Freeland <diogenesquest@gmail.com> Date: 29 February 2012
23:49

By Michel Chossudovsky and Finian Cunningham

Global Research, February 27, 2012

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29524

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that Al Qaeda and
other organizations on the US "terror list" are supporting the Syrian
opposition.

Clinton said: "We have a very dangerous set of actors in the region,
al-Qaida [sic], Hamas, and those who are on our terrorist list, to be
sure, supporting – claiming to support the opposition [in Syria]." [1]
(Click here to watch video)

Yet at the same time, in the above BBC interview the US Secretary of
State repeats the threadbare Western claim that the situation in Syria
is one of a defenceless population coming under "relentless attack" from
Syrian government forces. ...

Notes

[1] Transcript of Clinton interview on BBC, 26 February, 2012:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1202/S00690/interview-with-kim-ghattas-of-bbc.htm

(8) Egyptian junta lifts travel ban on NGO operatives
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/ngos-m03.shtml

By Johannes Stern
3 March 2012

On Thursday, a US military plane flew several American NGO operatives
out of Egypt following the lifting of a travel ban by the ruling
military junta. The move was a climb-down by the regime, which had
insisted on proceeding with plans to try the Americans for illegally
interfering in Egyptian affairs. It followed weeks of intense pressure
from Washington.

US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland declared that the US was
“very pleased,” but stressed that “the departure of our people doesn't
resolve the legal case or the larger issues concerning the NGOs.” She
added that the US remains “deeply concerned about the prosecution” and
wants “to see the NGO situation settled in a manner that allows all NGOs
[...] to be registered.”

In June, the Egyptian interim government accused several NGOs and
political organizations working in Egypt of receiving illicit and
unregistered foreign funding. The campaign against the NGOs started
after the US Agency for International Development (USAID) told Egyptian
newspapers it was supporting “pro-democracy” initiatives in Egypt.

According to media reports, the Obama administration funneled some $200
million into Egypt ahead of the parliamentary elections held last
November. The US was reportedly seeking to prop up the country's
pro-Western political parties to counterbalance the Islamist Freedom and
Justice Party (FJP), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).

In October, Egyptian Minister of Justice Mohamed Abdel Aziz El-Gendi
assigned two judges to investigate the allegations, and on December 29
armed military and police forces stormed and closed the offices of 17
NGOs in Cairo. Amongst the raided organizations were the American
International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic
Institute (NDI), Freedom House and the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

However, shortly before a trial of 43 people, including 16 Americans,
was about to start on February 26, the Egyptian authorities announced a
postponement. The lifting of the travel ban enabled the
defendants—including the IRI director in Egypt, Sam LaHood, son of US
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood—to leave the country.

Prior to the postponement of the trial, the US government stepped up its
pressure on the junta. High-ranking US officials, including the head of
the IRI and Republican Senator John McCain, visited Egypt and stressed
the need for a quick resolution of the crisis. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton and other leading US politicians threatened to cut the
annual allocation of $1.3 billion in military aid if the Egyptian
authorities did not back down.

On Tuesday, Clinton told a Senate hearing: “We've had a lot of very
tough conversations and I think we're… moving towards a resolution.” She
added that Cairo was “coming to understand” that Washington was serious
about the threat to cut off aid to Egypt.

While it remains unlikely that the US would have cut its aid to the
Egyptian junta—the chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staffs, General
Martin Dempsey, recently said such a step would be against US
interests—certain tensions have been growing between the US and the
regime in Cairo in recent months. ...

(9) Libya faces disintegration as tribal leaders in Benghazi declare
semi-autonomous region

From: Kristoffer Larsson <krislarsson@comhem.se> Date: 8 March 2012 08:15

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/9126968/Libya-fears-of-disintegration-as-tribal-leaders-declare-semi-autonomous-region.html

Libya: fears of disintegration as tribal leaders declare semi-autonomous
region

Tribal leaders and militia commanders in eastern Libya declared the
formation of a semi-autonomous region, raising fears that the country is
witnessing the first stages of disintegration just six months after the
fall of Col Muammar Gaddafi.

By Alex Spillius

7:30PM GMT 06 Mar 2012

A conference of about 3,000 delegates in Benghazi installed Ahmed
al-Senussi, a great nephew of Libya's former king, as head of the new
Cyrenaica Provincial Council.

It proposed that an eastern region should run its own affairs apart from
foreign policy, the national army and oil resources, which would be left
to a federal government in Tripoli.

The province would cover nearly half the country, from central Libya to
the Egyptian border in the east and down to the borders with Chad and
Sudan in the south.

The announcement aimed to present a federal system as a fait accompli
before the struggling National Transitional Council in Tripoli.

The goal is to revive the system in place after the Second World War
under King Idris, when Libya was divided into three states: Tripolitania
in the west, Fezzan in the southwest and Cyrenaica – or Barqa, as it was
called in Arabic – to the east.

As the monarch's power base, Cyrenaica enjoyed kudos and influence that
was very largely lost during Col Gaddafi's 42-year rule.

The east was the cradle of last year's rebellion against the late
dictator but complaints that it has been sidelined have grown more vocal
since his removal from power.

It is not clear what activities if any the council will undertake soon,
but Mohammed Buisier, one of the main organisers, said that he had
contacted "the people in Tripoli" and told them "come here and negotiate".

He added: "We are not going to give anyone a blank cheque."

The NTC has repeatedly voiced its opposition to the creation of a partly
autonomous eastern region, warning it could eventually lead to the
break-up of the north African nation of six million.

"This is very dangerous. This is a blatant call for fragmentation. We
reject it in its entirety," said Fathi Baja, the head of political
committee of the NTC. "We are against divisions and against any move
that hurts the unity of the Libyan people."

The declaration underscored the weakness of the NTC. It holds little
sway even in Tripoli, where militias that arose during the anti-Gaddafi
revolt have divided neighbourhoods up into fiefdoms.

The prime minister of the interim government created by the NTC,
Abdel-Rahim el-Keib, admitted earlier this week that the new government
was not performing up to the task.

"My evaluation of its performance is not good," he said in an interview
on state television. "The steps we are taking are slow."

The NTC has called for national elections in June to select a 200-member
assembly that would name a prime minister to form a government and then
write a constitution.

Rejecting that plan, the Benghazi conference appointed King Idris's
descendant Ahmed al-Senussi, Libya's longest serving political prisoner
under Col Gaddafi, as leader of the planned governing council. He is
also a member of the NTC, which contains many representatives of the
Benghazi region.

Other attendees included leaders of heavyweight tribes of the eastern
region, including the Ubaidat, Mughariba and Awajeer, defence ministry
officials and commanders from the Barqa Army, a grouping of 61 eastern
"revolutionary militias".

(10) Arab Spring is Arab Socialism's Fall - Wayne Madsen

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2012/03/07/arab-spring-is-arab-socialism-fall.html
http://www.4thmedia.org/2012/03/07/arab-spring-is-arab-socialism%E2%80%99s-fall/

«Arab Spring» is Arab Socialism's Fall

Wayne MADSEN | 07.03.2012 | 00:00

  The fall of autocratic regimes in the Arab Middle East and North
Africa, which had more to do with skyrocketing unemployment and
inflation than in a desire to «democratize,» gave the circling vultures
of Western «pro-democracy» think tanks and foundations the opportunity
to put stakes in the hearts of governing pan-Arab socialist political
parties long seen as a threat to the goals of «uber-capitalist»
globalization. The Ba'ath socialist party of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was
the first victim of a desire by the global forces of extreme capitalism
to re-make the Middle East's financial, demographic, political, and
social construct.

Because the invasion and occupation of Iraq was such an unmitigated
disaster, the neo-conservative and neo-liberal forces of corporatism
decided that other traditional Arab socialist regimes would fall as a
result of «soft power.» Soft power involves the use of foreign-funded
domestic pressure groups, financed and organized by Western
non-governmental organization (NGO) interests, to foment insurrections
and «popular revolutions» by using street demonstrations, propagandized
media – including social media – and false flag human rights violations
intended to generate worldwide sympathy for the manufactured revolutions.

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq the first action of L.
Paul «Jerry» Bremer, the de facto U.S. viceroy of occupied Iraq and
close associate of Henry Kissinger, was to abolish the Arab Socialist
Ba'ath Party. In fact, Bremer's first order, Coalition Provisional
Authority Order Number 1, totally banned the Ba'ath Party and all of its
affiliated structures. Bremer ensured that pan-Arab socialism was dead
in Iraq. Bremer's propaganda against Ba'athism was supported by his
press spokesman, Dan Senor, a longtime supporter of Israel and a former
investment portfolio manager for the Carlyle Group.

The Ba'ath Party of Iraq was the principal mechanism through which the
Iraqi bureaucracy, which ensured payments of salaries to government
workers, operated. Without the Ba'ath Party – public sector
infrastructure, Iraqis in all walks of life saw and end to their
paychecks. Popular discontent and rebellion against the Western
occupiers ensued. An army of U.S. contractors arrived in Iraq to ensure
the «de-Ba'athification» of the country, with right-wing Republicans at
the forefront of trying to create a capitalist and privatized wonderland
in Iraq that would not even sell to the public in the most conservative
U.S. state.

Naomi Klein summed up the West's desire to turn Iraq into a
neo-conservative capitalist theme park in her September 2004 article in
Harper's Magazine. Titled «Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit
of a neocon utopia,» Klein wrote, «A country of 25 million would not be
rebuilt as it was before the war; it would erased, disappeared . . .
Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their
quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible
workforce, open borders. Minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership
restrictions . . . Two months after the war began, USAID (U.S. Agency
for International Development) began drafting a work order, to be handed
to a private company, to oversee Iraq's «transition to a sustainable
market-driven economic system.» The company that received the contract
was Bearing Point, the follow-on firm of the accountancy firm KPMG. KPMG
and USAID are also linked closely to U.S. intelligence operations.

In her article, Klein detailed the planned future for Iraq: distribution
rights for Proctor & Gamble products was seen as a potential gold mine
in Iraq, a single 7-Eleven was forecasted to «knock out» thirty Iraqi
stores, and «Wal-Mart could take over the country.» Plans were in place
for McDonald's to open in downtown Baghdad and HSBC branches to open all
over the country.

Ba'ath Socialist Iraq, which guaranteed a social safety net and public
services, including water, electricity, education, and health care to
every Iraqi citizen, was dead. The capitalist utopia in Iraq never
materialized. Iraq became a country split into Sh'ia, Sunni, and Kurdish
zones, wracked by religious strife and almost daily terrorist attacks.
The standard of living enjoyed by Iraqis before the Western invasion and
occupation plummeted. Only Western military, security, and oil companies
benefitted from the deposing of the Ba'ath Party. But for the greedy
global «alchemists» huddled over their conference room tables in
Washington, New York, and London, Iraq was merely the first of the old
pan-Arab socialist countries to fall. Others would follow but without
the full-scale military invasion and occupation strategy that had failed
so miserably in Iraq. A new strategy would be needed, along with a new
administration in Washington to implement it.

After Barack Obama became president and lulled the Arabs of the Middle
East into a fairy tale that suggested that Obama was a different kind of
American president, one more interested in reaching out a hand of
friendship rather than a clenched fist, the Obama team of «democracy
engineers» set out to implement policies that would eliminate the Middle
East's remaining pan-Arab socialist regimes.

Now, history is repeating itself in Syria where another faction of the
Ba'ath Party has been in power for decades. Syria is the birthplace of
Ba'athist socialism. The chief founder of Ba'athism was Michel Aflaq,
the Syrian who founded the ideology that combined elements of communism
with strictly Arab principals of «Ba'ath» or «rebirth» with pan-Arab
socialism under the motto of «Unity, Liberty, and Socialism.»
Eventually, the Syrian and Iraqi factions of the Ba'ath Party broke with
one another and the two Ba'ath-governed nations became bitter enemies.
Today, in rejecting any negotiated settlement with the Bashar al-Assad
regime the West is copying some of the same elements of
«de-Ba'athification» carried out by the Kissinger/Carlyle Group cabal
that took over Iraq temporarily from Saddam Hussein.

The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt and its replacement by
a hybrid Salafist/Muslim Brotherhood reactionary parliament governed by
a military junta also saw the eclipse of what remained of the pan-Arab
socialist influence of Nasser. Mubarak, who succeeded Anwar Sadat, was a
political heir of Nasser and his brand of socialism. The new regime in
Egypt has made it clear that the secular socialist policies of Nasser,
Sadat, and, to a much lesser extent, Mubarak, have come to an end, with
Salafist Islamist sharia law replacing secular governance and equal
rights for minority religions throughout the country.

One of Nasser's political disciples was Libya's Muammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi
transformed Libya from a feudal backwater kingdom into a Socialist
People's Jamahiriyah, a country where all Libyans, regardless of race
and skin color, were guaranteed a safety net of social services, not
least of which was the benefit of popular revenue sharing from Libya's
royalties paid by Western oil firms. The new Salafist-linked regime
imposed by the West in Tripoli has carried out revenge murders of
Qaddafi supporters, totally dismantled any vestige of the Socialist
Jamahiriyah, committed human rights abuses, including the killing of
black African guest workers and black Libyans considered «kafirs»
(unwashed disbelievers) by Libyan Salafist Berbers of a more European,
rather than African, origin. Even the cemeteries of British and
Commonwealth troops who died in World War II have been smashed and
desecrated by the Western-imposed Salafists in Libya.

Tunisia's Socialist Destourian Party, founded by Tunisian nationalist
leader and later president Habib Bourguiba in the 1930s, saw its legacy
in Tunisia obliterated with the ouster in 2011 of the corrupt oligarch
and Bourguiba successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the first victim of
the so-called «Arab Spring.»

The Palestinian socialism advocated by Yasir Arafat, George Habash, and
Nayef Hawatmeh has been replaced by a kleptocracy shared by corrupt
officials of Fatah and Hamas who are often more interested in enriching
themselves than in breaking free from the Israeli yoke of occupation.
Lebanon's Arab socialist standard bearer, Kamal Jumblatt, was
assassinated in 1977. Although it was the West that benefitted by the
murder of the Arab socialist leader, Syria's Ba'ath Party was blamed, as
it would be later for various assassinations of Lebanese political
figures. However, over the years, Israel and Western intelligence
agencies have been discovered to have colluded in the assassinations of
a number of Lebanese officials.

The West has always sought to stamp out Arab socialism, beginning with
the 1965 «disappearance» in Paris of Morocco's Mehdi Ben Barka, called
the North African «Che Guevara,» allegedly at the hands of the French
intelligence service. The 1994 civil war between North Yemen and
socialist-Nasserite South Yemen resulted in the defeat of South Yemen
and its total absorption into a Western-supported Yemen led by Ali
Abdullah Saleh, an anti-socialist reactionary. Only in Algeria does some
semblance of the Arab socialist doctrine of the former president Ahmed
Ben Bella continue to exist to some degree under the administration of
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. But with more and more weapons being
intercepted at the Algerian border with Libya, it is a matter of time
before the anti-socialist juggernaut sweeps across the Sahara for Algiers.

496 World Bank head Robert Zoellick tells China to Privatize/Deregulate

World Bank head Robert Zoellick tells China to Privatize/Deregulate

(1) World Bank tells China to abandon "state-led capitalism dominated by
giant state-owned corporations"
(2) World Bank head Robert Zoellick tells China to Privatize/Deregulate
(3) China should Privatize state-owned firms - economist Michael Pettis
(4) China's state sector is reason its stimulus package more successful
than the West's - economist John Ross
(5) China's post-Mao economic transformation "the greatest economic
achievement in world history" - John Ross
(6) China tightens grip on hot money
(7) China to continue crackdown on hot money
(8) Japan's Trade Figures: Some Perspective - Eamonn Fingleton

(1) World Bank tells China to abandon "state-led capitalism dominated by
giant state-owned corporations"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204778604577238901231511224.html

February 22, 2012

China Needs Deep Reform, Says Upcoming Report

China could face an economic crisis unless it implements deep reforms,
according to a report by the World Bank and a Chinese government think
tank, which urges Beijing to operate its vast state-owned enterprises
more like commercial firms.

By Bob Davis

BEIJING—China could face an economic crisis unless it implements deep
reforms, according to a report by the World Bank and a Chinese
government think tank, which urges Beijing to scale back its vast
state-owned enterprises and make them operate more like commercial firms.

The recommendation is contained in "China 2030," a report set to be
released Monday, according to a half-dozen individuals involved in
preparing and reviewing it.

The report, which addresses some of China's most politically sensitive
economic issues, is designed to influence the next generation of Chinese
leaders who take office starting this year, these people said. It
challenges the way China's economic model has developed during the past
decade under President Hu Jintao, when the role of the state in the
world's second-largest economy has steadily expanded.
Reuters A customer pays for her vegetables at a local market in Shanghai
February 9, 2012.

"China 2030" cautions that China's growth is in danger of decelerating
rapidly and without much warning, as has occurred with many high-flying
developing countries once they reach a certain income level, a
phenomenon that development economists call the "middle-income trap." A
sharp slowdown could deepen problems in the banking sector and
elsewhere, the report warns, and could prompt a crisis, according to
those involved with the project.

It recommends that state-owned firms should be overseen by
asset-management firms, say those involved in the report. It also urges
China to overhaul local government finances and promote competition and
entrepreneurship.

"China's state-owned sector is at a crossroads," said Fred Hu, chief
executive of Primavera Capital Group, a Beijing investment firm. The
Chinese government must decide "whether it wants state-led capitalism
dominated by giant state-owned corporations or free-market
entrepreneurship."

Even ahead of its release, the report has generated fierce resistance
from bureaucrats who manage state enterprises, according to several
individuals involved in the discussions.

China's political heir apparent, Xi Jinping, now vice president, has
given few clues about his economic policies. Analysts expect the
high-profile report will help to shape discussions among Mr. Xi and his
allies about whether to make changes to a state-led economic model that
has alarmed Chinese private entrepreneurs and is becoming a source of
growing tension between China and its main trading partners, including
the U.S.

The report's authors argue that having the imprimatur of the World Bank
and the Development Research Center, or DRC—which reports to China's top
executive body, the State Council—will add political heft to the
proposals. The World Bank is widely admired in Chinese government
circles, particularly for its advice in helping China design early
market reforms. ...

(2) World Bank head Robert Zoellick tells China to Privatize/Deregulate

http://www.cnbc.com//id/46537810

China to Be Largest Economy Before 2030: World Bank

Published: Monday, 27 Feb 2012 | 3:43 AM ET

By: Reuters

China must relax its grip on industry and move towards a free-market
economy, the World Bank said on Monday in a report that forecast the
country would become the world's largest economy before 2030.

AP

Judging China to be near an inflection point in its economic growth, the
World Bank called on Beijing and its incoming leaders to overhaul the
structure of the world's No. 2 economy to keep income and productivity
rising in years ahead.

"As China's leaders know, the country's current growth model is
unsustainable," World Bank President Robert Zoellick said in Beijing at
the launch of the "China 2030 Report".

"This is not the time just for muddling through. It's time to get ahead
of events and to adapt to major changes in the world and national
economies."

An executive summary of the 400-plus page report, made public by
Zoellick, had six broad recommendations for Beijing: strengthen a
market-based economy, foster innovation, go "green", provide social
security for all, improve the fiscal system and seek mutually beneficial
relations with the world.

Among other specific recommendations, it urged Beijing to commercialize
banks and allow interest rates to be set by the financial market,
develop its private sector, protect farmers' rights and cut local
governments' dependence on land revenues.

The outcome of these changes would produce a China that is more socially
stable and equal in wealth distribution, relies less on exports and
investment for economic growth, and more on domestic consumption that
can be sustained, the Bank said.

"The reforms that launched China on its current growth trajectory were
inspired by Deng Xiaoping who played an important role in building
consensus for a fundamental shift in the country's strategy," the report
said.

"China has reached another turning point in its development path when a
second strategic, and no less fundamental, shift is called for."

President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are scheduled to hand over
power to a new leadership in the late autumn, by which time China should
be well on course for its slowest full year of growth since they took
office a decade ago.

Zoellick acknowledged that the World Bank and Beijing had disagreed over
the contents of the report, which is prepared by the Bank and the
Development Research Center, a top Chinese think-tank that advises
China's cabinet, the State Council.

But Zoellick said the report "stops short of being overly prescriptive",
as requested by Chinese authorities, and recognizes that any
recommendation needs further discussion within Beijing before they can
be implemented.

"The report is realistic. Reforms are not easy. They often generate
pushback," he said. "We have tried to recognize obstacles to reforms,
suggest sequencing and quick wins, steps that can make reforms easier to
implement."

The thrust of the World's Bank latest report is similar to one released
by the International Monetary Fund in November that urged Beijing to
free up its financial markets to give investors, commercial banks and
the central bank more autonomy.

The IMF's recommendations drew rebukes from Beijing, which said some of
the ideas were not comprehensive and objective enough.

Dong Tao, an economist at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong, said while the
World Bank's recommendations were sensible, it was unlikely that they
would all be implemented due to political sensitivities around any form
of privatization.

"As an economist, I'm a big fan of market-based economies. But Beijing
needs to balance what is economically good with what is politically and
socially practical," he said.

(3) China should Privatize state-owned firms - economist Michael Pettis

http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-pettis-china-must-privatize-state-monopolies-or-face-a-severe-slowdown-2012-2

MICHAEL PETTIS: No One Is Considering The One Option That Could Save China

Gus Lubin | Feb. 29, 2012, 5:33 AM | 610 | 1

Michael Pettis says the World Bank's report on China out this week
doesn't go far enough.

Where the World Bank calls for moderate reforms to increase state
revenue like increasing dividends paid by SOEs, Pettis says China needs
a radical solution—or it faces severe slowdown.

He writes in a newsletter:

What we really need are much more dramatic transfers, for example
wholesale selling of assets, with the money used either to clean up bad
loans or delivered directly to households. According to the article,
however, “neither the World Bank nor the DRC proposed privatizing the
state-owned firms, figuring that was politically unacceptable.”

This is the problem. The best solution for China, economically, seems to
be off limits because it will be politically difficult. In that case the
second best solution, a gradual build-up of government debt as growth
slows for many years, is the most likely outcome.

And how much will growth slow? The World Bank report apparently doesn't
say, but the consensus has been slowly moving down towards 5-6% annual
growth over the next few years. That's better than the crazy numbers of
8-9% most analysts were predicting even two years ago (and some still
are), but it is still too high. GDP growth rates will slow a lot more
than that. I still maintain that average growth in this decade will
barely break 3%. It will take, however, at least another two or three
years before a number this low falls within the consensus range.

(4) China's state sector is reason its stimulus package more successful
than the West's - economist John Ross

http://ablog.typepad.com/keytrendsinglobalisation/2012/02/deng-xiaoping-and-john-maynard-keynes-1.html

05 February 2012

Deng Xiaoping and John Maynard Keynes

John Ross

[...] In the US and Europe budget deficits have been utilised – although
they are under increasing attack. Low central bank interest rates have
been pursued and some forms of quantitative easing, driving down long
term interest rates through central bank purchases of debt, have been
used. But no serious programmes of state investment have been launched –
let alone Keynes's 'somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment'.

In China, in contrast, relatively limited budget deficits have been
combined with low interest rates, a state owned banking system
('euthanasia of the rentier') and a huge state investment programme.
While the West's economic recovery programme has been timid, China has
pursued full blooded policies of the type recognisable from Keynes
General Theory as well as its own 'socialism with Chinese
characteristics.' Why this contrast and why has China's stimulus package
been so much more successful than the West's?

Because in the US and Europe, of course, it is held that the colour of
the cat matters very much. Only the private sector coloured cat is good,
the state sector coloured cat is bad. Therefore even if the private
sector cat is catching insufficient mice, that is the economy is in
severe recession, the state sector cat must not be used to catch them.
In China both cats have been let lose – and therefore far more mice are
caught.

The recession in the Western economies, as foreseen by Keynes, is driven
by decline in investment – in most countries decline in fixed investment
accounted for two thirds to more than ninety per cent of the GDP fall
(Ross, Li, & Xu, 2010). Keynes's calls for not only budget deficits and
low interest rates but also for the state to set about 'organising
investment' are evidently required. But this is blocked because the
state coloured cat is not allowed to catch mice.

To put it another way, the US and Europe insist on participating in a
race while hopping on only one leg – the private sector. China is using
two legs, so little wonder it is running faster.

To turn from metaphors to economic measures, a large scale state
financed house building programme, or large scale expansion of
transport, of the type China is following as part of anti-crisis
measures not only delivers goods that are valuable in themselves but
boosts the economy through macro-economic effects in raising investment.
But in the West such state investment is blocked as it creates
competition for the private sector. As the top aim in the US and Europe
is not to revive the economy, but to protect the private sector,
therefore such large-scale investment must not be undertaken.

It is an irony. Keynes explicitly put forward his theories to save
capitalism. But the structure of the US and European economies has made
it impossible to implement Keynes's policies even when confronted with
the most severe recession since the Great Depression. The anti-crisis
measures of China's 'socialist market economy' are far closer to those
Keynes foresaw that any capitalist economy. Whereas in the US, for
example, fixed investment fell by over twenty five per cent during the
financial crisis in China urban fixed investment rose by over thirty per
cent. Consequently, there is no mystery why China's economy has grown by
41.4 per cent in the four years since the peak of the last US business
cycle, in the 4th quarter of 2007, while the US economy has grown by 0.7
per cent. ...

(5) China's post-Mao economic transformation "the greatest economic
achievement in world history" - John Ross

http://ablog.typepad.com/keytrendsinglobalisation/2012/02/chinas-achievement.html

John Ross

19 February 2012

China's achievement is literally the greatest in world economic history

Economic development's purpose is to improve the conditions of human
beings. Robert Lucas put it eloquently, in frequently quoted words,
examining the consequences of different rates of economic growth: 'I do
not see how one can look at these figures without seeing them as
possibilities. Is there some action a government of India could take
that would lead the Indian economy to grow… If so, what, exactly?… The
consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are
simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to
think about anything else.'

In this framework it should be stated, soberly and with due
consideration, that China's economy since 1978 is the greatest economic
achievement in world history. This article shows this in the prosaic
language of statistics. But of course that is not the real issue. What
really counts is the consequences of this for human beings – escape from
poverty, improvement in life expectancy, improved health, expanded
potential for education, improvement in the position of women, and many
other dimensions. Economic statistics, such as GDP per capita, simply
underpin this improvement in human conditions.

The scale of China's economic achievement

A problem in assessing the true scale of China's economic achievement is
that partial statistics are frequently used to state it. Some of these,
for example that China has become the world's second largest economy, or
that it has raised 620 million people out of internationally defined
poverty, are extremely striking (Quah, 2010). But nevertheless, because
they are partial, they do not capture the full scope of what has
occurred. Only when systematic data is used does the full magnitude of
China's achievement become clear.

Again, even when systematic comparisons are attempted, the scale of
China's economic achievement is frequently underestimated because
inappropriate measures are used. For example when comparing rates of
economic growth, in calculating contributions to economic welfare, it is
misleading to take individual countries as the unit of comparison,
rather than the proportion of world population affected – rapid economic
growth in a small country evidently contributes less to human well being
than rapid growth in a large country.

In order to give an initial systematic comparison, therefore, Table 1
shows the percentage of world population affected at the point when
sustained rapid growth commenced in major economies. For example the
first country to experience sustained rapid economic growth was the UK
in the industrial revolution - which was in a country with 2.0 per cent
of the world's population. The sustained rapid US economic growth after
the Civil War was in a country with 3.3 per cent of the world's
population. ...

No other economy starting sustained rapid economic growth even
approaches the 22.3 per cent of the world's population in China in 1978
at the beginning of its new economic policies. For comparison Japan's
rapid post-World War II growth was in a country with 3.3 per cent of the
world's population, and the growth of the four Asian 'Tigers' (Hong
Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) was in economies with only 1.4
per cent of the world's population.

Only India's sustained economic growth after the late 1980s, in a
country with 16 per cent of the world's population, even begins to
approach China's achievement in scale, but the percentage of the world
population affected is still lower than China's, as is India's growth
rate. ...

(6) China tightens grip on hot money

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90778/7653840.html

By Luo Lan (People's Daily Overseas Edition)

12:39, November 23, 2011

Edited and translated by People's Daily Online

Since the beginning of 2011, the State Administration of Foreign
Exchange has used heavy-handed measures to crack down on hot money.
Recently, Deng Xinhong, vice director-general of the administration, was
interviewed regarding the issue of coping with and cracking down on
illegal capital flows, including hot money.

The administration confiscated 260 million yuan of hot money in the
first half of 2011.

Question: What achievements has the administration made in 2011 in
cracking down on illegal capital flows, including hot money?

Deng: Since the beginning of 2011, the State Administration of Foreign
Exchange has been using heavy-handed measures to crack down on hot money
and has made remarkable achievements.

In the first half of 2011, the administration investigated and treated
nearly 1,900 illegal foreign exchange cases and the money involved
totaled more than 16 billion U.S. dollar, up 26 percent and 27 percent,
respectively, compared to figures for the same period of 2010.

The administration confiscated 260 million yuan in total administrative
penalties in the first half of 2011, and the number for the full year of
2010 was 243 million yuan.

Maximum award to informants: 100,000 yuan

Question: The total amount of illegal capital confiscated by the
administration has increased dramatically. What is the main reason for that?

Deng: Generally, the administration has three channels to get clues
about illegal capital flows: first, the investigations or on-site
inspections carried out by the foreign exchange administration sectors;
second, tip-offs from the masses; and third, clues offered by other
sectors, such as the public security, auditing, customs, taxation and
others. We give awards to informants who feed back, report or expose
illegal foreign exchange activities according to their contributions,
and the maximum award to an informant is as high as 100,000 yuan. For an
informant who has made an especially large contribution, the maximum
award could also be raised beyond that with proper authorization.

Imposing heavy fines on illegal practices

Question: If illegal cross-border flows of capital, such as hot money,
are discovered, what administrative fines will the related parties face?

Deng: Following the investigations and verifications into irregular or
illegal foreign exchange flows, the foreign exchange authorities will
either levy administrative fines on related parties or transfer them to
the judicial organs for criminal charges.

For institutions and the individuals that have involved illegal
cross-border flows of capital, such as hot money, the authorities will
not only regulate them and confiscate their illegal income but they will
also fine them for less than 30 percent of the amount of money involved;
for particularly serious practices, the fines can be above 30 percent of
the amount of money involved.

For financial institutions with irregularities or illegal activities
concerning foreign exchanges, the foreign exchange management organs
will terminate their operations as well as warn and fine directly liable
persons.

Question: What is the outlook for dealing with and cracking down on hot
money in the future?

Deng: Given complicated domestic and foreign economic situation, the
State Administration of Foreign Exchange will continue to combat illegal
cross-border capital flows, particularly imposing strong pressure on the
inflows of hot money. It will also improve investigation means and step
up the crackdown on major cases.

(7) China to continue crackdown on hot money

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90778/7652275.html

China to continue crackdown on hot money: SAFE

Xinhua

10:09, November 22, 2011

BEIJING - China's top foreign exchange regulator said on Monday that
China will continue to crack down on the influx of hot money as a result
of complicated economic conditions at home and abroad.

"Outstanding achievements have been made in the country's campaign
against hot money inflows," Deng Xianhong, deputy director of the State
Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), said in a statement on SAFE's
website.

SAFE investigated 1,865 cases of foreign exchange irregularities in the
first half of this year, involving more than $16 billion in illegal
funds, up 26.2 percent and 26.9 percent year-on-year, respectively.

Deng attributed the "outstanding achievements" to the country's
investigations into illegal foreign fund inflows, as well as an
investigation and supervision system that covers all foreign exchange
transactions under both current account and capital account.

He noted that SAFE will continue improving the system while enhancing
its monitoring of abnormal foreign capital outflows, adding that SAFE
has the ability, means and confidence to win in the battle against
illegal foreign fund inflows.

(8) Japan's Trade Figures: Some Perspective - Eamonn Fingleton

http://www.fingleton.net/japans-trade-figures-some-perspective/#more-1490

Japan's Trade Figures: Some Perspective

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Eamonn Fingleton

As usual the American press missed the real story.

The American press has made much of news that Japan last year recorded a
deficit of $32 billion on its visible trade. Supposedly this is the
beginning of the end for the Japanese trade engine. Some of us have been
around a while and have seen that same story written dozens of times
over the years — yet always said trade engine has not only recovered but
has gone on to ever greater achievements.

The first thing to note is that the figures are incomplete in a way that
crucially distorts the real news — of an extraordinarily strong
performance in the face of unprecedented challenges.

The proper way to measure a nation's performance is not by the visible
trade balance alone but by the current account, which is the widest and
most meaningful measure of a nation's trade. The current account
includes financial flows such as interest payments, dividends, insurance
premiums, and patent royalties. The balance in such items has been
positive for Japan since the 1960s and the net invisible surplus has
grown astoundingly in the last two decades. This reflects not only the
fact that the underlying economic performance in true invisibles has
been strong but because of so-called transfer pricing, which is now
rampant in Japanese industry and results in massive understatement of
exports. (In a typical maneuver, goods might be shipped to China via
Hong Kong. The goods are exported from Japan at heavily discounted
prices and a Hong Kong subsidiary takes a huge profit in selling to
China. Such profits constitute hidden export revenues that are not
caught in the visible trade numbers. The maneuver makes sense because
Japan's corporate tax rate is one of the world's highest.)

As for the numbers as officially presented, the effect of temporary
factors is hard to exaggerate: the earthquake, tsunami, power shutdowns,
and then late in the year the Thai floods all contributed to severe
supply chain disruption that curtailed exports. Meanwhile oil imports
have temporarily soared as almost the entire nuclear power industry has
been closed for maintenance.

Then there is the “minor” matter of a 1930s-style recession across much
of the world, which has drastically cut demand for Japanese exports,
particularly capital goods.

For me the Wall Street Journal's coverage was particularly notable as an
exercise in spin and double-think. Not only did the Journal not make any
mention of transfer pricing but it did not refer to the fact that the
current account figures, due in a few days, will show a strong surplus —
a truly remarkable performance given the circumstances of 2011.

The Journal only covers Japanese trade figures when they are bad. (The
$196 billion current account surplus of 2010, announced this time last
year, did not merit a single sentence in the Journal.) By the same token
when it comes to reporting America's trade performance, the Journal
thinks the numbers count only when they are good.

Another inconsistency is that while huge U.S. trade deficits are
dismissed as not important or are even presented as evidence of the
“strength of the American economy,” bad Japanese numbers — however
obviously fleeting — are given big play as a “historic” turn towards
economic decline.

I have a modest request for the Journal: when the current account
figures come out, please give them at least as much attention as you
have given the visible figures.

495 Occupy AIPAC sides with Edward Said, and against Chomsky, on the Jewish Lobby

Occupy AIPAC sides with Edward Said, and against Chomsky, on the Jewish
Lobby

(1) As Occupy AIPAC approaches, Chomsky insists that US is targeting
Iran, not for Israel but for defiance of the Empire - Peter Myers,
February 29, 2012
(2) Chomsky website search 120229
(3) Ten reasons why AIPAC is so dangerous - from Occupy Aipac
(4) Chris Hedges to Speak at Occupy AIPAC
(5) The drumbeat for war will reach a fever pitch at the AIPAC
conference - from Occupy Aipac
(6) Mossad Chief Set AIPAC Founder's First Public Relations Priorities
-- Declassified FBI Files (from Occupy AIPAC)
(7) Occupy Oakland protesters attack Sacramento rally
(8) Letter to Editor: Occupy movement should denounce Occupy Oakland
(9) Search in Google News for Chomsky "occupy AIPAC" yields just 2 hits,
neither relevant
(10) 1st hit: comment by Chomsky on Assange, but not on Occupy AIPAC
(11) 2nd hit: criticism of Chomsky: Harry Clark on the Jewish Left
(12) Jewish Lobby is America's Last Taboo - Edward Said, New Left Review
(2000)
(13) Chomsky says US retains control of Israel (Feb '12): American
decline in perspective, part 2
(14) Iran targeted by US for spreading instability (not because of
Lobby) - Chomsky (2011)

(1) As Occupy AIPAC approaches, Chomsky insists that US is targeting
Iran, not for Israel but for defiance of the Empire - Peter Myers,
February 29, 2012

Occupy AIPAC runs from March 2-6; it's the brainchild of Kalle Lasn,
Anarchist inspirer of OWS.

Trots participate too. They like violent confrontations, and some
Anarchists do too - thus the recent violence in Sacramento (item 7). But
Kalle Lasn has maintained civility overall.

The New Left has, thus far, taken a Chomskyist stance on the West's wars
against Islamic countries - blaming them on the Empire, on the Oil
motive etc - anything but Israel.

Occupy AIPAC marks a welcome break from that. For the first time, the
New Left is publicly recognizing the power of the Jewish Lobby, that it
has been the motive force behind these wars, and that it is pushing
America into war with Iran.

Nevertheless, Chomsky still denies the power of the Lobby, as shown in
two major articles: item 13, published just two weeks ago, and item 14,
published in 2011.

Edward Said, also of the New Left, took an anti-Chomsky position in his
denunciation of the Jewish Lobby and its manipulation of the American
mind (item 12). But Said could not marshal forces on the street - until now.

Items 2 to 6 are taken from the Occupy AIPAC website. They mark a clear
break from the Chomskyist position.

Chomsky addressed Occupy Boston a few months ago. A search in Google for
Chomsky "Occupy Boston" yields 769,000 hits.

But Chomsky has had nothing to say about Occupy AIPAC. A search today in
Google News  for Chomsky "Occupy Aipac" yielded just 2 results, neither
relevant (but the second, an article about the Jewish Left, is
interesting, and is included as item 11 below).

(2) Chomsky website search 120229

I searched Chomsky's website today. It's a big website spanning ten years.

Aipac only 7 hits - the most recent July 2010, blaming Christian
Zionists instead of the Lobby

Vanunu 0 hits

Holocaust Industry 0 hits

Shahak - 9 hits, only as a Human Rights activist, no mention of his
books on Jewish religion & Jewish Fundamentalism

(3) Ten reasons why AIPAC is so dangerous - from Occupy Aipac

http://www.occupyaipac.org/2012/02/10-reasons-why-the-israel-lobby-aipac-is-so-dangerous/

10 Reasons Why the Israel Lobby AIPAC is So Dangerous

February 28th, 2012 · Posted by Occupy AIPAC!

Medea Benjamin

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most
powerful lobby organizations in the country. AIPAC's clout helps fuel a
never-ending cycle of violence in the Middle East.

Here are ten reasons why AIPAC is so dangerous.

1. AIPAC is lobbying Congress to promote a military confrontation with
Iran. AIPAC – like the Israeli government – is demanding that the U.S.
attack Iran militarily to prevent Iran from having the technological
capacity to produce nuclear weapons, even though U.S. officials say Iran
isn't trying to build a weapon (and even though Israel has hundreds of
undeclared nuclear weapons). AIPAC has successfully lobbied the U.S.
government to adopt crippling economic sanctions on Iran, including
trying to cut off Iran's oil exports, despite the fact that these
sanctions raise the price of gas and threaten the U.S. economy.

2. AIPAC promotes Israeli policies that are in direct opposition to
international law. These include the establishment of colonies
(settlements) in the Occupied West Bank and the confiscation of
Palestinian land in its construction of the 26-foot high concrete
"separation barrier" running through the West Bank. The support of these
illegal practices makes to impossible to achieve a solution to the
Israel/Palestine conflict.

3. AIPAC's call for unconditional support for the Israeli government
threatens our national security. The United States' one-sided support of
Israel, demanded by AIPAC, has significantly increased anti-American
sentiment throughout the Middle East, thus endangering our troops and
sowing the seeds of more possible terrorist attacks against us. Gen.
David Petraeus on March 16, 2010 admitted that the U.S./Palestine
conflict "foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S.
favoritism for Israel." He also said that "Arab anger over the
Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships
with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy
of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other
militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support."

4. AIPAC undermines American support for democracy movements in the Arab
world. AIPAC looks at the entire Arab world through the lens of Israeli
government interests, not the democratic aspirations of the Arab people.
It has therefore supported corrupt, repressive regimes that are friendly
to the Israeli government, such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Events now
unfolding in the Middle East should convince U.S. policy-makers of the
need to break from AIPAC's grip and instead support democratic forces in
the Arab world.

5. AIPAC makes the U.S. a pariah at the UN. AIPAC describes the UN as a
body hostile to the State of Israel and has pressured the U.S.
government to oppose resolutions calling Israel to account. Since 1972,
the US has vetoed 44 UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel's
actions against the Palestinians. President Obama continues that policy.
Under Obama, the US vetoed UN censure of the savage Israeli assault on
Gaza in January 2009 in which about 1400 Palestinians were killed; a
2011 resolution calling for a halt to the illegal Israeli West Bank
settlements even though this was stated U.S. policy; a 2011 resolution
calling for Israel to cease obstructing the work of the UN Relief and
Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees; and another resolution calling
for an end to illegal Israeli settlement building in East Jerusalem and
the occupied Golan Heights.

6. AIPAC attacks politicians who question unconditional support of
Israel. AIPAC demands that Congress to rubber stamp legislation drafted
by AIPAC staff. It keeps a record of how members of Congress vote and
this record is used by donors to make contributions to the politicians
who score well. Members of Congress who fail to support AIPAC
legislation have been targeted for defeat in re-election bids. These
include Senators Adlai Stevenson III and Charles H. Percy, and
Representatives Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney, and Earl
F. Hilliard. AIPAC's overwhelmingly disproportionate influence on
Congress subverts our democratic system.

7. AIPAC attempts to silence all criticism of Israel by labeling critics
as "anti-Semitic," "de-legitimizers" or "self-hating Jews." Journalists,
think tanks, students and professors have been accused of anti-Semitism
for merely taking stands critical of Israeli government policies. These
attacks stifle the critical discussions and debates that are at the
heart of democratic policy-making. The recent attacks on staffers at the
Center for American Progress is but one example of AIPAC efforts to
crush all dissent.

8. AIPAC feeds U.S. government officials a distorted view of the
Israel/Palestine conflict. AIPAC takes U.S. representatives on
sugar-coated trips to Israel. In 2011, AIPAC took one out of very five
members of Congress—and many of their spouses—on a free junket to Israel
to see precisely what the Israeli government wanted them to see. It is
illegal for lobby groups to take Congresspeople on trips, but AIPAC gets
around the law by creating a bogus educational group, AIEF, to
"organize" the trips for them. AIEF has the same office address as AIPAC
and the same staff. These trips help cement the ties between AIPAC and
Congress, furthering their undue influence.

9. AIPAC lobbies for billions of U.S. taxdollars to go to Israel instead
of rebuilding America. While our country is reeling from a prolonged
financial crisis, AIPAC is pushing for no cuts in military funds for
Israel, a wealthy nation. With communities across the nation slashing
budgets for teachers, firefighters and police, AIPAC pushes for over $3
billion a year to Israel.

10. Money to Israel takes funds from world's poor. Israel has the 24th
largest economy in the world, but thanks to AIPAC, it gets more U.S.
taxdollars than any other country. At a time when the foreign aid budget
is being slashed, keeping the lion's share of foreign assistance for
Israel meaning taking funds from critical programs to feed, provide
shelter and offer emergency assistance to the world's poorest people.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, which is a de facto agent for a foreign
government, has influence on U.S. policy out of all proportion to the
number of Americans who support its policies. When a small group like
this has disproportionate power, that hurts everyone—including Israelis
and American Jews.

 From stopping a catastrophic war with Iran to finally solving the
Israel/Palestine conflict, an essential starting point is breaking
AIPAC's grip on U.S. policy.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of www.codepink.org and
www.globalexchange.org. She is one of the organizers of Occupy AIPAC,
which will take place March 3-5 in Washington DC.

(4) Chris Hedges to Speak at Occupy AIPAC

http://www.occupyaipac.org/2012/02/chris-hedges-to-speak-at-occupy-aipac/

February 27th, 2012 · Posted by Occupy AIPAC!

We are excited to announce Chris Hedges will be our closing speaker!

Chris Hedges was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He
is an Arabic speaker and spent seven years in the region, including many
months in the Israeli occupied territories. Hedges, who was part of a
team at the paper that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for their work on
global terrorism, is an outspoken critic of Israel's treatment of the
Palestinians as well as a fierce opponent of the Iraq war. He left the
New York Times after being issued a formal written reprimand to stop
speaking out against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a restriction
he refused to accept.

Hedges has authored nine books including the best sellers War is a Force
That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the
War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph
of Spectacle and Death of the Liberal Class. His newest book, Days of
Destruction, Days of Revolt, which he wrote with the graphic illustrator
Joe Sacco, is due out in June.

(5) The drumbeat for war will reach a fever pitch at the AIPAC
conference - from Occupy Aipac

http://www.occupyaipac.org/2012/02/all-out-for-no-war-on-iran-during-aipac-convention/

All Out for NO WAR ON IRAN during AIPAC Convention - from Occupy Aipac

February 10th, 2012 · Posted by Occupy AIPAC!

No War On Iran!

The drumbeat for war will reach a fever pitch when AIPAC, with 10,000
attendees, holds its annual policy conference on March 4. The bellicose
stance of keynote speaker Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will
push our nation closer to a catastrophic war.

Come show that the American people demand "Diplomacy, Not War." We'll
have an open mic, so if you have a personal story or message that you
want to share about Iran, come prepared to speak your mind.

When: Sunday, March 4th, 11:00am – 2:00pm

Where: Mt. Vernon Place (corner of Massachusetts and 9th)

Take action now: sign this petition calling on President Obama to Take
War With Iran "Off the Table"!

(6) Mossad Chief Set AIPAC Founder's First Public Relations Priorities
-- Declassified FBI Files (from Occupy AIPAC)

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mossad-chief-set-aipac-founders-first-public-relations-priorities----declassified-fbi-files-140713253.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/

Declassified FBI files reveal details of the founder of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) early coordination with the
head of Mossad and the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs. The 198-page
file, released under the Freedom of Information Act to the Institute for
Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep), is now on the Internet at:
http://www.IRmep.org/ila/kenen

According to the FBI, on July 18, 1949 Mossad founder Reuven Shiloah and
Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett ordered AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen to
implement urgent public relations strategies to boost Israel's economic
and military might. At that time Kenen directed the Israeli Ministry of
Foreign Affair's Israel Office of Information (IOI) in New York which
was tasked with receiving encrypted cables from Israel for decoding and
placement into prominent U.S. print publications such as Reader's Digest
and Cosmopolitan. According to the formerly secret FBI report, IOI
established a network of such offices.

Under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) Kenen and other
Americans working at IOI's were required to disclose foreign funding and
guidance. All IOI circulated propaganda had to display mandatory
foreign-agent declaration stamps of origin from the Israeli government.
The IOI was cited several times by the Justice Department for
circulating undeclared propaganda.

Under growing law enforcement crackdowns, Kenen negotiated his departure
from the IOI in 1951 according to his autobiography. "Israelis began
looking for a lobbyist to promote the necessary legislation … would I
leave the Israeli delegation for six months to lobby on Capitol Hill?
There were other questions. Should I continue my registration as an
agent of the Israel government? Was it appropriate for an embassy to
lobby? Embassies talked to the State Department, and American voters
talked to their congressmen." Kenen founded and grew AIPAC amidst
ongoing 1950s-1970s clashes with the U.S. Department of Justice over new
FARA orders and illicit use of foreign funding in U.S. lobbying. AIPAC
was later investigated by the FBI over theft of classified government
property and for circulating classified U.S. national defense and
confidential business information. As AIPAC grew IOI's became redundant
and eventually closed down.

Today AIPAC faces growing demands that it be re-registered under FARA
and disclose activities coordinated by the Israeli government. AIPAC is
currently lobbying for a lower and more ambiguous threshold of "nuclear
capability" as the trigger for a U.S. attack on Iran. SOURCE Institute
for Research: Middle Eastern Policy

(7) Occupy Oakland protesters attack Sacramento rally

Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:49:39 -0800 Subject: Violence in Sacramento
From: Archer Frey <archerfrey@gmail.com>

{comment - AF} On 27Feb12 a 100 strong mob from “Occupy Oakland”
traveled over 80 miles to interrupt an authorized, permitted assembly on
the steps of the California State Capitol in Sacramento. Basically the
MSM put the now well know PC spin on the happening.
{end}

{comment - Peter M} These protestors are probably Trots. They're really
a militia. Their violence gives the Occupy movement a bad name.
{end}

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/28/4295880/pp-efpf-fpsejf-psoe-fse-af-spof.html

Two officers injured, three arrested as protesters clash near state Capitol

By Hudson Sangree, Steve Magagniniand Torey Van Oot
hsangree@sacbee.com

Published: Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 3A

Last Modified: Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012 - 12:14 am

A mini-melee broke out near the state Capitol on Monday, with at least
two officers injured and three people arrested, after Occupy Oakland
protesters and others hurled objects at police and a group claiming
thousands of whites have been killed by blacks in South Africa.

The protest by South Africa Project, started out relatively calmly in
the day. At about noon, dozens of members walked a lap around the
Capitol grounds, then took up position on the south steps for a
three-hour protest of what they called "White Genocide in South Africa."

Their literature cliams that as of December 2011 more than 3,000 white
farmers of European origin had been murdered in South Africa in racially
motivated attacks. Since the end of Apartheid, more than 30,000 whites
have been murdered, said coordinator Michael Myers, an electrician from
Oakland.

At the same time, a multi-ethnic group of about 100 protesters, held
back by police on horses, chanted "White is the Enemy, White Supremacy!"
and "Hey, Hey. Ho, Ho. You Nazi F--ks Have Got To Go!."

The South Africa Project protesters denied the charges that they are
white supremacists. "For some reason, when a white person tries to stick
up for an issue based on race, the''re automatically labelled racist,
Neo-Nazi Klan members," Myers said.

The group's website, however, later proclaimed the demonstration a
success and chided "those of you who call yourselves White Nationalists"
who didn't participate.

At the rally, another member of the group made an anti-Semitic comment.
Jimmy Marr, a protester from Springfield, Ore., said he represented
"white people who don't have a guilt complex and have a way of
communicating outside the Jewish media."

For much of the day, the groups shouted back and forth at each other as
officers kept them separated, said California Highway Patrol spokesman
Sean Kennedy.

"I heard yelling from both sides," he said. "It was mutual."

The South Africa group had a permit to protest on the Capitol steps, but
the counter protestors, who did not have a permit, had to stay on the
sidewalk, authorities said.

At about 3 p.m., extra CHP and Sacramento police officers were called in
to escort the South Africa protesters to their vehicles in a parking
garage at 10th and L streets.

The officers kept the counter-protesters - including those who arrived
marching under a banner that said "Occupy Oakland" – on the opposite
side of the street. Some wore dark bandanas over their faces.

"It's the wild, wild west m-----f---ers!" they chanted. "The system is
racist, you are all disgraces."

As the groups approached the parking garage, the counter-protesters
hurled bottles, rocks and paint-filled "eggs" at the officers and those
they were protecting, according to Kennedy and Sacramento Police
spokeswoman Officer Laura Peck.

One CHP officer, sitting on a large draft horse, rode into the crowd of
counter-protesters while other officers tried to apprehend those they
suspected of throwing objects. The group scattered, with police in pursuit.

One CHP bicycle officer chased down and tackled a fleeing suspect, but
appeared to be injured after the man was handcuffed and taken away.
Sitting on the sidewalk, the officer had blood on his chin and pointed
to his knee, as if to indicate he was hurt.

Another CHP officer held his hands over his face while colleagues put
their hands on his shoulders. An ambulance driver said the officer had
been pepper sprayed.

Kennedy said Monday evening that at least two CHP officers suffered
minor injuries and at least three counter-protesters were arrested by
the CHP for resisting arrest. Another counter-protester was arrested
earlier in the day, he said.

Peck said no Sacramento police officers were injured, though some were
doused with paint, and they made no arrests.

The ruckus snarled traffic. It also disrupted service on light rail's
Blue Line from 3-4:30 p.m., a Regional Transit spokeswoman said.

As news of the event spread, organizers of Occupy Sacramento said in a
statement that they were not involved.

"Occupy Sacramento adheres to a strict non-violence policy," the
statement said. "We do not fight police, even if they are the
perpetrators of violence, as they have been at Occupy demonstrations."

One Occupy Sacramento protestor at the scene, who goes by the name of
Faygo, said it was after the Occupy Oakland protesters arrived that
things got rowdy.

"I can't really blame Oakland," he said. "They deal with a lot of police
brutality, so a lot of them have a lot more animosity toward the police."

"It just takes one person to throw a stone," he said, "and you've got
chaos."

(8) Letter to Editor: Occupy movement should denounce Occupy Oakland

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/28/4295985/officers-injured-at-capitol.html

Letter to Editor

Occupy movement should denounce Occupy Oakland
Published: Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012 - 11:02 am

Last Modified: Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012 - 12:04 pm

Re "Two officers injured, three arrested as protesters clash near state
Capitol" (Capitol & California, Feb. 28): What does attacking police
officers have to do with defendding the 99 percent? Isn't it time for
the Occupy movement to dissociate itself from Occupy Oakland?

-- Greg deGiere, Sacramento

(9) Search in Google News for Chomsky "occupy AIPAC" yields just 2 hits,
neither relevant

Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:31:40 +1000
Subject: Chomsky "occupy AIPAC" in Google News Wed 29/28

2 hits. The first has a comment by Chomsky on Assange, but not on Occupy
AIPAC.

The second is a criticism of Chomsky by someone else.

ie Chomsky is not in the news over Occupy AIPAC - he's sdaid & done nothing.

On the other hand, Chomsky "occupy Boston" has 769,000 hits in Google -
he spoke there, some months ago.

Transformational Politics: Be Part Of The Evolution – OpEd
Eurasia Review - 13 Feb 2012
By Clive Hambidge 'Julian Assange' said Noam Chomsky 'should be
congratulated for .... growing and vocal public protest (Occupy AIPAC)
and opprobrium, ...

Liberal Citizenship, not "Jewish Identity"
Dissident Voice - 14 Feb 2012
... I think there is some bastard-ism in Chomsky's analysis and in the
New Yorker magazine's. ... 109 Code Pink is organizing Occupy AIPAC in
early March.

(10) 1st hit: comment by Chomsky on Assange, but not on Occupy AIPAC

http://www.eurasiareview.com/14022012-transformational-politics-be-part-of-the-evolution-oped/

Transformational Politics: Be Part Of The Evolution – OpEd
Written by: Palestine Chronicle

February 14, 2012

By Clive Hambidge

'Julian Assange' said Noam Chomsky 'should be congratulated for carrying
out the responsibilities of a citizen in democratic societies, where the
population should be aware of what their selected representatives are
doing and planning.' ... one would agree with Noam Chomsky that we must
try on a daily basis, and with some stringency, to "capture one
significant aspect of a highly complex reality." ...

(11) 2nd hit: criticism of Chomsky: Harry Clark on the Jewish Left

http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/02/liberal-citizenship-not-jewish-identity-2/

Liberal Citizenship, not "Jewish Identity"

by Harry Clark

February 14th, 2012

An abiding feature of the Palestine question in the United States since
1967 has been a "Jewish Left," which combines Jewish affirmation with
criticism of Israel's occupation of the territories it conquered in that
war. A 1973 anthology of writings from the "Jewish radicalism" movement
stated:

{quote} In the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967, an
upsurge of Jewish consciousness hit the campuses, and a new voice—what
we call the 'Jewish Left'—appeared. Young Jews began to make demands for
'Jewish studies' programs, to publish Jewish underground newspapers, to
criticize Israeli policies while defending Zionism against Arab and
pro-Arab attacks, and to confront the Jewish Establishment for 'selling
out' to the 'American dream' while ignoring the needs of the Jewish
community.1 {endquote}

Thirty years later, journalist Esther Kaplan described "the old school
of Jewish activism on Palestine…organizations from Breira in the 1970s
to New Jewish Agenda, International Jewish Peace Union, the Road to
Peace and Women in Black in the 1980s and early '90s."2

These activists followed "the star of identity politics"; they felt
personally implicated by Israel's deeds, saw a strategic role for
themselves, and felt that changing the views of the US Jewish community
was possible and necessary.3 After the second Intifada (Palestinian
uprising) began in 2000, Kaplan found all this "anachronistic."4 She
described new organizations such as the International Solidarity
Movement, and the boycott/divestment/sanctions movement (BDS), and
concluded: "We Jews can join in—many of us will—but we don't own this
movement any more."5

Yet the Jewish Left has thrived. It is not uniform, and exists in more
and less sophisticated forms, but it is noticeable. It is the subject of
a new book by David Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights:
Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel.6 Landy is the former head of the
Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and earned his PhD at Trinity
College, Dublin. Landy's main focus is the British "Israel-critical
diaspora Jewish movement," in his careful phrase.7 He notes that the UK
movement became important only after the second Intifada, while
elsewhere in Europe and Australia, movements arose only after Israel's
assaults on Lebanon in 2006, and especially on Gaza in 2008-9. Obviously
that is not true in the US, whose movements' "size and dynamism" make
them the most important case.8

In his introduction, Landy states that this movement seeks "to challenge
Zionist hegemony among fellow Jews and to challenge Israel, speaking as
Jews…who oppose Israel" so that we "do not conflate the two."9 This
formulation at once raises questions, beginning with the meaning of
"Jew." A religious definition is clear, as one who practices Judaism,
but a secular definition is not; in fact, secular Jewish nationality is
precisely what Zionism claims, and what many in Landy's movement claim.

Landy's background is Jewish, but he states that being a "movement
activist is more important than shared Jewishness."10 He also notes that
many people of Jewish background are "active in society-wide
groups…rather than specifically Jewish ones," so that his study
understates diaspora Jewish opposition to Israel. More important, the
choice to work in "society-wide groups" sets a universalist benchmark to
judge the choice to work in Jewish groups. The book is a sustained
critique of identity politics, yet Landy does not fully comprehend his
subject, in part because the UK movement, his main focus, is not the
most illustrative example, which is in the US. Still, Landy's rigor and
honesty inevitably raise wider questions, and his book is a welcome
contribution.

In his first chapter, "Understanding and researching the social
movement," Landy argues that the movement "seeks to re-cognize what it
means to be a disapora Jew," and also notes "the constraints and traps,
as well as the opportunities that identity contestation offers."11 Landy
defines the movement theoretically using Pierre Bourdieu's formula of
"[(Habitus)(capital)] + field = practice". "Habitus" is "'a system of
durable, transposable dispositions'" acquired in upbringing from which
an individual "generates schemata" in different spheres of life.12
"Capital" is "'good, services, knowledge, or status.'13 "'Fields denote
arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation'" of capital.14
Social life is a struggle over "field-dependent capital." Participating
in a field means accepting its "doxaor realm of undiscussed and
undisputed paradigms."15 Thus while "the unnameability of Palestinians
has been successfully challenged" within the Jewish field, "other
silences, such as on the Palestinian right of return, have to an extent
been reproduced."

Landy's second chapter discusses "The conflict over diaspora Jewish
identity." He notes that "identity has replaced ideology as the idiom of
modern politics," and that "diaspora identity is commonly deployed to
create some sense of bounded racialized identity."16 Diaspora identity
is thus "a concession" to the "hegemonic language" and "illusio of the
field." Diaspora is viewed "perhaps as thecondition of authentic Jewish
existence and imbued with qualities of alterity, heterogeneity,
hybridity and (usually) universalism."17 This outlook, "while often
critical of Israel, effaces Palestinian subjectivity," and "creates a
false symmetry with Palestinian refugees" by confusing "symbolic chosen
exile and actual forced exile."18

A claim that "Jews are uniquely univeralistic subjects" arises from
concepts like Marxist Isaac Deutscher's "non-Jewish Jew."19 Landy
"wonders what the term 'non-Jewish Jew' means absent these specific
social connotations," i.e., the traditional Polish Jewish upbringing
that Deutscher rejected. Landy forgets today's activists who choose to
work in "society-wide groups" rather than Jewish ones, even as he finds
them often as stifling as Deutscher's traditional background. Landy
notes the "link between Jews and justice," citing the rabbinical
injunction tikkun olam, conventionally interpreted as "heal the
world."20 This leads to claims of pre-Zionist Jewish innocence, and that
Zionism is actually assimilation to Christian values. He finds the term
"Jewish prophetic" much over-used, a "flag of convenience" which becomes
an "ideological and even racial construct."21 Despite all this
"diasporist ideas with all their problems are a motivating force for
Jewish Israel-critical groups."

Landy's third chapter, "The Jewish field and its dissidents," discusses
"community" in the traditional "sense of community as a small-scale,
organic, bounded arena."22 Landy accepts today's Jewish self-definition
as "ethnic" even as he finds "ethnicity" a problematic concept, and
finds Jews among the least "ethnic" in their societies. He refers to a
"religiously linked ethnicity," a "religio-cultural concept called
Jewishness."23 He seeks to account for the power and patronage in
organized Jewish life, and recalls Bourdieu's notion of "field" in order
to avoid making "assumptions about its authenticity or normativity."

 From this ambiguous foundation, Landy surveys the Jewish field, or
fields. With national variations, he finds the inexorable forces of
liberal society at work, and enduring Zionist allegiance, despite
criticism. Jewish populations are declining more or less from
assimilation and exogamy, with secular disaffiliation from religion,
from communal organizations, and from other Jews. In religion, the
center is outflanked by traditional Orthodoxy, syncretism of liberal
Reform and Christianity, and non-denominational spirituality. A
diasporist culture of "'new forms of synagogue…festivals, books and
films'" accompanies alienation from, and criticism of, Israel most
strongly among the young. Yet "disillusion and disidentification" can
lead "to withdrawal," not change.24 In Britain, it "is not true that
most Jews aren't 'really' Zionist."25 In the US, an "ageing Zionist
leadership" still controls a "robust institutional framework.26 However,
former points of unity, Israel and Holocaust, are now points of
dissension, allowing "Israel-critical movements" to arise in the "Jewish
field."

Landy surveys these movements, since the second (al-Aqsa) intifada began
in September, 2000. In Britain, the conventional Jewish Israel-critical
strategy of "reach[ing] out to the community" failed, being depicted as
"one-sided," which confirms "the success of Jewish communal controls at
repressing dissent."27 Overall, the events of the past decade have
radicalized the Israel-critical groups within the Jewish field, and
institutionalized them in the general movement, following en bloc the
Jewish individuals omitted from his study. Landy finds in the US "the
most dynamic national Israel-critical Jewish movement.28 Landy notes the
limitations of J Street's "community-based criticism," and the past
"pusillanimous position" on BDS of Jewish Voice for Peace.29

Landy's fourth chapter, "Activists between the universal and the
community," discusses the emergence of Israel-critical Jewish activists.
"In the USA, this process of coming out against the Occupation or
against Israel has been compared to, and sometimes experienced as more
difficult than, coming out gay or lesbian."30 Human rights discourse is
useful against Zionists, but also has "decontextualizing qualities"
which undercut "the political aims of oppressed peoples and their
struggles.31 Activists often adopt a position of "strategic Jewishness"
and may even experience a "return to Judaism. 32 Most agree that
"community is the locus of Jewishness" and it thus follows that
interventions "should be done with respect.33 Ultimately, "engagement
with the community constrains as well as enables Israel-critical
activism."34 Landy's last two chapters seek to reconcile this tension.

In "The terrain of activism," Landy acknowledges charges that Jewish
Israel-critical groups want mainly to "feel good about themselves…or
'heal the Jews'…rather than affect the outside world," are perhaps
"backdoor Zionists" or otherwise act in "bad faith."35 Landy argues that
their concern is to be effective, and offers the debate over BDS
(boycott/divestment/sanctions) as an example. Groups that feel that a
reformed "community" can help Palestinians find boycott ineffective, for
the opposition it arouses, while those who view the community as less
important than the larger world find it successful and useful. Landy
does not dispel suspicion of the opponents, who apparently oppose a
broader, non-Jewish movement like that against apartheid South Africa.

A common view is that Jewish criticism of Israel discourages
anti-semitism, but one activist questioned its importance in the
Palestine solidarity movement. In support of one who did not, Landy
could only cite Israeli ex-patriate jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, for
comparing US organized Jewry to the Elders of Zion.36 Atzmon was in good
company, with comedian Jon Stewart, the late Israeli academic and
activist Tanya Reinhart, and veteran Israeli politico Uri Avnery.37 A
related view is that speaking "as a Jew" breaks the link between Jews
and Zionism. Landy notes that this can also "strengthen the idea of a
primordial link" and make Jews "gatekeepers" of criticism, but in the
end accepts such ploys. The view of one interviewee that "solidarity
with Palestinians has to be taken out of that [Jewish] ghetto" is an
outlier.38

Landy's final chapter is "Rooted cosmopolitans: participants and
Palestinians." His activists have adopted this position "to counter the
characterization of an actor as being a rootless cosmopolitan," with no
"real stake in the local [Jewish] field and therefore…of no
relevance."39 Landy's concern is that this self-conception "leads to a
lack of contact and denial of political subjectivity of Palestinians"
which "hampers movement effectiveness in achieving change.40 Landy
argues that relating to Palestinians is a general problem for the
Palestine solidarity movement; his chief example is western feminist
criticism of Palestinian men and women.

Jewish activists have special difficulties. Some are jolted by political
trips. "'I felt bad for being so concerned with my own Jewishness…Here
that concern feels selfishly stupid. The people of Gaza are persecuted.
Full stop.'41 Jewish groups, however, are limited by heavy reliance on
Israeli interlocutors, and their desire to appeal to Jewish diaspora
public. They tend to cast Palestinians as victims without agency and in
need of charity, even as they deprecate solidarity groups as uncritical.

Landy errs in chapter two when he labels Deutscher a "Eurocentric" who
replayed "the Zionist-Bundist debates of his youth."42 Deutscher was a
Communist, never a Bundist, and implicitly shared the Palestine
Communist Party's struggle against Zionism and British imperialism in
the 1930s. The international PCP was torn apart in 1943 by the rising
Arab-Jewish struggle over Palestine; after the war Deutscher accepted
Israel, but did not consider himself a Zionist, and was acutely critical
until his death shortly after the June 1967 war. Landy also overlooks
classical Reform Judaism's strictly religious version of the "Jewish
prophetic," and Marc Ellis's religious notion of exile, though he is
surely correct about their secular misappropriation. While tikkun olam
is now interpreted as a call for social justice, it began as a
prescription for social order.43

Landy is correct to qualify today's Jewish "ethnic" self-description. A
century ago, many cities in western Europe and North America had
districts where life was scarcely distinguishable from cities in the
Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. No amount of academic
theorizing about ethnicity can equate Yiddish immigrant society and
contemporary "Jewish identity." A more fruitful branch of social theory
is race theory, in the modern sense of race; e.g., "whiteness," as a
social construction.44 Few social artifacts today are more wilfully and
assiduously constructed than "Jewish identity," beginning with Zionism.

Zionism is not "Jewish nationalism." That term is reserved for political
movements which arose in Jewish quasi-national conditions in the Pale of
Settlement, where Jews spoke Yiddish, and were a high plurality,
especially in the cities. Such movements included the socialist Bund,
and the bourgeois Autonomist movement. Zionism, which proclaimed a
"people" speaking a vernacular language that did not exist, in a land
they did not inhabit, a people descended from biblical "history," a
people alien to their societies, no matter how acculturated or
assimilated, is not nationalism, but race doctrine. "Because it defines
Jew not by religious observance, language, place of birth, or culture,
but by descent, Zionism is an ideology of race."45 Unsurprisingly, the
biblical studies, archaeology and historiography that purport to show a
"Jewish people" have been totally demolished.46 In modern terms, the
"Jewish" national group in Palestine can only be Israeli Hebrew,
potentially a secular nationality open to all, as Boas Evron argued in
Jewish State or Israeli Nation in 1986.47

Diaspora Zionism, the "Zionism of Jewish peoplehood," is also race
doctrine, ipso facto, no less wilfully and assiduously constructed.

{quote} We Jews form a unique entity, neither wholly a nation, nor
wholly a religion, though part of us share a common faith, and all of us
derive from that faith. We are a group without a common language, and
with little that binds us as a common culture. What makes us a group
today? It is our international character and concern; we are men and
women who care deeply about what happens to Jews throughout the world.
It is our historical heritage; we are men and women who together come
from somewhere. It is our destiny; we are men and women who share a
common fate…We are made a group…by our fathers and mothers and theirs,
who constituted a people on earth, and who brought us into the world to
carry on the existence of that people.48 {endquote}

Obviously, the racial construction of "Jewishness" excludes personal and
family history. In principle it also excludes Judaism, the academic
study of Jewish and Judaic subjects, and cultural and philanthropic
activity. Racism begins when such activities are undertaken in the name
of the Jewish people, in support of its social and political claims, or
when such claims are opposed in the privileged terms of Jewish identity
politics. This critique is immanent in Landy's strained attribution of
Jewish "ethnicity" to contemporary diaspora Jews, and in his critique of
Jewish identity politics as, essentially, a regime of privilege. He
cites one description of "ethnic community" as "an ideological claim: 'a
categorical identity that is premised on various forms of exclusion and
construction of otherness.'"49

The Left Jewish field in the US maintains its own doxa and illusio, some
that Landy criticizes and some he misses, as shown by the views of
Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest US group. JVP's web site states that
"Jewish ethics guide us to a belief that Israeli Jews and Palestinian
Arabs are of equal importance and deserve equal rights; members are
inspired by Jewish tradition to work together for peace, social
justice."50 The group has a new rabbinical council, but does not
identify itself as religious. Landy criticizes this self-attribution of
the universal on several grounds. One must add that in modern terms
there is only Judaic religion, or secular citizenship; accepting secular
"Jewish ethics" and "progressive Jewish tradition" as more than personal
allusion and illusion, as collective social traits, lets identity
politicians turn Jewish identity into a universal category, and claim
identity prejudices as civil rights.

JVP claims that "[b]ecause we are Jews, we have a particular legitimacy
in voicing an alternative view." Moreover, "Israel claims to be acting
in the name of the Jewish people, and it is up to us to make sure the
world knows that many of us are opposed to their actions."51 In Landy's
terms this "'queers' Jewish identity" from the Zionist norm, "enabling
others to speak [critically] about Israel/Palestine."52 He acknowledges
that "such practices can strengthen the idea of a primordial link
between Jews and the Jewish state…whether…through criticism or through
support." 53 For JVP it makes "the community" the normative locus.

While Landy testifies to the Zionist obduracy of the Jewish field in
Britain, and Esther Kaplan states that "no effort tough enough to
overpower that [Israeli] government's belligerence will ever emerge from
the American Jewish community," JVP national director Rebecca
Vilkomerson states: "We are trying to create a space in the Jewish world
where we can express our criticism as Jews without needing to apologize
for ourselves."54 Deputy director Cecilie Surasky seems anguished most
of all by the hostility of official Jewry. "'It's very painful to do
this work and it's very hard…I do not use the word McCarthyite
lightly.'" "Jewish organizations in San Francisco have 'banned us [JVP]
from the Jewish public square.'"55

JVP pursues a Potemkin politics of "Jewish debate," notably by
organizing debates on BDS, with interlocutors who advocate arming and
funding and supporting Israel politically to the hilt. J Street, the
"pro-peace, pro-Israel" lobby, advocates "maintaining Israel's
qualitative military edge" as "an important anchor for a peace process"
along with "robust US foreign aid to Israel".56 JVP debated BDS with J
Street at Princeton University, in defense of a campus BDS measure.57 A
second debate was organized at J Street's annual meeting in 2010, for
the express purpose of discrediting JVP.58 A debate in Boston pitted
Vilkomerson against a liberal hypocrite and a neoconservative, the range
of Jewish communal opinion.59 JVP's first attempt was to invite the
Jewish Federation of San Francisco to debate; naturally the Federation
didn't show.60 This activity is like asking Murder, Inc. to plead guilty
to manslaughter, when it commits first degree homicide with impunity.
Posing the real question—should Israel be coerced by withholding US
support—would reveal communal obduracy and dispel the illusion that it
can be reformed.

Another disadvantage of Jewish sanction of criticism of Israel,
according to Landy, is that it can lead to Jews determining what is and
is not acceptable. Landy claims that activists "are alive to the problem
of becoming 'certifying authorities.'61 Again, JVP seems to regard this
not as a problem, but an opportunity. On the origins of US policy, JVP
states:

"Interest groups within the United States, such as the Christian Zionist
lobby, the arms and aerospace industry lobbies, and right-leaning Jewish
organizations, have a vested interest in maintaining the Occupation."62

This is narrowly true, but very misleading. Israel exists today because
the nascent Zionist lobby captured US policy 1944-48 and secured
official patronage for a Jewish state, over the opposition of the
military and diplomatic establishments, and amidst elite concern that
national security was being affected by partisan politics.63 Today's
fundamentalist Christian supporters of Israel were far over the horizon,
and US arms sales to Israel were proscribed.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy, call Christian Zionists a "an important 'junior partner'" for
whom Israel is not the sole or most important issue, and who do not have
the lobbying ability, policy analysis and financial resources of the
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.64 Nor are Christian
evangelicals united behind Israel. A film for this audience, With God on
Our Side, looks "at the consequences Christian Zionism has on the local
people in the Middle East, especially the Palestinians," and leads
thoughtful Christians "to question some of the things they had always
just taken for granted."65 Mearsheimer and Walt also show that US
military aid is designed to benefit Israel, often to the detriment of US
arms manufacturers.66 They further note that "American Jews are the
lobby's predominant constituency."67 All organizations represented in
the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
strongly support the present US-Israel relationship, including arms
sales, making all of them "right-wing."

JVP's constrained view of history is abetted by its "core principles,"
including "human rights, and respect for international law." Landy
emphasizes the inadequacy of the rights and law discourse. "Palestinians
need the right to seek redress within the framework of their loss, not
futile demands by outsiders that their occupier acts illegally…'a rights
discourse entails the renunciation of the frame, the historical
context.'"68 That context is the conquest of Arab Palestine by Zionist
Israel, now a century old. International law and human rights are
important, but omitting Zionism is like describing the Nazi conquest of
Poland and the Judeocide as violations of League of Nations collective
security, and the minority rights clauses of the Versailles Treaty,
without mentioning Nazism.

JVP's liberalism does not include opposing Zionism. On Zionism, JVP only
states that its "members hold a wide variety of views on many issues
involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This diversity has been a
great source of strength for JVP."69 It is also a source of confusion
and ignorance. JVP's "Israel-Palestine 101" material leads the reader
carefully away from, not toward, insights like Boas Evron's noted above,
away from any fundamental critique of Zionism. One "primer" states:
"Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, is a modern political movement. Its
core beliefs are that all Jews constitute one nation (not simply a
religious or ethnic community) and that the only solution to
anti-Semitism is the concentration of as many Jews as possible in
Palestine/Israel and the establishment of a Jewish state there.70 The
innocuous claim of "modernity" contradicts the common view of Zionism as
reactionary and pre-modern because it opposes assimilation and
integration of Jews. JVP accepts secular Jewish identity, and accepts
Zionism as a "solution to anti-Semitism." Yet that secular identity was
also upheld by racialist anti-semitism, of which Zionism was a fraternal
twin, a role which included major cooperation with Nazism.

Zionism's antithesis, liberal society, has proven the overwhelmingly
successful "solution to anti-Semitism," but that doesn't interest the
authors, Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar, American academics in Middle East
Studies. They present Zionist and Arab claims to Palestine as if they
cannot be adjudicated. Zionist claims are based "on the biblical promise
to Abraham and his descendants" and "on the fact that this was the
historical site of the Jewish kingdom of Israel." Arab claims are based
on "continuous residence in the country for hundreds of years, and the
fact that they represented the demographic majority." They note that
Arabs "reject the notion that a biblical-era kingdom constitutes the
basis for a valid modern claim," as if this were a partisan view, not
international law and common sense.

Beinin and Hajjar argue that Jews needed "a haven from European
anti-Semitism," as if a Jewish state in Palestine would obviously and
necessarily have prevented the Judeocide. The great majority of Jews in
Germany and Austria managed to emigrate before war began.71 Most
European Jews were not in Germany, but in Poland. One historian has
estimated that "had the gates of Palestine been open in the
1930s…[i]nstead of 140,000 Polish olim during the entire [interwar]
period, there would perhaps have been half a million who went to
Palestine. (To be sure, even that figure would not have solved the
Jewish question in Poland.)"72 Had the Nazis conquered Palestine, it
would have been a death trap, not a refuge. The Judeocide happened
because Hitler and Nazi Germany committed it, not because there was no
Jewish state; the Zionist movement in any case always subordinated
rescue of Jews to its political aims in Palestine.

Beinin and Hajjar acknowledge Orthodox religious anti-Zionism, but
cannot name liberal, secular anti-Zionism. "Some Jews…opposed Zionism
out of concern that their own position and rights as citizens in their
countries would be at risk if Jews were recognized as a distinct
national (as opposed to religious) group." For Beinin and Hajjar
liberalism was apparently only an obstacle to Jewish collective destiny,
not a positive program. Overall, their "primer" concedes most of the
critical history of Zionism in Palestine, while defending Zionism in
subtle and unsubtle ways.

Even as Israel commits genocide and foments wars, it demands recognition
as the state of the Jewish people. Rejecting Zionism, not merely "the
occupation," as bellicose racialism, is a moral imperative, not a
debating point. A sovereign Jewish state in Arab Palestine is inherently
violent and unnatural, as the record amply shows. Full peace will arrive
only when the Israeli Hebrews become another minority in the Arab and
Muslim world. The historic Jewish communities would naturally revive,
and Hebrew Palestine would become a source of Jewish tradition, and of
cosmopolitan detachment, for the Islamic world. That is the only moral
future for Zionism, whatever the path.

The "strategic asset" view of the US-Israel relationship is a staple in
Left Jewish thought, as developed by Beinin and others.73 The "asset"
view, which denies or deprecates the relationship between US policy and
organized US Jewry, is the most important example of the gatekeeper
effect noted by Landy, the most important question of all, and must be
considered at length. Mearsheimer and Walt deprecate Israel's "asset
value" even during the Cold War; Walt states that Israel has been a
strategic nemesis, an instrument of imperial decline, from the 1990-1
Gulf War to today.74 Israel's US supporters were a decisive factor in
the 1991 Gulf War. Israel had traditionally cultivated Iran against the
Arab states, in its "periphery" doctrine, which did not change after the
Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah in 1979. During the Iran-Iraq war,
Israel's US supporters tried assiduously to orient US policy against
Iraq, most conspicuously in the Iran-contra affair. After Iraq invaded
Kuwait in 1990, the congressional war vote—52 to 47 in the Senate, 250
to 183 in the House—was the closest since the War of 1812, amidst dire
predictions of casualties, and deprecation of war aims.75 "Some of the
ten Democrats in the Senate and eight-six in the House who supported the
use-of-force resolution did so because of their overriding concern for
the fate of Israel."76 The ultras, chiefly Jewish neoconservatives,
argued for attacking Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but were
frustrated when Bush limited the campaign to expelling Iraqi forces from
Kuwait. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was elaborated in a 1996 study,
"Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," published by an
Israeli think-tank, but written by US neoconservatives for the new
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.77 The replacement of Saddam
Hussein's regime by a Hashemite monarchy was proposed, as part of a
broad assault on Israel's "enemies," including Hizbollah in Lebanon,
Syria and Iran.

When Clean Break was written, Iran had surpassed Iraq in Israel's
demonology. The US policy of "dual containment" of Iran and Iraq was an
incentive for Israel to participate in the Oslo "peace process."78
Crippling sanctions were imposed on Iraq, over the opposition of the US
oil companies.79 US-Iran trade of $5 billion was first banned by
executive order, then prohibited outright by legislation. Business
interests protested vehemently and later organized unsuccessfully
against the legislation.80 Several Clean Break authors became part of
the George W. Bush administration, making it then "a policy manifesto
for the Israeli government penned by members of the current U.S.
government.81 Afghanistan was targeted immediately after 9/11, but the
invasion of Iraq followed in March, 2003, accompanied by fabrications
about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and a connection with al-Qaeda.

The 9/11 attacks themselves were directed above all against US patronage
of Israel. The "notion of payback for injustices suffered by
Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully recurrent in bin Laden's
speeches."82 Bin Laden's concern for Palestine is attested by statements
from his mother about his teenage years; by accounts after Israel
invaded Lebanon in 1982, to drive out the Palestine Liberation
Organization, and intimidate Palestinians in the occupied territories;
and from his first public political statement in 1994. "Speaking just
before the 2004 presidential elections, bin Laden himself voiced
amazement that Americans, deceived, he supposed, by their government,
had yet to understand that he had struck America because 'things just
went too far with the American-Israeli alliance's oppression and
atrocities against our people.'"83 The perpetrators of the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center garage, which killed 6, shared that view.84

Israel's long march to war on Iran is the ultimate strategic nemesis, a
nightmare from which we cannot seem to awaken. AIPAC forced renewal of
the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act in March 2001, over strenuous objection by
business interests. Iran provided vital cooperation during the US attack
on Afghanistan in late 2001, but the ultras spurned further contacts.
After the US crushed Iraq in the spring of 2003, Iran proposed, through
Swiss auspices, an extraordinary "grand bargain" of critical
concessions, in return for improved relations, which the ultras also
spurned. The ultras have also thwarted US "realist" initiatives, such as
a 2004 study by the Council on Foreign Relations urging dialogue with
Iran; the 2006 Iraq Study Group proposal of a gradual US withdrawal from
Iraq, in consultation with Syria and Iran; and the December, 2007
National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus of the 16 US intelligence
agencies, which deprecated Iran's nuclear potential.

The ultras' relentless campaign against Iran informs US policy in
Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. The "major domestic supporters of an
accelerated war in Afghanistan are the neoconservatives," wrote Stephen
Sniegoski in 2009. Stabilizing Afghanistan "would involve broadening
Iran's role in Afghanistan" making it "virtually impossible for the US
to treat it as an enemy.85 The ultras "will be advocating a hard-line
interventionist position towards Libya, in large part, because they see
that such an endeavor can facilitate U.S. military intervention in
Iran."86 The US is presently attempting to overthrow the Assad regime in
Syria, ally of Iran and patron of Hizbollah in Lebanon, by exploiting
popular protest. Manifestos such as "Which Path to Persia?" and "Toward
a Post-Assad Syria," from many of the Clean Break authors, prepare the
way.87 Recent history is following 1982 proposals by Israeli strategist
Oden Yinon to balkanize the entire Arab world into ethnic and religious
statelets which Israel could easily dominate. Such ideas long predate
Yinon's article in Zionist thought.88

The Iran campaign has entered a more ominous phase. AIPAC legislated
sanctions on foreign firms dealing with Iran's central bank, a
requirement in oil sales.89 Iran threatened to block the Strait of
Hormuz, and held naval exercises.90 Trita Parsi warns that the
"temperature between the West and Iran has increased
dramatically…military confrontation is a rising probability."91 Iran has
become an issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, while Netanyahu, US
neoconservatives and GOP elements are plotting to prevent Obama's
re-election.92 Roger Cohen in the New York Timeswarned Netanyahu against
attacking Iran to influence the election.93 The US has cancelled
military exercises with Israel and has warned Netanyahu against an
attack.94 Israel insists that any attack is "far off," and things are
hanging fire more precariously.95

In the vulgar Marxism favored by the Jewish Left, this is all a
capitalist master plan to seize "oil" and "resources." Yet the
capitalists, including the oil industry, opposed sanctions; indeed the
ultras vilify business for selling out Israel. Capitalism requires
access, not sanctions, and enough peace for trade and investment.
Politics and ideology are separate domains from economics, and
capitalism is a protean system that can exist under different regimes.
Capitalist Germany had interests in eastern Europe under the
Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic
during the Cold War, and in the unified Federal Republic of today. The
Nazi period, and the invasion of the USSR, resulted not from a sudden
interest in Russian oil and wheat, but because German elites embraced a
dictatorship and its fanatical ideology, which led them to total war and
genocide.

Zionism is playing that role for the US today; it is turning western
Asia into the "eastern front" of the US empire, comparable to the
eastern front of the Third Reich. Like the Nazi crusade against
"Judeobolshevism" and the Judeocide, the US eastern front is the site of
our most depraved ideologies and deeds—Islamophobia, the "war on
terror," the "clash of civilizations," crushing attacks on Arab
societies, beginning with Palestine, with more horrors threatening
daily. As the 1930s wore on, Hitler consolidated his rule, outflanking
elite conservatives. The struggle between the ultras and the realists
over US foreign policy is like the struggle between Nazis and non-Nazi
conservatives in the 1930s; it cannot be said that today's realists are
winning. The Zionist agenda of total war, which includes 9/11 and its
disastrous blow to civil liberties, is the essential axis of the
emerging US dictatorship.

Obviously, Israel did not invent the US empire and its military Moloch,
which gave Osama bin Laden his start against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The empire also overthrew the elected government of Iran and installed
the Shah in 1953, which led to the Islamic revolution 26 years later.
Nor has Israel invented the rivalry of Iran and the Arab Gulf states, or
the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, or Arab monarchies, or
other features of regional politics. However, Israel's anti-gentile
racialism, its boundless irredentism, and its overwhelming influence on
the US government, have turned normal politics into an existential
crisis, and national interest into an endless war for existence, with
pyrrhic victories for winners and total destruction for losers.

Against this world-historical catastrophe, JVP offers ahistorical
legalism and anti-occupation; strategic asset; and—the last refuge of
the scoundrel on this topic—anti-anti-Semitism. "As Jews, we can make
the distinction between real anti-Semitism and the cynical manipulation
of that issue to shield Israel from legitimate criticism. [A]s long as
even legitimate criticism of Israel is blocked by accusations of
anti-Semitism, it is the responsibility of Jews to stand up for
universal justice. [W]e also believe that actual anti-Semitism is alive
and well and is mostly misunderstood both on the Left and in the
mainstream."

JVP publishes an anti-anti-Semitism manifesto, its contribution to a
literary genre on the Jewish Left.96

Reframing Anti-Semitism begins by discussing "the Holocaust" as the
cardinal event in Jewish history and Jewish consciousness. "Holocaust"
means "burnt offering," as in a religious sacrifice; historians prefer
non-emotional, descriptive terms such as "Judeocide."97 JVP has no
interest in criticism like that of Marc Ellis, who discusses the
"Holocaust and redemption" syndrome long used to defend Zionism, or of
Norman Finkelstein, who describes how a rich "Holocaust industry" shakes
down governments and financial institutions. JVP has its own use, to
define "illegitimate" and "legitimate criticism of Israel," and to
trivialize and caricature claims of Zionist influence as "Jewish
conspiracy theories," and thus prima facie evidence of "anti-semitism on
the Left." For US policy, JVP adduces the usual alternate suspects,
Christian Zionism and the arms industry, and tragicomically compares the
Jewish role to that of medieval Jews who were channeled into exploiting
the peasantry while serving landowners and nobility.

One article charges the Allies with responsibility for the Final
Solution for focusing on defeating the Nazis instead of saving Jews, as
if there were a choice. "Arguably, the decision to do nothing else to
save the victims' lives can be seen as culpability akin to violence."98
Historian William Rubinstein, in The Myth of Rescue, doubts that more
Jews could have been saved "by any action which the Allies could have
taken at the time, given what was actually known about the Holocaust,
what was actually proposed at the time, and what was realistically
possible."99 He implies that the "failure to rescue" critique mainly
expresses Jewish chauvinism after the June, 1967 war. "This great and
profound change in the perception of the Allies and their leaders arose
fairly abruptly between the late 1960s and mid-1980s."100 Rubinstein
also reviews immigration policy and anti-Semitism in the democracies in
the 1930s.

The JVP writers in Reframing Anti-Semitism generally concede that Jews
live freely today, but still find pervasive anti-semitism in subtle and
unique forms, and find it perpetually immanent in gentile attitudes. JVP
holds an essentialist view of gentiles as inalienable anti-Semites,
actual or potential, which is the inverse of anti-Semitic essentialism
about Jews. Two thoughtful articles attempt to deal with Jewish
chauvinism, in limited ways.

Rightward of JVP, the liberal temper is shown by the "pro-peace,
pro-Israel" J Street, fulsome funders and armourers of Israel. Another
example is Peter Beinart, whose widely cited 2010 article denounced "the
failure of the Jewish establishment" to preserve "humane universalistic
Zionism."101 Beinart warned of the disaffection of young, liberal
American Jews, and of the future domination of communal life by the
blindly pro-Israel Orthodox. The "humane univeralist Zionism" has never
existed, and pro-Israel fanaticism arrived long ago, seen today in the
Iran war drive and the plotting of Obama's defeat. Beinart is a step
back from the late Tony Judt, who called for a unitary democratic state
nearly a decade ago.102 The danger is not anti-Semitism but the
opposite, overweening Jewish power and confidence, which make the
US-Israel relationship immutable.

JVP's outlook expresses maximum Jewish advantage and minimum Jewish
obligation, a lawyerly plea bargain on behalf of Jewish identity. This
is due to an exaggerated sense of Jewish entitlements, and to
anti-gentilism. Philip Weiss, co-editor of the influential web site
MondoWeiss, has written candidly about the Jewishness of today's
establishment, about the anti-gentilism of his upbringing, and about
anti-gentilism in the Left. The "bastards, the goyim in power, they
always received the full measure of our scorn…the bastards had unbroken
pedigree in my family's cultural/political memory from Coolidge to
Hoover to Dulles to Eisenhower to Nixon to Reagan, right on up to the
Bushes and the Koch brothers. These were the real powers in political
life; and I think there is some bastard-ism in Chomsky's analysis and in
the New Yorker magazine's." Yet: "We are wealthy and privileged in
America…we are not excluded from the real sources of power. To believe
otherwise is a piece of nostalgic self-service."103

Anti-gentilism encourages the idea that gentile criticism is, or must
inevitably be, about more than Israel. Endless repetition of the truism
that it's not anti-Semitic to criticize Israelmakes anti-Semitism the
overriding concern, and conceals the mortal dangers of Zionism, come
what may in Palestine, in the Gulf, in Washington, or on 9/11. JVP's
"Muzzlewatch" web site seeks to expose "pressure, intimidation, and
outright censorship of critics of US-Israeli policy," anodyne terms for
fanatical attacks like those on 11th-grader Jesse Lieberfeld for his
prize-winning essay criticizing Israel.104 Perhaps the fact that they
are Jewish, and are also directed at gentiles, prevents JVP from calling
such attacks Jewish racism. Racism is instead reserved for gentile
attacks on Jews.

Landy speaks of his UK subjects "'queering' Jewish identity." JVP claims
that "[b]ecause we are Jews, we have a particular legitimacy in voicing
an alternative view," and affirms the "responsibility of Jews to stand
up for universal justice." This accepts Zionist essentialism about
"Jews." Secular "Jewish identity" cannot be "queered" from the outside,
nor can it be the basis for "universal justice," because it is a Zionist
invention, based on anti-gentilism. For Ahad Ha'am, one of its chief
inventors a century ago, "assimilation, not antisemitism…threatened the
Jewish people most compellingly."105 Thus Ahad Ha'am disowned one of his
daughters when she married a gentile, despite the husband's conversion,
since "for nonreligious Jews like himself…'a goy remains a goy'" who
could not "'change [by his conversion] his soul from within.'"106 "The
State has no daughters,'" Ahad Ha'am said sternly, and saw his daughter
once in the remaining 15 years of his life.107

Freedom is absolute and normative, not Jewish identity. The possible
disappearance of the group through assimilation is a trifling price to
pay for freedom and its benefits. While "Jewish Israel-critical
activity" may have a role in assisting people of Jewish background to
understand Israel and Zionism, mature awareness, and general public
awareness, cannot be so limited. "Universal justice" cannot be achieved
on Jewish terms, but only with the rest of humanity. JVP members should
declare that Zionism has no claim on Jewish identity or gentile
conscience, proclaim themselves liberal citizens, and join their fellow
citizens in opposing Zionism, in the US and Palestine. Any Jewish
Israel-critical activity must be subordinated to that. Any hypothetical
anti-Semitism can be opposed only in concert with others, not by Jewish
separatism. Precedents are the people in Landy's study who work in
"society-wide groups" and "the New York activist group JATO [Jews
Against the Occupation]" which "now exists more or less as a paper
organization, since many members have joined Adalah-NY, the wider
boycott organization in New York.108

The chief concern of US citizens must be the US-Israel relationship and
its arming, funding and political support of Israel. BDS is adopted
because the formal political process is owned by the "Israel lobby,"
which precludes coercing Israel by reducing US support. A narrow legal
focus on particular actions and companies may sometimes be useful in
pressing BDS, but asking "who profits from the occupation" implies that
profits of Motorola and the like are driving US policy. This is naive if
not deliberate obfuscation. Broader BDS campaigns like cultural and
academic boycott can stigmatize Israel, and US support for it, like
apartheid South Africa. Whatever the approach, reliance on BDS cannot
obscure the fact of US support for Israel and its sources.

The Washington-based US Campaign to End the Occupation says nothing
about Zionism. It has never organized a demonstration against the annual
AIPAC meeting, which the president and most of Congress attend, though
it did showcase a small Jewish demonstration. This is due to the
"strategic asset" and anti-anti-Semitism dogmas of JVP, which has shared
personnel with the Campaign. It was up to scrappy Code Pink to organize
Move Over AIPAC in 2011, which the Campaign, and JVP and others
"endorsed" but did little about, except to oppose Helen Thomas's
presence.109 Code Pink is organizing Occupy AIPAC in early March.110.
Every year energetic and courageous campus activists organize "Israeli
Apartheid Week," which dramatizes the facts on the ground. Showing their
origins requires Anti-Zionism Week.

Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy, insist that the "Israel lobby" is just another interest group
doing its job, when Grant Smith has shown that it has always operated on
the margins of legality.111 Mearsheimer and Walt accept Israel as a
Jewish state, rather than discussing it as racist.112 These emphases
reflect in part their total lack of support from elsewhere in the
culture, notably the Left.

The tentativeness and limitations of criticism of Israel in the US show
that a general movement against Zionism is the only way of even
addressing the issues and marshaling such resources as we have.

Today, Jewish identity is made to seem as timeless and monumental as the
Grand Canyon, but it is really a big sand dune blown up by chauvinist
winds since 1967. In the 1940s, American Jews rallied to the Zionist
call, established the state of Israel—and that was that. Ant-Semitism
declined rapidly, and Jews began to enjoy their just desserts in liberal
society. Holocaust and Israel were not the complexes they later became.
Three historians of US Jewry have called the two postwar decades a
"golden age."113

The New Left, which began in the late 1950s, had many Jewish members,
though not a majority. Nonetheless, "Jewish issues in these years…were
publicly invisible."114 Anti-Semitism was not a concern, Jews were
prosperous, and Israel was neither threatened nor threatening. "The New
Left was the most 'American' movement since the early Socialist party at
around the turn of the century…made up almost entirely of native-born
Americans," and "also more American than its predecessors in terms of
its ideology and dominant themes." This broad appeal was important to
Jewish and non-Jewish members alike. Thus, like "their cosmopolitan
Jewish predecessors in the pre-World War I Socialist party and in the
student movement of the 1930s, the Jewish New Leftists did not desire to
be tied to particularistic primordial groups and identities. They wanted
instead to be part of a universalistic movement."115 The contrast with
today's Jewish Left could not be sharper, and compares unfavorably to
the Jewish religious debate over the Judeocide in the 1960s and later.

One school in the debate held that the "'Voice of Auschwitz… commands
the survival of Jews and Judaism. Because Hitler was bent on the
destruction of both, it is the duty of the Jews who survived Hitler to
make sure that they do not do his work, that they do not, by
assimilation, bring about the disappearance of what Hitler attempted,
but ultimately failed to destroy.'"116 Another school ridiculed the
substitution of "'the commanding Voice of Auschwitz' for the revelation
of Sinai, and Hitler for Moses."117 For this view, "'the voices of the
Prophets speak more loudly than Hitler,'" and "'the divine promise
sweeps over the crematoria and silences the voice of Auschwitz.'"118
"Jews find in the Holocaust no new definition of Jewish identity because
we need none. Nothing has changed. The tradition endures."119 The
secular Jewish Left in the US had no such debate and affirmation. The
universalism of the New Left was swept away in a tsunami of identity
politics, largely, if not entirely, due to the June, 1967 war.

At the same time, for older/non-American universalists, "the tradition
endured." Isaac Deutscher, the Polish Marxist, accepted Israel after
World War II, but did not consider himself a Zionist. He died on August
19, 1967, a sharp critic of Israel and its role in the origins of the
June war. Rabbi Elmer Berger, who co-led the American Council for
Judaism in the 1940s, at age 60 in 1968, founded Jewish Alternatives to
Zionism to continue the fight, and was resolute until his death in 1996.
Maxime Rodinson, the French Marxist scholar of Near Eastern languages
and sociologist of Islam, remained an acute critic of Zionism and Israel
to his death in 2004.

Israel Shahak survived the Warsaw Ghetto, the Judeocide, Zionism and
Israel, to discover what he called "the modern, secular Jewish
tradition," which he dated from Spinoza, the most rigorous of the 17th
c. rationalist philosophers. He was a chemist at the Hebrew University
and a leading human rights activist and critic of Zionism and Orthodox
Judaism. The Israeli Socialist Organization, founded in 1962, attempted
to rebuild internationalism from the wreckage of the 1940s. The ISO,
known as Matzpen (compass) for its publication, included Arab members,
and Matzpen had an Arabic edition which was, however, censored. Shahak
and Matzpen came of age after the 1967 war, and put Israel's occupation
on the map from the Israeli side. Shahak died in 2001; senior Matzpen
alumni are still active.

All these veteran universalists knew radical evil first hand, except for
Berger, who was fortified by liberal upbringing and religious
conviction. It never occurred to them that, once Nazism had been totally
destroyed, they were threatened by gentiles. They expressly rejected
Zionism, in terms of their respective outlooks; their criticism was
generally more substantive and acute than the work of the American
Jewish Left, and richly repays study today.

In diametric contrast, the JVP school fails to confront Zionism, in
Palestine or in the US. It invokes a chimerical, liberal Palestine
Zionism, or buries the subject in ahistorical legalism and
anti-occupation rhetoric. It conceals Jewish power in the US with the
"strategic asset" dogma, or deprecates and dismisses it. This failure to
oppose Zionism with its universalist antipodes is stupendous and
unbelievable, comparable to the "treason of the intellectuals" described
by Julien Benda in his 1927 book about the climate that preceded World
War I.120

Landy is well aware of the many problems of identity politics, but his
UK focus makes him like a promising minor league pitcher, who must still
face the major league sluggers. In the words of a pitcher who had all
the moves:

{quote} What do you want with this particular suffering of the Jews? The
poor victims on the rubber plantations in Putumayo, the Negroes in
Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play a game of catch, are just as
dear to me. Do you remember the words written on the work of the Great
General Staff about Trotha's campaign in the Kalahari desert? "And the
death-rattles, the cries of those dying of thirst, faded away into the
sublime silence of eternity."

Oh, this "sublime silence of eternity" in which so many screams have
faded away unheard. It rings within me so strongly that I have no
special corner of my heart for the ghetto; I am at home wherever in the
world there are clouds, bird and human tears.

— Rosa Luxemburg, writing to Mathilde Wurm, from jail in 1917.121
{endquote}

1.Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier, eds., Jewish Radicalism: A
Selected Anthology (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. xv-xvi. [?]
2.Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds. Wrestling with Zion. Progressive
Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York:
Grove Press, 2003), p. 81. [?]
3.ibid. [?]
4.ibid., p. 82 [?]
5.ibid., p. 88 [?]
6.David Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish
Opposition to Israel, London: Zed Books, 2011 [?]
7.ibid., p. 6 [?]
8.ibid., p. 211 [?]
9.ibid., p. 5 [?]
10.ibid., p. 12 [?]
11.ibid., p. 21 [?]
12.ibid., p. 28, quoting Bourdieu [?]
13.ibid, quoting Bourdieu [?]
14.ibid., p. 29 [?]
15.ibid., pp. 31-2 [?]
16.ibid., pp. 44 [?]
17.ibid., p. 47 [?]
18.ibid., pp. 42, 47 [?]
19.ibid., p. 52 [?]
20.ibid., p. 53 [?]
21.ibid., p. 64 [?]
22.ibid., p. 66 [?]
23.ibid., p. 70 [?]
24.ibid., p. 85 [?]
25.ibid., p. 78, 80 [?]
26.ibid., p. 84, 85 [?]
27.ibid., p. 89 [?]
28.ibid., p. 103 [?]
29.ibid., p. 107, 110 [?]
30.ibid., p. 125 [?]
31.ibid., p. 138 [?]
32.ibid., pp. 140-1 [?]
33.ibid., pp. 144, 148 [?]
34.ibid., p. 148 [?]
35.ibid., p. 153-4 [?]
36.ibid., p. 167 [?]
37.Philip Weiss, "Jon Stewart Calls AIPAC 'Elders of Zion'",  June 6,
2008; Philip Weiss, "Late Tanya Reinhart Reportedly Likened Lobby to
'Protocols of Elders of Zion'", September 15, 2008; Uri Avnery, "The
Charge of the New York Times",  CounterPunch, July 22, 2011 [?]
38.Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, p. 169 [?]
39.ibid., p. 198 [?]
40.ibid., p. 182 [?]
41.ibid., p. 191 [?]
42.ibid., p. 59 [?]
43.Jill Jacobs, "The History of 'Tikkun Olam'", Zeek. A Jewish Journal
of Thought and Culture. June 2007.  Jacobs points out that the term also
has antecedents in an intolerant passage about the true god in a common
Jewish prayer. [?]
44.See David W. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of
the American Working Class, New York: Verso, 1991 [?]
45.Noel Ignatiev, "Zionism," Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (New York:
Macmillan Press, 2007), pp. 240-44. See also EAFORD and AJAZ
(International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination, and American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism), Judaism or
Zionism: What Difference for the Middle East?(London: Zed Books, 1986 [?]
46.Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (New York: Verso,
2009); Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism. Myth, Politics and
Scholarship in Israel (New York: Verso, 2008); Israel Finkelstein and
Neil Ascherman, The Bible Unearthed. Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient
Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts,  New York: Free Press, 2001 [?]
47.Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986). The Hebrew edition appeared in 1984. [?]
48.Jacob Neusner, Stranger at Home. "The Holocaust," Zionism and
American Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp.
135-6, Neusner, a distinguished Judaic scholar, is a loyal critic of the
"people," who considers himself "on the margins of the group." His
"Zionism of Jewish peoplehood" is descriptive, not prescriptive. [?]
49.ibid., p. 67 [?]
50.JVP Mission Statement,";   "Frequently Asked Questions," [?]
51.Jewish Voice for Peace, "Frequently Asked Questions," [?]
52.Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, pp. 17, 168. [?]
53.ibid., p.167 [?]
54.Kaplan, "'Globalize the Intifada'", Wrestling with Zion, p. 88; Gal
Beckerman, "JVP, Harsh Critic Of Israel, Seeks a Seat at the Communal
Table But Its Refusal To Support 'Two States' Prevents Acceptance,"
Jewish Daily Forward, April 13, 2011; see
http://forward.com/articles/137016/#ixzz1evMmyIIu [?]
55.Philip Weiss, "'JVP' takes on the 'epic battle' inside the Jewish
community," MondoWeiss, March 5, 2010; [?]
56."The U.S.-Israel relationship and foreign aid," [?]
57.Max Blumenthal, "A BDS Debate at Princeton, with J Street, JVP, and
me (this Wednesday)"; [?]
58.Max Blumenthal, "JVP's Rebecca Vilkomerson debates for BDS at J
Street's annual convention," March 1, 2011; Philip Weiss, "J Street says
it invited boycott advocate to its conference so as to pillory her,"
MondoWeiss, February 10, 2011; Phil tries to say that Ben-Ami was
covering his right flank, but any organization that advocates
"maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge" is the right flank. [?]
59.Leah Burrows, "BDS backer in hot seat at shul forum," Jewish Advocate
(Boston), October 28, 2011 -  subscription only; Leonard Fein, who
co-founded Moment magazine with Elie Wiesel, and Larry Lowenthal of the
American Jewish Committee were the featured speakers. The AJC is a
bastion of neo-conservatism, and Moment of liberal hypocrisy; also
Fein's columns [?]
60.Cecile Surasky, "Omar Barghouti asks Jewish Federation to a debate on
BDS," March 4, 2010 [?]
61.ibid., p.166 [?]
62.ibid., Jewish Voice for Peace, ? [?]
63.See Michael J. Cohen, Truman and Israel (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990). On elite concern, see Walter Millis, with the
collaboration of E. S. Duffield, The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking
Press, 1951), pp. 322, 344-46, 356-65 [?]
64.John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt The Israel Lobby and U.S.
Foreign Policy (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), pp. 132-39 [?]
65.See the film's web site;  Professor Stephen Walt introduced a showing
of the film at Harvard and moderated a discussion afterward [?]
66.ibid., pp. 31-4 [?]
67.ibid., p. 115 [?]
68.Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, p. 138, quoting Raef
Zureik [?]
69."Frequently Asked Questions," [?]
70.Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar, "Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli
Conflict. A Primer," The authors are academics, Beinin a historian at
Stanford and past president of the Middle East Studies Association,
Hajjar a sociologist at UC Santa Barbara. [?]
71.William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue. Why the Democracies Could
Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 1997); see
Chapter 2, "The Myth of Closed Doors" [?]
72.Ezra Mendelssohn, "Zionist Success and Zionist Failure," in Ruth
Kozodoy, David Sidorksy and Kalman Sultanik, eds., Vision Confronts
Reality. Historical Perspectives on the Contemporary Jewish Agenda (New
York: Herzl Press, 1989), p. 205 [?]
73.Joel Beinin, "The United States-Israeli Alliance," in Tony Kushner
and Alisa Solomon, eds. Wrestling with Zion. Progressive Jewish-American
Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Grove Press,
2003). [?]
74.Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,
Chapter 2, "Israel: Strategic Asset or Liability?"; Stephen Walt, "When
did the American empire start to decline?" [?]
75.Geoffrey Wawro, Quicksand. America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle
East (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), pp. 405, 418-21; Stephen
Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal. The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the
Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (Norfolk, VA: Enigma
Editions, 2008), pp. 62-3 [?]
76.Elizabeth Drew, "Letter from Washington," New Yorker, February 4,
1991 [?]
77."A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies; [?]
78.Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle. The Conflict Between Iran and
America (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 261 [?]
79.Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal. The Neoconservative Agenda,
War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (Norfolk,
VA: Enigma Editions, 2008), pp. 335-6, part of Chapter 18, "Oil and
Other Motives." [?]
80.Sasan Fayezmanesh, "The Politics of the U.S. Economic Sanctions
against Iran", Review of Radical Political Economics 35:3, Summer 2003,
pp. 221-240 [?]
81.Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal, p. 90. [?]
82.Max Rodenbeck, "Their Master's Voice," New York Review of Books,
March 9, 2006. [?]
83.Rodenbeck, "Their Master's Voice" [?]
84.Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, pp.
65-5. [?]
85.Stephen Sniegoski, "Afghanistan: Back Door to War on Iran," September
7, 2009;   See also Stephen Sniegoski, "President Petraeus: The Neocons'
Choice," July 14, 2010;  and  Stephen Sniegoski, "The Duel of the
Machiavellians: Obama vs. Petraeus," July 6, 2010 [?]
86.Stephen Sniegoski, "Neocons' Goal: Iran by Way of Libya," March 19,
2011 [?]
87.See "Which Path to Persia?" from the Haim Saban Center at the
Brookings Institution; and and "Toward a Post-Assad Syria," from the
Foreign Policy Initiative [?]
88.Oden Yinon, "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties," from
Directions, a Journal for Judaism and Zionism, Issue 14, Winter 5742,
February, 1982, translated by Israel Shahak; [?]
89.See Philip Weiss, "AIPAC posterizes Obama in Senate, 100-0," [?]
90.David E. Sanger and Annie Lowrey, "Iran Threatens to Block Oil
Shipments, as U.S. Prepares Sanctions," New York Times, December 28,
2011 [?]
91.Trita Parsi, "Reckless talk of war with Iran makes confrontation a
probability," The Independent, January 7, 2012; [?]
92.Max Blumenthal, "The Bibi Connection," January 12, 2012 [?]
93.Roger Cohen, "Don't Do It, Bibi," January 16, 2012 [?]
94.Gareth Porter and Jim Lobe, "Obama Delays U.S.-Israeli War Exercise,"
January 17, 2012 [?]
95.Isabel Kershner and Rick Gladstone, "Decision to Attack Iran Is 'Far
Off,' Israel Says" New York Times, January 18, 2012 [?]
96.Henri Piccioto and Mitchell Plitnick, eds., Reframing Anti-Semitism.
Alternative Jewish Perspectives,  San Francisco: Jewish Voice for Peace,
2004 [?]
97.Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens not Darken? The "Final Solution" in
History, New York: Harper and Row, 1988 [?]
98.ibid., p. 75 [?]
99.William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue. Why the Democracies Could
Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 1997), p. x. [?]
100.ibid., p. 2. Franklin D. Roosevelt's demotion from Jewish hero to
anti-semite was unjust, according to Robert N. Rosen, Saving the Jews.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust, New York: Thunder's Mouth
Press, 2006 [?]
101.Peter Beinart, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,"
New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010; see also "'The Failure of the
American Jewish Establishment': An Exchange," June 24, 2010, Abraham H.
Foxman, reply by Peter Beinart [?]
102.Tony Judt, "Israel: The Alternative," New York Review of Books,
October 23, 2003.  See also "An Alternative Future: An Exchange,"
December 4, 2003, Amos Elon, Abraham H. Foxman, Michael Walzer, and Omer
Bartov, reply by Tony Judt [?]
103.Philip Weiss, "The Bastards," April 27, 2011 [?]
104.Philip Weiss, "Jesse Lieberfeld is a, a fake, b, about to be
swallowed by a whale, c, the Jewish future," January 17, 2012 [?]
105.Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet. Ahad Ha'am and the Origins
of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 80 [?]
106.ibid., p. 289 [?]
107.ibid., p. x [?]
108.Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, p. 105 [?]
109.Harry Clark, "Move Over AIPAC" [?]
110.See Occupy AIPAC [?]
111.Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, pp.
11-12. See the web site of the Institute for Research: Middle East
Policy for Grant Smith's writing, including articles and books based on
documents unearthed with FOIA [?]
112.ibid., p. 11 [?]
113.Arthur Goren, "A 'Golden Decade' for American Jews, 1945-1955" in
Peter Y. Medding, ed., A New Jewry? America Since the Second World War.
Studies in Contemporary Jewry. An Annual. VII (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), for the Institute for Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew
University; Goren cites on p. 3 a chapter in a work by Lucy Dawidowicz
entitled, "The Golden Age in America," referring to 1945-67. See also
Chapter XVIII, "From Cold War to Belle Epoque," in Howard M. Sachar, A
History of the Jews in America, New York: Knopf, 1992. [?]
114.Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1979), p. 560. See the section "The New Left and Jewish Concerns," in
Chapter 9, "The New Left and the Jewish New Left in the 1960s and 1970s" [?]
115.ibid., p. 561 [?]
116.Neusner, Stranger at Home, p. 73, citing a review of Emil Fackenheim
by Michael Wyschogrod [?]
117.ibid., p. 86 [?]
118.ibid., p. 77, quoting Wyschogrod. [?]
119.ibid., p. 81 [?]
120.Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2007). This book has been tendentiously
misinterpreted by neoconservatives, and a recent reprint has an
introduction by Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, but the book
transcends such misuse. [?]
121.Paul Le Blanc, ed., Rosa Luxemburg (New York: Humanity Books, 1999),
p. 19 [?]

Harry Clark is an independent student of the Palestine question. He can
be reached at his web site http://questionofpalestine.net Read other
articles by Harry, or visit Harry's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 at 8:01am

(12) Jewish Lobby is America's Last Taboo - Edward Said, New Left Review
(2000)

http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2285

New Left Review 6, November-December 2000

America's Last Taboo

Edward Said

{written just after Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount on Sept. 28, 2000}

The events of the past weeks in Palestine have been a near-total triumph
for Zionism in the United States. Political and public discourse has so
definitively transformed Israel into the victim during the recent
clashes that, even though over 200 Palestinian lives were lost and 6,000
casualties have been reported, there is unanimity that 'Palestinian
violence' has disrupted the smooth and orderly flow of the 'peace
process'. ...

The general picture is that Israel is so surrounded by rock-throwing
barbarians that even the missiles, tanks and helicopter gunships used to
'defend' Israelis from them are warding off what is essentially an
invasive force. Clinton's injunctions, dutifully parroted by Albright,
that Palestinians must 'pull back', give us to understand that it is
Palestinians who are encroaching on Israeli territory, not the other way
round. In the US media, Zionization is so thorough that not a single map
has been published or shown on television that would risk revealing to
Americans the network of Israeli garrisons, settlements, routes and
barricades which crisscross Gaza and the West Bank. Blotted out
completely is the system of Areas A, B and C, which perpetuates military
occupation of 40 per cent of Gaza and 60 per cent of the West Bank, in
keeping with the Oslo 'accords'. The censorship of geography, in this
most geographical of conflicts, creates an imaginative void—once
deliberately fostered, but now more or less automatic—in which all
images of the conflict are decontextualized. The result is not just the
preposterous belief that a Palestinian attack on Israel is under way,
but a dehumanization of Palestinians to the level of beasts virtually
without sentience or motive. Little wonder, then, that the figures of
dead and wounded regularly omit any mention of nationality—as if
suffering were shared equally by the 'warring parties'. Nothing is said
of house demolitions, land expropriations, illegal arrests, beatings and
torture. Forgotten are the ethnic cleansing of 1948; the massacres of
Qibya, Kafr Qassem, Sabra and Shatila; the defiance of UN resolutions
and flouting of the Geneva Convention; the decades of military
invigilation and discrimination against the Arab population within
Israel. Ariel Sharon is at best 'provocative', by no stretch of the
imagination a war criminal; Ehud Barak is always a statesman, never the
assassin of Beirut and Tunis. Terrorism is invariably on the
Palestinian, defence on the Israeli, side of the moral ledger.

Ever since September 28 there have been an average of anywhere between
one and three opinion articles a day in the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the
Boston Globe. With the exception of perhaps three pieces written with
sympathy for the Palestinians in the Los Angeles Times, and two—one by
an Israeli lawyer, Allegra Pacheco; the other by a Jordanian liberal who
favours Oslo—in the New York Times, every such article—including the
regular columns of Thomas Friedman, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer
et al.—has vociferously supported Israel and denounced Palestinian
violence, Islamic fundamentalism and Arafat's backsliding from the
'peace process'. The authors of this relentless tide of propaganda have
been former US military officers and diplomats, Israeli functionaries
and apologists, regional experts and think-tank specialists, lobbyists
and front men for Tel Aviv. The unspoken premise of this total
blanketing of the mainstream press is that no Palestinian or Arab
position on Israeli police terror, settler-colonialism, or military
occupation is worth hearing from. In fine, American Zionism has made any
serious public discussion of the past or future of Israel—by far the
largest recipient ever of US foreign aid—a taboo. To call this quite
literally the last taboo in American public life would not be an
exaggeration. Abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, even the
sacrosanct military budget can be discussed with some freedom. The
extermination of native Americans can be admitted, the morality of
Hiroshima attacked, the national flag publicly committed to the flames.
But the systematic continuity of Israel's 52-year-old oppression and
maltreatment of the Palestinians is virtually unmentionable, a narrative
that has no permission to appear.

American fanatics

What explains this state of affairs? The answer lies in the power of
Zionist organizations in American politics, whose role throughout the
'peace process' has never been sufficiently addressed—a neglect which is
absolutely astonishing, given that the policy of the PLO has been in
essence to throw our fate as a people into the lap of the United States,
without any strategic awareness of how American policy is dominated by a
small minority whose views about the Middle East are in some ways more
extreme than those of Likud itself.  ...

Policy stranglehold

But the role of these immigrants is insignificant beside that of their
sympathizers at home. There the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee—AIPAC—has for years been the most powerful single lobby in
Washington. Drawing on a well-organized, well-connected, highly visible
and wealthy Jewish population, AIPAC inspires an awed fear and respect
across the political spectrum. Who is going to stand up to this Moloch
on behalf of the Palestinians, when they can offer nothing, and AIPAC
can destroy a congressional career at the drop of a chequebook? In the
past, one or two members of Congress did resist AIPAC openly, but the
many political action committees controlled by AIPAC made sure they were
never re-elected. The only Senator who once remotely tried to oppose
AIPAC was James Abourezk of South Dakota, who resigned for his own
reasons after a single term. Today, virtually the entire Senate can be
marshalled in a matter of hours into signing a letter to the President
on Israel's behalf. No-one exemplifies the sway of AIPAC better than
Hillary Clinton, outdoing even the most right-wing Zionists in fervour
for Israel in her avid clawing for power in New York, where she went so
far as to call for the transfer of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to
Jerusalem and the grant of leniency for Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli
spy serving a life sentence in the US.

If such is the material of the legislature, what can be expected of the
executive? In a little noticed but revealing episode, the current US
ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk was abruptly stripped of his security
clearance by the State Department, supposedly for a lax use of his
laptop which may have disclosed confidential information to
'unauthorized persons'. For a time he was unable to enter or leave the
State Department without an escort, and was forbidden to return to
Israel, pending a full investigation. [1] It is not difficult to guess
what happened. The originating scandal—naturally, never mentioned in the
media—was Indyk's appointment in the first place. On the very eve of
Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, it was announced that Indyk—an
Australian national of Jewish origin, born in London—had been sworn in
as an American citizen at the express command of the President-elect,
overriding all normal procedures in an act of peremptory executive
privilege, to allow him to be parachuted immediately into the National
Security Council, with responsibility for the Middle East. What had
Indyk been or done to merit such extraordinary favour? He had been head
of the Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington think-tank that
lobbies for Israel in tandem with AIPAC. Predictably enough, Dennis
Ross—a State Department consultant who heads American superintendance of
the 'peace process'—is another former head of the same Institute.

What, then, of civil society? Here the consensus that Israel is a model
democracy, forming the one oasis of Western modernity in the political
desert of the Middle East, is virtually impregnable. Should there be any
sign of its slipping, an array of Zionist organizations, whose role it
is to police the public realm for infractions, steps in. Rabbi Arthur
Hertzberg, a respected American liberal cleric, once said that Zionism
was the secular religion of the American Jewish community. Many Jewish
organizations run hospitals, museums, research institutes for the good
of the whole country. Alas, these noble public enterprises coexist with
the meanest and most inhumane ones. To take a recent example, the
Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), a small but vociferous group of
zealots, paid for an advertisement in the New York Times on September 10
which addressed Barak as if he was their employee, reminding him that 6
million American Jews outnumber 5 million Israelis, should he decide to
negotiate over Jerusalem. The language of the advertisement was
positively minatory, upbraiding Israel's Prime Minister for
contemplating actions anathema to American Jews. The ZOA feels it has
the right to intervene in everybody's business. Its adherents routinely
write or telephone the President of my university to ask him to dismiss
or censure me for something I have said, as if universities were like
kindergartens and professors to be treated as underage delinquents. Last
year they mounted a campaign to dismiss me from my elected post as
President of the Modern Language Association, whose 30,000 members were
lectured to by the ZOA as so many morons.

In similar vein, right-wing Jewish pundits like Norman Podhoretz,
Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol—to mention only a few of the
more strident propagandists—have not hesitated to express their
displeasure at the prospect of any concessions, however faint or bogus,
by Israel to the Palestinians. The tone of these self-appointed
guardians of Zionism is a combination of brazen arrogance, moral
sanctimony, and unctuous hypocrisy. Most sensible Israelis regard them
with distaste. To describe their diatribes as curses from the Old
Testament would be a slur on the prophets. But their relentless clamour,
incessantly criminalizing support for Palestinian resistance against
Israel, can rely on an ideological trump card in the United States. For
a totalitarian Zionism, any criticism of Israel is proof of the rankest
anti-semitism. If you do not refrain, you will be hounded as an
anti-semite requiring the severest opprobrium. In the Orwellian logic of
American Zionism, it is impermissible to speak of Jewish violence or
Jewish terror when it comes to Israel, even though everything done by
Israel is done in the name of the Jewish people, by and for a Jewish
state. Of course, strictly speaking, this is a misnomer, since nearly a
fifth of its population is not Jewish. These are the people the media
call 'Israeli Arabs', as if they were another species from 'the
Palestinians'. What American reader or viewer would know they are the
same people, divided only by decades of brutal Zionist policy, assigning
apartheid to the former, occupation and expulsion to the latter?

Hapless pleas

The worst of this implacable machinery of consensus in America, however,
is Arab blindness to it. When the PLO opted after the Gulf War to follow
the example of Egypt and Jordan, and work as closely as possible with
the American government, it made its decision (as had the two Arab
states before it) on the basis of vast ignorance and quite
extraordinarily mistaken assumptions. The essence of its calculation was
expressed to me, shortly after 1967, by a senior Egyptian diplomat: we
must surrender, and promise not to struggle any further—we will accept
Israel and the determining role of the United States in our future.
There is no doubt that continuing to fight as the Arabs had historically
done would indeed have led to further defeat and disaster. But neither
then nor today was it the case that the only alternative was to throw
ourselves onto the mercy of America—saying, in effect, we will no longer
resist you, let us join you, but please treat us well. The pathetic hope
was that if Arabs cried long enough, 'We are not your enemies', they
would be welcomed as friends. They forgot the disparity of power that
remained. From the viewpoint of the powerful, what difference does it
make to your own strategy if an enfeebled adversary gives up and
declares, 'I have nothing further to fight for, take me as your ally,
just try to understand me a bit better and perhaps you will then be
fairer?'

Such pleas are bound to fall on deaf ears in the American state. All
peace arrangements undertaken in the illusion of an 'alliance' with the
US can only confirm Zionist power. To submit supinely to American
designs in the Middle East, as Arabs have done for almost a generation
now, will bring neither peace and justice at home, nor equality abroad.
Since the mid 1980s I have tried to impress on the PLO leadership, and
every Palestinian or Arab I have met, that the quest for a protector in
the White House is a complete chimera, since all recent presidents have
been devoted to Zionist aims, and that the only way to change US policy
is through a mass campaign on behalf of Palestinian human rights,
out-flanking the Zionist establishment and going straight to the
American people. Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they
are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign
against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside
South Africa. James Zoghby, then an energetic human rights activist, was
one of the originators of the idea. Then he threw in his lot with
Arafat, the US government and the Democratic Party, and abandoned it
totally.

But it was soon clear that the PLO would never adopt this course anyway.
There were several reasons for that. A strategy of this kind requires
sustained and dedicated political work. It has to be based on democratic
grass-roots organization. It can only spring from a movement, not a
personal initiative by this or that leader. Last but not least, it
demands genuine knowledge of US society, rather than superficial pieties
or clichés. The reality is that there exists, inside America, a vast
body of opinion which is often bewildered by the lurid rhetoric of
Zionism and which would be capable of turning against it, were a mass
campaign mobilized in the US itself for Palestinian human, civil and
political rights. The tragedy is that the Arabs here have been too weak,
too divided, too unorganized and ignorant to mount such a movement. But
unless American Zionism is taken on in its homelands, all attempts to
parley with the United States or Israel will lead to the same dismal and
discrediting outcome.

The Oslo accords could scarcely have shown this more starkly. The Wye
and Camp David talks brought home the same truth once again. What has
Barak's 'unprecedented generosity' consisted of? The promise of a very
limited military withdrawal, made at Wye—from a mere 12 per cent of the
occupied territories—has never been kept, and is now forgotten. Instead,
the Western media extol Barak's munificent offer of '90 per cent' of the
West Bank to the PLO, in exchange for its abandonment of the Palestinian
refugees to their fate. The reality is that Israel has no intention of
giving back Greater Jerusalem, which covers over 5 per cent of the
choicest West Bank land; or Jewish settlements, which amount to another
15 per cent; not to speak of military roads or areas yet to be
determined. The largesse of '90 per cent' refers to what is left after
all this is deducted. As for the grand gesture of considering shared
authority over Haram al Sharif, the breathtaking dishonesty of the
matter is that all of West Jerusalem (principally Arab in 1948) has
already been conceded by Arafat, plus most of a vastly expanded East
Jerusalem.

The shameful charade of the 'peace process' has now, at any rate
temporarily, broken down, amid the explosion of popular anger among
Palestinians who were supposed to be grateful for it. The stones and
slings of young men thoroughly tired of injustice and repression are now
offering courageous resistance to a demeaning fate, meted out to them
not just by Israeli soldiers, armed by the United States, but by a pact
with Zionism designed to coop them up in reservations fit for animals,
policed by Arafat's apparatus with US military and financial aid, and
openly collaborating with Shin Bet and the CIA. The function of the Oslo
accords is to cage Palestinians in a remnant of their own lands, like
inmates in an asylum or prison. What is astonishing is not the popular
revolt against this diktat, but that it could ever have been passed off
as peace instead of the desolation that it has really been all along. A
dithering Palestinian leadership, unable either to retire or to go
forward, has been caught on the wrong foot. But the signs are that a new
generation will not be content with the miserable, denigrated place
accorded them in the Zionist scheme of things, and will go on rebelling
until it is finally changed.

[1] Indyk has now been fully reinstated.

(13) Chomsky says US retains control of Israel (Feb '12): American
decline in perspective, part 2
The imperial way: American decline in perspective, part 2

The US's presumed right to impose its will on the world, by force if
necessary, has not changed. But its capacity to do so has

Noam Chomsky for TomDispatch, part of the Guardian Comment Network

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 February 2012 18.07 GMT

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175503/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/15/imperial-way-american-decline-noam-chomsky

In the years of conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, "losses"
continued to mount elsewhere. In the past decade, for the first time in
500 years, South America has taken successful steps to free itself from
western domination, another serious loss. The region has moved towards
integration, and has begun to address some of the terrible internal
problems of societies ruled by mostly Europeanized elites, tiny islands
of extreme wealth in a sea of misery. They have also rid themselves of
all U.S. military bases and of IMF controls. A newly formed
organization, CELAC, includes all countries of the hemisphere apart from
the U.S. and Canada. If it actually functions, that would be another
step in American decline, in this case in what has always been regarded
as "the backyard."

Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries -- Middle
East/North Africa -- which have been regarded by planners since the
1940s as "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the
greatest material prizes in world history." Control of MENA energy
reserves would yield "substantial control of the world," in the words of
the influential Roosevelt advisor A.A. Berle.

To be sure, if the projections of a century of U.S. energy independence
based on North American energy resources turn out to be realistic, the
significance of controlling MENA would decline somewhat, though probably
not by much: the main concern has always been control more than access.
However, the likely consequences to the planet's equilibrium are so
ominous that discussion may be largely an academic exercise.

The Arab Spring, another development of historic importance, might
portend at least a partial "loss" of MENA. The US and its allies have
tried hard to prevent that outcome -- so far, with considerable success.
Their policy towards the popular uprisings has kept closely to the
standard guidelines: support the forces most amenable to U.S. influence
and control.

Favored dictators are supported as long as they can maintain control (as
in the major oil states). When that is no longer possible, then discard
them and try to restore the old regime as fully as possible (as in
Tunisia and Egypt). The general pattern is familiar: Somoza, Marcos,
Duvalier, Mobutu, Suharto, and many others. In one case, Libya, the
three traditional imperial powers intervened by force to participate in
a rebellion to overthrow a mercurial and unreliable dictator, opening
the way, it is expected, to more efficient control over Libya's rich
resources (oil primarily, but also water, of particular interest to
French corporations), to a possible base for the U.S. Africa Command (so
far restricted to Germany), and to the reversal of growing Chinese
penetration. As far as policy goes, there have been few surprises.

Crucially, it is important to reduce the threat of functioning
democracy, in which popular opinion will significantly influence policy.
That again is routine, and quite understandable. A look at the studies
of public opinion undertaken by U.S. polling agencies in the MENA
countries easily explains the western fear of authentic democracy, in
which public opinion will significantly influence policy.

Israel and the Republican Party

Similar considerations carry over directly to the second major concern
addressed in the issue of Foreign Affairs cited in part one of this
piece: the Israel-Palestine conflict. Fear of democracy could hardly be
more clearly exhibited than in this case. In January 2006, an election
took place in Palestine, pronounced free and fair by international
monitors. The instant reaction of the U.S. (and of course Israel), with
Europe following along politely, was to impose harsh penalties on
Palestinians for voting the wrong way.

That is no innovation. It is quite in accord with the general and
unsurprising principle recognized by mainstream scholarship: the U.S.
supports democracy if, and only if, the outcomes accord with its
strategic and economic objectives, the rueful conclusion of
neo-Reaganite Thomas Carothers, the most careful and respected scholarly
analyst of "democracy promotion" initiatives.

More broadly, for 35 years the U.S. has led the rejectionist camp on
Israel-Palestine, blocking an international consensus calling for a
political settlement in terms too well known to require repetition. The
western mantra is that Israel seeks negotiations without preconditions,
while the Palestinians refuse. The opposite is more accurate. The U.S.
and Israel demand strict preconditions, which are, furthermore, designed
to ensure that negotiations will lead either to Palestinian capitulation
on crucial issues, or nowhere.

The first precondition is that the negotiations must be supervised by
Washington, which makes about as much sense as demanding that Iran
supervise the negotiation of Sunni-Shia conflicts in Iraq. Serious
negotiations would have to be under the auspices of some neutral party,
preferably one that commands some international respect, perhaps Brazil.
The negotiations would seek to resolve the conflicts between the two
antagonists: the U.S.-Israel on one side, most of the world on the other.

The second precondition is that Israel must be free to expand its
illegal settlements in the West Bank. Theoretically, the U.S. opposes
these actions, but with a very light tap on the wrist, while continuing
to provide economic, diplomatic, and military support. When the U.S.
does have some limited objections, it very easily bars the actions, as
in the case of the E-1 project linking Greater Jerusalem to the town of
Ma'aleh Adumim, virtually bisecting the West Bank, a very high priority
for Israeli planners (across the spectrum), but raising some objections
in Washington, so that Israel has had to resort to devious measures to
chip away at the project.

The pretense of opposition reached the level of farce last February when
Obama vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for implementation of
official U.S. policy (also adding the uncontroversial observation that
the settlements themselves are illegal, quite apart from expansion).
Since that time there has been little talk about ending settlement
expansion, which continues, with studied provocation.

Thus, as Israeli and Palestinian representatives prepared to meet in
Jordan in January 2011, Israel announced new construction in Pisgat
Ze'ev and Har Homa, West Bank areas that it has declared to be within
the greatly expanded area of Jerusalem, annexed, settled, and
constructed as Israel's capital, all in violation of direct Security
Council orders. Other moves carry forward the grander design of
separating whatever West Bank enclaves will be left to Palestinian
administration from the cultural, commercial, political center of
Palestinian life in the former Jerusalem.

It is understandable that Palestinian rights should be marginalized in
U.S. policy and discourse. Palestinians have no wealth or power. They
offer virtually nothing to U.S. policy concerns; in fact, they have
negative value, as a nuisance that stirs up "the Arab street."

Israel, in contrast, is a valuable ally. It is a rich society with a
sophisticated, largely militarized high-tech industry. For decades, it
has been a highly valued military and strategic ally, particularly since
1967, when it performed a great service to the U.S. and its Saudi ally
by destroying the Nasserite "virus," establishing the "special
relationship" with Washington in the form that has persisted since. It
is also a growing center for U.S. high-tech investment. In fact, high
tech and particularly military industries in the two countries are
closely linked.

Apart from such elementary considerations of great power politics as
these, there are cultural factors that should not be ignored. Christian
Zionism in Britain and the U.S. long preceded Jewish Zionism, and has
been a significant elite phenomenon with clear policy implications
(including the Balfour Declaration, which drew from it). When General
Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the
American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the
Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

The next step was for the Chosen People to return to the land promised
to them by the Lord. Articulating a common elite view, President
Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described
Jewish colonization of Palestine as an achievement "without comparison
in the history of the human race." Such attitudes find their place
easily within the Providentialist doctrines that have been a strong
element in popular and elite culture since the country's origins: the
belief that God has a plan for the world and the U.S. is carrying it
forward under divine guidance, as articulated by a long list of leading
figures.

Moreover, evangelical Christianity is a major popular force in the U.S.
Further toward the extremes, End Times evangelical Christianity also has
enormous popular outreach, invigorated by the establishment of Israel in
1948, revitalized even more by the conquest of the rest of Palestine in
1967 -- all signs that End Times and the Second Coming are approaching.

These forces have become particularly significant since the Reagan
years, as the Republicans have abandoned the pretense of being a
political party in the traditional sense, while devoting themselves in
virtual lockstep uniformity to servicing a tiny percentage of the
super-rich and the corporate sector. However, the small constituency
that is primarily served by the reconstructed party cannot provide
votes, so they have to turn elsewhere.

The only choice is to mobilize tendencies that have always been present,
though rarely as an organized political force: primarily nativists
trembling in fear and hatred, and religious elements that are extremists
by international standards but not in the U.S. One outcome is reverence
for alleged Biblical prophecies, hence not only support for Israel and
its conquests and expansion, but passionate love for Israel, another
core part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican candidates
-- with Democrats, again, not too far behind.

These factors aside, it should not be forgotten that the "Anglosphere"
-- Britain and its offshoots -- consists of settler-colonial societies,
which rose on the ashes of indigenous populations, suppressed or
virtually exterminated. Past practices must have been basically correct,
in the U.S. case even ordained by Divine Providence. Accordingly there
is often an intuitive sympathy for the children of Israel when they
follow a similar course. But primarily, geostrategic and economic
interests prevail, and policy is not graven in stone.

The Iranian "Threat" and the Nuclear Issue

Let us turn finally to the third of the leading issues addressed in the
establishment journals cited earlier, the "threat of Iran." Among elites
and the political class this is generally taken to be the primary threat
to world order -- though not among populations. In Europe, polls show
that Israel is regarded as the leading threat to peace. In the MENA
countries, that status is shared with the U.S., to the extent that in
Egypt, on the eve of the Tahrir Square uprising, 80% felt that the
region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons. The same polls
found that only 10% regard Iran as a threat -- unlike the ruling
dictators, who have their own concerns.

In the United States, before the massive propaganda campaigns of the
past few years, a majority of the population agreed with most of the
world that, as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a
right to carry out uranium enrichment. And even today, a large majority
favors peaceful means for dealing with Iran. There is even strong
opposition to military engagement if Iran and Israel are at war. Only a
quarter regard Iran as an important concern for the U.S. altogether. But
it is not unusual for there to be a gap, often a chasm, dividing public
opinion and policy.

Why exactly is Iran regarded as such a colossal threat? The question is
rarely discussed, but it is not hard to find a serious answer -- though
not, as usual, in the fevered pronouncements. The most authoritative
answer is provided by the Pentagon and the intelligence services in
their regular reports to Congress on global security. They report that
Iran does not pose a military threat. Its military spending is very low
even by the standards of the region, minuscule of course in comparison
with the U.S.

Iran has little capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrines are
defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to set
it. If Iran is developing nuclear weapons capability, they report, that
would be part of its deterrence strategy. No serious analyst believes
that the ruling clerics are eager to see their country and possessions
vaporized, the immediate consequence of their coming even close to
initiating a nuclear war. And it is hardly necessary to spell out the
reasons why any Iranian leadership would be concerned with deterrence,
under existing circumstances.

The regime is doubtless a serious threat to much of its own population
-- and regrettably, is hardly unique on that score. But the primary
threat to the U.S. and Israel is that Iran might deter their free
exercise of violence. A further threat is that the Iranians clearly seek
to extend their influence to neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and
beyond as well. Those "illegitimate" acts are called "destabilizing" (or
worse). In contrast, forceful imposition of U.S. influence halfway
around the world contributes to "stability" and order, in accord with
traditional doctrine about who owns the world.

It makes very good sense to try to prevent Iran from joining the nuclear
weapons states, including the three that have refused to sign the
Non-Proliferation Treaty -- Israel, India, and Pakistan, all of which
have been assisted in developing nuclear weapons by the U.S., and are
still being assisted by them. It is not impossible to approach that goal
by peaceful diplomatic means. One approach, which enjoys overwhelming
international support, is to undertake meaningful steps towards
establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, including
Iran and Israel (and applying as well to U.S. forces deployed there),
better still extending to South Asia.

Support for such efforts is so strong that the Obama administration has
been compelled to formally agree, but with reservations: crucially, that
Israel's nuclear program must not be placed under the auspices of the
International Atomic Energy Association, and that no state (meaning the
U.S.) should be required to release information about "Israeli nuclear
facilities and activities, including information pertaining to previous
nuclear transfers to Israel." Obama also accepts Israel's position that
any such proposal must be conditional on a comprehensive peace
settlement, which the U.S. and Israel can continue to delay
indefinitely. ...

(14) Iran targeted by US for spreading instability (not because of
Lobby) - Chomsky (2011)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175382/noam_chomsky_who_owns_the_world

Is the World Too Big to Fail?

The Contours of Global Order

By Noam Chomsky

Posted by Noam Chomsky at 9:49am, April 21, 2011.

The democracy uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display
of courage, dedication, and commitment by popular forces -- coinciding,
fortuitously, with a remarkable uprising of tens of thousands in support
of working people and democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and other U.S.
cities. ...

The Iranian and Chinese "Threats"

The democracy uprising in the Arab world is sometimes compared to
Eastern Europe in 1989, but on dubious grounds. In 1989, the democracy
uprising was tolerated by the Russians, and supported by western power
in accord with standard doctrine: it plainly conformed to economic and
strategic objectives, and was therefore a noble achievement, greatly
honored, unlike the struggles at the same time "to defend the people's
fundamental human rights" in Central America, in the words of the
assassinated Archbishop of El Salvador, one of the hundreds of thousands
of victims of the military forces armed and trained by Washington. There
was no Gorbachev in the West throughout these horrendous years, and
there is none today. And Western power remains hostile to democracy in
the Arab world for good reasons.

Grand Area doctrines continue to apply to contemporary crises and
confrontations. In Western policy-making circles and political
commentary the Iranian threat is considered to pose the greatest danger
to world order and hence must be the primary focus of U.S. foreign
policy, with Europe trailing along politely.

What exactly is the Iranian threat? An authoritative answer is provided
by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence. Reporting on global security last
year, they make it clear that the threat is not military. Iran's
military spending is "relatively low compared to the rest of the
region," they conclude. Its military doctrine is strictly "defensive,
designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to
hostilities." Iran has only "a limited capability to project force
beyond its borders." With regard to the nuclear option, "Iran's nuclear
program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing
nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy." All quotes.

The brutal clerical regime is doubtless a threat to its own people,
though it hardly outranks U.S. allies in that regard. But the threat
lies elsewhere, and is ominous indeed. One element is Iran's potential
deterrent capacity, an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that might
interfere with U.S. freedom of action in the region. It is glaringly
obvious why Iran would seek a deterrent capacity; a look at the military
bases and nuclear forces in the region suffices to explain.

Seven years ago, Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld wrote
that "The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for,
as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build
nuclear weapons, they would be crazy," particularly when they are under
constant threat of attack in violation of the UN Charter. Whether they
are doing so remains an open question, but perhaps so.

But Iran's threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand
its influence in neighboring countries, the Pentagon and U.S.
intelligence emphasize, and in this way to "destabilize" the region (in
the technical terms of foreign policy discourse). The U.S. invasion and
military occupation of Iran's neighbors is "stabilization." Iran's
efforts to extend its influence to them are "destabilization," hence
plainly illegitimate.

Such usage is routine. Thus the prominent foreign policy analyst James
Chace was properly using the term "stability" in its technical sense
when he explained that in order to achieve "stability" in Chile it was
necessary to "destabilize" the country (by overthrowing the elected
government of Salvador Allende and installing the dictatorship of
General Augusto Pinochet). Other concerns about Iran are equally
interesting to explore, but perhaps this is enough to reveal the guiding
principles and their status in imperial culture. As Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's planners emphasized at the dawn of the contemporary world
system, the U.S. cannot tolerate "any exercise of sovereignty" that
interferes with its global designs.

The U.S. and Europe are united in punishing Iran for its threat to
stability, but it is useful to recall how isolated they are. The
nonaligned countries have vigorously supported Iran's right to enrich
uranium. In the region, Arab public opinion even strongly favors Iranian
nuclear weapons. The major regional power, Turkey, voted against the
latest U.S.-initiated sanctions motion in the Security Council, along
with Brazil, the most admired country of the South. Their disobedience
led to sharp censure, not for the first time: Turkey had been bitterly
condemned in 2003 when the government followed the will of 95% of the
population and refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq, thus
demonstrating its weak grasp of democracy, western-style.

After its Security Council misdeed last year, Turkey was warned by
Obama's top diplomat on European affairs, Philip Gordon, that it must
"demonstrate its commitment to partnership with the West." A scholar
with the Council on Foreign Relations asked, "How do we keep the Turks
in their lane?" -- following orders like good democrats. Brazil's Lula
was admonished in a New York Times headline that his effort with Turkey
to provide a solution to the uranium enrichment issue outside of the
framework of U.S. power was a "Spot on Brazilian Leader's Legacy." In
brief, do what we say, or else.

An interesting sidelight, effectively suppressed, is that the
Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal was approved in advance by Obama, presumably on
the assumption that it would fail, providing an ideological weapon
against Iran. When it succeeded, the approval turned to censure, and
Washington rammed through a Security Council resolution so weak that
China readily signed -- and is now chastised for living up to the letter
of the resolution but not Washington's unilateral directives -- in the
current issue of Foreign Affairs, for example.

While the U.S. can tolerate Turkish disobedience, though with dismay,
China is harder to ignore. The press warns that "China's investors and
traders are now filling a vacuum in Iran as businesses from many other
nations, especially in Europe, pull out," and in particular, is
expanding its dominant role in Iran's energy industries. Washington is
reacting with a touch of desperation. The State Department warned China
that if it wants to be accepted in the international community -- a
technical term referring to the U.S. and whoever happens to agree with
it -- then it must not "skirt and evade international responsibilities,
[which] are clear": namely, follow U.S. orders. China is unlikely to be
impressed. ...