Is Islamic finance the answer?

By Robin Brant
Malaysia correspondent, BBC News, Kuala Lumpur

Experts in Islamic finance believe their way of doing business has shielded them from the global credit crisis.

But how does it differ from conventional Western finance?

A former executive director of the International Monetary Fund, Dr Abbas Mirakhor, says wider Islamic economics relies on God’s guidance, handed down almost 1,400 years ago.

There is a “consciousness of a supreme creator and a system that he has provided”, he says.

What we know as the conventional Western way does not have that, which is “really the major difference between the two”, he adds.

In practical terms, the most significant difference is that charging interest is not allowed in Islamic finance.

FEATURES OF ISLAMIC ECONOMY

  • Dealing in interest, liquor, pork, gambling or pornography are prohibited under Sharia law
  • Islam forbids all forms of economic activity which it deems morally or socially harmful
  • Individuals must spend their wealth judiciously and not hoard it, keep it idle or squander it
  • Muslims have a duty to contribute a percentage of their wealth to deprived and poor sections of Muslim society
  • Neither are most forms of speculative investment permitted, such as hedging or derivatives trading.

    “We don’t recognise the concept of interest… to look for some profit from trading money,” explains Dr Bambang Brodjonegoro from the Islamic Development Bank.

    “In the Islamic concept, money is strictly for the purpose of exchange or storing value, but not for the transaction of looking for excessive profit,” he says.

    Sharing risks

    How then, does an Islamic bank, and a customer who puts money in that bank, make a profit?

    The system is asset-based, with tangible assets or commodities at the heart of it. There are buyers and sellers, not borrowers and lenders.

    Here is a comparison.

    In Los Angeles a customer who wants to borrow money to buy a car would go to a conventional bank and agree a loan. The bank would hand over the money.

    There would be regular repayments, which include interest accrued on the loan.

    In Lahore a customer could go to an Islamic bank and sign a contract with the bank to buy a car from them.

    The bank would not loan the money but buy the car itself. Then it would sell it to the customer at a mark up.

    The customer would agree to pay back the cost in instalments over a regular period.

    One of the core principles at the heart of Islamic economics is risk sharing. The bank and the people who put their money in it share any profit, or loss, from investments.

    “In Islam we appreciate merit, so if someone works harder in a business…they (the bank) will get the sharing benefit,” explains Dr Brodjonegoro.

    “The more important thing is that there will be no bank that rules everything. It will be bank and borrowers at the same level and they share the risk and benefit.”

    Alternative way

    This sense of equality is important. It is one of the defining characteristics which proponents of Islamic economics say make it different from the conventional western way.

    It is time for Islamic finance to pause and think of the direction it is taking
    Prof. Habib Ahmed, Islamic finance expert

    Islamic economics also highlights a belief in benefitting the wider Muslim community.

    The former IMF Executive Director Dr Mirakhor says that it chimes with “a movement toward becoming more ‘other conscious’…having consciousness about the other fellow, about the general public interest.”

    This contrasts with what he described as the “simple narrow basis of self interest which motivates, supposedly, the economic agents in the liberal economic system.”

    Some see the Islamic model as an alternative. Others see it as complementary to the system which has dominated the western world.

    “I don think that this Islamic banking system is the alternative, that we have one or the other. I think this is a complimentary service, a way of doing service,” says Prof Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Countries.

    “It needs to be an option there where people can find different ways of doing the same thing.”

    Compromising principles

    Islamic economics is not the exclusive preserve of Muslims.

    London is emerging as a major financial centre for Islamic finance. Islamic banking products are also widely used by non Muslims in Malaysia.

    “This is an alternative system that can be applied to everybody. Everybody can use it regardless of their religion,” says Dr Brodjonegoro from the Islamic Development Bank.

    Major banks like Britain’s HSBC and Citi of the US have set up Islamic banking subsidiaries that are flourishing. Some of the champions of the Islamic way want to see business expand beyond the natural market of Muslim countries.

    They believe that now, more than ever, there is a market for non Muslims who share in the values espoused in Islamic economics.

    But there are some who fear that by expanding the Islamic way is becoming less Islamic.

    Time to reflect

    “Unfortunately what is happening is that Islamic finance in some ways is moving more and more closely to the conventional finance,” says Prof Habib Ahmed, a world authority on Islamic finance.

    “If you look at the development in the past few years, Islamic finance appears to be mimicking most of the products of conventional finance.”

    There has never been a better time to champion an economic model which is different to the one laying in shreds on Wall Street, says Prof Ahmed. But he believes that the Islamic concept is being diluted.

    “As people after this crisis are looking for solutions…the Islamic finance industry is moving towards that very system,” he says.

    “I think it is time for Islamic finance to pause and think of the direction it is taking”.

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    IT WASN’T MUSLIMS

    It wasn’t Muslims in an Afghan cave who had access to highly energetic nano-thermites; it was the US military and government scientists such as those connected with NIST.

    It wasn’t Muslims who ran a construction company that was awarded a $124 million contract for construction of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) headquarters in Washington, DC, which oversees the Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC-IH), which was described during the 1990s as the “National Center for Energetics“, the military’s term for “explosives work”, and as of 1999-2000 the “only reliable source of aluminum nanopowders in the United States“; it was Tom Leppert who was CEO of Turner Construction as of 9/11/01, and who even writes parts of Presidential speeches.

    It wasn’t Muslims who ran a construction company that had supervised the 2000 demolition of the Seattle Kingdome, participated in the post 9/11 collection and disposal of the steel wreckage of the WTC towers, and carried out extensive renovations throughout the World Trade Center complex right up to the morning of 9/11 including fireproofing upgrades on the floors that were struck by planes and subsequently “failed”, when the steel had already been certified to ASTM E119 by Universal Laboratories, and, in tests sponsored by NIST on corresponding floor assemblies subjected to greater heat exposure and protected with less fireproofing than was the case at the WTC, the test specimens “were able to sustain the maximum design load” without collapsing for as long as the tests were run (2 to 3 1/2 hours); it was Tom Leppert who was CEO of Turner Construction as of 9/11/01 and received a Torch of Conscience award from the American Jewish Congress.

    It wasn’t Muslims who trained their cameras on the World Trade Center Towers prior to the first aircraft impact, who danced and celebrated with high fives prior to the second impact as most onlookers still believed it had been a terrible accident rather than terrorism, and who were caught with foreign passports, $4,700 in cash hidden in a sock, maps highlighting certain places in the city, and a van that tested positive for traces of explosives; it was Israelis Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omer Marmari, several of whom have been confirmed as Mossad agents, as part of their job in “documenting the event“.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were caught on 9/11/01 operating in teams with vans full of explosives, including one team who attempted to blow up the George Washington Bridge with a truck packed with tons of explosives, and another who blew up a van between 6th and 7th on King Street with a mural painted of a remote controlled airplane diving into New York and blowing up; it was Israelis, which is why the authorities did their best to ignore and bury these reports which included a suspected van bomb driven into the WTC basement and exploded to weaken the structure.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were caught shortly after midnight on May 7, 2002 very close to the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, Oak Harbor, Wash., (where the Navy conducts explosive ordnance training for bomb disposal mobile units to the consternation of local marine life) with a rental truck that tested positive for TNT and RDX plastic explosives; it was Israelis whose cover story was of “delivering furniture” but regarded by authorities as dubious because of the early morning hour, and the authorities’ subsequent claim that the dog’s reaction and initial tests for explosives were wrong is so full of holes that it merely demonstrates the power of the Israeli lobby.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were in New York on 9/11 and in London on the morning of the 7/7 attacks; it was Benjamin Netanyahu and Rudy Giuliani.

    It wasn’t Muslims who received advance warning of the London 7/7 attacks; it was Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad.

    It wasn’t Muslims who provided two hours’ advance warning of an attack on the World Trade Center via an instant messaging company based in Herzliya; it was Israelis.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who fled the US on September 14, 2001; it was Dominick Suter of “Urban Moving Systems” who fled to Israel.

    It wasn’t over a hundred Muslims who, from around January 2000 to September 2001, posed as “art students” and attempted to penetrate US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) offices and other federal buildings including 36 sensitive Department of Defense (DoD) sites, were caught with diagrams of the interior of federal buildings and photographs of federal agents and often evaded security by entering through back doors or parking garages, and even visited the homes of senior federal officials but not those of their neighbors; it was Israelis, none of whom were “art students” but many of whom had backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence. Not surprisingly, the Press went for a limited hangout by trying to pretend the Israelis were merely shadowing “Arab hijackers” and either failed to pass on information, or “it was not treated seriously“, the old canard about “intelligence failure“. The operations of the Israeli fake “art students” is well documented, including plenty of names and even descriptions. An unusually large number of these Israelis were located in Irving, Dallas, TX (p.23, previous link), which is about ten miles west of Tom Leppert’s Alva Court home, which is barely more than a mile north of the Dallas home that George W. Bush moved into after leaving office.

    It isn’t Muslim countries that have a massive spy ring in the USA capable of tapping into much of the telecoms network and using information obtained to blackmail Americans; it is Israel.

    It wasn’t Muslims who received advance warning on Monday September 10, 2001, against flying the next day; it was San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, and a group of top Pentagon officials.

    It wasn’t Muslims who acquired a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, Buildings Four and Five and approximately 400,000 square feet of retail space, and insured for billions of dollars against terror attacks a mere six weeks before terror attacks did in fact occur, and then employed (to press for the insurance claim) a ‘structural engineer‘ who misleadingly asserts that steel loses half its strength at “400 degrees”; it was – in a deal negotiated by Lewis Eisenberg of the Port Authority – Benjamin Netanyahu’s (and Ariel Sharon’s and Ehud Barak’s) friend Larry Silverstein and his partner Australian billionaire and “Holocaust survivor” Frank Lowy who fought “in the Jewish underground”, was embroiled in a high-level bank corruption scandal with Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert and found to be making payments to Lord (Michael Abraham) Levy who was arrested several times in relation to a “cash for honors” scandal, Levy being a “tennis partner” and advisor of Tony Blair.

    It isn’t Muslims who have a reputation for perpetrating arson scams in order to claim off insurance companies as evidenced by any colloquial use of the term “Muslim lightning”; it is Jews as evidenced by the recognized term “Jewish lightning“.

    It wasn’t Muslims who normally breakfasted at the Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower, but by some bizarre coincidence did not happen to be there on 9/11 and were thus spared the fate of occupants on that tragic day (none of whom escaped from the floors above the aircraft impact at 8:46 AM); it was Larry Silverstein who was spared due to having a “dermatologist’s appointment”, an event which also spared his two children who worked at Silverstein Properties.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who went on TV within hours of the attacks to tell everyone that “It… certainly has the fingerprints of somebody like bin Laden” and the World Trade Center had collapsed because of “the velocity of the plane” and “intense heat probably weakened the structure as well”, and who reportedly on that very day advised the White House to take Cipro, an effective antibiotic against anthrax, seven days before the commencement of an anthrax letters terror campaign targeted at Democratic U.S. Senators and news media offices, who on 9/11/01 was a managing director of the crisis and consequence management group at Kroll Associates, who was an advisor to the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) regarding “epidemiological surveillance” and national security advisor at the National Institute of Health (NIH), and who gave his ‘friend’ John O’Neill a job as Head Of Security at the World Trade Center; it was Jerome Hauer.

    It wasn’t Muslims who carried out a terror campaign mailing letters containing anthrax spores that had their electrostatic charge altered so that they would disperse more readily, anthrax that was traced to the weapons grade Ames strain originating at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, neither was it the FBI’s final “suspect” Roman Catholic Bruce Ivins, who, unlike the true perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, had no motive to target news media and Opposition Senators and thereby scare them into uncritical acceptance of the “Arab hijackers” conspiracy theory. Ivins died of an overdose and alleged “suicide” in July 2008 after the FBI gave up attempting to pin the blame on Steven Hatfill because there was not a scintilla of evidence against him; a logical suspect is Philip M. Zack who left Fort Detrick under a cloud in December 1991 after having headed a clique calling itself the “Camel Club” that was racially harassing Egyptian-born Dr. Ayaad Assaad. Zack was found by a 1992 inquiry to have been caught on surveillance camera being let into a Fort Detrick lab building at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992 apparently by Dr. Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack. The inquiry also found someone had been in a lab late at night secretly conducting unauthorised research, evidently on anthrax believed to include the Ames strain. Nearly ten years on, during the week between 9/11 and the commencement of the anthrax campaign, the FBI received an anonymous letter attempting to frame Dr. Assaad as a “bioterrorist”. The anthrax letters seemed contrived so as to appear to have been written by a Muslim, and a New York Times writer told of a “Mr. Z.” who failed some FBI polygraph tests and was once caught with a girlfriend at Fort Detrick “surrounded only by blushing germs”.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who was claimed to have been killed on the alleged American Airlines “Flight 77”, to have lived at Silver Spring, Maryland (as did a certain Rabbi Dr. Dov Zakheim), and to have worked on top-secret “deep-black” projects at the Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC-IH), a “renowned leader in energetics” which operates an “Energetics Manufacturing Technology Center”, carries out “advanced research in energetic systems” and “absorbed the function of the closed Naval Ordnance Laboratory, formerly in White Oak, MD” which is a couple miles from Silver Spring; it was William E. Caswell.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were claimed to have been killed on the alleged “Flight 77” and who worked for government or defense, particularly the Navy; it was John Yamnicky who, strangely, for the first time did not tell his daughter that he was going on travel, and who, like William Caswell, had worked for the Navy on top-secret “black” projects. Others included Charles Burlingame, a former Navy fighter pilot who used to work in the section of the Pentagon that was hit and who had formulated a response for the eventuality of an airliner being flown into the Pentagon and whose daughter Wendy subsequently died in a “suspicious fire” at a 50-story high-rise in New Jersey in December 2006, Wilson “Bud” Flagg, a retired American Airlines pilot and Navy Admiral, Stanley Hall, an expert in anti-radar technology and a director of program management at Raytheon, Bryan Jack, a senior executive and top budget analyst who worked at the Pentagon, Chandler Keller, a Boeing propulsion engineer, Dong Lee, a Boeing engineer who worked for their Integrated Defense Systems and who had worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) for 14 years, Barbara Olson, CNN commentator and wife of the US Solicitor General who claimed to have received cell phone calls from “Flight 77”, Ruben Ornedo, a Boeing propulsion / satellite communications engineer, Robert Penniger, an electrical engineer with BAE Systems, and another dozen alleged “Flight 77 passengers” who were linked to defense and government who, we are told, all just happened to be on this unusually low occupancy flight. These people, well loved and respected as honest, decent heroes, are the very sort of characters whose work could have been horrifically exploited without their knowledge, and whom the 9/11 perpetrators would need to eliminate to prevent them speaking out after the attacks.

    It wasn’t Muslims who profited by speculating on airline and insurance stocks in advance of 9/11; it was Israelis.

    It wasn’t Muslims who concocted a hoax about pork-swilling, money-eschewing, celibate, truthful, courageous, pro-animal rights, “devout Jews” who were “suicide hijackers / pilots”, almost half of whom later turned up alive and well; it was Jews who concocted a hoax about drinking, gambling, strip joint-frequenting, womanizing, “devout Muslims” who were “suicide hijackers / pilots”, almost half of whom later turned up alive and well.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who was a former unit team leader in an elite special forces unit and whose father was a senior aide, secretary and pallbearer to a man who in 1937 was commander of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi, a Jewish terrorist organization responsible for atrocities such as the King David Hotel bombing; it was Benjamin Netanyahu.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who was the mentor of Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion and who wrote a column in the Revisionist Zionist magazine Doar Hayom under the title “From the Notebook of a Fascist”, praising Mussolini and referring to one-time commander of the Irgun Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky as “our Duce”; it was Abba Ahimeir the founder of Revisionist Maximalism, a Jewish fascist ideology.

    It wasn’t Muslim terrorists who plotted to assassinate British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin; it was Jewish terrorists.

    It wasn’t Muslims who orchestrated, and whose operatives were caught red-handed in, a failed false-flag terrorist campaign in Egypt; it was Israel.

    It wasn’t Muslims who attacked the USS Liberty killing 34 Americans, and had the US President saying “I don’t give a damn if every man drowns and the ship sinks. I don’t want to embarrass our allies“; it was Israel.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were evacuated “apparently due to a specific security threat” in advance of the Amman, Jordan terror attacks on November 9, 2005 (9/11 by Israeli and European calendars), which included a blast at the Radisson hotel that was known to have emanated from a bomb hidden in a false ceiling, even though the official story held that it was really the work of “suicide bombers” and therefore by some bizarre coincidence the ceiling bomb must have been placed there previously by someone else; it was Israelis who were evacuated in advance of these attacks in which there were no Jewish casualties, most of the dead were Jordanian Sunni Muslims, two Israeli casualties were both Arabs, and five Palestinians died including Major-General Bashir Nafeh, the head of military intelligence in the West Bank.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were caught and arrested inside the Mexican Congress chamber on October 10, 2001 in possession of guns, grenades, dynamite, detonators and wiring while posing as “press photographers”; it was Mossad agent Salvador Guersson Smecke and Israeli illegal immigrant Saur Ben Zvi at the very time that Zionists would obtain maximum benefit from a false-flag terror attack that would mobilize support for the war on “Muslim terrorists” in Afghanistan that had been launched only three days previously.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were convicted and jailed for six months in 2004 for fraudulently attempting to obtain a New Zealand passport in the name of a tetraplegic man; it was Mossad agents Uriel Kelman and Eli Cara who were seeking to create a false identity for Zev Barkan.

    It wasn’t Muslims who claimed to know the identity of “suicide hijackers” Abdulaziz al-Omari and Saeed al-Ghamdi when, since individuals with the exact same names and other personal details such as birth date, place and occupation subsequently turned up alive and well, the population of Saudi Arabia in 1975 was 7,180,000 and even given a high annual birth rate of 30 per 1,000 and ignoring infant mortality the daily birth rate was only 590 and so it is highly improbable that individuals would share the exact same name, birth date, place and occupation, al-Omari’s passport had been stolen in 1995 when his apartment was burgled in Denver, Colorado (a state where Mossad agents have been active), and only utter cretins would steal the identities of people with a different appearance but having their exact same name, place, date of birth and occupation, ergo those hypothetical “suicide hijackers” would have had entirely different names; it was the FBI who published a list claiming that the 9/11 perpetrators included Abdulaziz al-Omari and Saeed al-Ghamdi in addition to several others who had turned up alive and well, and even though the FBI admitted that some hijackers may have used stolen identities and that there is “no legal proof to prove the identities of the suicidal hijackers,” they denied having misidentified the alleged “suicide hijackers” and refused to change the names, photographs or backgrounds on their list – albeit obfuscating and trying to cover themselves by including multiple spellings and aliases.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were behind a failed coup in Turkey; it was crypto-Jew and Mossad agent pseudo-Rabbi Tuncay Guney, who fled to Canada in 2004, and who in 2001 lived in New Jersey towns that were centers of activity for Mossad Urban Moving Systems operatives.

    It wasn’t Muslims who set up an “al Qaeda cell” in Palestine; it was the Israeli Mossad.

    It wasn’t Muslims who had established a reputation for having the capability to stage false-flag terror attacks, i.e., to target U.S. forces and make it look like the act of a third party, prior to 9/11; it was the Mossad.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who infiltrated the Pentagon and betrayed his country of birth by selling classified documents to another country that were then traded to the USSR; it was convicted spy Jonathan Pollard whose treachery resulted in stolen nuclear secrets being passed on to the USSR with Israel as the paying intermediary.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were running an exercise commencing at 9:00 a.m. on the morning of 9/11 involving a plane crashing into a tower; it was officials at the National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, VA.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who, in response to the question “Do the orders still stand?” regarding the response – or more precisely, the lack of response – to an aircraft that was rapidly homing in on the Pentagon and ten miles out after both of the Twin Towers had already been hit by planes more than half an hour previously, whipped his neck around and replied “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”; it was Dick Cheney.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who was CEO of a company that made remote control “Flight Termination Systems” that could electronically hijack in-flight aircraft and steer them into targets by means of a “Command Transmitter System”; it was Rabbi Dov Zakheim.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who, well aware that a percentage of trillions of dollars is still hundreds of billions of dollars, took a position as Comptroller of the Pentagon in May 2001 when it was already public knowledge that the Pentagon’s accounting systems were in complete disarray with $6.9 trillion of “adjustments” having been required in an attempt to make the figures add up, and with no receipts for $2.3 trillion of these hard to track changes on non-integrated computer systems and antiquated paperwork that could be readily taken out by a missile or plane strike on the relevant auditing section at the Pentagon, and who subsequently delivered a commemorative sermon on the Pentagon lawn to hundreds of co-religionists from 40 countries six months after such a terror strike did in fact occur killing at least 34 budget analysts / accountants / financial experts; it was Rabbi Dov Zakheim.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who was at a breakfast meeting with Donald Rumsfeld when the first plane hit the WTC, and was at the Army Navy Country Club “when the plane that hit the Pentagon came right over the top of the Army Navy Club and bounced down the hill and hit the side of the Pentagon“; it was Thomas E. White, who is linked to the Enron fraud, who participated in JINSA trips to Israel, e.g. with his wife Susan in 1997, and who was sworn in as Secretary of the Army on May 31, 2001 which is 27 days after George W Bush appointed Rabbi Dov Zakheim as Undersecretary of Defense and Comptroller of the Pentagon, both White and Zakheim having been placed by Bush at the Pentagon where more than $2 trillion of transactions had no receipts and Pentagon finances were vulnerable to a “terror attack” that would target the appropriate auditing section.

    It wasn’t Muslims who in 2000 co-authored a document which called for a “new Pearl Harbor“; it was Roger Barnett, Alvin Bernstein, Stephen Cambone, Eliot Cohen, Devon Gaffney Cross, Thomas Donnelly, David Epstein, David Fautua, Dan Goure, Donald Kagan, Fred Kagan, Robert Kagan, Robert Killebrew, William Kristol, Mark Lagon, James Lasswell, I. Lewis Libby, Robert Martinage, Phil Meilinger, Mackubin Owens, Steve Rosen, Gary Schmitt, Abram Shulsky, Michael Vickers, Barry Watts, Paul Wolfowitz, and Rabbi Dov Zakheim.

    It wasn’t Muslims who had a motive for employing a “Flight Termination System” to take control of EgyptAir Flight 990 – a Boeing 767 – on October 31, 1999 (after a bizarre coincidence in which “air crash victims grief counselor” Ed McLaughlin of the Family Enterprise Institute was the only person to board the ill-fated plane in Los Angeles and get off at New York), send it plunging into the Atlantic 60 miles south of Nantucket killing all 217 on board, none of whom were Israelis but 33 of the casualties were Egyptian army officers including two Air Force brigadier generals and two army major generals, and promote the concept of “Muslim suicide pilots” to a gullible public; it was Jews who would have needed to conduct a trial run of electronically hijacking in-flight Boeing aircraft for their imminent false-flag terror operation that was to be blamed on “Muslim suicide pilots / hijackers”, with the EgyptAir Flight 990 “inquiry” being overseen by Zionist Jew Bernard Loeb who had Jewish translators transcribe the cockpit recordings, and the FBI conducting a character assassination to smear the alleged “suicidal” co-pilot.

    It wasn’t Muslims who wrote in 1998 of a “transforming event” rather like “Pearl Harbor”; it was John Deutsch, Ashton Carter and Philip Zelikow.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who served as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, whose expertise and job entailed the creation and maintenance of public myths or “presumptions”, and who confirmed that the Iraq war had been for Israel’s benefit; it was Philip Zelikow.

    It wasn’t Muslims who published a paper in 1996 entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which mentioned “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq” and introduced the concept of pre-emptive strikes for which some phony pretext such as halting drug money or striking counterfeiting infrastructure or “weapons of mass destruction” could be devised that Americans would sympathise with; it was The Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies (IASPS) of Jerusalem and Washington which, for new Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, discussed how such a policy would benefit Israel.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who, in a 1995 book, predicted that “if the West doesn’t wake up to the suicidal nature of militant Islam, the next thing you will see is militant Islam is bringing down the World Trade Center“; it was Benjamin Netanyahu.

    It wasn’t Muslim security officials who, in 1991, inspected the garage of a Muslim shipping company in the World Trade Center and concluded that the WTC garage was vulnerable to a car bomb, two years before the WTC garage was in fact hit by a car bomb and the FBI were aware of the plot yet let it go ahead killing six people and injuring more than a thousand, and ten years before the WTC was demolished one week after the very same shipping company had moved out of the WTC; it was Israeli security officials and an Israeli shipping company.

    It wasn’t Muslims who paid Ali al-Jarrah more than $300,000 for services rendered, i.e., posing as a “supporter” of the Palestinian cause while betraying his country to an enemy state, and who was a cousin of Ziad al-Jarrah who was alleged to be one of nineteen 9/11 “suicide hijackers”; it was Israel that paid this Mossad asset.

    It wasn’t Muslims who 1) broadcast the pilot episode on March 4, 2001 of The Lone Gunmen TV series, an episode about a plot by a secret cabal within the US government to electronically hijack by remote control a Boeing heading for Boston and divert it to crash into the World Trade Center 2) said in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that no one had ever conceived of aircraft being used by terrorists as missiles to target buildings; it was 1) Fox TV, owned by Rupert Murdoch, a long-time friend of Benjamin Netanyahu 2) National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice / acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers / President George W. Bush / Vice President Dick Cheney / White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who said he’d seen the (first) plane hit the (North) Tower and reckoned it must have been “one terrible pilot” and “a horrible accident” before going into a classroom and subsequently being informed of the second impact when the first impact was not broadcast live on TV; it was George W. Bush.

    It wasn’t Muslims who, on Tuesday, October 2 through Friday, October 5, 2001: 1) met with, and 2) received $3 million in gifts for “funds for victims” from Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar who started the Al Jazeera channel in 1996 with a $150 million grant, the channel which broadcasts audios and videos purporting to be of “Osama bin Laden” aka Emmanuel Goldstein; it was: 1) George W. Bush, Dick Cheney (an “old friend”) – Cheney also met the Emir on October 20, 2001 to discuss the “Osama” interviews, Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Myers 2) Rudy Giuliani, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Myers.

    It wasn’t Muslims who fabricated a fairy story about Pfc. Jessica Lynch being ambushed, stabbed, shot, bravely continuing to shoot Iraqis, being abused, raped, and held captive in a hospital by Iraqi guards, and later rescued by elite US forces; it was “unnamed US officials” who lied, since in fact there was no “rescue”, Lynch’s gun had jammed with sand, she was being cared for by the Iraqis after being injured in a car crash, she had no “bullet holes” or “knife wounds”, the hospital was not “under guard”, and doctors had even tried to return Lynch to US forces themselves.

    It wasn’t Muslims who conspired to invade a defenseless nation by lying about “weapons of mass destruction” (“WMDs”) when they had already made up their minds to invade for “regime change”, resulting in excess Iraqi deaths estimated at 655,000 to one million, the displacement of more than four million, the sacrifice of thousands of troops and throwing away of $3 trillion to no avail save for enriching a few war criminals and profiteers to the tune of billions of dollars in this proxy war for Israel; it was George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who ordered aides to plan for striking Iraq barely five hours after the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11; it was Donald Rumsfeld.

    It wasn’t Muslims who ordered 250 police to smash their way into a house in Forest Gate, London, in the middle of the night and arrest two brothers after shooting one of them in the shoulder, on the basis of intelligence said to be from a “reliable”, single source regarding a conspiracy involving a “cyanide bomb”, with the brothers being released without charge several days later before it was subsequently revealed that the source was a man with an IQ of 69 who was already in jail on a terror conviction; it was Jewish supremacist lackeys MI5, Tony Blair and John Reid.

    It isn’t Muslim countries that have hundreds of nuclear warheads and submarines equipped with cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads with a 900-mile range; it is Israel.

    It isn’t Muslims that have a powerful political lobby capable of extorting vast sums; it is Israel.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who boasted “We Muslims control America, and the Americans know it”; it was Ariel Sharon who boasted “We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it”.

    It isn’t Muslims who fake phony “hate crimes” against themselves, such as vandalising their own cars or graves, or poisoning their dogs and defacing their houses with swastikas, or cutting their clothes and drawing swastikas on their stomachs; it is Jews.

    It wasn’t Muslims who took control of The New York Times in 1896, or who indeed own and control much of the mainstream media today; it was and is Jews.

    It isn’t a Muslim country that crushes peace protesters to death with bulldozers or shoots them, or shells a picnicking family on a beach (and then refuses to own up) when it wants to launch a war within the next three weeks, or warns civilians to flee after blowing up bridges so it can target them like sitting ducks, or shoots at Red Cross ambulances or UN observers after promising they would be safe, or bombs a power station so that more than ten thousand tonnes of crude oil leaks into the Mediterranean as a “collective punishment“; it is Israel.

    It isn’t Muslims who routinely employ weapons such as phosphorus shells to inflict grave and horrific injuries on civilians, and who deliberately fire more than a million cluster bomblets of which 40% fail to detonate on impact and 90% are employed in the final three days before a ceasefire so they can “get them all in while the going is good”; it is Israel.

    It isn’t a Muslim nation that holds the world record for defying UN resolutions; it is Israel.

    It wasn’t Muslims who ganged up on a handicapped Jew for hiking on his own land, beat him with clubs, dragged him along the ground, tied him to a power pole and continued to beat and kick him as Muslim soldiers did nothing to stop it and police merely advised the thugs to pour water on the victim’s head to wash away the blood before journalists and  photographers arrived; it was a gang of four cowardly, bigoted Jewish settlers who beat up a handicapped Palestinian with impunity, basking in the knowledge that Jewish soldiers and police would not act impartially, and even returning a week later to torment the neighbors, ransacking their home and destroying their few possessions.

    It wasn’t Muslim soldiers who beat up and killed a Jew with clubs and rifle butts and kicks to the head and then, after an ‘investigation’, concluded that the soldiers had “acted properly”; it was the Israeli “Defense” Forces who smashed three holes in a Palestinian teenager’s skull killing him as he merely waited at a bus stop, continuing to beat him as he lay unconscious, then made up a story about him “pulling a knife” and suggested that he was “mentally unstable” in a case that is sadly all too typical of violence perpetrated by racist, bigoted right-wing extremist Jewish supremacists upon those whom they perceive as “animals in human form“.

    It wasn’t Muslims who created a global organization named the “Anti Defamation League” in order to defend Muslim criminals by playing the race card and accusing their pursuers of being “racists” and “anti-Semites” who were guilty of “hate crimes“; it was Jews who set up the Anti Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in response to the lynching of Leo Frank, president of the Atlanta chapter of the B’nai B’rith Jewish secret society who had been convicted of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan who worked at Frank’s pencil factory, with the lynching of Frank being in response to the commuting of his death sentence to life imprisonment after organized Jewry had tried to cast doubt on Frank’s conviction by shifting the blame to a black man even though ritual murder is a known Jewish tradition, the ADL being used thereafter to denounce anti-criminals as “anti-Semites” whenever the criminals happened to be Jews.

    It isn’t Muslims who, for political and financial gain, demolished the World Trade Center with nano-thermite and crashed remote-controlled planes into it in order to set up a hoax about “Jewish kamikaze pilots” and then attempt to throw researchers off the scent by pretending to “investigate” the demolitions whilst ‘accidentally’ plumping for the wrong hypothesis (e.g. H-bombs rather than thermite), and then stubbornly refuse to change to a hypothesis that is in accordance with the evidence; it is Jews who set up a hoax about “Muslim kamikaze pilots” and have their deliberately misleading ‘work‘ about the demolitions hosted at sites that are owned and edited by Jews.

    It wasn’t Muslims who practised pseudo-science by refusing to look for Iron Blue at Auschwitz or explosives at the World Trade Center, in order that their ‘investigation’ would come up with the required financially and politically motivated result; it was Jan Markiewicz, Wojciech Gubala, and Jerzy Labedz of the Jan Sehn Institute at Krakow (Auschwitz fraud), and “scientists” and “engineers” at NIST (WTC fraud).

    It wasn’t Muslims who took over the “investigation” of the World Trade Center collapses when FEMA were making a hash of the cover up, mixed up Figures 11-51 and 11-52 in NCSTAR1-9Vol2 on their WTC7 report which was published two days after the mysterious death of eyewitness Barry Jennings whose testimony of explosions in WTC7 before either Tower had collapsed  – note he specifically says (4:43) “I was trapped in there when both buildings came down” – blew their politically motivated assumptions and conclusions apart, failed to spot their mistake in their accompanying description, assumed unrealistically high gas temperatures in order to derive their required unrealistically high steel temperatures, published a preposterous hypothesis of a “thermal-expansion“-based collapse with the logical conclusion that the 180 kip shear capacity of four bolts in a seated connection would be exceeded if the steel heated up from 20 C to 32 C making the force to completely resist the thermal expansion 191 kip, irrespective of the fact that no steel-framed high-rises had ever collapsed due to “fires” or “impacts” apart from the three that allegedly did so on 9/11, claimed inward bowing of the WTC1 perimeter columns between floors 94 to 100 peaking at 55 inches at column 316 on the 96th floor which could not be reconciled with the fact that the columns’ moment of inertia or second moment of area was at least 342 ins^4 along the minor axis and a maximum deflection of 55 inches given fixed – fixed boundary conditions and a distributed load would have required the failure within 102 minutes of at least ten consecutive floors, many of which did not have any fireproofing ‘dislodged’ by a plane and did not even experience substantial fires; it was NIST, whose top scientists and engineers have extensive knowledge of nano-thermites, but said they had found “no evidence” of explosives at the WTC and later admitted that they had not bothered to look for any. The 9/11 perpetrators had to ensure those in charge of the “investigation” were aware of that which they must not find.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who announced on Sunday September 16, 2001 that a “hijacker’s passport” (allegedly that of Satam al Suqami) had been found “several blocks from the ruins of the World Trade Center“, with other reports asserting that the passport was found “in the vicinity of Vesey Street“; it was former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik who was indicted November 2007 on multiple counts including lying, fraud and conspiracy, which is consistent with the fact that the laws of aerodynamics dictate that the passport should have been found in the vicinity of Liberty Street, the scriptwriter forgot that Suqami was supposed to be on Flight AA11 approaching from the north, and, of several attempts made by the authorities to guess where the passport should have been found, not one of them was correct!

    It wasn’t Muslims who had JFK killed; it was Jews.

    It wasn’t Muslims who stole elections by exploiting electronic voting machines that biased the results such that the odds for several swing states to swing as much as they did from the exit polls was 250 million to one against; it was George W. Bush.

    It isn’t Muslims who exhibit traits of supremacist megalomaniacs by referring to their enemies as “grasshoppers”, “beasts”, “crocodiles” and “cockroaches”; it is Jews.

    It wasn’t a Muslim who set up a Ponzi scheme that netted $50 billion; it was a Jew.

    It wasn’t Muslims who made a record about doing “The Wall Street Shuffle” and whose other songs included scatological references; it was Jews.

    It isn’t Muslims who rule the world by proxy and get others to fight and die for them in wars; it is Jews, whose modus operandi is to select rich host populations that will let them in, pose as their “ally” whilst draining them of hard-earned wealth, employ deception to trick the hosts into fighting poorer nations, and reap the spoils of war such as Afghan opium trafficking, missing Pentagon funds, looting of oil-for-food funds, etc, along with other opportunistic scams such as the $550 billion electronic run on the banks. Note: some reports incorrectly state Thursday September “15”, 2008 for the latter; it should of course be September 11, the Thursday prior to September 15.

    It isn’t Muslims who have been expelled from countries on numerous occasions, it is Jews who keep getting kicked out as soon as the host gets wise to the fact that Jews’ only loyalty is to their own tribe, rather than the host nation to whom Jews pose as an “ally”.

    It wasn’t Muslims who started a World War in 1914 in the hope that they could successfully launch a hoax about “six million” of their number being killed in order to obtain their own country and net a substantial fraction of global wealth in “reparations”, failed, but also exploited the opportunity to annex and loot Russia and indulge in horrific blood-letting and oppression as a means of settling old scores with the Rus who had chased them westwards from former Khazaria; it was Khazar (fake) ‘Jews’.

    It wasn’t Muslims who blew up Francois Duprat’s car killing him and maiming his wife, beat up Dr. Robert Faurisson at least ten times in which his jaw was broken / teeth knocked out / nearly killed several times / hospitalized for weeks and was persecuted in legal battles and had his home raided by police, tried to kill Ernst Zundel on at least three occasions in arson and pipe bomb attacks and had him and Germar Rudolf deported to Germany and jailed for years, beat Jurgen Rieger unconscious and blew up his car, beat up David Cole and threatened to kill him and his family, persecuted and beat Joseph Burg, attacked Frank Walus seven times and nearly killed him in an acid attack, forced Ivan Lagace to resign from his job as a crematory expert after endless threats from thugs claiming to be from the Jewish Defense League, perpetrated numerous terrorist attacks in France including sulfuric acid sprayed into faces / attacks with iron bars / baseball bats / gas sprayed / excrement strewn around, had historian David Irving spend 400 days in jail before being released on Appeal from a three year sentence which was for two speeches and a newspaper interview he gave 16 years earlier, had Dr. Frederick Toben jailed in Germany for ten months for using his Australian website to express his views, and who had dozens more jailed, fined, and financially ruined by character assassination and legal battles; it was Jews attempting to prop up their idiosyncratic brand of “truth” which profited them handsomely for decades.

    It wasn’t Muslims who fabricated a hoax about “six million” of their people being “murdered” involving an evidence-free conspiracy theory about a plot to exterminate them in “gas chambers” which netted them – by way of a huge, illegitimate land grab – their own sovereign state, colossal profits in “reparations“, hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign “aid” and “loan guarantees” and waiving / subsidizing of interest payments, etc, and now serves as their “sword and shield” to practice apartheid and kill and oppress their enemies with impunity; it was Jews.

    It wasn’t Muslims who were caught red-handed forging fake “smoke” onto wartime photographs of Auschwitz; it was the Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose suitability as guardians of truth is comparable to a choice of Count Dracula as a maintainer of blood banks.

    It isn’t Muslim mathematics that holds that the sum of a set of variables a + b + c + d + e… remains constant, e.g. at “six million“, when several variables fluctuate downwards by, say, nearly three million and about half of that, in the absence of any corresponding upwards revision; it is financially and politically motivated Jewish “mathematics“.

    It isn’t Muslim physics and chemistry that holds that corpses may be rapidly and economically cremated with between a pound and a kilogram of coke per body when the firebricks of the cremation ovens are not even replaced after some 20,000 cremations (which is rather like expecting a Trabant to be capable of doing 100,000 miles non-stop at 100 mph on 100 gallons of gasoline and a couple of cans of motor oil); it is politically and financially motivated Jewish “physics” and Jewish “chemistry“.

    It wasn’t Muslims – or even the “Russian police” – who behave as if they authored The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion; it is International Jewry, and if it hisses like a snake and rattles like a rattlesnake, it isn’t exactly benign.

    It is not the “international Muslim” who has much to answer for; it is the international Jew.

    The mainstream media’s conspicuous silence over the collapse of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory has clearly exposed them as “the dogs that didn’t bark”.

    Posted in Conspiracy, Zionism | Leave a comment

    The End of Free Speech? – Criminalizing Criticism of Israel By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

    On October 16, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Israel Lobby’s bill, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act. This legislation requires the US Department of State to monitor anti-semitism world wide.

    To monitor anti-semitism, it has to be defined. What is the definition? Basically, as defined by the Israel Lobby and Abe Foxman, it boils down to any criticism of Israel or Jews.

    Rahm Israel Emanuel hasn’t been mopping floors at the White House.
    As soon as he gets the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 passed, it will become a crime for any American to tell the truth about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and theft of their lands.

    It will be a crime for Christians to acknowledge the New Testament’s account of Jews demanding the crucifixion of Jesus.

    It will be a crime to report the extraordinary influence of the Israel Lobby on the White House and Congress, such as the AIPAC-written resolutions praising Israel for its war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza that were endorsed by 100 per cent of the US Senate and 99 per cent of the House of Representatives, while the rest of the world condemned Israel for its barbarity.

    It will be a crime to doubt the Holocaust.

    It will become a crime to note the disproportionate representation of Jews in the media, finance, and foreign policy.

    In other words, it means the end of free speech, free inquiry, and the First Amendment to the Constitution. Any facts or truths that cast aspersion upon Israel will simply be banned.

    Given the hubris of the US government, which leads Washington to apply US law to every country and organization, what will happen to the International Red Cross, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and the various human rights organizations that have demanded investigations of Israel’s military assault on Gaza’s civilian population? Will they all be arrested for the hate crime of “excessive” criticism of Israel?

    This is a serious question.

    A recent UN report, which is yet to be released in its entirety, blames Israel for the deaths and injuries that occurred within the United Nations premises in Gaza. The Israeli government has responded by charging that the UN report is “tendentious, patently biased,” which puts the UN report into the State Department’s category of excessive criticism and strong anti-Israel sentiment.

    Israel is getting away with its blatant use of the American government to silence its critics despite the fact that the Israeli press and Israeli soldiers have exposed the Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the premeditated murder of women and children urged upon the Israeli invaders by rabbis. These acts are clearly war crimes.

    It was the Israeli press that published the pictures of the Israeli soldiers’ T-shirts that indicate that the willful murder of women and children is now the culture of the Israeli army. The T-shirts are horrific expressions of barbarity. For example, one shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a crosshairs over her stomach and the slogan, “One shot, two kills.” These T-shirts are an indication that Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians is one of extermination.

    It has been true for years that the most potent criticism of Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians comes from the Israeli press and Israeli peace groups. For example, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Jeff Halper of ICAHD have shown a moral conscience that apparently does not exist in the Western democracies where Israel’s crimes are covered up and even praised.

    Will the American hate crime bill be applied to Haaretz and Jeff Halper? Will American commentators who say nothing themselves but simply report what Haaretz and Halper have said be arrested for “spreading hatred of Israel, an anti-semitic act”?

    Many Americans have been brainwashed by the propaganda that Palestinians are terrorists who threaten innocent Israel. These Americans will see the censorship as merely part of the necessary war on terror. They will accept the demonization of fellow citizens who report unpalatable facts about Israel and agree that such people should be punished for aiding and abetting terrorists.

    A massive push is underway to criminalize criticism of Israel. American university professors have fallen victim to the well organized attempt to eliminate all criticism of Israel. Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at a Catholic university because of the power of the Israel Lobby. Now the Israel Lobby is after University of California (at Santa Barbara,) professor Wiliam Robinson. Robinson’s crime: his course on global affairs included some reading assignments critical of Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

    The Israel Lobby apparently succeeded in convincing the Obama Justice (sic) Department that it is anti-semitic to accuse two Jewish AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, of spying. The Israel Lobby succeeded in getting their trial delayed for four years, and now Attorney General Eric Holder has dropped charges. Yet, Larry Franklin, the DOD official accused of giving secret material to Rosen and Weissman, is serving 12 years and 7 months in prison.

    The absurdity is extraordinary. The two Israeli agents are not guilty of receiving secrets, but the American official is guilty of giving secrets to them! If there is no spy in the story, how was Franklin convicted of giving secrets to a spy?

    Criminalizing criticism of Israel destroys any hope of America having an independent foreign policy in the Middle East that serves American rather than Israeli interests. It eliminates any prospect of Americans escaping from their enculturation with Israeli propaganda.

    To keep American minds captive, the Lobby is working to ban as anti-semitic any truth or disagreeable fact that pertains to Israel. It is permissible to criticize every other country in the world, but it is anti-semitic to criticize Israel, and anti-semitism will soon be a universal hate-crime in the Western world.

    Most of Europe has already criminalized doubting the Holocaust. It is a crime even to confirm that it happened but to conclude that less than 6 million Jews were murdered.

    Why is the Holocaust a subject that is off limits to examination? How could a case buttressed by hard facts possibly be endangered by kooks and anti-semitics? Surely the case doesn’t need to be protected by thought control.

    Imprisoning people for doubts is the antithesis of modernity.

    Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

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    Posted in Conspiracy, Disclosure, Redneckia, Zionism | 1 Comment

    Rolling Out the Product Again – A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War By CHRIS FLOYD

    Pakistan

    We asked for signs,
    And signs were sent.

    — Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

    I.

    We are now in the midst of a full-blown campaign to “roll out the product” for a new war: this time, in Pakistan. Anyone who lived through the run-up to the invasion of Iraq should be able to read the signs — anyone, that is, who is not blinded by partisan labels, or by the laid-back cool of a media-savvy leader far more presentable than his predecessor.

    This week brings yet another bumper crop of panic buttons and alarm bells from the powers-that-be, with ever-increasing emphasis on the “Taliban kooks with Muslim nukes” theme: one more variation on the old “mushroom clouds rising in American cities” ploy that has worked like a charm for our militarists lo these 60 years or more.

    Some of the war-pushing powers-that-be are public figures in the Obama Administration (including Obama himself, who has dutifully taken on the Bushian mantle of Fearmonger-in-Chief), and some of them are shadowy, unnamed eminences in the military-security apparat, clearly aiming to act for Obama as those daggers of the mind did for Macbeth: “Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going.”

    The first story to greet America’s political class as they sat down to their prunes and Post Toasties this morning was a big New York Times spread with one loud, clanging message: You cannot defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan without going deep into Pakistan.

    It seems the Times has discovered an unusually loquacious “Pakistani logistics tactician” who for some reason has spent the last six months spilling the beans on the Taliban’s strategy to the leading newspaper of the American establishment. The anonymous 28-year-old guy from somewhere in Pakistan’s tribal lands told a harrowing tale of the “workings and ambitions of the Taliban” as they prepare to defeat Obama’s Afghan surge from their safe havens in Pakistan, then seize Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal.

    What’s more, the “logistics tactician” has provided his American enemies with a ready-made, pre-positioned “justification” for the mass civilian slaughter that will inevitably accompany Obama’s surge:

    “He acknowledged that the Americans would have far superior forces and power this year, but was confident that the Taliban could turn this advantage on its head. ‘The Americans cannot take control of the villages,’ he said. ‘In order to expel us they will have to resort to aerial bombing, and then they will have more civilian casualties.'”

    This is of course the precise “reason” trotted out every time American-led occupation forces kill a group of civilians in Afghanistan: the Taliban made us do it. This happened just yesterday, in the village of Gerani, where village leaders tried to shield children, women and elderly men in housing compounds far away from fighting between Taliban forces and Afghan troops with American “advisors.” But the advisors called in an airstrike that destroyed the civilians’ safe haven, killing between 70 and 100 innocent people, as two of the New York Times’ non-stovepipe reporters, Taimoor Shah and Carlotta Gall, report:

    “Mohammad Nieem Qadderdan, the former top official in the district of Bala Baluk, said he had seen dozens of bodies when he visited the village of Gerani. ‘These houses that were full of children and women and elders were bombed by planes. It is very difficult to say how many were killed because nobody can count the number, it is too early,’ Mr. Qadderdan, who no longer holds a government position, told The A.P. by telephone. ‘People are digging through rubble with shovels and hands.'”

    The outraged and grieving villagers gathered up at least 30 of the slain and took them to officials in the provincial capital as proof of the massacre: a grisly, desperate measure forced on them by the American’s constant denials and denigrations of reports of civilian casualties, as we saw last year, when an American air assault killed up to 90 civilians in Azizabad.

    But now the great and good can turn from this disturbing story to the convenient divulgings of the unnamed 28-year-old guy from an unnamed place in Pakistan, and see that such slaughters are all just part of the Taliban’s fiendish plan. In fact, he provides grist for the PR mill of the great imperial blood libel of them all: There no “civilians.”

    “The tactician says he embeds his men in what he described as friendly Afghan villages, where they will spend the next four to six months with the residents, who provide the weapons and succor for the missions against American and NATO soldiers.”

    There, you see? Every villager is a two-faced sneak, working to kill Americans. If they die — then they deserve it. Boy, that makes the prunes and Post Toasties a little easier to digest, doesn’t it!

    But Anonymous Guy is not done toting water for the militarists yet. Not only does provide cover for collateral damage, and red-flag the hot-button issues of the new roll-out — Pakistan as the true epicenter of the Good War in Afghanistan, and kooks with nukes — he also praises the effectiveness of their most beloved new toy: the robot drones that rain remote-control death on Pakistani villages:

    “The one thing that impressed him were the missile strikes by drones — virtually the only American military presence felt inside Pakistan. ‘The drones are very effective,’ he said, acknowledging that they had thinned the top leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the area. He said 29 of his friends had been killed in the strikes.”

    Of course, they have also killed almost 700 Pakistani civilians (as of last month), according to the Pakistani government. But what of that, when the remarkably top-heavy leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has been pruned a bit — at least, according to some anonymous guy from somewhere in Pakistan. (Surely no organizations in history have ever had so many “top leaders” as America’s Terror War enemies, who, according to Washington, have been felled in their hundreds over the years in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan.)

    In any case, the anonymous guy from somewhere or other could hardly have put the militarists’ case for war in Pakistan any better even if they had, you know, paid him to do it or something.

    II.

    But the New York Times is only one front in the new campaign. On the same day as Anonymous Guy was working his militarist mojo, McClatchy Newspapers fired off a resounding fusillade of largely unnamed “experts” from the military-security apparat, all of them, remarkably enough, with the same message: Pakistan is falling to the Muslim kooks who want them nukes.

    It is an astounding performance. The story, by Jonathan Landy, marshall’st a multitude of nightmare scenarios now coming true before our very eyes. But this is not to say the story is unbalanced in any way: there are two short passages, buried in the middle and at the end of the story, that take a different view. Such as this one:

    “Many Pakistanis, however, dismiss such warnings as inflated. They think that the militants are open to dialogue and political accommodation to end the unrest, which many trace to the former military regime’s cooperation with the U.S. after 9/11.”

    But this nugget of genuine insight gleaned from, you know, the actual people who live in the actual country in question, is swamped by waves of heavy-duty doomsaying from anonymous Washington savants. Such as:

    “A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there’s little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan’s terrorist haven did before 9/11.

    ‘It’s a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution,’ said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly…

    ‘Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al Qaida sitting in two-thirds of the country which the government does not control,’ said David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer, a former State Department adviser and a counterinsurgency consultant to the Obama administration.”

    Significantly, one of the few people named in the article is directly connected to the White House, giving an official seal of approval to the other, anonymous alarmists:

    “The experts McClatchy interviewed said their views aren’t a worst case scenario but a realistic expectation based on the militants’ gains and the failure of Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership to respond.

    ‘The place is beyond redemption,’ said a Pentagon adviser who asked not to be further identified so he could speak freely. ‘I don’t see any plausible scenario under which the present government or its most likely successor will mobilize the economic, political and security resources to push back this rising tide of violence.

    ‘I think Pakistan is moving toward a situation where the extremists control virtually all of the countryside and the government controls only the urban centers,’ he continued. ‘If you look out 10 years, I think the government will be overrun by Islamic militants.’

    Are you scared to death yet? Or even better: are you scared enough to give your approval to “whatever it takes” to save us? After all, the president himself says that the situation in Pakistan is a “mortal threat” to the sacred Homeland; a view reiterated by his special “Af-Pak” envoy, Richard Holbrooke, who told Congress yesterday (on yet another front in the roll-out campaign) that “our most vital national security interests are at stake,” in Pakistan. A mortal threat to our most vital interests — can there be a greater, more urgent, more noble casus belli?

    Again, Pakistanis have a different view of their own country, which is large, diverse, cosmopolitan, and made up overwhelmingly of adherents of Sufi Islam, as well as non-violent, non-militant Sunnis and Shiites. These ordinary human beings enjoy the arts, popular entertainment, sports, technology eating out, running businesses, pursuing scientific research and intellectual studies, raising their families. As Ahsan Iqbal, a top aide to opposition leader and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, told McClatchy:

    “While militants will overrun small pockets, most Pakistanis embrace democracy and will resist living under the Taliban’s harsh interpretation of Islam, he said.

    ‘The psychology, the temperament, the mood of the Pakistani nation does not subscribe to these extremist views,’ Iqbal said.”

    But of course, the anonymous unipolar dominationists of the American power structure know better:

    “The U.S. intelligence official, however, said that Pakistan’s elite, dominated since the country’s independence in 1947 by politicians, bureaucrats and military officers from Punjab, have failed to recognize the seriousness of the situation.

    ‘The Punjabi elite has already lost control of Pakistan, but neither they nor the Obama administration realize that,’ the official said. ‘Pakistan will be an Islamist state — or maybe a collection of four Islamic states, probably within a few years. There’s no civilian leadership in Islamabad that can stop this, and so far, there hasn’t been any that’s been willing to try.'”

    Of course, Islamabad has been carrying out military operations against insurgents for many years, losing hundreds of soldiers in the campaigns. But this history is being erased and rewritten to accommodate the new narrative: The United States will be forced to intervene directly in Pakistan because the Pakistanis are too stupid to realize the danger posed by the militants, and too weak and cowardly to even try to stop them. The whole damned place was “beyond redemption,” so we have to step in.

    We have been here before, and not so long ago either. The signs are there — for anyone who wants to see them.

    Chris Floyd is an American writer. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com

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    Posted in Disclosure | Leave a comment

    Australia’s Role in the American Inquisition – The Torturer’s Apprentice By RICHARD NEVILLE

    The revelations of a once secret 2006 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross on the use of torture and “cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment” on prisoners at Guantánamo and secret CIA jails came as a shock to many. This is odd, because anyone with a keyboard, modem and half a brain, quickly discovered that in the panicky aftermath of 9/11, the West had forged a pact with the Devil. It was not only Dick Cheney who felt the call of the dark side – it was virtually the entire governing class of America, Britain and Australia. Yes, even Australia, a former penal colony that started life as Britain’s Guantanamo.

    You might think this grim past would sharpen the desire of our institutions to root out injustice and comfort the afflicted. Well, we go through the motions. Australia signed the Convention against Torture (CAT) and, unlike the US, ratified it. But now we have trashed it. How come? Let’s take a swift trip into the heart of darkness.

    At 3am on October 2001, a bus bound for Karachi was boarded by Pakistani security heavies on the look-out for “suspicious foreigners”. Two young Germans were dragged from their seats. When Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib interceded on their behalf, he too was taken into custody. According to Habib, he was hooded, shackled, dumped in a cell and roughed up. Eventually, he was taken to the Australian High Commission in Islamabad. In his memoir, My Story, Habib insists that he met with a senior consular official, Alistair Adams. The Australian Government denies such a meeting took place. However, in 2007, The Australian newspaper tracked down Ibrahim Diab, one of the Germans removed from the bus. Diab briefly shared a cell with the Australian, and heard a policeman tell Habib he was being taken to the High Commission, and watched them depart. On his return, Habib showed Diab a business card provided by the consul.

    Habib states he met Mr Adams several times while he was held in Pakistan, and that the diplomat was present when he was interrogated by US agents. Adams allegedly told him he would be sent to an Egyptian jail. The Government admits Habib was twice seen by an officer of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) who used the name Paul Stokes and once by an Australian Federal Police officer, Mark Briskey.

    Meanwhile, under pressure from the Americans, the Pakistanis were keen for Habib to confess to an act of terror, so he was strung on a hook and zapped with electricity until he bled through every orifice. This happened, he says, more than once. Next on the agenda was an act of rendition, which began with a bunch of Americans in balaclavas, wearing black T-shirts, grey pants & yellow boots, beating him black and blue. They cut off his clothes, rammed a suppository up his rectum and fitted him with nappy and tracksuit. “The Australian diplomat was there and saw everything that happened”, writes Habib. “He wore a balaclava, but I recognized his coloured shirt, the checked jacket, the elbow patches…” More than one Australian official was allegedly present.

    Now here’s the rub: Under Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT), a State must not transport a person to another State where he/she risks being tortured. So when Habib was “wrapped up like a spring roll”, barely able to breathe or walk, and dragged aboard the CIA flight to Egypt, this provision was breached. Article 4 of CAT states that an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture must be treated as a criminal offence. Thus anyone involved in renditions is liable to prosecution.

    In Egypt, where torture seems to be a Government sport, Habib was interrogated by the country’s Intelligence Director, General Omar Suleiman, who is is ranked second in power to President Hosni Mubarak. Back in 2001, Suleiman took a personal interest in anyone suspected of links with Al Qaeda. As Habib had visited Afghanistan shortly before 9/11, he was under suspicion. Suleiman slapped Habib’s face so hard, the blindfold was dislodged, revealing the torturer’s identity. According to his memoir, Habib was repeatedly zapped with high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten, his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks.

    He was again interrogated by Omar Suleiman. To loosen Habib’s tongue, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a gruesomely shackled Turkistan prisoner in front of Habib – and he did, with a vicious karate kick. Suleiman is expected to be the next President of Egypt.

    According to My Story, ASIO agents and other Australian officials visited Habib in Egypt (“David” and “Stewart” are two of the names provided). ASIO had previously raided Habib’s Sydney home, and delivered the results to his Egyptian torturers: phone numbers, bank statements, SIM cards, a laptop, tapes of private conversations, his address book, etc. On the face of it, this is a blatant breach of article 4 of CAT. In Federal Court hearings, Habib’s lawyers stated that Australian officials were not only complicit in Habib’s torture, but were active participants.

    During his time in Government, Attorney General Phillip Ruddock repeatedly denied he was ever aware of Habib’s whereabouts, as did PM John Howard and Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer. These denials lack credibility. In Feb 2005, the New York Times revealed that soon after the CIA kidnapped Habib, the Department of Foreign Affairs sent a bizarre fax to his wife: “We remain confident that your husband is detained in Egypt… the government has received credible advice that he is well and being treated well.” (Until recently, Downer continued to claim there was no proof torture occurred at Guantanamo). The ABC’s Four Corners program disclosed a paper trail of documents that revealed the Government was aware, within days of his rendition, that Mr Habib was in Egyptian hands.

    Article 2 of CAT states that no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. A Sydney Morning Herald trawl of FOI documents revealed that “senior Australian officials were fully aware that Habib was a victim of the CIA’s rendition program and desperately tried to cover it up.”

    In April 2002, after five months of abominable torment, Habib was illegally rendered to Bagram jail in Kandahar – an infamous hellhole – and later to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by which time he was half dead. Even so, when Habib was carted off to meet Australian officials at Guantanamo, he was handcuffed and chained to the floor, apparently in distress. An official interview transcript names an ASIO agent as present, as well as Australian federal police officers Ramzi Jabbour and Steven Lancaster, plus Glenda Gauci from the Department of Foreign Affairs. Apart from the familiar litany of beatings, drugging and electric shocks, Guantanamo offered unique refinements: being urinated upon, having menstrual blood thrown in your face, being interrogated for 15 hour periods with short breaks. Former British detainee Tarek Degoul said that Habib was beaten, dragged by chains and photographed naked. Doctors who later examined Habib’s medical reports found plenty of signs of abuse.

    In May 2004, Australia’s consul general in Washington, Derek Tucker finally arrived at Guantanamo with a warning for Habib: unless he cooperated with the Americans and admitted to something incriminating, he would be sent back to Egypt. The torture continued. US interrogators did everything possible “to make me crazy,” says Habib. He says he was sexually humiliated by a prostitute, told that his family were dead and shown images of his wife’s head superimposed on photographs of naked women next to Osama bin Laden.

    In Parliament, John Howard swept aside allegations of torture and quoted the view of Derek Tucker, that Habib “had not been treated unacceptably”. Tucker visited Habib several times and his mantra never varied: unless Habib “co-operated with the Americans”, he would be sent back to Egypt. Only the swift intervention of US human rights lawyer Joe Margulies stopped this illegal act from occurring. After being held in Guantánamo Bay for almost three years, Mamdouh Habib was released without charge.

    On his return to Australia, Habib was placed under surveillance and his passport confiscated. Article 14 of CAT commits Australia to ensure the victim of an act of torture obtains redress and has an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation. This Article was flouted, compensation was rejected. Habib has been pursuing the matter since 2005, with the case continually obstructed by the Howard government and its successor, the Rudd government. A flicker of progress was achieved a few weeks ago, according to a single report in a socialist blog, though I cannot find a mention elsewhere. The slumbering proceedings evoke the aura of a secret trial.

    What is the Government hiding? The awful truth, perhaps. That some authorities have aided and abetted multiple acts of torture and kidnap of an Australian citizen. In January 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald obtained documents confirming that the Howard government and its intelligence agencies were “deeply implicated in the illegal rendition and imprisonment” of Habib. Following the recent US torture scandals, President Obama wants the investigation to focus on the lawyers, which is also a pretty good place to start in Australia.

    Former Prime Minister John Howard is a lawyer, as is the former Attorney General Philip Ruddock. The former head of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, will need to face scrutiny, as well as legal officers, public servants and others who violated local and international laws. It has emerged that the US Government told ASIO heads it planned to send Habib to Egypt for “questioning” several weeks before his illegal rendition. Other agencies are tainted. Last December, Natalie O’Brien of The Australian reported that the Defence Department holds over 85,000 pages of documents relating to the rendition of Habib to Egypt, “despite having assured federal parliament it had no involvement in the matter”. it is Australia’s rock solid obligation under Article 5 of CAT to make torture offences “punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature”. While the official hand of the Australia Government signed and ratified CAT, its covert hand fed human flesh to the torturers. Prime Minster Rudd has no other choice but to set up a Royal Commission with sweeping powers.

    • • •

    Post Script: The endemic infliction of torture and abuse on prisoners by coalition forces has long been documented by bloggers and independent journalists. In 2005, this account of the CIA’s World Torture Tour was widely circulated on the web. It took another four years for the New York Times to wake up.

    Richard Neville lives in Australia, the land that formed him. In the Sixties he raised hell in London and published Oz. He can be reached through his websites, http://www.homepagedaily.com/ and http://www.richardneville.com.au/

    Source

    Posted in Conspiracy, Empire, Redneckia | Leave a comment

    The myth of Talibanistan By Pepe Escobar

    Taliban forces in Afghanistan

    Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media – from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.

    But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won’t fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.

    Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan’s 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There’s no evidence they are about to embrace

    Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi’ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis – faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari’s centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People’s Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces – amounting to 85% of Pakistan’s population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class – are an infinitesimal minority.

    The Pakistan-based Taliban – subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles – are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.

    To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.

    Moreover, there’s no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of “Af-Pak”(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That’s mythical al-Qaeda’s privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country’s nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.

    Of course, there’s a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban – as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army – with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad’s own designs.

    Zardari’s government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset – because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal “strategic depth” doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.

    Bring me the head of Baitullah Mehsud
    So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several reasons. To start with, what Washington – now under Obama’s “Af-Pak” strategy – simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian government in Islamabad; these would be much more than a threat to “US interests” than the Taliban, whom the Bill Clinton administration was happily wining and dining in the late 1990s.

    What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup – and sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf (Busharraf as he was derisively referred to) is active behind the hysteria scene.

    It’s crucial to remember that every military coup in Pakistan has been conducted by the army chief of staff. So the man of the hour – and the next few hours, days and months – is discreet General Ashfaq Kiani, Benazir’s former army secretary. He is very cozy with US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen, and definitely not a Taliban-hugger.

    Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars from Washington to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously arming to fight the Americans and NATO. It works. Washington is now under a counter-insurgency craze, with the Pentagon eager to teach such tactics to every Pakistani officer in sight.

    What is never mentioned by US corporate media is the tremendous social problems Pakistan has to deal with because of the mess in the tribal areas. Islamabad believes that between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and NWFP, at least 1 million people are now displaced (not to mention badly in need of food aid). FATA’s population is around 3.5 million – overwhelmingly poor Pashtun peasants. And obviously war in FATA translates into insecurity and paranoia in the fabled capital of NWFP, Peshawar.

    The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the slow-moving regional big wheel – which in itself is part of the new great game in Eurasia.

    During a first stage – let’s call it the branding of evil – Washington think-tanks and corporate media hammered non-stop on the “threat of al-Qaeda” to Pakistan and the US. FATA was branded as terrorist central – the most dangerous place in the world where “the terrorists” and an army of suicide bombers were trained and unleashed into Afghanistan to kill the “liberators” of US/NATO.

    In the second stage, the new Obama administration accelerated the Predator “hell from above” drone war over Pashtun peasants. Now comes the stage where the soon over 100,000-strong US/NATO troops are depicted as the true liberators of the poor in Af-Pak (and not the “evil” Taliban) – an essential ploy in the new narrative to legitimize Obama’s Af-Pak surge.

    For all pieces to fall into place, a new uber-bogeyman is needed. And he is TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who, curiously, had never been hit by even a fake US drone until, in early March, he made official his allegiance to historic Taliban leader Mullah Omar, “The Shadow” himself, who is said to live undisturbed somewhere around Quetta, in Pakistani Balochistan.

    Now there’s a US$5 million price on Baitullah’s head. The Predators have duly hit the Mehsud family’s South Waziristan bases. But – curioser and curioser – not once but twice, the ISI forwarded a detailed dossier of Baitullah’s location directly to its cousin, the Central Intelligence Agency. But there was no drone hit.

    And maybe there won’t be – especially now that a bewildered Zardari government is starting to consider that the previous uber-bogeyman, a certain Osama bin Laden, is no more than a ghost. Drones can incinerate any single Pashtun wedding in sight. But international bogeymen of mystery – Osama, Baitullah, Mullah Omar – star players in the new OCO (overseas contingency operations), formerly GWOT (“global war on terror”), of course deserve star treatment.

    Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

    He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

    Source

    Posted in Conspiracy, Pakistan | Leave a comment

    Gujarat Muslims the ‘living dead’

    Meraz Ahmad Jalaluddin Ansari lost everything in the riots. 

    Muslims in India’s Gujarat state who bore the brunt of religious riots in 2002 say they have been abandoned by the political parties. The BBC’s Soutik Biswas met some riot victims ahead of the general election in the state.

    The acrid smell of burning oil singes your nose and eyes as you walk into Bombay Hotel, a sprawling ghetto of Muslim-owned homes on the eastern flank of Ahmedabad, the main city in western Gujarat state.

    A pall of black factory smoke hangs over this untidy patchwork of squat, ugly houses. Residents pay 150 rupees ($3) a month to a private contractor who supplies yellow-coloured drinking water through dirty garden pipes. Sewage flows out into the street.

    Bombay Hotel, which takes it name after a local roadside eatery, is one of the places where many Muslims displaced by the 2002 Gujarat riots moved to. Over the past seven years, it has transformed from a remote industrial colony to become a busy refugee settlement.

    The anti-Muslim riots, sparked off by the death of Hindu pilgrims in the firebombing of a train, led to the death of 1,392 people in five districts, according to official records. NGOs say the toll is closer to 2,000.

    Shambolic

    The riots also left some 140,000 people homeless. They were put up in camps and given 2,500 rupees by the government – the majority of the displaced were in Ahmedabad city.

    Thirty-six-year-old Meraz Ahmad Jalaluddin Ansari is one of them.

    Bombay Hotel is a Muslim ghetto which lacks basic amenities

    He was lucky that he did not lose any relatives in the riots. He and his family fled their home in the Chamanpura area after Hindu neighbours warned them that the rioters were closing in.

    But he did lose his home and livelihood.

    He had hired a dozen workers and owned 15 sewing machines. He would make, he says, 15,000 to 20,000 rupees a month from embroidery work.

    After fleeing the riots and panic-selling his house to a local Hindu neighbour for 275,000 rupees, Mr Ansari moved into Bombay Hotel.

    His living standards are shambolic, the markets where he can sell his wares are now 10-12km away, and his children are soon going to lose their neighbourhood municipal school. It will be scrapped to make way for a bus lane.

    Mr Ansari has picked up the pieces again, built a new home and managed to buy about five sewing machines to start work.

    He can no longer afford to employ people. The government, he says, gave him compensation of 300 rupees for the damage to his house in Chamanpura.

    “Once I was fairly well to do. Now I work a lot more and just manage,” he says. “Life can’t come to a halt. But sometimes I feel we are the living dead.”

    Noor Banu and her husband are still trying to pay back a loan
    The riots do not find any echo in the general elections in Gujarat.

    Seven years after the incident, both the ruling BJP and Congress party remain silent on the shoddy rehabilitation of the victims or the delay in bringing the culprits to justice.

    “We cannot vote for the BJP and the Congress almost has a fixed deposit on our votes. So it’s a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea,” says Mr Ansari.

    There is little talk of the impending polls at Bombay Hotel. When you raise the subject, the residents turn their faces away in disgust.

    “Before the 2002 riots, there were just a few houses here. Now there are 15,000 houses and 80,000 people. Muslims have moved in from all over. They feel relatively safe here,” says Shabit Ali Ansari, 32, who owns a sweets shop.

    “But no party does anything for Muslims. The authorities do nothing for people here unless we raise a storm,” he says.

    Cynical

    Barber shops, groceries, sweets shops and even a photo studio that have sprung up in the grubby lanes do brisk business. But residents work on pitifully low wages.

    Riot victims like Noor Banu, 45, and her husband, Ashik Ali Badar Ali, 50, who moved here after their house was attacked in the Saraspur area, are struggling to make ends meet.

    The neighbourhood school is being demolished
    Mr Ali used to drive an auto rickshaw and bring home up to 150 rupees a day. Now he earns barely 1,800 rupees a month working as a security guard.

    Their three daughters chip in making lacquered bangles to help pay back a loan of 70,000 rupees the family borrowed for the two-room hovel in which they live.

    Next door, Asiyana Ahmed Sheikh, 12, makes kites. And Zarin Aslambhai Ghanchi gets less than one US cent for cutting and stitching together a campaign banner for a political party.

    “Even the political parties exploit us when giving us jobs. This is the state of affairs here,” says Zarin.

    Ashik Ali Badar Ali says he is going to vote for the Hindu nationalist BJP, which was blamed for inaction during the rioting.

    “The BJP is an open enemy of the Muslims, and the Congress is a hidden enemy. I’d rather vote for the open enemy, so I can go to them for protection.”

    Muslims comprise barely 10% of the population in Gujarat.

    “Despite the riots and the headlines, the political parties here feel that they can ignore them, because they don’t comprise a decisive vote bank,” says analyst Achyut Yagnik.

    Source

    The complete coverage at tehelka.com

    ‘Slumdog Muslim’

    Posted in India, South Asia | Leave a comment

    Ahmadinejad speech: full text

    President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

    I would like to ask all honourable participants to forgive them. They are ignorant.

    In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Thanks to God, the Lord of the worlds, and peace and praise be upon our master and prophet, Muhammad and his immaculate progeny and true followers. O God, hasten the reappearance of the Hidden Imam and grant him health and victory and make us his true companions and believers and those who testify to His rightfulness.

    Praise belongs to the just, merciful, and compassionate God. May God’s blessing be upon the prophets, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and the last prophet His Holiness Muhammad Mustafa, who called for monotheism, fraternity, kindness, human dignity, and justice.

    Mr Chairman, Honourable Secretary-General of the UN, Honourable High Commissariat for Human Rights, Ladies and Gentlemen, following the Durban anti-racism and discrimination conference, we have gathered here to examine the current situation and to find practical solutions for this humane and sacred campaign. In the past centuries, great injustice was inflicted on mankind.

    In the Middle Ages scholars and scientists were sentenced to death. And later on slavery and the hunting down of innocent people, separating them from their families and taking them in millions to Europe and America in the worst conditions, was popular. These were dark ages where lands were occupied and their sources were looted, and innocent people were killed and made homeless. Years passed until people rose. They paid a high price in order to drive occupiers out and establish independent and national governments; millions of people were killed. Those in power imposed two major wars in short periods of time on Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. These were wars which took about 100 million lives and resulted in destruction of a lot of countries and regions. Those who won these wars considered themselves conquerors of the world and considered other nations defeated. And by the imposition of oppressive laws and arrangements they ignored and violated other nations rights.

    Ladies and gentlemen, look at the Security Council which is the legacy of World War I and II. Based on what logic have they been given the right to veto? With which human and divine value is this logic compatible? Justice, equality in the eye of law and human dignity or discrimination, injustice, violation of human rights and belittling the majority of nations and countries? This Council is the most supreme decision-making centre for maintaining peace and security in the world.

    When there is legal discrimination and the law-making centre is a source of bullying and force instead of justice and fairness, how can one expect to achieve justice and peace? Seeking power and selfishness is the source of racism, discrimination, aggression and tyranny. Today many racists condemn racism in their slogans and speeches but when some powerful countries give themselves the right to make decisions for other countries, using their discretion, and based on their own interests, they can easily trample on all rules and human values. As they have already proven.

    After the Second World War, by exploiting the holocaust and under the pretext of protecting the Jews they made a nation homeless with military expeditions and invasion. They transferred various groups of people from America, Europe and other countries to this land. They established a completely racist government in the occupied Palestinian territories. And in fact, under the pretext of making up for damages resulting from racism in Europe, they established the most aggressive, racist country in another territory, i.e. Palestine.

    The Security Council endorsed this usurper regime and for 60 years constantly defended it and let it commit any kind of crime.

    Worse than this is that some Western governments and America are committed to support genocidal racists while others condemn the bombardment of innocent human beings, the occupation of their land and the disasters that took place in Gaza. Even before they kept silent, not responding to all the crimes of that regime, and supported it. Dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, what has been the source of recent wars such as the Americans’ attack on Iraq or the wide military expedition in Afghanistan? Has it been anything else than the selfishness of the American government of the time and the pressures by those in possession of wealth and power to expand influence and hegemony, support weapon manufacturers, destroy a great culture that is thousands of years old, destroying possible and potentials risks by the countries of the region against the occupying Quds regime, and looting the energy resources of the Iraqi people?

    In fact why were one million people dead and injured and a few million people forced to leave their homeland? Why were hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage inflicted on the Iraqi people and hundreds of billions of dollars of costs for the military invasion imposed on the American people and America’s allies? Was attacking Iraq not orchestrated by the Zionists and their allies in the previous ruling government of America which was on the one hand in power and on the other the owner of arms manufacturing companies?

    Did peace, security and prosperity return to Afghanistan by military intervention? America and its allies were not even able to stop the production of narcotics and during their presence it increased several fold. The main question is this: What was the role of the previous ruling system in America and its allies? Were they the representatives of the world nations? Were they elected by the world nations? Do they have representation by the world nations to interfere in the affairs of all parts of the world and especially our region? Don’t these actions, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, count as examples of selfishness, racism, discrimination and violating the dignity and independence of other nations?

    Ladies and gentlemen, who are the people in charge of the crisis-hit economy of the world? Where did the crisis start? Did it start in Africa and Asia or American and then Europe and their allies?

    For a long time, using their political influence, they [West] imposed unfair economic laws on international economic transactions. They set up financial and monetary systems without provisions of international supervision and imposed those systems on countries that did not have the smallest role to play in the processes and policies adopted.

    They do not even allow their own nations to supervise. By taking away morality from their actions, they have established laws in a way that they serve the interests of certain powerful people and capitalists. By giving a specific definition of free market and competition, they took away many opportunities from others and imposed their problems on others.

    Today, with dozens of thousands of billions of dollars of debt and thousands of billions of dollars of budget deficit, those waves of crisis have come back to them.

    Even today in order to improve the situation, they have started injecting hundred billions of dollars of unsupported money from the pockets of their citizens and other nations into banks and companies and financial markets which were close to bankruptcy and they have made their people even more indebted and they have made the problem more complicated.

    They are thinking of maintaining their power and wealth. And the people of the world and even their own people are of no value to them. Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the true root of racism is the lack of human understanding as God’s chosen creatures and deviation from the true path of human life and human missions in creation. Due to negligence in worshipping God with awareness and pondering on the philosophy of life and the path towards human perfection – which leads to the natural outcome of being committed to divine values and mankind – the horizon of human insight has declined. And limited and temporary interests became the criteria of evaluation and actions by human beings. Therefore, the seeds of evil power took their shape and by neglecting fair chances for others’ growth, it added to the boundaries of its development.

    In such a way that it changed to an ugly and uncontrollable racism that today it is threatening the global peace as the most dangerous factor. And it is an obstacle on the way of achieving peaceful life in the world. Undoubtedly, racism should be recognised as the symbol of ignorance of the depth of history and a sign of dogmatism against mankind’s general growth. Therefore, we should look for the signs of racism under conditions and situations in a society where poverty of knowledge and lack of understanding would be spread. Therefore, the main means of fighting such symptoms is to promote general awareness and deepening public understanding towards the philosophy of mankind’s existence and the truth about the human-oriented world. Its requirement or outcome is a return to spiritual and ethical values and human virtues and finally the belief in God. The global society should start a united cultural movement for enlightening certain suffering and undeveloped societies as much as possible and uproot this hideous and evil phenomenon.

    But dear friends, today the human society is facing a kind of racism which has an ugliness that has completely distorted the honour of mankind at the verge of the third millennium and it has made the global society shameful. The global Zionism is the complete symbol of racism, which with unreal reliance on religion has tried to misuse the religious beliefs of some unaware people and hide its ugly face. But what should be seriously considered are the goals of certain superpowers and those in possession of major interests in the world; those who try their best through economic power and political influence and wide media means, to lessen the crimes and ugliness of the nature of the Zionist regime. Here, the main issue is not ignorance and therefore, cultural movements on their own, are not sufficient to fight this evil phenomenon. But we should try to put an end to the misuse of international means by the Zionists and their supporters. And by respecting nations’ demands, we should motivate the united governments to eliminate this clear racism and step on the path of reforming international relations 0and mechanisms with courage.

    Undoubtedly, you are all aware of the extensive efforts by the institutes of global power towards creating a deviation on the path of the real mission of this important conference. Unfortunately in the literature supporting the Zionists, a clear participation and cooperation in their crimes can be noticed. And this adds to the responsibilities of the respectful representatives of nations in revealing this antihuman issue and improving relations and behaviours. We should be aware that to keep a huge global capacity, such as this conference, away from its real intentions, means helping to continue the most hideous sense of racism. Today the necessity of defending human rights is firstly, to defend the rights of a nation to be free to make decisions regarding important global affairs without the influence of certain powers; secondly, to take action to improve international structures and relations. Therefore, this conference is the arena of a major test and we will be judged by the world’s public opinion today and tomorrow.

    Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, the world’s general condition is rapidly moving towards basic changes. Power based equations have become very weak. The sound of the pillars of global tyranny breaking can be heard. Political and macro economic structures are falling. Political and security crisis are growing. And the growing global economic crisis, for the resolution of which there is no bright horizon, makes all sorts of quantitative and quality aspects of change on the way very impressive. I have emphasised the necessity of getting back from the wrong path that today’s absolute global management is following and I have warned about the critical outcomes of delaying to do so.

    Also now, in this valued conference, addressing you managers, thinkers and all the world nations who are thirsty for peace, freedom, progress and prosperity, I would like to say that the unjust ruling of the world is reaching its end. This deadlock was inevitable since the logic behind this imposed management is tyrannical. This is because the logic of the mass movement of the world is divine, purposeful, humane and God-centred. It is a movement which opposes any policy or plan which is not in line with the interests of nations. Victory of truth over vice and the bright future of humanity and the establishment of a just global system is the promise of God and all prophets, and a common hope of all communities and generations. Achieving such a future justifies the reason behind creation, is the belief of all those faithful to God and the very high status of the human beings.

    Formation of a global community, the practical possibility of a common global system materialising and finally involving thinkers, managers and people of the world to actively and justly participate in the macro and principle decision makings is the main path to this great destination.

    At the moment, scientific and technical capabilities as well as information and communication technology have created a mutual and comprehensive understanding of the global community and have created the necessary ground for a common system to materialise. .

    Now, this is a grave responsibility that the world’s scientists, elites and officials across the world should shoulder by playing a historic role through faith in this definite path.

    Now I want to stress on this fact that western capitalism like communism has reached the end of its path because it does not see the world and humanity as they are. It has tried to impose a self-constructed path and destination and instead of paying attention to human and divine values, justice, freedom, compassion and brotherhood it has set fierce competition for gaining individual and collective materialistic interests as a basis for life.

    Now we should collectively try to learn lessons from the past and understand the necessity for correcting this path by considering today’s conditions. And on the same note and as the final word I would like to draw your attention to two important points.

    First point: The improvement of the current international condition is hundred per cent possible. But we should know that this cannot be achieved without the cooperation of all the governments and nations. Therefore, we should benefit from the capacities of international cooperation to the maximum. My presence in this conference indicates my respect for this important issue, and the essential issue of human rights and support for nations’ rights against the evil phenomenon of racism and cooperation with you, the thinkers.

    Second: Considering the lack of efficiency of systems and international political, economic, security and cultural relations is necessary. In view of divine and humanitarian values and the true and real definition of human beings and based on justice and respect for the rights of all human beings across the world, confessing to the wrong management in the past and changing the views and performances, measures should be taken to reform the current structures. Therefore, a speedy change in the structure of the United Nations and the elimination of the discriminatory right to veto and a change in the financial and monetary system of the world must be on the agenda. Obviously, the lack of understanding for the urgency of this change will result in heavier costs due to any delay.

    My dear friends, you should know that moving in line with justice and human dignity is like moving quickly on a stream of water. Let’s not forget the valuable elixir of love and compassion. The guarantee for a clear future for human beings is a great asset that can keep us more aware and more hopeful than ever before. It can enable us to create a world full of love and blessing and can be free from poverty and hatred. We will also be able to profit from the blessings of God and have the advantage of having a decent management of a complete human being.

    Let us all have a share in this important issue, and hope for that bright and beautiful day. I would like to sincerely thank the President and the UN Secretary-General and all of you for your patience, wishing you dignity and success.

    This is a BBC translation from a speech transcript supplied by the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, Tehran, in Persian.

    Alternate link | Here is the full link to a video of the entire speech: http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/ond…90420pm1-eng.rm (it is a RealPlayer file).

    The speech Mr Ahmadinejad gave was different in some respects from the draft submitted previously by the Iranians to the UN. That can be accessed here. Iranian draft of speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

    Source

    Arab world applauds Ahmadinejad’s speech amid catcalls for US – SMH – 22 Apr.09

    Robert Fisk: How can you trust the cowardly BBC?

    Posted in Iran, Speeches, Zionism | Leave a comment

    Israeli Scholar Disputes Founding Myth

    Then, there was the story of the Diaspora – that after Jewish uprisings against the Romans in the First and Second centuries A.D., the Jews were exiled from the land of Israel and dispersed throughout the Western world. They often were isolated from European populations, suffered persecution, and ultimately were marked for extermination in the Nazi Holocaust.

    Finally after centuries of praying for a return to Israel, the Jews achieved this goal by defeating the Arab armies in Palestine and establishing Israel in 1948. This narrative – spanning more than three millennia – is the singular, elemental and sustaining claim of the State of Israel as a Jewish nation.

    But a new book by Israeli scholar Shlomo Sand challenges this narrative, claiming that – beyond the religious question of whether God really spoke to Moses – the Roman-era Diaspora did not happen at all or at least not as commonly understood.

    In When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, Dr. Sand, an expert on European history at the University of Tel Aviv, says the Diaspora was largely a myth – that the Jews were never exiled en masse from the Holy Land and that many European Jewish populations converted to the faith centuries later.

    Thus, Sand argues, many of today’s Israelis who emigrated from Europe after World War II have little or no genealogical connection to the land. According to Sand’s historical analysis, they are descendents of European converts, principally from the Kingdom of the Khazars in eastern Russia, who embraced Judaism in the Eighth Century, A.D.

    The descendants of the Khazars then were driven from their native lands by invasion and conquest and – through migration – created the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe, Sands writes. Similarly, he argues that the Jews of Spain came from the conversion of Berber tribes from northern Africa that later migrated into Europe.

    The Zionist Narrative

    Sand, himself a European Jew born in 1946 to Holocaust survivors in Austria, argues that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews because they shared a common religion, not because they possessed a direct lineage to the ancient tribes of Israel.

    However, at the turn of the 20th Century, Sand asserts, Zionist Jews began assembling a national history to justify creation of a Jewish state by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion and that they had primogeniture over the territory that had become known as Palestine.

    The Zionists also invented the idea that Jews living in exile were obligated to return to the Promised Land, a concept that had been foreign to Judaism, Sand states.

    Like almost everything in the Middle East, this new scholarship is fraught with powerful religious, historical and political implications. If Sand’s thesis is correct, it would suggest that many of the Palestinian Arabs have a far more substantial claim to the lands of Israel than do many European Jews who arrived there asserting a God-given claim.

    Indeed, Sand theorizes that many Jews, who remained in Judea after Roman legions crushed the last uprising in 136 A.D., eventually converted to Christianity or Islam, meaning that the Palestinians who have been crowded into Gaza or concentrated in the West Bank might be direct descendants of Jews from the Roman era.

    Despite the political implications of Sand’s book, it has not faced what might be expected: a withering assault from right-wing Israelis. The criticism has focused mostly on Sand’s credentials as an expert on European history, not ancient Middle Eastern history, a point that Sand readily acknowledges.

    One critic, Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, attacked Sand’s credentials and called Sand’s thesis “baseless,” but disagreed mostly over Sand’s assertion that the Diaspora story was created as an intentional myth by Zionists seeking to fabricate a direct genealogical connection between many of the world’s Jews and Israel.

    “Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions,” Bartal wrote in the newspaper Haaretz. “Important groups in the Jewish national movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely. …

    “The kind of political intervention Sand is talking about, namely, a deliberate program designed to make Israelis forget the true biological origins of the Jews of Poland and Russia or a directive for the promotion of the story of the Jews’ exile from their homeland is pure fantasy.”

    In other words, Bartal, like some other critics, is not so much disputing Sand’s historical claims about the Diaspora or the origins of Eastern European Jews, as he is contesting Sand’s notion that Zionists concocted a false history for a cynical political purpose.

    But there can be no doubt that the story of the Diaspora has played a key role in the founding of Israel and that the appeal of this powerful narrative has helped the Jewish state generate sympathy around the world, especially in the United States.

    “After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom,” reads the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

    Reality from Mythology

    In January 2009, as the Israeli army bombarded Palestinians in Gaza in retaliation for rockets fired into southern Israel, the world got an ugly glimpse of what can result when historical myths are allowed to drive wedges between people who otherwise might have a great deal in common.

    After the conflict ended – with some 1,400 Palestinians dead, including many children and other non-combatants – the Israeli government investigated alleged war crimes by its army and heard testimony from Israeli troops that extremist Rabbis had proclaimed the invasion a holy war.

    The troops said the Rabbis brought them booklets and articles declaring: “We are the Jewish people. We came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”

    In his book – and in an interview with Haaretz about his book – Sand challenged this core myth. In the interview, he said:

    “I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land – a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country.

    “The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th Century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.”

    The True Descendants

    Asked if he was saying that the true descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians, Sand responded:

    “No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents.

    “The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-1939], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled.

    “Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'”

    Sand argues further that the Jewish people never existed as a “nation race” but were rather an ethnic mix of disparate peoples who adopted the Jewish religion over a great period of time. Sand dismisses the Zionist argument that the Jews were an isolated and seminal ethnic group that was targeted for dispersal by the Romans.

    Although ruthless in putting down challenges to their rule, the Romans allowed subjects in their occupied territories a great many freedoms, including freedom to practice religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.

    Thousands of Jews served in the Roman legions, and there was a sizable Jewish community in Rome itself. Three Jewish descendants of Herod the Great, the Jewish Emperor of Jerusalem, served in the Roman Senate.

    Jewish dietary laws were respected under Roman law, as well as the right not to work on the Sabbath. Jewish slaves – 1,000 carried to Italy by Emperor Titus after crushing the first Jewish rebellion in 70 A.D. – were bought and set free by Jewish families already long settled into Roman society.

    After the final Jewish rebellion, the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 A.D., historians say the Romans placed restrictions on Jews entering Jerusalem, which caused other areas, such as Galilee in northern Palestine, to become centers of Jewish learning. But there is little or no evidence of a mass forced relocation.

    Sand says the Diaspora was originally a Christian myth that depicted the event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.

    Genetic Evidence

    There has been no serious rebuttal to Sand’s book, which has been a bestseller in Israel and Europe – and which is expected to be released in the United States within the year. But there were earlier genetic studies attempting to demonstrate an unbroken line of descent among Ashkenazi Jews in Europe from the Hebrew tribes of Israel.

    In a genetic study published by the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Y chromosomes of Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish, Near Eastern, Yemenite, and Ethiopian Jews were compared with 16 non-Jewish groups from similar geographic locations. It found that despite long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level.

    Although the study also demonstrated that 20 percent of the Ashkenazim carry Eastern European gene markers consistent with the Khazars, the results seemed to show that the Ashkenazim were descended from a common Mid-Eastern population and suggested that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.

    However, a monumental genetic study entitled, “The Journey of Man,” undertaken in 2002 by Dr. Spencer Wells, a geneticist from Stanford University, demonstrated that virtually all Europeans males carry the same genetic markers found within the male population of the Middle East on the Y chromosomes.

    That is simply because the migration of human beings began in Africa and coursed its way through the Middle East and onward, stretching over many thousands of years. In short, we are all pretty much the same.

    Obsessive Delusion

    Despite the lack of conclusive scientific or historical evidence, the Diaspora narrative proved to be a compelling story, much like the Biblical rendition of the Exodus from Egypt, which historians and archeologists also have questioned in recent years.

    It is certainly true that all nations use myths and legend for sustenance; some tales are based on fact, others are convenient self-serving contrivances.

    However, when myth and legend argue for excess, when they demand a racial, ethnic or religious purity to the exclusion of others – so that some prophecy can be fulfilled or some national goal achieved – reason and justice can give way to extremism and cruelty.

    The motive for creating the state of Israel was to provide respite for the Jews of Europe after World War II, but that worthy cause has now been contorted into an obsessive delusion about an Israeli right to mistreat and persecute Palestinians.

    When right-wing Israeli Rabbis speak of driving non-Jews out of the land that God supposedly gave to the Israelites and their descendants, these Rabbis may be speaking with full faith, but faith is by definition an unshakable belief in something that taken by itself cannot be proven.

    This faith – or delusion – also is drawing in the rest of the world. The bloody war in Iraq is an appendage to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as is the dangerous rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the region.

    There is also now the irony that modern Israel was established by Jews of European origin, many of whom may be ethnically unconnected to Palestine.

    Another cruel aspect of this irony is that the descendants of the ancient Israelites may include many Palestinians, who are genetically indistinct from the Sephardic Jews who were, like the Palestinians, original and indigenous inhabitants of this ancient land.

    Yasir Arafat told me quite often that the Israelis are really cousins of the Palestinians. He may have been wrong; they are more likely brothers and sisters.

    Morgan Strong is a former professor of Middle Eastern history, and was an advisor to CBS News “60 Minutes” on the Middle East.

    Source

    Posted in History, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

    Brace Yourselves – The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance By REZA FIYOUZAT

    Iran - United States

    It is customary in an Iranian wedding ceremony, when asked, “Do you take this man?”, for the bride to not answer “Yes!” the first time the question is posed. By tradition, the bride, but not the groom, is asked the signifying question three times. To show her proper upbringing, she must wait until the third time before answering ‘Yes!’ Otherwise, she may come off seeming too eager, not ladylike, not coy enough, aggressive or too enthusiastic (implying further bad things), way too much in a hurry, not able or patient enough to observe the proper decorum. Not good.

    The Obama administration’s recent overtures for a reconciliation with Iran have come in the form of sweet talk of opening up of fisted hands, accompanied with a quotation from the wily and clever Sa’di, one of our more popular poets (1184-1283?). The initial Iranian responses to these Obama overtures are starting to resemble the coy Iranian bride’s ladylike silence upon first being asked if she would take the man.

    Initial reactions from the Iranian government were predictable rebukes and denunciations to the effect that nothing has changed in reality, that the Americans should draw some lessons from their past and present behavior if they really want better relations with Iran. Yet, the Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, left open the possibility that the Americans can and may change their attitude, in which case the Iranians likewise will change theirs; which is to say, “Keep talking! I’m listening.”

    Of course, the Iranian government would like nothing better than to have full and complete recognition from the global bully, a recognition that comes with a guarantee of unfettered turf and a ticket to actual and concrete cooperative joint projects with the global bully in regional matters, such as in ‘stabilizing’ Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Iranians can play a substantial role in furthering the agenda set out by the global bully. But, of course, the Iranians cannot come out and just say it like that. They have to play coy, or actually, even pissed off a bit initially, demanding the unfreezing of assets, the stopping of economic embargo and the hostile language; basically, demanding the stoppage of all abusive behavior, and a show of some real sweetness before this principled and pious bride is convinced that she can live comfortably within the coming union of objectives.

    One of the signs of attitude change the Iranian side expects to see, one of the most obvious, is the un-freezing of the their assets held in American banks. This can easily be arranged without any loss of face on the part of the Americans, since not a really big deal, yet can be used in Iran as the proof that the Americans are starting to step on the righteous path and yielding to the Iranian people’s demands. This in turn will lead to more open Iranian cooperation with, say, the NATO, providing them whatever help they can in the war against Afghanistan. In time, further concrete measures will be taken to bring the two states closer.

    But, the ‘bringing closer’ of the two states will only work as long as the union is beneficial to the imperialists. As long as the major interests of the imperialists are reinforced and fortified, they will have no problem throwing around some crumbs.

    Signs of relational improvements between the two sides have already manifested themselves. “[A] meeting took place on March 9 between NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy Martin Erdmann and Iran’s Ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the European Union, Ali-Asghar Khaji,” (see:http://news.xinhuanet.com/). There is also the invitation offered to Iran (and Iran’s acceptance) to participate in a NATO-organized international conference, held on March 31, to deal with the war in Afghanistan.

    And, as pertains to some of the things the Iranian government would like to see done by the American side, we have seen the throwing to the wolves of about 3,500 members of an Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin (or Mojaheddin-e Khalq-e), camped for the past twenty years in a military compound north of Baghdad, some 50 miles from the Iranian border. This organization has been a major irritant to the Iranian regime ever since 1980. The Mojahedin in Iraq have been told their camp will be moved to a location far removed from the border and much more remote, and that they will have to leave Iraq. Their presence in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussain had been tolerated by the invaders and, presumably, held as a card to be used in any potential negotiations with the Iranian government. It seems that card is now in play.

    * * *

    The support base of the current Iranian state — this particular form of government, a post-modern capitalist theocracy — comprises a host of actors with a variety of socio-political backgrounds.

    Internally and on the far right, there are obviously the obsessive, clerical advocates and functionaries of this despotic, religiously based state apparatus, and they have their own ideologically correct armies in the Basiji Forces and the Revolutionary Guards (which are separate from the regular armed forces), as well as in loose networks of religious vigilantes. They also have allies across the higher academia and the larger educational system, in the judiciary, in the majlis (parliament), and they control a substantial amount of print and electronic media (and theirs never get shut down by the government).

    But not all theocrats are extremist zealots dependent on a cocktail of one part ideology mixed with three parts bullying. Khatami, to name an internationally known ‘moderate’, is a representative of another strand of theocrats, those with a gentler face (and their ‘reformist’ newspapers regularly get shut down; theocrats can’t even fully tolerate their own!). As the reader may well know, the moderates have been more vocal, and for a longer time, about finding it reasonable to have relations with the Great Satan as long as those relations are based on respect. Khatami famously advocated a ‘Conversation between civilizations’. But, ‘hardliners’ too welcome better relations and even cooperation with the Great Satan. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that relations with the U.S. are welcome as long as some face saving issues are addressed. And the most recent contacts between Western and Iranian diplomats, lest we forget, did occur under his presidency. Of course, Iran observers and Iranian people know that the Supreme Leader has the final say on all matters and the thumbs-up to diplomatic contacts must have come from him. But, he too is considered a ‘hard-liner’.

    The theocratic state apparatuses have their backs watched by ideological armed forces of their own but, more significantly, they make great use of the state run foundations that form an echelon-specific welfare state, making sure that the relative well being of millions of lower-working class and poor people is directly dependent on the survival of this particular form of government. Additionally, the state can count on the support of the bazaari merchant classes, though merchants may not be the most reliable of the state’s allies since, from time immemorial, they have had their own independent social interests, regardless of who wields the state power. But, it must be said that this particular state has been a particularly good friend of the merchant classes.

    Internationally, the Islamic Republic has also built strong alliances. They have very cooperative relations with major western European powers, including France, Germany, and Italy; they have economic and trade ties with the U.K.; their strategy of building trade and bilateral economic alliances with Russia and China, as well as with Japan, South Korea and others, has extended their independence from purely western connections. They have also made sure to create key political alliances with Latin American leftist leaders in countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, which furthers their standing among the left-leaning elements of societies in those countries as well as internationally.

    Finally, they have developed a network of international lobbyists cleaning up the Iranian state’s image abroad, trying to win it business as well as parliamentary and congressional allies in Europe and the U.S. In the case of the U.S., beside seeking and securing key business and some Congressional allies, we have seen a particular effort by the Iranian state’s lobbyists since 2004-2005 to neutralize any radical left objections to the Iranian state’s violations of basic human rights, and to preempt any objections to the fact of it being a theocracy; inherently anti-democratic, an abhorrent phenomenon for any Westerner, the inheritors of the Enlightenment project advocating the separation of state and religion.

    This is not an insignificant move. Iranian state functionaries have basically clipped the wings of any American leftist critique of the normalization of relations between the U.S. and a theocratic state — a normalization that will most definitely include Iran’s active and direct participation in the American war against the people of Afghanistan, a war opposed by most Americans and anybody who thinks of themselves as being on the left.

    So, all in all, one can say the Iranian mullahs have covered most of their bases pretty well. And if their calculations are correct, they are about to load all the bases and hit a home run.

    And what calculations are those? They are derived simply from basic facts of human history: as omnipotent as imperialists would like to make themselves look, their powers are not infinite, meaning they are not god, and their wishes are not the only determinants in the calculus of international power relations.

    Just like everybody living in the world outside the gated U.S.A, Iranians have eyes and can see that this particularly American global bully — with all the mountains of resources, the trillions of dollars of expenditure on hi-tech armory, ‘intelligence’ and know-how, with a military budgetary might that equals the combined military expenditures of all the rest of the world — cannot successfully pacify an infinitely poor and most devastated country like Afghanistan. Further, the American imperialists have not been able to pacify the people of Iraq; not with mass slaughter nor with creating mini-civil wars and proliferation of death squads, not with incineration of entire cities and neighborhoods, not with open bribery, not even while a great portion of the majority Shiite population of the country is either with them (since the imperialists put their representatives in power) or passively hoping and wishing to hell that they wouldn’t have to take up arms against the imperialists.

    Further, in both cases, the U.S. attacked countries that had already been devastated by over a decade of warfare (in the case of Afghanistan, over two decades): of bombings, of economic strangulation, and the destruction of infrastructure.

    Iran’s case, in contrast, is greatly different. An attack on Iran would be countered by two sets of armies (the regular, traditional army and the ideological one created after the revolution), a well-fortified military infrastructure totally intact, and by an army of civilian support that will easily swell in ranks to millions in short order (who knows how many thousands or more of even expats and exiles would rush back home to fight the imperialists?).

    So, a war against Iran is not in the imperialists’ short to mid-term interests, nor is it their real wish. Not at this point. To use a very crude analogy (with all its pitfalls), when building a tunnel, after you’ve dug for a while, with the completion of each section and before going farther, you need to reinforce each bit of the tunnel just dug. If you don’t, many a dead miners would tell you, you get buried alive when the tunnel collapses.

    The permanent foothold into the Middle East and the West- and Central-Asia that the American imperialists have been constructing needs to be reinforced at this point. By recklessly expanding the war further, as some neocon crazies have been espousing, imperialists run the highly explosive risk of having everything blow up in their faces and lose all they have achieved so far, particularly in Iraq.

    For those who believe that the Iraq war has been a fiasco, it is worth reviewing the American achievements in their war against the people of Iraq. Those achievements are: destruction of Iraqi society’s structural protections that previously limited and shaped western multinationals’ access to Iraq’s natural and social resources and markets; destruction of Iraq’s taxation regime, and its replacement with one far friendlier to foreign capital investments; destruction of some of the most fundamental rights of Iraqi women, thereby lowering the floor for expected, overall social misery; structural integration of parts of the leadership of the Iraqi society into the American imperial machinery; under the cloak of war, the Iraqi organized labor has been driven further into the ground, to assure it would not pose any serious strategic challenge to the imperialist designs for Iraq; tribalization, or Balkanization, of a unified Iraqi society into religious and ethnic based identities (Shiite’s, Sunni’s, and Kurds); and most importantly, the establishment of an Iraqi government absolutely dependent on the American military and political backing for its survival. For imperialists, these are tangible strategic achievements, not the stuff of ‘utter disaster’, which is how the liberals like to portray the results of the neocons’ policies in Iraq.

    But, again, for these achievements to last and become part of the ‘permanent’, long-term and structural setup in the Middle East, they need to be reinforced.

    Enter Iran. In the contextual scenario of a global bully wanting more than its might allows, the differences between the Iranian state acting as an outright enemy (which it would have to, the minute an attack against it is launched) and a friendly and cooperative Iran are not small. In fact, the differences are huge, and can make the difference between utter disaster and the possibility of some salvation. Especially at this historical junction, when it comes to the available tools at the disposal of the American imperialists. The crazies may well yell and scream bloody murder, or, “Bomb, bomb Iran,” all they want, but such chest thumping is more like the overjoyed outbursts of a crotchety old, impotent yet macho man momentarily caught up in the euphoric delusion of real potency induced by Viagra.

    Social reality has its own dynamics and those dynamics invariably slap all power-wielding idiots in the face equally dispassionately. The Iranian government’s bet has been that at some point the tunnels being burrowed by the Americans into the social life of the region will need their Iranian, able hands in constructing the needed reinforcements.

    Of course, more than anybody, the Iranians know that once the reinforcements are built, they themselves may come under a real attack. But, that is always the rub when dealing with imperialists: there are no guarantees. Look at Pakistan and how miserably enslaved she is in the American imperialists’ bear hug.

    So, there may be grumblings by the Iranians about the release of their bank assets and the need for a lifting of trade sanctions, as there will surely be demands by the U.S. for Iran to reject ‘terrorism’ (coming from the U.S., that’s balls!) and suspend their ‘nuclear activities’, or to stop their support for ‘terror groups’ such as Hamas and Hezbollah, but by the end of this dance, the bride will say ‘Yes!’ and the gathered celebrators of normalization will happily cheer the newly reconciled into the dark chambers, where big deals shall be made.

    But, do not be fooled by either side. Normalization of relations between the U.S. and Iran will have nothing to do with reaching a civilized agreement, in which the U.S. agrees not to interfere in the affairs of the Iranian society and Iran agrees to be nice. Quite the contrary, the normalization will have to be about integrating more methodically the Iranian government’s resources into the ongoing American imperial projects for the region, and this by nature will have to lead to increased U.S. interference in how things are run in Iran.

    When social and natural resources of the Iranian society are put into creating a ‘corridor’ for the NATO to transport its supplies to Afghanistan, that must be called what it is in plain language: aiding and abetting the imperialists in their war of aggression in Afghanistan.

    Socialists must ask, Why should any amount of the Iranian social wealth be integrated into some sub-section of a NATO planner’s schemes? Gradually and by extension, are we to become a cog in the American imperial military machinery? That cannot be considered progress for the Iranian people. It would be more like the Pakistanization of Iran.

    From the standpoint of the Iranian socialists, the best form of relations with the imperialists is no relation at all. That means both no negative or adverse relations (no embargoes, no economic harassment, no military bullying, no diplomatic bullying, no covert interferences, no destruction of any of our resources, human or otherwise), and no so-called positive relations, either (no U.S. corporations in Iran to steal our natural and social resources, no one-sided trade agreements, no shared production agreements in oil industry, ditto for gas resources or any metals and minerals in Iran).

    Imperialists do not enter any relations based on equality or respect or any such irrelevant principles. They enter relations of dominance. Only. To not do so is fundamentally against their nature. It should be enough to observe how the Yankee imperialists approach their European allies; not based on equality. So, for the Iranian theocratic state to seriously expect to be treated as an equal by the American imperialists … well, as politically (not to forget romantically) correct as that may be for some, such notions will simply not become operational in the really existing world capitalist system of today. Not by a long shot.

    But, a marriage does not have to be one between equals, as most marriages rarely are. Just as in actual marriages anywhere in the world, and especially as is the case with marriages of convenience (which the Iran-U.S. rapprochement will surely be), both sides will continue to pretend that all is worth the sacrifices made internally and externally, both will do their best to keep up the pretenses, no matter how awkward it may become at times to keep appearances and hold things together. But, hold things together they will, because bigger objectives are at stake.

    For the U.S., the bigger objectives at stake include the continuation of its project of tunnel building into the deep structures of social life in the Middle East as well as West- and Central-Asia. For the Iranian theocrats, the larger goals include a much awaited sigh of relief, a reprieve for sure, and the golden opportunity to bring water for the global bully in a fashion that saves face and assures the expansion of Iran’s own regional power plays.

    Alas, happy together and happily ever after they shall not live. This one will be a messy marriage, filled with sour bickering about past affairs, past abuses and aggressions, past failings of character and failures to allow for possibilities of better lives; there shall be arguments over current flaws, current neglects and continued abuses. There will, for sure, be some trouble over wife number one, Israel, that the U.S. keeps in the same neighborhood. Expect major catfights.

    So, all in all, this Iran-U.S. rapprochement dance will make for a very entertaining but overall abusive relationship to be worked out, as well as observed and chronicled. Brace yourselves and try not to be too taken by the bickering coming down the line. It’s all about uniting over a miserable cause anyway.

    Reza Fiyouzat can be reached at: rfiyouzat@yahoo.com

    Source

    Posted in Empire, Iran | 1 Comment