Another Chorister for Israel
January 9, 2009
Nidal El-Khairy
On February 29 last year the BBC’s website reported deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatening a ‘holocaust’ on Gaza. Headlined “Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust’”, the story would undergo nine revisions in the next twelve hours. Before the day was over, the headline would read “Gaza militants ‘risking disaster’“. (The story has since been revised again with an exculpatory note added soft-pedalling Vilnai’s comments). An Israeli threatening ‘holocaust’ may be unpalatable to those who routinely invoke its spectre to deflect criticism from the Jewish state’s criminal behaviour. With the ‘holocaust’ reference redacted, the new headline shifted culpability neatly into the hands of ‘Gaza militants’ instead.
One could argue that the BBC’s radical alteration of the story reflects its susceptibility to the kind of inordinate pressure for which the Israel Lobby’s well-oiled flak machine is notorious. But, as I will show in subsequent examples, this story is exceptional only insofar as it reported accurately in the first place something that could bear negatively on Israel’s image. The norm is reflexive self-censorship. Read the rest of this entry »
America’s Israeli-Occupied Media
August 12, 2008
Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi on US media’s platform for Israeli warmongering.
There should be little doubt that the Israeli government is making every effort to jump-start a war against Iran sooner rather than later. Many Israelis not surprisingly believe it is in their interest to convince the United States to attack Iran so that Israel will not have to do it, and they are hell-bent on bringing that about. Unfortunately, their efforts are being aided and abetted by a U.S. mainstream media that is unwilling to ask any hard questions or challenge the assumptions of the Israeli government.
Israeli intellectuals such as Benny Morris have been provided a platform to argue implausibly that a little war is necessary right now to prevent a larger nuclear conflict. The repeated visits to Washington by Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi to pressure Washington to commit to a military option are generally unreported in the U.S. media, and no one is asking why the United States should be involved in what is clearly a “wag the dog” scenario.
Suskind Revisited
August 9, 2008
An extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community has informed me that Ron Suskind’s revelation that the White House ordered the preparation of a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to attempts made to obtain yellowcake uranium is correct but that a number of details are wrong.
The Suskind account states that two senior CIA officers Robert Richer and John Maguire supervised the preparation of the document under direct orders coming from Director George Tenet. Not so, says my source. Tenet is for once telling the truth when he states that he would not have undermined himself by preparing such a document while at the same time insisting publicly that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Richer and Maguire have both denied that they were involved with the forgery and it should also be noted that preparation of such a document to mislead the media is illegal and they could have wound up in jail.
My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.
All Options on the Table?
August 8, 2008
It is likely resolution H. Con. Res. 362, to blockade Iran, was not just ‘supported’ by the Israel Lobby but was written and driven through congress by them too. I’m not convinced it was anti-war pressure that stopped this effort either. Otherwise a good article by Chomsky, although vague as to why the US wants a war on Iran, which only the Israel lobby is driving for.
NUCLEAR threats and counter-threats are a subtext of our times, steadily, it seems, becoming more insistent. The July meeting in Geneva between Iran and six major world powers on Iran’s nuclear programme ended with no progress.
The Bush administration was widely praised for having shifted to a more conciliatory stand — namely, by allowing a US diplomat to attend without participating — while Iran was castigated for failing to negotiate seriously. And the powers warned Iran that it would soon face more severe sanctions unless it terminated its uranium enrichment programs.
Meanwhile India was applauded for agreeing to a nuclear pact with the United States that would effectively authorise its development of nuclear weapons outside the bounds of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), with US assistance in nuclear programmes along with other rewards — in particular, to US firms eager to enter the Indian market for nuclear and weapons development, and ample payoffs to parliamentarians who signed on, a tribute to India’s flourishing democracy.
The War Party
August 7, 2008
This is from when BBC hadn’t yet been emasculated by Blair and was still producing half-decent documentaries. It is an excellent look at the neocons and also has interviews with Jim Lobe, the preeminent authority on the subject.
New actor on the same old stage
August 2, 2008
‘If Obama is elected he will be enmeshed in the Middle East tragedy and forced to take sides,’ writes Robert Fisk.
I was in the studios of al-Jazeera – the Qatar satellite channel so democratic in the eyes of Colin Powell that Bush later wanted to bomb it – while Barack Obama was performing his theatricals in the Middle East. “Theatre” is what I called it on air while the anchor desperately tried to suck some Arab hope out of the whole ridiculous fandango. No such luck, I told him. It isn’t going to make the slightest difference to the Arabs whether Obama or McCain wins.
Westerners believe that Obama appeals to the Arabs because of his middle name or because he’s black. Untrue. They like him – or liked him – because he grew up poor. Like them, he understood – or rather, they thought he understood – what oppression was about. But they quickly found out where they stood in the food chain. Forty-five minutes in Ramallah vs 24 hours in Israel was the Obama equation. Yes, I know the old saw. Every US presidential candidate has to make the pilgrimage to the Wailing Wall, to Yad Vashem, to some Israeli town or village that has taken casualties (albeit minuscule in comparison to those visited upon the Palestinians), to talk about Israel’s security, etc. That doesn’t mean, we are always told, that Israel is going to have it easy once the US president is elected. Wrong. Israel is going to have it easy. Because no sooner is he elected than he will be enmeshed in the Middle East tragedy and be forced to take sides – Israel’s, of course – and then it will be time for the next election, so the president’s hands will be tied again and he’ll be talking about Israel’s security (rather than Palestinian security) and we’ll be back on the same old itinerary.
Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide
July 31, 2008
The neocon-Joe Klein flap continues. Philip Weiss has a follow up:
Joe Klein is on fire, as they say. Here he is letting it rip again on the neocons and apologizing for supporting the Iraq war. Here are Josh Marshall and Jed Lewison standing up for him. And here is former Bush aide Peter Wehner being lawyerly and sanctimonious about him at the National Review, saying Klein shouldn’t blog, he’s too wild. Oh my– Klein should keep blogging this subject, he’s starting the conversation we’ve all been waiting for. Time Magazine should sense the moment and put the issue on the cover–Zionist claims on American Jews. And Klein should level with us, Did his own “strong” support for Israel affect his bad judgment on Iraq?’.
Today the story is also covered by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe in the excellent IPS. Also check out Jim Lobe’s post laying out the context for this feud.
WASHINGTON, Jul 30 (IPS) – A mushrooming media controversy pitting neoconservatives against a prominent Jewish-American political commentator could mark a new stage in the growing battle over who speaks for the U.S. Jewish community on foreign policy issues, particularly regarding the Middle East.
TIME columnist Joe Klein’s accusations that Jewish neoconservatives, who played a particularly visible role in the drive to war in Iraq and have since pushed for military confrontation in Iran, sacrificed “U.S. lives and money…to make the world safe for Israel” have spurred angry charges of anti-Semitism and personal attacks from critics at such neoconservative strongholds as the Weekly Standard, National Review, and Commentary.
But the fierceness of the controversy surrounding Klein, generally considered a political centrist, highlights the growing antagonism between neo-conservative hardliners and prominent U.S. Jews whose more moderate views are aligned more closely with those of the foreign policy establishment.
The Mearsheimer and Walt Effect
July 30, 2008
In just two years John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have had more of an impact on the debate over US Middle East policy than the so-called Left has in the past twenty (Mostly because with few exceptions, the left studiously avoids specifics in favour of dogma-sanctioned generalities; slogans and rhetoric in place of analysis). The space that they have created has not only empowered others to speak out, but has also put enough heat on the lobby that some of its erstwhile fellow-travelers feel compelled to decry its excesses, if only to make its influence sustainable over a longer term. So it was that we had Joe Klein — an avowed Zionist, and author of the Clinton election roman a clef, Primary Colors – come out indicting the Jewish neoconservatives with ‘divided loyalties’ for leading US into the war in Iraq. Denunciations were issued from the usual quarters led predictably by the ubiquitous Abe Foxman of the ADL. Klein refused to back down. And now we have one of the war’s boosters, Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewing Klein where despite his generally hawkish Zionist views, he speaks out against the possibility of a new neoconservative misadventure.
Philip Weiss, by far the finest blogger, has already done a fine job of parsing the interview and offering his insights.
Klein and Goldberg Establish Code for Critiquing Neocons’ Religious Agenda: 1, Be Jewish…
Jeffrey Goldberg has a great interview with Joe Klein on his blog, remarkable for a few things. First you see Klein unbound. He’s really smart. He stands by his criticism of Jewish neocons as having dual loyalties and then sounds the realist when he says that Iran is seeking nukes as a deterrent against western threats
I think that my reading on the nuclear issue is, given the level of threats that they’ve been getting from the United States, and from Israel, it’s a logical thing for Iran to want nuclear weapons as a deterrent. I don’t think they’d ever actually use it. First of all, they don’t actually have it, but if they did have it, they’d contaminate at the very least the third most holy site in Islam, and they’d kill a hell of a lot of Muslims.
Brilliant. Klein also opens up the essential conversation that I have been calling for for years, for non-neocon Jews to dime out the neocons’ religious agenda in the Middle East.
Acts of War
July 29, 2008
‘The war between the US and Iran is already on,’ writes Scott Ritter.
The war between the United States and Iran is on. American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities which result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed. This wanton violation of a nation’s sovereignty would not be tolerated if the tables were turned and Americans were being subjected to Iranian-funded covert actions which took the lives of Americans, on American soil, and destroyed American property and livelihood. Many Americans remain unaware of what is transpiring abroad in their name. Many of those who are cognizant of these activities are supportive of them, an outgrowth of misguided sentiment which holds Iran accountable for a list of grievances used by the U.S. government to justify the ongoing global war on terror. Iran, we are told, is not just a nation pursuing nuclear weapons, but is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world today.
Much of the information behind this is being promulgated by Israel, which has a vested interest in seeing Iran neutralized as a potential threat. But Israel is joined by another source, even more puzzling in terms of its broad-based acceptance in the world of American journalism: the Mujahadeen-e Khalk, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group sworn to overthrow the theocracy in Tehran. The CIA today provides material support to the actions of the MEK inside Iran. The recent spate of explosions in Iran, including a particularly devastating “accident” involving a military convoy transporting ammunition in downtown Tehran, appears to be linked to an MEK operation; its agents working inside munitions manufacturing plants deliberately are committing acts of sabotage which lead to such explosions. If CIA money and planning support are behind these actions, the agency’s backing constitutes nothing less than an act of war on the part of the United States against Iran.
Obama and Palestine
July 28, 2008
Mustafa Barghouti: Obama needs to see real life in Palestine
More here.
