by Miss America

So the gun grab finally has your attention?  I thought we were going to have to wait for the ground to be smoking under your shoeless feet before you woke up and looked around you!  I’m sorry, but the people who have been observing the take down of our country for many years now, don’t have time to bring you up to snuff at this point.

Basically it’s Paul Revere time for us.There have been so many assaults committed by stealth against Americans of good faith, and carried out so slowly and incrementally, that you have actually been ambushed.Now I’d advise that you prepare for the sucker punch.Yes, we were the richest and most prosperous nation on earth. Yes, a majority of us lived a lifestyle unprecedented in human history, but does the farmer not fatten up his pigs for the slaughter?? We have been a naive and trusting population. But it’s time to face the ‘opposite day’ world we now find ourselves in.  

Unfortunately, people who had a keen understanding of human nature designed a Madison Avenue society that kept the masses well preoccupied with ‘if you work hard enough, you can achieve the American Dream’, while they did their dirty work. And we were preoccupied, mesmerized by a televised induced spell in fact!  But all the while, the same group we threw off our backs in the American Revolution, never gave up their rabid desire to control our country.

They merely decided to use deception, subversion and the age old power of greed and fear to conquer us this time. We, along with 99% of the rest of the world have fallen into the hands of the international Jewish mafia banking cartel. They have lusted for world domination for centuries, and have killed millions upon millions of people in their quest. 

However, in spite of warnings throughout recorded history, and even from our country’s own founding fathers, in 1913 President Woodrow Wilson committed what was destined to become the gravest act of treason ever, when he signed into law the Federal Reserve Act.  With that signing, he essentially burnt down the country, and eventually the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence went down in flames with it. Jesus Christ threw the moneychangers out of the temple, as did many after him, but Wilson opened the door wide and welcomed them back in.   

What has ensued ever since, is the wholesale theft of everything America was, and all that Americans cherish and love.

With the ability to print money from nothing, and control it’s ebb and flow, the criminal Federal Reserve Jewish Mafia and Israeli dual citizens in high places of U.S. government, have been able to infiltrate and control every facet of our federal, state and local government, our military industrial complex, every educational, medical and research institution, every meaningful business possible including energy, all news media, publishing, agriculture, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals.They control all manner of entertainment including sports, Hollywood, gambling, illegal drugs, and pornography.These parasites upon humanity have also cast their dark shadow over us with:

*Nuclear power plants built on the earth’s fault lines and permitted far past their pre-planned life.

*Radiation from bomb testing.

*Military waste in corroding drums from bomb making tossed into oceans.

*Depleted uranium used in war weapons and unleashed on our own soldiers.

*Industrial waste illegally dumped in streams, rivers, bays and oceans. 

*The sexualization of our children.  

*DNA corrupting genetically modified crops and animals.

*MRSA infested meats used for food and 99% uninspected food imports.

*Radiation filled fish from Japan is just fine for US consumers thanks to Hillery Clinton.

*Known poisons added to thousands of foodstuffs and municipal water supplies.

*Human trafficking and sex slave operations.

*Illegal organ harvesting.

*Pedophile procurement rings.

*Snuff films, violent movies and video games.

*Gov. lab created bio-warfare germs accidentally and purposefully released on an unsuspecting public.

*Deadly, crippling, and ineffective vaccines, never tested for eventual cancer or disease causation.

*Disabling and violence inducing brain drugs prescribed to millions of children.

*Deadly pharmaceutical drugs ‘fast tracked’, then allowed to remain on the market as people drop dead by the thousands.

*Daily spraying of heavy metals into the sky by the military and private entities. 

*Control of 90% of the mainstream media which demonizes anyone who exposes truth or logic.

*Unsafe government ‘limits’ of microwave and radio frequency radiation from wireless technologies.

These sub-humans have even created fake environmental groups to convince us that humanity is a scourge on the earth, or that a blind salamander has more importance than people.  They even pay these groups to sue the government or ‘federal agencies’ to enable their hidden agendas such as land grabs or oil monopolies.  It’s called controlled opposition and they are experts at working both sides on any issue.   

Funny how these same environmentalists (called ‘tree huggers’ by their handlers) are mum on the actual atrocities being committed against mother earth!   

Our country, which once had morals, values, pride, love, the rule of law, and faith in our future, has disintegrated in front of our eyes. Many are too blinded to see, so stuck in front of the TV they are with its false propaganda, lies and assurances that everything is just fine (and pay no mind to those enemy combatants, the conspiracy theorists!). The television has absolutely been the downfall of our society, a powerful and hypnotizing mass control tool of the devils. Research the flicker rate of high definition TV and its effect on the brain.  Have you ever wondered why everyone had to transition to HDTV?

These are the people running the American show now.Our ‘Republic’ has been stolen by stealth. By bribe or threat they now create our legislation.

They’ve turned all our federal agencies into draconian rogue forces that terrorize and swat team us without explanation or charges. They are controlling what we can and can’t eat, and want to take vitamins and natural health treatments away from us. We can’t drink organic milk, but they want to force us to roll up our sleeves so they can inject their idea of good health into our veins.

The CIA is their assassination and terrorist recruiting arm, and the IRS will now police health care. The CPS, APS, and the courts abduct children and the elderly for incentive federal money and theft of estates. They are forcing school children into mental evaluations so that they can force drugs on them. They are doing the same to our veterans (of their wars) to take away their right to own arms, because if you went to guard Afghani poppy fields, surely you have PTSD!   

Maybe you have taken notice how our former ‘protect and serve’ police forces have turned brutal, impulsive, and merciless! Many have been trained in Israeli policing methods. They have long ago re-written the history books so citizens won’t learn American history, or understand world history.  In many countries you cannot talk or write about what really happened (or didn’t), concerning Hitler’s so-called death camps in Germany during WW2, or you will be guilty of ‘hate speech’ and go to jail.  Americans will be next.  To find out who controls you, ask who you cannot criticize.  

These Moneychangers have created the financial take down of the world in order to bring in their New World Order with a total technocratic control grid in which every facet of life will be under their boot.  It’s full blown Communism along with unaccountable rendition and extermination of any resisters.  Yet even to this day, most people have no idea who ‘they’ are, so presidents, congressional minions, and police will be left holding the blame bag.  And they are to blame! 

Anyone who lived to see JFK killed knew what was involved if they went down the road of American politics. They are vetted well before a serious run for office to make sure they will be loyal to our best enemy Israel and the Rothschild, Morgan, Goldman Sachs banking cartel. If they aren’t, they will be gone, one way or the other. At the very least they will be vilified and forever trashed by the totally controlled TV, print or internet media.  This also happens to honest scientists, doctors, or any credible or well known public figure who speaks the truth, or threatens to expose their crimes or agenda.  

This is why you do not see smart, ethical, intelligent, sensible, logical, red-blooded Americans seeking high office in our country. JFK was the last of them.   

Yes, I realize there have always been despots, ruthless dictators, and psychopaths on this earth with us, and narcissistic men filled with hubris who want to murder millions so they can run the world. But the Zionist Jew and his endless myriad of paid off minions have a particularly heartless, barbaric and sadistic signature. Read history books on how they have treated ‘the Goyim’ (anyone not a Jew) through the centuries. They deeply believe the ‘goy’ are merely put on earth to serve them. You can sense their lack of a soul.They thrive on blood, guts, torture, and destruction. And who invented circumcision, the butchering of God’s creation? Their modus operandi is to destroy families, morally bankrupt societies, introduce multi-culturalism (everywhere but in Israel) to dilute nationalism, create distention to divide groups, glorify deviance, demonize cultures and religions, and shove their beliefs down our throats.  At this point, it looks as if it has worked quite well. America has bought into the plan, hook, line and sinker and it appears that we’ve passed the point of no return.  There is no white horse on the horizon. We have but one savior left. Witness the big push for people to accept and welcome gay lifestyles, and the soon to be pedophilia normalcy bias.  And just so you know, they will do anything it takes to accomplish what they think is their God given right to achieve. Open hypocrisy, lies, subversion, slow kill, murder, and murder disguised as suicides or accidents are their calling card. The list of extinguished souls is endless. 

Personally I have never had prejudice against anyone’s race, religion, or color.  When I grew up we were not allowed to use racial slurs in our home.  I never knew anything negative about Jewish history until I began to search for who was doing this to us and why.   Why were our leaders turning on us?  Why is  everything they do the wrong thing for America, or morally wrong toward people?  Why have they turned us into the enemy?  Why was patriotism turned into terrorism? Why do they despise and have contempt for us?  

I got tired of hearing about ‘globalists, the New World Order, and the illuminati’!  I wanted to know WHO it is that thought up all these brutal things being done to our country and our people. Could there be that many people with such devious diabolical minds?  I’m a registered independent, but I voted for President Obama (alias Barry Sotoro), so desperate I was for ‘change’ and some ‘hope’ that our country would not continue to head for the dirt nap.  (Never mind that voting for the traitor Mr. McCain wasn’t even on my radar). Is there anyone who voted for this imposter that doesn’t feel like a real sucker and a totally betrayed fool??  I see now that the controllers are moving in for the kill, dropping their masks, and taunting us to protest or resist. They will not stop until they have stolen every last vestige of the life we had. They don’t care if we know what they’re doing. They are laughing at us. 

To be this obvious and this much in our face is not a good omen. They have been amazingly genius at keeping everyone in the dark until the big boot was all polished and ready to stomp, using printed trillions out of thin air to enslave us.They must be ready to pull the plug. Imagine, all the wars having been fought to guarantee them the right to counterfeit money to infinity. All wars are banker wars!

Now the big question is, who among you will be brave enough to print this truth telling ‘hate speech’? 

Who is strong enough to tell the masses who their real enemy is, as Henry Ford did way back in the 1920’s? In this case, it’s the Jewish mafia moneychangers dummy.

OCCUPY WALL STREET

How could we not have questioned and thrown out, the counterfeiting Ponzi scheme that is the banking system?

Their blueprint for financial slavery and control of countries is the same worldwide, and if we don’t shine the light on who they are, we are going to lose, just like we are losing now.

We have no choice but to face down our fears if we want to save our country and our lives!

Why did we ignore the warning signs? Why didn’t we learn from the brutal murderous trail the moneychangers had already laid? 

By not learning from history, we are now doomed to repeat horrific episodes of the past.

Oh….. don’t forget to observe The Federal Reserve’s Centennial Birthday: ‘Celebrating 100 years of stealing from you every day’! 

The Creature From Jekyll Island (by G. Edward Griffin)

Also see:

• The Staggering Cost of Israel to Americans

• US taxpayers paid more to Israeli defense budget than Israelis

• The Cost of Israel to the American People

The post The FED: Celebrating 100 Years of Stealing From You Every Day appeared first on My Catbird Seat.

by Jim W Dean

Originally published in PressTV  on May, 21st, 2013

Russian sailors march near their Navy vessel in the bay of the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol, which is the main base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

US Secretary of State John Kerry visits Moscow

The first big part of the news is the active word ‘permanent.’ Corporate media decided to ignore the strategic shift consequences of that, and the West may be looking back soon at the wisdom their aggressive regime change military moves, despite the extensive use of proxies.

The recent Israeli attacks on Syria, particularly the use of a nuclear bunker buster gave the Russians a gift from heaven, opening the door to make a defensive deployment to protect their longtime ally in Syria. The Russians are back in the Med to stay, and this might be a good lesson to the folly of the Western slow motion aggression policy in the region, which has put a match to the whole place.

Russian Navy Commander Admiral Viktor Chirkov has announced that a permanent staff was being set up, and the present force might eventually include their nuclear submarines. In speaking to RIA:

“Overall, already from this year, we plan to have five or six warships and support vessels [in the Mediterranean Sea], which will be replaced on a rotating basis from each of the fleets – the Black Sea, Baltic, Northern and, in some cases, even the Pacific Fleet. Depending on the scope of assignments and their complexity, the number of warships in the task force may be increased.”

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu let the cat out of the bag when he stated that a permanent naval task force was needed to defend Russian interests in the region. The world has watched for two years now how coolly Russia has dealt with the continuing escalations in the fighting there, supported by a growing number of outside states who have effectively declared war on Syria thinking that such was a no-risk deal.

Here is what corporate media has not been telling you all. The preemptive strike doctrine of the Israelis and Neocons is going to be challenged. Netanyahu can talk all he wants to about red lines which will trigger a preemptive ‘defensive’ strike, but yours truly has written in these columns that eventually the intended targets would adopt that policy themselves. They have actually been given permission to by the dummies who invented it.

US Navy sources can sneer at the ‘old’ Russian ships all they want to, but there is nothing old about what they will be carrying, a game changer… their state-of-the-art missiles which they made a top priority in their defense policy as the new missiles are revolutionizing the next generation of warfare. The will sweep the skies of planes and the seas of ships. Air forces are working now to deploy robotic war plane drones that are basically missiles themselves by matching their speeds and aerodynamics.

Part of the corporate media hoax has been the fraudulent story of the S-300s being ‘introduced’ to the region as being destabilizing. Anyone wanting to check a copy of Jane’s in 1996 will find them already in Syria. Maybe some definition game has been going on that if they were under Russian physical control, as American munitions are in many foreign bases, they are not officially Syrian. But I would ask the lazy media what they thought brought down the Turkish F-16 provocations, a waste of those unfortunate pilots in peace time.

Yes folks, the S-300’s have been there all this time, and not fired at Israel yet. But that is all going to change. Israel’s days of roaming freely over Lebanon airspace and their ability to launch air flight munitions without entering Syrian territory may be over, or it will be when the Russians decide to.

Their fleet, even its older ships will be carrying their state-of-the-art weapons like the S-400’s where a pilot only has two or three seconds to live once the ‘beep beep’ that they are locked onto at tremendous speeds. The Russian ships on patrol will be able to shoot any attacking Israeli planes down, including those returning to base post attack. They can even be shot down while taking off.

Any retaliatory strike by Israel would trigger a full response by the Russians that could include their bases and command structure. Their updated Iskander missiles are stated to have speeds in the Mach 6 to 7 range but our sources say over Mach 8. To evade anti-missile fire they can pull 30+ g turns and make a 90-degree dive onto a target while doing so. The Israeli bullies have never had to stand up to a modern military but they may get the chance. They won’t like it.

The beauty in all of this is the scenario described above could all be done in a purely defensive mode while resisting an Israeli attack. After one incident alone the Russians might tell the Israelis that any Israeli warplane leaving Israeli air space would be considered an attack and both the plane and the base it flew from subject to attack.

Oh… I forgot to mention above that the targeting can be done either by satellite or programmed into the missiles so jamming would not be effective. This is not the Gaza Strip mortar shells on a back yard rocket tube, which Israel claims to be such a mortal threat where they have repeatedly launched civilian punishment retaliations as ‘deterrents.’ The dummy Israelis did not realize that they were giving moral permission for the same thing to be done to them someday.

Veterans Today has reported that the US Army Corps of Engineers has been spending huge amounts of money building the Israelis nuclear strike proof command centers. More American taxpayer money was wasted to protect Israel, which has a huge weapons-of-mass-destruction inventory threatening everyone else. Under the Bush/NeoCon preemptive strike policy the Russians could have taken these out of ‘potential’ threats, and similarly the Patriot missile batteries.

An Iskander missile in launch position — wiki

As for accuracy, the Iskanders can take the Patriot missile batteries out the first day. And the Russians could surrender to the international court the next day on the grounds that their response was totally legal under international law. And if that did not suffice, their second defense would be the Bush doctrine of preemptive strike for defensive purposes… not to eliminate a future threat, but one that had already signaled its hostile intent.

If any of you are thinking I am hyping this scenario, I held up publishing this until I got confirmation from the Israelis. The headline of the Israel Hayom for May 19th was:

“Expect Israeli strikes on Russian arms shipments to Syria-Hezbollah… US officials tell the Wall Street Journal another round of Israeli airstrikes could target a new Russian transfer of Yakhont advanced anti-ship missiles in the near future.”

This was nothing more than laying the ground work for the IDF to continue aggressive strikes in support of the Syrian rebels. Note the automatic linking of Syria and Hezbollah like they share arms depots or the Russians let them give their arms away to others. Do the Israelis have US permission? Well, kind of. Obama said Israel has the right to defend itself, so that means others have the right, also. But the game is a bit different when someone is in the Med who has full retaliatory ability including nuclear weapons.

Oh, I forgot to mention something about the nuclear bunker buster that the Israelis used in Damascus. The Russians of course have them also, to use on their newer missiles to keep their weight down for higher speed or longer range, and to make sure one missile does the job. Despite Bibi’s claiming that Israel is ready for all eventualities, it is ready for none of this. And if the Russians responded to an Israeli attack, believe me the US would not intercede.

The US would be in enough trouble for having put the region in such danger by arming Israel to the teeth to a level its own population could never have afforded, nor would they if they could have.

When Israel suffers a substantial retaliatory strike after an aggressive attack on their part, I can promise you the average Israeli is going to have an instant different opinion of the bully buzz they have grown used to when attacking weak or defenseless opponents.

In the long run more than a few international civilian and military Intel entities have long suspected that this is what eventually would have to happen to remove Israel as a threat to everybody. They would attack the wrong people at the wrong time.

Prosthetic legs for wounded American soldiers at the Center for Intrepid rehabilitation gym at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, TX, Aug. 7, 2012. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Nobody in the American military is going to willingly die for bully Israel other than maybe the Christian Zios in the Air Force. But that said, the world would be a safer place with them gone anyway.

Jim W Dean is managing editor at Veterans Today. He has been writing, speaking and doing public relations, television, consulting and now multimedia work for a variety of American heritage, historical, military, veterans and Intel orgs. He has appeared on PBS most recently on the Looking for Lincoln documentary with Prof. Henry Lewis Gates and lectured at the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Gordon. His current writing focus is on national security, intelligence, black and psy ops, military/Intel history including personal video archives, and the current wars.

Also see:

• What is the real American game in Syria?

• Shipping Death and Destruction to Syria

The post Russian Med fleet returns – an unintended consequence appeared first on My Catbird Seat.

by James M Wall

Ten years after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, another Middle East war looms large between the West and Muslim states.

Signs point to the strong possibility that Israel, and its US Zionist supporters, remain determined, first, to draw the US into the Syrian Civil War, and second, to lead Israel in a joint attack against Iran.

All from the skies, of course. Boots on the ground have not served well in the past, too visible, too costly in “our” lives lost.

At a cabinet meeting Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel was prepared to attack Syria for the third time this month “to stop the transfer of advanced Fateh-110 missiles to the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.”

Why not? He got away with it before, using the “self defense” righteous rationale that empires employ as they increase their power one step at a time. This is the way empires grow.  It is also the way they die, one pyrrhic victory after another.

Secretary of State John Kerry is doing his best to persuade Russia to help the US pull the Syria parties to peace talks before a civil war extends beyond its boundaries.

US Secretary of State John Kerry in Moscow

He will find little support from US domestic Zionist forces who are as hungry for war as is Israel

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s continued “defense” actions threatens another war between the West and Muslim states, ten years after the US invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.

The ostensible reason for that invasion was to eradicate Iraq’s non-existent WMDs. The American public was primed for the war.  The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld leadership team had whipped the American public into such a post-911 war fever that all normal reason and logic had been drained away.

In the picture  above, Iraqi citizens are walking around tanks on a bridge near the entrance to the besieged city of Basra. The picture was taken ten days after the war began. It was a time of great  uncertainty as Iraqis struggled to adjust to the presence of another foreign army on their soil.

These Iraqi citizens are caught in the middle of an empire’s over reach, a moment in time when the US, still reeling from the attacks of 9/11, goaded by its Israeli ally and its own domestic Zionist patriots, entered a war against  Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with the horrors of 9/11.

King Pyrrhus of Epirus. Artist is Johnny Shumate.

Instead of heeding warning signs, it is the nature of empires to ignore all warning signs. Instead, they travel one bridge too far and win one “pyrrhic victory” too many.   For the term “pyrrhic victory”–a victory that costs far more than it is worth–we are indebted to Greek King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in a battle in which Pyrrhus’ forces defeated the Romans at Heracleain in 280 BC and at Asculum in 279 BC.

After the Asoulum battle, the historian Plutarch conveyed words and wisdom that live on:

“The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him.”

When empires recognize they are losing too much in battles they win, it is past time to stand down. Unfortunately, empires become blind to reality and instead of withdrawing from battle, they plunge further downward toward their own demise.

Patrick J. Buchanan and Eric S. Margolis, two intrepid columnists, found a warning from King Pyrrhus as they reflected on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war . Their columns were linked together in the Washington Report. Read both columns here.

Here is how Buchanan ended his column on the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq:

What makes the question more than academic is that the tub-thumpers for war on Iraq a decade ago are now clamoring for war on Iran. Goal: Strip Iran of weapons of mass destruction all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran does not have and has no program to build.

This generation is eyewitness to how a Great Power declines and falls. And to borrow from old King Pyrrhus, one more such victory as Iraq, and we are undone.

John LeCarre’s recently published novel, A Delicate Truth, is a perceptive and clear-eyed presentation of the period before the US led Britain and a loose coalition into a war that strikes LeCarre as insane.

Early in A Delicate Truth, Second Secretary Toby Bell has arrived in Berlin on his first diplomatic assignment for Her Majesty’s government. Bell reaches Berlin in the weeks before the launching of the “shock and awe” assault against Iraq.

LeCarre’s novel captures the moment through Bell’s anger and frustration:

The neophyte diplomat [Toby] Bell, Second Secretary (Political), has just arrived at the British Embassy on his first overseas posting. The Iraq War looms. Britain has signed up to it, but denies it has done so. Germany is dithering on the brink. Giles Oakley, the embassy’s eminence grise – darting, impish Oakley, dyed in all the oceans, as the Germans say – is Toby’s section chief.

Oakley’s job, amid a myriad others less defined: to supervise the flow of British intelligence to German liaison, Tobys: to be his spear-carrier. His German is already good. As ever, he’s a fast learner. Oakley takes him under his wing, marches him round the ministries and opens doors for him that would otherwise have remained locked against one of his lowly status. Are Toby and Giles spies? Not at all! They are blue-chip British career diplomats who have found themselves, like many others, at the trading tables of the free world’s vast intelligence marketplace.

The only problem is that the further Toby is admitted into these inner councils, the greater his abhorrence of the war about to happen. He rates it illegal, immoral and doomed. His discomfort is compounded by the knowledge that even the most supine of his schoolfriends are out on the street protesting their outrage.

So are his parents who, in their Christian socialist decency, believe that the purpose of diplomacy should be to prevent war rather than to promote it. His mother emails him in despair: Tony Blair – once her idol – has betrayed us all. His father, adding his stern Methodist voice, accuses Bush and Blair jointly of the sin of pride and intends to compose a parable about a pair of peacocks who, bewitched by their own reflections, turn into vultures.

Little wonder then that with such voices dinning in his ear beside his own, Toby resents having to sing the war’s praises to, of all people, the Germans, even urging them to join the dance. He too voted heart and soul for Tony Blair, and now finds his prime minister’s public postures truthless and emetic. And With the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he boils over.

Bell’s religiously-committed parents had it right: “The purpose of diplomacy should be to prevent war rather than to promote it.”

Ten years after the Iraq War began, the American/Israeli empire appears hell-bent on its own destruction. To launch a war that makes no sense ten years after a war that made no sense in 2003, can only be understood as blind empirical arrogance.

Israel produces and sells more drones than any other nation in the world, while the US has refused to give up the drone as its weapon of choice in fighting forces of “terror”.  With our use of drones, our nation’s use of coercion is sliding down a dangerously dark slope.

In Moral Man and Immoral Society theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was aware of the ambiguity of nations forced to employ coercion to preserve “the course of justice”. However, Niebuhr was quick to warn, “moral reason must learn how to make coercion its ally without running the risk of a Pyrrhic victory in which the ally exploits and negates the triumph”.

Coercion is a dangerous ally. It is also one we must keep under strict control. Moral reason demands no less. If we want to apply moral reason to our nation’s action, our leaders must be warned that war is always a sign of failure.

(The photo from Basra, Iraq, above. is by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) from the Denver Post.

James Wall blogs at Wallwritings.

More from James Wall

• Confronting the “Moral Bankruptcy” of Iraq War’s Liberal Supporters

• Kerry Forgot Rule Number One: Never Question the Sacred Israeli Narrative

The post Ten Years After US Invades Iraq, Israel Eager to Take the US Into Round Two appeared first on My Catbird Seat.

by Franklin Lamb

Shift in support for Syrian Regime — AP : The U.N. General Assembly approved an Arab-backed resolution Wednesday calling for a political transition in Syria, but more than 70 countries refused to vote “yes” because of its support for the main opposition group and fears the resolution could torpedo a new U.S.-Russia effort to end the escalating conflict.

Homs, Syria — It’s not hard to find critics of the Assad government in the Governorate (Muhafazat) of Homs or for that matter, to varying degrees in Syria’s other thirteen Governorates according to Syrian analysts interviewed by this observer, and reports from human rights groups including lawyers representing dissidents in Syria. However, after nearly 27 months of turmoil, the public opinion pendulum is markedly shifting back in support of the current regime.

One international political result was registered at the United Nations this past week when a US-Qatari-Saudi-drafted General Assembly Resolution that was designed to increase pressure on the Assad government stumbled badly
and fell far short of what the Saudi Ambassador to the UN and other US allies predicted would be an overwhelming vote in favor.

Effect of shift in popular opinion in Syria

Over the past four or five months it has become increasingly clear that public opinion in Syria is shifting for reasons that include, but are not limited to the following:

While inflation at the grocery stores in probably the most common complaint heard from a cross-section of society here, the population is adapting somewhat to higher prices and it appears to credit the government for efforts, some successful, to soften the impact of the illegal US-led sanctions that target this same Syrian population for purely political reasons to achieve regime change.

While Syrians demand dignity and freedom from oppressive security forces and an end to corruption, as all people do in this region and beyond, they are witnessing a return to near normalcy with respect to supplies of electricity, benzene, mazout fuel oil, bus schedules, schools, and a host of public services such as garbage collection, street sweeping, park maintenance, and sympathetic traffic cops who are rather understanding of short-cuts taken by drivers and pedestrians due to “the situation”.

In addition, public service announcement and even text messages demonstrate that the government is aware of the degree of suffering among the population, accept partial blame, and are focusing on remedial measure and crucially, ending the crisis with its horrific bloodshed. One observes here a definite trend of the pulling together of a high percentage of Syrians who share a very unique history and culture and who are deeply connected to their country and who are increasingly repelled by the continuing killing from all sides including the recent barbarisms of body mutilations and summary executions videotaped and broadcast on utube by jihadist elements. The latter who these days come from nearly three dozen countries, paid for and indoctrinated by enemies of Syria’s Arab nationalism and deep rooted pillar of resistance to the occupation of Palestine.

In addition, many among Syria’s 23 million citizens, who initially supported the uprising following government reaction to event in Deraa in March 2011, now have serious second thoughts about who exactly would replace the current government. Events in Syria are also making plain that the army is still loyal to the Assad government, and according to Jane’s Defense Weekly, is actually gaining experience and strength as well as the well-known fact that as western diplomats are admitting, the “opposition militias” are hopelessly fractured, turning one another, many essential mafia outfits, and beginning to resemble their fellow jihadists from Libya, Chechnya and in between.

Opinion in Damascus and surrounding areas visited this past week, confirms this observers experience the past five months of a sharp and fairly rapid shift in opinion that now strongly favors letting the Syrian people themselves decide, without outside interference, whether the Assad regime will stay, and indeed, whether, the Baathist party will continue to represent majority opinion, not through wanton violence but rather via next June’s election. Many express confidence in the run up to this critical vote, noting that the election will be closely monitored by the international community to assure fairness.

Perhaps aided by the current glorious May weather, a certain optimism, that was more scarce in the past, pervades many neighborhoods.

For different reasons, foreign powers, including the USA, Turkey, European Union, the UK Jordan and even the majority population of the six Gulf Cooperation Council family run countries, according to Pew Research, are shifting their earlier positions which were based in part of the US administration, NATO, and Israeli assurances that the Assad government would surely fall quickly, “A matter of days, not weeks” US President Obama promised. That was two years ago.

As noted above, this trend has accelerated since the UN General Assembly vote with last weeks which did not go as planned on the biased and politicized non-binding draft resolution on Syria.

Syria’s U.N. Ambassador speaking at The U.N. General Assembly, May 15, 2013.

The public reaction in Syria and across the Middle East is substantially that the “Friends of Syria” non-binding GA resolution contradicts the reality on the ground, backs terrorism in Syria and hinders the international efforts to help achieve a political solution to the crisis in this country. Only 107 states voted in favor of the resolution, 12 against while 59 countries, mostly from Africa and Latin America, abstained from voting.

One reason the vote fell short of the 130 favorable votes that the basically same resolution garnered the past two times is that it is widely viewed as ignoring the crimes and atrocities committed by the armed jihadist groups in Syria and the flow of thousands of international terrorists backed by the West, the Gulf states and Turkey who provide them with weapons and money. According to the Russian delegate, backed by several other speakers, “the resolutions ignores all the terrorists’ heinous crimes and denounces what it called the escalation of the attacks by the Syrian government”. Afterward one Latin American Permanent Representative told Inner City Press that the count would have been below 100 if not for some “last minute arm-twisting.” As it turned out, 15 countries didn’t vote at all, opting to “get coffee,” as one African Permanent Representative put it before the vote.

Syria’s Ambassador al-Jaafari exposes a hoax in the Gulf

Syria’s permanent Envoy to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari said his country regretted the adoption of a biased and unbalanced UN resolution, thanking the countries that rejected the resolution “for their responsible positions which support the UN principles and the international law articles”. He noted that the decrease in the number of countries that voted in favor and the increase of numbers of those who abstained from voting indicates the growing international understanding of the reality of what is happening in Syria due to the foreign interference, support of terrorism, the spread of extremism and incitement besides the refusal of dialogue.

“We rely on the UN and its member states to support Syria and its people against the culture of extremism and terrorism, and to encourage the comprehensive national dialogue to peacefully resolve the Syrian crisis.” he said. In a statement released after the vote on the UN draft resolution on Syria, al-Jaafari He said that the French delegation had foiled the issuance of a number of UN press releases to condemn the terrorist acts committed by al-Qaeda-linked armed groups in Syria which claimed the lives of thousands of Syrians as it foiled a UN release to condemn the attempt of assassination of the Syrian Premier.

After Qatar’s ambassador spoke in favor of the resolution his country drafted (and re-drafted several time), Ja’afari revealed that there existed an e-mail, from the representative of the Syrian opposition given to Syria’s embassy in Qatar, showing Qatar’s involvement in the kidnapping of UN peacekeepers by the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade. He read out a phone number from the e-mail as several Gulf diplomats grimaced or scowled, and three left the Chamber.

Visibly stunned, the UK Permanent Representative Lyall Grant called the whole matter “deeply confusing”. Another Permanent Representative, from a militia contributing country, said that if true, it’s “very problematic.” The reasons include the fact that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had just thanked Qatar for its roles in the release of the UN Peacekeepers the earlier kidnapping of whom the Qatari government may have planned, paid for and executed.

Meanwhile, Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Martin Nesirky said he would not disclose any more about the “negotiations to free the peacekeepers or who was behind the crime.” 

Score a major diplomatic victory for Syria’s UN Ambassador as public opinion shifts in favor of the Assad government and pressure as well as certain optimism builds in the run-up to the Geneva II conference being organized by the White House and the Kremlin.

Franklin Lamb a former Assistant Counsel of the US House Judiciary Committee and Professor of International Law at Northwestern College of Law, Portland, Oregon.

Lamb earned his Law Degree at Boston University and his LLM, M.Phil, and PhD degrees at the London School of Economics. He is based in Beirut and  currently reporting from Damascus. He can be reached at: fplamb@gmail.com

Read more from Franklin Lamb:

• Franklin Lamb : The Oft-Predicted Fickle Syrian ‘Tipping Point’ Has Tipped

• Has the Arab League mortally wounded itself by declaring war on Syria?

• Anti-Iran Sanctions (No. 7) Franklin Lamb: International Law Is Overwhelmingly on the Side of Iran

The post UN General Assembly Vote reflects Shift in Syrian Public Opinion appeared first on My Catbird Seat.

The Holy Land needs advocates for the truth. “It is the truth, and only the truth, that will lead to peace and justice”

by Stuart Littlewood

While the Jewish State was putting its finishing touches to Operation Cast Lead

Archbishop Rowans and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

(the horrific blitzkrieg launched over Christmas–New Year 2008/9 against Gaza's civilians, including the Christian community there), the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, joined Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in a visit to the former Nazi camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau to demonstrate their joint solidarity against the extremes of hostility and genocide. 

"This is a pilgrimage… to a place of utter profanity – a place where the name of God was profaned because the image of God in human beings was abused and disfigured," said the Archbishop. "How shall we be able to read the signs of the times, the indications that evil is gathering force once again and societies are slipping towards the same collective corruption and moral sickness that made the Shoah possible?”

Read the signs? He needed to look no further than the hell-hole that the Holy Land had been turned into by Israel’s occupation and unfettered aggression, with Britain's blessing… and, dare one say, without too much fuss from England’s established church either.

If ever there was a place where "the name of God was profaned" the so-called Holy Land is it.

And in 2010, just a year after that slaughter, the Archbishop announced he was planning a visit to Gaza. I asked his Lambeth Palace office if he would sit down and talk with the elected prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, man of God to man of God (for Mr Haniyeh is an imam).  Would he do Gaza (and all of us) proud by spending a generous amount of his time with senior members of the Islamic faith?

His office didn't reply.

According to the Archbishop’s website he did none of those things. And on his return he said nothing about Gaza in the House of Lords, where he had the ear of Parliament and the support of 25 other Church of England bishops.

Yet he began his Ecumenical letter that Easter by declaring: "Christians need to witness boldly and clearly”….

I was told afterwards that the Israelis initially refused the Archbishop access to Gaza and only at the last minute granted him a piddling 90 minutes, just enough for a hurried visit to the Ahli hospital and no more.

But this didn't stop him hobnobbing with the Chief Rabbinate, paying his respects to Yad Vashem and the Holocaust, and talking with the President of Israel. Didn’t Lambeth Palace realise that his meekly accepting a situation where Israel’s thugs prevented him seeing what horrors they had inflicted, only served to legitimise the Israelis' illegal occupation and give the Anglican Church's stamp of approval to the vicious siege, the continuing air strikes, the persecution of Muslim and Christian communities and the regime’s utter contempt for international law and human rights?

When is ethnic cleansing not ethnic cleansing? When it’s “Newtonian energy transfer”.

In June 2011 Kairos Palestine, the voice of Palestinian Christians, felt it necessary to give the Archbishop of Canterbury a strong ticking-off for remarks he made during a BBC interview.

Rifat Kassis, co-ordinator of Kairos Palestine, said he was "deeply troubled" by the Archbishop's "inaccurate and erroneous remarks" about the situation of Christians in the Middle East. He called the Archbishop's failure to mention the Israeli occupation and the regime's oppressive policies "shocking".

In a letter to Williams he said: "You know very well that in the Bethlehem area alone there are 19 illegal Israeli settlements… and the wall that have devoured Christian lands and put Bethlehem in a chokehold. You know well that only 13% of Bethlehem area is available for Palestinian use and the wall isolates 25% of the Bethlehem area’s agricultural land. Not to mention the situation of Christians in Jerusalem, which you know very well, since you should have received reports from the Anglican Bishop in the City whose residency permit was denied by the occupying power."

Mr Kassis ended by saying: "We would like to remind Your Grace that Christian Palestinians need advocates for the truth. It is the truth, and only the truth, that will lead to peace and justice in our home."

So what did Archbishop Rowan Williams say to the BBC http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2071/christians-in-the-middle-east-archbishop-on-world-at-one  that so infuriated his Palestinian brethren? Apparently it was his remarks about the ethnic cleansing of Christians, referring to extreme pressure in Iraq while suggesting that the exodus of Christians from Palestine was due to much more "un-dramatic" pressure. Williams seemed happy to use the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ in connection with Iraq but not Israel’s programme to dispossess and terrorise Palestinians.

He was also content with the UK government's attitude. "I think the issue of religious freedom in general has very high priority in the Foreign Office at the moment. So I hope that continues.” The truth is that the British Foreign Office is infested with pro-Israel placemen and has not lifted a finger to ensure religious or any other freedoms in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Williams went on the say: "I think there are still perhaps too few people in this country who are aware of the haemorrhaging of Christian populations from the Holy Land. The fact [is] that Bethlehem, a majority Christian city just a couple of decades ago, is now very definitely a place where Christians are a marginalised minority. We want that to be a little bit higher on people’s radar… “

Interviewer:  “Would you see what’s happening in Bethlehem as another example of what you’ve described as ethnic cleansing?”

Archbishop:  “It’s not ethnic cleansing exactly because it’s been far less deliberate than that I think. What we've seen though is a kind of Newtonian passing-on of energy or force from one body to another so that some Muslim populations in the West Bank, under pressure, move away from certain areas like Hebron, move into other areas like Bethlehem. And there’s nowhere much else for Christian populations to go except away from Palestine.”

The Archbishop's comments were "faulty and offensive", according to Kassis, especially his claim that Muslims coming into the Bethlehem area, where space is limited, were forcing Christians out.

And I daresay exiled Palestinian Christians will be relieved to hear that their misfortune is all down to Newtonian energy effects.

Archbishop, Justin Welby.

Now that Williams has gone, what are we to make of the new Archbishop, Justin Welby, who came from nowhere and has Jewish immigrant roots? He was 'accelerated' up the ladder and served as Bishop of Durham for barely five minutes before landing the top job. It makes you wonder what influences are at work behind the scenes. Welby is touted as an expert in conflict resolution although he is not known for his concern about the Holy Land.  Indeed, the Jewish Chronicle reported that Welby helped mount a Holocaust Memorial Day exhibition in Liverpool Cathedral and abstained in the vote at the Anglican Synod which endorsed the EAPPI.

Frankly, anyone who cannot bring himself to give wholehearted backing to a worthy humanitarian project like EAPPI (the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel which provides protective presence to vulnerable communities, monitors and reports human rights abuses and supports Palestinians and Israelis working together for peace), shouldn’t be leading a great Christian church.

It’s a religious war

Israel Revokes Visa of Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem

The residency permit issue mentioned by Rifat Kassis referred to the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, Suheil Dawani, who is a classic victim of the evil machinations of the occupation. The Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem covers Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Dawani was installed in April 2007, but in March 2011 Israel cancelled his residency permit making it impossible for him to carry out his duties properly. As a non-Israeli he needed a temporary residence permit. The Israelis played silly-buggers, initially granting one then turning him down.

Here’s the explanation http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=17766 . "The bishop is a native of the Holy Land and has spent most of his life and ministry there, but cannot obtain either citizenship or legal residence in Israel, since he was born in Nablus, in the West Bank, which has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, but has not been annexed to Israel. East Jerusalem, on the other hand, where the Anglican Cathedral and Diocesan offices are situated, was also occupied at the same time, but Israel annexed it and considers it part of its national territory (although no other country in the world recognizes this annexation). Therefore, Bishop Dawani is considered by Israel to be a foreigner who can only visit – let alone live in – East Jerusalem with a special permit, which the Israeli authorities can either grant or deny at their sole discretion."

Dawani was wide open to this sort of dirty trick. After six months of aggravation and international pressure the illegal occupiers granted residency permits to the bishop and his family. But here's the catch… those permits will have to be renewed when they expire, whenever that may be or whenever the Israelis choose.

Do Christian clergy need an Army thunderflash up their collective cassock before they understand there's a religious war going on in the Holy Land and the churches of Western Christendom, regrettably, are not engaging in it, even though the source from which they draw their authority, inspiration and teachings is right there? They much prefer to appease the invader regime and leave their brother churches in Jerusalem and the Middle East to fight alone.

Disgraceful.

The Zionist wing of the Church of England?

Ever heard of the CMJ (the Church's Ministry among Jewish People)?

Apparently it has a proud 200-year history and feels a need to provide in-depth teaching on the Jewish roots of the Christian faith. In its statement of faith the CMJ says Christians have “a special responsibility to love, defend and share the Gospel with God's historic, chosen People, the Jews”.

http://www.cmj.org.uk/home/israelandthepalestinians  and  http://www.cmj-israel.org/Portals/0/docs/userdocs/CMJ%20Statement%20on%20Israel%20and%20the%20Palestinians.pdf

And this is the CMJ’s attitude to the Israel-Palestine struggle…

·      CMJ believes that both Jewish and Gentile believers (including our Palestinian brothers and sisters) are united in the one "olive tree". In fact, Jesus has made Jew and Gentile believers one "and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility…"

The reality is that the Israelis are still building the hated barrier and love nothing better than destroying whole groves of olive trees.

·      Gentiles are "fellow-citizens with God's people"… God loves all people equally. This means that he loves the Israelis and the Palestinians equally. 

So we can safely ignore all claims, including those made by the CMJ, that Jews are God’s “chosen ones”?

·      CMJ… has always seen the return of the Jewish people to their ancient land, and on a national scale to their Messiah, as a precursor to the return of Jesus in glory.

Their return is achieved by expelling the Arabs (whom God loves equally), slaughtering those who resist and trashing just about all of God's commandments. Jesus is really going to be impressed when he arrives.

·      CMJ rejoices that, after 2000 years… the Jewish people now, at last, have returned to the land from which the majority were dispersed in AD70…

Rejoice in the Jewish occupation and you rejoice in the murderous crime spree that goes with it.

·      CMJ recognizes that the State of Israel was set up as a result of a majority vote of the United Nations in 1947… However the Ministry does not hold any official position as to the appropriate location of the borders of the state. 

If CMJ recognises the UN's 1947 Partition Plan it should also accept the borders on which it was based. Instead the CMJ appears to advocate a 'blank cheque' for the Zionist entity’s territorial greed

·      CMJ  Ministry recognizes that the Israelis, after 2000 years of anti-Semitism, face a resurgence of anti-Semitism, a military threat from various nations, Palestinian terrorism and a threat to the stability of their safe homeland through demographic factors. 

Is it any wonder? Israel, with its nuclear arsenal and American-supplied state of the art weaponry, easily outguns its neighbours in the Middle East and even threatens Europe. Its lack of restraint and contempt for international law, demonstrated repeatedly, makes it the prime menace to the region. Meanwhile Palestinians have every right to defend their homes as best they can.

It’s obvious that the CMJ adopts the Zionist position and encourages the physical restoration of the Jewish people to the biblical Land of Israel regardless of the suffering and injustice this causes. Nevertheless the CMJ was adopted as an official ministry of the Church of England in 1995, Archbishop George Carey presiding, and has been operating in the shadows all this time. Is this the Church of England’s official Zionist wing?

Carey is remembered for opposing the Church of England’s divestment from companies, such as Caterpillar, which profit from Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, saying he was “ashamed of being an Anglican”.  http://www.jpost.com/International/Lord-Carey-ashamed-to-be-an-Anglican

Signs of hope from Scotland

CHURCH OF SCOTLAND ASSEMBLY DEBATES

Altogether it’s been a dismal performance by most (though not all) churches. But this week, hopefully, the Church of Scotland will give a new lead at their Assembly in Edinburgh to stop the rot.

Although under great pressure to re-write the Church’s report ‘The Inheritance of Abraham?’, which challenges the Jews’ divine right to the Palestinians’ homeland and is condemned by a furious Jewish lobby as a “truly hurtful” and “inquisition-era” document, they actually beefed it up! For example, the revised version re-states emphatically that they do not support the idea that ancient scripture offers anyone a privileged right to territory, and it not only urges the UK Government and the European Union to use pressure to stop further expansion of Israeli settlements but also to remove the existing ones.

Bravo, Scotland!

Read more from Stuart Littlewood here

Stuart Littlewood is a frequent contributor to My Catbird Seat.  He is writer-photographer in the UK. His articles are published widely on the web. He is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation.

The post Is this the best that Christianity can do? appeared first on My Catbird Seat.

Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of what gentile Europeans called the “Jewish Question”.

by Joseph Massad

What galled anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the “solution” to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe. 

It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew Bible that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would solidify through their discovery of the family of “Semitic” languages, including Hebrew and Arabic.

Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted that contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must leave Europe to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ, philological discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as “Semites”. The leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity would make in the 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews racial descendants of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a giant one. 

Basing themselves on the connections made by anti-Jewish Protestant Millenarians, secular European figures saw the political potential of “restoring” Jews to Palestine abounded in the 19th century.

Less interested in expediting the second coming of Christ as were the Millenarians, these secular politicians, from Napoleon Bonaparte to British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (1785-1865) to Ernest Laharanne, the private secretary of Napoleon III in the 1860s, sought to expel the Jews of Europe to Palestine in order to set them up as agents of European imperialism in Asia.

Their call would be espoused by many “anti-Semites”, a new label chosen by European anti-Jewish racists after its invention in 1879 by a minor Viennese journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political programme titled The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. Marr was careful to decouple anti-Semitism from the history of Christian hatred of Jews on the basis of religion, emphasising, in line with Semitic philology and racial theories of the 19th century, that the distinction to be made between Jews and Aryans was strictly racial.

Assimilating Jews into European culture

A young Orthodox jew insults an Arab woman publicly

Scientific anti-Semitism insisted that the Jews were different from Christian Europeans. Indeed that the Jews were not European at all and that their very presence in Europe is what causes anti-Semitism.

The reason why Jews caused so many problems for European Christians had to do with their alleged rootlessness, that they lacked a country, and hence country-based loyalty.

In the Romantic age of European nationalisms, anti-Semites argued that Jews did not fit in the new national configurations, and disrupted national and racial purity essential to most European nationalisms.

This is why if the Jews remained in Europe, the anti-Semites argued, they could only cause hostility among Christian Europeans. The only solution was for the Jews to exit from Europe and have their own country.

Needless to say, religious and secular Jews opposed this horrific anti-Semitic line of thinking. Orthodox and Reform Jews, Socialist and Communist Jews, cosmopolitan and Yiddishkeit cultural Jews, all agreed that this was a dangerous ideology of hostility that sought the expulsion of Jews from their European homelands.

Einstein’s famous quote, which most have never heard of. Now you know why.

The Jewish Haskalah, or Enlightenment, which emerged also in the 19th century, sought to assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture and have them shed their Jewish culture.

It was the Haskalah that sought to break the hegemony of Orthodox Jewish rabbis on the “Ostjuden” of the East European shtetl and to shed what it perceived as a “medieval” Jewish culture in favour of the modern secular culture of European Christians.

Reform Judaism, as a Christian- and Protestant-like variant of Judaism, would emerge from the bosom of the Haskalah. This assimilationist programme, however, sought to integrate Jews in European modernity, not to expel them outside Europe’s geography. 

When Zionism started a decade and a half after Marr’s anti-Semitic programme was published, it would espouse all these anti-Jewish ideas, including scientific anti-Semitism as valid. For Zionism, Jews were “Semites”, who were descendants of the ancient Hebrews.

In his foundational pamphlet Der Judenstaat, Herzl explained that it was Jews, not their Christian enemies, who “cause” anti-Semitism and that “where it does not exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations”, indeed that “the unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America”; that Jews were a “nation” that should leave Europe to restore their “nationhood” in Palestine or Argentina; that Jews must emulate European Christians culturally and abandon their living languages and traditions in favour of modern European languages or a restored ancient national language.

Herzl preferred that all Jews adopt German, while the East European Zionists wanted Hebrew. Zionists after Herzl even agreed and affirmed that Jews were separate racially from Aryans. As for Yiddish, the living language of most European Jews, all Zionists agreed that it should be abandoned. 

The majority of Jews continued to resist Zionism and understood its precepts as those of anti-Semitism and as a continuation of the Haskalah quest to shed Jewish culture and assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture, except that Zionism sought the latter not inside Europe but at a geographical remove following the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

The Bund, or the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which was founded in Vilna in early October 1897, a few weeks after the convening of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in late August 1897, would become Zionism’s fiercest enemy.

The Bund joined the existing anti-Zionist Jewish coalition of Orthodox and Reform rabbis who had combined forces a few months earlier to prevent Herzl from convening the first Zionist Congress in Munich, which forced him to move it to Basel. Jewish anti-Zionism across Europe and in the United States had the support of the majority of Jews who continued to view Zionism as an anti-Jewish movement well into the 1940s.

Anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts

Realising that its plan for the future of European Jews was in line with those of anti-Semites, Herzl strategised early on an alliance with the latter. He declared in Der Judenstaat that:

“The Governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want.”

He added that “not only poor Jews” would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, “but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them”. Herzl unapologetically confided in his Diaries that:

“The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

Theodor Herzl

Thus when Herzl began to meet in 1903 with infamous anti-Semites like the Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, it was an alliance that he sought by design.

That it would be the anti-Semitic Lord Balfour, who as Prime Minister of Britain in 1905 oversaw his government’s Aliens Act, which prevented East European Jews fleeing Russian pogroms from entering Britain in order, as he put it, to save the country from the “undoubted evils” of “an immigration which was largely Jewish”, was hardy coincidental.

Balfour’s infamous Declaration of 1917 to create in Palestine a “national home” for the “Jewish people”, was designed, among other things, to curb Jewish support for the Russian Revolution and to stem the tide of further unwanted Jewish immigrants into Britain. 

The Nazis would not be an exception in this anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts. Indeed, the Zionists would strike a deal with the Nazis very early in their history. It was in 1933 that the infamous Transfer (Ha’avara) Agreement was signed between the Zionists and the Nazi government to facilitate the transfer of German Jews and their property to Palestine and which broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany started by American Jews.

It was in this spirit that Zionist envoys were dispatched to Palestine to report on the successes of Jewish colonization of the country. Adolf Eichmann returned from his 1937 trip to Palestine full of fantastic stories about the achievements of the racially-separatist Ashkenazi Kibbutz, one of which he visited on Mount Carmel as a guest of the Zionists. 

Despite the overwhelming opposition of most German Jews, it was the Zionist Federation of Germany that was the only Jewish group that supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, as they agreed with the Nazis that Jews and Aryans were separate and separable races. This was not a tactical support but one based on ideological similitude.

The Nazis’ Final Solution initially meant the expulsion of Germany’s Jews to Madagascar. It is this shared goal of expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created the affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along. 

While the majority of Jews continued to resist the anti-Semitic basis of Zionism and its alliances with anti-Semites, the Nazi genocide not only killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because they refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and homes. 

The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

Theodor Herzl , Diaries

After the War, the horror at the Jewish holocaust did not stop European countries from supporting the anti-Semitic programme of Zionism. On the contrary, these countries shared with the Nazis a predilection for Zionism. They only opposed Nazism’s genocidal programme. European countries, along with the United States, refused to take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the holocaust.

In fact, these countries voted against a UN resolution introduced by the Arab states in 1947 calling on them to take in the Jewish survivors, yet these same countries would be the ones who would support the United Nations Partition Plan of November 1947 to create a Jewish State in Palestine to which these unwanted Jewish refugees could be expelled.

The pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis

Zev Vladimir Jabotinsky

The United States and European countries, including Germany, would continue the pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis. Post-War West German governments that presented themselves as opening a new page in their relationship with Jews in reality did no such thing.

Since the establishment of the country after WWII, every West German government (and every German government since unification in1990) has continued the pro-Zionist Nazi policies unabated.

There was never a break with Nazi pro-Zionism. The only break was with the genocidal and racial hatred of Jews that Nazism consecrated, but not with the desire to see Jews set up in a country in Asia, away from Europe. Indeed, the Germans would explain that much of the money they were sending to Israel was to help offset the costs of resettling European Jewish refugees in the country. 

After World War II, a new consensus emerged in the United States and Europe that Jews had to be integrated posthumously into white Europeanness, and that the horror of the Jewish holocaust was essentially a horror at the murder of white Europeans.

Since the 1960s, Hollywood films about the holocaust began to depict Jewish victims of Nazism as white Christian-looking, middle class, educated and talented people not unlike contemporary European and American Christians who should and would identify with them.

Presumably if the films were to depict the poor religious Jews of Eastern Europe (and most East European Jews who were killed by the Nazis were poor and many were religious), contemporary white Christians would not find commonality with them.

Hence, the post-holocaust European Christian horror at the genocide of European Jews was not based on the horror of slaughtering people in the millions who were different from European Christians, but rather a horror at the murder of millions of people who were the same as European Christians.

This explains why in a country like the United States, which had nothing to do with the slaughter of European Jews, there exists upwards of 40 holocaust memorials and a major museum for the murdered Jews of Europe, but not one for the holocaust of Native Americans or African Americans for which the US is responsible. 

Aimé Césaire understood this process very well. In his famous speech on colonialism, he affirmed that the retrospective view of European Christians about Nazism is that

it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices; and they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimised it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilisation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack. 

That for Césaire the Nazi wars and holocaust were European colonialism turned inwards is true enough. But since the rehabilitation of Nazism’s victims as white people, Europe and its American accomplice would continue their Nazi policy of visiting horrors on non-white people around the world, on Korea, on Vietnam and Indochina, on Algeria, on Indonesia, on Central and South America, on Central and Southern Africa, on Palestine, on Iran, and on Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The rehabilitation of European Jews after WWII was a crucial part of US Cold War propaganda. As American social scientists and ideologues developed the theory of “totalitarianism”, which posited Soviet Communism and Nazism as essentially the same type of regime, European Jews, as victims of one totalitarian regime, became part of the atrocity exhibition that American and West European propaganda claimed was like the atrocities that the Soviet regime was allegedly committing in the pre- and post-War periods.

That Israel would jump on the bandwagon by accusing the Soviets of anti-Semitism for their refusal to allow Soviet Jewish citizens to self-expel and leave to Israel was part of the propaganda.

Commitment to white supremacy

It was thus that the European and US commitment to white supremacy was preserved, except that it now included Jews as part of “white” people, and what came to be called “Judeo-Christian” civilisation.

European and American policies after World War II, which continued to be inspired and dictated by racism against Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Arabs and Muslims, and continued to support Zionism’s anti-Semitic programme of assimilating Jews into whiteness in a colonial settler state away from Europe, were a direct continuation of anti-Semitic policies prevalent before the War.

It was just that much of the anti-Semitic racialist venom would now be directed at Arabs and Muslims (both, those who are immigrants and citizens in Europe and the United States and those who live in Asia and Africa) while the erstwhile anti-Semitic support for Zionism would continue unhindered. 

Hungary’s 100,000 Jews alarmed at racism

West Germany’s alliance with Zionism and Israel after WWII, of supplying Israel with huge economic aid in the 1950s and of economic and military aid since the early 1960s, including tanks, which it used to kill Palestinians and other Arabs, is a continuation of the alliance that the Nazi government concluded with the Zionists in the 1930s. In the 1960s, West Germany even provided military training to Israeli soldiers and since the 1970s has provided Israel with nuclear-ready German-made submarines with which Israel hopes to kill more Arabs and Muslims.

Israel has in recent years armed the most recent German-supplied submarines with nuclear tipped cruise missiles, a fact that is well known to the current German government. Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Der SPIEGELin 2012 that Germans should be “proud” that they have secured the existence of the state of Israel “for many years”. Berlin financed one-third of the cost of the submarines, around 135 million euros ($168 million) per submarine, and has allowed Israel to defer its payment until 2015.

That this makes Germany an accomplice in the dispossession of the Palestinians is of no more concern to current German governments than it was in the 1960s to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer who affirmed that “the Federal Republic has neither the right nor the responsibility to take a position on the Palestinian refugees”. 

This is to be added to the massive billions that Germany has paid to the Israeli government as compensation for the holocaust, as if Israel and Zionism were the victims of Nazism, when in reality it was anti-Zionist Jews who were killed by the Nazis. The current German government does not care about the fact that even those German Jews who fled the Nazis and ended up in Palestine hated Zionism and its project and were hated in turn by Zionist colonists in Palestine.

As German refugees in 1930s and 1940s Palestine refused to learn Hebrew and published half a dozen German newspapers in the country, they were attacked by the Hebrew press, including by Haartez,which called for the closure of their newspapers in 1939 and again in 1941. Zionist colonists attacked a German-owned café in Tel Aviv because its Jewish owners refused to speak Hebrew, and the Tel Aviv municipality threatened in June 1944 some of its German Jewish residents for holding in their home on 21 Allenby street “parties and balls entirely in the German language, including programmes that are foreign to the spirit of our city” and that this would “not be tolerated in Tel Aviv”.

German Jews, or Yekkes as they were known in the Yishuv, would even organise a celebration of the Kaiser’s birthday in 1941 (for these and more details about German Jewish refugees in Palestine, read Tom Segev’s book The Seventh Million). 

Add to that Germany’s support for Israeli policies against Palestinians at the United Nations, and the picture becomes complete. Even the new holocaust memorial built in Berlin that opened in 2005 maintains Nazi racial apartheid, as this “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” is only for Jewish victims of the Nazis who must still today be set apart, as Hitler mandated, from the other millions of non-Jews who also fell victim to Nazism.

That a subsidiary of the German company Degussa, which collaborated with the Nazis and which produced the Zyklon B gas that was used to kill people in the gas chambers, was contracted to build the memorial was anything but surprising, as it simply confirms that those who killed Jews in Germany in the late 1930s and in the 1940s now regret what they had done because they now understand Jews to be white Europeans who must be commemorated and who should not have been killed in the first place on account of their whiteness.

The German policy of abetting the killing of Arabs by Israel, however, is hardly unrelated to this commitment to anti-Semitism, which continues through the predominant contemporary anti-Muslim German racism that targets Muslim immigrants.

Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition

The Jewish holocaust killed off the majority of Jews who fought and struggled against European anti-Semitism, including Zionism. With their death, the only remaining “Semites” who are fighting against Zionism and its anti-Semitism today are the Palestinian people. Whereas Israel insists that European Jews do not belong in Europe and must come to Palestine, the Palestinians have always insisted that the homelands of European Jews were their European countries and not Palestine, and that Zionist colonialism springs from its very anti-Semitism.

Whereas Zionism insists that Jews are a race separate from European Christians, the Palestinians insist that European Jews are nothing if not European and have nothing to do with Palestine, its people, or its culture. What Israel and its American and European allies have sought to do in the last six and a half decades is to convince Palestinians that they too must become anti-Semites and believe as the Nazis, Israel, and its Western anti-Semitic allies do, that Jews are a race that is different from European races, that Palestine is their country, and that Israel speaks for all Jews.

That the two largest American pro-Israel voting blocks today are Millenarian Protestants and secular imperialists continues the very same Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition that extends back to the Protestant Reformation and 19th century imperialism.  But the Palestinians have remained unconvinced and steadfast in their resistance to anti-Semitism. 

European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression; they became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination…

Yasser Arafat, 1974 UN speech

Israel and its anti-Semitic allies affirm that Israel is “the Jewish people”, that its policies are “Jewish” policies, that its achievements are “Jewish” achievements, that its crimes are “Jewish” crimes, and that therefore anyone who dares to criticise Israel is criticising Jews and must be an anti-Semite. The Palestinian people have mounted a major struggle against this anti-Semitic incitement. They continue to affirm instead that the Israeli government does not speak for all Jews, that it does not represent all Jews, and that its colonial crimes against the Palestinian people are its own crimes and not the crimes of “the Jewish people”, and that therefore it must be criticised, condemned and prosecuted for its ongoing war crimes against the Palestinian people.

This is not a new Palestinian position, but one that was adopted since the turn of the 20th century and continued throughout the pre-WWII Palestinian struggle against Zionism. Yasser Arafat’s speech at the United Nations in 1974 stressed all these points vehemently:

Just as colonialism heedlessly used the wretched, the poor, the exploited as mere inert matter with which to build and to carry out settler colonialism, so too were destitute, oppressed European Jews employed on behalf of world imperialism and of the Zionist leadership. European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression; they became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination…Zionist theology was utilised against our Palestinian people: the purpose was not only the establishment of Western-style settler colonialism but also the severing of Jews from their various homelands and subsequently their estrangement from their nations. Zionism… is united with anti-Semitism in its retrograde tenets and is, when all is said and done, another side of the same base coin. For when what is proposed is that adherents of the Jewish faith, regardless of their national residence, should neither owe allegiance to their national residence nor live on equal footing with its other, non-Jewish citizens -when that is proposed we hear anti-Semitism being proposed. When it is proposed that the only solution for the Jewish problem is that Jews must alienate themselves from communities or nations of which they have been a historical part, when it is proposed that Jews solve the Jewish problem by immigrating to and forcibly settling the land of another people – when this occurs, exactly the same position is being advocated as the one urged by anti-Semites against Jews. 

Israel’s claim that its critics must be anti-Semites presupposes that its critics believe its claims that it represents “the Jewish people”. But it is Israel’s claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all. 

Today, Israel and the Western powers want to elevate anti-Semitism to an international principle around which they seek to establish full consensus. They insist that for there to be peace in the Middle East, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims must become, like the West, anti-Semites by espousing Zionism and recognising Israel’s anti-Semitic claims.

Except for dictatorial Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority and its cronies, on this 65th anniversary of the anti-Semitic conquest of Palestine by the Zionists, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, the Palestinian people and the few surviving anti-Zionist Jews continue to refuse to heed this international call and incitement to anti-Semitism.

They affirm that they are, as the last of the Semites, the heirs of the pre-WWII Jewish and Palestinian struggles against anti-Semitism and its Zionist colonial manifestation. It is their resistance that stands in the way of a complete victory for European anti-Semitism in the Middle East and the world at large.

Images taken from: Veterans Today

Joseph Massad teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of  The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians.

"Electronic Intifada" “The Last of the Semites” was based on a lecture Massad gave at a conference in Stuttgart (PDF), Germany, to a largely German audience, just last week:

The post Last of the Semites – Joseph Massad appeared first on My Catbird Seat.

By Pamela Olson

If Americans Knew 

Israel has a population of approximately 7.8 million, or a million fewer than the state of New Jersey. It is among the world’s most affluent nations, with a per capita income similar to that of the European Union.[1] Israel’s unemployment rate of 5.6% is much better than America’s 9.1%,[2] and Israel’s net trade, earnings, and payments is ranked 48th in the world while the US sits at a dismal 198th.[3]

Yet Israel receives approximately 10% of America’s foreign aid budget every year.[4] The US has, in fact, given more aid to Israel than it has to all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean combined—which have a total population of over a billion people.[5] And foreign aid is just one component of the staggering cost of our alliance with Israel.

Given the tremendous costs, it is critical to examine why we lavish so much aid on Israel, and whether it is worth Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars. But first, let’s take a look at what our alliance with Israel truly costs.

Before the Iraq War in 2003 Direct Foreign Aid

According to the Congressional Research Service , the amount of official US aid to Israel since its founding in 1948 tops $112 billion, and in the past few decades it has been on the order of $3 billion per year.[6](In 2011, for example, this amounted to over $8.2 million every single day.)

But this money is only part of the story. For one thing, Israel gets its aid money at the start of each year, unlike other nations.[7] This is significant: It means Israel can start earning interest on the money right away. And it costs the US more than the typical year-end disbursements because the US government operates at a deficit, so it must borrow this money to pay Israel and then pay interest on the amount all year.

Israel is also the only recipient of US military aid that is allowed to use a significant portion annually to purchase products made by Israeli companies instead of US companies. (The costs to Americans caused by this unique perk are discussed below.)

In addition, the US gives roughly $2 billion per year to Egypt and Jordan in aid packages arranged largely in exchange for peace treaties with Israel. The treaties don’t include justice for Palestinians, and are therefore deeply unpopular with the local populations.[8]

On top of this, the US gives roughly half a billion to the Palestinian Authority each year,[9] much of it used to rebuild infrastructure destroyed by Israel and to bolster an economy stifled by the Israeli occupation.[10] This would be unnecessary if Israel were to end the occupation and allow the Palestinians to build a functioning and self-sustaining economy.

Yet there’s still much more to the story, because parts of US aid to Israel are buried in the budgets of various US agencies, mostly the Department of Defense. For example, since at least 2006, the American Defense budget has included between $130 and $235 million per year for missile defense programs in Israel.[11]

In all, direct US disbursements to Israel amount to approximately 10% of all U.S. aid abroad, even though Israelis only make up 0.001% of the world’s population. In other words, on average, Israelis receive 10,000 times more US foreign aid per capita than other people throughout the world, despite the fact that Israel is one of the world’s more affluent nations.[12] And that number rises significantly when one considers disbursements to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority and Defense spending on behalf of Israel.

Additional Ad hoc support for Israel

Dr. Thomas Stauffer, a Harvard economist and Middle East studies professor who twice served in the Executive Office of the President, wrote a comprehensive report about all components of the alliance with Israel’s cost to American taxpayers for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 2003. He wrote:

“Another element is ad hoc support for Israel, which is not part of the formal foreign aid programs. No comprehensive compilation of US support for Israel has been publicly released. Additional known items include loan guarantees… special contracts for Israeli firms, legal and illegal[13] transfers of marketable US military technology, de facto exemption from US trade protection provisions, and discounted sales or free transfers of ‘surplus’ US military equipment. An unquantifiable element is the trade and other aid given to Romania and Russia to facilitate Jewish migration to Israel; this has accumulated to many billions of dollars.”[14]

Israel has often used its privileged access to US military technology against both the US government and US corporate interests. According to the Associated Press in 2002, “In France, Turkey, The Netherlands and Finland, Israeli companies have edged such U.S. firms as Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics out of arms deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years. The irony, experts say, is that tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars and transfers of American military technology helped create and nurture Israel’s industry, in effect subsidizing a foreign competitor.”

The AP article quoted a vice president at the Aerospace Industries Association of America, who bluntly said, “We give them money to build stuff for themselves and the U.S. taxpayer gets nothing in return.”[15]

Meanwhile, according to the Christian Science Monitor , Israel has also “blocked some major US arms sales, such as F-15 fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s. That cost $40 billion over 10 years.”[16]

Even worse, Israeli weapons “buttress the arsenals of nations such as China that the United States considers strategic competitors, alarming US military planners,” the Associated Press article went on to report. “[In 2001] US surveillance planes flying along China’s coast were threatened by Chinese fighter jets armed with Israeli missiles… Had Chinese fighter pilots been given the order to fire, they could have brought down the US planes with Israeli Python III missiles… US defense chiefs say Israel sold China the missiles without informing the United States.”[17]

Lost jobs, trade, and standing

One of the most devastating indirect costs of the US alliance with Israel was the Arab oil boycott of 1973. The Arab states imposed the boycott in protest of US support of Israel during the 1973 war, in which Arab countries attacked Israel to try to reclaim lands Israel had invaded and occupied in 1967.

“Washington’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo which cost the U.S. doubly: first, due to the oil shortfall, the US lost about $300 billion to $600 billion in GDP; and, second, the US was saddled with another $450 billion in higher oil import costs,” wrote Stauffer in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.[18]

Then there’s the cost in lost jobs. “US policy and trade sanctions reduce US exports to the Middle East about $5 billion a year, costing 70,000 or so American jobs,” Stauffer estimates. “Not requiring Israel to use its US aid to buy American goods, as is usual in foreign aid, costs another 125,000 jobs.”[19]

But perhaps the most damaging cost to the US has been its loss of standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds, where US largesse towards Israel as it commits human rights violations[20] provokes deep resentment. “To many of the world’s Muslims, it places the US taxpayer on the Israeli side of its conflicts with Arabs,” observed the Associated Press article.[21]

According to Harvard professor Stephen Walt, “The 9/11 Commission reported that 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s ‘animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with US foreign policy favoring Israel.’ Other anti-American terrorists—such as Ramzi Yousef, who led the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center—have offered similar explanations for their anger toward the United States.”[22]

There are many more potential categories of costs that are even more difficult to quantify. All in all, Stauffer estimates that Israel cost the US about $1.6 trillion between 1973 and 2003 alone—more than twice the cost of the Vietnam war.[23]

Costs since Stauffer’s study in 2003

Israel’s cost to American taxpayers has remained high since Stauffer’s 2003 study. The US currently gives Israel an average of $3 billion a year in military aid, under an agreement signed by the Bush administration to transfer $30 billion to Israel over ten years, starting in 2009.[24]

All of the other extras and costs remain and in some cases have increased since 2003. For example, “Despite a tough economic climate and expected US budget cuts—including drastic cuts to the US military budget—US lawmakers will provide $236 million in fiscal 2012 for the Israeli development of three missile defense programs,” reported Israeli newspaper Haaretz.[25]

In addition, the US government “has provided $205 million to support the Iron Dome, manufactured by Israel’s state-owned Raphael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. The system uses small radar-guided missiles to blow up in midair Katyusha-style rockets with ranges of 3 miles to 45 miles, as well as mortar bombs… Legislation moving through the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives would give Israel additional $680 million for the Iron Dome system through 2015.”[26]

And if, as many experts believe, the US would not have invaded Iraq without intense and sustained pressure from Washington insiders who advocate actively on behalf of Israel,[27] this adds yet another dimension of staggering cost to the equation: “hundreds of billions of dollars, 4,000-plus U.S. and allied fatalities, untold tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and many thousands of other US, allied, and Iraqi casualties,” according to retired US foreign service officer Shirl McArthur.[28]

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes put the cost of the Iraq War at over $3 trillion, and incalculably more if you take into account the opportunity costs of the resources spent on this unproductive war. For example, higher oil prices due to the war have had a devastating impact on America’s economy, and so have the surging federal debt and the servicing of that debt. Without the war, the 2008 financial crisis almost certainly would not have been as severe, and the Afghanistan war most likely would have been shorter, cheaper, and more effective.[29]

The Israel lobby and partisans are currently gunning for a war with Iran with the same zeal they showed in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[30] By all estimates, the costs of a war with Iran will be much higher than the Iraq war. In addition to the loss of life, analysts predict, for example, that if Iran’s oil production were taken out of the world market, gas prices would rise 25-70 percent.

If the Straits of Hormuz (straits adjacent to Iran through which 20% of the world’s oil production passes on a daily basis) were attacked or blockaded, the cost of oil would skyrocket to a level never seen before, and the economic recession or depression that followed would be nothing short of “apocalyptic,” according to Matthew Yglesias writing for Slate .[31]

Reasons and Consequences

So now we are back to the question of why America continues to pour money into a state that commits daily human rights violations, defies US strategic interests,[32] provokes rage and resentment among billions of people,[33] competes with and crowds out US interests using technology subsidized by US taxpayers, and sells America’s military secrets to its enemies.[34]

The answer is simple and summed up well by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in their ground-breaking article in the London Review of Books , “The Israel Lobby,”[35] and their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy .[36]

“Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?” the article asks. “One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

“Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby.’ Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country—in this case, Israel—are essentially identical.”[37]

AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is consistently ranked in the top two most powerful lobbies in Washington.[38] And it is only one arm of the much larger, multi-faceted, and well-financed Israel lobby.[39]

According to Congressman Jim Moran, “AIPAC is very well organized. The members are willing to be very generous with their personal wealth. But it’s a two edged sword. If you cross AIPAC, AIPAC is unforgiving and will destroy you politically. Their means of communications, their ties to certain newspapers and magazines, and individuals in the media are substantial and intimidating. Every [Congress] member knows it’s the best-organized national lobbying force.”[40]

Senator Joseph Lieberman proudly stated, “Any attempt to pressure Israel, to force Israel to the negotiating table by denying Israel support, will not pass in Congress… Congress will act against any attempt to do that.”[41]

It’s true: The US Congress, along with the executive branch, overwhelmingly support virtually any action or wish of the Israeli government, no matter how at odds with US national interest or security,[42] primarily because of the power of the Israel lobby.[43]

Even when two AIPAC employees were indicted on espionage charges in 2005, and it was determined that they had obtained classified US government information illegally and passed it to Israeli agents, the charges were quietly dropped on technicalities.[44] AIPAC fired both employees and issued a statement that they were fired because their actions did not comport with AIPAC standards.[45] One of the fired employees, Steven Rosen, filed a lawsuit for defamation, claiming his actions were, in fact, common practice at AIPAC.[46]

When Israel attempted to sink a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Liberty , in 1967, killing 34 Americans and injuring over 170, it still failed to put a dent in aid to Israel.[47] Indeed, aid quadrupled the following year.[48]

Though Congressmen receive payments and support from the lobby in exchange for their loyalty, the American taxpayer is left footing the bill. As detailed above, the total cost has run from a bare minimum of $112 billion since 1948 (the cost of foreign aid alone) to $1.6 trillion or more, factoring in Defense appropriations, oil crises, the sinking of the USS Liberty , the heightened risk of terrorism, lost trade and co-opted technology, and countless other factors. If the Iraq war and the increased risk of a war with Iran are factored in, the cost skyrockets even higher.

Critics point out how much brighter our future would be if we had invested these billions or trillions in veteran rehabilitation and care, education, job creation, social security, housing, environmental clean-up and prevention, roads, bridges, health care, and scientific and health research. Or if Americans had simply held onto their tax dollars and used them as they saw fit, in our own economy. If some of the higher estimates are closer to the mark, our support for Israel could easily have covered the $700 billion TARP bailout with a great deal left over for massive stimulus spending and/or tax breaks.

If Israel were using these funds for a good purpose, one could debate whether the price was worth it. But Israel uses most of the money to prolong a 45-year military occupation (which regularly involves gross violations of international law),[49] commit egregious human rights violations,[50] and destroy billions of dollars worth of Palestinian homes and infrastructure[51] (resulting in still more U.S. tax money being sent to Palestinians to rebuild demolished homes, hospitals, and schools), while building illegal Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land.[52]

It makes the prospect of peace ever more distant, creates dangerous hostility to the US, placing Americans in peril, and puts the US Congress in violation of the Arms Export Control Act,[53] all for the sake of campaign contributions.

There is no good reason to keep throwing good money after bad in a failed, ill-founded policy. It’s long past time for a fundamental rethinking of the American government’s blank check to Israel. 

This report was produced by If Americans Knew analysts, particularly Pamela Olson, a President’s Scholar at Stanford University 1998-2002 with a major in Physics, a minor in Political Science, and 1600 GRE scores. Before coming to IAK, Olson lived and worked in the West Bank; worked as a researcher in Moscow, Siberia, and China; and was a research analyst at the Institute for Defense Analysis. She is the author of Fast Times in Palestine.

This analysis updates the groundbreaking 1998 work by Richard Curtiss, “The Cost of Israel to U.S. Taxpayers,” published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Mr. Curtiss, following military service in World War II, served for 30 years as a career Foreign Service Officer. He received the U.S. Information Agency’s Superior Honor Award and the Edward R. Murrow award for excellence in Public Diplomacy, USIA’s highest professional recognition. Upon retirement, Mr. Curtiss co-founded and the American Educational Trust, which produces the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. He is also the author of two books on U.S.-Middle East relations. A more extensive bio can be read here.

[1] “Country Comparison: GDP Per Capita (PPP),” CIA World Factbook, 2011. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html

[2] “Country comparison: Unemployment rate,” CIA World Factbook, 2011. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2129rank.html

[3] “Country comparison: Current account balance,” CIA World Factbook, 2011. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2187rank.html

[4] US Department of States, “FY 2012 State and USAID – Core Budget,” February 14, 2011. http://www.state.gov/s/d/rm/rls/fs/2011/156553.htm

[5] Richard Curtiss, “The Cost of Israel to the American People,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 1998. http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/component/k2/item/583-billions-in-aid

[6] Jeremy Sharp, “US foreign aid to Israel,” Congressional Research Service , September 16, 2010. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

[7] Clyde R. Mark, “Israel: US Foreign Assistance,” Congressional Research Service, April 26, 2005http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/IB85066.pdf

(Particularly noteworthy is the subsection of this report entitled, “Special Benefits for Israel.”)

[8] Jeremy Sharp, “U.S. Foreign Assistance to the Middle East: Historical Background, Recent Trends, and the FY2011 Request,” Congressional Research Service , June 15, 2010. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL32260.pdf Most of this money goes to elites rather than the general population, adding to the resentment about these policies.

[9] Jim Zanotti, “US foreign aid to the Palestinians,” Congressional Research Service , November 9, 2011. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS22967.pdf

[10] “Sustaining Achievements in Palestinian Institution-building and Economic Growth,” World Bank, September 18, 2011. http://unispal.un.org/pdfs/WBank09-2011_AHLCReport.pdf Quote from the report: “Ultimately, in order for the Palestinian Authority to sustain the reform momentum and its achievements in institution-building, remaining Israeli restrictions must be lifted.” See also: Dan Murphy, “Amid Palestinian statehood push, a grim World Bank report on the West Bank, Gaza,” Christian Science Monitor , September 14, 2011. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2011/0914/Amid-Palestinian-statehood-push-a-grim-World-Bank-report-on-the-West-Bank-Gaza Quote from the article: “The World Bank says that recent economic growth in Gaza and the West Bank has been almost entirely thanks to foreign aid, that a slowing of foreign aid delivery has presented the PA with a possible fiscal crisis, and that Israeli policies continue to stand in the way of sustainable economic improvement in the territories.”

[11] Jeremy Sharp, “US foreign aid to Israel,” Congressional Research Service , September 16, 2010. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf For the 2012 budget of $235 million, see John T. Bennett, “U.S., Israeli Military Cooperation Remains Strong,” US News and World Report, March 2, 2012. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/03/02/us-israeli-military-cooperation-remains-strong

[12] US Department of States, “FY 2012 State and USAID – Core Budget,” February 14, 2011. http://www.state.gov/s/d/rm/rls/fs/2011/156553.htm

[13] ‘Illegal transfers’ refers to several instances in which Israel has been accused of violating the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits the use of US military assistance for purposes other than legitimate self-defense. For example, during Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, the Israeli air force dumped tens of thousands of cluster bomblets over wide civilian areas, resulting in horrific and long-lasting civilian casualties with dubious military utility. That’s not even to begin to touch on daily Israeli violations of human rights in the Palestinian territories. Despite overwhelming evidence of Israeli violations of international law using US-supplied weapons, the US Congress has done little to comply with its own laws against funding such violations.

[14] Thomas Stauffer, “The Costs to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: $3 Trillion,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2003. http://ifamericansknew.org/stats/stauffer.html Stauffer’s original paper, prepared for the conference: “The United States and the Arab World: Challenges and Opportunities” at the William S. Cohen Center for International Policy, University of Maine, and the US Army War College in October 2002, is posted here: http://www.solargeneral.com/library/cost-of-us-middle-east-policy-an-economic-overview-dr-thomas-r-stauffer.pdf (PDF) and here: http://www.scribd.com/Abegael88/d/88696279-Cost-of-Us-Middle-East-Policy-an-Economic-Overview-Dr-Thomas-r-Stauffer

[15] Jim Krane, “U.S. Aid to Israel Subsidizes a Potent Weapons Exporter,” Associated Press, June 20, 2002. http://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/p-krane.html

[16] David Francis, “Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US,” Christian Science Monitor , December 9, 2002. http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1209/p16s01-wmgn.html

[17] Jim Krane, “U.S. Aid to Israel Subsidizes a Potent Weapons Exporter,” Associated Press, June 20, 2002. http://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/p-krane.html

[18] Thomas Stauffer, “The Costs to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: $3 Trillion,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2003. http://ifamericansknew.org/stats/stauffer.html Stauffer’s original paper, prepared for the conference: “The United States and the Arab World: Challenges and Opportunities” at the William S. Cohen Center for International Policy, University of Maine, and the US Army War College in October 2002, is posted here: http://www.solargeneral.com/library/cost-of-us-middle-east-policy-an-economic-overview-dr-thomas-r-stauffer.pdf (PDF) and here: http://www.scribd.com/Abegael88/d/88696279-Cost-of-Us-Middle-East-Policy-an-Economic-Overview-Dr-Thomas-r-Stauffer

[19] David Francis, “Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US,” Christian Science Monitor , December 9, 2002. http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1209/p16s01-wmgn.html

[20] For a small sampling of Israeli human rights violations, see Amnesty International’s “Annual Report: Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories 2011″ http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/annual-report-israel-and-the-occupied-palestinian-territories-2011, Human Rights Watch’s most recent reports http://www.hrw.org/by-issue/publications/228, and the publications of B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) http://www.btselem.org/publications

[21] Jim Krane, “U.S. Aid to Israel Subsidizes a Potent Weapons Exporter,” Associated Press, June 20, 2002. http://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/p-krane.html

[22] Stephen Walt, “Whiff of Desperation,” Foreign Policy, April 25, 2011. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/whiff_of_desperation?page=full

[23] David Francis, “Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US,” Christian Science Monitor , December 9, 2002. http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1209/p16s01-wmgn.html

[24] Shirl McArthur, “A conservative estimate of total direct US aid to Israel: almost $114 billion,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2008. http://ifamericansknew.org/stats/114bill.html

[25] Natasha Mozgovaya, “Obama signs bill that includes added U.S. military assistance to Israel,” Haaretz, December 24, 2011. http://www.Haaretz.com/blogs/focus-u-s-a/obama-signs-bill-that-includes-added-u-s-military-assistance-to-israel-1.403268

[26] “U.S. eyes funding boost for Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ shield,” Reuters, May 17, 2012. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-usa-israel-irondome-idUSBRE84G10P20120518

[27] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,” London Review of Books , March 23, 2006. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby See also: Stephen J. Sniegoski, “The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel,” Ihs Press, September 1, 2008.

[28] Shirl McArthur, “A conservative estimate of total direct US aid to Israel: almost $114 billion,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2008. http://ifamericansknew.org/stats/114bill.html

[29] Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, “The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond,” Washington Post , September 5, 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html

[30] See articles at http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/costs/iran

[31] Matthew Yglesias, “War for No Oil,” Slate , March 7, 2012. Link

[32] See, for example: Mark Landler, “Obama Presses Netanyahu to Resist Strikes on Iran,” New York Times, March 5, 2012. www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/world/middleeast/obama-cites-window-for-diplomacy-on-iran-bomb.html And: “Biden condemns new Israeli settlement plan,” USA Today, March 9, 2010. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-03-09-Israel_N.htm

[33] Andrew Sullivan, “Why Continue to Build the Settlements?” The Daily Beast, March 30, 2012. http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/03/why-beinart-matters.html Excerpt: “The deliberate population of occupied lands violates the Geneva Conventions. The occupation itself enrages the Arab and Muslim world and creates a huge drag on the US’s strategic need to build up allies among emerging Arab democracies, and defuse Jihadism across the globe.” See also: Philip Weiss, “Former State Department official says Obama calls for human rights and democracy are ‘undercut’ by position on Palestinians,” Mondoweiss , April 2, 2012. http://mondoweiss.net/2012/04/former-state-dept-official-says-obama-calls-for-human-rights-and-democracy-are-undercut-by-position-on-palestinians.html

[34] Jim Krane, “U.S. Aid to Israel Subsidizes a Potent Weapons Exporter,” Associated Press, June 20, 2002. http://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/p-krane.html

[35] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,” London Review of Books , March 23, 2006. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby

[36] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2007.

[37] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,” London Review of Books , March 23, 2006. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby An earlier book by former Congressman Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, first exposed this in 1985. Findley and others founded the Council for the National Interest to try to counter this.

[38] Jeffrey Birnbaum, “Washington’s Power 25: which pressure groups are best at manipulating the laws we live by?” CNN Money , December 8, 1997. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1997/12/08/234927/index.htm Other top contenders include the American Association of Retired Persons, with over 40 million members, and the National Rifle Association.

[39] “Introduction to the Israel lobby,” Council for the National Interest , August 19, 2011. http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/israellobby

[40] Michael Lerner, “The Israel Lobby,” Tikkun Magazine , September/October 2007. http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/Lerner-the-israel-lobby

[41] Jeremy Sharp, “US foreign aid to Israel,” Congressional Research Service , September 16, 2010. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

[42] Max Fisher, “Should U.S. Veto UN Measure Condemning Israeli Settlements?” The Atlantic Wire , January 20, 2011. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/01/should-u-s-veto-un-measure-condemning-israeli-settlements/21438

[43] “Even if Democrats and Republicans bicker on every other issue, AIPAC leaders seemed constantly eager to stress that one thing on which the parties can come together is unswerving devotion to Israel.” Gregory Levey, “Inside America’s powerful Israel lobby,” Salon , March 16, 2007. http://www.salon.com/2007/03/16/aipac Just recently has there been some high-level pushback against AIPAC’s hegemonic power in Washington. See, for example: Robert Dreyfuss, “AIPAC: Still the chosen one?” Mother Jones , September/October 2009. http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/aipac-still-chosen-one And: Alex Kane, “Sunlight on the lobby: AIPAC’s push for war exposed in ‘Atlantic’ magazine blog,” Mondoweiss , February 24, 2012. http://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/sunlight-on-the-lobby-aipacs-push-for-war-exposed-in-atlantic-magazine-blog.html

[44] Wikipedia, “Steven J. Rosen.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_J._Rosen#The_indictment_of_Rosen_and_Weissman

[45] Nathan Guttman, “AIPAC Gets Down and Dirty in Pushback vs. Defamation Suit,” The Forward, November 16, 2010. http://forward.com/articles/133172/aipac-gets-down-and-dirty-in-pushback-vs-defamatio

[46] Jeff Stein, “Ex-AIPAC official got at least $670,000 from donors,” Washington Post , November 19, 2012. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/11/ex-aipac_official_got_670000_from_private_donors.html

[47] The findings of the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty , the Recall of Military Rescue Support Aircraft while the Ship was Under Attack, and the Subsequent Cover-up by the United States Government can be read at http://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ul-commfindings.html

[48] Jeremy Sharp, “US foreign aid to Israel,” Congressional Research Service , September 16, 2010. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

[49] Jeremy R. Hammond, “Rogue State: Israeli Violations of U.N. Security Council Resolutions,” Foreign Policy Journal, January 27, 2010. http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/01/27/rogue-state-israeli-violations-of-u-n-security-council-resolutions

[50] For a small sampling of Israeli human rights violations, see Amnesty International’s “Annual Report: Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories 2011″ http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/annual-report-israel-and-the-occupied-palestinian-territories-2011, Human Rights Watch’s most recent reports http://www.hrw.org/by-issue/publications/228, and the publications of B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) http://www.btselem.org/publications

[51] See, for example, “Frequently Asked Questions,” The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. http://www.icahd.org/?page_id=313 And Rory McCarthy, “Hamas offers $52m handouts to help hardest-hit Gazans,” The Guardian, January 25, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/26/hamas-payout-gaza-infrastructure

[52] “Israeli Settlements on Palestinian Land,” If Americans Knew, May 2002. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/settlements.html

[53] The Arms Export Control Act prohibits the use of US military assistance for purposes other than legitimate self-defense. Despite overwhelming evidence of Israeli violations of international law using US-supplied weapons (a few of them outlined in citations above), the US Congress has done little to comply with its own laws against funding these violations.

The post The Staggering Cost of Israel to Americans appeared first on My Catbird Seat.

The General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, Edinburgh. Photo: Wikimedia

by Stuart Littlewood

The Church of Scotland's revised report 'The Inheritance of Abraham?' has now been released ahead of their Assembly http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/14050/The_Inheritance_of_Abraham.pdf .

The Church felt obliged to change some of it after Jewish leaders sought to interfere, one complaining that it was "an outrage to everything that interfaith dialogue stands for…  and closes the door on meaningful dialogue". Another said "it reads like an Inquisition-era polemic against Jews and Judaism."

The Israeli ambassador moaned that it belittled the deeply held Jewish attachment to the land of Israel in a way which was "truly hurtful".

So do the changes amount to a caving–in to Zionist meddlers?

I soon gave up comparing the two versions word for word to spot the difference. The press release gives no clues either. In it, Convener Sally Foster-Fulton simply says:

Sally Foster-Fulton

“We believe that this new version has paid attention to the concern some of the language of the previous version caused amongst the Jewish community whilst holding true to our concerns about the injustices being perpetrated because of policies of the Government of Israel against the Palestinian people that we wanted to highlight. The views of this report are consistent with the views held by the Church of Scotland over many years."

Cool under fire, this lady.

The report's key conclusion remains that "the Church of Scotland does not agree with a premise that scripture offers any peoples a divine right to territory”. At least they stand firm on that.

They also recap on what they already believe, and here's where disagreements might flare up. For example…

·       “Israel is a recognised State and has the right to exist in peace and security.”

Yet Israel's right to exist seems somehow inconsistent with the Church's statement that scripture does not bestow a divine right to someone else's land. Even if the Church believes that the UN's 1947 Partition Plan was morally and legally right, what does it say to the Jewish terror groups that were driving Palestinians from their homes before the ink was dry and before the state of Israel was declared? What about the hundreds of towns and villages not even allocated to the Jewish state in the UN Plan but erased by Israel in order to implant itself. What about the systematic ethnic cleansing and the criminal occupation of additional Arab territories in the 1967 war? Perhaps the Church should remain silent on the 'right to exist' question, at least until Israel declares its internationally recognised boundaries and halts its illegal expansion.

·       "There should be a Palestinian State, recognised by the United Nations, that should have the right to exist in peace and security."

Israel doesn’t recognise the Palestinians' right to a state.

·       "We condemn racism and religious hatred."

The Jewish state is a racist entity.

·       "We are especially concerned at the recent actions of the Government of Israel in its support for settlements, for the construction of the security barrier or ‘the Wall’ within Occupied Territory, for the blockade of Gaza and for the anti-Boycott law."

“Recent” actions? Israel has been building illegal settlements since 1967. Gaza has been blockaded since 2006. The West Bank has lived under permanent blockade for decades.

·       "We assert our sincere belief that to be critical of the policies of the Israeli Government is a legitimate part of our witness and we strongly reject accusations of anti-Semitic bias. We regularly engage with and critique policies of all Governments, where we deem them to be contrary to our understanding of God's wish for humanity."

Well said.

Central to the Church’s discussion is this excellent passage…

“To Christians in the 21st century, promises about the land of Israel shouldn't be intended to be taken literally, or as applying to a defined geographical territory; The 'promised land' in the Bible is not a place, so much as a metaphor of how things ought to be among the people of God. This 'promised land' can be found or built anywhere.”

The report’s key conclusions appear the same as before. Christians should not be supporting any claims by any people to an exclusive or even privileged divine right to possess particular territory… It is a misuse of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) and the New Testament to use it as a topographic guide to settle contemporary conflicts over land.

And regarding Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory the Church remains committed to the following principles (previously set out and agreed by the General Assembly):

That the current situation is characterised by an inequality in power, therefore reconciliation can only be possible if the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the blockade of Gaza, are ended.

The Church of Scotland condemns violence, terrorism and intimidation no matter the perpetrator

The Church of Scotland affirms the right of Israelis and Palestinians to live within secure and fixed boundaries in states of their own.

The Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are illegal under international law.

The Church of Scotland should do nothing to promote the viability of the illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

That human rights of all peoples should be respected, and this should include the right of return and / or compensation for Palestinian refugees.

That negotiations between the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority about peace with justice must resume at the earliest opportunity and the Church of Scotland should continue to put political pressure on all parties to commence such negotiations, and asking all parties to recognise the inequality in power which characterises this situation.

That there are safe rights of access to the sacred sites for the main religions in the area.

This stance seems pretty robust to me, and the Church’s support for refugees’ right of return is very welcome. However it also raises questions. Why, having already emphasised that the crisis in the Holy Land is characterised by "an inequality of power", call for the two sides to be thrown together again in fruitless negotiations? Negotiate what? Freedom? Is that negotiable? The return of stolen lands and property? Is that negotiable? These matters are already decided by international and humanitarian law and numerous UN resolutions waiting to be enforced. How can the Church approve so-called 'negotiations' while one party is still under illegal occupation with a gun to his head? What justice is likely to come out of that? The Church does urge the UK Government and the European Union "to do all that is within their power to ensure that international law is upheld", but that surely must come first, rather than relying on discredited talks.

The report going in front of the Church’s Assembly appears unchanged in substance and has cleverly sidestepped objections. The only caving-in, so far, has been the senior clergy's agreement to listen to the Zionists' impertinent demands in the first place.

I can only wish the Assembly an enjoyable week ahead and, on this issue, firm judgement.

Stuart Littlewood is a frequent contributor to My Catbird Seat.  He is writer-photographer in the UK. His articles are published widely on the web. He is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation.

Also see

• Abraham Is Not My Father

• Will the Church of Scotland cave in to Zionist bullies?

The post Church of Scotland report challenging Jews’ ‘divine right’ to Palestinian homeland unchanged appeared first on My Catbird Seat.

It commemorates the loss of Palestinian land because of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled from their villages or were expelled.

by Anthony Lawson

1948 LEST WE FORGET– How did Palestine come to this?

Excerpted from the website: 1948: LEST WE FORGET

The Basle Programme; Illegal Jewish immigration; Zionist Leaders and the German Government WWI; Framing The Balfour Declaration 1917; Britain’s Part in Arming the Hagana; Jewish National Fund’s Land Acquisitions; Britain’s failings in safeguarding its Mandate; The Zionist Biltmore Programme May 1942; The Zionist Military Machine; Plotting UN Resolution 181; Pressure Politics on Britain and the US;

In parallel, the Hagana and Irgun terrorist groups initiated the following military operations within the framework of Plan Dalet between 1 April 1948 – 15 May 1948 employing over 27,000 well armed men and women: Operation Nachshon, Operation Harel, Operation Misparayim (Haifa), Operation Chametz, Operation Jevussi, Operation Yiftagh, Operation Matateh, Operation Maccabi, Operation Gideon, Operation Barak, Operation Ben Ami, Operation Pitchfork and Operation Schfifon (Jerusalem). 

An intricate and determined programme of ethnic cleansing at all levels of society and with all forms of suppression continues until this day against the Palestinian people inside Israel and within the Occupied Palestinian Territories: the construction of illegal Jewish settlements and their exclusive network of roads and highways that connects them, the building of the prison Wall robbing more Palestinians of their land and cutting off communities from their farms and groves, the demolition of Palestinian homes and the uprooting of olive trees, the forced evictions, the destruction of essential civilian infrastructure such as water supply and sanitation, the segregationist ‘legal’ system that favours Jews over Palestinians, the arbitrary arrests and detentions of civilians and their elected leaders and, to crown it all, the flagrant and consistent Israeli violations of International Law and all UN Resolutions.

Go to Historical Synopsis

Re-introducing a video by me which is even more pertinent today, because nothing has changed during the intervening three years since it was made.

There can be absolutely no doubt that Israel has created an inhuman, illegal and utterly disgraceful Apartheid state, and the international community will never be able to excuse itself if it takes no action against this blatant, ongoing and in-plain-sight crime against humanity.

Israeli Apartheid and The Nakba

— Anthony Lawson (Narrator and Producer)

Please join the millions of decent people around the world who are crying out against Israel’s ongoing persecution of the Palestinians. Send the link to this video to your elected representative and make sure he or she does something about it.

You have to ask yourself: If I keep quiet , will it ever end?

The post Palestinians Mark 65th Nakba Anniversary appeared first on My Catbird Seat.

Davidson is a well-meaning writer, does he believe what he writes? The point was not to shovel money into the utterly corrupt PLO and its affiliates, IT IS TO SHOVEL MONEY INTO THE US and CANADA and  BRITAIN and AUSTRALIA, buy out newspapers and networks (ALL of which trade publicly and can be bought out by shareholders, at least in the US), to do to Congress and the three Parliaments what AIPAC and its ever growing counterparts in those three other countries do, and beat AIPAC and company at their own game.

Can you imagine (e.g.) a Muslim-owned NBC or CNN whose news coverage gave to the American public — not a pitiful few thousands or even tens of thousands, but tens of MILLIONS nightly — an accurate view of Israel and the Palestinians and Iran?

They don’t have a single lobby worth its name, let alone a network or two, even after 65 years. Talk about "significant progress over the past three decades".

As far as the assorted groups wandering around in these critical four countries, they are there and they are more vocal than four years ago, but the key question — as Dr. Alan Sabrosky wrote a couple of years ago — is what effect it has had on three critical issues:

(1) Israeli military power,

(2) The number of Jewish settlements and settlers, and

(3) Israeli leverage over the US government (and in this context, the governments of the UK and Canada and Australia).

Can anyone look at those three issues and honestly suggest that any of them is less now than four years ago?

Absolutely not, and Hagel's confirmation means nothing, as he absolutely made a Faustian bargain in order to be confirmed:

Israel is much stronger militarily and is now the recipient of an additional US$10 billion beyond its annual payment, there are more settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and about 100,000 more Jewish settlers, and their lock on all four governments is much stronger. All this would have been public knowledge and nipped in the bud, only if anyone had the commonsense to do the media takeover as mentioned above. But no one did, not the wealthy Arabs and neither did the Palestinians.

I understand Hart's position — in fact, several activists, writers and editors did the same thing several months ago, and not at all for financial reasons. Dr. Davidson's article below tends to belittle veteran journalist Alan Hart and that is not on!

I think one can safely presume everyone following the “Israel-Palestine conflict” knows who Alan Hart is. A former BBC Panorama and ITN Middle East correspondent with a vast first-hand knowledge of the subject. He knew, and interviewed, many of the main players in the Israel-Palestine conflict on all sides (Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat and other PLO leaders, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, Gamal Abdel Nasser, King Hussein of Jordan, George Habash, King Feisal, Margaret Thatcher – the list is long). He also participated at a leadership level in the secret politics of the search for peace in the Middle East (as an intermediary between Arafat and Peres when it was presumed Peres was headed for leadership). His passion and empathy with both sides in the conflict is apparent in his obviously erudite analysis. 

by Dr. Lawrence Davidson

I – Who Is Alan Hart?

Alan Hart is an author and a journalist. He is the former Middle East Chief Correspondent for Britain’s Independent Television News and a former BBC Panorama presenter whose beat was the Middle East. He has written a number of books, including Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? (1984) and the three-volume  Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews (2009-2010). He is also a longtime activist for various causes, particularly his three-decade struggle on behalf of justice for the Palestinian people.

II – Alan Hart Resigns

On April 25 Alan Hart, the activist for Palestine, literally turned in his resignation letter. In it he states, “I am withdrawing from the battlefield of the war for the truth of history as it relates to making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine.” Why did he do this? In Hart’s opinion, the struggle for justice in Palestine is “mission impossible.” The information/propaganda war between Zionists and those, such as himself, supporting the Palestinians (which, in any case, had always been “the most asymmetric of all information wars”) is lost. He notes that the Western media still follow a Zionist line and asserts that most of the Western populations remain either pro-Israel or indifferent to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

Hart blames this alleged Zionist victory in the propaganda war on a lack of financial support for those trying to write and speak out for Palestinian justice, and contrasts their plight to the situation of the Zionist writers and advocates, who enjoy almost unlimited funds. Hart feels it is mainly wealthy Palestinians and other Arabs who have failed to support pro-Palestinian activists. These wealthy Arabs  have failed to step forward because they either are afraid of Zionist retribution that would damage their businesses or careers, or are afraid of their own Arab governments, which do not want trouble with Israel because of assertive actions by pro-Palestinian wealthy citizens.

III – Mr. Hart’s Plight

With all due respect to Mr. Hart, who certainly does deserve our respect, I can’t help asking myself whether his assessment of this “war for the truth of history” is objectively true or an expression of personal disappointments. According to his own explanation, Alan Hart’s decision to leave the struggle is connected to the fact that Arab publishers and media failed to financially support and promote his recent book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. This was a great disappointment to him because the Arab media had serialized his prior work on Yasser Arafat and this had brought him “a significant income.” He had obviously made the assumption that the situation would repeat itself. So strong was that expectation that, as Mr. Hart tells us in his resignation statement, he made certain decisions, such as mortgaging his property in order to support the production of the Zionism study, which have now brought him into financial distress. Hart appears to see the failure of Arab money to come to his assistance as indicative of Arab failure to support the Palestinian cause.

IV – How accurate Is Alan Hart’s Assessment?

As disappointing as the Arab failure to promote Hart’s important work on Zionism may be, it is not accurate to conclude, as Hart does, that most wealthy Arabs “do not care about the occupied and oppressed Palestinians.” Before the first Iraq war, both public and private Arab money generously supported the PLO. Yasser Arafat’s unfortunate attempt to mediate that conflict and prevent a war against Iraq stopped most (but never all) of that support. Whether the wealthy Arabs could now do much more is another question. However, and this is an important point, this is not the same question as to whether Western supporters of the Palestinian cause should or should not give up.

Hart is correct that in the past thirty years supporters of Palestinian justice have not been able to create the necessary critical mass of public opinion to change the policies of national governments. However, that does not mean there has been no progress. It does not mean this is a lost cause.

I too have been a strong supporter of the Palestinians for decades, and I have seen a tremendous difference over time. Thirty years ago you could not critically raise the subject of Israel in public, and thus the Zionists had a monopoly on the entire history of this issue. That is emphatically not the case today. Despite Alan Hart’s unfortunate experience, the fact is that, at a popular level, the Zionists have lost control of the Palestine narrative. There are other real positive signs in this struggle that Hart fails to mention, including the progress of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; the continuing maturation of counter-lobbies, particularly in the United States; and the growing worldwide recognition of Israeli criminality, which has slowly increased that country’s sense of isolation. In other words, there is more to this than the Arab failure to support Mr. Hart’s latest work.

V – How Do We Measure Success?

One has to also understand that success and failure come on many levels. On the macro level, progress is slow, but as pointed out above, it is far from nonexistent. Sometimes you just need to know where to look to see the ongoing activity. For instance, in the case of the United States, there are a growing number of organizations that are constantly busy getting out the message of Israeli crimes and the Palestinian demand for justice. There are the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (a coalition of almost 400 member groups and organizations), Jewish Voices for Peace, and the Council for the National Interest, to name just a few. The struggle against Israeli apartheid might well be, as it was in the case of South Africa, multigenerational. But among the many organizations waging this struggle there is no sign of slacking.

On the micro level, success comes when one is consistently true to one’s principles in a manner that is personally acceptable. No one is asking Western supporters of the Palestinian cause to go bankrupt or put themselves in physical danger, although in the latter case notably heroic individuals such as Rachel Corey and Tom Hurndall have chosen to do so, with tragic results. However, there are less dangerous routes. To do what you can in a steady, consistent way for a just cause in which you believe is already to have achieved success at the personal level. We struggle not only for the cause, but also because of who we are.

Alan Hart is an admirable man who has done admirable things, and we all owe him our thanks for his contributions to the Palestinian cause. But his decision to retire from the field should in no way be taken as a sign that that cause is lost. It is emphatically not lost. It has made significant progress over the past three decades and it is well positioned to make more progress in the future.

Read the original article @  http://www.tothepointanalyses.com

Also see:

• William Cook : The Truth Tellers Lament in a Time of Darkness

• Stuart Littlewood : Alan Hart's Farewell

The post Alan Hart and What It Takes to Struggle On appeared first on My Catbird Seat.