Death of a Zionist warmonger

The last (we hope) Israeli casualty of the Lebanese war died yesterday. One of those evil racist Zionist warmongers that the Hezbollah killed with its heroic rockets. The "Zionist warmonger" was Mohamed Salum, an Israeli Arab who lived in Haifa.

 

Salum was critically wounded when a Katyusha rocket hit his family's home on Caesarea Street in the mostly Arab neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas. Salum suffered serious burns all over his body. The doctors fought for his life from the moment he arrived at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, and he had been kept in the hospital's intensive care unit since.

 

 Munira, Salum's sister was by his bedside since the incident. "There were weeks when we felt that his condition may be improving and he was beginning to recover. My mother and I thought that he was coming back to us and we even made sure to modify the house in order to cater to his needs, removing staircases and enabling wheelchair access, but over the last week his condition worsened and we slowly felt that we were losing him," she said.

Human Rights Watch has condemned Hezbollah for deliberately targetting Israeli civilians with its rocket attacks.

 

Remember Mohamed Salum the next time you see people carrying posters that say "We are all Hizbollah." Are we all Hizbollah? Are you? If you are, you are an enemy of humanity and decency.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

 

Israel warned US against Iraq attack - is this the end of the Jews started the Iraq war lie?

Anti-Israel "analysts" and media people in the United States and Europe have long insisted that the Iraq war was fought on the instigation of the "Zionists" or the "Israel Lobby" or more crudely, "the Jews."  Prominent proponents of this theory include professors Mearsheimer and Walt (whose article about the Jewish question is now coming out as a book and soon will be available as a major motion picture no doubt), the late Thomas Stauffer, Brian Whitaker of the Guardian, and Jason Vest of The Nation and Jim Lobe of IPS. Less sophisticated proponents of this view include an assortment of racists who are too uncouth to hide their views behind euphemisms like "neo-conservative" and "Israel lobby."

 

Vest fabricated a story based on selective quotes from a document prepared by an obscure right-wing Washington think tank, "A Clean Break" in 1996. That rather fatuous document was not in any case reflective of the policies of the Sharon government. It  had recommended that Israel pursue a policy of independent regional alliances in the Middle East, to break free of Israeli dependence on the United States and integrate Israel into the Middle East. Only by quoting out of context, could it be made to seem that instead of regional cooperation against Saddam, independent of the United States, the document was advocating Israeli pressure to get the United States to attack Iraq. To this was added the imaginative remarks of  Meyrav Wurmser and others, who explained how the fall of Saddam was supposed to catalyze democracy in the Middle East. Before Jason Vest had written his article in the nation, hardly anyone had ever heard of the unfortunately named "Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs "(JINSA) which soon became synonymous with the "International Jewish Conspiracy."  An example of the ignorant nonsense written about JINSA and Clean Break is at thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_conc2.htm. 

 

However, neither Wurmser nor anyone else quoted in these stories was every privy to Israeli policy decisions or represented the policy of the Israeli government.

 

Thomas Stauffer, less well known, insisted that that the Pentagon was riddled with agents of the Mossad. This McCarthyite view may have been shared by many others, who were wise enough not to go on record with it.  

 

The Israeli government itself mostly kept silent. Following the war, increasing evidence as emerged that points in the opposite direction: Israel strongly urged the Bush administration in private not to get involved in Iraq, certainly not on the account of Israel. A review of this evidence was presented by Martin Kramer, and not long after, Yossi Alpher reported in the Forward that Ariel Sharon had cautioned Bush against invading Iraq. Bob Woodward's book showed that Bush was determined to topple Saddam Hussein, and made the decision on his own.  Now, Gareth Porter provides further evidence that far from encouraging the US to invade Iraq, Israeli officials tried discretely to stop the impending invasion, according to  former administration official Lawrence Wilkerson, who asserts that Israel Warned US Not to Invade Iraq after 9/11 (full story below).

 

This is hardly surprising, since there was never any real evidence that Israel had favored the invasion. The evidence was created by innuendo and mistaken inference. Right wing American Jews are supposed to be "close to the Likud." The reader, and perhaps the writer, might be naive enough to believe that because someone in the United States has right wing opinions, they can sit in on Israeli security cabinet meetings and are privy to Israeli policy, just as the readers of the fantasies of Uzi Mahnaimi and others might believe that the Israeli Air Force will conveniently leak top secret plans to attack Iran using non-existent refeuling capabilities.

 

Without doubt, those who wish to continue to believe the "Jews caused the Iraq war" story will do so, regardless of evidence. There are still people who believe that Jews poison wells and prepare Matzot from the blood of slaughtered Chrisian children. However, the rest of us should understand that there just isn't any real evidence beyond the fabrications of such over-imaginative, ignorant or malicious "analysts." 

 

Ami Isseroff

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Israel Warned US Not to Invade Iraq after 9/11
By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Aug 28 (IPS) - Israeli officials warned the George W. Bush administration that an invasion of Iraq would be destabilising to the region and urged the United States to instead target Iran as the primary enemy, according to former administration official Lawrence Wilkerson.

Wilkerson, then a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and later chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, recalled in an interview with IPS that the Israelis reacted immediately to indications that the Bush administration was thinking of war against Iraq. After the Israeli government picked up the first signs of that intention, Wilkerson says, "The Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy -- Iran is the enemy."

Wilkerson describes the Israeli message to the Bush administration in early 2002 as being, "If you are going to destabilise the balance of power, do it against the main enemy."

The warning against an invasion of Iraq was "pervasive" in Israeli communications with the administration, Wilkerson recalls. It was conveyed to the administration by a wide range of Israeli sources, including political figures, intelligence and private citizens.

Wilkerson notes that the main point of their communications was not that the United States should immediately attack Iran, but that "it should not be distracted by Iraq and Saddam Hussein" from a focus on the threat from Iran.

The Israeli advice against using military force against Iraq was apparently triggered by reports reaching Israeli officials in December 2001 that the Bush administration was beginning serious planning for an attack on Iraq. Journalist Bob Woodward revealed in "Plan of Attack" that on Dec. 1, 2001, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld had ordered the Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks to come up with the first formal briefing on a new war plan for Iraq on Dec. 4. That started a period of intense discussions of war planning between Rumsfeld and Franks.

Soon after Israeli officials got wind of that planning, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked for a meeting with Bush primarily to discuss U.S. intentions to invade Iraq. In the weeks preceding Sharon's meeting with Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, a procession of Israeli officials conveyed the message to the Bush administration that Iran represented a greater threat, according to a Washington Post report on the eve of the meeting.

Israeli Defence Minister Fouad Ben-Eliezer, who was visiting Washington with Sharon, revealed the essence of the strategic differences between Tel Aviv and Washington over military force. He was quoted by the Post as saying, "Today, everybody is busy with Iraq. Iraq is a problem...But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq."

Sharon, who died of a stroke in early 2006, never revealed publicly what he said to Bush in the Feb. 7 meeting. But Yossi Alpher, a former adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, wrote in an article in the Forward last January that Sharon advised Bush not to occupy Iraq, according to a knowledgeable source. Alpher wrote that Sharon also assured Bush that Israel would not "push one way or another" regarding his plan to take down Saddam Hussein.

Alpher noted that Washington did not want public support by Israel and in fact requested that Israel refrain from openly supporting the invasion in order to avoid an automatic negative reaction from Iraq's Arab neighbours.

After that meeting, the Sharon government generally remained silent on the issue of an invasion of Iraq. A notable exception, however, was a statement on Aug. 16, 2002 by Ranaan Gissin, an aide to Sharon. Ranaan declared, "Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose. It will only give [Hussein] more of an opportunity to accelerate his programme of weapons of mass destruction."

As late as October 2002, however, there were still signs of continuing Israeli grumbling about the Bush administration's obsession with taking over Iraq. Both the Israeli Defence Forces' chief of staff and its chief of military intelligence made public statements that month implicitly dismissing the Bush administration's position that Saddam Hussein's alleged quest for nuclear weapons made him the main threat. Both officials suggested that Israel's military advantage over Iraq had continued to increase over the decade since the Gulf War as Iraq had grown weaker.

The Israeli chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Farkash, said Iraq had not deployed any missiles that could strike Israel directly and challenged the Bush administration's argument that Iraq could obtain nuclear weapons within a relatively short time. He gave an interview to Israeli television in which he said army intelligence had concluded that Iraq could not have nuclear weapons in less than four years. He insisted that Iran was as much of a nuclear threat as Iraq.

Israeli strategists generally believed that taking down the Hussein regime could further upset an Iran-Iraq power balance that had already tilted in favour of Iran after the U.S. defeat of Hussein's army in the 1991 Gulf War. By 1996, however, neoconservatives with ties to the Likud Party were beginning to argue for a more aggressive joint U.S.-Israeli strategy aimed at a "rollback" of all of Israel's enemies in the region, including Iran, but beginning by taking down Hussein and putting a pro-Israeli regime in power there.

That was the thrust of the 1996 report of a task force led by Richard Perle for the right-wing Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies and aimed at the Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

But most strategists in the Israeli government and the Likud Party -- including Sharon himself -- did not share that viewpoint. Despite agreement between neoconservatives and Israeli officials on many issues, the dominant Israeli strategic judgment on the issue of invading Iraq diverged from that of U.S. neoconservatives because of differing political-military interests.

Israel was more concerned with the relative military threat posed by Iran and Iraq, whereas neoconservatives in the Bush administration were focused on regime change in Iraq as a low-cost way of leveraging more ambitious changes in the region. From the neoconservative perspective, the very military weakness of Hussein's Iraq made it the logical target for the use of U.S. military power.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.

(END/2007)

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Comforting news about Iraq and Iran

Those who object to the US leaving Iraq because it would create a power vacuum apparently need have no fear. According to Reuters, Iran says it is ready to fill the vacuum left in Iraq by the US, so of course, everything will be fine, right?  

 

"The political power of the occupiers (of Iraq) is being destroyed rapidly and very soon we will be witnessing a great power vacuum in the region," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said.

"We, with the help of regional friends and the Iraqi nation, are ready to fill this void." Saudi Arabia was one of the countries Iran was ready to work with, he said.

The U.S. military accuses the Islamic Republic of arming and training militias behind some of the violence in Iraq. Iran rejects the charge and blames the presence of U.S. forces, numbering about 162,000, for the violence.

In a two-hour news conference, Ahmadinejad also rejected reports Iran had slowed nuclear work, which the West fears is aimed at making atom bombs, and said it would respond if Washington branded its Revolutionary Guards a terrorist force.

Iran, which like Iraq is majority Shi'ite Muslim, has often called on fellow Gulf states to reach a regional security pact. But Gulf Arab states, most of which are predominantly Sunnis, are suspicious of Tehran's intentions in Iraq and the region.

With Shi'ite Muslims now in power in Baghdad, ties have strengthened between Iran and Iraq since 2003, when U.S.-led forces toppled Iraq's Sunni president, Saddam Hussein, who had waged an eight-year war against Iran in the 1980s.

The region did not need countries from "thousands of kilometers away" to provide security, Ahmadinejad said, and U.S. and other forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had run out of solutions.

 

And in case you were worried about Iran's nuclear program, you can rest easy on that score too:

 

...Ahmadinejad dismissed reports it was not making such fast nuclear progress. "These (reports) are not true," he said.

"I want to officially announce to you that from our viewpoint the issue of Iran's nuclear case has been closed. Today Iran is a nuclear Iran, meaning that it has the complete cycle for fuel production."

So don't you worry. Everything is going to be just fine. What could go wrong?  

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Che Guevara Jewish - end of the story?

It is already more than two months since this revelation was published in English. Time to shut the trapdoor and to count the prey. Time to say:

GOTCHA!

Read the rest here.

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Governor of Iran’s Central Bank Resigns

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: August 27, 2007

TEHRAN, Aug. 26 — The head of the Central Bank of Iran resigned Sunday, bringing the number of key economic figures who have left President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's cabinet to three this month.

A government spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, announced the resignation of the bank's governor, Ebrahim Sheibani, after weeks of rumors that he had resigned over his differences with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Elham said a former economy minister, Tahmaseb Mazaheri, would succeed Mr. Sheibani, the Iranian Students News Agency reported.

The resignation came after the departures this month of the minister of oil, Kazem Vaziri-Hamaneh, and the minister of industry, Alireza Tahmasebi.

Mr. Sheibani had reportedly opposed Mr. Ahmadinejad's unexpected intervention to lower interest rates to 12 percent from 15 and 17 percent.

Economists were shocked after the president dissolved the Money and Credit Council, a monetary policy-making body, this month.

Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005 on a mandate to distribute the country's oil wealth among its poor. Economists had warned that his policy of importing goods to lower prices, and of distributing the oil windfall instead of investing in development projects, would increase inflation.

Iran's Nuclear Threat Aided by Fake Firms, Rome Bank, U.S. Says

By Vernon Silver

 

Aug. 23 (Bloomberg) -- On Dec. 23, 2006, the United Nations Security Council slapped economic sanctions on Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group for its role in weapons proliferation as Iran's maker of liquid-fueled ballistic missiles.

Known as SHIG, the Iranian firm produces the Shahab III rocket, which has a range of at least 800 miles, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. That radius puts downtown Tel Aviv, Saudi Arabia's oil fields and India's financial center, Mumbai, within reach.

Three days after the Security Council ordered a freeze on SHIG's assets to help block Iran from developing nuclear weapons, the maker of the country's longest-range missile was ready to go shopping in Europe.

It turned for help to state-owned Bank Sepah, Iran's fifth- biggest lender. On Dec. 26, a Bank Sepah branch in Tehran issued a 28,845 euro ($39,255) letter of credit on behalf of Sabalan Co. -- a front company for SHIG that shares the address and phone number of the missile maker, according to a person with access to details of the transaction. The letter of credit was forwarded to Bank Sepah's branch in Rome, where Sabalan paid its supplier -- Behringer GmbH, the Kirchardt, Germany-based maker of drills and metal-cutting tools.

 

Complete article: Iran's Nuclear Threat Aided by Fake Firms, Rome Bank, U.S. Says

 

Thomas Braun, Lima, Peru.

Measuring an obsession

Roaming the CiF jungle, I have stumbled on an interesting page - one that shows the frequency of main subjects broached on that Guardian forum. It is not clear what period of time is represented, but in any case the statistics are amazing (yes, I know - lies, damn lies and statistics...). Take a look (click to enlarge):

United States seems to lead the list as the most popular subject with 776 articles. Well, you may say, it is only natural that the most powerful nation on Earth would be of the highest interest to The Guardian in its choice of topics. Even if we are talking about a British newspaper.

And you will be dead wrong, as I have been - after the first glance. While Israel looks quite high on the charts, trailing Iraq (the third horse in the race) by 49 points, the charts do not do it full "justice".

After the second glance, I have decided to mark by green the subjects directly or indirectly related to Israel. Then I have applied some conservative percentages to those bearing a question mark (e.g. 10% of all Iran-related articles will carry some Israel-related tunes, 60% of all terror-related etc...). I have left out on purpose several subjects that are definitely carrying some Israel-related pieces, again - to be on a conservative side.

The result - roughly 1300 points - is rather staggering.

I don't want to go into further analysis of the statistics, just compare the above number with that of China (137) Britain (130 - it is supposed to be a British newspaper, FFS!), Russia(106).

No matter how the results are turned around, looked upon and dissected, the picture shows a dark and unhealthy obsession. If you take into account that the majority (I would say, more than 90%) of the articles are bashing Israel for this or other, real or imaginary, offense, deservedly or not... well, I don't have to spell it, do I?

Or do I?

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

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