Free Iraq

Jihad el-Khazen, Israel Is The Mother of Terror: Israel is the mother of terror, but how it can practice terrorism and accuse others of it?

The answer is that there are apologists for Israel in the United States. The majority of these apologists are Jewish American extremists, but not all of them cover up the terror of Israel and divert attention from it. When George Bush was installed in the White House, the neoconservatives hijacked US foreign policy and put it in the service of Israel at the expense of the lives of the Americans themselves, as we have seen in Iraq. The result was that European, not Arab, public opinion says that the US was a menace to peace more than Iran or North Korea.

It would suffice the reader to go back to the 'New Strategy for Securing the Realm'*, or to protect Israel, and read the names of the signatories. The strategy abounds in incitement against Lebanon and Syria and a call for war. Then the reader will remember that this strategy was laid down in 1996 by the then Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The reader will then be able to see how terrorism ranges between intellectual terror, via the extremist research and media institutions in the US, and criminal practices against women and children in our countries.

Shall I summarize extremism in its entirety for the reader in one subject? There is a study entitled 'Why Israel Is Free to Set Its Own Borders?'** co-authored by US academics, Michael I. Krauss and J. Peter Pham. Both of them oppose every decision, law and opinion on the issue. They say, for example, that the West Bank was no one's possession, and that Israel has more right to it than Jordan…and, of course, the Palestinians, as well.

Israel kills innocent people in our region, but the crime is initiated by Israel's cabal in the US.
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* 'A Clean Break: New Strategy for Securing the Realm'
** 'Why Israel Is Free to Set Its Own Borders'
 

Jostein Gaarder, God's Chosen People: There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. ... We do not believe in the notion of God's chosen people. We laugh at this people's fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God's chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.

We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.

There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.

We call child murderers 'child murderers' and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!

We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

He said: "Do to others as you would have them do to you." ...

... It is forever a crime without mitigation to lay hand on refugees and stateless people.
 

'Damage is done' to Lebanon coast: Lebanon's coastline could take up to 10 years to recover from a massive oil spill, the nation's environment minister has said.
 

Larry Chin, The Anglo-American empire’s “next 9/11” will set up final war; “foiled” UK terror plot a propaganda dry run: It is a known fact that the Bush administration, itching for a wider war, has been planning to set up a “second 9/11” to establish the pretext to justify a multi-front war stretching from Africa across Middle East, and across the Eurasian continent that the Anglo-American empire seeks to control.

Check the calendar, and think like a Bush administration criminal. The five-year anniversary of 9/11 is only a few weeks away. (emphasis added) The Bush administration wants to attack Iran and Syria by October. Israel is going into Lebanon, but cannot expand beyond southern Lebanon, cannot attack Syria and Iran without Anglo-American help. A US election (or “selection”) in November, likely to hand some degree of political power back to neoliberals (Democrats), gives the Bush-Cheney neocons a three-month window to attempt their super-violent end run. Peak Oil and Gas, increasing shortage, is making itself felt in earnest with the disruptions of US oil supplies from Prudhoe Bay, crisis reports from remaining oil fields (Saudi Arabia), defiance from Venezuela, etc. Desperation fuels the likelihood of increasing brute force and violence, led by the Bush administration.
 

Wayne Madsen, Sources claim latest "terror plot" a hoax cooked up to divert attention from Blair's and Bush's woes
 

Acting On Request Of Iranian Prez., C-SPAN To Air Unedited 60 Minutes Interview: This Monday night, for the first time in six years, C-SPAN will air one of Mike Wallace's 60 Minutes interviews uncut and commercial-free.

Portions of Wallace's interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are set to air on Sunday. CBS has given C-SPAN permission to air the 60 Minutes segment followed by "Wallace's entire 90-minute interview." C-SPAN's press release says: "According to CBS News, the request to air the entire interview on C-SPAN came directly from President Ahmadinejad."
 

Israel pounds Lebanon hours before UN truce
 

Baghdad: Attacks kill up to 25, wound 75
 

Terror alert: Blair to force through 90-day detention
 

Sickened Iraq Vets Cite Depleted Uranium: Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.
 

UK: Media must stay silent on suspects


Video (1:30), Thousands protest Mideast policy at White House
 

Video (59 min), The Iron Wall: In 1923 Vladimir Jabotinsky, leading intellectual of the Zionist movement and father of the right wing of that movement, wrote:

"Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population - behind an Iron Wall, which the native population cannot breach." First published in Russian under the title O Zheleznoi Stene in Rassvyet, 4 November 1923.

From that day these words became the official and unspoken policy of the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel. Settlements were used from the beginning to create a Zionist foothold in Palestine.
 

What has changed? . . .

"Everybody has to move,
run and grab as many hilltops as they can
to enlarge the settlements
because everything we take now
will stay ours ...
Everything we don't grab
will go to them."

(Ariel Sharon, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998)
 

Arab News, Cease-Fire Charade: As long as Israeli troops continue their incursions into Lebanon, they know those incursions will be resisted and, according to 1701, resistance will give them the excuse to continue their bloody depredations. It will also enable them to try to throw the blame for the worsening humanitarian crisis onto the Hezbollah fighters who oppose them. Even though it is Israeli weapons that have cut roads and bridges, Israeli warplanes that have destroyed vehicles — even those transporting innocent civilians who want only to flee to safety — the Israelis will deny the death and destruction are their responsibility.
 

Al Jazeera, Israel approves UN ceasefire deal: Eli Yishai, the Israeli trade minister... , "If a single stone is thrown at Israel from whatever village that happens, it should be turned into a pile of stones."
 

Omar Yousef Shehabi, Deepening the fault lines: Clearly, history does not begin in 1948, when the refugees created by the Israeli state, who with their descendants comprise 900,000 of Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants, were corralled into the tiny costal strip. ...

... What the Americans cheerfully describe as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" is the darkest hour in the singularly dark history of Gaza since 1948.

On the West Bank, the cantonization of the native population by means of the separation wall, apartheid roads, checkpoints and identity cards is as-yet incomplete. In the interim, the Israeli military manually tightens the noose by barring access to Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and travel between the northern and southern cities. ...

... Twenty years elapsed between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the first intifada. Eight years elapsed between the start of the Oslo process and the second intifada. The Gaza withdrawal has only exacerbated the Palestinians' suffering, and without a diplomatic track to speak of, a third intifada is imminent, one that likely will not be constrained by the sham of Palestinian self-governance.
 

'US, Israel planned ME war': ... Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist Seymour Hersh writes that President George W Bush and vice president Dick Cheney were convinced that a successful Israeli bombing campaign against Hezbollah could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential US pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations.

Citing a US government consultant with close ties to Israel, Hersh also reports that earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, several Israeli officials visited Washington "to get a green light" for a bombing operation following a Hezbollah provocation, and "to find out how much the United States would bear".

"The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits," the magazine quotes the consultant as saying. "Why oppose it? We'll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran."

"There is no way that (defence secretary Donald) Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this," the report quotes the former official as saying. "When the smoke clears, they'll say it was a success, and they'll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran."
 

Robert Fisk, As the 6am ceasefire takes effect... the real war begins: The real war in Lebanon begins today. The world may believe - and Israel may believe - that the UN ceasefire due to come into effect at 6am today will mark the beginning of the end of the latest dirty war in Lebanon after up to 1,000 Lebanese civilians and more than 30 Israeli civilians have been killed. But the reality is quite different and will suffer no such self-delusion: the Israeli army, reeling under the Hizbollah's onslaught of the past 24 hours, is now facing the harshest guerrilla war in its history. And it is a war they may well lose.
 

Mike Whitney, Ceasefire or Trojan Horse?: If Sheik Nasrallah chooses to disarm and put his faith in Israel’s assurances of non aggression, that’s his choice. But he should pay close attention to the treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza before he sets his rifle down.
 

(See 11:56 PM above)
Christian Science Monitor, Report: US helped Israel plan Lebanon offensive - White House denies as 'flat wrong' a US role in Hizbullah conflict, with an eye toward Iran.
 

Paul Joseph Watson, Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Baby Milk?: British Government Says Mothers With Babies New Terror Threat "You're either with us, or you're with the babies."
 

Christopher Reed, London Fog; Doubts Hang Over Terror Plot: We await the release of more facts about the 21 (or 23, or 24) young men and one (or two) young women who intended to blow up in mid-air nine (or 10 or 12) transatlantic airplanes "soon" or in the "next few days" or just "imminently". The two-score young Muslim Brits allegedly were preparing liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks, but actually nitroglycerin (or nitormethane, or triacetone triperoxide). However, one of these was so unstable it was likely to fail (as it did in another plot) or smelled so pungent a patrol dog would sniff it at half a mile, or was "almost impossible" to mix on an airplane.

Not only the Arab papers but anyone with a cynical eye on politics in London and Washington cannot fail to notice how convenient was the timing of this raid. The bloody fiasco of Israeli aggression in Lebanon was removed from the headlines just as they became the worst. And, as Al Quds noted, mounting British protest and parliamentary threats of an official inquiry, were swept away for the rest of the week.
 

Critics warn against attempt to push through 90-day detention
 

UK terror threat level downgraded from "critical" to "severe"; attack "highly likely" but not "imminent"
 

Kurt Nimmo, Liquid Bombing the Constitution: “Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is emerging as a point man in the drive for tougher laws, yesterday noting Britain’s ability to hold suspects without publicizing the charges. Appearing on ABC News’s ‘This Week with George Stephanopoulos,’ Mr. Chertoff said he would like to see a renewed look at U.S. laws that could give authorities here the flexibility to detain suspects for longer periods of time, noting that the British have such latitude.”
 

Bean Bricmont, The De-Zionization of the American Mind; How to Deal with The Lobby: Why is Israel so hated? The constant stalling of "peace plans" in favor of more settlements and more war aggravates that hatred, but the basic cause lies in the very principles on which that state is build. There are basically two arguments that have justified establishing the State of Israel in Palestine: one is that God gave that land to the Jews, and the other is the Holocaust. The first one is deeply insulting to people who are profoundly religious, like most Arabs, but of another creed. And, for the second, it amounts to making people pay for a crime that they did not commit.

When people in the antiwar movement divert attention from Israel by blaming Big Oil or Big Business for the wars (specially the one in Lebanon, or the threats against Iran) one should demand that they provide some evidence for their claims. Challenge all the apologists or excuse makers for Israel or its lobby within progressive circles. When politicians and journalists claim that Israel and the United States have common interests, ask what services exactly has Israel rendered to the United States recently. Of course one can always point to some (minor) services; but, then, ask them what a cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis would reveal and why such an analysis is impossible to undertake publicly. If they speak of common values (the fallback position), provide a list of discriminatory Israeli laws for non-Jews.

Rolling back the lobby would necessitate a change of the American mentality with respect to the people of the Middle East, and to Islam, like ending the Vietnam war required a change in the way Asians were looked at. But that alone would have a greatly humanizing effect on American culture.

It is true that a change in the U.S. policy with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict would change nothing about traditional imperialism-- the United States would still support traditional elites everywhere, and press countries to provide a "favorable investment climate". But the conflict in the Middle East, involving Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, has all the aspects of a religious war-with Islam on one side and Zionism as a secular Western religion on the other. And wars of religion tend to be the most brutal and uncontrollable of all wars. What is at stake in the de-Zionization of the American mind is not only the fate of the unfortunate inhabitants of Palestine but also unspeakable miseries for the people of that region and maybe of the rest of the world. The ultimate irony in all this is that the fate of much of the world depends of the American people exercizing their right to self-determination, which, of course, they should.


xymphora, The Israeli double bind: ... They want us to unquestioningly accept the concept of a state based on racist religious/ethnic basis – a basis so complicated you need a rabbinical expert to determine who is in the ‘in’ group and who is in the ‘out’ group – while simultaneously pretending to ignore the fact that the illegal actions of that state appear to be grounded in religious exceptionalism. They rely on the Jewish nature of Israel when it suits them, and parry legitimate complaints about what Israel is doing by screaming ‘anti-Semitism!’.
 

Solomon Moore, Hundreds of officers desert after intimidation campaign: Hundreds of newly recruited police officers in Fallujah failed to show up for work Sunday after insurgents disseminated pamphlets threatening officers who stayed on the job, according to police officials in the restive western Iraq city.

"We will kill all the policemen infidels," read the pamphlets, "whether or not they quit or are still in their jobs."

Fallujah Police Lt. Mohammed Alwan said that the force, which he estimated had increased to more than 2,000, has now shrunk to only 100.
 

(Below, excerpts from the record - not precisely a transcript)
60 Minutes, Aug. 13, 2006: Iranian Leader Opens Up; Ahmadinejad Speaks Candidly With Mike Wallace About Israel, Nukes, Bush

[On Lebanon]
"[The United Nations Security Council] has been created to help with peace and justice. But we see that it is not responding to atrocities. If we search for the root causes we see the hand of the British and the Americans," Ahmadinejad said. "People, innocent people are being killed. … And houses are being destroyed. Where is the UNSC? Also, the draft resolution which has been circulated only serves the interests of one party. And it is not just."

[On nuclear technology & Iran]
"Basically we are not looking for — working for the bomb," the president said. "The problem that President Bush has is in his mind he wants to solve everything with bombs. The time of the bomb is in the past. It's behind us. Today is the era of thoughts, dialogue and cultural exchanges."

"Before the revolution, the German, French, American government and the Canadian government had signed contracts with us to produce nuclear fuel inside Iran. But immediately after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, their opposition started," he said. "Right now, they are opposed to our nuclear technology. Now why is that?"

[On Israel & the Palestinians]
"What I did say was, if [the Holocaust] is a reality, if this is real, where did it take place?" Ahmadinejad replied.

"In Germany," Wallace said.

"Who — who caused this in Europe?" Ahmadinejad asked.

"Well, if an atrocity was committed in Germany or Europe for that matter, why should the Palestinians answer for this?" the president asked. "They had no role to play in this. Why on the pretext of the Holocaust they have occupied Palestine? Millions of people have been made refugees. Thousands of people to-date have been killed, sir. Thousands of people have been put in prison. Well, at the very moment, a great war is raging because of that."

[On the occupation of Iraq]
"Well, we are very saddened that the people of Iraq are being killed," Ahmadinejad replied. "I believe that the rulers of the U.S. have to change their mentality. I ask you, sir, what is the American army doing inside Iraq? Iraq has a government, a parliament. Iraq is — has a civilized nation with a long history of civilization. These are people we're dealing with."

Asked if he thinks Saddam Hussein was a civilized, reasonable, leader and whether the United States was wrong about going into Iraq, Ahmadinejad said: "Well, Saddam's story has been finished for close to three years, I would say. He belongs in the past. … And the Americans are openly saying that 'We are here for the long run,' in Iraq that is. So, a question for you, according to international law, the responsibility of providing security rests on the shoulder of the occupying, rather army. So, I ask them why are not — why are they not providing security?"
 

Kurt Nimmo, Hezbollah’s Victory and the Coming Shock and Awe of Iran: ... Does the U.N. “pact” call for Olmert and his gang of war criminals to leave Israel? ...

In essence, the U.N.-brokered “ceasefire” is little more than a public relations stunt, as Israel fully intends to continue targeting Hezbollah, that is to say the Shia of Lebanon. “We will continue to pursue the leaders of Hezbollah everywhere and at all times,” Ehud Olmert told a special Knesset session. “This is our moral duty to ourselves, and we have no intention of apologizing or asking anyone’s permission.” Likudite Benjamin Netanyahu threw in his two cents. “There is a danger that threatens our people. Not only us, our soldiers and our economy…. Since Hitler, there has not been an enemy like Ahmedinejad…. He has Hamas in the south, and Hezbollah in the north. This is an existential peril.”

At this point, the question is: will the neocon free side of the Pentagon be able hold off Bush’s ruinous push for an invasion against Iran?
 

Robert Fisk, Desert of trapped corpses testifies to Israel's failure: "Come out of the ground" is an expression I have heard several times these past four weeks and I am beginning to suspect that many of the thousands of guerrillas did indeed shelter in caves and basements and tunnels, only to emerge to fire their missiles or to use their infra-red rockets on the Israeli army once it made the mistake of sending troops into Lebanon on the ground. And does anyone believe that the Hizbollah will submit to their own disarmament by a new international force of UN and Lebanese troops once - if - it arrives? There was a symbolic moment yesterday when Lebanese soldiers already based in southern Lebanon joined Hizbollah men in Srifa to clear the rubble of a house in which the bodies of an entire family were believed buried. Lebanese Red Cross and civil defence personnel - representatives of the civil power which is supposed to claw back its sovereignty from the Hizbollah - joined in the search. The mukhtar, who so blatantly regarded the Hizbollah as heroes, is also a government representative. And at the entrance to this shattered village still stands a poster of Nasrallah and the Iranian President Ali Khamenei.

Far from driving the Hizbollah north across the Litani river, Israel has entrenched them in their Lebanese villages as never before.
 

Video, President Ahmadinejad Interview (CBS, 60 Minutes) - An edited version
 

How Superpowers Become Impotent: In Lebanon and Iraq, guerrilla tactics turn clean, mean fighting machines into wimps
 

! ! ! . . .
Edgar J. Steele, Never Trust a Man with a Comb-Over: Coincidentally, the man with the comb-over ... happens to be Ehud Olmert, Israel's current Prime Minister and architect of the genocidal frenzy that has been taking place in both Palestine and Lebanon. Past Israeli Prime Ministers have included self-confessed assassins (Begin) and mass murderers (Sharon) who thought themselves fit to mingle in amongst normal, decent people. That such men are selected to lead should tell you a great deal about Israel.

Not that choosing a boob like Bush to lead America is not just as telling. H. L. Mencken (1880-1996) once observed: "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
 

Craig Murray, The UK Terror plot: what's really going on?: None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
 

Luciana Bohne, Remembrance of terrors past: I am sure that we will be reading illuminating detective work on the Heathrow liquid-bombs plot very soon, exposing the holes in the official version -- detective work by journalistic investigators with better resources and more expertise than I can muster. However, in preparation for the revelations to come, I am going to focus on a crash review of the relations between the paladins of the so-called "war on terror," Britain and the US, with Pakistan and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
 

No evidence Iran active in Iraq: US general
 

Gen. Pace: Bigger U.S. Force May Stabilize Iraq
 

UK: Muslims face extra checks in new travel crackdown
 

Zats my prezedent zeyr talkin about -
Jeffrey Steinberg, In Your Guts, You Know He's Nuts
 

Richard Sanders, Canadian Military Components used in Israel's War Against Lebanon
 

Baghdad’s hospitals overflowing after blasts


Javid Hassan, Outrage Over Bush’s Use of ‘Fascist’ Term
 

The Modern Myth of the Holocaust: The myth which I here dispute is not that the Holocaust (so-called with capital H) ever happened, but that it was a unique event. Jews, in particular modern Isrealis, identify strongly with this event (which did in fact happen). Many have felt that they are owed an apology from the government of Germany, or from the German people. The wonder of it is that I have ever yet to hear, or read, that they have offered least slightest apology, or even any hint of remorse for all those other holocausts...you know...the ones in the Torah (aka Biblical Old Testament).

Which holocausts are these, you ask? And here I allow for the Bible itself to answer: all those previous holocausts where the Israelites (ancient Israeli forefathers) committed wholesale wanton rape and murder, utterly destroying entire tribes, nations and races of their neighbors. Oh, yeah...those holocausts... But do not take just my word for it. Let us read how the Bible itself recounts this history...

Holy War (aka Jihad, Crusade, etc.), Israelite-fashion

Deuteronomy 3:6
And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon king of Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children, of every city.

Deuteronomy 2:34
And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain.

Numbers 31:17, 18
Now therefor kill every male among the little ones, and kill every women that hath known a man by lying with him. But the women-children who hath not known a man by lying with him, these you may keep for yourselves.

1 Samuel 15:3
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Isaiah 13:16
Their children shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled and their wives ravished.

Hosea 13:16
Samaria shall become desolate: for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed to pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.