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The one-sided US veto

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The US, arguing that unilateralism is misguided, hypocritically plans to veto Palestinian statehood at the UN.

Neve Gordon and Yinon Cohen

 

US President Barack Obama’s decision to use the US’ veto prerogative if the United Nations votes to recognise a Palestinian state will constitute a blow to those seeking peace in the Middle East.

His administration’s claim that peace can only be achieved through dialogue and consent rather than through unilateral moves ignores the complex power relations that constitute peace-making between Israelis and Palestinians. History teaches that peace is achieved only when the conflicting sides believe that they have too much to lose by sustaining the conflict. And, at this point in history, the price Israel is paying for continuing the occupation is extremely small.

But if, for the sake of argument, one were to accept the view expressed by President Obama – that unilateralism is a flawed political approach – then one should survey the history of unilateral moves within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and examine the US response towards them.

A logical place to begin is 1991, when Israelis and Palestinians met for the first time in Madrid to negotiate a peace agreement. United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for Israel’s withdrawal from the land it occupied during the 1967 War in exchange for peace, served as the basis for the Madrid Conference.

Ever since that conference, Israel has carried out numerous unilateral moves that have undermined efforts to reach a peace agreement based on land for peace. These include the confiscation of Palestinian land, the construction of settlements and the transfer of Jewish citizenry to occupied territories, actions that every US administration regarded as an obstruction to the peace process.

Settlement expansion

Consider, for example, the Jewish settler population. At the end of 1991, there were 132,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and 89,800 settlers in the West Bank. Two decades later, the numbers of settlers in East Jerusalem has increased by about 40 per cent, while the settlers in the West Bank, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, have increased by over 300 per cent. Currently, there are about half a million Jewish settlers.

If Israel had arrested its unilateral transfer of Jewish citizens to Palestinian land in 1991 once it had embarked upon a peace process based on the return of occupied territory, the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank would have been less than 50 per cent of what it is today.

Indeed, estimations based on the natural growth rate of the West Bank settler population suggest that this population would have been less than 150,000 people in 2011, while today it is actually over 300,000.

An analysis of settler movement to the West Bank also reveals that settler population growth has not been substantially different when left-of-centre parties have been in power. During periods in which the Labour Party formed the governing coalition, the numbers have been just as high, if not higher, than periods during which Likud or Kadima have been in power. This, in turn, underscores the fact that all Israeli governments have unilaterally populated the contested West Bank with more Jewish settlers while simultaneously carrying out negotiations based on land for peace.

Seeing that the settlers are undermining any future two-state solution, the Palestinians have decided not to wait any longer and are asking the United Nations to recognise a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. This, they intimate, is their last attempt to salvage the two-state route before abandoning it to the dustbin of history.

Their argument is straightforward: If the idea behind a two-state solution is dividing land among the two peoples, how can Israel unilaterally continue to settle the contested land while carrying out negotiations? Israeli unilateralism, in other words, has driven the Palestinians to choose the unilateral path. The only difference is that the latter’s unilateralism is aimed at advancing a peace agreement, while the former’s is aimed at destroying it.

One-sided US veto

The US has never considered using its veto power to stop Israel from carrying out unilateral moves aimed at undermining peace.

Instead, the US has frequently used its veto to prevent the condemnation of Israeli policies that breach international law. Now the Obama Administration wants to use the veto again, with the moral justification that unilateralism is misguided. But the real question is: Why is unilateralism bad when it attempts to advance a solution, yet warrants no response when unilateralism threatens to undermine a solution?

President Obama should keep in mind that the Palestinian appeal to the international community might very well be the last chance for salvaging the two-state solution.

If the Palestinian demand for recognition falls through due to a US veto, then the necessary conditions for a paradigm shift will be in place: The two-state solution will be even less feasible, and the one-state formula will emerge as the only alternative.

First published in Al Jazeera

Neve Gordon is the author of Israel’s Occupation and can be reached through his website www.israelsoccupation.info

Yinon Cohen is Yerushalmi Professor of Israel and Jewish Studies, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York.

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Ignorance and 9/11

US National Park Service of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City (Wikimedia Commons)

US National Park Service of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City (Wikimedia Commons)

US National Park Service of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City (Wikimedia Commons)


Ignorance and 9/11 – An Analysis (15 September 2011) by Lawrence Davidson

Part I

On Monday 12 September 2011 I had sixty five students in a “Twentieth Century World” history class ask me what I thought were the origins of the 9/11 attacks. I said I was quite willing to tell them what I thought, but first they had to give me their opinions. The vast majority believed that Muslim fanaticism led to the tragedy. The only other competitive theory, held by a small minority, was that the attacks were the result of a conspiracy located within the U.S. government itself.

I made it clear that I do not believe in the conspiracy explanation, if for no other reason than it would be impossible to keep that sort of thing secret in a political environment (Washington DC) which leaked information like a sieve. I was more interested in why they thought Muslim fanaticism caused the attack. They could not answer the question in any specific way. It was just the majority opinion that was somehow “in the air.” And, indeed, it is what our leaders and the media suggest and is, by now, part of a shared national consciousness.

Next I inquired why they asked me this question? They answered that as the fellow in the History Department who taught about the Middle East, they saw me as a credible source of information. With that established, I agreed that this was a good and indeed necessary use of class time. So I began.

I told them that Muslim fanaticism did not cause the attack. Clearly the belief that one was acting in a way approved by God made it easier to hijack the planes and crash them into their targets. But that belief was not the motivation for these acts. Rather the attacks on September 11, 2001 were performed as revenge for decades of U.S. foreign policy decisions that had caused enormous suffering in the Middle East.. Student reaction was something like: “foreign policy, what foreign policy?” I told those sixty five students that was exactly the right question. It was time (actually it was long past due) that they understood 9/11 in its historical context. I then led them through a brief description of the following events, all of which identified the United States as an enemy of justice and democracy in the Middle East:

1. In 1953 the U.S. overthrow the democratically established government of Iran and installed the Shah’s dictatorship.

2. In 1958 the U.S. landed troops in Lebanon in support of a Maronite Christian president who was seeking to subvert the Lebanese constitution. We repeated the mistake 25 years later, in 1983, when Ronald Reagan once more sent U.S. forces into Lebanon and quickly lost 241 servicemen to a suicide bomber.

3. We have subsequently backed numerous ME dictators, among them Mubarak in Egypt, Abdullah in Jordan, the Saudi monarchy in Arabia (where we kept troops on the holiest of Muslim soil), the king of Bahrain, etc. even while selectively opposing others such as those in Syria and Lybia. Our criterion for support is not whether a government is a dictatorship or democracy, but rather whether it cooperates or not with American policies in the region.

4. The notorious regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was an excellent example of this criterion. For a number of years this dictator was the beneficiary of American support (we sold him his poison gas and biological agents). However, he eventually invaded Kuwait (which the British had lopped off from Iraq in 1913) and we then turned against him. Following the First Gulf War a U.S. sponsored blockade of Iraq resulted in the death of over half a million Iraqi poor people and children. I quoted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s infamous 1996 confession on the TV program 60 Minutes that she thought all those deaths were “worth it.” I am sure that Osama bin Laden thought exactly the same way about the deaths of the civilians in the Twin Towers and the hijacked airplanes.

5. And, of course, there is the consistent U.S. support of Israel in its policy of relentless absorption of Palestinian land. Which, in the eyes of many in the Middle East, makes Washington an accomplice in an imperialist and colonialist foreign occupation. As a function of this support U.S. sought to overturn the 2006 fair and free democratic election of the Hamas government in Palestine.

Finally, I explained to the students that however U.S. officials might rationalize these policies, it is simply naive to expect that those who do not like our behavior will stand by and do nothing. And they haven’t. As it turns out, most of those who have turned violent against us are non-state actors such as those associated with Al Qaeda because, over the last 60 odd years, those Middle Eastern governments that opposed the U.S., and also Israel, have been proven impotent.

Part II

The vast majority of Americans have no clue about this history of U.S. behavior. And, the truth is that we simply cannot think critically about what we do not know. As a consequence Americans have no historical context through which to understand the “blowback” such behavior engenders. That being the case they are susceptible to whatever fantasies the media and their leaders feed them, as well as innumerable conspiracy theories. Most Americans accept the story that the terrorism of September 11 was motivated by religious fanaticism and carried out by those who “hate our freedoms.” (To this contention I reply that those who fight against the U.S. do not care what we Americans do in our country, they care what we do in their countries). The sceptics gravitate to the conspiracy stories. They too have it wrong though oddly the U.S. government, by acting in the way described above, did engineer the disaster.

In the case of my students I have filled in the knowledge gaps. It is hard to know how deeply they will ponder this new information and what they can do with it if they do think it through. In any case, as the saying goes, they are but a drop in the ocean. I know that is a depressing thought, but it is an accurate one.

I have come to the conclusion that the United States, for all its ability to project force, is in decline. It is in decline for the same reason that most past empires and power states have faltered. They falter because, over time, their elites become self-deluded and the general public kept in ignorance. The elites come to mistake their own perceptions, limited by narrow interest and/or distorted by ideologies, for objective reality. None of them have ever seen fit to integrate a “devil’s advocate” into their deliberations. Those who can see the world objectively are more likely than not to be ignored or outright fired. Without such people in the halls of power and the offices of the media we are blind. And, as the English poet Gerald Massey once observed, “in blindness we gather thorns for flowers.”

 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found on RamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it at http://www.tothepointanalyses.com

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America’s FBI Goes Rogue – An Analysis

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Part I – Entrapment as Government Policy

Here is an important question: What single organization is responsible for more terror plots in the USA than any other? Possible answers: Al Qaida. That would no doubt be the popular answer but it would be wrong. The KKK. Way past their prime, so that is not it. The Jewish Defense League. Good guess, but still not it. So what is the correct answer? It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, AKA the FBI. Don’t believe me? Well, just read Trevor Aaronson’s expose entitled “The Informants” published in the September/October 2011 issue of Mother Jones.

Aaronson looked at over 500 terrorism related cases taken up by the FBI and found that over half of them involved the Bureau’s stable of 15,000 informants. Many of these are ex-felons and con men who are often paid well if their efforts result in an arrest and conviction. So what, you might say. Using informants to obtain information about criminal activity is an old and legitimate tactic. Yes, however, that approach to information gathering is not exactly how the FBI uses all of its informants. Indeed, the Bureau has a program, misnamed “prevention” which encourages its agents to get creative in the use of informants. How creative? Well, if they can’t find any terrorist activity going on, they have their informants instigate some. Where are they doing this? Mainly in our country’s Muslim communities.

According to the Mother Jones story the FBI has concluded that Al-Qaeda as an organization is no longer a major threat to the US. The threat now comes from the “lone wolf,” the person who is angry at or frustrated by their life situation and open to the influence of terrorist rhetoric. Allegedly, the American Muslim community is full of these “lone wolves” just sitting out there fuming, aching to vent their anger on a myriad array of significant and insignificant targets. As the FBI’s logic goes, sooner or later a lot of these people will find the courage to act. So, the role of the informant is to find these folks and nab them before they blow up a Christmas tree in Portland Oregon. Here is a typical scenario:

1. FBI informant A is assigned, in Aaronson’s words, to “troll the mosques” of some American Muslim community. They might work this area for months looking for those angry, frustrated types. Gadeir Abbas, Staff Attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), says they may hit upon some fellows living “on the fringes of society.” These people are often poor and unsettled, with only a rudimentary knowledge if Islam, and usually quite gullible.

2. Having spotted a candidate B, informant A befriends him and encourages B to vent his anger and dissatisfaction. At one point informant A might suggest to B that Allah put him on this earth for better things and what would he like to do about all that anger and frustration?

3. Now we are at the seminal moment. What if B has no idea what he would like to do? At this point informant A (carefully turning off his hidden recording device) transforms himself into an agent provocateur (remember he has a financial incentive to entrap this guy) and comes up with a suggestion. Why don’t we go blow up an army recruitment center? In other words, A is a confidence artist, a con-man (one of these informants boasted that he could con the kernels off a cob of corn) and is using his “talent” to maneuver his victim, who as yet has done nothing illegal, into an incriminating situation.

4. If B takes the bait, then A leads him on, concocting a plot, perhaps informing B that he A is an agent (not of the FBI of course) of some Pakistani terrorist organization come to the US to wage Jihad. He can supply B with weapons, explosives, vehicles and money. In other words, all the things that B could never have reasonably procured on his own (such as the necessary money or appropriate vehicles). All the things that B has no knowledge how to construct (like a bomb).

5. Eventually B is led to enact the crime, usually using a fake bomb. Then, of course, he gets arrested. Typically, he is sent to jail for decades. A gets paid up to $100,000 by the FBI. Voila, another terrorist plot foiled.

Part II – Criminal Cops

There has always been a fine line between the behavior of the criminal and that of the policeman. The police know this to be true and that is why major state and local police departments have internal affairs sections which look out for “criminal cops.” I do not know if the FBI has such an internal operation, but they certainly should. There are laws against what the FBI is doing. Their informants, at the Bureau’s direction, are not just rooting out criminals, they are inciting the crimes and organizing their commission.

This interpretation of the situation has been raised with Attorney General Eric Holder. His reply is that those who make these accusations “do not have their facts straight or do not have a full understanding of the law.” This is not a very satisfactory response. The FBI will not give us all the facts and in many cases has carefully made sure some of the facts go unrecorded. And, as for the crime of incitement, if you look this topic up using Wikipedia, here is part of what you get: “The plan to commit crime may exist only in the mind of one person until others are incited to join in, at which point the social danger becomes more real. The offence overlaps the offences of counseling or procuring as an accessory.” This is exactly what the FBI informants are doing: counseling, procuring and inciting.

One can go on and read in the Wikipedia piece that incitement exists as a crime because if you wait for the actual crime to be committed, “it is too late to avert the harm. Thus the offence of incitement has been preserved to allow the police to intervene at an earlier time and so avert the threatened harm.” This is probably the part of the law Holder feels is not understood. Yet in the FBI’s “prevention” campaign there is often no evidence of prior intent on the part of those eventually arrested. That is, without the intervention of the informant, without his incitement, there is no evidence that any of these entrapped “criminals” would have done anything wrong. That being the case, it appears that in these incidents, the FBI is inciting others to criminal acts. This is illegal and an egregious abuse of power.

Part III – Conclusion.

If one thinks this through, it becomes clear that the FBI policy makers have confused thought and action. This is a very Judeo-Christian thing to do. Is the sin in the thought or the action? According to the Old Testament thought will do. You do not have to seduce your neighbor’s wife to break one of the Ten Commandments. All you have to do is “covet” her. To pursue the metaphor a bit further, who is it in the Bible stories who goes around and encourages sin, first in the mind and then in action? Adam and Eve might have occasionally thought about eating that apple, but who incited them to do so? Now we have the FBI reenacting this ancient storyline. They know that there are all these people with the sin of terrorism in their hearts. And, they have taken it upon themselves to play the role of the tempter and move these people from thought to action. It seems to me that there must be a daring cartoonist out there who would like to lampoon Robert Mueller, current Director of the FBI, by drawing him with little horns and a pointed tail.

Peter Ahearn, a retired FBI agent who has directed some of these entrapment operations, would get upset at such a cartoon. He is one of the strongest defenders of “prevention.” According to Mr. Ahearn it is important to understand who the FBI is dealing with. These are not “real people.” How so? Ahearn explains that “real people don’t say ‘Yeah, let’s go bomb that place.’ Real people call the cops.” Alas, calling the cops has been tried. When one of the FBI’s more aggressive informants was “trolling” the mosques in the Los Angeles area representatives of the Muslim community called the FBI to report him as a potential terrorist. Nothing happened. The FBI did not act as a “real cop” should and arrest this fellow. The community’s lawyers could not find anyone to arrest him and had to go to court to get a restraining order to get him out of the community. Tell me Peter Ahearn, how many “real cops” do you have in the FBI anti-terrorism unit?

Finally, there is a good chance that “prevention” is making us all less safe. This is because the program will likely make any “real” lone wolf act truly as a loner. If there is anyone out there with actual terrorist designs they are by now forewarned not to share their intentions with anyone for fear of potential informants. They will act alone. In such a way is the road to hell paved with (alleged) good intentions.

 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found on RamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it at http://www.tothepointanalyses.com

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America; Second Declaration of Independence.

This image is a digital version of the "Dunlap Broadside" copy of the Declaration of Independence held at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
This image is a digital version of the "Dunlap Broadside" copy of the Declaration of Independence held at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

This image is a digital version of the "Dunlap Broadside" copy of the Declaration of Independence held at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Sami Jamil Jadallah, 6 July 2011
America, the great country and power it is, is in deep trouble, failing in many of its wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Libya. Failing in its drug wars and failing in its war on terrorism, with a failing and polarized political system that is failing the people, and a financial system that is colluding with Washington political powers and the Federal Reserve waging wars of no mercy against the American people and the world.

As if America’s problem are not enough, America the great country it is, is held hostage by Israel, its American lobby and its Fifth Column more than ever needs a 2nd Declaration of Independence and need to rewrite a new social and political contracts with its citizens. I say this out of love and care for America and the American people.

As Americans, native born and immigrant we have every reason to celebrate the birth of the nation and its Declaration of Independence. I am writing from the City of Tangier, Morocco both of which have great significant to the birth of the new nation.

Morocco was the first country in the world to extend full diplomatic recognition to the United States of America and Tangier was the first site of the first diplomatic mission for the US anywhere.

As an immigrant, being an American was a matter of choice, thanks to my late father who made the first choice and made it much easier for me, my late mother and all of the brothers and sisters to immigrate to the US and became US citizens.

I always will remember the happy face of may late father during election days, when he will put his time and his car in the service of the Democratic Party machine in Gary, Indiana. My father who worked in the steel mills and as house-to-house peddler was so proud to be an American. He went to night school at the local YMCA to learn how to read and write English even how to read and write Arabic.

Franklin Roosevelt was my father idol and hero and he always spoke of this president as the president of the people, the man who gave people jobs, dignity and away from the soup lines. The man who introduced social security and other social benefits to the working class of America. Franklin Roosevelt was the one and only president that my late father cared about and now I see the reasons.

Over the years, my late father as US citizen is perhaps directly and indirectly though marriage is responsible to bring to this country some 100 persons, and thanks God; all did very well, with so many professionals within our own family.  Lawyers, prosecutors, professional journalists, contractors and builders, international media executives, scientists and college professors, small business owners, artists and teachers, hospitality executives and food professionals.

In my household, my mother in law has two university degrees (bachelor and master), my wife has three degrees (bachelor, master and doctorate degree), myself have three degrees (bachelor, master and jurist doctor), my son Jamil has two degrees and will be working on the third, Diala has one and is working on the second and is a Legislative Director in a congressional office, and my other daughter Laila got her bachelor and master degree and is looking for a job. Only in America can a family with modest means and background, can have access to this kind of opportunity that only a country like America can offer. I always wonder why education is never a constitutional right left to local district and without national educational policy covering primary, middle, secondary and college education and wonder why higher education is so expensive and why vocational and industrial education is so lacking in our country.

As proud Americans happy with the opportunities and citizenship we also answered the calls to serve this nation. 5 out of 6 boys joined the service, 3 in the army and 2 in joined the marines. Joining the military service was the least thing we can do for this country that gave us rights and freedoms we did not have before. And yes, we will always be proud of this. Though we did not believe in the wars our leaders engaged us in.

Of course America of the Sixties and Seventies saw much turmoil. It was hard to believe that Blacks were not yet full citizens some 2 centuries after the birth of the nation and the Sixties saw a transformation of America to a country where the doctrine of “separate but Equal” was thrown out of the window, with the Civil Rights movement paving the way for the election of the first Black Americas to the US presidency… no country in the world can match such a great transformation.

The War on Vietnam also was a water shed were a weekly visit to the Mall in Washington is constant reminder of the more than 50,000 who lost their lives, soldiers I personally knew in high school and shared basic training with. It seems our leadership never learned from the lies that put us at war with Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos. Someone like Henry Kissinger responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. Unbelievable.

During the last two decades American politics, turned ugly, and against the people, became dirty, unprincipled and hostage to money and plenty of it and hostage to special interests and lobbies, polarized between Left and Right and for the most part hijacked by AIPAC and Right Wing Evangelical politics.

Hard to believe in a country like ours that it takes $1-2 millions for a candidate to run for the House and it takes $20-30 millions for a Senate seat. Of course this money does not come free, and for sure it is at the expense of citizens of this country.  Politics of today is a far cry from that envisioned by the Founding Fathers, with politics becoming a profession and a business and not service to the nation and people.

These days we only see our politicians, through their own handlers, their own pollsters, through 30 seconds sound bites.  All are polished and mere actors told what to say and what to do, not spontaneous and downright people to people.  The media, and pollsters are is every thing to winning elections, offering 30 seconds sound bites for lifetime problem as if the issue of “tax” is the only solution to the economic mess we are in.  It seems all politicians are anti-government these days competing with each other’s in their attacks on a government that was responsible for rebuilding the nation immediately after the Great Depression, World War II and of course America became the great industrial power because of Washington policies and great industrial leaders, not greedy Wall Street financiers.

All that of course changed. Congress and its allies on Wall Street are on a course of self-destruct taking down this nation and the years it took to build. Industrial, health, labor and tax laws are drafted by industry and special interests and formally voted on by our Congress resulting in millions of jobs going over seas, were some 5 millions Americans working in industries losing their jobs forever. This war against America and the American people remain the primary agenda of a Congress and national politics beholding to special interests.

During the last two decades small town America saw drastic transportation from good to worst with many of its downtown shops closing down with an estimated 500,000 small business owners losing their business to Wall Mart. The wealth and family business suddenly shifted from these small business owners in small towns to the bank accounts of some 100 members of Sam Walton. Millions of lifetime jobs became minimum wage in one of the largest employer in America.

Wall Street was not far behind. In the old days, it was the managers of businesses and industries who were in the driver seat building great industrial powers and companies such as GM, Ford, Chrysler, US Steel, Inland Steel, IBM, making decisions and spending their times on the floors managing their products and work force. These days’ business executives and managers spend there days and times managing and massaging the ego of young, ruthless and greedy Wall Street  “business and financial analysts”. It is Wall Street not Main Street is in charge and in the driver seat. Wall Street and the politicians of Washington all conspired to turn this country from a great industrial power to country in constant trade deficit and tax policies that conspired against the American labor force causing millions to lose their jobs forever. Managing the “stock price” became the focal point and primary business of executives. Stock prices determined the bonuses and salaries of these business managers, not the quality of product, certainly not the number of person they employ.

Fraud and lies substituted for hard work and sense of common decency. No need to mention Enron and other companies were business managers colluding with auditors and with Wall Street ruined the lives and lively hood of millions of people who lost their lifetime saving and pension, as a result of American managers shifting from being best in the world to a punch of liars and thieves.

Committing fraud and committing tax evasion became the sole business of many in the business with many of those committing financial frauds end up paying hundreds of millions in fines while committing tens of billions in financial fraud. So many shareholders lost everything under the unscrupulous business managers in the auto, airlines and especially in the health care industry with some who committed billions of dollars in fraud becoming leading politicians rather than spending the rest of their lives in jail.

Over the last couple of decades, American so so many cycles of lies and fraud, robbing of the people of their lifetime savings. Yes, our primary saving remains in our highly mortgaged homes and that too was taking away from us. Over the years, we witness the Saving and Loan Associations scandal, the Junk Bond Scandal, the Internet Bubble, the collapse of the Telecommunication Industry, and with it the bankruptcy of major airlines such as Pan Am, TWA, Eastern, Banff and later United and Continental. The chain continued with the collapse and bankruptcy of such American industrial icons as General Motor, Chrysler Corporation. The health industry also saw major transformation with Wall Street helping small time crooks to take over national health services whose primary purpose was not to provide quality and affordable health care but to cheat the government out of tens of billions in Medicare charges. Some of these small time crooks went on to become leading politicians and even governors.

The recent sub-prime lending scandal encouraged by the Federal Reserve, its members banks and leading Washington politicians and lobbyists continued in their quest to fleece the people one more time, relying on the propensity of people to be greedy, forcing so many people into default and foreclosures with banks hiring unscrupulous law firms to take whatever left in the bank accounts of the people.

Greedy unscrupulous bankers and financiers took their companies down the drain, while making hundreds of millions in salaries and bonuses, and our government both Republican and Democrats rather than coming to the people’s rescue went overboard in making sure these bankers stand whole. Trillions of dollars went to rescue these financial institutions while millions of people lost their homes to foreclosures and millions more lost their jobs for ever as both industry and services collapse. It is hard to believe that “usury laws” outlaws for centuries became the standard operating procedures for the banking and credit cards industries. It is even harder to imagine that “ payday lenders” who as “bankers” get their money to lend almost for free turn around and charge poor Americans living from pay day to pay day 30 even 50% interests.

The NeoCons all were gearing up to American of the New Century prompted by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union decided to turned to the “shock doctrine” often used by greedy bankers to transform economies to their likings as they did in Chile and Argentina, turned to attack on America. September 11th was no accident and so far we do not know the complete truth as to what happened that faithful day.  The NeoCons for sure succeeded in what they wanted, a police state at home, and wars everywhere and they got both.  Rather than spending the billions in our reserve and surplus we went to debts in trillions of dollars without any material or benefits to the American people. Our economy shifted from an industrial manufacturing economy to service economy with some 1.5 millions working in the “war on terror” industry producing “ paper and intelligence reports” we could not sell to China or India or Latin America.

The War on Iraq and Afghanistan and the trillions of dollars wasted and down the drain on these private and self serving wars of the NeoCons and their vision of America for the New Century put our citizens and tax payers in debt forever.

Israel remains America’s main source of insecurity and weakening national sovereignty. The triumphant visit of Bibi Netanyahu and his reception in Washington as a conquering hero and his condensing insults to the president of the United States and his repeated standing ovation in Congress should remind all of us of the needs for a 2nd Declaration of Independence.  America political, financial, economic and industrial sovereignty is at stake here. Israel through its Fifth Column and its Lobby in Washington remains the single most dangerous thing to American freedom and independence and leadership in the world. Our Congress is as much an Israeli Occupied Territories as Gaza and the West Bank.

However there is always hope and the hope is the people of the United States who will sooner than later take charge and make the right decisions through a complete change and retirement of an ideologically driven Congress, controlled by big money, Wall Street, AIPAC, the NRA and now the Tea Party. It will take time, but the people will not have any choice but to take charge and revamp a political and financial system that went array.

America will always remain the great country it is enriched with its diversity of people, different colors, different faith, all hard working and looking for a better life.  America will always remain a place I call home and a place in the heart and mind.

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah is an international legal and business consultant and is the founder and director of Palestine Agency and Palestine Documentation Center www.palestineagency.com and founder and owner of several business in technology and services. Sami also runs an online website (Jefferson Corner). His articles are also featured on PalestineNote and Veterans Today.

Articles on RamallahOnline by Sami Jamil Jadallah

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It’s “cool” for Israel to kill Americans.

democracy now

Sami Jamil Jadallah, 1 July 2011

 

It is hard to believe the total silence of Obama’s White House, Clinton’s State Department, Justice Department, the FBI and Home Land Security and lack of taking legal actions against those who openly call on Israel to kill and murder unarmed American civilians aboard the Freedom Flotilla heading toward Gaza.

I can only wonder what the reaction of the White House, the Justice Department, the Homeland Security if any one citizen or resident of the United States openly call on a foreign country to kill and murder a Black, or a Jew or a Democrat or a Republican of for that matter, just your average American Joe?  I am sure all government departments and agencies will move against those who openly called on and advocate the murder of Americans, but this is not the case with Joshua Trevino.

 

Never expected the day will come when an American, albeit a Republican and a Tea Party member to call on a foreign country, Israel, to take out and kill Americans while the entire government agencies remain in total silence.  I always thought or at least we all have been told that advocacy and calls for murder are illegal and in violation of American penal codes.

 

But it seems this is not the case when Israeli is a party, then all American laws goes out of the window and no one within this great country dare to speak out, not even the President of the United States who promised to protect the American people. Question will President Obama dares to take on Israel when it kills Americans? I doubt it.

 

President Obama will not be the first nor the last president who will succumb to the local political pressure and dare not take any actions when the lives of Americans are put in harm way, even killed by Israel.  President Lyndon Johnson did just that when he failed to muster the courage as Commander in Chief and failed to order a commission of inquiry into the cold blooded murder of American sailors on board the USS Liberty in June of 67, when some 40 sailors were killed and more than 100 injured by repeated Israeli attacks on the US navy ship.

 

The former Bush administration speechwriter Joshua Trevino did just that when he twitters his calls to the IDF to shoot and kill Americans on board the Freedom Flotilla. Joshua Trevino is quoted as saying” Dear IDF, if you end shooting any Americans on the new Gaza flotilla, well, most Americans are with that including me”.  I wonder who in the hell is Joshua Trevino to claim to speak for “most Americans” who are cool with Israel killing and murdering Americans?

 

To those who do not know Joshua Trevino, he is a Red State American, who could not get himself to vote for someone like John McCain, who is also the co-founder of RedState.com and is Vice President of Communication at Texas Public Policy Foundation and key activists in the American Tea Party. Mr. Joshua is extending his expertise and concern beyond Texas and reaching out to the Israeli state and its army to kill Americans.

 

It seems the White House and State Department are also “cool” with that and in fact, the State Department spokesperson gave Israeli Army, a wink perhaps a green light that it is absolutely Ok if Israel used deadly force to stop the Freedom Flotilla even if this entail the killings of American on board, just like it was OK to kill the American Furkan Dogan (19) who was killed by Israeli navy on board Freedom Flotilla One.

 

Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokesperson went further labeling the entire 1.5 million people of Gaza “terrorists” and warning those American on board with tough legal action stating “We underscore that delivering or attempting or conspiring to deliver material support or other resources to or for the benefit of a designated foreign terrorist organization, such as Hamas, could violate U.S. civil and criminal statutes and could lead to fines and incarceration,” Nuland said. Perhaps Victoria Nuland can enlighten us Americans and tell us when the US classified the entire population of Gaza as “terrorists”?

 

It would be interesting to know these American laws that forbid American civilians from carrying on humanitarian mission even when these mission are designed to break an illegal siege and blockade of a territory by a country that claims it ended its occupation.

 

Perhaps Israel can order Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the House of Representative to rush through Congress a law that deems Israeli siege and blockade of Gaza legal and consistent with US laws and allowing US government to prosecute those who break the siege and the blockade. You never know, any thing Israel asks for Israel always get, even if this means the justification and cold blooded murder of Americans. Israel is the only country that always gets away with killing and murdering Americans.

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah is an international legal and business consultant and is the founder and director of Palestine Agency and Palestine Documentation Center www.palestineagency.com and founder and owner of several business in technology and services. Sami also runs an online website (Jefferson Corner). His articles are also featured on PalestineNote and Veterans Today.

Articles on RamallahOnline by Sami Jamil Jadallah

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Political art at its worst

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Sam Bahour, 21 June 2011

For anyone closely following the Palestinian-Israeli issue, nothing is more insulting than the world’s political players peddling another peace initiative, crusading as the ultimate formula to extract the conflict from its current abyss.

The most recent episode of such political peddling happened in rapid fire from mid-May to early June 2011, when US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu engaged in a ping-pong-like game of four days of policy speeches. The political fallout of these speeches was rather predictable. The media hailed Obama’s words as historic and started to view his approach as a new set of parameters (which are actually a step back from past US parameters) that could serve to bring the parties back to the negotiations table and on a path to resolving the conflict.

Those immersed in this conflict knew better. They saw Obama’s words for what they really were: a total buckling of US policy to an arrogant and intransigent Israeli prime minister who wields tremendous domestic leverage on US politics by way of the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). For Obama, who already has his eye on the prize of a second term, the pressure was too much to bear.

A few days later, yet another “peace initiative” was announced, this time from France. In reply to the French announcement, the June 6 Haaretz editorial title read loud and clear: “Netanyahu must accept French peace initiative”. The editorial explained why:

France has placed an offer on the desk of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Begin direct negotiations with the Palestinians in September, on the basis of the Obama plan. The proposal does not define Israel’s borders, draw a map of Jerusalem or determine which settlements Israel must remove. It even helps the Israeli position in that it speaks of “two states for two peoples,” in other words it acknowledges that Israel is a Jewish state. It opposes unilateral steps by either side–that is, both the expansion of Israeli settlements and the Palestinians’ intention of seeking UN recognition for their state.

Anyone who knows anything about this conflict can tell you that this so-called “initiative” has as much chance of serving its proclaimed purpose as Hosni Mubarak has of being re-elected as president of Egypt.

The collective global memory seems to be in deep amnesia. We have been here before–at a point where half-baked initiatives and resolutions, non-compliant with international law and absent of any sense of historical justice, were touted as “the right formula”.

Palestinians don’t forget so easily, especially since their deep wounds due to dispossession since 1948, military occupation since 1967 and non-stop institutional discrimination against Palestinians inside Israel have never been given a chance to heal.

To name just a few of the past infamous peace initiatives, whose number is mind-boggling: UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) Future Government of Palestine (November 29, 1947), Count Folke Bernadotte proposals (1947-1948), UN Security Council Resolution 242 (November 22, 1967), Jarring Mission (1967-1971), Allon Plan (July 26, 1967), Rogers Plan (1969), UN Security Council Resolution 338 (October 22, 1973), Reagan Plan (Sept. 1, 1982), Oslo Accords (1993), Wye River Memorandum (October 23, 1998), Camp David 2000 Summit (2000), The Clinton Parameters (December 23, 2000), Taba summit (January 2001), The Tenet Plan (June 13, 2001), Elon Peace Plan (2002), Nusseibeh-Ayalon Agreement (2002), Arab Peace Initiative (March 28, 2002), The People’s Voice (July 27, 2002), Road Map for Peace (April 30, 2003), Geneva Accord (October 20, 2003), Sharm el-Sheikh Summit of 2005 (February 8, 2005), 2006 Franco-Italian-Spanish Middle East Peace Plan and, sadly, the list goes on and on.

For those still believing a two-state solution paradigm is possible, one past initiative is worthy to reflect upon: that of Count Folke Bernadotte. On May 20, 1948, Count Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat and nobleman, was unanimously appointed as the United Nations mediator in Palestine, the first official mediator in UN history. He was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by the militant Zionist group Lehi while pursuing his official duties. Lehi was led at the time by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became prime minister of Israel.

After unsuccessfully trying to promote the idea of a “union” between Palestine and Transjordan, he proposed two independent states. This proposal was completed on September 16, 1948, and its seven “basic premises” were:

1. Peace must return to Palestine and every feasible measure should be taken to ensure that hostilities will not be resumed and that harmonious relations between Arab and Jew will ultimately be restored.

2. A Jewish State called Israel exists in Palestine and there are no sound reasons for assuming that it will not continue to do so.

3. The boundaries of this new State must finally be fixed either by formal agreement between the parties concerned or failing that, by the United Nations.

4. Adherence to the principle of geographical homogeneity and integration, which should be the major objective of the boundary arrangements, should apply equally to Arab and Jewish territories, whose frontiers should not therefore, be rigidly controlled by the territorial arrangements envisaged in the resolution of 29 November.

5. The right of innocent people, uprooted from their homes by the present terror and ravages of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return.

6. The City of Jerusalem, because of its religious and international significance and the complexity of interests involved, should be accorded special and separate treatment.

7. International responsibility should be expressed where desirable and necessary in the form of international guarantees, as a means of allaying existing fears, and particularly with regard to boundaries and human rights.

Although this two-state approach is more honest in its larger context (as it relates to the flawed notion of “Jewish state” and right of return of Palestinian refugees), the text in premise four demonstrates that Count Bernadotte, 64 years earlier, stated the same principle that President Obama and the most recent French “initiative” promote: setting borders not compliant with the reference at the time, which was UN Resolution 181, the Partition Plan.

Sixty-four years has only changed the reference point of borders to the disadvantage of Palestinians, and today, the forces-that-be are proposing that the 1949 Armistice line (1967 green line) not be respected. Palestinians can only expect that remaining on the same path will result in Israel gobbling up more land while the international community continues to grasp for a workable initiative. In the meantime, the entire two-state paradigm is collapsing.

I’ll never understand why they call this field “political science”, for it is political art at its worst.- Published 20/6/2011 © bitterlemons.org

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business development consultant. He is co-author of “HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians” (1994). This article was first published at Bitterlemons.org

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Mahmoud Abbas; Another U-Turn ?

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Palestine Israel Flag

Palestine Israel Flag

Sami Jamil Jadallah, 14 June 2011

 

Mahmoud Abbas like his predecessor Arafat and the entire PLO leadership, never held accountable to any one or by any one, will for sure disregard all the advice and the momentum leading to September and announce a U-Turn at the UN in favor of sitting at the table with Bib Netanyahu.

Mahmoud Abbas made his preference of sitting with Bibi Netanyahu over a UN vote for full admission of Palestine in a meeting in Ramallah, this past weekend with a delegation from Socialist International.

According to Haaretz that carried the news “ Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared over the weekend in Ramallah that he prefers to returning to negotiations with Israel over demanding that the United Nation vote on recognizing a Palestinian state”. It seems 20 years of wasteful useless negotiations with Israel and the US are not enough; perhaps there will be another 100 years of “peace process”.

Mahmoud Abbas wavering under pressure from the US and Israel, sent his chief negotiator Saeb Erekat (you remember he resigned in disgrace over his roll in the Palestine Paper) together with Nabil Abu Rudeineh to the White House and State to meet with Obama’s team, not to push for the case of going to the UN seeking full recognition of the Palestinian State along the June 4th borders with East Jerusalem, but to find and negotiate a “secret” deal “ fist full of dollars” that will keep the Palestinian Authority and the Ramallah boys in business, in exchange for aborting the plans to go to the UN.

This is not the first, certainly will not be the last time that Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO leadership makes a U-Turn and proceed in manner and on track that is totally against the interests of the people of Palestine and in favor of their own selfish interests.

Abbas, Arafat and Qurai did it when they went to Oslo and negotiated the deal that gave Israel total and unconditional control not only over 58% of the land known as Area C, but they gave Israel a “veto” over any of the key and “final status issues”, such as the borders, the return of the refugees and of course East Jerusalem without having a way out in event of failed or dead end negotiations. Any thing the PLO or the PA undertake without having Israel’s approval is deemed “unilateral action” and in violations of Oslo. That same rule of course does not apply to Israel.

The PLO leadership went even further, it gave Israeli and its partner the US a total and additional “veto” in accordance with the Road Map, devised by non other than the leading American Jewish Zionist Elliot Abrams, which made it impossible for the Palestinian Authority to meet any of the conditions of the Quartet, while allowing Israel to take “unilateral “ actions in Area C including continued and uninterrupted and expanded settlement buildings, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, expanding house demolition and of course maintaining and increasing security checkpoints. Obama and Netanyahu called these “facts on the ground”.

President Obama beholding to his benefactors and looking for a second term threatened the Palestinians with a certain “veto” if they go to the UN, terming the steps toward seeking full recognition as “delegitimizing” the State of Israel, as if admitting Palestine to the UN means expelling Israel from it. Barack Obama is bullying the Palestinian leadership knowing well they will scum to unfulfilled promises as they did in the Goldstone Report.

Professor Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, Champaign, in a widely distributed and circulated article The Case for Palestine’s membership in the United Nation strongly argues for a Palestinian membership in the United Nation. According to Professor Boyle, “the State of Palestine is bilaterally recognized de jure by about 130 states and a de facto diplomatic recognition from most countries” including some European countries.

Professor Boyle further argues the case that “Palestine is already a member of the Arab League and a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference”, mentioning the case of the World Court when conducting its proceedings over the “Apartheid Wall” invited the State of Palestine to participate in the proceedings, concluding “in other words, the International Court of Justice recognized the State of Palestine. With the Palestine having an “Observer State Status” with all the basic rights except the ‘vote” in the General Assembly “effectively Palestine has a de facto UN Membership”.

However the threatened “veto” by President Obama is “clearly illegal because it would violate a solemn and binding pledge given by the United States not to veto States applying for UN membership” argues Francis Boyle. Threatening a veto, President Obama proves one more time; he is not the master of his White House.

Every one, least of all Mahmoud Abbas and his boys in Ramallah should know the US was never a fair and honest broker in the Middle East conflict with decisions and policies formulated in Tel-Aviv and carried out in Washington by the “Israeli Team” with in the State Department and the White House and could not honor any thing it promises.

Going to the UN is also strongly argued by HRH Prince Turki Al-Faisal of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in an Op-Ed published this Sunday June 12, 2011 in the Washington Post Why the Palestinians need the UN. Prince Turki Al-Faisal when he speaks he speaks with authority and power of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Arab and Islamic states.

Prince Turki argued that “ One conclusion can be drawn from recent events: that any peace plans co-authored by the United States and Israel would be untenable and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain intractable as long as UN policy is unduly beholden to Israel”.

So true, but for the fact the US is always siding with Israel “right and wrong”, the entire Middle East conflict would have been solved long, long time ago. Entrusting the US as the “honest broker” proved time and time again, the futility of entrusting any thing or any promise even one coming from the President of the United State. When it comes to the Middle East, and Israel, it is not the words of the US that count; it is the masters in Tel-Aviv and AIPAC that count.

Mahmoud Abbas will be making another fatal mistake if he trust Washington fulfilling any promise and should heed the calls of the people of Palestine, friends of the Palestinian people around the Arab and the world and seek formal recognition of Palestine as a full member of the United Nation and hell with the US “veto”.

Time for Abbas to do something right to mend for all the sins and wrongs he committed since Oslo continuing with 20 years of futile negotiations with the US and Israel while Israel stole and stole, built and built “facts on the ground”. Time to take the US out of the equation and out of the sham called “peace process”. If it is question of money, let Israel take over and pay the PA directly to manage its occupation. When the US and Europe contribute to the Palestinian Authority, they are not doing the Palestinians a favor, they are doing Israel the favor. I hope I am wrong about President Mahmoud Abbas this time around.

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah is an international legal and business consultant and is the founder and director of Palestine Agency and Palestine Documentation Center www.palestineagency.com and founder and owner of several business in technology and services. Sami also runs an online website (Jefferson Corner). His articles are also featured on PalestineNote and Veterans Today.

Articles on RamallahOnline by Sami Jamil Jadallah

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What the American public shouldn’t know

Kourosh Ziabari

Kourosh Ziabari, 13 June 2011

Many people around the world might have credulously or perhaps naively fallen in the trap of believing the tempting claims of the U.S. statesmen and politicians who say that their country is a “beacon of freedom” and a “pioneer of democracy.”

It’s a bitter reality that many of us have been defeated and overwhelmed by the propaganda of the U.S. mainstream media who incessantly attempt to make their audiences believe that democracy and freedom are originally American values and cannot be found anywhere else in the world, that all of the world nations need the United States to achieve these values and that the United States must resort to every instrument to export these home-made values to the rest of the world, including frequent military expeditions.

But what’s the reality on the ground? Who really knows about what’s taking place behind the scenes? How much difference is there between the United States which is trimmed and made neat to be put before the eyes of the international community and the United States which mercilessly and inexcusably deprives its own people of getting informed about the latest developments in the world? Isn’t it ironic that the same United States whose leaders always boast of democracy, freedom and equal opportunities set off media outlets to direct black propaganda against countries such as Iran while preventing its people from having access to the content of such media?

If you’re familiar with the conventional double standards and hypocrisy of the American type, you might have heard about the US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, popularly known as the Smith-Mundt Act.

This discriminatory and indefensible act which was first signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on January 27, 1948 after getting approval by the 80th Congress is, in a nutshell, a regulation which allows the United States to establish and initiate media outlets which are aimed at non-American audiences in order to further the diplomatic and political objectives and interests of the U.S. overseas; however, these media outlets, including radio and TV stations, are unavailable to the U.S. citizens, and to put it more succinctly, it’s forbidden for them to have access to these media channels.

The legislation which was introduced in the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs at the request of State Department, authorizes the U.S. State Department to communicate to audiences outside of the borders of the United States through broadcasting, face to face contacts, exchanges, online activities, the publishing of books, magazines, and other media of communication and engagement. Funding for these activities comes from other legislation passed by the U.S. Congress called appropriations.

According to this law, the materials which are produced to be broadcast through certain American media outlets cannot and should not be disseminated and publicized domestically and can be only available to the members of Congress and academicians. With the concerted efforts of several U.S. Congressmen, the Act was amended to read: “no program material prepared by the United States Information Agency shall be distributed within the United States.”

However, it’s interesting to note that at the time of working on the compilation of the Smith-Mundt Act, fierce controversies had arisen among the congressmen, including a quarrel over how to “remove the stigma of propaganda” from this law, because even the U.S. lawmakers had come to the conclusion that it was an all-out replica of the propaganda machinery of the former Soviet Union and Nazi regime.

Seven radio and TV stations are covered by the Act, two of which are exclusively dedicated to Iran: Radio Farda and Voice of America. It means that the American citizens cannot watch the TV programs which VOA airs and listen to what the Radio Farda broadcasts.
This clearly shows that the U.S. statesmen and politicians have predetermined and programmed plans for the nation of Iran and it’s on their agenda to sow the seeds of discord between different groups of Iranian nation by airing programs in which nothing can be traced but mere propaganda, falsification and fabrication.

A quick look at the performance of media outlets such as VOA and Radio Farda helps us comprehend that making the Iranian nation worried about the current situation of the country, spreading falsehood and untruth about the course of events and developments in the country and advertising the large-scale policies of the White House and the Israeli regime with regards to Iran are the main objectives of these state-run media which are sumptuously funded and excessively supported by the U.S. government.

According to the statistics released by Washington Post, the U.S. Congress has allocated an annual budget of $7 million to Radio Farda and by using this profuse amount of money, this soft war machine unremittingly produces and disseminates falsehood and mendacious propaganda against the nation of Iran.

Maybe, it may be necessary for the people of the United States to know where they taxes go and how their government spends on its unrelenting wars with the countries which don’t want to fall under the umbrella of U.S. hegemony.

The American people are deprived of listening to the propaganda of Radio Farda and VOA; however, it is vital for them to know that their government does not really represent a “beacon of freedom” nor does it have the features of a “pioneer of democracy” but is more of a propaganda machine programmed to wage wars and win profits.

Kourosh Ziabari
Kourosh Ziabari

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist, and regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com. More articles by Kourosh Ziabari can be found here.

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Iran and the Issue of Nuclear Weapons – An Analysis

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Dr. Lawrence Davidson, 11 June 2011

Part I – Is there an Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program?

On Friday 3 June 2011 the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh gave an interview to Amy Goodman for the radio program Democracy Now! The topic was Iran and whether or not it is developing nuclear weapons. Hersh answered this question definitively for Goodman as he did shortly thereafter in an comprehensive piece for the New Yorker magazine (6 June 2011 ) entitled “Iran and the Bomb: How Real is the Threat? His answer: there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program. There is no threat.

Hersh set this issue against the background of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In that case there was no credible evidence for weapons of mass destruction yet we had high government officials going around talking about the next world war and mushroom clouds over American cities. Both the U.S. Congress and the general population bought into this warmongering. Hersh is obviously worried about a replay of that scenario. Thus, in his interview, he said “you could argue its 2003 all over again….There’s just no serious evidence inside that Iran is actually doing anything to make nuclear weapons….So, the fact is…that we have a sanctions program that’s designed to prevent the Iranians from building weapons they’re not building.”

In 2003 those kind of sanctions, applied to Iraq, along with the accompanying misinformation campaign, led to a tragic and unnecessary war. Are we now doing it all over again? As Amy Goodman pointed out, “the Obama White House…has repeatedly cited Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to the world. President Obama raised the issue…during his speech before AIPAC (22 May 2011)….” Obama told his audience, “So let me be absolutely clear: we remain committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.” Obama went on to characterize Iran’s civilian nuclear energy program, which is its only program and perfectly legal, as “its illicit nuclear program.”

Finally, Hersh pointed out that there have already been two National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) on the question of Iran and nuclear weapons. These express the collective opinion of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. Their unanimous conclusion has been that “there is no evidence of any weaponization.”

If this is the case, what in the world was President Barack Obama talking about when addressing AIPAC? What in the world was Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking about when (18 December 2010), during a visit to Gulf Sheikdom of Bahrain, he announced that “from my perspective I see Iran continuing on this path to develop nuclear weapons….”? And what are the members of Congress talking about when they address this question? The vast majority of them take the same line as the president and Admiral Mullen. In addition, this assumption about Iran’s nuclear ambitions has crept into the mainstream press. Amy Goodman asked Hersh about a New York Times report (24 May 2011) stating “the world’s global nuclear inspection agency [IAEA]…revealed for the first time…that it possesses evidence that Tehran has conducted work on a highly sophisticated nuclear triggering technology that experts said could be used for only one purpose: setting off a nuclear weapon.” Hersh quickly pointed out the that the word “evidence” never appeared in the IAEA report and, it turns out, the type of nuclear trigger the New York Times was referring to is so fraught with technical problems that, according to Hersh, “there is no evidence that anybody in their right mind would want to use that kind of a trigger.” So, what in the world is the New York Times telling us?

Part II – What is Real?

Questions One and Two: The questions about Iran’s nuclear development are not open ended. They have real answers. First, is Iran developing nuclear energy? The answer to this is a definitive yes. No one, Iranian or otherwise, denies this. Their aim here is energy production and medical applications. This is all legal. Second, is it developing nuclear weapons? According to every reliable expert within the intelligence agencies of both the United States and Europe, the answer is a no. These answers describe reality in relation to Iran and its nuclear activities.

Question Three: The really important question is why do American politicians and military leaders refuse to accept reality as regards this issue? That too must have an answer. And intelligent people who investigate these matters should be able to figure it out. I consider myself in this crowd, and so I am going to venture forth with my answer.

Answer to question three: Its Politics. However, it is not just U.S. politics. Others have helped write the script. These others can be identified by asking to whom are American officials pledging to pursue the Iranian nuclear weapons fantasy? The president pledged to AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, that the United States will “prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.” And Admiral Mullen assured the Gulf Arabs that he, as the head of the U.S. military, takes seriously the notion that “Iran [is] continuing on this path to develop nuclear weapons.”

Part III – Other People’s Fears and Fantasies Become America’s

Israeli politicians are addicted to the Iran threat. Iran serves, alongside the Palestinians, as the latter day ruthless anti-Semite who would destroy the Jews. Zionists seem to need this kind of “existentialist” enemy. This is the equivalent of the Islamic fundamentalist taking the place of the hateful communist as the great enemy that the United States also seems to need. The Israeli lobby is more influential in formulating U.S. foreign policy toward Iran than all of the nation’s intelligence services put together. Hence our politicians from the president on down, chase shadows. Not just verbally, mind you, but in terms of definable policy (like sanctions against Iran).

The Gulf Arab leaders are also addicted to the Iran threat. While Israel’s addiction comes from centuries of conditioning based on anti-Semitism, the fear in the minds of the oil sheiks comes from centuries of conditioning based on Sunni-Shiite competition. The Gulf Arabs are all Sunnis and they have been raised to dislike Shiites. Iran is an up and coming Shiite power and its people have been raised to dislike Sunnis. For the oil sheiks even the rumor, just mere gossip, about a nuclear armed Iran sends them into a panic. And it is these Arabs who supply the West with a big percentage of its oil. So, their fantasies have to be taken seriously. Not just verbally, mind you, but in terms of definable policy (like naval fleets shadowing the Iranian coastline).

U.S. politicians and military leaders can not talk like this and create policy like this without the mainstream press following along. Where there is smoke, there must be fire. Plus, ever since the Iranian hostage crisis (1979-1981), Americans have been told that the Iranians hate us. So be it Fox TV, whose fanatical conservative backers have always lived in a bi-polar fantasy world of good and evil, or the New York Times, whose quasi-liberal backers empathize with Israel just enough to buy into that country’s paranoia, the message is that the Iranians are crazy people out to destroy the West. And the evidence? Who needs it?

Part IV- The Real Danger is Acting on False Assumptions

What happens when a well armed individual can not tell the difference between reality and unreality? What happens when a well armed individual just knows, in his gut, that the other guy is plotting to destroy him? Chances are good that something horrible will happen. And, the American public ought to know that this is so, because collectively we have already lived out this tragedy in 2003. In that year we had leadership who were much more influenced by their guts, by religious imagery, by duplicitous Iraqi con men, by scheming Zionists and ideologically driven neo-cons, than anything vaguely resembling hard evidence. That “something horrible” cost the lives of over a million human beings.

But, your might argue, Barack Obama is not George Bush. There is a high likelihood that Obama and his military people actually take seriously the intelligence reports (those NIEs) that tell the truth about Iran. Alas, they do not appear to be able to tell this truth publically – to you and me or the media. If they did that the Israeli lobby would get mad, the Gulf Arabs would get mad, and the Republican opportunists would scheme to say they were weak and naive come the next election.

So let us get this straight. It seems there are two worlds. The real world of facts and evidence and the unreal world of political fantasy. Our political leaders and their advisers are, apparently, stuck in the unreal one. Their words, and their policies, are built on the assumptions of this fantasy world. They go to war and kill people based on beliefs that are demonstrably false. And the rest of us? Most of us are stuck in our own local niches and beyond them we do not know what is real or unreal. So we rely on others to tell us what is allegedly real beyond our local sphere. Who are the others? They just happen to be our political leaders and their advisers. Well, that makes a nice little circle. And, a predictably fatal one at that.

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found on RamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it at http://www.tothepointanalyses.com

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Egypt and the US: Considering the What and the Why of Things

Over 1 million protestors in Tahrir Square only demanding the removal of the regime and for Mubarak to step down and there was many millions all over Egypt demanding the same things. (8 Feb 2011, Jonathan Rashad)

Lawrence Davidson, 8 May 2011

Part I – Egypt

Last week I was in Egypt, a country presently moved by optimism. The optimism reflects a high state of political consciousness. Almost everyone I met, be they workers (urban and rural), students, shopkeepers, and the ubiquitous taxi drivers know why their country is beset by problems. They can itemize the structural flaws that led to massive corruption, economic deprivation and brutal repression. For instance, they all know that the “laughing cow” dictator, Hosni Mubarak, had substituted his personal interests, and that of his friends, for the national interest. Everyone has the same general notion of what needs to be done: destroy the power of this “party of thieves” and rid the country of the failed policies it has so long endured. How all this will play out in the new environment of relative freedom, with its multiple party formation and emotional debate, is uncertain. However, if the United States can refrain from its usual level of gross interference, things should end up better rather than worse. Hence the optimism.

What are the odds that the US will leave the Egyptian reform process alone? In the long run, they are not good. The new Egypt has already moved to repair ties with Iran and ease the blockade of Gaza. The latter, in particular, is immensely popular in Egypt and will be just as unpopular in the US Congress. Egypt’s military still exercises ultimate control and is supposedly guiding the nation on its path of political reform. That same military is the recipient of billions of US aid dollars and Congress controls those purse strings. There is a lot of room for behind the scenes interference here. The pressure to meddle will increase if the Muslim Brotherhood is successful in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. They are getting ready to contest up to half the legislative seats and their prospects look good. However, such particulars are but catalysts that set in motion a more general, essentially structural, US approach to places like Egypt. On-going meddling in the affairs of other “sovereign” nations has become a veritable part of the culture of the “intelligence” and military bureaucracies of the United States.

Part II – The United States

Here is a depressing example of this attitude. While in Cairo I picked up the 29 April edition of the International Herald Tribune. The story that caught my eye was entitled “New Missions, Blurred Roles.” In part, the opening paragraph went like this, “President Barack Obama’s decision to send an intelligence chief [Leon Penetta] to the Pentagon [as Secretary of Defense] and a four star general [David Patraeus] to [be head of] the CIA is the latest evidence of a significant shift…in how the US fights its battles: the blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies.” What level of awareness does this maneuver reflect of the problems that have long beset America’s failed Middle East policies? In relative terms, certainly something short of that possessed by your average Egyptian cab driver. The Egyptians now boldly think about and discuss not only what is wrong but also why it is so. A significant aspect of why their problems persisted so long was the decades of US support for the country’s dictator. They know that and there is popular sentiment for avoiding that sort of “aid” in the future. If they can achieve this the Egyptians have a genuine shot at a better future. On the other hand, America’s leaders are fixated on what they think confronts them and have relegated the why of it all to irrelevancy. In other words, when it comes to foreign policy our leaders, to say nothing of our soldiers and our spies, are dismally short-sighted. Hence the policy failures.

The CIA, along with the rest of America’s so called “intelligence” agencies, are designed to tell the country’s leaders what is going on in the world. Somewhere buried deep in these information gathering bureaucracies are people who can also tell them why things are happening as they are, but these folks carry little or no influence. This is because the explanations they often give for events conflict with or call into serious question the special interest motives and ends that drive US policies. You see, just as in Egypt, special interests have supplanted national interests. With rare exception, American foreign policy in the Middle East is designed to respond to the desires of domestic lobbies such as the Zionists and not to any national interest, or even to the conditions on the ground in foreign lands. If foreign opposition develops to what our domestic special interests desire, we want to know what it is and then destroy it. Why it arises is a question to avoid because it opens space for the questioning the influence of the special interests.

If the CIA is stuck at the ‘what’ stage of things (say, the what of Israeli security or the what of Iranian nuclear energy development), the Defense Department is dedicated to designing tactical responses to the ‘what.’ Now the efforts of these two aggressive government organizations are to be closely coordinated within a political environment that refuses to look objectively at the roots of its own policies. So what can this move really mean?

Part III – Assassination as a Panacea

In the post Cold War era the decision was made that ability to carry on classical warfare, the warfare between fielded armies, is a less immediate priority than “special operations” designed to “penetrate, disrupt, defeat and destroy” small militant groups which stand against US policy positions in the Third World. Beyond the supporting of dictators and their armies, how does this presently translate into practice? Well, under Leon Panetta, the CIA oversaw “a sharp escalation” of the agency’s “bombing campaign in Pakistan using armed drone aircraft and an increase in the number of secret bases and covert operations in remote parts of Afghanistan.” On the Defense Department side, in 2009 General Patreaus, acting as head of the US Central Command signed a classified order “authorizing US special operations troops to collect intelligence in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran and other places outside of traditional war zones.” The intelligence gathered is to be used to “prepare the environment for future military attacks.”

What we have here is an admission that both the CIA and the Defense Department have taken up the tactic of assassination as a major adjunct to the support the dictator policy. These are not like the horridly romanticized James Bond “license to kill” actions, nor even the cruder, but still selective, operations of the 11th century Assassins. What Washington has elevated to the level of high tactics is the extraordinarily messy fighter bomber and predator drone attacks that are as likely to massacre entire families, wedding parties, mosque gatherings and café crowds as they are any intended victims. And now the fighter bombers of the Defense Department and the predator drones of the CIA will be oh so better coordinated. Of course, none of this touches on the question of why the “bad guys” are out there, in so determined a fashion, in the first place.

The refusal to consider why opposition to American foreign policy in the Middle East has grown steadily since the end of World War II and finally, on September 11, 2001, reached an unparalleled level of destructiveness, suggests that this latest tactical maneuver will be of little long term worth. It will not alter the US policy of allying with dictators and oppressors. It will not alter the US policy of destructive economic exploitation. It will only intensify American violence against the innocent people who happen to be in the vicinity of those we decide are guilty. And, in doing so, drive them into the arms of extremists – that is those who stand against the US by pursuing tactics as extreme as those used by the US itself. Keep in mind that the violence of the oppressed tends to raise to the level of the violence of the oppressor.

Part IV – Conclusion

There is a difference between being smart or clever, and being truly intelligent. The men and women who run the United States are very clever, but they are not equally intelligent. They are clever enough to design deadly responses to specific situations. However, the responses are almost always bounded by a priori domestic political positions. Our leaders never display the intelligence and the political courage to challenge those positions no matter how disastrous they prove to be.

The most recent example of this stuck in a rut scenario is the national hoopla that followed the assassination of Osama bin Laden. In the president’s speech announcing this action, and the subsequent media discussion about what it might mean for the future, no attention was paid to why the 9/11 attacks were originally launched. President Obama solemnly declared that “justice had been served” but he dared not note the fact that bin Laden had launched the attacks of 2001 in order to obtain “justice” for what American policy in the Muslim world had wrought.

Unless the US changes its policies in the Middle East the so-called War On Terror cannot be won. There is a symbiotic relationship between our policies and the resistance we encounter, between our state terrorism and their non-state terrorism. You cannot bludgeon the connection away by simply honing your tactical abilities to “penetrate and disrupt” because doing so does not “destroy” the reasons for continuing opposition. That is the truth that comes from an objective consideration of the ‘why’ of things. Unlike the Cairo taxi drivers, America’s leadership just does not get it.

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found on RamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it at http://www.tothepointanalyses.com