US ZIONIST BANALITY DOCTRINE: Supporting Israeli massmurder while the world turnes away

Charlie Rose, PBS. Vice President Joe Biden discusses flotilla incident. Aired on Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Paul C Roberts USA Traitors AIPAC, Zionist Loyal to ISRAEL – USA Hijacked

1967 USS Liberty survivor was onboard flotilla ship

In June 1967, the Israel military attacked the USS Liberty. A survivor of that attack was onboard the Gaza aid flotilla and has survived yet again to tell the story.

Joe Meadors is a pro-Palestinian activist and a survivor of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. That attack by the Israeli Air Force killed 34 Americans. Meadors was onboard one of the Gaza aid flotilla ships.

“They [Israeli military] are very inept, to tell you the truth,” said Meadors.

Israeli forces were unable to sink an unarmed US Naval ship and were unable to adequately engage a the Turkish liner.

“It was an illegal attack. We were on the high seas conducting legal activities. They admitted that they closed the area for military purposes but they, we tried to find out the boundaries of that area and they wouldn’t tell us,” said Meadors.

Meadors said that they violated international waters both in the recent flotilla attack and in 1967 at the attack of the USS Liberty, stating that Israel also violated international law by using unmarked aircraft.

“They’re just a bunch of rag-tag people who think they can do no wrong. Every time they speak they say they don’t break any laws, they always abide by international laws. But, they break them with impunity and the US Government is not going to hold them accountable, nobody is,” said Meadors.

Meadors expects an investigation will show that Israel violated international law and should be held accountable for its actions. He holds the same hope for the USS Liberty case, which has yet to be settled.

“We filed a war crimes report with the Department of Defense in 2005. They claim they already investigated the allegation we made, but they can’t show us where they have,” said Meadors.

Meadors said that Israel was the aggressor in the flotilla attack and that the only story is being portrayed is Israel’s version, because the Israeli forces confiscated all video and recording equipment from the flotilla passengers

Analysis: Israel’s Gaza assault

“If you remember what Tzipi Livni said in Egypt after her meeting with President Hosni Mubarak and the foreign minister, she made a clear warning, not just about a tit-for-tat attitude, but about a change in Gaza.

“That’s why I suspect that the operation is not only intended to be limited, but aimed at toppling the regime in Gaza altogether, otherwise why would Israel target the police force?

“They are not the ones firing missiles in Israel – the police force keeps the order in Gaza. This is an operation that will create disorder and I suspect that Egypt and Ramallah are colluding in this.

“Israel would never have carried out such a massive attack had it not been for a green light from people that matter – for instance the United States, some of the European powers and also from Egypt and Ramallah.

“Hamas did not say it wanted the truce to be renewed, it wanted to renegotiate new terms for the truce. Hamas wanted a truce with the Israelis that would bring about the end to the siege.

“Unfortunately, because the Egyptian broker was a dishonest broker, siding by Israel and siding by Ramallah, the truce did not bring the most important dividend which was ending the siege.

“So Hamas said ‘if you want to renew the truce, let’s end the siege and open the crossings.’ The Egyptians would not agree to this. The Israelis would not agree to this.

“The Israelis were not interested in renewing a truce. Cairo was determined to give Hamas a fatal blow and they gave the green light to Israel I suspect.”

Osama Hamdan, the Palestinian Islamist Hamas representative in Lebanon

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Osama Hamdan, Hamas representative in Lebanon

“I believe what happened today is a continuity of the Israeli collective crime against the Palestinians.

What happened in the last three years, the Palestinians were suffering under the siege.

“The Israelis expected that the people will react against the resistance and against Hamas which didn’t happen in the past three years. That means they have to start very tough actions against Hamas.

“They attack 32 positions in Gaza, we expect the casualties will … reach 200 killings.

“There is a clear reaction of the Palestinians in Gaza. They are calling for revenge. They are asking for the Palestinian resistance to react against the occupation.

“I believe Israel is not learning the lesson. They don’t know that this kind of aggressive attack against the Palestinians creates a new cycle of violence inside Palestine. It will not defeat the Palestinian resistance.

“We are talking about six decades of occupation and, until now, the Palestinian people are resisting. What has happened today in Gaza will not stop the resistance, will not defeat the Palestinian people. They will find themselves under a reaction from the resistance.

“The peace process has completely failed, so we have to talk about a new process in the region which is supposed to start from the restoring of Palestinian rights and the commitment towards those rights.

“No one will accept now any talk about a peace process, because everyone knows that the Palestinian people are fed up with 17 years of negotiation without any result.

“The second thing which I believe is happening every morning is that Palestinians believe that there is no solution unless there is a resistance.”

Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought

Ref: Al Jazeera

Jeff Halper’s An Israeli In Palestine

According to Israeli-based author and journalist Jonathan Cook, Halper’s book is “one of the most insightful analyses of the Occupation I’ve read. His voice cries out to be heard” on the region’s longest and most intractable conflict. Part II continues the story.

Part III: The Structure of Oppression – Expanding Dispossession, The Occupation and the Matrix of Control

What 1948 left undone, 1967 completed – securing control over the entire “Holy Land” with the seizure of Gaza, the West Bank and all of Jerusalem. Nishul’s fifth stage began and today includes expanding West Bank settlements and continued displacement inside Israel.

After the Six-Day War, all Palestinians came under military rule, and “a comprehensive Matrix of Control was implemented to perpetuate Israeli control forever.” A problem arose, however, as international law prohibits an occupier from remaining permanently. Israel’s Attorney General, Meir Shamgar, got around it in typical Israeli fashion. No “occupation” exists so Israel didn’t violate Geneva or other international law. In other words, “occupation” only occurs when one sovereign state conquers another, so presto – Palestine wasn’t sovereign and Israel did nothing illegal.

This has no legitimacy in international law, yet Israel gets away with it, and it’s the reason it calls the West Bank (and formerly Gaza) “disputed,” not “occupied.” Furthermore, Shamgar’s ruling affected Supreme Court decisions ever since and lets Israel expand its settlement project on annexed Palestinian land.

Immediately after the 1967 war, the Labor government began “integrating Judea, Samaria and Gaza to Israel.” After Menachem Begin’s 1977 election, he appointed Ariel Sharon to head a Ministerial Committee on Settlements and gave him the job to do it. He was charged with two tasks:

— create irreversible “facts on the ground;”

— prevent any chance of a sovereign Palestinian state; and begin implementing a formal “Matrix of Control” – an almost “invisible system…behind a facade of ‘proper administration,’ thus protecting Israel’s” democratic image to this day.

It has four modes of control:

(1) Administrative, Bureaucracy, Planning and Law as Tools of Occupation and Control

They include rules, restrictions, procedures and sanctions under Military orders regulating everything in Occupied Palestine. For example, 72% of the West Bank was classified as “state lands” making seizure a simple administrative task. A further 400 square miles were designated as closed “military zones,” and more restrictions covered zoned “nature reserves.”

Military commanders also have authority to prohibit Palestinian construction for security reasons or to ensure “public order.” Hundreds of other military orders forbid Palestinian building around army bases, installations, settlements, or within 200 meters on each side of main roads. This effectively closes off tens of thousands of acres from their rightful owners. At the same time, settlement expansion continues, and measures in place use every means possible to advance them.

Administrative restrictions among them like requiring Palestinians to get permits to plant crops on their own land, sell it, or have them for their own use. Opening banks and businesses are also curtailed through a process of licensing and inspections to harass the owners and harm the Palestinian economy.

Control encompasses everything. Resistance is called “terrorism,” and legal gymnastics justify assassinations in the name of national security. Mass imprisonments as well. Uncharged victims held administratively. Extensive use of torture. All of it under the radar with a wink and a nod from the West.

(2) Economic Warfare

From 1967 to the Oslo process, “asymmetric containment” defined economic policy in the Territories. The idea was to keep cheap products and labor from competing advantageously with Israel and to prevent Palestinians from gaining economic strength. So constraints were placed on them:

— preventing their opening a bank;

— implementing tariffs and subsidies to advantage Israeli businesses;

— various import controls disadvantaging Palestinians;

— de-developing the Palestinian economy through lack of infrastructure development, housing and key services;

— expropriating agricultural land;

— preventing Palestinian produce from reaching Israeli markets; and

— implementing internal closure policies to impede Palestinian business inside the Territories.

Israel eased off somewhat during the Oslo years, but the Paris Economic Protocol annex to Oslo II (in 1995) assured total Israeli control over the Palestinian economy. Today economic closure is total under strict Israeli measures:

— control over industrial and commercial enterprise licensing;

— issuance of import and export permits; and

— a nightmarish bureaucracy controlling all facets of Palestinian commerce.

It devastated the economy. Most manufacturing is shut down, and 70% of Palestinians companies either closed or severely cut production and staff. Unemployment is staggering – 67% in Gaza and 48% in the West Bank at the time of Halper’s writing. Today it’s higher. Without jobs, Palestinians have no income source. Poverty levels are at 75% or higher. Most people live on $2 a day or less. External food and other aid is essential. Still 30% or more of Palestinian children under age five suffer from malnutrition. With Gaza now under siege, it’s far higher there and dangerously so. It remains to be seen what effect the cease-fire will have.

Israel also controls fuel, water, electricity, phone and other services, and when available they’re at higher prices than Israelis pay. The result is “profound structural imbalances in the Palestinian economy and (an) artificial dependence upon Israel.” A “deliberate de-development” scheme as well is in place with international investment cut off and Gaza’s airport and sea port destroyed during the second Intifada.

Conditions are so extreme that one UN official complained that he doesn’t “know of another conflict area in the world” with these type problems. Nor is there one the entire world is so dismissive of or practically so.

(3) Creating “Facts on the Ground”

Israel began the process with the Six Day War still raging. Ever since, disconnected cantons were created to cement settlements and make control irreversible. Following the Gulf War, the Madrid peace conference promised hope and was the catalyst for Oslo. They established a vaguely-defined negotiating process, specified no outcome, and let Israel delay, refuse to make concessions, and continue colonizing the Territories.

In return, Palestinians got nothing for renouncing armed struggle, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and leaving major unresolved issues for indefinite later final status talks. They include an independent Palestinian state, the Right of Return, the future of Israeli settlements, borders, water rights, and status of Jerusalem as sovereign Palestinian territory and future home of its capital.

Oslo I led to Oslo II in September 1995. It called for further Israeli troop redeployments beyond Gaza and major West Bank population centers and later from all rural areas except around Israeli settlements and designated military zones. The process divided the West Bank into three parts – each with distinct borders, administrative and security controls – Areas A, B and C plus a fourth area for Greater Jerusalem:

— Area A under Palestinian control for internal security, public order and civil affairs;

— Area B under Palestinian civil control for 450 West Bank towns and villages with Israel having overriding authority to safeguard its settlers’ security; and

— Area C and its water resources under Israeli control; settlements as well on the West Bank’s most valuable land.

The Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum followed and was agreed to by Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak in September 1999. It implemented Oslo II and other post-Oslo I agreements. Months later came “permanent status” talks in July 2000. Promises became betrayal, and Barak’s “generous offer” was fake leaving Arafat no choice to reject it. But not without being blamed for spurning an “unprecedented” chance for peace. Barak insisted Arafat sign a “final agreement,” declare an “end of conflict,” and give up any legal basis for additional land in the Territories. There was no Israeli offer in writing, and no documents or maps were presented.

Barak’s offer consisted of a May 2000 West Bank map dividing the area into four isolated cantons under Palestinian administration surrounded by expanding Israeli settlements and other Israeli-controlled land. They got no link to each other or to Jordan. They consisted of:

— Jericho;

— the southern canton to Abu Dis;

— a northern one, including Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarm; and

— a central one, including Ramallah. Gaza was left in limbo as a fifth canton and “resolved” when Israel “disengaged” in August and September 2005 but kept total control; the right to reenter any time for any reason; and, as it turned out, to impose a medieval siege.

Barak’s deal was no deal, all take and no give, with no chance for reconciliation or resolution of the most intractable issues. Halper calls it “a subtle yet crucial tweaking of the Matrix.” Rather than defend all Israeli settlements, Barak defined seven “blocs” to remain under Israeli control under any future agreement.

Overall, Israel maintains total control of the Territories and occupies most of the West Bank with expanding settlements, by-pass roads, Separation Wall, military areas and no-go zones. Palestinians are tightly confined in disconnected cantons. Checkpoints and other obstacles restrict free movement, and no possibility exists for a viable sovereign state as of now.

Halper gave a “brief tour” of Israel’s settlement blocs. Below they’re listed briefly:

— the Jordan Valley as Israel’s eastern “security border;” it separates Palestinians from Jordan;

— the “Western Samaria” bloc centered around the city of Ariel; it virtually divides the West Bank;

— the Modi’in bloc connects the Western Samaria Bloc to Jerusalem; it contains some of the West Bank’s richest agricultural land;

— the three settlement blocs of (1)Givat Ze’ev, (2) Ma’aleh Adumim and (3) Gush Etzion, Efrat-Beitar, Illit, comprise “Greater Jerusalem;” they contain 97 square miles and house 80,000 settlers; along with Israeli-controlled Jerusalem and its 240,000 settlers, it dominates the West Bank, destroys its territorial contiguity, and prevents any hope for a viable Palestinian state; and

— the Hebron bloc in the southern West Bank.

They’re all linked by 29 highways and by-pass for-Jews only roads. Finally, there’s the Separation Wall. Construction began in June 2002. The World Court ruled it illegal. Israel continues building it. It’s nearly complete, and when finished will be 721 kilometers in length or five times longer than the Berlin Wall and more imposing with its sensors, trenches, security roads, mine fields, checkpoints, terminals, watchtowers, surveillance cameras, electronic sensory devices and military patrols using killer dogs. It entraps 50,000 Palestinians, steals their land, and has nothing to do with purported security. It’s a plain and simple land grab combined with enclosing Palestinians inside disconnected cantons.

(4) Military Controls and Military Strikes

Israel’s Matrix conceals its “Iron Fist” that when unleashed is very visible and destructive. During both Intifadas, major operations were launched killing hundreds of Palestinians and wounding thousands more, mostly innocent civilians. Operations Defensive Shield (March-April 2002), Rainbow (May 2004), Summer and Autumn Rains (second half 2006) are just three among many. Israel’s “Iron Wall” shows no mercy.

Concluding Dispossession: Oslo and Unilateral Separation

Oslo represented nishul’s sixth stage, “a kind of occupation-by-consent,” according to Halper. It’s explained above with a few more comments to add. Israel’s “security” is key to any peace process. So is getting Palestinian acquiescence to all Israeli demands and being willing to act as its enforcer. The process was flawed by design, collapsed under its own weight, led to the second Intifada, and awakened peace activists to be more proactive for their cause. It also inspired Halper to establish ICAHD, and he’s been active in it since.

Oslo’s failure got Israelis to “hunker down” and make “security” their foremost issue. It also explains their willingness to elect Ariel Sharon Prime Minister. Halper says “Everything he did had a clear focus and purpose: beating the Palestinians into submission, extending Israel’s sovereignty to the Jordan River and preventing the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.” He would complete the final nishul stage, and by luck he took power along with George Bush, his close friend and willing co-conspirator. They had a common agenda and 9/11 advanced it – in four decisive stages:

(1) Defeating the Palestinians Once and For All

It began with Sharon’s controversial visit to the Haram/Temple Mount on September 28, 2000 before he was elected Prime Minister. It ignited the second Intifada the result of years of frustration over a “dead-end” peace process. It was also inspired by Hezbollah’s forcing Israel’s May 2000 South Lebanon withdrawal.

Anger and discontent built and finally erupted on September 29. Israel responded harshly. A cycle of resistance and retaliation followed, and the struggle persisted since despite its formal 2005 end. The first five days were especially bloody. Before a single Israeli soldier was targeted, the IDF unleashed over a million projectiles – bullets, shells, air-to-surface missiles, chemical weapons and more against a civilian population in clear violation of international law that classifies this as war crimes. Palestinian deaths numbered over 170. Another 7000 were wounded. It was just the beginning, and Sharon once in office unleashed it full force with Khan Yunis and its refugee camp one of his first targets.

With 60,000 residents, it’s one of the most crowded places on earth. The IDF attacked it and obliterated an entire neighborhood. In April 2002, it invaded Jenin’s refugee camp, home of 13,000 Palestinians in the northern West Bank. It cut it off from outside help. Jenin city as well. Hundreds of buildings were destroyed. People were buried under rubble. Power and water were cut off. Food and essentials kept out, including medical aid, and dozens of mostly civilian men, women and children were killed and many more injured and displaced.

Similar campaigns went on throughout the West Bank that took a terrible toll on the people and left all its cities “smoldering.” Palestinian infrastructure was notably targeted – houses, roads and physical infrastructure. Institutional also, including government ministry data banks for Health, Education, and Higher Education. Affected were NGOs, research institutes, human rights organizations and everything a modern state needs to function.

It was the beginning of the end for Yasser Arafat. No longer a “reliable” ally, he was targeted for removal. His Ramallah headquarters was destroyed, save for a room or two where Sharon imprisoned him. Every Palestinian city, town and village was under siege as well and subjected to police state repression, curfews and midnight raids against helpless civilians. Thousands of acres of farmland and olive groves were leveled. “Security” is always the reason. Harassment explains it better – the beating of all resistance out of contained people with no outside support for help. David v. Goliath hardly defines it.

(2) Completing the Matrix of Control

The Separation Wall is the end process and is now nearly complete. Israel has all the choice land and settlements it needs, and in September 2004 unveiled a plan for Palestinian-only roads to assure they stay disconnected from Israeli ones.

(3) Getting American Approval for the Annexation of the Settlement Blocs

For this, the Road Map was announced in March 2003. George Bush was reluctant but agreed. If serious, it held promise, but that was too much to expect. From the start, it was a dead letter, and Israel’s intransigence killed it although technically it’s still alive. It promises a two-state solution, but not the one Israel envisions – disconnected, cantonized and no state at all for Palestinians who reject it out of hand. It can only work if imposed unilaterally and only for so long. For now, Bush is on board with Israel. Negotiations are at a dead end, and the year end Annapolis conference was a combination tragedy and travesty. It was the first time in memory the legitimate government of one side was excluded from discussions, and that alone doomed them.

(4) Implementation of the Cantonization Plan

In December 2003, Sharon launched some called “the maneuver of the century.” It refers to his 2005 Gaza “disengagement” as a ploy to secure greater West Bank control and give up nothing in return. In March 2006, he suffered a stroke, became incapacitated, and Ehud Olmert took over to “nail down” Sharon’s key objective – “a permanent solution, an end of the Occupation based on the notion of cantonization.” It would have to be unilateral as Palestinians were offered nothing.

Olmert conceived his “Convergence Plan” to control all land Israel wants and maintain separation from Palestinians. It’s the same idea as Begin’s Palestinian “autonomy,” Sharon’s cantonization, unilateral separation, the Matrix of Control, and the Oslo process while it lasted. A Palestinian state would be offered between Israel’s two eastern borders, a mere truncated territory with no potential and little sovereignty. It will be imposed unilaterally, but that contradicts the Road Map that requires negotiation. So Olmert switched his “convergence” to “realignment” – finessing a border one. Palestinians get their state but a “transitional” one with “provisional borders,” according the Road Map’s Phase II. The problem is no Phase III will follow to assure an “independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state.”

If Israel manages this, it wins and Palestinians lose. It can claim the Occupation’s end, a two-state solution in place, and the conflict for the victor ended. So far, Palestinians want none of it. Olmert is beset with corruption problems, and final resolution remains a long way off.

Part IV: Overcoming Oppression – Redeeming Israel

Here’s where things now stand. “Israel/Palestine (is) at a crossroads.” Israel’s political leadership believes it’s won. The settlement project is in place. It “ensures permanent control over the entire Land of Israel.” Palestine is cantonized. The “facts on the ground” are established. America is on board. So are Europeans. The Arab world is indifferent. A mere political act will make Occupation permanent. Israel offers no concessions, Palestinians have no say, and as of now have no chance for a fair and equitable solution – or so Israel thinks. Is it so?

Halper’s view is this, and many share it: Ultimately, Israel will fail in its attempt “to transform its Matrix of Control (and permanent Occupation) into a stable, peaceful state of affairs.” Oppressed people everywhere “have one source of leverage: the power to say ‘no.’ ” And Palestinians have said it for six decades. For six more if they have to. For as long as it takes to get the justice they deserve. For all their wishes? Maybe not, but enough to matter and be able to end the most intractable conflict anywhere. Be assured – it will happen, one way or other, at some future time.

Hamas is a powerful symbol – of the future – the power to say “no,” or as Halper puts it: “To hell with”……Israel, its Matrix of Control, America, the international community, the dismissive Arab world, and corrupted Fatah. We won’t submit; won’t play your rigged game; won’t let you crush us; won’t let you deny us our rights; in the end you’ll come to us, and we’ll prevail. If six decades of struggle doesn’t prove it, what then will. We’ll give you six more, and more still. Had enough? Now we’ll set the terms. Think it can’t happen? Read on.

One day Israel and the world community will reach an inevitable conclusion. The price of Occupation is too great – regional instability, global also, continued war, maybe nuclear, and a potential cost far too great to risk. Push will come to shove when it’s too great to chance.

Palestinians like Jews and people everywhere have national rights of self-determination provided they don’t impinge on others with equal rights. Ethnocracies like Israel don’t work. Nor do they in the Muslim or Christian worlds. And understand the distinction. France for the French and Mexico for Mexicans aren’t the same as Israel for the Jews. France like most countries have Christians, Jews, Muslims, whatever – all entitled to equal rights under law. Israel only affords them only to Jews – an untenable system doomed to fail. When it’s realized, push will have come to shove, and then some.

So where are we, and what’s ahead? Halper doesn’t have a solution, but he offers an approach based on “indispensable” elements:

(1) National expression for the two peoples –

Jews and Palestinians both claim self-determination rights in the same country. Logically, it calls for a two-state or bi-national one-state solution.

(2) Viability –

The two-state option requires real sovereignty for Palestinians to be viable – self rule, over borders, basic resources, and so forth.

(3) Refugees –

The Right of Return is essential or something close enough to matter. Most important – Palestinians have the right to choose. International law backs them. It doesn’t give Israel a pass.

(4) A regional dimension –

Adopting a regional approach opens new options. Middle East countries have a stake in what affects them.

(5) Regional Security –

Israel’s only chance for peace and stability is to achieve a just peace with the Palestinians and integrate fairly in the greater region. Playing hegemon won’t do it. In the end, militarism always fails.

Enormous obstacles must be overcome to achieve any meaningful settlement: locked in attitudes, decades of failure, unresponsive governments, much the same for the UN, so where does that leave things – world public opinion, people of conscience, on a global scale, from the grassroots, creating a groundswell for change. Can it happen? Not easily, but Halper offers a “reframing.”

(1) Conceptualizing the conflict: how to secure mutual national rights –

Reconciling mutually opposing rights is key to a meaningful just solution.

(2) Defining the problem: security v. occupation and a proactive expansion policy –

Palestinians have been conciliatory; willing to compromise; accept a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders (22% of historic Palestine); Israel flatly refuses; diktats, not compromise is its strategy; “security” the mantra; the outcome – win-lose.

Only a rights-based win-win solution can work; one under international law; apartheid is untenable; human rights reframing advances the de-colonization argument; why elsewhere but not in Israel.

Sum it up and here are Halper’s choices:

(1) a traditional two-state solution –

A viable Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories is unrealistic given Israeli settlements with 500,000 Jews in them.

(2) An “Israel plus-Palestinian minus” two-state solution: the Israeli option –

It’s a non-starter for Palestinians – a semi-sovereign, hardly viable, disconnected, South African-style apartheid system.

(3) A single-state solution: multi-national and democratic –

The best choice, but is it workable? Transforming a Jewish state into a democratic one faces enormous obstacles. Maybe one day but not soon.

(4) A regional confederation –

It’s more complex, “less elegant,” but for Halper the only workable choice, and he compares it to the EU – balancing national autonomy with freedom to live and/or work anywhere in the union. It neutralizes Occupation, gets Palestinians out of their trap by allowing them wider economic, social, and geographic opportunities within the region. It’s fair and win-win, and he suggests a “two-stage” process:

(a) A Palestinian State alongside Israel –

Essentially what now exists for starters with “stage two” to follow; a “way out of the trap” – an international community regional confederation guarantee within, for example, a decade. That assures viability.

(b) A regional confederation leading to a wider Middle East confederation –

The international community must take charge; set the terms; get everyone on board; and begin say with Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Later bring in Egypt, others and eventually all regional states – a full-blown Middle East Union, like the EU.

Settlements can stay in place; Israel needn’t offer Palestinians citizenship; but nishul must stop, allow Palestinians out of their trap; and bring an end to conflict because its reason no longer exists. Details are important and must carefully be worked out, but on a fair and equitable basis to both sides and all regional states. It’s no simple task, maybe one too great, but look at the possibilities:

— ending the longest and most intractable conflict anywhere;

— stopping it from getting worse; endangering the region; beyond it as well;

— transforming Israel from an ethnocracy to a legitimate democratic state diplomatically recognized by its neighbors; and

— allowing Jews and Muslims to live in peace; then both with everyone everywhere; imagine the possibilities; the alternative is hopelessness: Jews will also suffer; ethnocracy is self-destructive; the way out is justice; a little compromise for a lot of gain; win-win; Halper sees Israel going beyond peace to redemption, committed to human rights, and beginning the journey to get there.

What About Terrorism?

First off, distinguish between individual/group v. the far greater state kind. Then consider aggressors and victims, one act begetting another, an eventual vicious circle, and nations claiming the high ground when they’re at fault – “worthy” victims of “unworthy” ones even when they act in self-defense.

The real issues is life. It’s sacred, and taking it from non-combatants is terrorism. It’s also “illegal, immoral and prohibited.” Self-defense against combatants is another matter fully justified under international law as is the right to resist with arms. Israel says otherwise, blames its victims, and so far has avoided accountability. That no longer can stand, and Halper suggests a “better language” to hold all terrorist acts accountable.

It exists so let’s use it – the language of human rights. It’s codified in law, and it’s high time it’s applied universally. It’s precise, inclusive and condemns all forms of terror – by individuals, groups and most importantly states. And judicial bodies exist to enforce it – the International Criminal Court (ICC) for example to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. The principle of “universal jurisdiction” also exists that requires other states to bring rights violators (including heads of state) to trial if their own nation won’t do it.

Halper sees human rights and applying international law as key to genuine peace and conflict resolution. States, of course, are the obstacle. They won’t police themselves, and in-place institutions have proved weak. Changing things requires people action – international civil society demanding justice; doing it proactively; marshaling enough voices to make them heard; refusing to take no for an answer. Think impossible? Think again.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Here’s the problem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves far more than two peoples. Far more than the region. It’s global and resonates everywhere and affects everyone. For the Middle East alone, regional peace is impossible without a just settlement of the conflict. Absent that and anything is possible – all bad.

Globally, the entire world is affected. For Halper, it’s brought him “full circle,” a Jew, an Israeli in Palestine seeing his “own people coopted by Israel’s security framing and disempowered.” Disadvantaged as well considering the alternative. He’s part of an effort to change things and suggests four strategic elements:

(1) A global, regional, local and personal vision

The last two decades have seen the emergence of a vibrant international civil society – thousands of peace and human rights organizations of all types together with activists, intellectuals and concerned people everywhere standing up against injustice and demanding resolution. So far, the other side outmuscles them, but who knows for how long. New tools are around like the Internet that connects people everywhere. Alternative media as well, including online choices attracting growing audiences fed up with the mainstream’s mind-numbing array.

That combination against injustice has power. Omnipotent – no. Effective – why not, and in enough numbers it works. Social movements comprised of ordinary people have enormous political clout. They can win when they’re of a mind to, but it’s no simple task. It takes muscle-flexing, exercising “disruptive power,” according to Frances Fox Piven, and look what it brought America – ending slavery, labor and civil rights and a liberating revolution from Britain. Why not one freeing Palestinians from Occupation. But it needs an effective program for action. Here’s Halper’s:

— reframe the conflict; make it rights-based; include other choices also; mobilize civil society; get support within governments; UN officials; anyone from anywhere to stand up for justice.

ICAHD has “two meta-campaigns:

— an “anti-apartheid” one involving resistance and ending the Occupation employing various tools and strategies; once an apartheid regime is in place, have planned responses to counteract it;

— a “60 Years Later: Marking 1948” one highlighting displacement and dispossession;

— both campaigns focus on other issues as well – home demolitions, the Separation Wall, the entire Matrix of Control, boycotts, disinvestment, sanctions, holding Israel accountable, and framing everything within a “Big Picture” meta-campaign strategy.

Redeeming Israel fits in as well. Making it an “exclusive patrimony” created a “violent nightmare….a self-defeating enterprise.” The more Jews “try to Judaize Palestine, the more (they) destroy it” and themselves. The situation is untenable and begs for an alternative. Political Zionism is “exhausted.” A prosperous and formidable Jewish state has failed – to achieve “accommodation, justice, peace and reconciliation” with Palestinians, the region, and international civil society.

A “New Cultural Zionism” is needed, disassociating itself from self-defeating politics and its corrupting violence. What’s good for Jews is good for Arabs is good for everyone. Halper “can’t argue with that.” Can anyone?
His book is powerful, enlightening, and important to read and act on.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM – 1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests. All programs are archived for easy listening.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM – 1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests. All programs are archived for easy listening.

Ref: Counter currents

Israeli Apartheid MUST READ!!!

South Africa’s ex-president Nelson Mandela, as well as its Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu have likened the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, as well as many internal practices of the Israeli state as being equivalent to or worse than South Africa’s bygone version of apartheid.

Imagine, if you will, a modern apartheid state with first, second and eleventh class citizens, all required to carry identification specifying their ethnic origin. First class citizens are obliged to serve in the armed forces, kept on ready reserve status until in their forties, and accorded an impressive array of housing, medical, social security, educational and related benefits denied all others.

Second class citizens are exempted from military service and from a number of the benefits accorded citizens of the first class. They are issued identity documents and license plates that allow them to be profiled by police at a distance. Second class citizens may not own land in much of the country and marriages between them and first class citizens are not recognized by the state. Second class citizens are sometimes arrested without trial and police torture, while frowned upon and occasionally apologized for, commonly occurs.

Citizens of the eleventh class, really not citizens at all, have no rights citizens of the first class or their government are bound to respect. Their residence is forbidden in nearly nine-tenths of the country, all of which they used to own. The areas left to them are cut up into smaller and smaller portions weekly, by high walls, free fire zones and hundreds of checkpoints manned by the army of the first class citizens, so that none can travel a dozen miles in any direction to work, school, shopping, a job, a farm, a business or a hospital without several long waits, humiliating searches and often arbitrary denials of the right to pass or to return. Posh residential settlements for the first class citizens with protecting gun towers and military bases are built with government funds and foreign aid on what used to be the villages and farms and pastures of the eleventh class citizens. The settlers are allotted generous additional housing and other subsidies, allowed to carry weapons and use deadly force with impunity against the former inhabitants, and are connected with the rest of first class territory by a network of of first-class citizen only roads.

Citizens of the eleventh class are routinely arrested, tortured, and held indefinitely without trial. Political activism among them is equated to “terrorism” and the state discourages such activity by means including but not limited to the kidnapping of suspects and relatives of suspects, demolition of their family homes, and extralegal assassination, sometimes at the hands of a death squad, or at others times by lobbing missiles or five hundred pound bombs into sleeping apartment blocks or noonday traffic. Passports are not issued to these citizens, and those who take advantage of scarce opportunities to study or work abroad are denied re-entry.

“It is nearly taboo in US mainstratin print and broadcast media to apply the word racist or apartheid to the state of Israel or its policies”

The apartheid state in question is, of course, Israel. Its first class citizens are Israeli Jews, the majority of them of European or sometimes American origin. The second class citizens are Israeli Arabs, who enjoy significant but limited rights under the law including token representation in the Knesset. The eleventh class citizens are not citizens at all. They are Palestinians. One expects to be able to say that Palestinians live in Palestine and are governed by Palestinians, but the truth is something different. The areas in which Palestinians may inhabit have shrunk nearly every year since the Nakba, their name for the wave of mass deportations, murders, the dispossession, destruction and exile of whole Arab towns, cities and regions that attended the 1948 founding of the state of Israel. As the whole world, except for the US public knows, Palestinians have lived under military occupation, without land, without rights, without hope, for nearly sixty years now.

The difference between life inside and outside the US corporate media bubble is extraordinarily clear on this question. US authorities subsidize the state of Israel to the tune of at least six billion per year, and corporate media take great pains to protect US citizens from news of actual human and legal conditions their tax dollars pay for. The ugly and racist realities of Israeli society and life under Israeli occupation are rarely discussed anywhere most consumers of media might find them. It is nearly taboo in mainstream US print and broadcast media to apply the words racist or apartheid to the state of Israel or its policies, or to call its control at the point of a gun of millions of non-citizens what it is, namely the longest standing military occupation in the world today. In the US media, and on the lips of every administration since Harry Truman’s Israel is “a democracy”, whatever that word has come to mean.

Though news stories in the US talk about autonomous “Palestinian areas” allegedly controlled by Palestinian authorities, often referring to Gaza and the West Bank by name, actual maps displaying the geographic boundaries of the so-called Palestinian controlled areas are rarely seen by American viewers, let alone maps comparing the size of Palestinian areas year to year, or showing the steady encroachment upon Arab land and water resources year to year by Israeli settlements, military outposts, Israeli-only roads, free fire zones and Israel’s wall. The massive and militarized apartheid wall, as the rest of the world calls it, is termed a “separation barrier” or a “separation fence” in the US media, an understandable precaution against hordes of terroristic former owners of the land who lurk just outside.

Still, when you Google the terms Israel + apartheid, you get 5.5 million hits. A lot of somebodies somewhere are making the connection without the help of CNN, ABC or Fox News.

The parallels with apartheid South Africa are many and striking. Like its earlier apartheid cousin, Israel menaces all its neighbors with an impressive array of nukes and the largest military establishment in the region. As Noam Chomsky observed back in 2004:

”Not discussed, in the US at least, is the threat from West Asia. Israel’s nuclear capacities, supplemented with other WMD, are regarded as “dangerous in the extreme” by the former head of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Gen. Lee Butler, not only because of the threat they pose but also because they stimulate proliferation in response. The Bush administration is now enhancing that threat. Israeli military analysts allege that its air and armored forces are larger and technologically more advanced than those of any NATO power (apart from the US), not because this small country is powerful in itself, but because it serves virtually as an offshore US military base and high tech center. The US is now sending Israel over 100 of its most advanced jet bombers, F16I’s, advertised very clearly as capable of flying to Iran and back, and as an updated version of the F16s that Israel used to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981….”
The old South Africa bombed, strafed and invaded all its neighbors with some regularity, crippling their commerce and extracting horrific death tolls from refugee camps and other civilian targets. The last time Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon, it left 30,000 corpses.

White South Africans rightly fretted at the fact that they were a minority ruling over an unhappy majority, and concocted schemes to exile the country’s black population to isolated rural reservations it called bantustans. Israeli pundits calmly discuss the demographic bomb, their name for the fact that second and eleventh class citizens, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians will soon outnumber them within the borders of their supposed “Jewish state” while Israeli politicians sit in Knesset and hold ministries in successive governments openly calling for mass deportations and ethnic cleansing.

White South Africans constructed for themselves a bogus scriptural narrative in which the God of Abraham promised them somebody else’s land, and brought it into modern history with the embellishment that they were holding the line for the free world against godless communism and the black menace. How similar is Israel’s line that European Jews are promised the land of Muslim and Christian Arabs, and that they now hold the line for the free world against radical Islam and those ungrateful brown people?

We at BC have to believe that if the American people knew the truth about what their tax dollars pay for in Israel and what is left of Palestine, there would be a deep and widespread revulsion, similar to that occasioned by US support for apartheid in South Africa. But there are important differences between that time and this one. Though unspeakably odious, racist South African was only marginally important to US interests. By contrast, the maintenance of Israel’s apartheid regime, essentially a white hi-tech and military outpost in the middle of all those brown people sitting atop a large share of the world’s proven oil reserves is absolutely central to US foreign policy for the foreseeable future. The US is Israel’s banker, its arms depot, and its principal diplomatic sponsor. The US is far more complicit in the crimes of the Israeli state than it ever was in South Africa.

Racism and apartheid being what they are, and our historical experience in America being what it is, African Americans have a crucial role to play. African Americans have seldom supported US imperial adventures overseas as readily as whites. Our American experience inclines us to a skeptical appraisal of our government’s means and motives at home and abroad. Even though we live as much within the media bubble as white America, where images of the broken and mangled families, the incinerated homes and bombed hospitals are hard to come by, our skepticism leads us to sympathize with those who live at the sharp end of US foreign policy far more often than do our white neighbors.

Our first duty is to tell the truth to each other. We must combat among ourselves the bogus historical narratives which permit indifference to US policy in the Middle East in general, and support of Israeli apartheid in particular. The churchgoers among us urgently, publicly and repeatedly must confront and debunk the nonsense which holds that “wars and rumors of wars” are something predestined to happen in the biblical holy land for what they are – bad scripture and fake history. We need to interrupt, correct and school everyone who talks to us about a “cycle of violence” in the Holy Land, as though some raggedy fool with a suicide belt, or a few hundred fighters with small arms are or ever have been equivalent to the devastation wrought by the established gulags, checkpoints, airborne firepower, economic strangulation, house demolitions and nuclear armed might of the Israeli state. The two sides do not have access to anything like equal means of inflicting violence, and so cannot be equally culpable or equally responsible for stopping that violence.

We need to catch up with the rest of the civilized world, and talk about what we can do to emphatically withdraw our support from the apartheid state of Israel and its immoral and illegal occupation regime. The Presbyterian church, for example, has in the past considered selective divestiture from Israel and from US companies who profit from the occupation, as have the Anglicans. Both might do so again. What can our churches, our unions, our local elected officials, our young people do? What will we do?

Apartheid in South Africa eventually bit the dust mostly because the inhabitants of that country, black, brown and white resisted it, putting their bodies and lives on the line. Their resistance was aided and abetted materially, financially, politically and spiritually by people of good will the world over. Someday the sun will rise on a post-apartheid Jerusalem, one that belongs to all the people who live there of whatever origin. This is bound to happen because Palestinians as well as substantial numbers of Israeli Jews do and will continue to resist the regime. They will do what they can. What will we do?

Ref: Black Agenda report

Bruce Dixon can be contacted at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com


Brilliaaaaant!
A MUST READ for everyone.

:a

Plan to put synagogue in heart of East Jerusalem likely to be approved

The Jerusalem municipality has begun the process of approving a plan for a new housing complex, including a synagogue, in the heart of the Arab neighborhood of Silwan south of the Old City.

The plan, submitted by the right-wing Elad association, includes 10 apartments, kindergarten classrooms, a library and underground parking for 100 cars. Documents show the land the complex is to be built on belongs to the Israel Lands Administration (ILA); however, the ILA said it was unaware of the plan.

The municipal spokesman said Elad had leased the land, and therefore the plan does not require ILA approval. A municipal document dated January 21, 2008 notes that all necessary recommendations had been received in the planning file.

The area slated for the new project is located 200 meters from the Old City walls, in an area considered one of the most sensitive in the present negotiations with the Palestinians over the final-status agreement.

In a letter on Tuesday to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, attorney Daniel Seideman, representing the Ir Amim association and a city council member, Pepe Alalo (Meretz), asked whether Mazuz thought it proper that a synagogue be established in the heart of an Arab neighborhood.

The Ir Amim association addresses issues impacting Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem.

Seideman reminded Mazuz of repeated pledges by the State Prosecutor’s Office to the High Court of Justice to ensure there were no recurrences of the government allowing right-wing associations to take over public lands in Silwan and the Old City. He attached the photocopy of a 1991 deed of sale by the Jewish National Fund of the lands of Silwan to the ILA. The ILA then transfered the land to Elad in a process that was not made public.

“In the heart of Jerusalem, for all intents and purposes, an independent Elad kingdom has been created, in which hegemony, above and below the ground, has been given to a body with a clear ideological bent,” Seideman wrote Mazuz. He also said the “kingdom” was being established through actions designed to push out thousands of Arab residents from the area.

Seideman demanded that Mazuz instruct the ILA to withdraw the plan and the city to shelve it, and to investigate how the decision was made that led to the proposal for the construction project.

A 1992 government investigation headed by then Justice Ministry director general Haim Klugman found that associations managing properties in East Jerusalem, including Elad, had took them over by continuously submitting false affidavits, misusing the law governing absentee property and illegally transfering tens of millions of shekels public money to the associations, among other allegations.

In November, Haaretz reported that the registrar of non-profit associations was considering demanding that Elad be disbanded as a non-profit association, after it refused to report the sources of contributions of more than $7 million that it had received in 2005.

The Justice Ministry said in response that Elad had given the registrar the names of its donors, but asked that the names remain confidential in its financial report, as the law allows. The request was granted, and there is no intention of disbanding the association, the Justice Ministry added.

Ref: Haaretz

Israeli Violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention

Israel is a serial international law abuser. Specifically, it commits grave violations of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention that protects civilians in times of war and has done it for decades:

— Article 2 states that “the present Convention shall apply to all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the High Contracting Parties, even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them. The Convention shall also apply to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory….even if the said occupation meets with no armed resistance;”

— Article 3 prohibits all kinds of assaults on life or physical security;

— Article 27 refers to “protected persons” and states “They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence….,”

— Article 32 prohibits murder, torture and corporal punishment, and

— Article 33 prohibits collective punishment and “all measures of intimidation or….terrorism.”

Geneva and other international human rights laws guarantee what Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: that everyone “has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” It also affirms Article 6 (1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 stating that every “human being has the inherent right to life.” Violations of Geneva and other internationa laws are crimes of war and against humanity. Israel is a serial offender but has yet to be held to account.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights documented its extra-judicial executions from September 29, 2000 through December 2007 and updates it weekly on its web site – pchrgaza.org. Below are examples, but first some background.

Some Brief History of Israeli Targeted Killings

Without cause, these executions target specific individuals with explicit government approval, and Israelis have done it for decades. During the Mandatory Palestine period, Stern Gang (later renamed Lehi) and Irgun members were underground terrorists with very committed aims – to drive out the British (seen as occupiers), allow unrestricted Jewish immigration, remove indigenous Arabs, and establish the Jewish state of Israel. They carried out killings and bombings, some of which were notorious like Lehi’s 1944 assassination of Britain’s Lord Moyne, the military governor of Egypt. Another was Irgun’s infamous 1946 King David Hotel bombing killing 91 Brits, Arabs and Jews and injuring many more.

Two of their leaders became future prime ministers – Lehi’s Yitzhak Shamir (1983 – 84 and 1986 – 1992) and Irgun’s Menachem Begin (1977 – 1983), but they were wanted men before 1948. The New York Times called Irgun a “terrorist organization,” and the World Zionist Congress in 1946 strongly condemned “the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare.” It was just beginning.

In the 1950s, targeted killings were common and were used to halt fedayeen resistance attacks from Egypt. In 1967, after Gaza and the West Bank were occupied, Palestinians became the favorite target, inside and outside the Territories, and by various means:

— car and mail bombs,

— air attacks,

— commando raids,

— undercover operations,

— poisoning,

— snipers, and

— various other methods, including proxy forces to do Israeli killing.

General Ariel Sharon commanded an “anti-terror” detachment in the early 1970s that targeted Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza. Through undercover operations, the unit killed 104 Palestinians and arrested 742 others.

After Israeli athletes were killed at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan established “Committee X” that used Mossad operatives to find the kill the perpetrators. Thirteen deaths resulted, including a Moroccan busboy in Norway by mistake.

Throughout the 1970s, Palestinians in the Territories were targeted, especially its leaders, and in 1982 Israelis nearly killed Yasir Arafat with car bombs, air attacks and at least once when a sniper had him targeted but got no orders to shoot. His second in command, Abu Jihad (Khalil el-Wazir), was less fortunate. He was key to the first Intifada’s success, an irreplaceable leader, and had to be eliminated. Ehud Barak reportedly got the assignment and headed a commando operation that killed him.

Executions continued in the 1990s, including three major ones with mixed success. One killed Islamic Jihad leader, Fathi Shikaki, in Malta in 1995. Another eliminated Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas Izzaddin al-Qassam Brigades member who was known as “the Engineer” for his bomb-making skills. One embarrassing attempt failed. It targeted Hamas’ Amman, Jordan political bureau chief, Khaled Meshal. Two Mossad agents poisoned him but were captured by Jordanian authorities before they could flee. To secure their release, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to provide the poison’s antidote and release Hamas’ founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, from an Israeli prison.

With the outbreak of the second Intifada, killings escalated markedly. Below are examples, including several high-ranking Palestinians:

— Abu Ali Mustafa – head of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),

— Mustafa Zibri – the PFLP’s Secretary-General,

— Raed al-Karmi – a Lebanese Tanzim movement leader, and

— many mid-level resistance fighters from various Palestinian groups opposing the occupation.

Examples of Extra-Judicial Executions from September 29, 2000 Through December 2006

All three Israeli government branches support extra-judicial killings and require no evidence to justify them. Officials merely say those targeted are wanted, dangerous, and threaten State security. As a result, security forces kill with impunity and with no regard for the innocent, including women, children, the elderly or infirm.

Consider an egregious example. On July 12, 2006, IDF aircraft attacked the home of Dr. Nabeel Abu Silmiya in the Gaza City Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. The house was completely destroyed and Dr. Nabeel, his wife and seven children were killed – possibly in error, according to IDF. It claimed it targeted Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades leader, Mohammed al-Daif, and a number of his colleagues but struck the wrong house instead.

Multiple killings are common and are carried out against civilian homes, government buildings and structures, and by planting bombs in cars and targeted shootings on the ground. The death toll keeps rising, and PCHR documented specific examples below.

Examples of IDF Executions from January Through March 2007

Five targeted killings occurred in the period during which three others were injured.

On February 1, IDF soldiers killed Jaser Nader Ahmad Abut Zugheib in the Tulkarm refugee camp. In the same incursion, two Palestinians were wounded, one seriously with a bullet in the chest.

On February 21, an IDF undercover unit targeted the al-Bassatin area west of Jenin. It killed Mahmoud Ibrahim Qassem Obaid, an Islamic Jihad al-Quds Brigades leader, by shooting him in the head at close range.

On February 28, another IDF undercover unit executed three Islamic Jihad members as they tried to flee the Jenin refugee camp in a car.

In the examples above, arrests weren’t attempted, and victims were either wounded or unarmed when IDF soldiers executed them Mafia-style by point-blank shootings. PCHR stresses that with no due process and the absence of evidence, there’s no guarantee or even likelihood that targeted individuals committed crimes. They were simply Israeli vigilante justice victims targeting the innocent.

Selected IDF Executions from April Through June 2007

During the period, 25 killings occurred, but only 16 were actually targeted.

On April 21, an IDF undercover unit attacked a car in Jenin killing three Palestinians in it. Two were al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades members and the other belonged to the al-Quds Brigades. On the same day, an IDF aircraft-fired missile killed an innocent civilian in his vehicle who had no affiliation with Palestinian resistance groups.

On May 4, Seilat al-Harthiya village, west of Jenin was attacked. Two al-Quds Brigades members and a mentally disabled Palestinian civilian were executed.

On May 20, an IDF aircraft missile struck a Gaza City al-Shojaeya neighborhood meeting hall killing seven members of the al-Haya family and a Hamas activist as well as wounding three others.

On May 29, IDF undercover units killed two Palestinian activists in Ramallah and Jenin and wounded five others.

On June 1, the IDF assassinated an Islamic Jihad member in Khan Yunis.

On June 12, the IDF executed an al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades member in the north Tulkarm Saida village.

On June 24, the IDF killed three al-Quds Brigades members and wounded three civilians.

On June 30, IDF forces executed three al-Quds Brigades members in Khan Yunis.

Selected IDF Executions from July Through September 2007

On July 26, an IDF aircraft struck a vehicle south of Gaza City killing three activists in it.

On August 4, an aircraft-fired missile struck a civilian car near the Rafah International Crossing Point on the Egyptian border. Three al-Quds Brigades members in it were seriously wounded but managed to survive. Moments later, two other missiles hit another civilian car killing the driver and a civilian bystander and wounding 12 others.

On August 20, IDF forces executed four Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades members and two additional Palestinian Ministry of Interior Executive Force members in central Gaza’s al-Boreij refugee camp.

On August 21, IDF air and ground forces killed three Palestinians in al-Qarara village, northeast of Khan Yunis.

On August 22, the IDF executed an Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades member and wounded another east of Gaza City.

During the last week of August, three children were extra-judicially killed in Beit Hanoun. There was no evidence they had any affiliation with a local resistance group.

On September 26, IDF forces executed five Army of Islam members in the al-Zaytoun neighborhood, east of Gaza City.

Examples of IDF Executions from September through December 2007

On October 11, an IDF undercover unit killed one and wounded another al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades member near al-Hamam Square in Jenin.

On November 25, IDF forces executed an al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades member in the Tulkarm refugee camp, east of the town. Witnesses said he raised his hands to surrender but was shot in the neck. Seriously injured, two IDF soldiers beat him violently and let him bleed to death in a coffee shop. A second man was also seriously injured in the attack.

On November 29, IDF aircraft attacked and killed two Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades members northeast of Khan Yunis.

Attacks continue unabated – by air strikes and on-the-ground Mafia-style executions in violation of sacred international law explained above. And a Haaretz February 29 article suggests they threaten to escalate.

It quoted Defense Minister Ehud Barak blaming Hamas for the increased violence and said it will “bear the cost of our response….(it’s) necessary and will be carried out.” On the same day, Knesset chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Tzachi Hanegbi, said IDF forces must “quickly….topple the Hamas terror regime and take over all the areas from which rockets are fired on Israel,” and they should remain in those areas for years.

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went further and threatened a “shoah,” which is the Hebrew word for holocaust. On Israeli radio he said: “the more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger ‘shoah’ because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” The comment is outrageous, it incites genocide, and it’s a punishable crime in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Gregory Stanton’s Genocide Watch site has a mission: to “predict, prevent, stop, and punish genocide and other forms of mass murder (by) rais(ing awareness and influenc(ing) public policy concerning potential and actual genocide.” Its aim “is to build an international movement to prevent and stop genocide,” and it’s badly needed in Occupied Palestine where Israel has conducted state-sponsored genocide for decades according to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.

International law expert Francis Boyle agrees and proposed in a March 20, 1998 article that “the Provisional Government of (Palestine) and its President institute legal proceedings against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague for violating the (Genocide Convention).” He categorically stated that “Israel has indeed perpetrated the international crime of genocide against the Palestinian people (and the) lawsuit would….demonstrate that undeniable fact to the entire world.” Boyle would likely agree that the case today is even more compelling at a time Israeli forces are ravaging Gaza and assaulting West Bank communities as well.

Genocide is hideous in concept and execution, and Stanton explains how it progresses in eight defined stages:

1. Classification – Cultures or societies distinguish between “us and them” to categorize people by race, religion, nationality or other distinguishing characteristic;

2. Symbolization – Classifications are given names or other symbols, such as Jews, Latinos, blacks or Muslims.

3. Dehuminization – A dominant group denies another’s humanity and equates its members with animals, vermin, insects, diseases or, in the case of Palestinian resistance fighters, gunmen or terrorists;

4. Organization – Genocide is always organized; most often it’s by the state using militias, the military and/or other security forces to target victimized groups;

5. Polarization – Extremists incite hate through propaganda and other communication methods, and laws and other measures often target the victims;

6. Preparation – Victims are identified, separated out and targeted for elimination;

7. Extermination – Once it starts, it escalates to mass killing that’s legally defined as “genocide;” and finally

8. Denial – The final stage assures continued genocide will follow with evidence of it suppressed or destroyed. Some genocidal regimes are brought to justice like the Nazis at Nuremberg. Others like Israeli governments since 1948 have gotten away with it for decades with no indication (so far) the Olmert or a future regime will be held to account.

Minister Vilnai affirms that killing may now escalate against a people who’ve been under a medieval siege for months. Talk of peace and ceasefire is hollow, Israel and Washington incite violence and want none of it, and IDF commanders are preparing a large-scale assault to target Hamas for removal. How much longer will this go on? When will the occupation end? How many more killings will be tolerated? When will world leaders take note? People who care want answers. It’s about time they got them.

Ref: The populist party

Israel’s Ethnic Weapon?

Israel is reportedly developing a biological weapon that would harm Arabs while leaving Jews unaffected, according to a report in London’s Sunday Times.
The report, citing Israeli military and western intelligence sources, says that scientists are trying to identify distinctive genes carried by Arabs to create a genetically modified bacterium or virus.

The “ethno-bomb” is reportedly Israel’s response to the threat that Iraq may be just weeks away from completing its own biological weapons.
The “ethno-bomb” program is based at Israel’s Nes Tziyona research facility. Scientists are trying to use viruses and bacteria to alter DNA inside living cells and attack only those cells bearing Arabic genes.

The task is very complex because both Arabs and Jews are Semitic peoples. But according to the report, the Israelis have succeeded in isolating particular characteristics of certain Arabs, “particularly the Iraqi people.”
Dedi Zucker, a member of the Israeli parliament, denounced the research in the Sunday Times. “Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied.”

Last month, Foreign Report claimed that Israel was following in the ignominious footsteps of apartheid-era research, in their supposed efforts to develop an “ethnic bullet.”

Ref: Wired

Microbiologists With Link to Race-Based Weapon Turning Up Dead

(Another week of) Israeli Human Rights Violations

The four children from the Abu Me’tiq family who were killed by an Israeli missile that hit their house

– 9 Palestinians, including 5 children and a woman, were killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip.
– The victims include a woman and her 4 children who were killed when IOF shelled their house in Beit Hanoun town.
– 29 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 6 children and a woman, were wounded by IOF.
– A Palestinian civilian was wounded by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
– IOF conducted 36 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank, and 4 ones into the Gaza Strip.
– IOF razed 140 donums[1] of agricultural land in the southern Gaza Strip.
– IOF demolished a house and damaged agricultural areas in Beit Hanoun.
– IOF arrested 37 Palestinian civilians and held at least 50 others for some time in the Gaza Strip.
– IOF have continued to impose a total siege on the OPT.
– The fuel crisis in the Gaza Strip has escalated.
– 6 Palestinian civilian were arrested by IOF at military checkpoints in the West Bank.
– IOF have continued settlement activities in the West Bank and Israeli settlers have continued to attacks Palestinian civilians and property.
– The Israeli High Court legitimize the demolition of at least 60% of the houses in al-‘Aqaba village in the Jordan Valley.
– Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian civilians and their property in Hebron.

Ref: Palestine Human Rights Report

Signs Supplement – Ethnic Specific Weapons

Today’s conditions brought to you by the Bush Junta – marionettes of their hyperdimensional puppet masters – Produced and Directed by the CIA, based on an original script by Henry Kissinger, with a cast of billions…. The “Greatest Shew on Earth,” no doubt, and if you don’t have a good sense of humor, don’t read this page! It is designed to reveal the “unseen.”
If you can’t stand the heat of Objective Reality, get out of the kitchen!

We posted a story on the Signs page that David Kelly was involved with ultra secret work at Israel’s Institute for Biological Research.

A report on November 15, 1998 by the Sunday Times suggests that this Institute “is working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews”.

Israel planning ‘ethnic’ bomb as Saddam caves in

The London Times
November 15 1998

ISRAEL is working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, according to Israeli military and western intelligence sources. The weapon, targeting victims by ethnic origin, is seen as Israel’s response to Iraq’s threat of chemical and biological attacks.

A scientist there said the task was hugely complicated because both Arabs and Jews are of Semitic origin. But he added: “They have, however, succeeded in pinpointing a particular characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab communities, particularly the Iraqi people.”

It is widely accepted that Israel has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the region, and it is assumed that this applies to their stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. A quick search on the web turned up a long list of articles on the subject, including the following:

Report: Secret Israeli chemical tests kill 4, wound 25

Arabic News.Com
August 21 1998

Tests carried out by an Israeli secret laboratory recently killed four persons and other 25 have been reported wounded in Neis Zayouna district near Tel Aviv, an Israeli daily reported.

Israel flatly denied the report. “No person has ever been killed in a work accident at the Biological Institute since its inception 45 years ago,” Prime Minister Netanyahu’s media advisor stated today.

This just happens to be the Institute cited above. And if these deaths were due to field tests, they wouldn’t be “work accidents”. But it is evidence that something is going on in Israel that could be related to the development of these types of weapons. There is also this comment from Ariel Sharon, while he was still Foreign Minister. His attitude hasn’t changed in the intervening years as his active sabotage of the so-called “Peace Map” shows.

Report: Israel developing biological weapons targeting Arabs

Regional-Israel, Military, 11/16/1998

Last year the Pentagon warned in a secret report against the possibility of developing biological elements through genetic engineering to manufacture new weapons of mass destruction.

Within the same context, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon reiterated that, “Israel reserves its right to repel any possible Iraqi attack.”

At the conclusion of his meeting on Sunday with the US secretary of commerce, Sharon added: “Israel can defend itself and knows how to prevent being attacked.”

A different type of evidence is found in the following written by the webmaster at http://www.konformist.com who published a good article on ethnic weapons in 2000 that we will look at later. He is discussing the reader response to the article:

What is interesting is that, though I received quite a few Emails from the Zionist community, none denied the accuracy of the story. Instead, they brashly admitted it was true, then added it was necessary because Israel needed to defend itself from its Arab neighbors. What is most telling is that many letters included references to Arabs that were derogatory and dehumanizing. That such a destructive philosophy is accepted by so many uncritically in Israel explains much of the vicious thuggery performed against the Palestinians over the last four months (not to mention the last 33 years).

These comments are completely in keeping with Sharon’s, so we can put a high probability that Israel is developing something along these lines.

The progress on the Human Genome Project now makes it possible to target specific groups of individuals based upon certain genetic signatures. This is the logical next step in the progression of biological weapons. These weapons have been around for thousands of years. The Romans used to dump dead animals into the water supply of their enemies to inflict disease. The American “settlers” used small pox in blankets to target the Native American populations. The American Native population is still subjected to this type of attack:

#16 Human Genome Project Opens the Door to Ethnically Specific Bioweapens

In this country, continuing a historic policy toward Native Americans, it has been revealed that the American Indian Health Service (IHS—funded by the Federal Government, who employ the doctors and nurses) coerced Native American men and women into forced sterilizations in the early to mid 1970s. The General Accounting Office (GAO) estimated that 3,400 people (mostly women) underwent the treatment, but their study only covered four of twelve IHS regions for four years.

Activists put the estimate much higher, at 60,000 to 70,000. This, coupled with the suspicion raised by the hantavirus outbreak in the Four Corners region of Arizona/New Mexico/Colorado/Utah keeps suspicion and fingers pointed at the federal government and at least some government policies toward the American Indian population. (Hantavirus is one of many “new” diseases that have come under suspicion of having their origins in genetic engineering or biowarfare labs.)

As reported in a 1994 Project Censored update, Utah’s Dugway Proving Grounds biowarfare research site was also reopened despite local residents’ protests over fears that the facility was originally closed because of safety concerns. Fort Dietrick, the site of the most notorious CIA drug and army biowarfare research in the United States now houses major research facilities of the National Cancer Institute, raising issues of conflict (or collusion) or interest.

But with the development of the chemical industry, bio-warfare took a new turn. Greg Bishop, in the article referred to above, first published at konformist.com, looks at some of the major points:

Ethnic Weapons For Ethnic Cleansing

Greg Bishop
March 2000

[T]his “theoretical possibility” was recognized over 25 years ago, if not before. It was originally brought to the attention of potential customers with the publication of an article in the Military Review of November 1970.

This journal for command-level military personnel was published by the US Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The feature, entitled “Ethnic Weapons,” authored by Carl A. Larson, outlines the history, desirability, and possibilities of engineered biological pathogens which would affect only those races which historically have no natural defense against certain “enzyme inhibitors.”

Larson is listed as head of the “Department of Human Genetics at the Institute of Genetics, Lund, Sweden” as well as a licensed physician. The Hippocratic oath was apparently not administered in Sweden when Larson received his accreditation.

Larson explains that many of the chemical activities and functions within the human body are caused by the interactions of enzymes. One of the more significant activities enabled by enzyme chemical reactions are the contraction and relaxation of muscle tissue. If the activities of these enzymes are blocked, the victim will be paralyzed, even to the point of death by asphyxiation.

Not coincidentally, the enzyme-blocking action of compounds called organophosphates were discovered in Germany in the 1930s when experimental insecticides killed the people unlucky enough to have used them. This discovery led to the mass production of a substance named “Trilon,” later used to impressive effect in the extermination of groups of people the Nazis considered little more than insects. This substance and others of similar makeup became known as “nerve gas.”

A concentration of 40 milligrams per cubic meter can kill in about 10 minutes. Stronger agents were later developed which can do the job with a single drop on the skin.

[…] Larson is even more explicit in a way that would probably never make it into the mainstream press. In a passage that would make Doctor Strangelove proud, he muses uncontrollably on the possibilities of genetically-sensitive chemicals to subdue enemy populations:

“Friendly forces would discriminatingly use incapacitants in entangled situations to give friend and foe a short period of enforced rest to sort them out. By gentle persuasion, aided by psychochemicals, civilians in enemy cities could be reeducated. The adversary would use incapacitants to spare those whom he could use for slaves.”

This was published in a serious, staid professional journal read by US military strategists. He concludes with the statement that “the functions of life [now] lie bare to attack.”

According to Charles Piller and Keith Yamamoto in their 1988 book Gene Wars, Larson’s article was the first time that the subject of ethnically targeted CBWs was broached publicly, and that in “the military’s private circles it was old news.” The authors further state that in 1951 the Mechanicsburg, PA Naval Supply Depot was the site of a classified test using a benign organism delivered to personnel to mimic the behavior of an actual bioweapon: ”

According to documents declassified in the late 1970s, the site was chosen because ‘Within this system there are employed large numbers of laborers, including many Negroes, whose incapacitation would seriously affect the operation of the supply system.”

The black workers in the Depot were supposedly more susceptible to a strain of Valley Fever than were whites, but instead of using the actual virus, a substitute fungal organism was used. Valley Fever is more often fatal to blacks than to whites. It was recently revealed that the truth and reconciliation hearings in South Africa had presented witnesses who testified that scientists working for the apartheid regime had pursued efforts along similar lines.

Another possible example of field testing of ethnic weapons (or at least an interesting case for study by those interested in their development) may be the famed “Four Corners” virus, which seems only to affect Native Americans living in northern New Mexico and Arizona. Most reports identified or compared the disease to the Hantavirus, which killed victims relatively quickly following the occurrence of a prolonged fever and fluid which rapidly filled the lungs and asphyxiated the patient. Supposedly contracted through deer mice droppings, the mystery disease has claimed at least a dozen victims in the last ten years.

The most recent outbreak occurred this last summer [1999], coming on the heels of El Niño, which the major news media blamed for the renewed threat. Some area residents believe that the virus may have been released either accidentally or intentionally from a bioweapons cache at Fort Wingate, an army facility a few miles east of Gallup. The munitions storage at Wingate is now officially closed.

We learn that the work on such weapons was begun in Nazi Germany. The victims of these weapons were largely Jews. When Larson published his paper in 1970, “the military’s private circles it was old news.” Which means it had been discussed for a long time by the US military, most likely with the Nazis brought into the US after World War II via Operation Paperclip. Tests were carried out as far back as 1951 on Blacks working at the Mechanicsburg, PA Naval Supply Depot. For more information on tests carried out by the US government against its own citizens, refer to our timeline.

An early form of ethnic specific weapon were the malororants, developed to control crowds (of people dissenting against the Bush Reich, perhaps?).

Pentagon Tests Ethnically-Targeted Crowd Control Weapons

Sunshine-Project
19. February 2002

Almost sixty years ago, the US developed a nauseating ‘bathroom odor’ chemical for use as a weapon. But according to the Army, the old malodorant will not work outside of the US and Western Europe, because “it was found that people in many areas of the world do not find ‘fecal odor’ to be offensive, since they smell it on a regular basis.” Therefore, according to the Army, new agents are needed for overseas missions. These new malodorants are to be specifically adapted for their victims. According to a 1998 document: “The objective of this work is the development of a comprehensive set of [malodorants] that can be applied against any population set around the world to influence their behavior.”

The documents describe the Army research procedure. A group of subjects selected “based on a diversity of geographic origins and cultural heritage” is systematically exposed to candidate malodorants to develop “culture-response data” based on ethnic categories. That data is aggregated into “odor response profiles” that suggest the types and quantities of malodorants necessary to “elicit a favorable behavioral response” (i.e. incapacitation, panic, or flight) when used for crowd control on a particular ethnic group.

[…] Whether the malodorants work or fail, research on any ethnic weapon raises serious legal questions and could set a very dangerous precedent. If the Pentagon saw any major legal barriers to ethnic weapons it would not have approved the malodorant research. The Pentagon’s conclusion that ethnic weapons are permissible must be challenged.

As horrible as these weapons are in their practice and in what they reveal about the people developing them, it was the work on the Human Genome that really opened the door to a new generation of bioweapons, weapons that could be fine-tuned to one’s genetic make-up. We have been subjected to reams of paper and hours of air-time discussing the benefits of genetic research, the ability to target individual genes to “repair” them. Look at the flip-side:

GE Biological “Ethnic” Weapons Loom on the Horizon

Date: Thu, Jan 21, 1999
By Patricia Reaney
Reuters

The designer weapon works on a similar principle to gene therapy but instead of replacing faulty genes that don’t work it exploits genetic variations to target its victims.

For example, micro-organisms could be genetically engineered to attack known receptor sites on the cell membrane or viruses could be targeted at specific DNA sequences inside cells.

This is the technology that Israel is using. But it did not originate in Israel:

Biowar and the Apartheid Legacy

By Salim Muwakkil, In These Times
June 6, 2003

A two-part story in the Washington Post on April 20 and 21 revealed that biological agents developed by the South African government during its apartheid days have fallen into private hands. Written by Post reporters Joby Warrick and John Mintz, the piece noted that unique, race-specific strains of biotoxins were available on the world market – for the right price or the right ideology.

[…] The top-secret program that Basson directed was called Project Coast, and it lasted from 1981 to 1993. The South African National Defense Force created it at a time when the white-minority regime was under increasing threat by indigenous black South Africans. Daan Goosen, the former director of Project Coast’s biological research division, told the Post he was ordered by Basson to develop ways “to suppress population growth among blacks” and to “search for a ‘black bomb,’ a biological weapon that would select targets based on skin color.”

[…] The Washington Post even noted, “Goosen says many scientists kept copies of organisms and documents in order to continue work on ‘dual-use’ projects with commercial as well as military applications.” A May 2002 story on Project Coast in the Wall Street Journal reported that Goosen said he has been “visited by scores of people looking for ‘stuff to kill the blacks.'” Race-specific weapons naturally are in hot demand among racists, so it’s no surprise that South Africa’s race-specific research is highly coveted.

[…] Reported links between Israel’s ethnic weapons and South Africa’s Project Coast are tentative; some would say tenuous. But the possibility of such links is terrifying, and justifies as much scrutiny as was focused on Iraq’s imaginary arsenal.

It also appears that the anthrax incidents of 2001, in which five people died and 13 were sickened, may also have a South African connection. The Post noted that officials found evidence in a Frederick, Maryland, pond that may explain how the perpetrators of the deadly attacks used water to handle the lethal toxin without infecting themselves or loosing the anthrax spores.

On May 11, the Post said the water theory is the result of the FBI’s interest in one person, Steven J. Hatfill, a medical doctor and bioterrorism expert who formerly worked for the U.S. Army, and who lists South African diplomas in diving and underwater medicine on his résumé.

A June 2002 article in the Hartford Courant reported that Hatfill also worked with a guerilla unit of the white-supremacist Rhodesian army from 1978 to 1980, when “an anthrax outbreak killed hundreds and sickened thousands of villagers.” He also lived in South Africa, “where he completed various military-medical assignments.”

The Apartheid regime in South Africa. Israel. The United States. Not the most progressive regimes in the world.

Note the reference to the Great Anthrax Scare following 9/11, the ability to manipulate the anthrax virus without getting infected. And the connection of this to Steven J. Hatfill. Curious, isn’t it, how the anthrax story just died when it was discovered that the strain used to attack Americans wasn’t from a foreign sourse but came a military base in Maryland?

Anthrax Attacks Pushed Open an Ominous Door

22 September, 2002

PURCHASE, N.Y. — On this first anniversary of the anthrax attacks, a number of conclusions can be drawn even without an arrest by the FBI. First, the strain and properties of the weaponized anthrax found in the letters show that it originated within the U.S. biodefense program, where the necessary expertise and access are found. Government officials recognized that the anthrax source was domestic less than two weeks after they learned of the letters, and nothing in their investigation has led them to say otherwise since.

One can also conclude that, given the origin of the anthrax and the warnings contained in the letters, the perpetrator’s motive was not to kill but rather to raise public fear and thereby spur Congress to increase spending on biodefense. In this, the attacks have been phenomenally successful.[…]

Although biodefense has gotten a shot in the arm, it is important to understand that the goal of defending against bioweapons is not primarily public protection–which is largely impossible, as last year’s attacks demonstrated.

It is rather “to allow the military forces of the United States to survive and successfully complete their operational missions … in battlespace environments contaminated with chemical or biological warfare agents,” according to the annual report of the Department of Defense’s Chemical and Biological Defense Program. […]

Two weeks ago, I attended an informal meeting in Geneva where diplomats from six continents struggled in the face of U.S. Intransigence to map out a joint strategy for combating the global biological threat. The United States had demanded that a formal Biological Weapons Convention conference, scheduled to take place during two weeks in November, should instead disband in one day with only an agreement not to meet again until 2006.

To make sure that the American resolve prevails in this setting where international consensus is de rigueur, the U.S. demand was accompanied by an overt threat to disrupt any further proceedings with accusations that would make productive international action impossible.

At that Geneva meeting, the assembled diplomats, representing the political spectrum from our closest allies to declared enemies, were uniformly frustrated. They find it hard to comprehend why a country that has just been the victim of bioterrorism should stand in the way of peaceful efforts supported by all its allies to deter bioterrorism.

The following article suggests that the evidence for a link between the Israeli program and the South African program is neither tentative nor tenuous as the above would suggest. It is the same author writing earlier. Perhaps he found new info. Perhaps something else happened…

DOUBLE STANDARDS HAUNT AMERICA’S FOREIGN POLICY

By Salim Muwakkil.
Published: Monday, November 23, 1998

Goosen’s comments jibe well with conclusions reached by South Africa’s recently concluded Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard testimony that Wouter Basson, the director of the country’s chemical-biological warfare program, conducted extensive research on weapons that exclusively targeted blacks.

Incidentally, the commission’s concluding report noted that South Africa’s chemical-biological weapons team received considerable assistance from their American counterparts during the apartheid era. And it’s easy to see why: Ethno bombs are a dream weapon on a planet so preoccupied with ethnic conflicts. Of course, that’s also why such weapons are so remarkably menacing.

[…] The article noted that the ethno-bomb claims were given further credibility by a report in “Foreign Report,” a publication of the respected Jane’s group, that Israeli scientists used some of “the South African research in trying to develop an ‘ethnic bullet’ . . .”

Once more the thread comes back to the US: “South Africa’s chemical-biological weapons team received considerable assistance from their American counterparts during the apartheid era”.

So let’s look more at America’s links to the development of these weapons. We saw above that this started after World War II. But, in fact, there are links back to the Eugenics program started in the US at the turn of the century.

#16 Human Genome Project Opens the Door to Ethnically Specific Bioweapens

The U.S. has a long history of interest in such genetic research. The current home of the Human Genome Project is the Cold Springs Harbor laboratory on Long Island, NY—the exact site of the notorious Eugenics Research Office that was started in 1910 by the Harriman family. The project’s 1910 agenda included governmental imposition of sanctions on such human rights as reproduction, and on U.S. immigration, based on the alleged inferiority of particular ethnic groups.

The Eugenics Research Project established medical and psychological conditions that would qualify one for sterilization or euthanasia. Prominent advocates of the program such as the Rockefeller family, Henry Ford, and Margaret Sanger helped smooth the way for the passage of forcible sterilization laws in 25 states. These laws allowed the forcible sterilization of tens of thousands of people, mostly of minority status, during the first half of the 20th century.

So we have one policy, begun in the early 20th century, funded by the Rockefellers, Henry Ford, the Harrimans, many of the same people who were financing the Nazi Party in Germany during the thirties. The work goes underground after the Second World War until it reemerges as part of the new “genetic research”.

Biological Warfare: Genetically-Engineered Weapons Cannot Be Excluded

By K.P. Kavanaugh
Journal of the Federation of American Scientists (F.A.S.)
Volume 52, Number 2
March/April 1999

It has long been rumored that modern biological weapons could be designed to attack specific vulnerabilities of particular ethnic groups. Early in the development of the US offensive biological weapons program Colonel Creasey, Chief of Research and Engineering of the US Chemical Corps, suggested that agents may be selected because of known susceptibility of the target population.

This shows that the differential susceptibility of different populations to various diseases had been considered at that time and, according to scientists at Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is continuing today.

Indeed ethnic-specific biological warfare predated the advent of the biotechnology revolution. Smallpox was almost certainly deliberately used against the Native Americans centuries ago and there are other examples. U.S. and British officials believe an ethnic-specific weapon would be used today if it became available during a severe conflict between two deeply antagonistic groups. […]

Today, warnings are coming not only from the medical community, but also from other specially credible sources. There have been indications, for example, that the US Secretary of Defense is concerned about the possible development of genetic weapons.

In June 1997, Jane’s Defense Weekly reported that Secretary Cohen “quoted other reports about what he called ‘certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could eliminate certain ethnic groups or races.'” Then after a later interview with the Defense Secretary in August 1997, it was stated again in Jane’s Defense Weekly that “he also continued to insist that the science community is ‘very close’ to being able to manufacture ‘genetically engineered pathogens that could be ethnically specific'”.

Early Accounts, Then Silence

In accounts during the 1980s of the possible development of genetic weapons, a frequent source of scientific data was a paper by Carl A. Larson, then head of the Department of Human Genetics, University of Lund, Sweden, published in the journal Military Review in November 1970. Larson’s paper was mainly concerned with the possible development of a new range of chemical weapons, including incapacitants.

Individual differences in response to chemical agents had been known for some time, but Larson reviewed what was known of differences between populations in reaction to drugs and saw the basis of such population differences as genetic. Larson seems to have been pointing to possible future developments rather than near-term practical possibilities. The question is whether, almost 30 years later: have genetically engineered weapons become a practical possibility?

There does not appear to have been subsequent detailed open publication by reputable scientists of the application of modern biotechnology to genetically -engineered weapons until the 1990s. Then in 1992 the journal Defense News carried a report which noted a scientist arguing that genetic engineering may enable us to:

…recognize DNA from different people and attach different things that will kill only that group of people…You will be able to determine the difference between blacks and whites and Asians and Jews and Swedes and Finns and develop an agent that will kill only a particular group.

Shown this quotation in February, scientists within the DOD confirmed that defensive research was being done specifically in this area. Thus the threat would appear to slide along the spectrum from the merely theoretical through the potentially possible to the patently workable.

Such arguments have been set out at greater length in an appendix to the 1993 Stockholm Peace Research Institute’s Yearbook . The most pertinent aspect of the appendix entitled, “Benefits and threats of developments in biotechnology and genetic engineering,” reads:

While modern biotechniques are revolutionizing medicine and agriculture, the possibility exists of their misuse for political ends, for clandestine production and refinement of biological weapons (BW), and for future development of weapons of mass extermination which could be used for genocide.

Particular reference is then made to the possible misuse of knowledge gained from the Human Genome Project and knowledge about genetic diversity. The element of critical significance here is contained in the last sub-section of section VI where the question is clearly stated, “Can’t genetic weapons be developed?” The answer is that if:

investigations provide sufficient data on ethnic genetic differences between population groups, it may be possible to use such data to target suitable micro-organisms to attack known receptor sites for which differences exist at a cell membrane level or even target DNA sequences inside cells by viral vectors… […]

Flashback: Scientists’ deaths are under the microscope

So we have governments financing the development of these weapons, envisioning them as the Ultimate Weapon in their battles against their enemies. Or should we say “Final Solution” because it is racially based. It makes targets of people because of their genes.

Note: It is governments that do these things. But when this is discussed in the press, where are our fears turned? Who are portrayed as the real villains?

Genetic weapons: a 21st-century nightmare?

Ethirajan Anbarasan

Most of the nearly 30,000 scientists who were involved in biological research in the USSR during the 1980s are now out of a job because of the country’s economic difficulties. Last year, some of them disclosed that they had been approached by certain countries which have shown particular interest in learning about microbes that can be used in war to destroy or protect crops, as well as genetic engineering techniques that could be used to make deadly germs for which there may be no antidotes.

One prospect that alarms arms control experts is that biological weapons will fall into the hands of terrorist or cult groups.

But they are already in the hands of the Israelis who have not ratified a single international treaty allowing inspections of their nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. No, what is important is to vilify the invisible “terrorist”, the “cult”, to inculcate in the minds of the readers that the danger is widespread, invisible, and ready to pounce at any moment. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Yes. But be afraid because these governments are prepared to use them on their enemies…and that may well include their own citizens.

Mystery pneumonia is being caused by America’s weapons of mass destruction: A theory

by Steve Hesske August 8, 2003

Could America’s mainstream media be any more perfidious and derelict in its so-called reporting of the current so-called pneumonia epidemic among U.S. service personnel in Iraq and a few nearby countries?

A quick, informal survey of this week’s coverage of the pneumonia story by our bastions of truth and enlightenment — CNN, Fox, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post — shows that while all covered the story, none mentioned Gulf War Syndrome which befell maybe as much as 20% of the 700,000 Americans who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War (PGW) or depleted uranium (DU) a radioactive weapon of mass destruction (WMD), outlawed by international treaty and world courts, that was used exclusively and extensively by the United States during the PGW and that was used by the U.S. during the recent invasion of Iraq at 10 times its PGW rate.

Here’s what the mainstream press does tell you: Army brass have dispatched teams to Iraq and to Landstuhl Army Hospital in Germany to investigate over 100 mysterious cases of pneumonia that have stricken American troops currently serving in the Persian Gulf. The puzzling disease has killed two and put another dozen or so in serious peril. According to the Army, a common geographical thread can not be established, a common bacteria can not be isolated.

True enough. A military spokeswoman goes on to say that those who have fallen ill have not been exposed to biological or chemical weapons, a bald-faced lie. DU is a chemical WMD of the most destructive and virulent kind. The documentation is in. And the connection between DU and a “mysterious pneumonia-like disease” was established over 10 years ago. […]

The [British] government’s microbiological research establishment at Porton Down spread bacteria through the London Underground system in the 1960s are contained in two files released to the public record office in Kew yesterday.

The trials, which were revealed in the Guardian last year, show how a powder compact filled with bacteria was dropped on to the Northern line and samples taken to see how contamination spread over the network.

We again refer you to our Timeline of Cosmic COINTELPRO subversion through the last few centuries to see more of this.

Given that these new strands of bioweapons need to be tested, we might think that the recent outbreak of SARS could be a field test. The pneumonia from Iraq. But these are not the only ones. There have been so many of these new strains recently that the US Government has set up centers to watch for “Unexplained Deaths” in four US states:

Unexplained Deaths Due to Possibly Infectious Causes in the United States: Defining the Problem and Designing Surveillance and Laboratory Approaches

EID Volume 2 * Number 1
January-March 1996

Many new infectious diseases have been identified in the United States during the last several decades (1). Among these are AIDS, Legionnaires’ disease, toxic-shock syndrome, hepatitis C, and most recently, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome; all caused serious illness and death.

In each instance, the disease was recognized through investigation of illness for which no cause had been identified. Retrospective studies of these and other newly recognized infectious diseases often identified cases that occurred before the recognition of the new agent; therefore, a more sensitive detection system may make the earlier recognition of new infectious agents possible.

[…] A more systematic public health approach for the early detection of unknown infectious agents is needed. This need was acknowledged in Addressing Emerging Infectious Diseases Threats: A Prevention Strategy for the United States, a CDC publication about emerging infections (13). CDC has established an emerging infections program (EIP) network to conduct special population-based surveillance projects, develop surveillance methods, pilot and evaluate prevention strategies, and conduct other epidemiologic and laboratory studies.

In late 1994, CDC funded four programs based at state health departments and academic institutions in California (Alameda, Contra Costa, Kern, and San Francisco counties), Connecticut, Minnesota, and Oregon. Some projects are conducted at all program sites and others, depending on local interest and expertise, at only one or two sites.

Surveillance for unexplained deaths due to possibly infectious causes (UDPIC) for early detection of new infectious diseases is one of the core activities being conducted at all sites.

Great way to track the field tests, is it not?

In looking over the press reports in the last few years, we see that Israel is being singled out, especially since the “suicide” of David Kelly. This is somewhat normal because much attention has been focused in recent years on the barbarity of the Israeli actions against the Palestinians.

As Greg Bishop writes above, the Germans considered the Jews “insects”. Now the Jews turn on the Palestinians in the same way. So Israel, from the Balfour Declaration through today, is being set up and portrayed as villains, maneuvered into a particular situation.

What they do is odious. But is there something even more odius behind the curtain?

Relations Between Israel and the Apartheid Regime in South Africa

We looked yesterday at the issue of Ethnic Weapons, biological and chemical weapons that can be built to single out populations by their genetic characteristics. We saw evidence that Israel may be building such weapons to be used in their final solution against the Palestinians.

The technology for this program came from the apartheid regime of South Africa, that is, the Boers who ruled over the Blacks until the last decade of the 20th century.

The close relations between Israel and the apartheid regime go back to the mid seventies.

Profile of Bilateral Relations

State of Israel
HISTORY OF RELATIONS

Israel established a Legation in South Africa in 1952 and in 1974 it was upgraded to an Embassy. In 1972 South Africa established a Consulate General in Tel Aviv which was upgraded to an Embassy in December 1975. Israel continued to enjoy close relations with the Apartheid Government in South Africa.

While many African countries had seen Israel as an ally in the fifties and early sixties, another country struggling to survive in a hostile climate, after the wars of 1967 and 1973, their view had changed and Israel was now the neighborhood bully. For more on this, see the article Africa, Arabia, and Israel: Forty-Five Years of Relations.

South Africa had seen two of its neighbors become “Popular Republics” under Marxist-inspired “People’s Armies” after the fall of the Salazar regime in Portugal in 1974. So both Israel and South Africa had a siege mentality, believing they were surrounded by enemies.

Africa, Arabia, and Israel
Forty-Five Years of Relations

(Originally published as Sheen-File #053)

[…] In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and the joint forces of Egypt and Syria, almost all of sub-Saharan Africa broke off diplomatic relations with Israel completely. And in 1975, the Arab League states succeeded in passing a motion on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, equating Zionism with racism and South African apartheid. It passed in large measure to the near-automatic support the resolution received from the sub-Saharan African states.

Although there is evidence that several African nations wished to maintain covert relations with Israel, privately insisting that its public condemnation of Israel was merely an act for show, designed to placate the Arab states, to many Israelis, this hypocrisy was an unimaginable slight that could not easily be forgiven. It was said that, in response to this overwhelming rejection, “Israel pursued its relationship with South Africa with an element of vindictiveness.”

Israel and South Africa

excerpted from the book
Israeli Foreign Policy
by Jane Hunter
South End Press, 1987

Israel has also been connected with the mercenary forces deployed by South Africa against Angola and Mozambique. In the 1970s Israel aided the FNLA (Angolan National Liberation Front) proxy forces organized and trained by the CIA to forestall the formation of a government led by the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola-now the ruling party of Angola).

John Stockwell, who ran the CIA operation against Angola, recollected three arms shipments Israel made in cooperation with the CIA: a plane full of 120 mm shells sent via Zaire to the FNLA and Unita; a shipment of 50 SA-7 missiles (all of which were duds); a boat-load sent to neighboring Zaire in a deal that the Israelis had worked out with President Mobutu, even though the Zairian strong man had broken ties with Israel two years earlier.

South Africa’s Nuclear Policy

Ruchita Beri, Research Fellow, IDSA

The political changes in the Southern African region heightened the security concerns of South Africa. The end of Portuguese rule in Africa after the 1974 Lisbon coup and the subsequent accession to power of Communist regimes in Angola (MPLA) and Mozambique (Freelimo) enhanced the encirclement by Communist forces regionally. The mid- 1970s also saw the intensification of the anti-apartheid struggle within South Africa-in the apartheid government’s perception, sponsored by the Communist forces.

Thus, perceiving itself to be encircled by Communist forces, the South African government promoted a militarist ideology legitimising the use of force by the state to counter that threat, codified in the concept “Total National Strategy” to coordinate its national security planning. This ultimately involved a nuclear deterrent capability.

The arrival of Cuban troops in Angola after the establishment of the MPLA regime provided the final stimulus. Defence Minister P.W. Botha spelled out the defence requirements to meet this challenge as “South Africa can establish a balanced defence force to defend itself against terrorism…and this we are fully able to do….Secondly, we must have a deterrent to be able to resist a fairly heavy conventional attack on South Africa.”3 This statement was quite ambiguous; however, one could reach the conclusion that both conventional and nuclear capabilities would be pursued by South Africa. Ambiguity became the trademark of the South African nuclear policy in the apartheid era.

The attitudes of the two countries can be summed up by this comment from Jane Hunter, cited above:

It has also been said that those arms sales are understandable, given the striking similarities between the two countries in their day-to-day abuse and repression of their subject populations, South African blacks and Palestinians under Israeli rule; in their operating philosophies of apartheid and Zionism; and in their similar objective situations: “the only two Western nations to have established themselves in a predominantly nonwhite part of the world,” as a South African Broadcasting Corporation editorial put it. That understanding, however, is somewhat superficial, and the focus on similarities of political behavior has somewhat obscured the view of the breadth and depth of the totality of Israeli-South African relations and their implications.

As she suggests, this understanding is “somewhat superficial, as we will see below.

Another factor cementing the relationship was the embargo placed on South Africa following the riots of 1975 and the international outcry over the death of Stephen Biko.

S O U T H A F R I C A: 1 9 6 2 – 1 9 8 9
Access to Critical Events in Recent U.S. Policy Toward South Africa

The second period (1976-1980) deals primarily with the response of the U.S. government and the international community to the South African government’s brutal reaction to the June 1976 student revolt, the death of Steve Biko (the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement), South Africa’s subsequent security crackdown on opponents of apartheid and the adoption of the U.N. Security Council Resolution that called for a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa.

Because of this, South Africa was isolated, at least “officially”, from the world.

One of the projects Israel and South Africa undertook together was the development of nuclear weapons. Hunter continues:

Israel’s relations with South Africa are different than its interactions with any of its other arms clients. That Israel gave South Africa its nuclear weapons capability underscores the special nature of Tel Aviv’s relations with the white minority government and begins to describe it – a full-fledged, if covert, partnership based on the determination of both countries to continue as unrepentant pariahs and to help each other avoid the consequences of their behavior.

Arms industry

Nuclear Apprentice

There are few areas where the respective needs and advantages of Israel and South Africa dovetailed so perfectly as in the field of nuclear cooperation.

“The most powerful reason for Israeli willingness to bear the undesirable consequences of expanded and more open trade with South Africa may be her desire to acquire material necessary to manufacture nuclear weapons,” wrote a military analyst in 1980.’ To that must be added Israel’s great desire to test the nuclear weapons it already had, and the attractions of South Africa’s vast territory and proximity to even vaster uninhabited spaces-the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Then at the point in its nuclear development where it was fashioning sophisticated bombs (devices which use less nuclear material but have infinitely greater explosive force than the “primitive” bomb dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima), Israel would find it particularly helpful to observe the performance, explosive force and fallout of a detonated weapon.

Since 1984, Israel had been operating a plutonium extraction plant in a secret underground bunker at Dimona in the Negev Desert. Built by the French in the late 1950s, the Dimona plant also included facilities for manufacturing atomic bomb components. At the time of the 1976 accords, Israel was preparing to build an adjoining plant for the extraction of lithium 6, tritium and deuterium, materials required for sophisticated thermonuclear weapons.

Israel’s reasons for devoting what had to have been a significant portion of its scant resources to such an ambitious nuclear weapons program – nuclear experts have recently ranked it as the world’s sixth nuclear power, after the U.S., the USSR, Britain, France and China – have been variously offered as the desire to develop a credible deterrent to attack by its neighbors and the desire to substitute that deterrent for at least part of the costly conventional arsenal that Israel, with one of the world’s most powerful military forces, maintains, and also (with much less frequency) as an “umbrella” over a partial withdrawal from the occupied territories.

This cooperation is discussed as well here:

Abstract:

Note: Details about the Blaauw case are provided in the Africa Confidential article. ….. According to information released regarding the secret mid-1980s extortion trial of Johann Blaauw, a brigadier in the South African army, South Africa and _Israel_ participated in four clandestine nuclear deals in the mid-1970s. Blaauw was found not guilty of trying to extort mining concessions from Minister of Mines Fanie Botha in a trial in 1989 [1].

The first nuclear deal occurred in shortly after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 when “Benjamine,” a member of the Israel Council for Scientific Liaison, asked Blaauw to acquire South African yellowcake which Israel could use for weapon-grade plutonium. (“Benjamine” is believed to be Benjamin Blumberg, the head of the Israeli Intelligence division Lish Ka l-Kishrei (Lakam) [2].)

After discussions with Gen. Hendryk van den Bergh, head of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS), South African Prime Minister John Vorster eventually agreed to sell 50 metric tons of yellowcake to Israel. The deal was handled by Minister of Mines Fanie Botha, who replaced Piet Koornhog [Koornhof] after Koornhog opposed the sale. Uranium Enrichment Corporation Chairman Ampie Roux was also aware of the deal.

During his testimony, Blaauw said that “a high degree of confidence was developing between the South African and Israeli governments which involved the exchange of military technology, joint aeronautic ventures, and the supply of ‘know-how’ by Israel to South Africa in regard to the manufacture of weaponry.”

There is evidence of a joint nuclear test carried out in the Indian Ocean in September, 1979. Ruchita Beri, cited above, writes:

1979 Nuclear Test

On September 22, 1979, a US Vela satellite detected an unusual “double flash” indicative of a nuclear test, in an “area of the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic including portions of the Antarctic continent, and the southern part of Africa.” In fact, some have claimed it to be a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test. South Africa denied that it had conducted a nuclear test. As late as March 1993, the AEC’s Chairman, Waldo Stumpf, is reported to have said, ” If it was a nuclear explosion, South Africa was definitely not involved.

I doubt that it was a nuclear [test] because no radioactive fallout was detected.” Eighteen years after the event, Aziz Pahad, the Deputy Foreign Minister, confirmed that South Africa conducted a nuclear test in the South Indian Ocean in 1979. This admission has laid to rest the controversy surrounding the test.

We can see that the relations between the two countries were very close.

Not only were nuclear weapons part of the partnership, but strategy and tactics in dealing with their enemies, both internal and external were also an important part of the collaboration. Jane Hunter again:

The South Africans began teaching the lessons of Israel’s 1967 war at their maneuver school, and Israeli advisers began teaching the Boers the arts of suppressing a captive population and keeping hostile neighbors off balance…

The white government’s practice of domestic counterinsurgency combines outright military brutality with the extensive use of informers and collaborators. It is impossible to know how many refinements of these age-old techniques have been borrowed from the Israelis’ occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.

The Israeli system of village leagues is obviously comparable to the hated town councils imposed on segregated townships by the apartheid government. The collective punishment employed by the Israelis, such as the destruction of a whole family’s home when one of its members is arrested as a suspect in an act of resistance, has lately been matched by the recent South African practices of sealing off townships, and assaulting entire funeral processions.

What is perhaps more salient is the South African victims’ perceptions of Israel’s involvement in their oppression and how readily that perception is communicated…

And when the population you are systematically trying to annihilate fights back, how do you justify it? Of course, you call it “terrorism”. Hunter continues:

The Frontline States

The South Africans noted that their May, 1983 aerial attack (dubbed Operation Shrapnel) on Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, was analogous to Israel’s attack on Beirut the previous summer. One analyst, Joseph Hanlon, believes that one of South Africa’s objectives in the attack was to see how its version of events would play in the media. It was received very well indeed, according to Hanlon, with the Western press accepting South Africa’s claim that its attack was in “retaliation” for an ANC attack and that ANC “bases” were hit.

Instead, the South African Air Force hit a child-care center and private houses with “special fragmentation rockets,” leaving 6 dead and 40 wounded. This follows the Israeli practice in Lebanon of speaking about PLO installations while civilians are the actual targets, and attacking with particularly heinous anti-personnel weapons-cluster bombs and phosphorous bombs.

The victims of South Africa’s angst are not blind to the similarity of attacks-or motives.

President Samora Machel likened the Israeli Government to the Pretoria regime. He said that because of its inability to contain the fury of the Palestinian people led by the PLO, the Zionist regime is trying to transfer the war to other regions.

So reported Mozambican radio shortly after Israeli aircraft bombed PI headquarters in Tunisia in October 1985.

The model provided by Israel, which punishes every internal act of resistance and violent act outside its jurisdiction with a bombing raid on Palestinian targets in Lebanon-almost always refugee camps cynically identified by the Israelis as “terrorist bases” or “headquarters”-has served South Africa well. In January 1986, the white government’s radio delivered a commentary on “the malignant presence” of “terrorism” in neighboring states and said “there’s only one answer now, and that’s the Israeli answer.” Israel had managed to survive “by striking at terrorists wherever they exist.”

In May 1986, South Africa demonstrated that it had assumed the right to attack its neighbors at a time and on a pretext of its own choosing. The chosen time was during a visit by the Eminent Persons Group of the Commonwealth of Nations, which was attempting to establish negotiations between the apartheid regime and its opposition. The victims-Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, all Commonwealth members-were chosen for their alleged harboring of “terrorists”; the real victims were South African exiles and an employee of the government of Botswana. The South Africans said they had attacked “international terrorism” and compared their raids to the Israeli attack on Tunisia and the U.S. attack on Libya in April 1986.

The attack was similar in style to Israel’s 1985 attack on Tunisia. Initially, the Israelis had been threatening Jordan and perhaps because King Hussein of Jordan was at the time on an official visit to the U.S., the Israelis chose to take revenge for the killing of three Israelis (believed to be top Mossad agents) in Larnaca, Cyprus on the PLO in Tunisia.

Two weeks after its three-pronged attack on its Commonwealth neighbors, South Africa attacked the Angolan harbor of Namibia, firing their version of the Israeli Gabriel missile.

When Israel reestablished relations with Zaire (in 1982) and began to train Zairian forces in the Shaba border province, Angola had cause for concern. The leader of the FNLA had been Holden Roberto, brother-in-law of Zairian president Mobutu, Israel’s new client. In 1986, it would be established that Zaire acted as a funnel for “covert” U.S. military aid for the Unita forces of Jonas Savimbi.

In 1983, the Angolan News Agency reported that Israeli military experts were training Unita forces in Namibia. Since Zaire began receiving military aid and training from Tel Aviv, Angola has been ill at ease. Its worries increased after discovering that:

Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was personally involved in the organization, training and equipping of “commando” units of the army of Zaire, especially organized for missions along the borders of the RPA [Angola].

In 1984, the Financial Times (London) wrote of “joint Israeli-South African support for Unita forces.” Other sources also report the transfer of Israeli arms and financial support to Unita.

In 1983, Angola’s President Jose Eduardo dos Santos told Berkeley, California Mayor Eugene (Gus) Newport that an Israeli pilot had been shot down during a South African attack. The Angolan President showed Newport pictures of captured Israeli weapons. The following year, Luanda reported the capture of three mercenaries who said they had been trained by Israeli instructors in Zaire.

Israel has also been involved with the Mozambican “contras,” the South African-backed MNR (Mozambique National Resistance or “Renamo”), which has brought great economic and social distress to Mozambique. Renamo has a particular reputation for ideological incoherence, being regarded by most other right-wing insurgencies as a gang of cutthroats. For several years there have been stories coming from Southern Africa of captured mercenaries of Renamo who say they were trained in neighboring Malawi-one of the four nations to maintain relations with Israel after the Organization of African Unity (OAU) declared a diplomatic embargo in 1973-by Israelis. And more than one report has told of “substantial Israeli aid” to the MNR, thought to have been funded by the CIA and Saudi Arabia as well as South Africa and former Portuguese nationalists.

Two countries, both with the mentality of the “besieged”, begin carrying out attacks against their neighbors under the cover of “defence”. Sometimes “to see how its version of events would play in the media”.

In fact, it looks as if they were field-testing the strategies and tactics that the Bush Reich is now imposing upon the US population and the rest of the world.

The links between Israel, the apartheid regime, and the CIA are well-established. It is not too much to suspect that this information was being shared by the intelligence agencis of the three countries.

But as we are trying to see “behind the scenes”, as it were, we leave you with one last item to reflect upon. Remember a few years ago how the anti-globalization forces were growing stronger? Remember the Conference Against Racism held in South Africa? Remember how Israel was becoming isolated because of its butchering of the Palestinians in the period following Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000?

Israel and US walk out of UN conference on racism

By Chris Marsden
6 September 2001

The joint US-Israeli walkout from the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa was something of a foregone conclusion. It was a stage-managed affair, the purpose of which was to portray all opposition to the Zionist state’s persecution of the Palestinians as inherently racist.

The original draft resolution to the UN conference stated its “deep concern” at the “increase of racist practices of Zionism and anti-Semitism” and spoke of the emergence of “movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas, in particular the Zionist movement, which is based on racial superiority.” It made direct criticisms of Israeli repression against the Palestinians on the West Bank as a “new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity.”

The US and Israel insisted on the removal of any direct reference to Israel.

[…] Israel has also achieved some success in winning a more friendly response from Russia, which is again seeking to challenge US domination of Middle Eastern affairs by offering itself as an honest broker between Israel and the Arab regimes. During the Durban conference Sharon visited Moscow for talks with President Putin to discuss the common threat posed by Islamic terrorism-Sharon has even indicated sympathy for Russia’s bloody suppression of Islamic rebel forces in Chechnya-the possibility of a further one million Jewish immigrants from Russia to Israel, armaments and other trade deals.

[…]Shimon Samuels, the head of the Jewish caucus in Durban, declared, “We saw an NGO document that would have made [Hitler’s Nazi Party propaganda chief] Goebbels happy. And now it is clear that we are going to see, at the end of the government conference, resolutions that can be called the UN’s Mein Kampf.”

Mordechai Yedid, Israel’s official spokesman at the conference, insisted there could be no condemnation of Israel in the resolution. He told the plenary meeting prior to the US-Israeli departure, “anti-Zionism, the denial of Jews the basic right to a home, is nothing but anti-Semitism, pure and simple.” Yedid derided the Arab regimes proposals to criticize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as “a group of states for whom the terms ‘racism’, ‘discrimination’, and even ‘human rights’ simply do not appear in their domestic lexicon”. The UN resolution, he continued, was “the most racist declaration in a major international organization since World War Two”.

His remarks prompted a walkout by Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, who represents one of the most pro-US of all the Arab states.

Announcing its withdrawal from the conference, US Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced any attempt to single out “only one country in the world, Israel, for censure and abuse'” and any suggestion that apartheid existed in Israel. For his part, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres proclaimed, “We were portrayed in an insulting and baseless manner as a colonial nation… The Arab League, all of it, has come out against peace.”

The right-wing media in Israel marched to the same tune. An article in the September 4 Jerusalem Post by Yossi Olmert described the Durban conference as “the mirror image of the Nuremberg rallies, in which the Nazis propagated their anti-Jewish messages, striving hard to delegitimise the Jews, as an inevitable step leading to their eventual liquidation.” He conceded reluctantly that “not all the participants in Durban are Nazis, maybe not even a majority of them, but too many are, and they clearly give this shameful gathering its true character”.

Ref: Sign Times

51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis


I had to crack up when I saw the one star reviews on this book. That’s the grassroots portion of the Israel Lobby voicing its objection to truth again, (they do that A LOT). It’s also an excellent indication the book, film or information you’re seeking is exactly what you need to read. I first ran into this

The Lobby is out in force

The book on Jews Against Zionism, the Torah True Jews of New York who are 100% anti-apartheid, (Israel is the world’s only aparthied nation today. They call it ‘Zionism’). One of the tools used to keep apartheid alive and well in Israel is, as Norm Finkelstein put it, the Holocaust Industry. Yes, the German holocaust happened…as did another seven during the twentieth century. The Zionist movement set on the complete conquest of Palestine for a Jewish supremacist state did work with the Nazis. These documents prove it as do such facts as Walburg’s handling of security for the Nazi state until 1939, (his brother was one of the founding members of our Federal Reserve). Walburg, though Jewish was allowed to leave Nazi Germany with his fortune in tact in 1939 so certain influential Jews were shielded from Nazi oppression. You should be asking why. These documents will help you understand the double standard. Of course be careful where you discuss this. In some countries, deviating from the accepted historical revisionism with the truth on this issue, the German holocaust, lands you in jail. That is if you talk about the 50% of the victims who were Jewish. See, the Catholics, Mentally Ill, homosexuals, Gypsies, Communists and handicap making up the other 50% of victims, they don’t matter anymore.
They were not the right faith, nor were they included in reparations and rarely are they mentioned…even in the state funded holocaust museums. (Hint that also should give you a clue there is something very unkosher about this whole thing…that 50% of the victims no longer are mentioned or matter)

If history has lessons, you need to know these. Just be very careful with whom you discuss this book’s details. Trillions of dollars depend on the truth not getting out because if it does, the world’s greatest victims are shown for what they really are, the world’s foremost victimizers.

If that happens, bye, bye US support; bye bye US aid; bye bye protection from war crimes prosecution and bye, bye what little international sympathy that is left. Like I said. A lot is at stake if people learn the whole truth about the German holocaust. Today truth will land you in jail and that fear is used to censor your thoughts and what you read. Another reason you probably want to read this book.

Ref: Amazona