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Much of the international support that Israel receives is based on several lies it tells and re-tells as “facts”.

In 1991, negotiations started officially and unofficially between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (and the Palestinians associated with it) and the Israeli government. At the time, Israel had occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip for the previous 24 years.

Today, 20 years later, Israel and President Obama insist that the only way to bring about peace, and presumably end the Occupation, is to continue with negotiations. It is unclear if what Obama and Israel are claiming is that Israel needs 24 years of negotiations in order to end its 24-year occupation of Palestinian land, so that by the time the occupation ends, it will have lasted for 48 years.

This of course is the optimistic reading of the Israeli and US positions; the reality of the negotiations and what they aim to achieve, however, is far more insidious.

The negotiations have been based on specific goals to end certain aspects of the Israeli relationship to the Palestinians, namely some of the parts introduced since the 1967 war and the occupation, and the beginning of exclusive Jewish colonial settlement of these territories.But what always remains outside the purview of negotiations is the very core of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship, which the Palestinians are told cannot be part of any negotiations.

These off-limits core issues include what has happened since 1947-1948, including the expulsion of 760,000 Palestinians, the destruction of their cities and towns, the confiscation and destruction of their property, the introduction of discriminatory laws that legalise Jewish racial, colonial and religious privilege and deny Palestinian citizens of Israel equal rights and reject the right of the expelled refugees to return.

Yet, this core, which the Israelis summarise as Israel’s right to be, and to be recognised as, a “Jewish” state, is what is always invoked by the Israelis themselves as central to beginning and ending the negotiations successfully and which the Palestinians, the Israelis insist, refuse to discuss.

But the core issues of the question of the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis have always been based on the agonistic historical, geographic and political claims of the Palestinian people and the Zionist movement.

While the Palestinians have always based their claims on verifiable facts and truths that the international community agreed upon and recognised, Israel has always based its claims on facts on the ground that it created by force and which parts of the international community would only recognise as “legitimate”, retroactively.

How is one then to sift through these competing notions of truths and facts on the one hand, and facts on the ground, on the other?

The core issues of the US and Israeli agenda were best articulated in the speeches delivered by Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the United Nations (UN) last month in response to the PLO’s bid for statehood at the UN. It is there where both Netanyahu and Obama invoked what they called “truths” and “facts” to assert Israeli facts on the ground. As I will show, their strategy is engineered to convert Israeli facts on the ground from antonyms of truths and facts to synonyms with them.

The first ‘fact’

Let me begin with what Zionists and the US have defined as the first “fact”, which is by definition not open to any doubt or question. Obama insists: “These facts cannot be denied. The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland.”

Netanyahu echoes Obama by listing this first “fact” as the first “truth,” or rather by making sure that “the light of truth will shine” at the UN through his words: “It was here in 1975 that the age-old yearning of my people to restore our national life in our ancient biblical homeland … was … branded … shamefully, as racism.” He added later “and we will know that [the Palestinians are] ready for compromise and for peace … when they stop denying our historical connection to our ancient homeland.”

Now, this insistence that the first fact, nay the first truth, that Palestine is the historic homeland of modern European Jews who resided in Europe and not of the Palestinian people who lived in it for millennia, turns out to be neither factual nor truthful, though it indeed remains the primary and first claim made by Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The claim relies on anti-Semitic notions propagated initially by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and later by secular anti-Semitism, both of which insisted that modern European Jews were blood and genetic descendants of the ancient Hebrews respectively, which is precisely how eighteenth century European philology’s reference to Jews as “Semites” would soon be transformed in the hand of political and racial anti-Semitism by the late nineteenth century from a “linguistic” category into a “racial” and biological one.

It is based on these anti-Semitic claims – that millenarian Protestants, secular anti-Semites, and Zionists called for the “restoration” of European Jews to the alleged homeland of their alleged ancestors.

The uncontroversial academic and historical facts that European Jews are descendants of European converts to Judaism from the centuries before Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century are unquestionable axioms in academic scholarship, including by Zionist historians.

No respected historian of European Jewry has ever argued that European Jews, or for that matter Moroccan, or Iraqi, or Yemeni Jews, were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. All respected scholars recognise them as descendants of converts to Judaism.

But even if the wildest genetic fantasies of anti-Semites and Zionists of Jews as a “race” were “proven”, would this make ancient Palestine, where the ancient Hebrews cohabited with other ancient peoples, the historic land of modern European Jews?

And even if one were to commit oneself to the science-fiction of Christian biblical archaeology which accompanied European colonialism in the nineteenth century and on which Israeli archaeology continues to be based, would that mean that modern Jews, now posited as direct genetic and biological descendants of the ancient Hebrews could claim the land where the ancient Hebrews lived with the Canaanites among other myriad groups as their own exclusive national domain and take it from its inhabitants who lived in it for millennia?

Could anyone today, except genocidal racists, link Germanic populations to an Aryan origin that started in northern India and based on that link, argue that northern India is the ancient homeland of all German-speaking people to which they must return and evict the current inhabitants of the land as nothing but recent interlopers in the land of the White Aryans?

These fantastical scenarios are precisely what Obama and Netanyahu tell us are undeniable facts and truths.

Indeed they both insist on them being the first fact, the very first indubitable principle of Zionism, which they want to impose on the international community and on the Palestinians!

The second “fact”

Obama’s second fact is asserted with a rhetorical flourish: “Let’s be honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbours that have waged repeated wars against it … These facts cannot be denied.”

But these also are not facts at all. Not even Israeli historians of Israel’s wars agree with them. But Israeli politicians and ideologues of course do. In his UN speech, Netanyahu himself echoes Obama’s words by telling us that Israel is threatened by its neighbours, that it is “surrounded by people sworn to its destruction and armed to the teeth by Iran” and enjoins presumably the American part of his audience at least not to “forget that the people who live in Brooklyn and New Jersey are considerably nicer than some of Israel’s neighbours.”

These racist overtones aside, the academic and historic record shows us however that it was Zionist forces who have waged war against the Palestinians in the wake of the 1947 Partition Plan starting on November 30, 1947.

By May 14, 1948, when Israel declared itself a state, it had expelled 400,000 Palestinians from their homes and was capturing their lands and territories, which were assigned to the Arab state. When three (not five!) Arab armies invaded Zionist-held Palestine on May 15, 1948, they were intervening to stop the expulsion of the Palestinian people and to protect their lands from being taken over by Zionist forces. At the end of the war, they failed miserably at their task. Israel was able to expel another 360,000 Palestinians and to capture half the territories of the Arab state adding them to the Jewish state.

• In 1956, Israel invaded Egypt along with Britain and France. This was in addition to intermittent but continuous cross border raids into the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egyptian-held Gaza over the decades to come.
• In 1967, Israel invaded Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and occupied their territories and all of the remaining lands of Palestine.
• In 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories (Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights), which Israel had earlier occupied, in an attempt to reclaim them but failed. They did not invade Israel itself.
• In 1978, in 1982, and in 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon killing tens of thousands of people.
• In 2008-2009, Israel invaded Gaza.

These are the undeniable facts that the international community and historians and the actual documentary record proves. As such, Israel was never invaded by its neighbours, except in 1948 – which was an attempt to stop Israel’s invasion of Palestinian territory and the expulsion of Palestinians.

That Israel won the majority of these wars cannot change the facts that it initiated them and that it has been the aggressor on its neighbours since even before its establishment in 1947. Indeed, Israel would launch raids on Iraq in 1981 and on Tunisia in 1985, neither of which was an immediate neighbour and without the slightest military provocation from either.

That Israel and the Zionist movement have been the aggressor in the region for the past century are the undeniable facts.

That Obama wants to assert that Israelis were victims of their neighbours is nothing short of imposing a fact on the ground by sheer American rhetorical and political power unrelated to real events. Obama’s invocation of honesty here turns out to be nothing short of a call for outright dishonesty.

But this “fact” for Obama derives from the “first fact”, namely, if European Jews have the right to colonise Palestine, expel the Palestinians, confiscate their lands, occupy them and discriminate against them by virtue of the first fact of their bogus historic claim, then any Palestinian or Arab resistance to the Zionists’ murderous campaigns is nothing short of aggression on Jews.

Obama proceeds to tell us other “facts”, including that “Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them.”

While a handful of Israelis have been killed over the years by rocket fire, tens of thousands of Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians, have been killed by Israeli rocket fire during times of war and peace. Perhaps the most recent example can shed some light on this.

During Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Israeli rockets killed over 1,400 Palestinians while Hamas rockets against Israel did not kill a single Israeli, though several Israelis were shell-shocked and required psychological counselling. As for the murder of thousands of Arab children since 1948 and through the invasion of Gaza, Israel has killed at a rate of thousands of Arab children to one Jewish child in retaliatory attacks on Israel.

So, while Obama is indeed not lying that rockets have been fired on Israel and that historically Israeli Jewish children have been killed by attacks, he takes it out of the context of the much larger destruction and killings Israel engaged in against its neighbours since it was established, which is after all based on the first fact!

Obama’s half-facts, like his alleged full facts, end up being again engineered to impose Israeli facts on the ground. For these claims are being made to assert Israel’s need for “security”, which is of paramount importance, and which is the reason both Obama and Netanyahu claim that the negotiations have failed.

Let me quote several of Obama’s references to Israel’s security in his UN speech: “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable”; “Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security”; “any lasting peace must acknowledge the very real security concerns that Israel faces every single day.”

So, basically Israel gets to invade the Palestinians and all its sovereign neighbours, some repeatedly, over the last six decades, and it continues to occupy their territories and invade their airspace and oppress the occupied populations and colonise their lands. However, for negotiations to be successful, Israel wants to ensure that its security be safeguarded from any resistance to Israeli attacks, colonisation, and occupation by those it continues to attack, colonise, and occupy. And this it can demand based on the first fact.

Obama, it should be noted, never mentioned the security concerns of Israel’s neighbours who have been the target of Israel’s attacks for over six decades. He did however mention the security of Palestinian children once alongside his several mentions of Israeli children despite the one-to-several-thousands victimisation ratio between them: “The measure of our actions must always be whether they advance the right of Israeli and Palestinian children to live in peace and security, with dignity and opportunity.”

Netanyahu picks up where Obama left off: “Our major international airport is a few kilometres away from the West Bank. Without peace, will our planes become targets for anti-aircraft missiles placed in the adjacent Palestinian state?”

What is most interesting about this statement is the fact that Israel’s airport has never been attacked by rockets, which is not to say that Israel has not attacked the airports of its neighbours. That, it has done with aplomb. In 1968, Israel bombed the Beirut international airport destroying 13 civilian airliners on the tarmac. It would attack Beirut airport again in 2006 – bombing runways.

As for plane hijackings, Israel was a pioneer in the Middle East, when its first hijacking took place in 1954. The Israeli air force would often seize flying civilian airliners in international skies and divert them to Israel, subject the passengers to inspection, interrogation as well as incarceration.

Indeed, Israel remains the only Middle East country that blew up a civilian airliner when it shot down a Libyan civilian plane in 1973, killing 108 passengers on board.

Negotiations and more negotiations

This takes us back to what Obama believes, the negotiations are and should be about, namely: “It is Israelis and Palestinians – not us – who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: On borders and security; on refugees and Jerusalem.”

The negotiations which started in 1991 in Madrid and continued in earnest after the 1993 Oslo agreement, however, were based on UN resolutions that stipulate that Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories (Resolutions 242 and 338), which would settle the borders question if it were not for Israel’s refusal to abide by the resolutions.

Moreover, the main issue that has terminated the negotiations and which both sides do not agree on has been Israeli Jewish colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

As luck would have it, the international community and international law both condemn Israeli colonial settlement in the 1967 territories, which are categorically considered illegal and have been declared as such myriad times by UN resolutions and policy statements.

It is curious that Obama never mentioned the colonial settlements in his speech, even though he had attempted a number of times in the last two years without success to intervene with the Israeli government to stop, or at least slow down, building them.

As for the issues of borders, the 1947 Partition Plan had already specified the borders of the two states, and Resolution 242, on which the negotiations are based, specified where Israel should be withdrawing to after the 1967 war, Israeli casuistry in that matter notwithstanding.

The Palestinian negotiating position echoes that of international law and UN resolutions while the Israeli position violates them. This also relates to the matter of the refugees which has also been settled by UN resolutions and international law while Israel remains adamant in its refusal to implement these resolutions by refusing to repatriate, compensate and return the property of the 760,000 Palestinians it expelled. Neither will it agree to compensate and return the property of the quarter of a million Palestinians (internal refugees and their descendants) who are Israeli citizens whom it expelled from one part of the country to another part of it.

But the so-called historical truths and the first “fact” that Netanyahu marshals to assert facts on the ground are endless.

He adds: “In my office in Jerusalem, there’s a … an ancient seal. It’s a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there’s a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu. That’s my last name …”

“… My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin – Binyamin – the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Samaria 4,000 years ago, and there’s been a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since.”

Netanyahu (a name which Benjamin Netanyahu changed when he lived in the United States to Ben Nitay allegedly because it was easier for Americans to pronounce) is itself an invented Zionist name, which, like all other Zionist names, began to bestow on European Jews an ancient Hebrew lineage.

Indeed Netanyahu’s father Benzion Mileikowsky was the son of Polish Jews converted to Zionism, who named their son Benzion based on their ideological commitments and changed their name to “Netanyahu” after they immigrated to colonise Palestine in 1920.

The names of Benzion’s father and mother (and Benjamin Netanyahu’s grandparents) were Nathan Mileikowsky and Sarah Lurie, common European Jewish pre-Zionist names.

For Benjamin Mileikowsky (Netanyahu), a descendant of Polish Jewish colonists, to claim ancient Jerusalem as his ancestral origin, would be seen as a curious ideological and mythical fabrication during a dinner conversation, but to assert it as a fact-based political and territorial claim to the land of the Palestinians at the United Nations, makes a mockery of international law, which is the basis of UN resolutions that condemn Israel’s occupation and colonisation of the city.

While Israel today maintains at least 30 laws that grant Jews racial, religious and colonising privileges over Palestinian citizens of Israel – including the 2002 temporary law banning marriage between Israelis and Palestinians of the Occupied Territories – and more so against the Palestinian non-citizens living under Israeli occupation; Netanyahu claims, against these documented facts, that “The Jewish state of Israel will always protect the rights of all its minorities, including the more than one million Arab citizens of Israel.”

He adds a curious statement with regard to illegal Jewish colonial settlers in the Occupied Palestinian territories stating that “I wish I could say the same thing about a future Palestinian state, for as Palestinian officials made clear the other day – in fact, I think they made it right here in New York – they said the Palestinian state won’t allow any Jews in it. They’ll be Jew-free – Judenrein. That’s ethnic cleansing. There are laws today in Ramallah that make the selling of land to Jews punishable by death. That’s racism. And you know which laws this evokes.”

“Tel Aviv is the only Western city that does not have any Arab or Muslim inhabitants.”

While no Palestinian official since the negotiations started has ever dared to state unequivocally that Jewish colonial settlers must be returned to Israel in line with international law, this unverifiable claim by Netanyahu, even if proven true, would not be racist or discriminatory, but rather anti-colonial, refusing to allow Israeli Jews to colonise Palestinian lands against international law by virtue of some Jewish privilege that invokes the “first fact”.

It is Israeli laws that restrict access to Israel’s lands to its non-Jewish Palestinian citizens, even though 90 per cent of that land was confiscated from the Palestinian people. It is also Israeli cities that remain Araberrein; indeed, as many observers have noted, Tel Aviv is the only Western city that does not have any Arab or Muslim inhabitants.

If any racist laws are being evoked here, they are evoked by Israel’s own racist laws and practices, not by Palestinian anti-colonial resistance.

But this statement clarifies where Netanyahu stands on the question of Jewish colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is not Jewish colonisation of the land of the Palestinians that is racist as the UN defined it in 1975, but rather the application of international law by preventing Jews from colonising the land of the Palestinians that is racist.

For Zionism and Obama, any attempt to reject the Zionist “first fact” is immediate proof of anti-Semitism. This is yet another example of how facts on the ground are transformed by Israel and its US backers into “truths” and “facts”.

Israel has many racist and discriminatory laws against its Arab citizens [GALLO/GETTY]

Indeed, Netanyahu (or is it Mileikowsky, or Nitay?) asserts: “I came here to speak the truth. The truth is … that Israel wants peace. The truth is that I want peace. The truth is that in the Middle East at all times, but especially during these turbulent days, peace must be anchored in security. The truth is that we cannot achieve peace through UN resolutions, but only through direct negotiations between the parties. The truth is that so far the Palestinians have refused to negotiate. The truth is that Israel wants peace with a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want a state without peace. And the truth is you shouldn’t let that happen.”

For Netanyahu and the Israelis, however, peace can only be achieved if the Palestinians recognise the rights of Jews to occupy their land, to colonise their lands, and to discriminate against them.

To do so, the Israelis offer a simple formula, which Obama has also endorsed and insists on, namely that the Palestinians must recognise Israel’s right to be a Jewish state.

Netanyahu does not mince words when he asserts that: “this year in the Knesset and in the US Congress, I laid out my vision for peace in which a demilitarised Palestinian state recognises the Jewish state. Yes, the Jewish state. After all, this is the body that recognised the Jewish state 64 years ago. Now, don’t you think it’s about time that Palestinians did the same? … Israel has no intention whatsoever to change the democratic character of our state. We just don’t want the Palestinians to try to change the Jewish character of our state. We want … them to give up the fantasy of flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians.”

Challenging the UN and international law, which has called on Israel to allow the Palestinians it expelled to come back to their homes, is identified as a “flood” that will undermine Israel’s raison d’être as a state that extends racial and colonial privileges to Jews, which indeed it would be.

Where Netanyahu is wrong is when he asserts that when the UN General Assembly called for the establishment of a Jewish State in 1947, it, by default, recognised the Jewish State’s right to expel the Palestinian people, colonise their lands, and confiscate their property for the exclusive use of Jews and to discriminate against them by law.

Not only did the UN Partition Plan grant no such rights to the Jewish state, it explicitly stated that the establishment of such a Jewish state means that this state cannot expel its non-Jewish population, and that “no discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex” (Chapter 2, Article 2) and that “no expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State … shall be allowed except for public purposes. In all cases of expropriation full compensation as fixed by the Supreme Court shall be said previous to dispossession.” (Chapter 2, Article 8).

The fabrications and lies about UN recognition are being asserted by Netanyahu to the very international body that issued the Partition Plan, and are addressed to their face, as truths, when all they are is nothing less than facts on the ground established by Israel, condemned by the UN, and defended by the United States.

While the negotiations that the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis have engaged in have prevented the Palestinians from raising the 1947/1948 crimes of the Israeli state (and those committed in the decades to come) because they would render the “first fact” dubitable indeed, Netanyahu and Obama raise these crimes as a sacrosanct principle of the Jewishness of the state, indeed of the very “first fact” that they affirmed.

Indeed Netanyahu does the same with Israeli crimes post 1967, including the colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Finally, Netanyahu concludes with a call to expel the 1.6 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. He instructs PA President Abbas to: “Recognise the Jewish state, and make peace with us. In such a genuine peace, Israel is prepared to make painful compromises. We believe that the Palestinians should be neither the citizens of Israel nor its subjects. They should live in a free state of their own. But they should be ready, like us, for compromise.”

“We believe that the Palestinians should neither be the citizens of Israel nor its subjects.”

– Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister

Netanyahu offers his call for a new expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel as a compromise that the Palestinians should accept. In doing so, his logic is impeccable. If Palestinians recognise the “first fact”, namely, Israel’s right to be a Jewish state based on fabricated historical claims, and that it should guarantee Jewish racial and colonial privilege, then it follows that they must accept another expulsion of Palestinians from that state to ensure that Jewish privilege continues to operate.

It is this formula of peace that the Israelis offer the Palestinians and which the Palestinians, even the collaborating PA, cannot accept.

When Obama asserts that “peace depends upon compromise among peoples who must live together long after our speeches are over, and our votes have been counted,” he is being at best coy, for the peace that Israel seeks, as Netanyahu’s call for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens, rendering Israel finally Araberrein, clarify, will result in Palestinians and Israelis not living together at all.

The Pale of Palestinian settlement

The peace that Israel is proposing for Palestinians in fact evokes another memory, of how another country dealt with Jewish settlement, namely the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great and the creation of the Pale of Settlement in the late eighteenth century for Jews to be confined to, which they were for the most part till the early part of the twentieth century.

The Pale, like the Palestinian Bantustans, was the only territory where Russian Jews were allowed to live by the anti-Jewish czars, though Russian Christians also lived in it to ensure that there was no territorial contiguity for Jews. The Palestinian Bantustans would serve a similar function.

While Israel will become Araberrein, the Palestinian Bantustans carved out of West Bank and East Jerusalem territories would be criss-crossed by Jews-only roads and Jewish-only colonial settlements and cities, and by the Israeli army, which, as Netanyahu himself has proposed, will be stationed indefinitely in the Jordan Valley.

The Pale of Palestinian Settlement will be then called a “Palestinian State” which the Israelis and the Americans will immediately recognise as “sovereign”, though it would not even have the formal accoutrements of sovereignty. It is thus that the Palestinian State, whose existence would neither be a fact nor the truth, will be recognised as a fact on the ground, indeed the very last fact that Israel and the US will be asserting.

For the Palestinians to survive the more than a century-long Zionist assault on their society and country, their only option is to resist this Israeli- and American- imposed “peace”, and all the so-called facts they impose on them, from the very first “fact” to the very last one.

By Joseph Massad

27 October 2011

@ Al- Jazeera

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. His most recent books are The Persistence of the Palestinian Question and Desiring Arabs.

Source: Al Jazeera

The claim that Iran employed a used-car salesman with a conviction for cheque fraud to hire Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington goes against all that is known of Iran’s highly sophisticated intelligence service.

The confident announcement of this bizarre plot by the US Attorney General Eric Holder sounds alarmingly similar to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious claim before the UN in 2003 that the US possessed irrefutable evidence Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

The problem is that the US government has very publicly committed itself to a version of events, however unlikely, that, if true, would be a case for war against Iran. It will be difficult for the US to back away from such allegations now.

Could the accusations be true? The plot as described in court was puerile, easy to discover and unlikely to succeed. A Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant in Corpus Christi, Texas, with supposed links to Los Zetas gangsters in Mexico, said he had been approached by an Iranian friend of his aunt called Mansour Arbabsiar to hire the Zetas to make attacks. A link is established with the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

None of this makes sense. The IRGC is famous for making sure that responsibility for its actions can never be traced to Iran. It usually operates through proxies. Yet suddenly here it is sending $100,000 (£63,000) from a known IRGC bank account to hire assassins in Mexico. The beneficiaries from such a plot are evident. There will be those on the neo-con right and extreme supporters of Israel who have long been pressing for a war with Iran. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have been vociferously asserting that Iran is orchestrating Shia pro-democracy protests, but without finding many believers in the rest of the world. Their claims are now likely to be taken more seriously in Washington. There will be less pressure on countries like Bahrain to accommodate their Shia populations.

In Iraq, the US and Britain were always seeing Iran’s hidden hand supporting their opponents, but they could never quite prove it. It was also true, to a degree never appreciated in the US, that Washington and Tehran were at one in getting rid of Saddam Hussein and installing a Shia government. There were points in common and a struggle for influence. The same has been true in Afghanistan, where Iran was delighted to see the anti-Shia Taliban overthrown in 2001.

Some Iran specialists suggest there might be a “rogue faction” within the Revolutionary Guard, but there is no evidence such a body exists or of a convincing motive for it to be associating with Mexican gangsters.

On Wednesday afternoon, we marched out of Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have bedded down for the duration. Drums were pounding and shouts of “Whose streets? Our streets!” “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street,” and “This is what democracy looks like, that is what hypocrisy looks like!” rang out as we headed directly into New York City’s version of a police state. The helicopters with the high-tech sensors and high-resolution cameras hovered in the distant sky, the security cams peered down from walls, the barriers the police had set up hemmed us in — no street, just sidewalk for these demonstrators — and the cops, scores of flexi-cuffs looped at their belts, were lined up all (photo: Ianqui Doodle)

along the way, while empty buses wheeled past ready for future arrestees. (photo: Ianqui Doodle)

This was not exactly a shining Big Apple example of the “freedom” to demonstrate. It was demonstration as imprisonment and at certain moments, at least for this 67-year-old, it was claustrophobic. This is the way the state treats 15,000 terrorist suspects, not its own citizens.

Still, the energy and high spirits were staggering. The unions were out — nurses, teachers, construction workers — the bands were lively (“… down by the riverside, ain’t gonna study war no more…”), and hand-made signs were everywhere and about everything under the sun: “Crime does pay in the USA — on Wall Street,” “When did the common good become a bad idea,” “4 years in college, $100,000 in debt, for a hostess job,” “Eat the rich,” “Arab Spring to Wall Street Fall” (with the final “L” in “Fall” slipping off the sign), “We are the 99%,” “Legalize online poker, occupy Wall St.”

Amid the kaleidoscopic range of topics on those signs and in those chants and cries, one thing, one name, was largely missing: the president’s. In those hours marching and at Foley Square amid the din of so many thousands of massed people, I saw one sign that said “Obama = Bush” and another that went something like “The Barack Obama we elected would be out here with us.” That was it. Sayonara.

It’s as if the spreading movement, made up of kids who might once have turned out for presidential candidate Obama, had left him and his administration in the dust. Like big labor, the left, and the media, the administration that loved its bankers to death (and got little enough in return for that embrace) is now playing catch-up with a ragtag bunch of protesters it wouldn’t have thought twice about if they hadn’t somehow caught the zeitgeist of this moment. (Don’t forget that the Obama administration was similarly left scrambling and desperately behind events when it came to the demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo last January.)

The best Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner could say a few days ago, when asked about his sympathies for the Occupy Wall Street movement, was: “I feel a lot of sympathy for what you might describe as a general sense among Americans that we’ve lost a sense of possibility.” Really? White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley didn’t know if the movement was exactly “helpful” for the White House agenda. Truly? And White House press spokesman Jay Carney commented blandly, “I would simply say that, to the extent that people are frustrated with the economic situation, we understand.” Do you?

Suddenly, last Thursday, with news about the anti-Wall Street movement whipping up a storm, the Obama administration found itself out of breath and running hard to reposition itself. Vice President Joe Biden said, “The core is the bargain has been breached with the American people,” while at his news conference addressing questions about the movement the president added, “I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel… [T]he protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

Still, those signs with everything but Barack Obama on them should be considered a warning. Recently, Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean writer and activist, penned a message from a man who died in the attacks of September 11th. His name was Salvador Allende, he was the elected president of Chile, and the “terrorists” on that day in 1973 were the Chilean military backed by the CIA. (Strangely enough, afterwards no one declared a global war on anyone.)

Dorfman, author most recently of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, channels warning words from “the dead” to Barack Obama. But mark my words, Allende’s isn’t the only warning to the president at this moment. Those kids in downtown Manhattan (and increasingly across the country and the world) are offering their own warning, and theirs, after a fashion, comes from the future, one in which Obama’s presidency could someday be seen as little but an irrelevancy.

By Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com

Nazareth: Amid the enthusiastic applause in New York City and the celebrations in Ramallah, it was easy to believe — if only a for minute — that, after decades of obstruction by Israel and the United States, a Palestinian state might finally be pulled out of the United Nations’ hat. Will the world’s conscience be midwife to a new era ending Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians?

It seems not.

The Palestinian application, handed to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week, has now disappeared from view — for weeks, it seems — while the United States and Israel devise a face-saving formula to kill it in the Security Council. Behind the scenes, the pair are strong-arming the council’s members to block Palestinian statehood without the need for the US to cast its threatened veto.

Whether or not President Barack Obama wields the knife with his own hand, no one is under any illusion that Washington and Israel are responsible for the formal demise of the peace process. In revealing to the world its hypocrisy on the Middle East, the US has ensured both that the Arab public is infuriated and that the Palestinians will jump ship on the two-state solution.

But there was one significant victory at the UN for Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, even if it was not the one he sought. He will not achieve statehood for his people at the world body, but he has fatally discredited the US as the arbiter of a Middle East peace.

Craven to Israel

In telling the Palestinians there was “no shortcut” to statehood — after they have already waited more than six decades for justice — the US president revealed his country as incapable of offering moral leadership on the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Obama is this craven to Israel, what better reception can the Palestinians hope to receive from a future US leader?

One guest at the UN had the nerve to politely point this out in his speech. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president who himself appears to be wavering from his original support for a Palestinian state, warned that US control of the peace process needed to end.

“We must stop believing that a single country, even the largest, or a small group of countries can resolve so complex a problem,” he told the General Assembly. His suggestion was for a more active role for Europe and the Arab states at peace with Israel.

Sarkozy appeared to have overlooked the fact that responsibility for solving the conflict was widened in much this way in 2002 with the creation of the Quartet, comprising the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

The Quartet’s formation was necessary because the US and Israel realized that the Palestinian leadership would not continue playing the peace process game if oversight remained exclusively with Washington, following the Palestinians’ betrayal by President Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000. The Quartet’s job was to restore Palestinian faith in — and buy a few more years for — the Oslo process.

Blair’s bias

However, the Quartet quickly discredited itself too, not least because its officials never strayed far from the Israeli-Washington consensus. Last week senior Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath spoke for most Palestinians when he accused the Quartet’s envoy, Tony Blair, of sounding like an “Israeli diplomat” as he sought to dissuade Abbas from applying for statehood.

And true to form, the Quartet responded to the Palestinians’ UN application by limply offering Abbas instead more of the same tired talks that have gone nowhere for two decades.

The Palestinian leadership’s move to the UN, effectively bypassing the Quartet, widens the circle of responsibility for Middle East peace yet further. It also neatly brings the Palestinians’ 63-year plight back to the world body.

But Abbas’ application also exposes the UN’s powerlessness to intervene in an effective way. Statehood depends on a successful referral to the Security Council, which is dominated by the US. The General Assembly may be more sympathetic but it can confer no more than a symbolic upgrading of Palestine’s status, putting it on a par with the Vatican.

So the Palestinian leadership is stuck. Abbas has run out of institutional addresses for helping him to establish a state alongside Israel. And that means there is a third casualty of the statehood bid — the Palestinian Authority. The PA was the fruit of the Oslo process, and will wither without its sustenance.

Entering a new phase

Instead we are entering a new phase of the conflict in which the US, Europe, and the UN will have only a marginal part to play. The Palestinian old guard are about to be challenged by a new generation that is tired of the formal structures of diplomacy that pander to Israel’s interests only.

The young new Palestinian leaders are familiar with social media, are better equipped to organize a popular mass movement, and refuse to be bound by the borders that encaged their parents and grandparents. Their assessment is that the PA — and even the Palestinians’ unrepresentative supra-body, the Palestine Liberation Organization — are part of the problem, not the solution.

Until now they have remained largely deferential to their elders, but that trust is fast waning. Educated and alienated, they are looking for new answers to an old problem.

They will not be seeking them from the countries and institutions that have repeatedly confirmed their complicity in sustaining the Palestinian people’s misery. The new leaders will appeal over the heads of the gatekeepers, turning to the court of global public opinion. Polls show that in Europe and the US, ordinary people are far more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than their governments.

The first shoots of this revolution in Palestinian politics were evident in the youth movement that earlier this year frightened Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas into creating a semblance of unity. These youngsters, now shorn of the distracting illusion of Palestinian statehood, will redirect their energies into an anti-apartheid struggle, using the tools of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. Their rallying cry will be one person-one vote in the single state Israel rules over.

Global support will be translated into a rapid intensification of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Israel’s legitimacy and the credibility of its dubious claim to being a democracy are likely to take yet more of a hammering.

Events at the UN are creating a new clarity for Palestinians, reminding them that there can be no self-determination until they liberate themselves from the legacy of colonialism and the self-serving illusions of the ageing notables who now lead them. The old men in suits have had their day.

By Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net

On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only “engage” for “self-defence”, says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.

Obama’s decision is described in the press as “highly unusual” and “surprising”, even “weird”. It is none of these things. It is the logic of American foreign policy since 1945. Take Vietnam. The priority was to halt the influence of China, an imperial rival, and “protect” Indonesia, which President Nixon called “the region’s richest hoard of natural resources …the greatest prize”. Vietnam merely got in the way; and the slaughter of more than three million Vietnamese and the devastation and poisoning of their land was the price of America achieving its goal. Like all America’s subsequent invasions, a trail of blood from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq, the rationale was usually “self defence” or “humanitarian”, words long emptied of their dictionary meaning.

In Africa, says Obama, the “humanitarian mission” is to assist the government of Uganda defeat the Lord’s resistance Army (LRA), which “has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa”. This is an accurate description of the LRA, evoking multiple atrocities administered by the United States, such as the bloodbath in the 1960s following the CIA-arranged murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first legally elected prime minister, and the CIA coup that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, regarded as Africa’s most venal tyrant.

Obama’s other justification also invites satire. This is the “national security of the United States”. The LRA has been doing its nasty work for 24 years, of minimal interest to the United States. Today, it has few than 400 fighters and has never been weaker. However, US “national security” usually means buying a corrupt and thuggish regime that has something Washington wants. Uganda’s “president-for-life” Yoweri Museveni already receives the larger part of $45 million in US military “aid” – including Obama’s favourite drones. This is his bribe to fight a proxy war against America’s latest phantom Islamic enemy, the rag-tag al Shabaab group based in Somalia. The RTA will play a public relations role, distracting western journalists with its perennial horror stories.

However, the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. In the world of self-serving, institutionalised paranoia that justifies what General David Petraeus, the former US commander and now CIA director, implies is a state of perpetual war, China is replacing al-Qaeda as the official American “threat”. When I interviewed Bryan Whitman, an assistant secretary of defence at the Pentagon last year, I asked him to describe the current danger to America. Struggling visibly, he repeated, “Asymmetric threats … asymmetric threats”. These justify the money-laundering state-sponsored arms conglomerates and the biggest military and war budget in history. With Osama bin Laden airbrushed, China takes the mantle.

Africa is China’s success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa’s greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China’s most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and Nato backed the “rebels” with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning “genocide” in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30,000 workers in Libya. The subsequent UN security council resolution that allowed the west’s “humanitarian intervention” was explained succinctly in a proposal to the French government by the “rebel” National Transitional Council, disclosed last month in the newspaper Liberation, in which France was offered 35 per cent of Libya’s gross national oil production “in exchange” (the term used) for “total and permanent” French support for the NTC. Running up the Stars and Stripes in “liberated” Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!”

The de facto conquest of Libya by the US and its imperial partners heralds a modern version of the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the 19th century.

Like the “victory” in Iraq, journalists have played a critical role in dividing Libyans into worthy and unworthy victims. A recent Guardian front page carried a photograph of a terrified “pro-Gaddafi” fighter and his wild-eyed captors who, says the caption, “celebrate”. According to General Petraeus, there is now a war “of perception … conducted continuously through the news media”.

For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s “defence strategy” plan, America simply wishes to rule the world.

That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the “Son of Africa”, is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in Black Skin, White Masks, what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.

By John Pilger

20 October, 2011

Johnpilger.com

John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London. He has twice won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US

By definition, capitalism is: An economic system based on private ownership of the means of production (industry, banks, technology), where through the process of market competition, production occurs for private profit — if something cannot be sold for a profit it is not produced.

In practice, private ownership has evolved into giant corporations, which monopolize production, markets, and government via campaign contributions, corporate lobbying (often legalized bribery) and promising politicians a cozy retirement from politics: “working” for corporations as consultants, lobbyists, etc.

There are certain policies that raise profits for corporations in general, including: destroying labor rights and attacking unions (since lower wages equals higher profits), slashing social spending (since corporations paying taxes cuts into their profits), cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (since corporations help pay for these too, lowering their profits), privatization, lowering corporate taxes, lowering taxes for the wealthy, etc.

These anti-worker, pro-profit policies strongly unite corporations, giving them a powerful organizational tool: corporations (and the wealthy who own them) pool their resources to pursue these policies through buying politicians, think tanks, news media, university donations, etc.

Such demands are obvious, since they effect the vast majority of working people: Good Jobs Now, No Cuts to Social Services, Save Social Security and Medicare, Health care for All, Save Public Education, End the Wars. Pay for these policies by TAXING THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS.

Putting forward a few demands that all working people can unite behind will give the movement a united, strong message, while allowing other demands of working people to find a safe place to express themselves.

By Shamus Cooke

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org)

In a recent debate Congressman Ron Paul claimed the United States military had troops in 130 countries.  The St. Petersburg Times looked into whether such an outrage could actually be true and was obliged to report that the number was actually 148 countries.  However, if you watch NFL football games, you hear the announcers thank members of the U.S. military for watching from 177 countries.  The proud public claim is worse than the scandalous claim or the “investigative” report.  What gives?

We are supposed to be proud of the U.S. empire but to reject with high dudgeon any accusation of having an empire.  Abroad, this conversation makes even less sense, because those troops and their bases are in everyone’s faces.  I lived near Vicenza, Italy, years ago.  The people tolerated the U.S. Army base.  The addition of a many-times larger one in the same town, now underway, has led to outrage, condemnation, and bitter resentment of being handed second-class citizenship in one’s own country while being asked to show gratitude for it.

As President Obama encircles Russia with missile bases and China with naval bases, the people who live or used to live where the bases are built resent the occupation, just as the people of Iraq and Afghanistan resent the occupation.  A global movement against U.S. military bases is rapidly rising from all corners of the empire.  But so is a movement against the occupation of Der Homeland by an unrepresentative and unrepresenting police state.

Those of us not in the Forbes 400 have been handed second-class citizenship in the place we are supposedly protecting through the occupation of every other place.  A large majority of us want the rich and the corporations taxed heavily, but they are not.  We want the wars ended, the troops brought home, and military spending cut.  None of this happens.  Nor do the outcomes of elections impact the likelihood of any of these things happening.  We want to keep and strengthen Social Security.  We want Medicare protected and expanded to cover us all.  We want rights enlarged for human beings and curtailed for corporations.  We want to cut off the corporate welfare and the bankster bailouts.  We want to invest in infrastructure, green energy, and education.  We want the right to organize and assemble.  And we want a clean system that allows public pressure through ordinary means: publicly funded elections, verifiable vote counting, no gerrymanders, no media and ballot barriers to candidates.  None of this is forthcoming.  We are paying taxation and receiving no representation.

Here’s an “End Empire” agenda:

·      Cut a half a trillion dollars out of the $1.2 trillion national security budget; putting half of it into tax cuts for non-billionaires, and half of it into useful spending on green energy, education, retraining for displaced military-industrial workers, etc.

·      Bring the National Guard home and de-federalize it.

·      Ban the redeployment of personnel currently suffering PTSD.

·      Ban no-bid uncompeted military contracts.

·      Restore Constitutional war powers to the Congress.

·      Create of a public referendum required prior to launching any war.

·      Close the foreign bases.

·      Ban weapons from space.

·      Ban extra-legal prisons.

·      Ban kangaroo military courts outside of our ordinary court system.

·      Restore habeas corpus.

·      Limit military spending to no more than twice that of the next highest spending nation on earth.

·      Ban secret budgets, secret agencies, and secret operations.

·      Ban the launching of drone strikes into foreign nations.

·      Forbid the transfer of students’ information to military recruiters without their permission.

·      Comply with the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

I’ve had people across the political spectrum tell me this all seems reasonable and necessary.  But that doesn’t make it happen.  What could make change possible is the process of reversal now underway through which the occupied are becoming the occupiers.  On Wall Street, protesters of plutocracy are risking their bodies.  Police are assaulting, pepper-spraying, and tasering peaceful demonstrators, as uppercrusters guzzle champagne on balconies, gawking at the spectacle.  But reports are leaking out of police refusing to participate in assaulting people  — people who are acting on behalf of the police as much as anyone else.  If the NYPD finds the decency found by some members of the militaries of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the decency to refuse evil orders, the tide will quickly turn.  If they do not, the tide will slowly turn.  But turn it will.

Occupations are now being organized across the country, building up to a massive occupation of Washington, D.C., beginning October 6 th : http://october2011.org

This is how it starts.  There is no other moral option than nonviolent resistance.  There is no other possible outcome than success.  That’s the beauty of ending an empire; victory is guaranteed sooner or later by the inevitability of imperial collapse.  Our task is to speed it along and ease the pain during the process.  The last word goes to U2:

October

And the trees are stripped bare

Of all they wear

What do I care

October

And kingdoms rise

And kingdoms fall

But you go on

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie”

JOIN HIM IN DC OCTOBER 6TH AT http://october2011.org

By David Swanson

27 September, 2011

Warisacrime.org

Tehran would have to be terminally foolish to try to snuff out an ambassador on US soil, author says.

No one ever lost money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just as Occupy Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum – piercing the noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism – Washington brought us all down to earth, sensationally advertising an Iranian cum Mexican cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

FBI Director Robert Mueller insisted the Iran-masterminded terror plot “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script”. It does. And quite a sloppy script at that. Fast and Furious duo Paul Walker/Vin Diesel wouldn’t be caught dead near it.

The good guys in this Washington production are the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, they uncovered “a deadly plot directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign Ambassador on US soil with explosives”.

Holder added that the bombing of the Saudi embassy in Washington was also part of the plan. Subsequent spinning amplified that to planned bombings of the Israeli embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires.

The Justice Department has peddled quite a murky story – Operation Red Coalition (no, you can’t make that stuff up) – centred on one Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old holding both Iranian and US passports and an Iran-based co-conspirator, Gholam Shakuri, an alleged member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) Quds Force.

Arbabsiar allegedly had a series of encounters in Mexico with a DEA mole posing as a Mexican drug cartel heavy weight. The Iranian-American seems to have been convinced that the mole was a member of the hardcore Zetas Mexican cartel, and reportedly bragged he was being “directed by high-ranking members of the Iranian government”, including a cousin who was “a member of the Iranian army but did not wear a uniform”.

On top of it, he told the DEA mole that his Iranian government buddies could come up with “tons of opium” for the Mexican cartel (an Afghan connection, perhaps). Then they discussed a “number of violent missions” complete with Arbabsiar bragging about bombing a packed Washington restaurant used by the Saudi ambassador.

Holder characterised the whole thing as a $1.5m “murder-for-hire” plan. Arbabsiar was arrested only a few days ago, on September 29, at JFK airport in New York. He allegedly confessed, according to the Justice Department. Shakuri for his part is still at large.

Holder was adamant: “The United States is committed to hold Iran accountable for its actions.” Yet he stopped short of stating the plot was approved by the highest levels of the Iranian government. So what next? War? Hold your horses; Washington should first think about asking the Chinese if they’re willing to foot the bill (the answer will be no).

Predictably, the proverbial torrent of US “officials” came out with guns blazing, spinning everything in sight. An alarmed Pentagon will be increasing surveillance over the Quds Force and “Iran’s actions” in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. Former US ambassadors stated that, “it’s an attack on the United States to attack this ambassador”. Washington is about to impose even more sanctions against Iran; and Washington is urgently taking the matter to the UN Security Council.

What next? An R2P (“responsibility to protect”) resolution ordering NATO to protect every House of Saud minion across the world by bombing Iran into regime change?

Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a spokesman for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at least introduced a little bit of common sense. “I think the US government is busy fabricating a new scenario and history has shown both the US government and the CIA have a lot of experience in fabricating these scenarios … I think their goal is to reach the American public. They want to take the public’s mind off the serious domestic problems they’re facing these days and scare them with fabricated problems outside the country.” Iran has not even established yet that these two characters are actually Iranian citizens.

The Iranian government – which prides itself on a logical approach to diplomacy – would have to have been inoculated with a terminal Stuxnet-style foolishness virus to behave in such a counterproductive manner, by targeting a high-profile foreign policy adviser to King Abdullah on American soil. The official Iranian news agency IRNA described the plot as “America’s new propaganda scenario” against Iran.

As for the Washington mantra that “Iran has been insinuating itself into many of the struggles in the Middle East”, that’s undiluted Saudi propaganda. In fact it’s the House of Saud who’s been conducting the fierce counter-revolution that has smashed any possibility of an Arab Spring in the Persian Gulf – from the invasion and repression of Bahrain to the rash pre-emption of protests inside Saudi Arabia’s Shia-dominated eastern provinces.

The whole thing smells like a flimsy pretext for a casus belli. The timing of the announcement couldn’t be more suspicious. White House national security advisor Thomas E. Donilon briefed King Abdullah of the plot no less than two weeks ago, in a three-hour meeting in Riyadh. Meanwhile the US government has been carrying not plots, but targeted assassinations of US citizens, as in the Anwar al-Awlaki case.

So why now? Holder is caught in yet another scandal – on whether he told lies regarding Operation Fast and Furious (no, you can’t make this stuff up), a federal gun sting through which scores of US weapons ended up in the hands of – here they come again – Mexican drug cartels.

So how to bury Fast and Furious, the economic abyss, the 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the increasing allure of Occupy Wall Street – not to mention the Saudi role in smashing the spirit of the Arab Spring? By uncovering a good ol’ al-Qaeda style plot on US soil, on top of it conducted by “evil” Iran. Al-Qaeda and Tehran sharing top billing; not even Cheney and Rumsfeld in their heyday could come up with something like this. Long live GWOT (the global war on terror). And long live the neo-con spirit; remember, real men go to Tehran – and the road starts now.

By Pepe Escobar

12 October 2011

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?

If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. US and European firms will now get juicy contracts, financed by US taxpayers, to rebuild Libya. The new real estate will be carefully allocated to lubricate a new ruling class picked by Washington. This will put Libya firmly under Washington’s thumb.

With Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start on the other African countries where China has energy and mineral investments. Obama has already sent US troops to Central Africa under the guise of defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army, a small insurgency against the ruling dictator-for-life. The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, welcomed the prospect of yet another war by declaring that sending US troops into Central Africa “furthers US national security interests and foreign policy.” Republican Senator James Inhofe added a gallon of moral verbiage about saving “Ugandan children,” a concern the senator did not have for Libya’s children or Palestine’s, Iraq’s, Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s.

Washington has revived the Great Power Game and is vying with China. Whereas China brings Africa investment and gifts of infrastructure, Washington sends troops, bombs and military bases. Sooner or later Washington’s aggressiveness toward China and Russia is going to explode in our faces.

Where is the money going to come from to finance Washington’s African Empire? Not from Libya’s oil. Big chunks of that have been promised to the French and British for providing cover for Washington’s latest war of naked aggression. Not from tax revenues from a collapsing US economy where unemployment, if measured correctly, is 23 percent.

With Washington’s annual budget deficit as huge as it is, the money can only come from the printing press.

Washington has already run the printing press enough to raise the consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) to 3.9% for the year (as of the end of September), the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers (CPI-W) to 4.4% for the year, and the producer price index (PPI) to 6.9% for the year.

As statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) has shown, the official inflation measures are rigged in order to hold down cost of living adjustments to Social Security recipients, thus saving money for Washington’s wars. When measured correctly, the current rate of inflation in the US is 11.5%.

What interest rate can savers get without taking massive risks on Greek bonds? US banks pay less than one-half of one percent on FDIC insured savings deposits. Short-term US government bond funds pay essentially zero.

Thus, according to official US government statistics American savers are losing between 3.9% and 4.4% of their capital yearly. According to John Williams’ estimate of the real rate of inflation, US savers are losing 11.5% of their accumulated savings.

As retired Americans receive no interest on their savings, they are having to spend down their capital. The ability of even the most prudent retirees to survive the negative rate of interest they are receiving and the erosion by inflation of any pensions that they receive will come to an end once their accumulated assets are exhausted.

Except for Washington’s favored mega-rich, the one percent that has captured all of the income gains of recent years, the rest of America has been assigned to the trash can. Nothing whatsoever has been done for them since the financial crisis hit in December 2007. Bush and Obama, Republican and Democrat, have focused on saving the 1 percent while giving the finger to the 99 percent.

Finally, some Americans, though not enough, have caught on to the flag-waving rah-rah “patriotism” that has consigned them to the trash bin of history. They are not going down without a fight and are in the streets. Occupy Wall Street has spread. What will be the fate of this movement?

Will the snow and ice of cold weather end the protests, or send them into public buildings? How long will the local authorities, subservient to Washington as they are, tolerate the obvious signal that the population lacks any confidence whatsoever in the government?

If the protests last, especially if they grow and don’t decline, the authorities will infiltrate the protestors with police provocateurs who will fire on the police. This will be the excuse to shoot down the protestors and to arrest the survivors as “terrorists” or “domestic extremists” and to send them to the $385 million dollar camps built under US government contract by Cheney’s Halliburton.

The Amerikan Police State will have taken its next step into the Amerikan Concentration Camp State.

Meanwhile, lost in their oblivion, conservatives will continue to bemoan the ruination of the country by homosexual marriage, abortion, and “the liberal media.” Liberal organizations committed to civil liberty, such as the ACLU, will continue to rank a woman’s right to an abortion with defense of the US Constitution. Amnesty International will assist Washington in demonizing its next target for military attack while turning a blind eye to the war crimes of President Obama.

When we consider what Israel has got away with, being as it is under Washington’s bought protection–the war crimes, the murders of children, the eviction in total disregard of international law of Palestinians from their ancestral homes, the bulldozing of their houses and uprooting of their olive groves in order to move in fanatical “settlers,” the murderous invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, the wholesale slaughter of civilians–we can only conclude that Washington, Israel’s enabler, can get away with far more.

In the few opening years of the 21st century, Washington has destroyed the US Constitution, the separation of powers, international law, the accountability of government, and has sacrificed every moral principle to achieving hegemony over the world. This ambitious agenda is being attempted while simultaneously Washington removed all regulation over Wall Street, the home of massive greed, permitting Wall Street’s short-term horizon to wreck the US economy, thus destroying the economic basis for Washington’s assault on the world.

Will the US collapse in economic chaos before it rules the world?

By Paul Craig Roberts

21 October, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was appointed by President Reagan Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and confirmed by the US Senate. He was Associate Editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and he served on the personal staffs of Representative Jack Kemp and Senator Orrin Hatch. He was staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, staff associate of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and Chief Economist, Republican Staff, House Budget Committee. He wrote the Kemp-Roth tax rate reduction bill, and was a leader in the supply-side revolution. He was professor of economics in six universities, and is the author of numerous books and scholarly contributions. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

The recent prisoner swap between the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas and the Israeli government has been hailed and celebrated among Palestinians, Israelis and their friends in various parts of the world. The deal entails the release of more than 1 000 Palestinian prisoners, in different stages, in exchange for the Israeli solider, Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Hamas and two other Palestinian groups in 2006. Toufic Haddad examines what happened, the negotiations that led to this development, and what was achieved, and analyses their significance

If the prisoner exchange deal announced on 11 October 2011 between Hamas and the Israeli government is fully implemented without major hitches, there is little question who ‘won’ this five-year war of wills: the deal will constitute a major victory for Hamas and the resistance-oriented political forces in Palestinian society, while simultaneously representing a significant retreat for Israel and its historical doctrines of forceful coercion and rejectionism vis-à-vis the Palestinian people and their rights.

Make no mistake about it, the tangible accomplishments and historical precedents embodied in this deal rival, if not exceed, other prisoner deals in recent memory. This does not mean that the deal was able to fulfil all expectations placed upon it. Nor does it discount the heavy price Palestinian society and political forces played to realise it. Nor again does it avoid complicated concessions by Hamas in the final conditions placed on the release of some prisoners. All this withstanding, this deal should be recognised as a major Hamas victory; any alternative interpretation of this scorecard misreads the basic balance of forces between Palestinians and their occupier in the context of the struggle to achieve Palestinian rights.

How do we read the ‘Shalit deal’ and assess its achievements, or otherwise, for the Palestinian movement? What are the criteria by which such deals can be judged and analysed in the first place? In order to answer these questions and appreciate more fully the dynamics at play, it is necessary to gain a command of the facts of the deal, from which a firmer assessment can be based.

The facts

Presuming a successful prisoner release takes place based upon the official list of prisoners published by both sides at midnight 16 October 2011, the totality of this deal looks as follows:

In exchange for the release of Israeli army Staff Sergeant Gilad Shalit, who has been held by Hamas since 25 June 2006, Israel will release a total of 1050 prisoners in three stages.

The first stage of the release actually took place in September 2009 when Israel released twenty-three prisoners in exchange for a Hamas-broadcast video indicating a ‘sign of life’ from Shalit. These prisoners included twenty women and three men from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The agreed-upon remaining 1027 prisoners are to be released in two stages. The first major stage, scheduled to take place on 18 October 2011, will see Israel release 477 prisoners, including 450 men and twenty-seven women prisoners. These prisoners were the subject of the fiercest negotiations, with each prisoner’s fate discussed via indirect negotiations between the contending parties, beneath Egyptian and previously German mediation.

The second and final stage of the deal will take place in two months, entailing the release of 550 prisoners. These prisoners will be released based on a basic set of criteria agreed upon by Hamas and Israel, with the former asserting some discretion over the selection of names. In other words, Israel cannot just arrest 550 people one day, then release them the next, and say they have fulfilled their obligations.

Prisoners released during the first major stage, and which we are limited to discussing at this time, are subject to certain negotiated conditions:

218 will be released to their homes without any conditions (including 133 to Gaza; sixty-eight to the West Bank; nine to East Jerusalem; seven to inside Israel, including one to the Occupied Golan Heights; and one to Jordan);

204 will be deported, including forty abroad, rumoured to be sent to Turkey, Qatar, Syria and Jordan. Of these, 164 will be taken to Gaza, eighteen of whom will be able to return to their homes in the West Bank within three years;

fifty-five will be released with some form of security arrangement, the nature of which has yet to be fully disclosed. This includes forty-nine to the West Bank and six to Jerusalem.

With this as the basic outline of the agreement, ‘crunching’ the data reveals additional aspects worth highlighting.

‘Quality’ of prisoners

Hamas was remarkably successfully in forcing Israel to release large numbers of prisoners with high prison sentences. In fact, 315 of the 477 prisoners released in the first major round have life sentences (310 men, five women); 144 prisoners have sentences longer than ten years; only nine prisoners have sentences less than ten years; and nine other prisoners have undetermined sentences, be they administrative detainees, or yet to be convicted.

The impressive depth of this deal is best illustrated by adding up the total number of years erased by the deal, at least on paper.

Of the 315 prisoners due to be released who are serving life sentences, a little more than half (163) have multiple life sentences (ranging from two to thirty-six). They total 926 life sentences all together. To get a sense of how much prison time this adds up to, Israeli civilian courts set one ‘life sentence’ at twenty-five years of prison time. Aside from the few cases of Palestinians tried in these courts—generally because they are Israeli citizens—most Palestinian prisoners do not have recourse to this interpretation of ‘life sentence’ because they are tried in military courts where the duration of life sentences is left open ended. If an Israeli civil court understanding for a life sentence (twenty-five years) is nonetheless applied to the number of Palestinians sentenced to life in prison, we arrive at the figure of 23,150 years negated through this deal. It needs to be emphasised that this figure is only for illustrative purposes, as, in any case, a prisoner would not be able to serve more than three of these life sentences (seventy-five years) in a given life time. Moreover, a certain portion of these years has already been served, and cannot hence be ‘erased’.

In addition to those serving life sentences, however, the total number of years of those serving high but non-life prison sentences totals just over 4,585 years.

If both figures are added together, a staggering 27,735 years are technically negated by the deal. All this from less than half the total number of prisoners released (roughly 45 percent).

Period of imprisonment

The Shalit deal sees Palestinian prisoners released from historical periods that date back to before the first intifada, to the most recent period of Palestinian history: forty prisoners were arrested before the first intifada (pre-8 December 1987); 112 were arrested during the first intifada (December 1987 – 13 September 1993); eighty-one were arrested during the ‘Oslo peace process’ years (September 1997 – 28 September 2000); and the remaining 244 are from the second intifada (September 2000 – present).

Political orientation

According to Israeli Prison Services, the political distribution of prisoners to be released is as follows: 307 prisoners are from Hamas, ninety-nine from Fatah, twenty-seven from the Islamic Jihad, and twenty-four from the Popular Front. The remaining prisoners derive from smaller factions (mainly the Democratic Front, the Popular Resistance Committees, and the Popular Front-General Command), or are unaffiliated with any political group.

Demographic distribution

Released prisoners hail from all geographic locations within historic Palestine including 289 from the West Bank, 134 from Gaza, forty-six from East Jerusalem, and eight from Palestinian communities inside Israel, including one from the occupied Golan Heights. Among the West Bankers is one woman who resided in Jordan, and a second who is Ukrainian, but lives in the West Bank.

Analysis: The accomplishments

Passing judgement on the Shalit deal cannot take place from a detached precipice of moral or political purity but, rather, must derive from an appreciation for the basic balance of forces at play between the contending parties and their historical precedents in relations between one another. There are no absolute criteria for judging such matters, with interests and needs within each negotiating party variegated, subject to shifts over time, and difficult to quantify to begin with.

For this reason, it is helpful to begin analysing the Shalit deal by understanding that before Shalit’s capture, Israel refused to recognise Hamas as a legitimate political entity; this non-recognition continued despite the Hamas victory in democratic elections in 2006. Israel subsequently refused all formal interaction with Hamas, encouraging other countries to do the same. Soon after Shalit’s capture, Israel’s Prime Minister’s Bureau reiterated this stance, asserting, ‘There will be no negotiations to release prisoners… The government of Israel will not give in to extortion by the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government, which are headed by murderous terror organisations. The Palestinian Authority bears full responsibility for the welfare of Gilad Shalit and for returning him to Israel in good condition.’

In this respect, the very sealing of a deal with Hamas was a major Israeli concession. Israel sought every possible way to retrieve Shalit without having to negotiate, but failed. The weeks after the capture of Shalit witnessed more than 400 Palestinians killed in Israel’s ‘Operation Summer Rains’ in a failed effort to retrieve him. Israel’s massive offensive ‘Operation Cast lead’ in December 2008/January 2009, which left 1400 Palestinians dead, also put the recovery of Shalit as a central objective of the mission. The siege of Gaza is still justified as necessary in the context of Shalit’s continued detention.

All of this was part and parcel of a broader Israeli strategy vis-à-vis Palestinians which entailed not only the historic rejection of all Palestinian political rights, but an on-the-ground military doctrine which holds that ‘might makes right’, Israel has a ‘long arm of justice’, and Israel will ‘burn into [Palestinian] consciousness’ their own defeat.

Viewed in this context, Shalit’s capture and detention for five years, and Hamas’ ultimate successful negotiation for a prisoner release are all the more impressive. The deal represents the first time that any Palestinian organisation captured an Israeli soldier in territorial Palestine and was able to translate this capture into a negotiated settlement with the Israeli government. Whether one agrees or disagrees with this as a tactic, there is no question that this series of events represents a significant advance for the armed resistance capabilities of the Palestinian movement, its organisational capabilities, professionalism, secrecy and stamina. No other conclusion is possible in the context of Gaza, where Israel and Egypt control its land passages; Israel controls and constantly monitors the territory via air, satellite and sea, and where electromagnetic airwaves and telecommunication networks are also dominated by Israel. Moreover, Israel also runs a substantial network of Palestinian collaborators throughout the area. These are the known means of Israeli domination over the Gaza Strip’s 360 square kilometres

All these accomplishments relate to the fact that a deal took place, and do not relate to the substantial achievements in the negotiations themselves. But here, too, Hamas forced impressive concessions: it broke Israel’s traditional refusal to release alleged ‘prisoners with blood on their hands’, and it broke Israel’s principled rejection to release prisoners from 1948 Palestine (Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship) as well as those from East Jerusalem. To contextualise the latter two precedents, all previous prisoner releases negotiated with the Palestinian Authority and Hizbullah have failed to break these formerly steadfast Israeli positions.

Aside from setting new precedents in negotiations, Hamas’ selection of prisoners emphasised important political dimensions that must also be seen as important achievements, while rejecting certain Israeli tenets of praxis vis-à-vis the Palestinian people.

The deal’s inclusion of prisoners from throughout geographic Palestine, the Palestinian diaspora, and the occupied Golan Heights represents a conscious effort by Hamas to assert the unity of the Palestinian people and their connectedness to its Arab/ Muslim periphery. The inclusion of prisoners from across the Palestinian political spectrum equally asserts the national, as opposed to factional, accomplishment of the deal. Inclusion of prisoners from the pre-first intifada period to the present also emphasises the cross-generational nature of Palestinian struggle, while implicitly criticising the Oslo ‘peace process’’ failure to release prisoners from these early periods.

Although it is complicated to compare prisoner releases given the shifting nature of interests and needs at given times, suffice it to say that Hamas achieved as much as or more than many of the most well-known prisoner deals carried out with Israel in the past 30 years: the 1985 prisoner exchange between the PFLP-General Command and Israel saw 1150 prisoners exchanged for three live Israeli soldiers; the 2004 Hizbullah-Israel swap saw Israel release 431 Arab and international prisoners and fifty-nine bodies for one live and three dead Israeli military personnel; the 2008 Hizbullah-Israel deal saw the exchange of 204 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners for two dead Israeli soldiers. All other exchanges were less significant quantitatively and ‘qualitatively’. It might be illustrative to note that Hizbullah’s first successful prisoner exchange with Israel saw the exchange of two Israeli bodies and nineteen South Lebanon Army personnel for 123 bodies and forty-five prisoners. The Shalit deal was Hamas’ first exchange but likely not to be its last.

Criticisms

The Shalit deal is not without its critics from the Palestinian side. They can be grouped into three categories:

Unfulfilled expectations: Hamas and the two other groups which engaged in the capture of Shalit (the Popular Resistance Committees and the Army of Islam) initially demonstrated forms of bombastic euphoria in the wake of their success, which led them to raise the ceiling of expectations within Palestinian society as to what could be achieved from a future prisoner exchange deal. Not only were high political representatives like Fatah’s Marwan Barghouti and PFLP’s Ahmed Sa’adat expected to be on the list, but the total numbers of prisoners demanded was at one stage set at 1400. Moreover, Hamas made claims that all female prisoners would be released (nine appear to be left out), and that all child prisoners would be released (it remains to be seen whether this criteria is met in the deal’s second major stage).

Conditions of release: The high number of deportees (204), be they sent abroad (forty) or to Gaza (164) drew criticism for touching upon a sensitive nerve in Palestinian society. Political exile was consistently practised by Israel throughout the occupied territories since 1967 as a means of punishment, as well as weakening the national movement by detaching it from its organic leadership. That Hamas would agree to forms of total or partial deportation at all, and in such large numbers, opened the movement up to criticism that it was an accomplice to strategic Israeli objectives. Because of the sensitivity of this concern, Hamas emphasised its consultation with prisoners over the issue of deportation, while hinting that all external deportees will be able to return to Gaza, at least, via the territory’s land crossings with Egypt. The issue of whether all prisoners were indeed consulted remains an open question, as it seems likely that some prisoners were consulted, while others were not.

Political timing: Hamas opened itself to additional criticism on two fronts regarding the deal’s timing. Coming scarcely three weeks after PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ bid for Palestinian statehood at the UN, Hamas was criticised, particularly by elements of Fatah, for attempting to steal Abbas’ ‘thunder’. Furthermore, the deal also came on the eleventh day of a major Palestinian hunger strike protesting prison conditions, particularly the policy of sustained solitary confinement (up to eight years and counting in some cases). Critics argue that the prisoner exchange is out of step and poorly coordinated with the hunger strike, while the celebratory atmosphere the prisoner exchange ushers in contradicts the seriousness demanded of the hunger strike. Concerned parties even argue that the poor timing may contribute to endangering some of the hunger strikers’ lives, or breaking the strike early without achieving its demands.

Conclusions and fallout

While the validity of these criticisms will reveal themselves over time, the political fallout of the Shalit deal can already be stated: Hamas and its agenda are unquestionably bolstered by the deal, enabling it to mitigate any popularity gap that might have arisen between the movement and its rival Fatah in the wake of the latter’s UN statehood bid. This is because Hamas will be able to argue that while Fatah makes grandiose speeches at the UN and is welcomed in international fora, its strategy (political negotiations with Israel) failed to ever achieve a substantive prisoner release, and hence Fatah cannot be expected to achieve the far larger goal of statehood. Hamas will argue that despite it pariah status by the Western powers, the movement remained steadfast in its non-recognition of Israel and its resistance-oriented strategy to achieve Palestinian rights, and in the end reaped tangible, political and human rewards of value to the movement and its future.

While debating these issues is indeed important and necessary for the Palestinian movement and its allies, the real political legacy of this deal might be more obvious than this simplified polarity suggests. That is to say that for any political strategy pursued by Palestinians and their allies to succeed, the enormous disparity in the ‘valuation’ between Palestinian and Israeli people and prisoners of war needs to end. That one single Israeli soldier could be negotiated for more than one thousand Palestinians gives pause to question how a situation arose locally and internationally where such disparity of value became possible.

To illustrate this disparity, suffice it to say that twenty-six Palestinian prisoners in the Shalit deal were already in prison before Gilad Shalit was even born, with the longest amongst them—Nael Barghouti–having served thirty-four years in prison. In fact, ten Palestinian prisoners expected to be freed in this deal spent more time in Israeli prison than Nelson Mandela spent on Robben Island, although not one of them is known to non-Arabic-speaking publics. Not one of them—Sami Yunis, Fuad al-Razem, Uthman Musalah, Hasan Salama, Akram Mansour, Fakhri Barghouti, Ibrahim Jaber, Muhammad Abu Hud’a, Nael Barghouti, and Salim Kiyal—is the subject of a Wikipedia entry, for example. In contrast, Gilad Shalit, who has spent five years in captivity, is a household name in many western countries, holds honorary citizenship in three countries, and has Wikipedia pages translated into twenty-three languages. The disparity in perception, organisation and financing between Zionist propaganda and Palestinian organising is obvious, shocking and humbling. This is the legacy of entrenched racism, complicit media practices, sustained dehumanisation campaigns, asymmetrical colonial and global power dynamics, disorganised or incompetent political projects and priorities. Whatever the cause, the disparity must be eradicated, and fast.

Let this prisoner deal light a path to areas of neglected work that need to be focused on in the coming period among Palestinians and their allies in order to ensure that never again will the racism and discrepancy of human value between the colonised and the coloniser be able to prevail for so long.

By Toufic Haddad

October 2011

Source: Afro-Middle East Centre (AMEC)