At the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington DC on March 7, 2024, The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal discussed the crisis within the Democratic Party as the party grassroots revolts against President Joe Biden’s vehement support for Israel’s rampage in the besieged Gaza Strip, where at least 30,000 have been killed to date – mostly women and children.
Blumenthal pointed the finger directly at the Democratic Party establishment for crushing any and all iterations of antiwar politics, and illustrates how its most prominent figures have been bought off by the Israel lobby.
Lebanese Hezbollah supporters hold portraits of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the Yemeni Ansar Allah, Beirut, Lebanon, October 12, 2016 (AP)
Yemeni Ansar Allah leader Sayyed Abdul-Malik al-Houthi underlines the need for Islamic cohesion on the birthday of Prophet Mohammad PBUH.
The global Zionist lobby and its American, Israeli, and some European arms are seeking to contain and infiltrate the Islamic Ummah, said Yemeni Ansar Allah movement leader Sayyed Abdul-Malik al-Houthi on Tuesday.
In his speech on the eve of the birth anniversary of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), al-Houthi stressed that the enemies of the Islamic world have reached the point of interfering in the curricula of Arab and Islamic countries.
Soft warfare aims to control the Muslim world in various fields, he said, adding that the Islamic people need to be cohesive in order to regain their leading role in the world.
According to the Yemeni leader, Muslims today, more than ever, need to strengthen their connection to the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad (PBUH), and the Quran, in order to regain their freedom, dignity, and liberation from all forms of subjugation.
Regarding the occasion of the noble birth anniversary of the Prophet, Sayyed al-Houthi said that the extent of engagement with this occasion enhances hope, meaning that the Yemeni people are qualified to provide a distinguished example of their faith and loyalty to the Messenger of Allah.
“The anniversary of the Prophet’s birth connects us to the greatest Islamic symbol, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad, and it strengthens our connection to Islam and the Quran, enhancing awareness,” he underlined.
National wealth squandered, plundered
Regarding Yemen’s internal affairs, al-Houthi revealed that the absence of competency standards is one of the main reasons for problems in all state institutions, adding that the deprivation of services is an issue that Yemenis all over the nation complain about.
“National wealth has been squandered and plundered for decades, not harnessed for the service of the Yemeni people,” he said. Some political figures have accumulated immense wealth, and they are now enjoying it in the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere, the leader added.
“Officials from the previous regime are shedding crocodile tears for the Yemeni people today, standing with the coalition of aggression after they contributed to the shedding of Yemeni blood.”
Al-Houthi underlined that the stability of state institutions in recent years is an achievement in and of itself, adding that the situation in state institutions should not continue as it is because there are deep imbalances in systems, laws, and procedures.
He asserted his belief that radical change should be accompanied by popular direction to change the reality of institutions, noting that there are effective and loyal cadres who have served the country diligently in various provinces, but there are also weak cadres, some of whom are exploited and others are hostile.
The enemies want the Yemeni people to become without identity or belonging, hoping that the people achieve freedom, independence, and dignified living.
He stressed that the Yemeni people are among the most virtuous in the world in preserving their moral and religious values, as evidenced by their interaction with the commemoration of the noble birth anniversary of the Prophet.
Military capabilities bolster hope
The leader of the Ansar Allah movement affirmed that Yemen’s enemies have witnessed the capabilities of the movement’s military, and they have seen its strikes reaching deep into Saudi Arabia and the UAE despite their possession of advanced defense systems.
He emphasized that the significant achievements in the military field instilled hope in the Yemeni people for actual change and effective reform in state institutions.
A few days ago, the annual Grand Prophet’s Festival took place in Sanaa, which included theatrical, musical, and poetic performances, commemorating the noble birth anniversary of the Prophet.
As part of the celebrations held in Yemen, cities and villages across Yemen were illuminated with green colors, from the mountains to the coasts.
Previously, Sayyed al-Houthi addressed Yemen’s military capabilities and its recent advancements, in a speech commemorating the September 21st Yemeni Revolution.
The leader said Yemen continues to improve its missile and rocket arsenal, comprising long-range rockets, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and various attack drones.
“Our country possesses missile technology, and the missile capabilities have evolved exponentially from long-range missiles to guided and ballistic ones, not to mention drones,” he said.
Sayyed al-Houthi pointed out that the blockade imposed on Yemen led to inverse results pushing its military to domestically produce weapons ranging “from pistols to missiles.”
He added that Yemen’s Armed Forces have also been remarkably successful in foiling several terrorist attacks, including assassination attempts, underscoring their vast contributions to maintaining Yemeni security.
The US administration has opted to employ aggressive policies against Yemen, taking advantage of internal division in an attempt to push the country into the abyss, al-Houthi emphasized.
Furthermore, the Yemeni leader highlighted the dire crisis that Yemen’s National Army endured during the US administration prior to the September 21 Revolution, marked by infighting within its ranks, under the auspices of the US.
The US administration aimed to exploit internal division in Yemen for its own strategic ends, but according to the Ansar Allah leader, the Yemeni people were cognizant of Washington’s intentions and effectively thwarted its plans on September 21, 2014.
In the context of the war on Yemen, al-Houthi said the US-Saudi-led coalition killed thousands of Yemeni civilians, carrying out genocides in the country through direct military action, not to mention the siege, which has left millions endangered by starvation.
Professor David Miller is a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Zaim University and a former Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol. He is a broadcaster, writer and investigative researcher; the producer of the weekly show Palestine Declassified on PressTV; and the co-director of Public Interest Investigations, of which spinwatch.org and powerbase.info are projects. He tweets @Tracking_Power – though he has been shadow-banned by Twitter.
The Israel lobby is working directly with the Canadian government and with Silicon Valley corporations to quash the voices of those critical of its expansionist policies and systematic oppression of its indigenous population.
One clear example of this came last September when an international parliamentary committee met in Congress in Washington, DC, to demand that Twitter remove the account of Palestinian-Canadian Laith Marouf. Marouf is a multimedia producer who currently serves as a senior consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Centre and the coordinator of ICTV, a project to secure a national multi-ethnic news television station in Canada. He also has a long record of active support for Palestinian rights.
As such, Marouf – whose Community Media Advocacy Centre is funded by the Canadian government – faced official consequences for comments he made critiquing Israel. But the Trudeau administration went further to secure his erasure from social media, which should concern all those who believe in free speech.
Marouf’s case is just one in an endless stream of such acts happening all over social media and beyond. Marouf, in other words, was not the first and certainly will not be the last. Furthermore, his case opens the floodgates for the stream of suspensions to become a torrent.
As a major human rights abuser engaged in apartheid and military occupation of Palestinian land, Israel’s working relationship with big tech and the Canadian government is showcasing how antisemitism is being weaponized to target, flag and now vanish accounts critical of the apartheid state.
Marouf’s case also highlights the existence of a nearly fifty-year alliance between a Canadian national and a former Soviet dissident – a relationship that began as part of an Israeli intelligence operation. This history directly ties what happened to Marouf to Israel’s foreign policy strategies developed between 2000 and 2016.
A BIASED GROUP
The Interparliamentary Task Force To Combat Online Antisemitism is, as the name suggests, an international grouping of parliamentarians. Launched in September 2020, the task force is focused on increasing awareness of and developing responses and solutions to allegedly growing online antisemitism. Its first hearing was held on September 16, and the committee called executives from Twitter, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok to testify and explain how and why accounts like those of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, were still in existence. Khamenei’s English Twitter account has nearly a million followers. At the time of writing, it and its Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Farsi alternative accounts remain live.
Former Canadian member of parliament (MP) Michael Levitt went over his five allotted minutes in his enthusiasm to denounce Marouf’s tweets. Another member of the task force devoted some of her time to arguing that “Zionism as an identity” should be included as a “protected characteristic.” She elaborated, “Zionist is an integral part of the identity of the majority of Jews and many non-Jews who self-define as Zionists.”
But who is on this committee, and why would they make such an argument? Answering this question accurately involves peeling back several layers of the onion and tracing back the origin story of this latest assault on online Palestinian speech.
An exhausted Laith Marouf and his CUTV crew report live from the ground in Montreal, May 20, 2012. Alexis Gravel | Flickr
It is claimed that the committee consists of “bipartisan legislators” and parliamentarians from Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Yet this claim of “bipartisanship” is quickly scotched. The task force’s four South African members identify as Zionists and are part of the controversial Democratic Alliance, the party for whom most White South Africans vote. No African National Congress (ANC) members are involved in the group. At the hearing, one MP denounced the ANC, reportedly claiming, “The greatest proponents of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment comes from our government.”
Members of the Task Force from the US include Democratic Congresspersons Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has visited Israel on an AIPAC-sponsored tour, and Ted Deutch, the newly-appointed CEO of the Zionist lobby group, the American Jewish Committee.
Among the British representatives is Andrew Percy, the Conservative MP who converted to Judaism in 2017 partly because of “a wholehearted commitment to support of Israel.” The other British representative is Alex Sobel, a longtime supporter of the Zionist affiliate of the Labor Party, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). The Canadian representatives included the former MP Michael Levitt, who is now President-CEO of the Zionist Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Also from Canada was Anthony Housefather, who in 2019 wrote, “I have always been and will continue to be a huge supporter of Israel.”
Along with two Members of the Israeli Knesset (MK) was the former MK Michal Cotler-Wunsh. Widely respected journalist Gideon Levy has described Cotler-Wunsh as both “an expert on human rights, an enlightened intellectual” and “nationalist, racist, cruel.”
At the hearing itself, three more Zionists were present. The first was the Israeli special representative for antisemitism, Noa Tishby. Recently Tishby denounced Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Bella Hadid – all Muslim women – as anti-Semites for condemning the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers. Tishby reportedly “singled out only criticism of Israel from Muslim Americans,” showing an apparent “effort to cast their anger as the product of ethnic or religious bigotry.” Another Zionist at the hearing was Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, appointed in March 2022. According to Ismail Allison of CAIR, Lipstadt has a “history of using bigoted rhetoric, including Islamophobic … talking points.”
Well-known Canadian politician and jurist Irwin Cotler was also in attendance. He is Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, a position receiving CA$ 5.6 million over five years beginning in 2022. He is also the stepfather of Michal Cotler-Wunsh MK, mentioned above. As it turns out, Cotler is the most significant actor in this story, being deeply embedded in Zionist lobby networks.
Unsurprisingly, no representative of Arab or Palestinian origin is involved in the task force.
20 YEARS OF CLASHES
Marouf claims that “in 2021, I began to be stalked and harassed online by Zionists in the Broadcasting sector in Canada.” These efforts led to his Twitter account being shut down for “hateful conduct” and promoting “violence against or directly attacking” people with protected characteristics like race, ethnicity or national origin.
In fact, Marouf has spent much of the past two decades years combatting Zionist efforts to censor him. The first such instance happened at Concordia University in 2001 when he was the first Arab candidate to be elected to a student union executive in Canada. Within months of his appointment, he was “expelled summarily … for writing that ‘Zionism is Jewish Supremacy’”. He won an ensuing six-month court battle with the university. After that, however, the attacks continued; the next was from the Chair of the Department of History, who, as Marouf noted, was also the chair of a Zionist lobby group.
Among the interlocutors back in 2002 was then-MP Irwin Cotler. Cotler’s reputation was at that stage not nearly as great as it is now. Perhaps this is why Marouf’s comrades were able to occupy his office, following which the police were called. Marouf has confirmed to Mintpress that he was “part of the organizing of the occupation” but was not present in the office.
At the time of Marouf’s clashes with Cotler, Cotler’s wife, Ariela, was also involved in the events. She was President of the board of Montreal Hillel in 2001 during the most heated period at Concordia. Hillel is the Zionist student organization on campus in Canada and the US. She “played a major role in the pro-Israeli activity” at that time, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think tank.
Before that, Ariela had been parliamentary secretary for Menachem Begin. As can be imagined from this, Ariela is a hardline Zionist and claims to have been involved “at the cradle” with the creation of the so-called Birthright program, which takes young Jews to “Israel” despite there being no “birthright” for Jews in Canada or elsewhere to colonize Palestine.
Ariela Cotler has also been involved in a wide range of other Zionist lobby groups, including the Canada Israel Committee and the Federation Combined Jewish Appeal, the largest Zionist fundraiser in Canada. The Federation CJA, as it is known, has promoted Canadians joining the Israeli army.
IRWIN COTLER – ZIONIST REGIME ASSET
Cotler’s public persona is that he has some sympathy for the underdog. At the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, he notes he has been described as “Counsel for the Oppressed” and as “Freedom’s Counsel.” His 600-word profile does not use the words “Israel,” “Zionism,” “Jewish,” or “antisemitism”; his decades-long advocacy for the crimes of the State of Israel are not even hinted at.
Born in 1940, he took degrees at McGill University and then secured a Law postgraduate degree at Yale in 1966. In 1968 he was hired as a speechwriter for the then Justice Minister for four years. In 1970 he was appointed as an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto before being appointed Professor at McGill in 1973. That same year he helped found and became President of the pro-Israel Canadian Professors for Peace in the Middle East, and he then “spent his summers travelling the Middle East.”
By the late 1970s, he was already heavily involved in Zionist advocacy, being the lawyer for Anatoli Shcharansky. A Ukrainian Zionist activist, Shcharansky was active in agitation as part of an operation run by a secret Israeli intelligence organization, Nativ, to access new settlers from the Soviet Union. Was Cotler aware that he was involved in an intelligence operation?
Cotler is welcomed by Benjamin Netanyahu during a 2014 visit to Israel. Photo | Israeli GPO
In 1978 while working with Shcharansky, he was living in the Jewish quarter of Damascus and, not surprisingly – given his Zionist contacts – drew the attention of Syrian officials. He also spent time in Egypt in 1975, 1976 and 1977, making contact with the political elite, including the foreign minister, and was introduced to President Anwar Sadat. Knowing that Cotler would later visit Israel, Sadat “asked him to deliver a message to … prime minister Menachem Begin.”
Cotler claims he said “he didn’t know” Begin “particularly well.” But when he arrived in Israel, he was “invited to lunch with members of the Knesset.” There he met a Begin staffer named Ariela Zeevi, who took him to meet her boss. The message was, “Egypt was prepared to enter into peace negotiations with Israel.” Cotler later married the staffer in 1979 and became a “close personal friend” of Begin.
ZIONIST LOBBY STALWART
In 1980, Irwin Cotler was appointed President of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Four years later, he participated in a Jerusalem conference entitled “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image.” (Hasbara is a Hebrew word meaning “explanation,” which is used as a synonym for “propaganda” in English). The American Jewish Congress ran the event, a group with a history of working directly with the Israeli intelligence agency Nativ, a campaign to recruit new settlers from the Soviet Union. Though referred to only as a professor of law at McGill, Cotler made it clear that he was a committed partisan of Israeli hasbara, complaining that “hasbara efforts are discriminated against” and that “Israel itself has become some kind of illegitimate entity.”
Since this public declaration of commitment to the cause of Zionism, he has taken up a dizzying number of appointments in Zionist organizations. He is or has been affiliated with a wide range of Zionist groups on three continents, including,
All of these groups are closely related to the State of Israel, some with intelligence connections, some in receipt of funds, or created by Tel Aviv. None of these roles are listed in his biography at the Wallenberg Center, to which he is currently attached. Nor are Cotler’s interesting links with the far right in Ukraine; he is reportedly on the advisory board of “Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter,” which honored Ukrainian Nazis who collaborated with Nazi Germany and massacred Jews in the 1940s.
ENTER THE MOSSAD
But it is in the policy planning process of the state of Israel that Cotler seems to have made the most significant impact. Cotler has been, as British writer Antony Lerman puts it, “probably the most significant and influential international figure in the propagation of the concept of the ‘new antisemitism.’” As codified and finally published in its current form in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, the “working definition” of antisemitism is the weapon of choice of the Zionist movement to intimidate and bully supporters of the Palestinians.
While the idea of the new antisemitism has roots back to the 1940s and was a subject of renewed interest from the early 1970s, the administrative infrastructure to redefine antisemitism flourished from the late 1980s when Mossad was given the lead in the coordination of the strategy. As Lerman has noted, the Monitoring Forum on Antisemitism, established in 1988, “aimed at establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism by Jewish groups worldwide.” It “was coordinated and mostly implemented by Mossad representatives” working in Israeli embassies.
A key step in the process was the first Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in January 2000. The resulting Stockholm Declaration “became the founding document” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. Cotler headed the Canadian delegation to that event. He was also a key figure in responding to the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, which concluded that Zionism is racism. In a hyperbolic reply for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, he denounced “what was supposed to be a conference against racism” [emphasis in original], saying it “turned into a conference of racism against Israel and the Jewish people.” He also decried what he called a new “genocidal antisemitism – the public call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.
Cotler was engaged directly with the state of Israel’s response to Durban in co-founding the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA) in 2002 “in collaboration with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior.” This venture, however, collapsed, its main problem being that it was obviously an instrument of Israeli foreign policy. Even an arch-Zionist like Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League observed: “If a lot of its strategy and implementation is coming from Israel, I won’t be supportive of it.”
In 2003 a new body, the Global Forum for Combatting Antisemitism, was created by Melchior and Cotler’s friend and former “client” Natan Sharansky (formerly known as Anatoli Shcharansky, he changed his name to Zionise it, as do many incoming settlers). Sharansky was also – as an Israeli government minister in charge of antisemitism —chair of the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism, which had been set up in the 1990s. “The State of Israel has decided to take the gloves off and implement a coordinated counteroffensive against antisemitism,” Sharansky said.
Scharansky, right, holds the Congressional Gold Medal presented to him by President Reagan, center, as President-elect Bush looks on, Jan. 11, 1989. Barry Thumma | AP
In his “3D test of antisemitism,” Sharansky took up the idea of discrimination against a nation-state, trialed by Cotler. It focused only on the occasions where it was claimed that criticism of Israel became antisemitism:
“demonization” is “when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion”;
“double standards,” when criticism of Israel is “applied selectively”;
“delegitimization” when Israel’s “fundamental right to exist” is denied.
These are tendentious arguments. Who is to judge what is “sensible” or “selective”? No regime or even state has a “fundamental” right to exist.
Cotler and Sharansky would frequently connect again over the course of the ensuing decade. For example, they both attended the February 2008 Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism. It was here that the plan to extend the event around the globe was announced. Though it has been claimed that the subsequent London event was independent, the 2008 event it was seen as simply another GFCA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) event. Minister Tzipi Livni personally thanked British MOP John Mann for ‘volunteering to host the Global Forum next year.’
Tellingly, the new body used the identical name to the previous 2002 effort: the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). Sharansky was an advisor.
In 2009, Cotler was on the steering committee of the ICCA. Also, there was Fiamma Nirenstein, an Italian writer and politician who has lived in an illegal settlement in East Jerusalem since 1998. Cotler led a delegation of 11 Canadian MPs to the event. Together, they decided to form a Canadian coalition. Thus was the Israeli network extended to Canada: the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism. It met in November 2010 and produced a final report the following year. Canadian groups which were critical of the redefinition of antisemitism to equate it with anti-Zionism responded to the consultation, but their submissions were “excluded from the hearings.”
The ICCA would host conferences in London in February 2009, Ottawa in November 2010, Brussels in June 2012 and Berlin in March 2016. A “task force” report on “internet hate” was published in 2013. In addition, an Italian parliamentary report was published in 2011, having reportedly taken “inspiration” from the ICCA. Similar German parliamentary reports came out in 2011 and 2017. These reports, commissions and groupings laid the groundwork for the American hearing late last year that removed Marouf from social media.
ZIONIST INFLUENCES EMBEDDED IN TWITTER
As the State of Israel developed its strategy to redefine antisemitism as opposition to Israeli government policy, it embedded a number of Zionist lobby groups in the process. For example, advisors on the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism included the following: The U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), B’nai B’rith International (BBI), the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and the U.K.-based Community Security Trust (CST). Some of these advisors to the state of Israel were carried over as advisors to the European Union Monitoring Center, which first introduced the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2005. Both the ADL and BBI were there, as was the EU branch of the WJC, the European Jewish Congress and the UK-based CST.
When Twitter started to appoint advisors on content, these same groups were again in the frame, with no indication that they were essentially assets of the Israeli government. In 2015, Twitter launched a safety center and listed a number of ‘trusted partners’ in the US, Australia, and Europe.
In the area of offensive speech, it listed both the ADL and CST as concerned with antisemitism. Twitter executives have referred to the CST as “empowering” Twitter to “take action.” The big tech platform takes advice from precisely zero Palestinian organizations or grassroots Muslim groups on how to regulate its content.
From 2018, the list of groups working with Twitter evolved. In addition to the ADL, two new European groups were added: the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the UK and the Centre Européen Juif d’Information [European Jewish Information Center] (CEJI) in Brussels. Both these groups are strongly pro-Israel. The Board of Deputies unblushingly admits in its 2020 Trustees report that it enjoys a “[C]lose working relationship with the Embassy of Israel in the UK, including with the Ambassador, diplomats, and professional staff, and strengthened links to the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the IDF Spokesperson Department.”
The CEJI is a Zionist organization that advertises working closely with a range of other Zionist groups as “partners,” including B’nai B’rith Europe and the CST. Scandalously, amongst its funders are a host of social media firms, including Twitter itself. So Twitter funds a Zionist lobby group to lobby Twitter on issues relating to the question of Palestine. It is not surprising, therefore, that when pressure is brought to bear from apparently bipartisan lawmakers, and Twitter turns to its trusted advisors, pro-Israel decisions are routinely made. The whole process of both pressure and response is entirely corrupted by Zionist influence.
Israel’s government is also heavily involved in censoring pro-Palestinian content online. According to 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, the Israeli Ministry of Justice Cyber Unit sends requests to remove Palestinian content to tech giants. Through Israel’s access to information law, the government said requests to social media companies led to the deletion of 27,000 posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Google from 2017-2018.
CONCLUSIONS
After all these years, Cotler continues to spearhead illegitimate attempts to subvert solidarity with Palestine under the guise of fighting antisemitism. Shored up by a constantly evolving Zionist movement with its front groups, lobby initiatives and covert operatives (many of whom are embedded in Twitter’s own editorial structures), it is not a surprise that Twitter censored Laith Marouf’s account.
The Israel lobby’s cancel culture depends on the decades of work done by Cotler as an Israeli asset and by his close co-conspirator, the former Soviet prisoner and Israeli government minister Sharansky. Both have been central to forging the “criticism of Israel is antisemitism” weapon which is put to daily use by the lobby through their operatives on the ground, via inter-parliamentary front groups or via the editorial structures of Twitter itself, to do the bidding of a foreign state.
It seems clear that the entry of Iran into the line came at the request of Damascus, which thus wanted to balance the Iranian role with the information that constantly talks about common and intertwined personal and official interests between Presidents Putin and Erdogan.
The following is the English translation from Arabic of the latest article by Turkish career journalistHusni Mahali he published on 2nd Feb 2023 on Al-Mayadeen news site Al-Mayadeen Net:
Two days after President Erdogan’s statements, in which he said, “Let Turkey, Iran, and Syria meet to discuss possibilities for a final solution,” Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said, in the press conference, with his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukry, in Moscow, “Today, an agreement has been reached aimed at Iran’s participation in the process of settling and normalizing relations between neighboring Turkey and Syria.
This means Cairo’s approval, perhaps on behalf of other Arab countries, of the Iranian role. This was recognized, the day before yesterday, by Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s spokesman, when he said, “We will be happy with Iran’s contribution to the mediation efforts with Damascus because Tehran is an important player in the Syrian crisis from the beginning.”
Minister Lavrov’s words came after a series of contacts and visits by his Iranian counterpart, Hussein Abdollahian, to Beirut, Damascus, and Moscow, followed by the visit of the Foreign Minister of Qatar, Ankara’s ally, to Tehran, days after the Abu Dhabi summit, in which the leaders of a number of Arab countries, including Qatar and Egypt, participated. This explains Minister Lavrov’s taking advantage of Minister Shukri’s visit to Moscow to talk in his presence about Iran’s involvement in the mediation efforts between Erdogan and President Assad.
It seems clear that Iran’s entry into the line came at the request of Damascus, which thus wanted to balance the Iranian role with the information that constantly talks about common and intertwined personal and official interests between Presidents Putin and Erdogan, which was reason enough for Moscow not to put pressure on Ankara on the issue of Idlib and the Syrian north. in general, but succeeded in persuading Ankara to seek rapprochement with Damascus.
There is much talk in the Turkish media about Russian financial support for Erdogan, to help him win the upcoming elections, which are crucial for Erdogan, Turkey, and Russia as well.
It has become clear that Turkey, before and after these elections, will witness interesting developments related to Erdogan’s foreign calculations, which will have direct and indirect repercussions on the internal situation. The Syrian crisis comes at the forefront of these calculations, and the reason for this is the problem of the Syrians in Turkey, which will be an important electoral material that the opposition will use against Erdogan.
It has also become clear that he, that is, Erdogan will make the minimum concessions required of him to ensure his meeting with President Assad before these elections, and his chances are still few, according to all independent opinion polls, especially after the “Nation Alliance” announced its electoral project that includes 2,300 items aimed to fix everything Erdogan destroyed during his 20 years of rule.
Among these concessions was his acceptance of Iran’s entry into the line of rapprochement between him and President Assad at this time, when Tel Aviv, Washington, Western countries, and its other allies are conspiring against Iran, which was attacked by unknown drones that targeted a military complex in the city of Isfahan.
In parallel, tension appears between Baku and Tehran due to the armed attack on the Azerbaijani embassy in Iran and the killing of one of the embassy guards. This is what some nationalist circles in Turkey and Azerbaijan exploited to launch a hostile campaign against Tehran, which they have been doing for a long time due to Iranian support for Syria in the years of the so-called “Arab Spring”.
On Tuesday, the leader of the National Movement Party, Devlet Bahchali, who is an ally of President Erdogan, said, “Azerbaijan is a state and nation of Turkish origin, the same as South Azerbaijan,” meaning northwestern Iran. This Turkish nationalist provocation is accompanied by a similar provocation and escalation from the nationalist circles in Azerbaijan, which has established and developed in recent years intertwined military and intelligence relations with “Tel Aviv”, which has established a number of espionage bases near the Azerbaijani border with Iran, which is what it did in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, especially in areas under the rule of Masoud Barzani
At a time when the Jewish lobby controls most of the Azerbaijani media, which is waging a hostile and violent campaign against Iran, which coincided with the visit of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to Azerbaijan, and a day later to Armenia, the two neighbors of Tehran.
Minister Lavrov’s talk about an “agreement” on Iran joining the Russian mediation between Assad and Erdogan seems clear that it came in support of the Astana process, but this time with Egyptian and Gulf approval, which may be reflected in support for the Egyptian-Turkish reconciliation path, that is, of course, if the Gulf capitals are sincere in their desire to return things to normal with Damascus.
It is not clear what practical positions the aforementioned capitals will take towards Iran entering the rapprochement line, which, if achieved, will undoubtedly be with the consent of the Gulf, which Erdogan hopes to support him financially, politically, and psychologically on the eve of the elections that will be on May 14.
Everyone knows that Erdogan was and still needs significant financial support from abroad, just as he needs media materials to help him gain more support, which will be achieved by meeting President Assad and announcing together their agreement to return Syrian refugees to their country. It is the issue that, if Erdogan succeeds in it, he will pull the rug out from under the feet of the opposition, which holds him responsible for the refugees and the entire Syrian crisis.
And while waiting for the American, Israeli, and European reaction to Iran’s entry into the mediation line between Erdogan and Assad, which is a victory for Iranian diplomacy at this particular time, everyone is waiting for President Erdogan to take practical and quick moves to resolve the issue of rapprochement before he is exposed to any external pressure, and the situation east of the Euphrates will be one of the most important elements of these pressures, since the rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus will aim, first or second, at joint action against the Kurdish “SDF” and “People’s Protection Units”.
This will be the biggest challenge for Erdogan and before Assad, especially if the Americans think about confronting Russian plans through Turkey, Syria, Iran, and perhaps Iraq as well. This may lead to a real and serious crisis in the relationship between Ankara and Washington, and it has enough reasons for such a crisis, as Turkey is a member of NATO which has many of its bases on its soil.
Ultimately, the bet remains on the success of Russian diplomacy in persuading Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar (Erdogan’s ally) of the necessity of urgency in achieving the Turkish-Syrian rapprochement, and by completing it, Erdogan’s reconciliations with Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh will acquire practical importance from which everyone will benefit.
And without it being clear how Tel Aviv will respond to these Russian moves, which Washington will obstruct by various means, and its biggest weapon for that is the Syrian Kurds with their extensions in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. They are Tel Aviv’s weapon also until the Gulf regimes convince Netanyahu and his allies in the terrorist government that the war is no longer in their interest and that the Palestinian youth generation, after the events in Jenin and the heroic Al Quds (Jerusalem) operation, is not the generation that will surrender to the conspirators against it internally, regionally and internationally, as long as there are those who stand and will stand by its side among the honorable people of the nation, and everyone knows them and they are the true source of terror for the Zionist entity and its allies in the region!
Syria News is a collaborative effort by two authors only, we end up most of the months paying from our pockets to maintain the site’s presence online, if you like our work and want us to remain online you can help by chipping in a couple of Euros/ Dollars or any other currency so we can meet our site’s costs.
A huge amount has changed in the twelve years since we started our weekly BDS actions, organized by the Australian Friends of Palestine Association (Afopa), in the heart of Adelaide, Australia. People no longer spit at us, call us terrorists, or use vile verbal abuse for our protesters of Middle Eastern appearance.
We are now more likely to be hugged and congratulated for standing up for Palestinians. It is blatantly obvious here in Adelaide that the Australian government’s craven toadying to the will of the Israel lobby and the United States when it comes to Palestinian human rights has not kept pace with the hearts and minds of the general population.
This 12-year mark is a good time to reflect on some of our successes. One of the most important of these is the grassroots organizational structure of the group. Our approach stands in stark contrast to some politicians and bureaucrats in this country but firstly a few examples of how individuals in our group have used their local knowledge and initiative to drive change.
For 12 years now, Helen Lawrie and Phil Davies have been writing original songs about Palestine, BDS campaigns, and/or adapting other songs. In just one example Helen turned “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” into “Diamonds are Israel’s Best friend.” The YouTube of this song traversed the seas to Sean Clinton, in Ireland, and was promoted widely by international Blood Diamond activists. I am happy to say the crucial Blood Diamond campaign is still going strong and becoming more influential.
In 2017, Dr. David Faber, Afopa’s historian, researched the facts of the Australian Light Horse Brigade’s action in Beersheba in 1917. This meant that Australian activists had knowledge at their fingertips to refute the Zionist myth, promulgated at the 100-year anniversary of Beersheba, that Australian soldiers died to create the state of Israel. We were part of a national campaign that led eventually to the chief sponsor, Australia Post, withdrawing all their public statements promoting this lie.
Another 2017 success story resulted from an action initiated by one of our most dedicated activists who has braved all conditions to stand weekly in Rundle Mall, Joe Frank. While he was in the hospital that year, Joe filled out his place of birth as Palestine on the mandatory forms for admission. The next day he was given a printout that said his place of birth was ‘Not Given’; apparently, there was no place in the database for Palestine. Obviously, a bureaucrat in Canberra at the stroke of a pen had decided to toe the Zionist line, or been instructed to toe the Zionist line, and deny the existence of Palestinians.Joe wrote a strong letter of complaint. Sometime later Joe received an email from the Australian Bureau of Statistics saying that a code has now been allocated for Palestine.
Not all of Joe’s campaigns were resolved so quickly. He had to persist for a year in asking the Australian government to change his country of birth from ‘Unspecified’ to Palestine on his new passport. Makes you wonder who are the bureaucrats dreaming up such weasel words to help the Zionist cause and then imposing them on every Palestinian in Australia.
After battling for a year Joe was informed he had won the case at mediation. This was a major win for all Australian Palestinians. Joe’s achievements with these two issues show that even the most powerful federal bureaucracies can change and you do not always need a large group of activists or powerful people or politicians just one Palestinian-Australian.
Reflecting on these successes is heartening and inspires us to keep going. However, we also know the noose is tightening – we see it in the Mall and the city every week. This last year has seen a local group of Christian Zionists increasing their harassment, increasing their stalking, flaunting their close relationship with security agencies, and increasing the numbers of Zionists in the Mall, especially on Friday evenings. Recently we were outnumbered 8 to 1.
We are also seeing the noose tightening at a government level with the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) Definition of Anti-Semitism laws attempting to shut down criticism of Israel and all BDS actions. Earlier this year a newly elected One Nation member of the South Australian Legislative Council introduced the adoption of what Dr. David Faber describes as this pseudo-definition. I am proud to say the Upper House in South Australia was prepared to reject this motion.
Unfortunately, some of our political parties are run like autocracies and the bureaucracies I have already mentioned. The hard word came down from Canberra that our South Australian Labor Party politicians had to toe the Zionist line. And they did. The South Australian Upper House has now adopted the pseudo-definition.
In a bizarre move, federal politicians have subsequently created a group named “The Parliamentary Friends of the IHRA Definition”. I believe this is the first time Australian politicians have befriended a definition. They usually create groups like Parliamentary Friends of the United States of America or Parliamentary Friends of Climate Action. To appease the Zionist lobby these politicians will happily support the silencing of free speech on human rights abuses in Palestine and make themselves ridiculous by cozying up to a definition.
Top-down control ignored the wishes of millions of Australians in 2003 and led to the obscenity and mass slaughter of the Iraq war now this dictatorial model of politics has led to senior politicians enforcing support for an Apartheid regime, Israel, and for silencing free speech in Australia. I would prefer to see political parties follow our Adelaide BDS group’s model of inclusive, grassroots decision-making and actions.
– Margaret Cassar is Convenor of the Australian Friends of Palestine’s BDS Activist Group, Co-founder of the Adelaide-based Scribes for Palestine organization, and Executive Member of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
We have a date with history and it is the liberation of Palestine today in the XXI century against the colonial yoke and anachronism called “Israel”.
Perhaps the end of hunger is the liberation of the world. Freedom is dignity and justice, there is no liberation with the injustice of hunger, hunger is savagery and slavery…The end of hunger is not in the universal human imaginary…It is a corpse theme and even laughable. There is an atheistic confession regarding the end of hunger in the world, anointed with alms, charity and philanthropy.
The liberation of Palestine is the liberation of the world
Zionism is a Eurocentric fascist movement and today it is the engine of imperial inhumanity and is the very normalization of fascism. Zionism is an enemy of humanity that with its despotic supra-power allows it to mock and subjugate the world as the untouchable bearer of Peace.
Zionism operates among rivals, i.e. there is American Zionism and there is Russian Zionism, and there is Chinese Zionism. There is Zionism in its fascist nature and there is also Zionism operating on the left wing. There is Nazi Christian Zionism as well as Islamo-fascist Zionism and at the same time, it operates in the illustrious temple of art, academia and intellectuality: in multiple cases in the scientific and technological plunder, always in the financial, commercial and media mafia. Its hyperrealistic power seems surrealistic.
For decades Zionism has been one of the great articulators of the West in the macabre spilling of the blood of the peoples of Africa and Latin America for the plundering of their natural resources.
In 1948, the Euro-Zionist movement succeeded in imposing a colonial regime in Palestine called “Israel”. It was imposed on the basis of ethnic cleansing against the native Semitic Palestinian people. The wounded Arab world protested and the international Zionist power managed to conceal its barbarism, stating that they were Arab savages, anti-Semitic Muslims… Zionism is the perfect crime, the victim is guilty. Western egocentric gluttony ejaculates in its creative and illustrative ignorance: They found the land of love, sang Edith Piaf in tribute to the colonial regime of “Israel” that massacred the native Semitic Palestinian people.
Note
“Israel” that was imposed in 1948 in Palestine is a classic colonialism, a colonial anachronism and its parallelism with the classic colonialism is that it does not come from a country but from a European movement (Zionism), which seeks to create a nation-state. In this case, they use the Jewish religious doctrine (Semitic heritage), they falsify history, they allege that it is about the ”return” to the ancestral land (Indo-Europeans, non-Semitic Jews). And this is why we are facing a colonialism in which it does not only colonize the land of the people but steals, appropriates the history of the native people, and this is because it is a colonialism that does not come from a country but from a movement that seeks to be a country. Therefore it takes the history of the native people. “Israelis” are not “Israelites”. This colonial particularity of usurping the native Palestinian history, culinary and cultural expression, is part of the equation of extermination of the Palestinian people. The native Palestinians are not only expelled from their homeland but the enemy seeks to expel them from history.
End of the note
It is worrying to see today, how the tyrannies, neo-colonial Arab monarchies, in order to perpetuate themselves in power, are investing colossal sums of money in the falsification of Islam, in school education, in large international Islamic forums, to present this colonialism as an Islamic principle. Be careful with this.
The liberation of Palestine, that is to say the end of the colonial regime of “Israel”, is the collapse of the Arab dictatorships, whether they are pro-imperialist Arab dictatorships or anti-imperialist Arab dictatorships.
Behind the cruel US imperial invasion of Iraq was the colonial regime of “Israel”, through the Zionist Lobby, as part of the colonial expansionist project: “Greater Israel”, from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Today, the colonial regime of “Israel” is in possession of at least 400 atomic bombs.
The humiliating Oslo Accords in which a Palestinian elite groveled and were forced to abandon the armed struggle. By abandoning the armed struggle, much of the Palestinian imaginary was lost, we no longer speak of the Fida’i. It used to be said: To be against “Israel” is not to be against the Jews. Now it is said: To criticize “Israel” does not mean to be against “Israel”. Without realizing it, we are becoming Zionists. It is criminally naïve to believe in the existence of this colonialism.
Former Palestinian leaders gave up the armed struggle for the peaceful struggle that already existed, but a peaceful struggle has not been achieved either, since Western repression does not allow us to express freely or to express the essence of the Palestinian Cause. We have not positioned our own lexicon, under the pretext that we must be intelligent, strategic, objective, subtle, tactical. Although the Palestinians have become more visible in the world, this has not stopped Zionism from advancing its ethnic cleansing in order to make the Palestinian people disappear.
Yes, war is perverse, but pacifism, in some cases of a petty bourgeois humanism, demagogic and in other honest cases, has proved not to be enough to fight the most powerful fascism of today; on the contrary, it has facilitated its advance. Zionism scoffs at all the great denunciations made by great institutions of the world including the UN. We are contemplating history instead of provoking history.
No one has the right to impose which is the way to resist, the peaceful or the armed struggle, both are valid. Another element is to impose on us to recognize Israeli colonialism as an alternative for Peace. That is a trap. As a native Palestinian of the Diaspora, I do not recognize colonial despotism. The solution is Palestinian independence. Never expel any so-called Israeli, they were born there, that is their land, that is Palestine.
Israeli colonialism is not limited to Palestine but to the rest of the Arab-Persian and Kurdish countries.
The end of the Palestinian people would be the victory of fascist obscurantism, an attack against the rest of the peoples of the world. The peoples of the world will be weaker.
We have a date with history and it is the liberation of Palestine today in the XXI century against the colonial yoke and anachronism called “Israel”. We have a debt to Humanity and that is to extirpate colonialism from our contemporary history and to extirpate the most powerful fascism of our time. It sounds lovely to say this, the challenge is immense, we must stop self-censorship, under the pretext that we must be strategic. We must kick the table, educating the world about the just Palestinian cause and the danger that Zionism poses to humanity. That embarks deep determination and steadfastness, therein lies the beauty of being Palestinian. From our Diaspora they will come for us to ruin our lives, but to liberate Palestine is the liberation of the world. A more dignified and noble world is mandatory.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
Today, some Arab tyrannies, in order to perpetuate themselves in power, seek to submit to this colonial-imperial force, putting the Arab-Persian world at risk.
Palestine in the face of “Palestinicide”
Zionism is a European colonial movement. The English historian Keith Whitelam conceptualizes it as the continuation of Colonial Europe. In 1948, Zionism succeeded in imposing a colonial regime in Palestine called “Israel”. It is classic colonialism, but it differs from historical colonialism in that it does not come from a people, but from a movement that aromatically falsifies history and disguises itself as a people, i.e. the “Jewish people”. Jews, Muslims, and Christians are not peoples, they are religions, and it is sad to have to explain this, at this point in human history and to a supposedly enlightened, educated, and secular world.
The West supposedly has to its credit a worthy history of fighting for secular values, which cost them blood. Secularism is today part of its identity and culture and is a sentiment, but it is inept and structurally ignorant to believe and feel that Jews are a people. To address this issue is to be discriminated against, even by pro-Palestinians. Beyond being a rotten Western taboo, it has its reckless consequences due to sophisticated totalitarian censorship, clear Western obscurantism.
The ideologues of Zionism foresaw that in their colonial enterprise, the day the native achieves his independence, they, as colonizers who do not come from a people but from a movement that seeks to become a people, do not have a point of return as happened in classical colonialism, that they as Jews would return to their respective original homelands. That is why Zionist colonialism has as its nature the very end of that native people in order to settle and ensure the foundations of a “nation-state” called “Israel”. This principle not only remains in force but also advances. Today, some Arab tyrannies, in order to perpetuate themselves in power, seek to submit to this colonial-imperial force, putting the Arab-Persian world at risk.
The colonial and expansionist regime of “Israel” withdrew from the Sinai territories in Egypt, conditioning and subjugating the Egyptian dictatorship. There is a false withdrawal from the Palestinian territories, conditioning and subjugating a caste of Palestinian traitors of the so-called Palestinian Authority. They maintain a military invasion in the Golan Heights in Syria. They unilaterally withdrew from South Lebanon, without conditioning and subjugating the Lebanese government or any Lebanese caste, and this exception is because they were overthrown by the Lebanese armed resistance of Hezbollah. The international Zionist lobby is the mastermind of the barbaric US imperial military invasion of Iraq, for the alleged establishment of democracy, and for the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There will be no justice in the Arab-Persian world, except through the abolition of “Israel’s” colonial expansionist anachronism.
The worst thing about the Oslo Accords is not Zionist colonialism that managed to infiltrate through the Palestinian Authority, but the “memoricide” exercised by that Palestinian Authority, erasing the essence or the raison d’être of what the cause of liberation of the native Palestinian people against the Israeli colonial yoke is. And this “memoricide” takes place when the armed struggle is abandoned, so people are encouraged to follow the “peaceful” approach of struggle, which already existed, that is to say, the cultural, legal, academic, political, financial, economic, media, intellectual, humanitarian, religious, artistic, culinary, and historical struggle, which already existed and must exist; it is vital and magical. But the point is that on the stage, in the peaceful universe, the raison d’être of the Palestinian Cause is censored, evaded. In fact, almost nobody talks about the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, anymore.
I do not remember the author of the phrase: “If you want peace, prepare for justice.” The Palestinian people are facing the most powerful fascist movement of our historical time. Zionism is neoliberal and non-neoliberal imperialism itself.
Armed struggle is not easy and neither is it a guarantee for the liberation of historic Palestine. The peaceful struggle is not easy; it focuses on human rights, and in many cases, it does not address the essence of the Palestinian Cause. Both fronts are important, all fronts of struggle are important.
From the peaceful stage, as a native Palestinian from the Diaspora, the daughter of peasant survivors of Al-Nakba, I fight against the colonial yoke of Israel, I fight for the National Liberation of my Palestinian people against a colonial force.
From the peaceful scenario, does the colonial regime of “Israel” have the right to exist? From the noblest of my soul, I say no. The so-called Israeli population would become Palestinian. Just to raise this is outrageous. I do understand and comprehend the reaction of not understanding; comprehending and accepting the right of native people to decide for themselves. I understand the atheists of freedom and justice.
Some might defend the existence of that colonial, imperial regime and anachronism and believe they have the right to do so, but what is not morally acceptable and constitutes an outrage to human dignity is censoring defending the others’ right to voice their rejection in the universe of debate. That is contrary to the free-thinking world.
There are those who lovingly state, I support “Israel”, and to those I say, support it in your country. why don’t you give it your homeland? There must be a debate, and this is part of the human condition.
I believe that we Palestinians must reposition ourselves, renaissance the root of our cause, be reiterative, not fall into distractions, and not submit to the reality of a contour or conjuncture. This implies intellectual courage and deep human fortitude in the face of so much censorship, fear, demonization, and threat. We must make our intellectual peaceful revolution. We must kick the table and be a rebellion of lucid intellectual light. Therein lies not only the beauty of the Palestinian Cause, but the beauty of being Palestinian.
… More than an intellectual challenge, it is to liberate intellectual fear, for Zionism itself is an intellectual, academic, media, legal, historical, moral, aesthetic, religious, archeological, sociological and philosophical fraud.
The Palestinian Liberation Cause is a direct cause for the protection of the Arab, Persian, and Kurdish world from Israeli expansionist colonialism. As I heard, it was said in the neighborhood of El Guarataro, in Venezuela, the liberation of Palestine is the liberation of the world.
Let us free ourselves from the self-censorship that sets the trap for us. We must be strategic, intelligent, and subtle. We will not receive any subsidy, if we do so, we will be rejected, demonized.
They operate an extermination plan against the Palestinian people; they not only colonized the homeland, but also its history, its cuisine, and its most popular artistic expression. And it is logical to say that, for example, they colonized the falafel and the embroidery. That is proof and sample that it is colonialism that does not come from a people, it needs to disguise itself as a people and take it from the native people. They are extermination modalities; they must expel Palestine from history.
It is all about being honest, the world, yes, the world is at risk in the face of Zionism. The Palestinians have an appointment with history and it is to liberate today, in the 21st century, their people from the anachronistic and expansionist colonial regime of “Israel”. Likewise, the Palestinians have a debt with humanity itself and it is to extirpate Zionism, the most powerful fascism of our time, for this we need everybody in, which is the struggle of our time.
Let me be riddled and demonized with the filthy and bastard accusation of the Zionist supremacy of anti-Semitism. Anyway, as Ernesto Guevara used to say, “How can my life matter if what is in danger is humanity.”
Yes, the liberation of Palestine is the liberation of the world, that is to say, taking steps against imperial, colonial atrophy and barbarism synchronized by Zionism.
The gloomy thing is that if we let the Palestinian people disappear, they will sadly exist in the echo of humanity as the cursed people, that by not liberating its noble cause, humanity remains in darkness. In this case, the outcome would be a cursed Palestinian, a traitor Arab.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district Ilhan Omar has already burst onto the political scene, and apparently ethnic cleansers and the Jewish lobby in the United States do not like this.
Omar has recently upset “nearly half of the Jewish Democratic lawmakers in the House” because she has summoned the moral and political law in order to assess what the US and Israel have been doing over the past few years or so. She asserted:
“We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”
That’s not supposed to be controversial at all. But among those groups, guess which one is upset? Well, you’ve got it: the Jewish democrats came out with pitchforks saying:
“equating the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban is as offensive as it is misguided. Ignoring the differences between democracies governed by the rule of law and contemptible organizations that engage in terrorism at best discredits one’s intended argument and at worst reflects deep-seated prejudice. The United States and Israel are imperfect and, like all democracies, at times deserving of critique, but false equivalencies give cover to terrorist groups. We urge Congresswoman Omar to clarify her words placing the U.S. and Israel in the same category as Hamas and the Taliban.”
Let’s just lay it on the line: the Taliban cannot and will never be able to top either the United States or Israel when it comes to committing crimes against humanity. Never! If you think otherwise, then pick up just one scholarly study: Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States, by Rebecca Gordon. According to a 2018-report, the so-called war on terror, for example, is responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 precious lives in Afghanistan Iraq, and Pakistan.
In any event, Omar was absolutely right: every country has to be examined on the same balance. If the United States and Israel cannot abide by the moral law, then they have absolutely no business going around killing precious civilians in the name of democracy and freedom. But it appears that Omar’s statement was viewed as anti-Semitic: “The House previously passed a resolution by Democrats condemning anti-Semitism in response to comments on Israel by Omar, and Republicans have long accused the Minnesota congresswoman of anti-Semitism — a charge she denies.”
It’s just plain silly. You can criticize the crimes in the black community, the United States, the UK, France, Japan, Korea, and you still can be on good terms with the powers that be. But the moment you say anything about the incestuous relationship between the United States and Israel, all of a sudden you are a vicious anti-Semite!
Well, that dumb ideology isn’t really having enough power over many people anymore, and that’s a good thing.
Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, history of Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled, Kevin MacDonald’s Abject Failure: A Philosophical and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and White Identity. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
Israeli leaders cannot fool everyone anymore with their stupid, mindless, pathetic, and impressively incoherent statement that they are just defending themselves.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, nails it: Israel has been perpetuating one categorical lie after another, and Israeli leaders don’t care whether they will be found to be hoaxers, fraudsters, and pathological liars.
The sad thing is that the US continues to send the regime at least $3 billion every single year. But as we have suggested in the previous article, people are waking up. Israeli leaders cannot fool everyone anymore with their stupid, mindless, pathetic, and impressively incoherent statement that they are just defending themselves. And once a person stands against their ideology, that person must ipso facto be an anti-Semite!
Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.
Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.”
The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.
I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror.
I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters.
I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror.
And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.
The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day.
The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.
The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions.
It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war.
Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.
Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy.
Saudi Arabia, a country that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.
Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges.
The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions.
Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people. From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land.
The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel is not defending the rule of law. Israel is not a democracy. It is an apartheid state.
That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors.
It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves.
The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech.
Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel.
This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians.
It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.
The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country. The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.”
Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement. Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.
The investment by Israel and its backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East.
These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.
The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel. This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites.
The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites.
Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous. It is not only bad for the Jews. It is bad for everyone. It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes. Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump.
Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other. They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence. The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence. These extremists are ideological twins.
This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society. It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security. Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States. It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.
It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.”
Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns.
Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion.
They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.”
Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.
Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”
Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims. This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.
There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States. The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies.
The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society.
We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down. It will be devastating for the Palestinians. It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.
Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, history of Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled, Kevin MacDonald’s Abject Failure: A Philosophical and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and White Identity. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
Lawrence Davidson is professor of history emeritus at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He has been publishing his analyses of topics in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, international and humanitarian law and Israel/Zionist practices and policies since 2010
Almost everyone in the West who is not a fan of Donald Trump—and if they are a fan, their sanity is to be doubted— assumes that U.S. President Joe Biden is now helping to save both the United States and the world. In some categories such as climate change, environmental regulation, economic reform favoring the poor and middle class, equal rights and, of course, combating the Covid-19 virus, they might have a point.
Nonetheless, it really saddens me to say that, at least in this author’s opinion, President Biden is not “the sharpest tack in the box.” That is, he is not the smartest guy in Washington, D.C. On the other hand, Joe has a strong point. He has the good fortune to have drawn together some very strong and progressive advisers on the domestic side of the political equation. It would also seem that, unlike his predecessor, Biden has the capability to actually listen to these people. He also has accommodated himself to the pressure put forth by true progressives such as Bernie Sanders.
The one exception to this wealth of good advice is on the other half of the job, in the area of foreign policy, in particular foreign policy toward the Middle East, and specifically policy toward the country of Israel. Here is where Joe has difficulty thinking straight and is out of luck with his chosen advisers.
To wit Andrew Bacevich of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft:
“Beneath a veneer of gender and racial diversity, the Biden national security team consists of seasoned operatives who earned their spurs in Washington long before Donald Trump showed up to spoil the party. So, if you’re looking for fresh faces at the departments of state or defense, the National Security Council or the various intelligence agencies, you’ll have to search pretty hard. Ditto, if you’re looking for fresh insights. In Washington, members of the foreign policy establishment recite stale bromides, even as they divert attention from a dead past to which they remain devoted.”
Part II—Analytical Shortcomings Nos. 1 and 1A: Policy Formulation toward Israel and the Palestinians
In the field of U.S.-Israeli relations, there are two areas where President Biden’s analytical shortcomings show themselves.
(1) The inability to formulate foreign policy that takes into account the behavior of the object of that policy.
President Biden says “my commitment to Israel is completely unshakable. As president, I’m going to continue our security assistance … and maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge. I’m not going to place conditions for the security assistance.” Essentially, this position abdicates U.S. national interests in favor of Israeli interests.
Here is a metaphor for such blind commitment. Think of how one adjusts attitudes toward friendships held over time. If you had a friend (we will refer to this friend as male) who, for whatever reason, evolved into a robber, would you give him a gun every year on his birthday? Would you do that because you remember he was a battered child and you think the arsenal you provide will make him feel secure and, hopefully, lead him to give up his criminal behavior? Or maybe you think he needs the gun because he lives in a bad neighborhood?
Biden believes that “Israelis wake up every morning facing an existential threat. That’s why we always have to be adamant that Israel must be able to defend itself.” But this is just a long-obsolete rationalization for spoiling your friend, who turns out to be head of the strongest gang on the block.
In the meantime, Biden points fingers at his predecessor for adopting exactly the same stance toward the Saudi Kingdom. Biden complained that “Donald Trump has given the government of Saudi Arabia a blank check to pursue a disastrous set of policies.”
(1A) The reverse side of this coin entails Joe Biden’s uninformed attitude toward the Palestinians. These are people who allegedly pose an “existential” threat to Israeli lives.
“The Palestinians need to end incitement in the West Bank and rocket attacks in Gaza. … No matter what legitimate disagreement they may have with Israel, it’s never a justification for terrorism.”
The truth is that it is the Palestinians who are under the “existential threat” and it is the Israelis who exercise massive violence against them, more often than not of a terroristic nature. When Palestinians resist Israeli oppression they are labeled terrorists, they are killed and their infrastructure is destroyed. When they do not resist, more and more of their land is taken. Volunteers must come from Europe to the West Bank so that farmers can harvest their olives without getting shot by Israeli settlers. Gaza is under blockade, not able to obtain basic supplies or vaccines. It should come as no surprise that “the death tolls in the Israel-Palestine conflict are lopsided, with Palestinians far more likely to be killed than Israelis. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which has compiled month-to-month fatality records, looking at the figures since 2005, 23 out of every 24 conflict deaths have been Palestinian.”
Biden also insists that the Palestinian Authority should “acknowledge, flat-out, Israel’s right to exist—period–-as an independent Jewish state and guarantee the borders.” Actually, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) did so in 1993. The Palestinian Authority suspended recognition in 2018 due to incessant theft of Palestinian land by Israel.
It appears that Joe Biden takes none of these facts into consideration. Is it because he does not know them? Such ignorance is certainly possible, though for a U.S. president it would be inexcusable. More likely, he has heard the Palestinian side, but cannot interpret it objectively because he is ideologically committed to the Israeli worldview.
President Biden has declared that “I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” Commitment to Zionism is commitment to an ideology. Seeing the world on the basis of an ideology—any ideology—must distort your understanding. Thus, Biden’s view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict becomes as lopsided as the conflict’s death toll.
Part III—Analytical Shortcoming No. 2: The BDS Movement
President Biden’s personal refusal to adjust U.S. policy to confront even those aspects of Israeli behavior he says he opposes—settlement activity and threats of annexation—carries over into his personal opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement against Israel, active both in the U.S. and Europe. Just as his reasoning is often faulty when refusing to match policy to Israeli behavior, it is also faulty as to his opposition to BDS.
On the one hand, “Joe Biden will protect the constitutional right of our citizens to free speech.” On the other, the president “has been unequivocal in condemning calls in the United States to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.” In other words, Americans can say it, but in this case, Joe ain’t listening.
According to the president, “the BDS movement singles out Israel—home to millions of Jews—in a way that is inconsistent with the treatment of other nations, and it too often veers into anti-Semitism.”
It is obvious that in the case of the BDS campaign, Israel is “singled out.” However, this is not unusual or “inconsistent with the treatment of other nations.” It is quite consistent. Cuban Americans single out Cuba. Other groups single out China, or Russia, or Myanmar and the like. Does the president dismiss these defenders of human rights because of their single-country focus? Of course not. Thus, he is being a hypocrite when singling out BDS.
In the case of Israel, those involved in BDS are mostly victims of Israeli oppression (Palestinians) or Jews who are utterly disgusted with what the Zionists are doing in their name. Israeli actions, particularly in the Occupied Territories, are in clear violation of international law and human rights declarations, and this gives the BDS a solid legal grounding. So what is Biden complaining about? Nothing that he has seriously thought through. And, when pushed on this, he falls back on the charge of anti-Semitism. Yet, the suggestion that the BDS movement is anti-Semitic is just a red herring.
Here is another quite legitimate justification for Americans, and others in the West, to “single out” Israel for attention by supporting BDS. Israel is indeed unique in that through its agents—Zionist lobbies—it is powerful enough to divert the debate over the aims of foreign policy in relation to much of the Middle East. That is, these agents of a foreign power divert the debate away from what is in the best interests of the U.S. or this or that Western nation, toward the question what is in the best interest of Zionist Israel. As a result, billions of dollars, pounds, euros and other resources have been diverted into making Israel a supremely powerful apartheid state.
Can President Biden understand these arguments? No more than any other self-proclaimed Zionist. As a Zionist he must, if he is to stay ideologically consistent, let Israel off the hook for its crimes. Sometimes this blinkered way of thinking creates embarrassingly contorted positions.
Consider this emotional proclamation made by then Senator Joe Biden at the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) Policy Conference, on March 20, 2016.
“Singling out Israel, [either at the UN or by BDS] is wrong! It’s wrong! I know it’s not popular to say, but it’s wrong, because as the Jewish people know better than any other people, any action that marginalizes one ethnic and religious group imperils us all. It’s incumbent upon us, all of us, that we stand up against those who traffic in pernicious stereotypes, who seek to scare and divide us for political gain, because the future belongs to the bridge builders, not the wall builders.”
Let’s unpack this declaration. We start with the sentence “the Jewish people know better than any other people, any action that marginalizes one ethnic and religious group imperils us all.” It is correct that, given their history, many Jews should recognize Biden’s statement as true. But all those who are Zionists will make an exception for Israel. They must do so in order to avoid outright contradiction. Why so? Because Israel has posited both its identity and its security on the “marginalization of one ethnic and religious group,” namely, Palestinians. Maybe President Biden senses that there is some inconsistency here, but being a Zionist he dismisses it as justified. Addressing an AIPAC audience, of course, meant no one challenged him.
We move on to the next sentence. “It is incumbent that all of us to stand up against those who traffic in pernicious stereotypes.” When Israeli leaders and Zionists such as Joe Biden constantly refer to Palestinians who resist Israeli oppression as “terrorists,” they too are “trafficking in pernicious stereotypes.” It is a safe guess that Biden does not realize this.
Next sentence, “It is incumbent that all of us that stand up against those who … seek to scare and divide us for political gain.” I cannot think of a more apt description of what the Zionist/Israeli aim is here in the United States and the West in general—to scare us away from the defense of Palestinian rights and divide us when it comes to legitimate criticism of Israeli behavior, all done for political gain in the form of maintaining an extraordinary level of financial and military support of an apartheid state.
Finally, the last statement, “because the future belongs to the bridge builders, not the wall builders.” It is amazing that, given his immediate audience, Biden made this statement with a straight face. For he was addressing those infamous for building a wall that divides and isolates.
Essentially, this entire declaration by Joe Biden attributes to BDS all the negative characteristics that Israel in fact displays. As a self-declared, true-believer Zionist, he does this without any recognition of the deep irony his declaration contains.
Part III—Conclusion
How much history does Joe Biden, or his foreign policy advisers, know? For instance, do they know the history of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency? Lyndon Johnson could have gone down in U.S. history as a remarkably successful and progressive leader. He could have done this on the basis of his championing civil rights. But he was destroyed by the Vietnam War—a war fought by the U.S. because of ideological imperatives.
President Biden may well be faced with the same choices. He probably could go down in U.S. history as the 21st century’s first truly great president for all those reasons listed at the beginning of this essay. But these achievements may be diminished by adherence to obsolete and dangerous foreign policies in the Middle East. If he follows his current trajectory he will bury the 2015 Iran agreement—one of the most promising diplomatic achievements of the 21st century. He may linger on in that “forever war” in Afghanistan. He will let both the Israelis and the Saudis off the hook for their past and future abominations. And, he will sustain Israeli dominance in the region even as that country confirms itself as a rightist, racist threat to human rights and international law. Through all of this Joe Biden may lose his moment in history.
If you think that Russia is or has been a threat to America and much of the West, I think you are mistaken. It was the same delusion that poison the mind of people like George Soros, who wrote in the Guardian back in 2016 that Vladimir Putin “is a bigger threat to Europe’s existence than Isis.”[1] Without the slightest evidence, Soros posited:
“The leaders of the US and the EU are making a grievous error in thinking that president Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a potential ally in the fight against Islamic State. The evidence contradicts them. Putin’s aim is to foster the EU’s disintegration, and the best way to do so is to flood Europe with Syrian refugees.
“Russia has also launched a large-scale air attack against civilians in northern Syria. This was followed by a ground assault by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s army against Aleppo, a city that used to have 2 million inhabitants. The barrel bombs caused 70,000 civilians to flee to Turkey; the ground offensive could uproot many more.”[2]
Complete fabrication! If Russia were liquidating Syrian civilians, why Syrian civilians appreciated the presence of the Russians in the region? One needn’t be a politician to realize that Soros’ formulation is generally dumb.
In any event, we shouldn’t be paying attention to people like Soros, particularly when they are postulating things that simply don’t make sense at all. Russia is not an enemy of the West. If there is one country that has been weakening the very foundation of what the founding fathers stood for, then it must be Israel. Perhaps people who doubt this statement should pay close attention to Philip Weiss here.
10-20 American mouthpieces for Israeli government had unrivaled access to Obama White House — Rhodes—Philip Weiss
Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser under President Obama, says that he had to meet with Israel lobbyists as much as all other interest groups combined; that these lobbyists were a tiny segment of the American Jewish community, the same 10 to 20 individuals; they invariably took the position of the Israeli government; and were apparently scripted by the Israelis in some cases.
He also said that White House national security aides were expected to appear at the Israel lobby group AIPAC’s annual conference, but if they paid attention to Arab-American or peace groups, they could “get in trouble.”
The Israel lobby’s access was reinforced by compliant media and Congress, with members of Congress at times warning Rhodes about the “acute” financial threat of taking on the lobby.
On Iran, the members would call me at the beginning of the August recess in 2015, when we’re having the Iran fight, and be like, AIPAC put out a press release saying they’re going to spend $40 million on ads on this. The money issue became acute. And people started to say, AIPAC told me they’d cancel my fundraisers if I vote this way. We’re never supposed to name the issue of money. But like when it became very acute and AIPAC is spending money and threatening people that they’re going to cancel fundraisers, suddenly you’re having that conversation in a way where you’re not even allowed to allude to it in normal circumstances.
Recall that in 2019 when Rep. Ilhan Omar dared to say that AIPAC used “benjamins” to command support for Israel in Congress, she was denounced far and wide and compelled to apologize for “antisemitic tropes,” though she was only saying what Rhodes says here.
Rhodes’s discussion of money echoes his 2018 memoir of the Obama years in which he said that after Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu lectured Obama in the White House in 2011, about why Israel could not accept the ’67 lines as a border, Rhodes had to get on the phone to “a list of leading Jewish donors . . . to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.” The concern then was the 2012 election.
Here are extended excerpts of Rhodes’s comments on the Israel lobby to Beinart. (I did a separate post on Israel’s disrepect for Obama per Rhodes yesterday, including Rhodes’s “shame” that the Obama White House pretended that Netanyahu believed in a two-state solution when he never did; and how the Biden team is forgetting the “history,” that Israel made life hell for Obama, sometimes in racially offensive terms).
On the omnipresence of the Israel lobby:
You meet more with outside, organized constituency groups on Israel than any other foreign policy issue. I’d actually go as far to say that . . . as a senior White House official working on national security . . . the number of people you meet from the organized pro-Israel community equals all the other meetings that you might do with kind of diaspora or constituency groups on all the other issues. It’s that degree of dwarfing. I’m pretty confident that’s consistent across [presidential] administrations . . .
You just have this incredibly organized pro-Israel community that is very accustomed to having access in the White House, in Congress, at the State Department. It’s taken for granted, as given, that that’s the way things are going to be done.
Rhodes said that any time there’s “daylight” between the U.S. government and the Israeli government, the White House hears from Democratic members of Congress.
The degree of congressional interest again dwarfs any other issue I worked on in the Obama years. Anything with a nexus to Israel, be it Iran or the Palestinian issue, the two dominant ones in our time, you’re going to hear from members of Congress, you’re going to be expected to be briefing members of Congress. If there’s any daylight between the US and the Israeli government, even Democratic members are going to be upset, concerned about that.
Netanyahu also applied pressure by calling on “vast” rightwing media resources in the U.S.
The media interest is dramatically intensified [on this issue]. And that’s both a very aggressive kind of pro-Likud media in the United States. It’s also just the mainstream media delights in any Israel controversies. Netanyahu knew that he could gin up the rightwing pro-Likud media in the United States, which is pretty vast, but he also knew that if he needled Obama he would create a week-long political story, because political reporters view Israel as a domestic political story, not a foreign policy issue.
So in all those ways, the outside pressure, the Congressional interest, the media interest, there’s just a much greater spotlight on anything with a nexus to Israel than on anything else. And inevitably that weighs on the minds of politicians and policymakers. You can’t act like it doesn’t.
Beinart asked how often aides had meetings with representatives of the pro-Palestinian side, and Rhodes laughed and said he was the only one to do so, because such meetings can get you “into trouble”– and they weren’t with Palestinians as such.
I would be the one to take those meetings. I actually did it like pretty regularly. Here’s the thing. Usually with me those types of meetings were either peace groups, sometimes Christian religious groups, Quakers and others advocating for peace. Sometimes Arab-Americans. Less Palestinian, but more broadly Arab-American. So there wasn’t a significant just-Palestinian or Palestinian-American organized constitutency that you would meet with… I ended up taking those meetings because look, not everyone wants to take those meetings. Because you can get into trouble if you’re seen as solicitous. I would get creamed in the rightwing press. I spoke at NIAC [National Iranian American Council] . . . Not on the Palestinian issue, but the Iran nuclear deal. You’d think I had dinner with the supreme leader of Iran. There’s a kind of chilling effect.
But everyone goes to AIPAC!
You are expected — every senior US government official in national security — is almost expected to turn up at AIPAC. You are not expected to turn up at NIAC.
Rhodes, who is half-Jewish, discussed the fact that Jews are heavily involved in policymaking and Arab-Americans are not.
I remember being in a meeting once early in the Obama years on Israel . . . I’m just acknowledging something and not suggesting that there’s anything inherently wrong with it. It just is what it is. I remember looking around the Situation Room on a meeting on the Israel/Palestine issue and every single one of us in the meeting was Jewish or of Jewish origin like me . . . Which again, I don’t want to sound conspiratorial. I’m not trying to advance a trope. I’m really not. I think it’s great that a lot of Jewish-Americans go into foreign policy and national security. I just remember thinking what if everybody in this room was Arab-American, you’d have a different [discussion].
We understand the Israeli fears and grievances and concerns intuitively as Jewish-Americans. Maybe not as much as Israelis . . . [but] we have some understanding with it in our unconscious literally . . . in a way that — intellectually, I can try to understand the Palestinian experience, but I don’t.
Rhodes said that the Israel lobby is a tiny subset of American Jews.
Over the eight years I met so many times with like the usual suspects from the organized American Jewish community. And part of what you start to realize is this is a pretty small number of people. The American Jewish community is a large, sprawling, raucous wonderful community, and it’s kind of like 10 to 20 people that you find yourself meeting with all the time, some of whom are by the way wonderful people. Some of whom, less so.
And they’re mouthpieces for the Israeli government.
And look, again — not a conspiracy, it is what it is. People are advocating a position. But it’s a common position. Whatever the tension point between us and the Israeli government was at a given time, they were usually coming in to represent what I knew to be the Israeli government’s view in that circumstance. There was a big push at the beginning of the Obama administration after Netanyahu’s election for the US to recognize Israel formally as a Jewish state, which actually had not been U.S. policy before 2009 . . . There was a big push on us to pressure the Palestinians into talks though it wasn’t clear those talks would lead anywhere.
Whenever there was an international incident like the Goldstone Report or the Turkish Flotilla, you have to make sure that you’re doing everything that you can at the U.N. to kind of block this from going forward.
The advice Rhodes got was at times intrusive and high-handed.
But I would also get advice on how to talk about these issues. I remember, to give you an example, they would complain that we dealt more with Palestinian grievances than Israeli grievances, which I did not think was the case frankly. One of these people said to me, “You’re right Ben–” cause I had showed him all the things we’d said about Israel’s legitimate security concerns and its history– he said, “But you put the Palestinians second.” So [having them first was] suggesting that you think they’re more important. You flip the order. It would get very specific. Language that Obama needed to use, reassurances that he needs to give.
During the Iran deal, the lobby piped the Israeli government line.
The nuclear deal was insane, the number of armchair centrifuge experts . . . We have nuclear scientists in the government, and I have someone from an organization yelling at me about advanced nuclear centrifuge issues! I think Ernie Moniz [former energy secretary] understands this. It’s not a conspiracy because other organizations do the same thing on their issues, but not as effectively frankly. But you could tell that somebody else had briefed them. In most instances, and whether that was the Israeli government or their own staff, I’m not suggesting . . . And in this case it was always whatever Netanyahu’s party’s difference was with Obama at the moment.
The Israel lobby’s talking points were laughably transparent.
I had members of Congress . . . talking to me about what the inspection regime needs to be about traces of isotope at Parchin [military site in Iran]. The talking points were so specific on Iran, that you knew . . . This was such an echo chamber; every member you’re meeting just conspicuously happens to be obsessed with the inspections regime at Parchin . . . You understood that everyone’s working off the same set of points.
Beinart, who is an observant Jew, and Rhodes agreed that Jews in government are granted a special place in discussion of these issues. Rhodes:
I will give you the obvious example. Congress. I would brief throughout the Iran process the Jewish Democrats in Congress. That was a group. And Sandy Levin, wonderful man, phenomenal human being, would pull it together and it wasn’t subtle. I was going up every few weeks to brief every Jewish Democrat, which is a pretty sizable group, about the particularities of the Iran negotiations. And by the way there was a Jewishness to it, like we had bagels. And so I think there is a kind of default to an assumption that you need to be informed by something of a Jewish perspective.
But then even in that, I sensed, I’m not a practicing Jew, and I sensed at times a bit of a vibe, Well who are you — and like I was called a fake Jew. There were these narratives of Jewishness that kind of informed this stuff.
By the way, it’s not as if anyone plans to “decenter” Jews! Today it is no coincidence that the top three officials in the Biden State Department — Tony Blinken, Wendy Sherman and Victoria Nuland — are all Jewish. These appointments are meant to reassure the Israel lobby of Biden’s support. The same reason Obama hired Hillary Clinton as secretary of state in 2008 by reaching out to an Israel lobbyist to be the intermediary. The same reason that for many years all of the Treasury undersecretaries for counter-terrorism, enforcing Iran sanctions, were Jewish.
Rhodes dealt with the Jewish part of the Israel lobby, but he says the Jewish lobby was able to use the “firewall” of the evangelical Christian Israel lobby in the Republican Party to shrink the debate and to “bludgeon” the Democratic Party.
The people who came to me knew that they had a Republican party that would be in total lockstep, total hawks — total wherever Netanyahu was. Debates about Israel . . . were entirely inside the Democratic party because the development of the last 20 years is that Republicans/evangelicals have completely embraced the rightwing Israeli side.
Weirdly, the evangelical firewall, if you will, of support for Israel really empowered the more conservative, in the political sense, rightwing Jewish perspective inside the American Jewish community because they knew they had the cavalry behind them of the entire Republican Party. Even though these were often debates with Jews in the room, the presence which wasn’t in the room, the evangelical conservative community, was very powerful. It gave them a . . . Trump card. If the Democrats didn’t fall into line they knew . . . the Republicans could bludgeon us with it. That’s the story of the whole Iran fight.
Rhodes said the Israel lobby is “not unique,” that it’s akin to the fossil fuel and gun lobby. “It’s not a Jewish specific thing. It’s just the combination of money and passion and organization coupled with this evangelical piece that has emerged in the last several decades that is not about Jews.”
The congresspeople are often craven. Rhodes related the occasion in 2015 when Netanyahu made a racist appeal at the end of his campaign, warning that “Arabs are voting in droves.” Asked about the remarks, Obama spokesperson Josh Earnest was critical, saying that the White House had serious concerns about “divisive rhetoric” and would communicate as much to Israeli government.
Rhodes:
And a member of Congress was complaining to me about this. I’m like, “What do you want us to do about this? The guy’s being a racist, he’s come out against the two-state solution, he’s talking about the Arabs coming out in droves, and we’re asked what we think about it. How can we not give an answer that’s somewhat honest?”
He said, “Why can’t you just blame the Palestinians?”
I said, “For what?”
He started talking about incitement. The pivot was not subtle.
Read Part 1 of the Rhodes comments here— how he feels “shame” that the Obama White House pretended that Netanyahu believed in a two-state solution when he never did; and how the Biden team is forgetting the “history” of Israel making life hell for Obama in sometimes racially offensive terms.
[1] George Soros, “Putin is a bigger threat to Europe’s existence than Isis,” Guardian, February 11, 2016.
Jonas E. AlexisJonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, history of Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled, Kevin MacDonald’s Abject Failure: A Philosophical and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and White Identity. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
A top adviser at the Pentagon said Iran hawks, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security advisor John Bolton, have been taking money and getting rich from the ‘Israeli’ lobby.
Washington’s support for Tel Aviv is the result of the ‘Israeli’ lobby money, said retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who was appointed this week as senior adviser to newly installed acting War Secretary Christopher Miller, in two media appearances back in 2012 and 2019.
“You have to look at the people that donate to those individuals,” he said in a September 2019 interview when asked if Bolton and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham wanted war with Iran.
“Bolton has become very, very rich and is in the position he’s in because of his unconditional support for the ‘Israeli’ lobby. He is their man on the ground, in the White House. The same thing is largely true for Pompeo, he has aspirations to be president. He has his hands out for money from the ‘Israeli’ lobby, the Saudis and others,” he added.
In another interview in 2012, Macgregor stressed that the ‘Israel’ lobby in the United States has “enormous influence” on Congress and that it wanted to instigate “military strikes” with Iran.
“I think the American ‘Israeli’ Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] and it’s subordinate elements or affiliated elements that represent enormous quantities of money over many years have cultivated an enormous influence in power in Congress,” he told Russia’s state media network RT.
“I think you’ve got a lot of people on the Hill who fall into two categories. One category that is interested in money and wants to be re-elected, and they don’t want to run the risk of the various lobbies that are pushing military action against Iran to contribute money to their opponents.”
AIPAC is known for being the main architect of US policies throughout the Middle East, and has been criticized repeatedly for wielding disproportionate influence in Congress.
The US State Department declined to comment on behalf of Pompeo in response to Macgregor’s remarks.
Bolton, however, reacted to the disclosure through a spokesman, saying, “I don’t respond to anti-Semites.”
This is while his financial disclosures show he earned thousands of dollars for speaking to pro-‘Israel’ groups prior to his appointment as the White House national security adviser in 2018.
Some have the impression that ‘world Zionism’ is an antisemitic conspiracy theory… even while the World Zionist Congress is in session, with 720 delegates from over 30 countries.
Menifee, CA (IAK) — I’m sometimes astounded at the fact that a major political movement over a century old is so little known among Americans – especially since it has had a momentous impact on the world in general and on the U.S. in particular, causing multiple wars, vast population displacement, and global instability.
In my travels around the US, I’ve found that most Americans know extremely little about Zionism. I would guess that the vast majority of Americans could not define the term (that was certainly my situation for most of my life), and that a great many may not have even heard of it.
And among those who have heard the term, many may think it refers to some antisemitic conspiracy theory.
The fact is, however, that Zionism – according to the dictionary, “a worldwide Jewish movement that resulted in the establishment and development of the state of Israel and that now supports the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland” – is both very real and extremely significant.
Zionism succeeded in establishing the state of Israel in 1948 after decades of sometimes open and sometimes covert efforts. It promoted a successful, though extremely false, slogan – “a land without a people for a people without a land” – and succeeded in perpetrating one of the major hoaxes of the 20th century, in which victims (indigenous Palestinians) were designated aggressors, and aggressors (Zionist colonists) were portrayed as victims (as documentedbydiverseauthors, and perpetrated through the silencing of others).
And today this movement contains numerous powerful international entities (see the list below), while remaining largely invisible to millions of citizens of the country that gives Israel massive amounts of money, shields Israel internationally, and has fought at least one war (against Iraq) on Israel’s behalf.
The dictionary definition captures only the simplest meaning of the word, but not its deep impact: how Israel was established and what supporting Israel today enables.
As numerous historians have documented, Israel was established through a war of ethnic cleansing, in the words of a major Israeli historian, in which approximately 750,000 men, women, and children were violently expelled. Hundreds of villages were destroyed and much of the indigenous population was displaced, their ancestral homes and land confiscated and the former owners made into penniless refugees.
Today, in its pursuit of the Jewish identity mentioned in the definition, Israel continues to confiscate Palestinian land, actively discriminates against the remnants of the non-Jewish population that remain in the area, and holds the four and a half million people in the remaining portion of their land (the West Bank and Gaza), in two virtual prisons, their ability to leave and to return to their homes controlled by Israel.
Palestinian villages are invaded daily, people terrorized and abducted, homes and crops are regularly destroyed; for over a year there was a weekly mass demonstration during which Israeli forces shot unarmed demonstrators every week. (To see these actions go here.)
Zionist movement in the US – a century of activism
As I describe in my book, the Zionist movement in the U.S. began in the late 1800s and played a significant role in the events that led to the establishment of Israel.
Today the pro-Israel lobby is probably the most powerful and pervasive special interest group in the U.S. Its members have diverse views and sometimes sharply disagree with one another on aspects of the issue, but all share one goal: support for Israel.
Israel partisans have become extremely influential in both political parties and have obtained numerous US policies of support for Israel. Most recently, they are promoting bills to expend $19 million per day on behalf of Israel; altogether, 90 bills for Israel have been introduced in the current Congress alone. In addition, there is also considerable evidence that Israel partisans were central in pushing the US into invading Iraq, and that many are similarly active in demonizing Iran. (See this, this, this, and this.)
Conspiracy theory?
Since little of the above is known by the general American public (U.S. media rarely report any of this), some Americans are under the impression that even suggesting there is a “world zionist movement” is an antisemitic conspiracy theory. (In fact, even discussing the Israel lobby in the U.S. can be dangerous to reputations and careers. For example, respected professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were attacked as “antisemitic” for their scholarly work in detailing the power of the Israel lobby.)
The fact is, however, that the World Zionist Organization has been in existence since the late 1800s, and this is just one of a number of international organizations that work on behalf of Israel.
Moreover, all of these are very public – if one knows where to look. Currently, the World Zionist Organization is holding its 38th Congress in an online format from Israel. The Congress is convened every five years.
Image featured on March 3, 2020 in the Jewish News of Northern California about candidates running for the World Zionist Congress. The caption read: “2017 event in Jerusalem commemorating the 120th anniversary of the first World Zionist Congress
The World Zionist Organization (WZO) was founded in 1897. It has an elaborate structure, including a World Zionist Congress, a Zionist General Council, a Zionist Executive, and a Zionist Supreme Court. It also has a department devoted to “repatriation” – encouraging Jews to leave their birth countries and move to Israel – and lists numerous affiliates and partners around the world.
Yesterday, the WZO convened its 38th Congress, with 720 delegates and observers from over 30 countries participating in a three-day conference. Based in Israel as usual, this year’s event is being held online because of the pandemic, and sessions are being synchronized with time zones in Israel, North America, Latin America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. The World Zionist Congress allocates about a billion dollars a year to various projects and is popularly known as the “parliament of the Jewish people.”
The Israeli Jerusalem Post newspaper reports that during the Congress “elections will take place for the leadership positions of the National Institutions – the World Zionist Organization, Keren Kayemeth Le’Israel (Jewish National Fund-JNF), and Keren Hayesod [aka United Israel Appeal: “the preeminent worldwide fundraising organization for Israel, which was established in London in 1920, to serve as the fundraising arm of the Jewish People and the Zionist Movement]. Current issues on the world Jewish agenda will be deliberated…”
Among the issues to be deliberated will be how to “allocate nearly $5 billion to Jewish organizations and programs in Israel and around the world.”
The event is being live-streamed and can be viewed here.
Additional Zionist organizations:
The WZO is far from the only organization with “Zionist” in its title. Among the others are:
Mizrachi, the global Religious Zionist movement: “Mizrachi is the global Religious Zionist movement, spreading Torat Eretz Yisrael across the world and strengthening the bond between the international Jewish community and the State of Israel.” It was founded in 1902, is based in Jerusalem and has branches across the globe. It opposes the international movement supporting Palestinian rights known as BDS. It says the Mizrachi Global Summit was held on October 18th.
Zionist Organization of America: “Founded in 1897, the Zionist Organization of America (“ZOA”) is the oldest pro-Israel organization in the United States.” It has 25,000 members and chapters throughout the U.S.
Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America: Over a century old, it says its vision is to “strengthen a connection to Israel.” It says it is “the largest women’s Zionist membership organization in the United States. It inspires a passion for and a commitment to its partnership with the land and the People of Israel.” (Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a lifelong member.)
American Zionist Movement: “AZM works to promote and defend Zionism in the United States; to deepen and expand the active relationship of the American Jewish Community to Zionism in a contemporary context; to facilitate dialogue and collaboration among Zionist organizations through and with the AZM; and to be the central hub for Zionist resources in America.”
(An interesting bit of history is that “Zion” was one of the names Zionist leaders considered in 1948 for the new state, before they finally settled on the name “Israel.”)
Still more Zionist organizations
There are also a number of other major international organizations that work for Israel. Virtually all of these organizations have large staffs, elaborate structures, and multi-million dollar budgets.
Their websites provide an abundance of information about their global reach and diverse activities. Many openly state that they work to oppose the international movement to boycott Israel, which has been organized because of Israel’s long documented human rights abuses. Known as “BDS” (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), the movement “upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.”
Below is a partial list:
• World Jewish Congress (WJC) is another international congress that supports Israel. According to its website, the WJC “represents Jewish communities and organizations in 100 countries around the world. It advocates on their behalf towards governments, parliaments, international organizations and other faiths.”
The WJC represents significant global wealth. Its annual gala held in New York last year was, as I wrote in a detailed article, attended by billionaires, Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian ambassadors, international financiers, the Rothschilds, and assorted other glitterati.
• World Holocaust Forum is another international entity that supports Israel. It is held in Israel and was founded and run by Russian-Israeli oligarch Viatcheslav Moshe Kantor. Last year, at least 45 world leaders attended his fifth event. Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper called it “an airlift of presidents, prime ministers and royalty from around the world.” Kantor, a billionaire known for unscrupulous business practices, is president of the European Jewish Congress and heads up a network of pro-Israel international entities.
In an interview for a Zionist publication, Kantor was asked: “Why are you so interested in Holocaust education and in creating big events to memorialize the Holocaust?” Kantor answered:
“The Holocaust was an essential tool used to bring about the establishment of the State of Israel. In 2006, it is the most effective tool we have to fight against anti-Semitism and to protect Israel.”
Some of the world leaders from 49 Countries who came to Israel for Kantor’s World Holocaust Forum. Source | Israel Hayom
• American Jewish Committee (AJC), despite its name, is yet another international organization. It has 30 offices around the world in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia-Pacifiic, and Israel. It also has numerous regional offices throughout the US.
• Jewish Agency for Israel has been in existence for 90 years, has branches around the world, and encourages people to move to Israel. It has a branch in the US where donations to it can be deducted from U.S. taxes. It states that it works to oppose BDS.
• B’nai B’rith International has been in existence for 175 years and had a connection to Israel from the state’s earliest years. Like many of the organizations, it periodically works to prevent events supporting Palestinian rights.
• Maccabi World Union, headquartered in Israel, spans five continents, is in 80 countries, has 450 clubs, and 450,000 members. Its website says it’s “a Zionist organization that utilizes sports as a means to bring Jewish people of all ages closer to Judaism and Israel.” It has a multitude of programs focused on Israel and works to “fight BDS.”
• Jewish National Fund was founded in 1901 and played a major role in transferring Palestinian land to Israel. It is holding its national conference right now (video here). Like many of these entities, it has a presence in the U.S. and has acquired tax deductible status.
• World Union of Progressive Judaism, headquartered in Israel, serves 1,200 congregations with 1.8 million members in more than 50 countries. It passed a resolution saying that the organization and its congregations “will act against public and political measures meant to question the legitimacy of the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, including against the BDS Movement.”
• World Union of Jewish Studentspartners with the WZO and represents Jewish students in 55 countries, with 225 branches around the world. It holds an annual World Union Jewish Student Congress in Israel. One of its commitments is to oppose BDS.
This list could go on and on and on…
What does this all mean and not mean?
The reality is that there are a great many well-funded, well-organized, often quite powerful organizations working internationally in support of Israel and, as part of this, against Palestinian rights.
While I haven’t attempted here to delve into the organizations’ budgets and the wealth of their benefactors, there is no doubt that the combined total represents many billions of dollars. Yet U.S. media rarely tell Americans about this powerful, extremely significant network of international organizations that promote Israel and work to block efforts on behalf of Palestinian human rights.
At the same time, it is important to remember that these organizations, despite some of their names, do not represent all Jews.
While Zionists tried from the earliest days of their movement to conflate Zionism with Judaism – and fooled many people into believing the two were synonymous – for decades most Jewish Americans did not support Zionism, many Jews in Palestine itself opposed it, and today there are many Jewish Americans and others around the world who are critical of Israeli actions.
In addition, some – perhaps many – of the members in the organizations listed above may be deeply uninformed about what the Zionist movement did in the past and is currently enabling against Palestinians.
They’re constantly told about rockets from Gaza, but don’t learn about the massive Israeli violence that preceded these largely home made projectiles and the Israeli weaponry that vastly exceeds their extremely small impact (for the facts go here).
They hear about Arab armies declaring war on the newly declared state of Israel, but they don’t learn that Zionist forces had already committed numerous grisly massacres, had pushed out massive numbers of Palestinians, and were working to dispossess an entire population.
While there have been numerous reports through the years documenting Israeli human rights violations and Israel’s systemic discrimination, the members of these groups either do not know of these findings, or are told they are the work of “antisemites.”
The fact is that these organizations, with their large budgets and often very slick programs, specifically work to inculcate their membership with myths about Israel and falsehoods about the currentreality. (Sadly, as mentioned above, they are often assisted in this by U.S. media that largely give us Israel-centric reporting and spin, while often omitting essential facts.)
It is time that more Americans learn the facts about the Zionist movement.
It is time for all Americans – of all faiths, races, and ethnicities – to join together to oppose a chauvinistic, deeply damaging international movement that has caused untold tragedy and harm. The devastation this movement has caused hasn’t been limited to Palestine. It has spilled over into the entire Middle East and North Africa, stretched into Europe, and damaged the U.S. It has caused wars, global destabilization and potential catastrophe.
It is not antisemitic to speak out about world Zionism. It is obligatory.
Most Zionist diplomacy takes place in secret, through corruption and blackmail (euphemistically called “lobbying”). But sometimes it is deemed appropriate that some statement be written down by some government representative in support of Zionism. The Goyim who write these statements may think them of little consequence, but Zionists know very well how to capitalize on them.
The most famous such document is the short letter written by the British Foreign Minister Lord Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, president of the Zionist Federation, on November 2, 1917. Prime Minister Lloyd George later explained the deal in those terms:
“Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to give facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. They kept their word.”
Less known than the Balfour Declaration is the letter obtained by Nahum Sokolow, head of the World Zionist Organization, from the French Foreign minister Jules Cambon. Dated June 4, 1917, it not only anticipated the Balfour Declaration but cleared the way for it. It states that the French government “feels sympathy for your cause, the triumph of which is linked to that of the allies.” The cause in question is “the development of the Israeli colonization in Palestine” and “the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago.” Back in London, Sokolow deposited the Cambon letter at the Foreign Office, where it stimulated a spirit of competition. In January 1918, he returned to Paris, this time with the aim of securing a public French declaration in support of the Balfour Declaration. A magnificent example of the efficiency of Zionist transnational diplomacy for war profiteering.
If Balfour thought that, after the war, his letter, cautiously worded and typed on unmarked paper, would be of little consequence, he was wrong. Zionists made it a cornerstone to their project. When the British government proved reluctant to deliver after the Versailles Treaty, they invested on the ambitious, unscrupulous and bankrupt Winston Churchill (1874-1965), whose thoughts were, in his own words, “99 percent identical” with Chaim Weizmann’s.
During WWII, Churchill and Weizmann conspired to repeat the winning strategy of the Balfour declaration in WWI, attempting to monetize Jewish influence to bring the United States into the war. In a letter to Churchill dated September 10, 1941, Weizmann wrote: “I have spent months in America, traveling up and down the country […]. There is only one big ethnic group which is willing to stand, to a man, for Great Britain, and a policy of ‘all-out-aid’ for her: the five million American Jews. […] It has been repeatedly acknowledged by British Statesmen that it was the Jews who, in the last war, effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favor of Great Britain. They are keen to do it—and may do it—again.”
As soon as he had become Prime Minister in May 1940, Churchill instructed his War Cabinet member Arthur Greenwood to craft a document assuring the Jewish elites that a winning Britain will give them not only Palestine but a major share in the “new world order” to compensate for “the wrongs suffered by the Jewish people.” Although it is little known, this “Greenwood Pledge” is, according to Zionist Rabbi Stephen Wise, “of wider and farther reaching implications” than the Balfour declaration. The New York Times published it in its October 6, 1940 edition, under the amazing title “New World Order Pledged to Jews” (reproduced here and here).
The recipient of the declaration, here presented as Dr. S.S. Wise, was a major player in Zionist deep politics since the time of Theodor Herzl, and a close collaborator of Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and Samuel Untermeyer. He was the founder of the New York Federation of Zionist Societies in 1897, the first seed for the Zionist Organization of America, of which he was president. In 1917 he participated in the effort to convince President Woodrow Wilson to approve the Balfour declaration. In 1936, he was a co-founder of the World Jewish Congress, dedicated to rallying world Jewry against Hitler.
Here is the full text of the New York Times, introducing the “Greenwood Pledge”:
New York Times, October 6, 1940
NEW WORLD ORDER PLEDGED TO JEWS;
Arthur Greenwood of British War Cabinet Sends Message of Assurance Here
RIGHTING OF WRONGS SEEN
English Rabbi Delivers to Dr. S.S. Wise New Statement on Question After War
In the first public declaration on the Jewish question since the outbreak of the war, Arthur Greenwood, a member without portfolio in the British War Cabinet, assured the Jews of the United States that when victory was achieved an effort would be made to found a new world order based on the ideals of “justice and peace.”
Mr. Greenwood, who is Deputy Leader of the British Labor party, declared that in the new world the “conscience of civilized humanity would demand that the wrongs suffered by the Jewish people in so many countries should be righted.” He added that after the war an opportunity would be given to Jews everywhere to make a “distinctive and constructive contribution” in the rebuilding of the world.
The message was delivered last week to Dr. Stephen S. Wise, chairman of the executive committee of the World Jewish Congress, by Rabbi Maurice L. Perzweig, chairman of the British section of the congress. Rabbi Perizweig arrived from England Monday evening.
Intention to Right Wrongs
Comparing the statement with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, D. Wise declared that in a sense it had “wider and farther reaching implications,” as it dealt with the status of Jews throughout the world. He said that Mr. Greenwood’s message could be interpreted as a statement of England’s firm intention to help right the wrongs which Jews have suffered and continue to suffer today because of Hitler’s “disorder and lawlessness.” Mr. Greenwood, sending the Jews of America a message of “encouragement and warm good wishes,” wrote: “The tragic fate of the Jewish victims of Nazi tyranny has, as you know, filed us with deep emotion. The speeches of responsible statesmen in Parliament and at the League of Nations during the last seven years have reflected the horror with which the people of this country have viewed the Nazi relapse into barbarism.
“The British Government sought again to secure some amelioration of the lot of persecuted Jewry both in Germany itself and in the countries which were infected by the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred. Today the same sinister power which has trampled on its own defenseless minorities, and by fraud and force has temporarily robbed many small peoples of their independence, has challenged the last stronghold of liberty in Europe.
New World Order Forecast
“When we have achieved victory, as we assuredly shall, the nations will have the opportunity of establishing a new world order based on the ideals of justice and peace. In such a world it is our confident hope that the conscience of civilized humanity would demand that the wrongs suffered by the Jewish people in so many countries should be righted.
“In the rebuilding of civilized society after the war, there should and will be a real opportunity for Jews everywhere to make a distinctive and constructive contribution; and all men of good-will must assuredly hope that in new Europe the Jewish people, in whatever country they may live, will have the freedom and full equality before the law with every other citizen.”
In an interview at the Hotel Astor, Rabbi Perlzweig declared he was certain Mr. Greenwood “speaks for England.” There is a clear realization, he added, that freedom and emancipation for the Jewish people are tied up with emancipation and freedom for people everywhere. The message, Rabbi Perlzweig remarked, was the subject of earnest consideration by the British Government. “This is a declaration on behalf of the whole world,” he observed. “Here the British Government expresses clearly what it hopes will take place after the war is won.”
[1] According to a 1937 report of the Palestine Royal Commission, quoted by Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (1953), Infinity Publishing, 2003, pp. 18-21.
[1] Martin Kramer, “The Forgotten Truth about the Balfour Declaration,” June 5, 2017, on mosaicmagazine.com
[1] Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, Henry Holt & Company, 2007.
[1] David Irving, Churchill’s War, vol. 2: Triumph in Adversity, Focal Point Publications, 2001, pp. 76–77.
يتعامل الكثير من المتعاطين في الشأن العام من اللبنانيين، سياسيين وكتاباً، بخفة وسذاجة مع الاهتمام الدولي بلبنان ومن ضمنه المبادرة الفرنسية. فبينما يتخيّل البعض أنه يأتي مساندة لفريق سياسي مؤيد لسياسات الغرب والخليج، أو مساندة لفريق طائفي بحكم العلاقات التاريخيّة والاجتماعية والثقافية، يظن البعض الآخر أنه يقترب من الواقع بالحديث عن ربط المبادرة الفرنسية حصراً بالمصالح الاقتصادية والجيوسياسية، حيث يفتح الغياب باب قدوم المنافسين الاقتصاديين كحال الصين، او الجيواستراتيجيين كتركيا؛ وعلى وجود تأثير متفاوت لكل من هذه العناصر، فإن التدقيق سيوصلنا الى ان هناك سبباً حاسماً يغيب عن كل هؤلاء.
–
عندما يقول الرئيس الفرنسي امانويل ماكرون إنه ناقش مبادرته مع الرئيس الأميركي وحصل على موافقته ودعمه. وعندما تتعثر المبادرة عند نقطة تشكيل الحكومة بفعل ما وصفه الفرنسيون بالتعطيل الأميركي، فالقضية تتمحور حول المقاومة. وعندما تتحرك المبادرات نحو الحلحلة يقول الفرنسيون إن ذلك لأنهم نجحوا بتنشيط الدعم الأميركي لمبادرتهم، وبين هذه السطور كلها معنى أن الاميركي ارتضى بالمبادرة الفرنسية لأن فرنسا وحدها بحكم موقفها من ايران ورفضها تصنيف حزب الله على لوائح الإرهاب تستطيع التكلم مع حزب الله وطمأنته الى ان تشكيل حكومة تعزل القضايا الخلافية لن يتم تحت عنوان استهدافه. وعندما يصف الفرنسيون العقوبات الأميركية على حلفاء للمقاومة بأنها تصويب على مبادرتهم، لأنهم يدركون معنى الربط بالضغط لنيل تنازلات من المقاومة وتزامنها مع العقوبات لتثبيت رمزية نيل التنازلات بقوة العقوبات، وإفهام حزب الله ذلك، بحيث يصير تمسك المقاومة برفض التنازل أكبر من حيثية وزارية وبُعدها الميثاقي، ليصير اختزالاً لموازين القوى بشمولية المعنى، فمن يتنازل عن حقيبة وزارية ميثاقية تحت الضغط يمكن انتزاع تنازلات أخرى منه تحت ضغط أشدّ.
–
التراجع الأميركي الذي عبر عنه موقف الرئيس الحريري بتشجيع فرنسي حاز على نسبة كافية من التغطية الأميركية، يعيد الموقف الاميركي الى معادلة رسمها ماكرون حول القلق من أن يؤدي انسداد الافق أمام التسويات إلى أخذ لبنان نحو انحلال الدولة، وخصوصاً نظامها المالي المحتضر، ومؤسساتها الأمنية والعسكرية التي تنوء تحت أثقال أحمالها الكبيرة بمقدرات مالية ورواتب مهددة بالاضمحلال، وانحلال الدولة بالعيون الأميركية والفرنسية سيجعل جبهة جنوب لبنان عرضة للاشتعال وربما الخروج عن السيطرة. وهذا القلق بالتأكيد ليس قلقاً فرنسياً فقط، بل هو قلق أميركي قبل أن يكون قلقاً فرنسياً، وثمة من يقول إن اللوبي اليهودي في فرنسا يدعم مبادرة ماكرون من هذا الباب، وإن تهديد ماكرون بسحب مبادرته حرك هذا اللوبي نحو واشنطن لتأمين عودة التغطية الأميركية.
–
المبادرة الفرنسية ومندرجاتها ليست مجرد تسوية سياسية لحكومة يرضى بها الجميع، بل هي مدخل لتعويم مالي نسبي للدولة يمنع الانهيار، ويمنع بالتالي انحلال الدولة، ومخاطر انتقال التوتر الى الجبهة الجنوبية. وهذا هو جوهر المبادرة، والباقي حاجات لنجاحها. ولهذا معنى وحيد، وهو أن الغرب الذي قادت مؤسساته المالية منذ نهاية التسعينيات مساعي تأمين التمويل اللازم للدولة اللبنانية عبر الاستدانة ومراكمة المزيد من الديون، وهو يدرك حجم المخاطر المترتبة لجهة تراجع القدرة على سداد هذه الديون، قد فعل ذلك بحساب سياسي وليس بحساب اقتصادي. والحساب السياسي بنظر البعض هو توريط لبنان بديون تفوق قدرته على السداد لابتزازه بطلب تنازلات تطال مصادر قوته التي تمثلها المقاومة. وبنظر بعض آخر هو حساب سياسي يهدف للحفاظ على الاستقرار السياسي في لبنان خشية انفلات الوضع من تحت السيطرة خصوصاً على الحدود الجنوبية، لكنه في الحالين حساب سياسي يشبه الحساب السياسي الذي سيحكم مشاريع التمويل التي يُحكى عنها في ظل حكومة جديدة، والسعي للحصول على تجاوب المقاومة مع تشكيلها، والعمل على تعطيل محاولات توظيف سياق ولادة الحكومة لفرض تنازلات على المقاومة، بقوة العقوبات، وهو ما تحقق بفتح نافذة إعادة قطار المبادرة الفرنسية الى السكة وفقاً لمواقف الرئيس الحريري الأخيرة، بعد نجاح محاولة الحريري وزملائه في نادي رؤساء الحكومات بتهديد القطار والسكة معاً، وفي الذهاب والإياب والتعطيل والعودة عنه، عنوان واحد هو المقاومة.
–
الغرب والخليج، في ضائقة مالية، ولو عاد الأمر لحسابات المصالح المحاسبية، فليس لديهم بنس يدفعونه للبنان، ومن دون قرار سياسي أميركي كبير لن تصل الى لبنان أموال تنتشله من الهاوية. وهذا القرار لا تنتجه إلا مخاوف كبرى بحجم القلق الأميركي على «اسرائيل». وهو قلق لا مكان له الا بمقاومة قوية عسكرياً، متمرسة سياسياً لحد الثبات بوجه التهويل والتهديد، بحيث لا يمكن فرض التنازلات عليها لا بالعقوبات ولا بالتلويح بالإفلاس، والطريق الوحيد لضمان هدوئها على الحدود هو رفع سيف العقوبات عن رقاب حلفائها ورفع سيف الإفلاس عن رقبة الدولة ونظامها المصرفي.
مشكلة أمر الذين لا يقرأون، وإن قرأوا لا يعرفون، وأن عرفوا لا يعترفون.
في مناخ الكثير من رواد وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي وبعض المشتغلين بالشأن العام، حديث انفعالي عن ثقافتين لبنانيتين وبيئتين مختلفتين، بما يعني الفوارق بين بيئة المقاومة والبيئة المناهضة لها، والأفكار والقيم التي ترتبط بها كل منهما، كالتناقض بين دعوات الحياد ودعوات الالتزام بفلسطين، والتناقض بين دعوات التوجّه شرقاً وتجذّر لبنان في العلاقات مع الغرب، وصولاً للقول إن الحل الوحيد هو بالطلاق الودّي، تحت شعار لي ديني ولكم دينكم، سواء بصيغة تقسيم كامل لدول مختلفة أو تقسيم جزئي بصيغة فدرالية، او بما يرسمه البعض من صور خيالية لدعوات اللامركزية لمحاكاة هذا النوع من الطلاق، وليس بحثاً عن وظائف تنموية للامركزية.
–
لا يهتم هؤلاء في النقاش لما ورد في الدستور حول رفض كل أشكال التقسيم والتجزئة فهم يتحدثون عن خروج كامل من فكرة الوطن الواحد، لكن لكونهم من غير المنطلقين من خلفيات تخريبية بل من غضب انفعالي يضيق معه صدرهم بتقبل الاختلاف، وعدم قدرتهم على الانتباه او الاقتناع بأن بمستطاع اللبنانيين إيجاد مشتركات كافية لجعل البعض من خلافاتهم مصادر قوة لهم، وتحسين قدرتهم على إدارة بعضها الآخر.
–
لذلك وجبت مناقشة فرضيات التقسيم بلغة الإمكانية الواقعية التي لا ينتبه لها اصحاب هذه المواقف الانفعالية. والسؤال الأول هو حول فرضية قيام دولتين أو اكثر بدلاً من لبنان كدولة واحدة. وهنا بعيداً عن كون هذا الكلام موضوع سخرية عالمياً، والبعد العالمي أساسي بمفهوم قيام الدول ونشوئها، فالعالم يتجه نحو أطر توسّع مدى الاتحادات وليس نحو تصغير الكيانات السياسية وتكثير عددها، ومثال الاتحاد الاوروبي أمامنا، ولبنان كله يعادل واحدة من مدن العالم الكبرى وليس بحجم ولاية من ولايات الدول المتوسطة الحجم؛ فيكف بالدول الكبيرة المساحة والكثيرة السكان، والأهم بعد هذا أن لبنان غير قابل موضوعياً للتقسيم. فالطوائف لا تعيش منعزلة جغرافياً، ورغم الحرب وما رافقها من تهجير بقي التداخل السكاني والجغرافي يجعل رسم خرائط دول بين اللبنانيين استحالة لا تتحقق بمليون قتيل، هذا عن حقيقة يجب أن يدركها هؤلاء الدعاة للتقسيم وهي أن قيمة مناوئي المقاومة بعيون الخارج الغربي والعربي وتشجيعهم على مواقفهم والإعلان عن الاستعداد لدعمهم او دعم لبنان من خلالهم نابع من كونهم مع المقاومة في دولة واحدة، يمكن لهم أن يمتلكوا من خلالها تأثيراً على خيارات المقاومة بقوه الشراكة، وبحال سقوطها لا تبقى لهم أي أهمية توجب الالتفات اليهم.
–
أما فرضية الفدرالية فتنسفها حقيقة أنها لن تحقق لأصحابها مرادهم، ففي الدولة الفدرالية سياسة خارجية موحدة وسياسة دفاعية موحّدة، ومثلها في اللامركزية، ومواضيع الخلاف اللبنانية هي هنا وليست في شكل إدارة الشأن الخاص بالمناطق، وستبقى قضايا الخلاف عنواناً للجمع الذي يريد هؤلاء لأجل التخلص منه الذهاب للفدرالية. وكذلك في الفدرالية ستبقى ليرة واحدة تجمع اللبنانيين، ومن يعتقد أنه بسبب المقاومة تشن حرب مالية لإضعاف لبنان مالياً، وبالتالي تصاب عملته بالأذى فلن يتخلص من تبعات هذه الشراكة عبر الفدرالية.
–
قضية العيش في ظل دولة موحّدة لتنوّع في الجذور الدينية او العرقية، او لتنوّع في الأفكار، ليس معضلة لبنان وحده، ففي القرن الحادي والعشرين تعيش أوروبا هاجس التوازنات الديمغرافية الناتجة عن موجات الهجرة، وما يرافقها من أزمات سياسية واقتصادية واجتماعية وأمنية وتجد أن قدرها هو بالتفكير بعقلانية بكيفية ضمان وحدة مجتمعاتها بصيغها الجديدة، ومثلها تعيش أميركا رغم كل ما تشير إليه الأرقام من تقدمها الصناعي والسياسي، في ظل هاجس استيقاظ العنصرية كعامل انقسام عمودي يهدد وحدتها.
The Patriarch Bishara al-Rahi’s statement that Hizbullah accused him of agency and treachery is most regrettable. Everyone assures that any attempt to learn Hizbullah’s response to the Patriarch’s call for neutrality was met with “No comment.” In her refrain from declaring her opposing perspective to the Patriarch’s stance, Al Mukawama aimed at preventing an interpretation of its position through lenses of sectarian defensiveness, giving lurkers the opportunity of fanning flames, resulting in exchanges of volleys of accusations of agency and treachery.
The invitation is open for the Patriarch to rise above allegations of treachery against him from a Party and a Mukawama, which have a full awareness and appreciation of sensitivities in Lebanon, and who prioritize a diligence about not taking positions, in order to ensure communication respectful of honorifics, including the Bkirki Honorific, and to preserve national unity.
To say that an understanding exists between the Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri and
Al-Sayyed Hassan Nasrullah, to refrain from comments on the Patriarch’s call for neutrality, personally or through their respective party platforms, would not be revealing a secret. In addition, they have both expressed their displeasure towards individual voices and religious, political, and publicity sites which went against their chosen direction.
In view of such diligence and approbation, they would have rightfully expected from Bkirki a reciprocal approach through an invitation for a discussion of her position with all the Lebanese entities, in an effort to promote agreement and harmony, before her declaration. What is occurring today instead, is that the Patriarch’s call transformed into a mudslinging campaign against Al Mukawama and her arms, unjustly relegating to her the responsibilities for and the dire consequences of the multitude of crises Lebanon has been facing.
This declaration provided an opportunity for its exploitation by those lying in wait, through a discourse insinuating that the injurious and demonizing campaign targeting Al Mukawama has gained a solid base through Bkirki’s leadership. The duo’s silence was the utmost they could offer amidst all that, as an expression of care and respect, awaiting reciprocity from the Bkirki Seat, to provide the opportunity for communication about disagreements behind closed doors.
The Patriarch’s call and his speech on the occasion of Lebanon’s Centennial is being presented as a reading about Lebanon’s future and a project for a new contract benefitting from past experiences and present dangers. He refers to a fear that what is meant by a new contract is an invitation to trilateral power sharing, i.e. power sharing on an almost equal basis between Christians, Shias, and Sunnis, rather than current power sharing divided equally between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon. Such expressed fear sounds strange in view of Speaker Berri’s refusal decades ago of a trilateral power sharing proposal, and Hizbullah’s refusal of more generous sectarian power-sharing offers as a trade-off for its power which constitutes a major security threat to the Israeli Occupation.
Both parties confirmed and continue to confirm their insistence on the preservation of the position and role of Christians in Lebanon and the region as a fundamental constituency in the Orient, independent of the actual number of Christians in it. They have repeatedly emphasized the necessity of reassuring this constituent and ensuring all elements of stability for its continued existence. Their belief is that the Orient’s Christians confer an added value to the Orient, and the loss or weakening of this constituent will rob the Orient of its distinctive characteristics.
These two parties who are implied in the “trilateral” accusation have been clear in attaching to every call for the end of sectarianism, another call for a positive Christian partnership which is reassuring to them, on one hand, and provides existential reassurances for Christians, on the other. A discussion is needed among the Lebanese about a new contract on the basic principles held by the duo encapsulated in progress towards a democratic state, unfettered by the federalism of sectarian protectorates, and ensuring guarantees against the transformation of democracy into a tool in the hands of a sectarian majority, shaking the equilibrium between sects or posing an existential threat to them.
The passage of one hundred years on the establishment of the political Lebanon, in the shade of which we stand today, makes it worthwhile to go back to the writings of two great Lebanese Christian thinkers who have had a strong influence on the conceptualization of Lebanon as an entity, and of Lebanese nationalism, and with whom every Christian political speaker affiliates or aligns his or her position with what had been attributed to them. The reference, of course, is to Charles Malek and Michel Chiha, who have drawn the picture for the Lebanese entity and the principles for its political and economic growth, and unequivocally warned of what they considered to be an imminent threat to its being, namely the earth shaking event of the creation of the Occupation State in 1948.
Both Malek and Chiha were terrified for the fate of the Lebanese entity, and called for the Lebanese to be vigilant about a future in an environment of increasing difficulties. They agreed, each from his own perspective, about the dangers associated with that cataclysmic event which made Lebanon a constant target for Zionist expansion, and at risk of structural damage to the culture of coexistence on which it is based. They agreed that this event created nurturing climates for religious prejudices and extremism, which in turn were expected to launch eras of threat to peace between the Lebanese, and geographic locations posing such threats, in the form of consecutive waves.
They stated that the Jewish State, which they described as racist and reliant on the potency of money and power, will constitute an existential threat to a Lebanon weak and helpless by comparison. They believed that the newly formed entity will pump waves of Palestinian refugees, and as their hopes of return to their homeland became increasingly out of reach, would place at risk the sectarian equilibrium in Lebanon.
Charles Malek, from his position in the United Nations, sent a report in 1949 to Lebanon’s President and Prime Minister in which he went further, pointing out the approach of a Jewish epoch to the area, that Palestine was the mirror for conditions in the Middle East, that the scant influence of the Arabs will result in an increasing “Jewish” influence, and warned against betting on international positions because the West, headed by the Americans, will side with the “Jews.” He stated: “ In every principal conflict between Israeli and Arab interests, America will support Israeli interests. I warn strongly against falling blindly into the trap of seductive American construction projects before their full scrutiny and the scrutiny of Jewish connections to them.” He proposed a countermeasure based on the building up of Arab armies, an Arab renaissance, and a liberation movement led by Lebanon and Syria. He wagered on a role supportive to the Palestinian cause, and aid to Lebanon and the area in the face of the “Jewish” threat, by the Worldwide Catholic Church, led by the Christian Church in the Orient, with Lebanon being its more important base.
Both Malek and Chiha believed, in the first place, that the triad of threats, expansionist, structural, and economic, posed by the Occupation, along with the Palestinian refugee issue, should form an axis for Lebanese policies internally, at the Arab level, and internationally. Secondly, they pointed to the losing bet on the effectiveness of international interventions without possession of a considerable interest potential and adequate power to enable participation in the big equations, implying that begging for protection from a position of weakness will inevitably result in disappointment. Thirdly, they bet on the leading role of the Church in escalating and reinforcing power resources internally, and moving outward from that position of political, economic, and military strength, to rouse the Worldwide Church, in the hopes of creating a balance protective of Lebanon. Can anyone say today that the threats no longer exist, or that the effectiveness of the Arab position has increased, or that the laws governing the movement in international relations have changed?
Al Mukawama, capable and competent, liberated and deterred, and became a source of anxiety for the Occupation in regard to its security and existence. She became one of the manifestations of what Chiha and Malek asked of the Lebanese. Sage and prudent,
Al Mukawama is the missing link which Bkirki should feel happy to meet halfway, for a complementarity in roles, translated into what should be done for Lebanon’s protection, with differentiation and variation lending strength to positions rather than being problematic. What has come forth instead from Bkirki’s positions only weakens power sources, aborts opportunities for complementarity between politics and power, and whets the appetite of those in wait for the possibility of weakening or isolating Al Mukawama. It fails to attempt seeking guarantees for Lebanon and the Lebanese using the pacification of Al Mukawama as leverage.
The neutrality initiative, even in its “active” form, fails to tell how it will solve the refugee issue in a time of Arab abandonment; how it will protect Lebanon’s economic role in the era of “normalization;” how it will protect Lebanon from the threat of aggression in the times of disintegration of Arab armies; and who will benefit from the weakening of Al Mukawama and from targeting her morale and reputation except lurking Takfeeri Extremism, lying in wait for Lebanon, the Orient, Christians, along with all the other constituents in the area?
Renewal of the Greater Lebanon starts with a dialogue between the Lebanese to form understandings which address points of defect and invest in power sources. Bkirki is the first invitee to openness towards Al Mukawama and investment in her sources of power, after Bkirki has clearly seen France coming to acknowledge Al Mukawama as a reality unsusceptible to marginalization or weakening. In making such acknowledgement, France was speaking for herself and on behalf of her allies, whom Bkirki considers as friends and fears Lebanon’s loss of their support.
The French movement confirms that the attention of those friends to Lebanon and lending their aid has come only as a result of the Al Mukawama raising their anxiety about “Israel’s” security and existence. Any reassurance to decrease such anxiety embedded in the calls for neutrality will only mean that such attention will shift, and any helping hand will be withdrawn and washed from anything related to Lebanon. Perhaps this is the most prominent conclusion Chiha and Malek came to 70 years ago.
ثوابت يجب عدم نسيانها وأوهام ممنوع السماح بمرورها وتغلغلها في نفوس الناس وعقولهم في النظر للحركة الفرنسيّة التي يقودها الرئيس امانويل ماكرون، حيث يتمّ تمرير كل شيء تحت ضغط الكارثة التي يعيشها اللبنانيون، أولها التوهّم أن فرنسا أم حنون جاءت لتساعد وتسهم في رفع المعاناة عن كاهل اللبنانيين، وثانيها أن إدراك أن السياسة باعتبارها لغة مصالح لا يعني الرفض المطلق لسياسات الآخرين ومصالحهم إذا لم تتعارض مع سياساتنا ومصالحنا، وثالثها أن ما لا يتعارض مع سياساتنا ومصالحنا ويؤسس لنقاط تقاطع لا تجوز إدارته بتساهل واسترخاء لأن المصالح تتراكم وتتغيّر والأطماع لا يردعها إلا حضور الحذر واستحضار القدرة وتحصين القوة. والمشهد اللبناني المقزّز في درجة التهافت أمام الرئيس الفرنسي، وتغيّر المواقف وتبدل الثوابت وتقديم أوراق الاعتماد، أظهر خصال انحطاط ليست حكراً على ما يحلو للبعض وصفه بطبقة سياسية فاسدة، فقد نخر سوس التهافت والانحطاط، صفوف الذين سمّوا أنفسهم ثواراً، والذين قدّموا أنفسهم بدائل، والنخب والكتاب والفنانين، ومن له مصلحة ومن ليس له مصلحة، إلا قلة رفيعة الشأن كبيرة النفس شامخة الأنف، لا عارضت علناً وقدمت الولاء سراً، ولا قاطعت، ولا سوّقت، ولا تهافتت، حالها كحال فيروز التي بقيت تشبه أرز لبنان يحتاجها ماكرون ولا تحتاجه، وتقاطع المصالح يعني لها النديّة، وليس الذل والاسترهان، ولا الزحف والبكاء، والبكاء السياسي والإعلامي، ليس بكاء وجع الناس المفهوم، وبقيت هذه القلة تحفظ سرّ المقام والدور والمسؤوليّة، فشارك بعضها بجدية ومسؤولية واحترام وندية، ولكنه لم يمنع نفسه من متعة التفرج على “الزحفطة” السياسية والإعلامية والاقتصادية و”الثورية” و”المدنية” وغير المدنية”، ولم يكن بعضها موجوداً فتابع عن بُعد وهو يجمع السخرية والألم من درجة هبوط وانحطاط مشهد، هو بالنهاية مشهد وطن لا يفرح محبّوه برؤيته على هذه الحال.
–
توضح زيارة امانويل ماكرون للعراق وتصريحات وزير الخارجية الأميركية مايك بومبيو، أن الحركة الفرنسيّة محميّة أميركياً، ولا تحظى فقط بالتغطية، بل هي جزء من سياسة أميركية بالوكالة، حيث تحتفظ واشنطن بالخطاب الدعائي ضد إيران والمقاومة، وتتولى فرنسا تبريد جبهات المشرق الملتهبة، بينما تتفرّغ واشنطن لتزخيم حفلات التطبيع العربي “الإسرائيلي” في الخليج، فماكرون المتحمّس لمرفأ بيروت بدا متحمساً لمشروع مترو بغداد، بينما كان الأردن والعراق ومصر يبشرون بمشروع “الشام الجديد” الذي يلاقي نتائج التطبيع الإماراتيّ الإسرائيليّ، بربط العراق عبر الأردن الذي يقيم معاهدة سلام مع كيان الاحتلال، بمرفأ حيفا، أسوة بالإمارات، في زمن خروج مرفأ بيروت من الخدمة، ولا يُخفى أن المشروع الذي قام أصلاً وفقاً لدراسة للبنك الدولي على ضم سورية ولبنان وفلسطين على المشروع قد اعتبر تركيا جزءاً منه، وقد أسقطت سورية ولبنان وفلسطين، واستبعدت تركيا حكماً، وفي زمن التغوّل التركي ورعاية أنقرة للإرهاب وتطبيعها مع الكيان لا اسف على الاستبعاد، وبمثل ما رحبت بالشام الجديد واشنطن وتل أبيب، هرول الرئيس الفرنسي مرحباً باستبعاد تركيا، على قاعدة تناغم مصري فرنسي سيظهر أكثر وأكثر، من ليبيا إلى لبنان، وصولاً للعراق، بحيث تقوم فرنسا بالإمساك بلبنان عن السقوط و”خربطة الحسابات” بانتظار، تبلور المشروع الذي يريد ضم سورية ولبنان معاً في فترة لاحقة، بعد إضعاف قدرتهما التفاوضيّة وعزلهما عن العراق، والمقصود بالقدرة التفاوضيّة حكماً قوى المقاومة وتهديدها لأمن الكيان، وهذا هو معنى التذكير الأميركي بأن المشكلة هي في حزب الله وصواريخه الدقيقة، كما يؤكد بومبيو.
–
لا مشكلة لدى قوى المقاومة بالمرحلة الانتقالية التي يتمّ خلالها انتشال لبنان من قعر السقوط، ليس حباً ولا منّة ولا مكرمة من أحد، بل خشية انفجار كبير يحول التهديد الإفتراضي للكيان إلى تهديد واقعي، ويأتي بالصين على سكة حديد بغداد دمشق بيروت، هي السكة التي يريدها ماكرون لفرنسا، لكن بعد التفاوض، بحيث تحفظ حدود سايكس بيكو، لكن يتغيّر مضمون التفويض بنقل الوكالة في حوض المتوسط إلى فرنسا، التي منعت من العراق والأردن قبل قرن، لحساب بريطانيا، المتفرّجة اليوم إلى حين. وهذا يكفي للقول إنه بعد فشل الرهان “الإسرائيلي” على نظرية معركة بين حربين كادت تفجّر حرباً، جاءت فرنسا بمشروع تسوية بين حربين، عساها تجعل الحرب الثانية اقتصادية، هدفها إبعاد الصين عن المتوسط، وإبعاد صواريخ المقاومة الدقيقة عن رقبة الإسرائيليين، والمقاومة المدركة للتحديات والاستحقاقات، تعرف ما بين أيديها كما تتقن ذكاء التوقيت.
–
لا شام جديد بدون الشام الأصلي والقديم، حقيقة يجب أن ينتبه لها ماكرون قبل أن يرتكب الأخطاء القاتلة، فلا ينسى أن التذاكي لا يحل المشكلات الأصلية، وأن روسيا لا تكتفي بالكلمات طويلاً، وأن بريطانيا لا تطيل النوم بعد الظهر.
Let’s begin with a disclaimer: in this article, I will assume that there will be a US Presidential election in the Fall. Right now, it appears to be likely that this election will take place (there appear to be no legal way to cancel or delay it), but this is by no means certain (see here for a machine translated and very interesting article by one Russian analyst, who predicts a diarchy after the election). Right now, the state of the US society is both extremely worried (and for good reason) and potentially explosive. It is impossible to predict what a well-executed false flag attack could do to the US. There is also the possibility of either a natural disaster (hurricane, earthquake, etc.) or even an unnatural one (considering the condition of the US infrastructure, this is almost inevitable) which could precipitate some kind of state of emergency or martial law to “protect” the people. Finally, though at this point in time I don’t see this as very likely, there is always the possibility of a coup of some kind, maybe a “government of national unity” with the participation of both parties which, as Noam Chomsky correctly points out, are basically only two factions of what could be called the Business Party. There might come a point when they decide to drop this pretense too (just look at how many other pretenses the US ruling elites have dropped in the last decade or so).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to explain that all governments can be placed on a continuum ranging from, on one end, “states whose power is based on their authority” to, on the other end, “states whose authority is based on their power“. In the real world, most states are somewhere between these two extremes. But it is quite obvious that the US polity currently has gone very far down the “states whose authority is based on their power” path and to speak of any kind of “moral authority” of US politicians is really a joke. The (probable) upcoming “choice” between Donald “grab them by the pussy” Trump and Joe “creepy uncle” Biden will make this joke even more laughable.
Right now, the most powerful force in the US political system must be the financial sector. And, of course, there are many other powerful interest groups (MIC, Israel Lobby, the CIA and the ridiculously bloated Intel community, Big Pharma, the US Gulag, the corporate media, Oil, etc.) who all combine their efforts (just like a vector does in mathematics) to produce a “resulting vector” which we call “US policies”. That is in theory. In practice, you have several competing “policies” vying for power and influence, both on the domestic and on international front. Often these policies are mutually exclusive.
Last, but certainly not least, the level of corruption in the US is at least as bad as, say, in the Ukraine or in Liberia, but rather than being on the street and petty cash level, the corruption in the US is counted in billions of dollars.
All in all, not a pretty sight (see here for a good analysis of the decline of US power).
Yet the US remains a nuclear power and still has a lot of political influence worldwide and thus this is not a country anyone can ignore. Including Russia.
A quick look at Russia
Before looking into Russian options in relation to the US, we need to take a quick look at how Russia has been faring this year. The short of it would be: not too well. The Russian economy has shrunk by about 10% and the small businesses have been devastated by the combined effects of 1) the economic policies of the Russian government and Central Bank, and 2) the devastating economic impact of the COVID19 pandemic, and 3) the full-spectrum efforts of the West, mostly by the Anglosphere, to strangle Russia economically. Politically, the “Putin regime” is still popular, but there is a sense that it is getting stale and that most Russians would prefer to see more dynamic and proactive policies aimed, not only to help the Russian mega-corporations, but also to help the regular people. Many Russians definitely have a sense that the “little guy” is being completely ignored by fat cats in power and this resentment will probably grow until and unless Putin decides to finally get rid of all the Atlantic Integrationists aka the “Washington consensus” types which are still well represented in the Russian ruling circles, including the government. So far, Putin has remained faithful to his policy of compromises and small steps, but this might change in the future as the level of frustration in the general population is likely to only grow with time.
That is not to say that the Kremlin is not trying. Several of the recent constitutional amendments adopted in a national vote had a strongly expressed “social” and “patriotic” character and they absolutely horrified the “liberal” 5th columnists who tried their best two 1) call for a boycott, and 2) denounce thousands of (almost entirely) imaginary violations of the proper voting procedures, and to 3) de-legitimize the outcome by declaring the election a “fraud”. None of that worked: the participation was high, very few actual violations were established (and those that were, had no impact on the outcome anyway) and most Russians accepted that this outcome was the result of the will of the people. Furthermore, Putin has made public the Russian strategic goals for 2030,which are heavily focused on improving the living and life conditions of average Russians (for details, see here). It is impossible to predict what will happen next, but the most likely scenario is that Russia has several, shall we say, “bumpy” years ahead, both on the domestic and on the international front.
What can Russia reasonably hope for?
This is really the key question: in the best of situations, what can Russia really hope for in the next elections? I would argue that there is really very little which Russia can hope for, if only because the russophobic hysteria started by the Democrats to defeat Trump has now apparently been completely endorsed by the Trump administration and the all the members of Congress. As for the imperial propaganda machine, it now manages to simultaneously declare that Russia tried to “steal” COVID vaccine secrets from the West AND that Russian elites were given a secret COVID vaccine this Spring. As for the US Dems, they are already announcing that the Russians are spreading “disinformation” about Biden. Talk about PRE-traumatic stress disorder (to use the phrase coined by my friend Gilad Atzmon)…
Although I have no way of knowing what is really taking place in the delusional minds of US politicians, I am strongly suspecting that the latest hysteria about “Russia stealing COV19 vaccine secrets” is probably triggered by the conclusion of the US intel community that Russia will have a vaccine ready before the US does. This is, of course, something absolutely unthinkable for US politicians who, (sort of) logically conclude that “if these Russkies got a vaccine first, they *must* have stolen it from us” or something similar (see here for a good analysis of this). And if the Chinese get there first, same response. After all, who in the US legacy media would ever even mention that Russian or Chinese researchers might be ahead of their US colleagues? Nobody, of course.
I would argue that this mantric Russia-bashing is something which will not change in the foreseeable future. For one thing, since the imperial ruling elites have clearly lost control of the situation, they really have no other option left than to blame it all on some external agent. The “terrorist threat” has lost a lot of traction over the past years, the “Muslim threat” is too politically incorrect to openly blame it all on Islam, as for the other boogeymen which US Americans like to scare themselves at night with (immigrants, drug dealers, sex offenders, “domestic terrorists”, etc.) they simply cannot be blamed for stuff like a crashing economy. But Russia, and China, can.
In fact, ever since the (self-evidently ridiculous) “Skripal case” the collective West has proven that it simply does not have the spine to say “no”, or even “maybe”, to any thesis energetically pushed forward by the AngloZionist propaganda machine. Thus no matter how self-evidently silly the imperial propaganda is, the people in the West have been conditioned (literally) to accept any nonsense as “highly likely” as long as it is proclaimed with enough gravitas by politicians and their legacy ziomedia. As for the leaders of the EU, we already know that they will endorse any idiocy coming out of Washington or London in the name of “solidarity”.
Truth be told, most Russian politicians (with the notable exception of the official Kremlin court jester, Zhirinovskii) and analysts never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend. The Kremlin was especially cautious, which leads me to believe that the Russian intelligence analysts did a very good job evaluating Trump’s psyche and they quickly figured out that he was no better than any other US politician. Right now, I know of no Russian analyst who would predict that relations between the US and Russia will improve in the foreseeable future. If anything, most are clearly saying that “guys, we better get used to this” (accusations, sanctions, accusations, sanctions, etc. etc. etc.). Furthermore, it is pretty obvious to the Russians that while Crimea and MH17 were the pretexts for western sanctions against Russia, they were not the real cause. The real cause of the West’s hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued, subverted or destroyed. They’ve been at it for close to 1,000 years and they still are at it. In fact, each time they fail to crush Russia, their russophobia increases to even higher levels (phobia both in the sense of “fear” and in the sense of “hatred”).
Simply put – there is nothing which Russia can expect from the upcoming election. Nothing at all. Still, that does not mean that things are not better than 4 or 8 years ago. Let’s look at what changed.
The big difference between now and then
What did Trump’s election give to the world?
I would say four years for Russia to fully prepare for what might be coming next.
I would argue that since at least Russia and the AngloZionist Empire have been at war since at least 2013, when Russia foiled the US plan to attack Syria under the pretext that it was “highly likely” that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians (in reality, a textbook case of a false flag organized by the Brits), This means that Russia and the Empire have been at war since at least 2013, for no less than seven years (something which Russian 6th columnists and Neo-Marxists try very hard to ignore).
True, at least until now, this was has been 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic, but this is a real existential war of survival for both sides: only one side will walk away from this struggle. The other one will simply disappear (not as a nation or a people, but as a polity; a regime). The Kremlin fully understood that and it embarked on a huge reform and modernization of the Russian armed forces in three distinct ways:
A “general” reform of the Russian armed forces which had to be modernized by about 80%. This part of the reform is now practically complete.
A specific reform to prepare the western and southern military districts for a major conventional war against the united West (as always in Russian history) which would involve the First Guards Tank Army and the Russian Airborne Forces.
The development of bleeding-edge weapons systems with no equivalent in the West and which cannot be countered or defeated; these weapons have had an especially dramatic impact upon First Strike Stability and upon naval operations.
While some US politicians understood what was going on (I think of Ron Paul, see here), most did not. They were so brainwashed by the US propaganda that they were sure that no matter what, “USA! USA! USA!”. Alas for them, the reality was quite different.
Russian officials, by the way, have confirmed that Russia was preparing for war. Heck, the reforms were so profound and far reaching, that it would have been impossible for the Russians to hide what they were doing (see here for details; also please see Andrei Martyanov’s excellent primer on the new Russian Navy here).
While no country is ever truly prepared for war, I would argue that by 2020 the Russians had reached their goals and that now Russia is fully prepared to handle any conflict the West might throw at her, ranging from a small border incident somewhere in Central Asia to a full-scaled war against the US/NATO in Europe.
Folks in the West are now slowly waking up to this new reality (I mentioned some of that here), but it is too late. In purely military terms, Russia has now created such a qualitative gap with the West that the still existing quantitative gap is not sufficient to guarantee a US/NATO victory. Now some western politicians are starting to seriously freak out (see this lady, for example), but most Europeans are coming to terms with two truly horrible realities:
Russia is much stronger than Europe and, even much worse,
Russia will never attack first (which is a major cause of frustration for western russophobes)
As for the obvious solution to this problem, having friendly relations with Russia is simply unthinkable for those who made their entire careers peddling the Soviet (and now Russian) threat to the world.
But Russia is changing, albeit maybe too slowly (at least for my taste). As I mentioned last week, a number of Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic politicians have declared that the Zapad2020 military maneuvers which are supposed to take place in southern Russia and the Caucasus could be used to prepare an attack on the West (see here for a rather typical example of this nonsense). In the past, the Kremlin would only have made a public statement ridiculing this nonsense, but this time around Putin did something different. Right after he saw the reaction of these politicians, Putin ordered a major and UNSCHEDULED military readiness exercise which involved no less than 150,000 troops, 400 aircraft & 100 ships! The message here was clear:
Yes, we are much more powerful than you are and
No, we are not apologizing for our strength anymore
And, just to make sure that the message is clear, the Russians also tested the readiness of the Russian Airborne Forces units near the city of Riazan, see for yourself:
This response is, I think, the correct one. Frankly, nobody in the West is listening to what the Kremlin has to say, so what is the point of making more statements which in the future will be ignored equally as they have been in the past.
If anything, the slow realization that Russia is more powerful than NATO would be most helpful in gently prodding EU politicians to change their tune and return back to reality. Check out this recent video of Sarah Wagenknecht, a leading politician of the German Left and see for yourself:
The example of Sahra Wagenknecht is interesting, because she is from Germany, one of the countries of northern Europe; traditionally, northern European powers have been much more anti-Russian than southern Europeans, so it is encouraging to see that the anti-Putin and anti-Russia hysteria is not always being endorsed by everybody.
But if things are very slowly getting better in the EU, in the bad old US of A things are only getting worse. Even the Republicans are now fully on board the Russia-hating float (right behind a “gay pride” one I suppose) and they are now contributing their own insanity to the cause, as this article entitled “Congressional Republicans: Russia should be designated state sponsor of terror” shows (designating Russia as a terrorist state is an old idea of the Dems, by the way).
Russian options for the Fall
In truth, Russia does not have any particularly good options towards the US. Both parties are now fully united in their rabid hatred of Russia (and China too, of course). Furthermore, while there are many well-funded and virulently anti-Russian organizations in the US (Neo-cons, Papists, Poles, Masons, Ukrainians, Balts, Ashkenazi Jews, etc.), Russian organizations in the US like this one, have very little influence or even relevance.
Banderites marching in the US
However, as the chaos continues to worsen inside the US and as US politicians continue to alienate pretty much the entire planet, Russia does have a perfect opportunity to weaken the US grip on Europe. The beauty in the current dynamic is that Russia does not have to do anything at all (nevermind anything covert or illegal) to help the anti-EU and anti-US forces in Europe: All she needs to do is to continuously hammer in the following simple message: “the US is sinking – do you really want to go down with it?”.
There are many opportunities to deliver that message. The current US/Polish efforts to prevent the EU from enjoying cheap Russian gas might well be the best example of what we could call “European suicide politics”, but there are many, many more.
Truth be told, neither the US nor the EU are a top priority for Russia, at least not in economic terms. The moral credibility of the West in general can certainly be described as dead and long gone. As for the West military might, it is only a concern to the degree that western politicians might be tempted to believe their own propaganda about their military forces being the best in the history of the galaxy. This is why Russia regularly engages in large surprise exercises: to prove to the West that the Russian military is fully ready for anything the West might try. As for the constant move of more and more US/NATO forces closer to the borders of Russia, they are offensive in political terms, but in military terms, getting closer to Russia only means that Russia will have more options to destroy you. “Forward deployment” is really a thing of the past, at least against Russia.
With time, however, and as the US federal center loses even more of its control of the country, the Kremlin might be well-advised to try to open some venues for “popular diplomacy”, especially with less hostile US states. The weakening of the Executive Branch has already resulted in US governors playing an increasingly important international role and while this is not, strictly speaking, legal (only the federal government has the right to engage in foreign policy), the fact is that this has been going on for years already.
The example of Sahra Wagenknecht is interesting, because she is from Germany, one of the countries of northern Europe; traditionally, northern European powers have been much more anti-Russian than southern Europeans, so it is encouraging to see that the anti-Putin and anti-Russia hysteria is not always being endorsed by everybody.
But if things are very slowly getting better in the EU, in the bad old US of A things are only getting worse. Even the Republicans are now fully on board the Russia-hating float (right behind a “gay pride” one I suppose) and they are now contributing their own insanity to the cause, as this article entitled “Congressional Republicans: Russia should be designated state sponsor of terror” shows (designating Russia as a terrorist state is an old idea of the Dems, by the way).
Russian options for the Fall
In truth, Russia does not have any particularly good options towards the US. Both parties are now fully united in their rabid hatred of Russia (and China too, of course). Furthermore, while there are many well-funded and virulently anti-Russian organizations in the US (Neo-cons, Papists, Poles, Masons, Ukrainians, Balts, Ashkenazi Jews, etc.), Russian organizations in the US like this one, have very little influence or even relevance.
Banderites marching in the US
However, as the chaos continues to worsen inside the US and as US politicians continue to alienate pretty much the entire planet, Russia does have a perfect opportunity to weaken the US grip on Europe. The beauty in the current dynamic is that Russia does not have to do anything at all (nevermind anything covert or illegal) to help the anti-EU and anti-US forces in Europe: All she needs to do is to continuously hammer in the following simple message: “the US is sinking – do you really want to go down with it?”.
There are many opportunities to deliver that message. The current US/Polish efforts to prevent the EU from enjoying cheap Russian gas might well be the best example of what we could call “European suicide politics”, but there are many, many more.
Truth be told, neither the US nor the EU are a top priority for Russia, at least not in economic terms. The moral credibility of the West in general can certainly be described as dead and long gone. As for the West military might, it is only a concern to the degree that western politicians might be tempted to believe their own propaganda about their military forces being the best in the history of the galaxy. This is why Russia regularly engages in large surprise exercises: to prove to the West that the Russian military is fully ready for anything the West might try. As for the constant move of more and more US/NATO forces closer to the borders of Russia, they are offensive in political terms, but in military terms, getting closer to Russia only means that Russia will have more options to destroy you. “Forward deployment” is really a thing of the past, at least against Russia.
With time, however, and as the US federal center loses even more of its control of the country, the Kremlin might be well-advised to try to open some venues for “popular diplomacy”, especially with less hostile US states. The weakening of the Executive Branch has already resulted in US governors playing an increasingly important international role and while this is not, strictly speaking, legal (only the federal government has the right to engage in foreign policy), the fact is that this has been going on for years already. Another possible partner inside the US for Russian firms would be US corporations (especially now that they are hurting badly). Finally, I think that the Kremlin ought to try to open channels of communication with the various small political forces in the US which are clearly not buying into the official propaganda: libertarians, (true) liberals and progressives, paleo-conservatives.
What we are witnessing before our eyes is the collapse of the US federal center. This is a dangerous and highly unstable moment in our history. But from this crisis opportunities will arise. The best thing Russia can do now is to simply remain very careful and vigilant and wait for new forces to appear on the US political scene.
Another possible partner inside the US for Russian firms would be US corporations (especially now that they are hurting badly). Finally, I think that the Kremlin ought to try to open channels of communication with the various small political forces in the US which are clearly not buying into the official propaganda: libertarians, (true) liberals and progressives, paleo-conservatives.
What we are witnessing before our eyes is the collapse of the US federal center. This is a dangerous and highly unstable moment in our history. But from this crisis opportunities will arise. The best thing Russia can do now is to simply remain very careful and vigilant and wait for new forces to appear on the US political scene.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 