Tag Archives: Bashar al-Assad

May 9 2013

‘CiF’ contributor Patrick Seale accuses Israel of “provoking” the US to war in Syria

seale

Patrick Seale

Whilst even before the state of Israel was reborn antisemitic demagogues like Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin characterized American Jews as disloyal “fifth columnists” who were pushing the U.S. to war for financial reasons, even after the war any temporary post-Holocaust taboos on the imputation of such malevolence to Jews soon were eroded. 

Paul Findley, a former U.S. Congressman whose book They Dare to Speak Out, an attack on the ‘pernicious’ influence of the “Israel lobby,” became a bestseller in 1985.  And, a couple of decades later academics considered to be foreign policy “realists”, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, became popular within anti-Zionist circles after their publication of ’The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’.  The book warned of the “stranglehold” which the Israel “Lobby” exercises over Congress; of their “manipulation of the media” and efforts to “squelch debate”.  They also argued that the 2003 Iraq war wouldn’t have been possible without the influence of Israel and the American Israel lobby.

While paleoconservative commentators in the mid to late 2000s have unsurprisingly also championed this narrative – Pat Buchanan wrote in 2008 that “Israel and its Fifth Column in [Washington , DC] seek to stampede us into war with Iran” – some liberal columnists have engaged in similar rhetoric.  For instance, columnist Joe Klein asserted in his TIME blog that Jewish neoconservatives “plumped” for the war in Iraq and are now doing the same for “an even more foolish assault on Iran” with the goal of making the world “safe for Israel.”  

Additionally, Guardian contributors have advanced the specious claim that Israel, or the Israel lobby, are primarily responsible for US sanctions against Iran, and represent a powerful and dangerous force pushing the US to outright war against the Islamic Republic. Such narratives, with varying degrees of explicitness, have been advanced by, among other CiF contributors, veteran Guardian journalists Simon Tisdall and Simon Jenkins, and the paper’s associate editor, Seumas Milne.  And, of course, Glenn Greenwald has been the most explicit promoter of the ‘Jewish necon’ cabal to take the country to war against Iran’ meme, arguing the following at his previous blog at Salon.com in 2007.

It is simply true that there are large and extremely influential Jewish donor groups which are agitating for a U.S. war against Iran, and that is the case because those groups are devoted to promoting Israel’s interests and they perceive it to be in Israel’s interests for the U.S. to militarily confront Iran.

Turning to the crisis in Syria, whilst we recently commented on suggestions made by Robert Fisk at the Indy that recent Israeli strikes on weapons in Syria intended for Hezbollah was an act which would recklessly push ‘the West’ into the Syrian war, a recent commentary by occasional Guardian contributor Patrick Seale, writing in ‘Middle East Online‘, takes Fisk’s hysterical claim a few steps further.

He writes:

On April 23, a senior Israeli officer, Brig Gen Utai Brun, head of research at army intelligence, made a serious accusation against Syria. In a lecture at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, he declared: “To the best of our professional understanding, the Syrian regime has used lethal chemical weapons against gunmen in a series of incidents in recent months…” General Brun gave no evidence for his accusation and produced no physical proof, but he added that the Israel Defence Forces believed Syria had used the nerve agent sarin on several occasions, including a specific attack on March 19.

In addition to Seale’s erroneous suggestion that it was Israel alone which charged Syria with using chemical weapons – French and British intelligence claimed on April  18 (several days before the Israeli claims cited by Seale) that “there is credible evidence that Syria has fired chemical weapons”  – his argument that such charges are without “proof” is contradicted by recent statements by the Obama Administration  charging Assad with using such weapons.

Seale’s commentary continues: 

As it happened, [Israeli] General Brun made his accusation against Syria during a three-day visit to Israel by America’s new Defence Secretary, Chuck Hagel — a man whose appointment Israel’s supporters in the United States had sought to prevent. Some Jewish organisations had come close to calling him anti-Semitic. Only by eating humble pie did Hagel manage to have his appointment confirmed. He now clearly hopes to put an end to his quarrel with America’s pro-Israeli lobby.

On this his first visit to Israel as Defence Secretary, he announced that Israel was to receive a rich haul of advanced U.S. weapons — air refuelling tankers, cutting-edge radar and the V-22 Osprey ‘tiltrotor’ aircraft, an advanced plane so far denied to all other US allies. But Hagel’s generous gesture was to no avail.

Seale’s facile logic assumes that the decision by the US Defense Department to sell Israel advanced weaponry – which was part of a broader Middle East arms package which included weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – must be the result, not of deliberations by the national security apparatus of the Obama administration, but of Secretary Hagel’s wish to mollify the pro-Israel lobby.

Seale then jumps to his broader conclusion:

Although Israel was evidently delighted with the weapons, this did not inhibit it from accusing Syria of using chemical weapons — clearly in the hope of provoking a U.S. attack on that country.

…

Hagel was angry that Israel was putting pressure on the United States to intervene in Syria. The Israeli authorities may well have thought that Hagel, still recovering from the beating pro-Israelis had given him in Washington, would not dare dispute Israel’s assessment

Finally, Seale makes this extraordinary leap:

By insisting that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons, General Brun’s aim seems to have been to persuade the United States to destroy both the Syrian regime and its Hezbollah ally

Interestingly, however, while some anti-Zionists have indeed accused Israel of siding with the rebels, many others have made the opposite claim – that Israel is siding with Assad and against the revolution in order to maintain relative peace on their northern border.  The failure of anti-Israel propagandists to stay on message aside, Israel has continually made it clear both in word and in deed that it is not at war with Syria, but primarily concerned with the threat posed by Hezbollah – an Iranian backed heavily armed Shiite Islamist terror group occupying large swaths of Lebanon.

Moreover, you’d be hard pressed to find a commentator or analyst other than Seale who has seriously argued that Israel is deviously trying to provoke the US into a Middle East war against its will. Seal’s accusation that Israel is “provoking” the US to “destroy” both the Syrian regime and Hezbollah is pure fantasy, concocted by a lazy and easily suggestible mind mired in historically based conspiratorial notions imputing enormous power to both the Jewish state and its supporters in the US.

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May 7 2013

Glenn Greenwald’s latest diatribe against Israel’s supporters, and others he detests

- “The outgoing Salon blogger can’t seem to have an honest discussion without accusing his debate partners of malicious motives”. (Foreign Policy Magazine, Aug. 16, 2012, 

Glenn Greenwald doesn’t seem much interested in the vexing moral questions naturally elicited by the ongoing bloodbath in Syria. The Arab dictator’s bombing of civilians, and the routine use of torture,  summary executions, and sexual violence against women and children by troops and ethnic groups loyal to the regime don’t weigh heavily on his conscience.   

And, whilst the putative topic of Glenn Greenwald latest CiF piece would suggest an interest in Israel’s recent, brief military foray into the conflict, he characteristically doesn’t attempt to engage in anything approaching serious critical scrutiny over IAF operations to destroy sophisticated Iranian made weaponry heading to Hezbollah.   Similarly, he doesn’t bother devoting space in his column calculating the political, military and political factors at play in the regional threat faced by the Jewish state from Bashar al-Assad and his Shiite Islamist allies, Hezbollah and Iran.

Additionally, Greenwald doesn’t take a stab at weighing the costs and benefits of Israeli military action relative to the alternative of simply allowing the illegal militia occupying much of Lebanon – which has already accumulated an arsenal of thousands of sophisticated rockets – free rein to further threaten Israeli communities, and what remains of Lebanon’s tattered national sovereignty.

Indeed, in reading Glenn Greenwald it seems clear that he doesn’t much fancy such serious, critical analyses of the real and often vexing political and moral decisions faced by democratically elected heads of state.

Greenwald’s inspiration – the blogging muse which constantly ignites his frenetic prose – lay in deconstructing the confidence and righteousness of democracy’s defenders, and those otherwise possessed with the moral clarity which he seems to so detest.

He informs us in quite vivid language, yet in tellingly vague military terms, about of the damage caused by Israel’s bombs  - which he notes are “massive” - and the IDF’s military objective communicated by “Israeli defenders” – and, evidently, only “Israeli defenders” – of targeting weapons provided by Iran that were to end up in the hands of Hezbollah.

And, he then – again, avoiding directly weighing in on the policy decision at hand – evokes a straw man while lashing out at supporters of Israel’s action.

Because people who cheer for military action by their side like to pretend that they’re something more than primitive “might-makes-right” tribalists, the claim is being hauled out that Israel’s actions are justified by the “principle” that it has the right to defend itself from foreign weapons in the hands of hostile forces.

Greenwald then descends further into the absurd:

Or, for that matter, if Syria this week attacks a US military base on US soil and incidentally kills some American civilians (as Nidal Hasan did), and then cites as justification the fact that the US has been aiding Syrian rebels, would any establishment US journalist or political official argue that this was remotely justified?

Of course, Nidal Hasan didn’t “incidentally” kill some American civilians.  He entered the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, TX in 2009 and, armed with several high-caliber assault rifles, shouted “Allahu Akbar!” while open firing on a room crammed with fellow soldiers. Hasan “sprayed bullets at soldiers in a fanlike motion” before aiming at individual soldiers.  Nidal didn’t attack a “military base”, but engaged in a cold-blooded execution of as many people as possible.

Greenwald’s contemptuous critique continues:

Few things are more ludicrous than the attempt by advocates of US and Israeli militarism to pretend that they’re applying anything remotely resembling “principles”. Their only cognizable “principle” is rank tribalism: My Side is superior, and therefore we are entitled to do things that Our Enemies are not

One could say quite reasonably that this is the pure expression of the crux of US political discourse on such matters: they must abide by rules from which we’re immune, because we’re superior. So much of the pseudo-high-minded theorizing emanating from DC think thanks and US media outlets boils down to this adolescent, self-praising, tribalistic license: we have the right to do X, but they do not. 

…

This whole debate would be much more tolerable if it were at least honestly acknowledged that what is driving the discussion are tribalistic notions of entitlement and nothing more noble.

Greenwald, a review of his posts on the subject of terrorism suggests, doesn’t merely advance the post-modern cliché that ‘one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter‘, but believes that the term “terrorism” is racially loaded and that the suggestion of serious moral distinctions between political actors represents an expression of primitive triumphalism.  

Greenwald not only isn’t prepared to acknowledge that regimes in Damascus, Khartoum, Pyongyang, or Tehran (for instance) may have less regard for human rights than those in Washington, D.C. or Jerusalem, but that those possessing such beliefs are necessarily compromised by intellectually and morally debilitating ethnocentric biases.

As such, for Greenwald, the suggestion of considerable moral differences between Syria and Israel is necessarily loaded with the pathos of ”tribalistic license”.

A review of his latest post, as well as much of his work to date, demonstrates that he’s not prepared to engage in serious thinking regarding the threats posed in the region by the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis.  Nor does he possess the capacity to conduct a broader analysis of the Middle East – in the context of the Arab upheavals in general and the Syrian war in particular – and dissect the continuing democracy deficit in the region.

In his latest 800 word diatribe against Israel’s “supporters”, Greenwald doesn’t even briefly suggest why Israel’s limited military operation in Syria wasn’t justified, because such quotidian concerns – relating to how citizens of democratic nations can most effectively, and most ethically, defend themselves from hostile state and non-state actors – don’t seem to much interest him.

For a careful, sober political survey of the Israeli-Arab (and Israeli-Islamist) conflict, and the broader issues concerning the “Arab Spring”, you’ll have to seek the commentary of serious analysts - those more concerned with honestly assessing the political dynamics of the region than with engaging in ad hominem and often hysterical attacks against their opponents. 

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May 6 2013

Robert Fisk convinces himself that Israel has ‘dragged the West into Syrian war’

It seems that the ethically challenged British ‘journalist’ Robert Fisk wanted desperately to impute the worst motives to Israel in analyzing reports of up to a dozen IAF strikes over the last few days on advanced Syrian weapons to prevent their transfer to Hezbollah.  However, the weakness of his latest essay suggests that he may have found the case against Israel’s sober decision not to allow Iranian made Fateh-110 missiles to fall into the hands of the Shiite terror movement allied with Bashar al-Assad was simply too difficult.

File photo of the Iranian made Fateh 110 missile, which Israel reported targeted in raids into Syria over the weekend.

File photo of the Iranian made Fateh 110 missile, which Israel reportedly targeted in raids into Syria over the weekend.

Facts have not served much of an obstacle for Fisk in the past when desiring a particular conclusion to a story, and his May 5 piece in the Indy –  implicitly suggesting that Israel is dragging unwilling, ineffectual Western governments into foreign wars - seems to be no exception.

fisk

He begins by expressing skepticism over the ‘official’ reason for Israel’s reported raid on Bashar al-Assad’s weapons and military facilities:

The story is already familiar: the Israelis wanted to prevent a shipment of Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles reaching Hezbollah in Lebanon;  they were being sent by the Syrian government. According, at least, to a ‘Western intelligence source’. Anonymous, of course. And it opens the old question: why when the Syrian regime is fighting for its life would it send advanced missiles out of Syria?

Well, for starters, Iran and Hezbollah have both backed President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war, a conflict, now in its third year, which has claimed over 70,000 lives and produced over one million refugees. But as fighting between forces loyal to the Assad regime and the rebels escalates,  Assad has a powerful interest in facilitating the delivery of advanced weapons to Hezbollah in case he loses his grip on power and it becomes more difficult for the regime to channel weapons from Iran directly to Damascus.

Additionally, some analysts have argued that an even more heavily armed Hezbollah could become a powerful ally for Assad if he is forced to leave Damascus and take refuge in the Hezbollah-controlled northern Bekaa Valley.

Later, Fisk gets to the central thesis of his polemic:

Much more important, however, is the salient fact that Israel has now intervened in the Syrian war.  It may say it was only aiming at weapons destined for the Hezbollah – but these were weapons also being used against rebel forces in Syria.  By diminishing the regime’s supply of these weapons, it is therefore helping the rebels overthrow Bashar al-Assad. And since Israel regards itself as a Western nation – best friend and best US military ally in the Middle East, etc, etc – this means that “we” are now involved in the war, directly and from the air. 

Fisk’s specious logic nearly “Fisks” itself, as his entire argument – that Israel has dragged the West into a foreign war – seems largely based on the following argument cum non-sequitur:

1. Israel has attacked arms caches in Syria

2. Israel regards itself as a Western nation.

3. Therefore, Israel has dragged the West into the Syrian war.

The Indy contributor offers nothing else to suggest that Israeli strikes to prevent the transfer of deadly weapons to Syria has any influence whatsoever on the current debate in the US, or within other Western nations, over whether to intervene militarily in the civil war.

Of course, in addition to the speciousness of his logic, Fisk is essentially parroting Assad talking points – which, notably, was also employed in a highly misleading headline chosen by a major UK news corporation - that Israel is acting in alliance with “Islamist terrorists” to overthrow the regime, a charge so unserious that even Guardian Middle East Editor Ian Black dismissed it as “lacking any evidence”.

Finally, Fisk complains thusly:

Let’s see if the US and the EU condemn Israel’s air attacks. I doubt it. Which would mean, if we are silent, that we approve of them.

However, Fisk’s suggestion that the US has been “silent” on the reported attacks is flatly untrue.

President Obama stated, after news of IAF strikes on Syria was first reported, that Israel was justified to guard “against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terror groups like Hezbollah” and suggested that there is considerable US-Israeli coordination regarding the threat of weapons transfers in Syria – a clear expression of support for Israel’s right to self-defense which was also echoed yesterday by UK foreign secretary William Hague.

One of the few places outside of the Syrian propaganda ministry where Israel’s decision to prevent Hezbollah – an Iranian backed illegal militia which occupies large swaths of Lebanon – from acquiring more deadly weaponry represents a ‘dangerous provocation’ which may ignite another Western war in the Mid-East is the mind of Robert Fisk.

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Feb 21 2013

George Galloway boycotts 6 million Jews

To those who don’t believe that BDS and other forms anti-Zionist agitation often lead to racism, here’s a video posted today at the site of the Oxford University Student Union.

The Respect MP (and ‘Comment is Free’ contributor) had just begun to debate Eylon Aslan-Levy, a student at Brasenose, a constituent college of Oxford, on the motion ‘Israel should withdraw immediately from the West Bank’.

Here’s what transpired next.

 

Galloway had been “misled”.  He wouldn’t have agreed to participate if he knew he was debating an Israeli.  He said:

 “I don’t recognize Israel and I don’t debate with Israelis.

(I guess we can assume his policy of exclusion doesn’t extend to Muslim and Arab citizens of the state.)

So, out of a population of roughly 13.5 million Jews in the world, 6 million live in Israel. 

George Galloway, who has paid homage to Saddam Hussein, “glorified” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and even praised the Syrian butcher, Bashar al-Assad, doesn’t respect 44% of the world’s Jews.

Whilst there is always the danger of using gratuitous political analogies in even the most sincere attempts to characterize the extreme malevolence of the BDS movement, there is a passage in a book about European Jewish history I read a while back which used a darkly evocative term that seems, at least in this context, historically apt.

The book, ‘The fate of European Jews’, by Leni Yahil, characterized the effects of the Nuremberg Laws and other antisemitic measures enacted by Germany in the 1930s as condemning the nation’s Jews to a “social death” – an idea which resonates at least when contextualizing the political objectives of some of the most extreme anti-Israel activists.

George Galloway, by, in effect, boycotting and refusing to recognize the moral legitimacy of Israelis (and not merely the state or its institutions), is attempting to consign six million Jewish men, women and children to pariah status, and social exclusion from the international community.

This is the hideously racist moral place the malign obsession with the Jewish state – often the sine qua non of the BDS movement – inevitably leads.    

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Jan 31 2013

More than a cartoon: What Jews talk about when they talk about antisemitism

The Gerald Scarfe Sunday Times cartoon controversy has followed a familiar pattern, with some arguing that the depiction of the bloody trowel wielding Israeli Prime Minister torturing innocent souls – published on Holocaust Memorial Day – evoked the classic antisemitic blood libel, while others (including Guardian contributors and cartoonists) dissented, claiming that Scarfe had no racist intent and was merely critiquing the policies of a head of state who happened to be a Jew.

In response to some who have noted, in Scarfe’s defense, that he had previously depicted Syria’s Assad using a similar blood motif, Stephen Pollard of The JC aptly noted: “But there’s never been an anti-Alawite blood libel, and the context matters. The blood libel is central to the history of antisemitism.”

Though Scarfe may have indeed possessed no antisemitic intent whatsoever, Pollard is stressing that the effect of the cartoon simply can’t be ignored, and that historical context matters.

When we talk about antisemitism at the Guardian and ‘Comment is Free’ on this blog we’re not claiming to possess some sort of political mentalism – a piercing moral intuition which grants us access to the souls of their journalists and contributors.  Similarly, we’re not suggesting that we can ever tell with any degree of certainty that, when we argue that criticism of Israel crosses the line to antisemitism, the writer who’s the focus of our ire is necessarily haunted by dark Judeophobic thoughts.

Rather, many of us who talk seriously about antisemitism are skilled at identifying common tropes, narratives and graphic depictions of Jews which are based on prejudices, stereotypes and mythology and which have historically been employed by those who have engaged in cognitive or physical war against Jews.

Though I’m now an Israeli, an apt analogy on the moral necessity of understanding and being sensitive about the racist context of seemingly benign ideas can be derived from my experience growing up in America.

Those who grew up in the US and inherited not the guilt but the moral legacy of slavery and segregation intuitively understand that we owe African-Americans an earnest commitment to strenuously avoid employing the linguistic, cultural and political currency of racism’s tyrannical reign.  Though race relations have matured immeasurably by any standard, and codified bigotry all but eliminated, there are, nonetheless, unwritten prohibitions against language which, even though often unintended, hearkens back to the past, evoking the haunting memory of the nation’s past sins.

In America, comedians avoid black-face routines, in which white performers create a stereotyped caricature of a black person.  A mainstream newspaper wouldn’t publish a cartoon depicting an African-American as lazy and shiftless, nor would any publication present a black public figure (in any context) as  a boot licking  ’Uncle Tom‘.  And, someone using the N-word (in public or private) would be rightfully socially ostracized or at least stigmatized as crude racist.

Such political taboos in America have developed organically over time in response to a quite particular historical chapter, and are recognized by most as something akin to an unwritten social contract on the issue of race.  White Americans can not ever fully understand black pain, the learned cognitive responses from their collective consciousness, but it is reasonable of them to expect that we not recklessly tread, even if without malice, on their sacred shared memory.  

Further, whites who honor this implied covenant – and avoid evoking such narratives and imagery – by and large don’t bemoan the so-called “restrictions” placed on their artistic or intellectual expression, or complain that African-Americans are stifling their free speech.  Rather, such unwritten rules, social mores and ethical norms about race are typically understood to represent something akin to a moral restitution for a previous generation’s crimes.  While in the US, the First Amendment affords legal protection to those who would engage in anti-black hate speech, it is largely understood that responsible citizenship often requires self-restraint – the greatness of a people measured by what they are permitted to do, but decide not to in order to preserve national harmony, what’s known in Judaism as Shalom bayit.  

When Jews talk seriously about antisemitism they are asking those who don’t wish to be so morally implicated to avoid needlessly poisoning the political environment which Jews inhabit.

They are appealing to the better angels of their neighbors’ nature by asking them not to carelessly conjure calumnies such as the “danger” to the world of Jewish power or conspiracies , Jews’ “disloyalty” to the countries where they live, that Jews share collective guilt for the sins of a few, that they’ve come to morally resemble their Nazi persecutors, or that Jews intentionally spill the blood of innocents.

In short, we are asking that decent people avoid employing canards which represented the major themes in Europe’s historic persecution of Jews, and which, tragically, still have currency on the extreme left, the extreme right, and, especially, in much of the Arab and Muslim world today.

The Scarfe/Sunday Times row is about more than the cartoon itself, and it is certainly not about the “right” to offend. It’s about sober but passionate pleas by a minuscule minority that decent people not afflict the historically afflicted, and to recognize their moral obligations to not provide aid and comfort to anti-Jewish racists.  

We are asking genuine anti-racists to resist becoming, even if unintentionally, intellectual partners or political fellow travelers with those who trade in the lethal narratives and toxic calumnies associated with the resilient Judeophobic hatred which has caused us immeasurable pain, horrid suffering and indescribable calamities through the ages. 

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Nov 17 2012

‘Comment is Free’ contributor: Israeli leaders murder Palestinian children to score electoral points

Up to 37,000 people (mostly civilians) have been killed in the Syrian civil war since an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime erupted 20 months ago.

During the Libyan Civil War, roughly 15,000 were killed.

At least 846 Egyptians (mostly civilians) were killed during the Egyptian revolution - the 3 week uprising which toppled Hosni Mubarak. Many were killed by  police forces “shooting protesters in the head and chest with live ammunition.”

Around 219 were killed during street protests in Tunisia. 

The death toll thus far in operation ‘Pillar of Defense’ has been 40 Gazans and 3 Israelis.

But, guess which country Egyptian ‘Comment is Free’ contributor  demonizes as vicious killers of Arabs?

In ‘Gaza is no longer alone‘, Soueif not only advances the insidious narrative that Israel’s operation ‘Pillar of Defense’ was launched by Netanyahu to win an election (a meme parroted by Guardian journalists Harriet Sherwood and Simon Tisdall) but characterizes the conflict as a “killing spree” inspired by Zionist blood lust.

Soueif writes the following, in a post which was highlighted at the Guardian’s ‘live blog’ on the conflict:

“Israel has always sold itself to the west as a democracy in a sea of fanaticism. The Arab spring has undermined that narrative, possibly fatally. So Israeli politicians have been pushing hard for a war against Iran and, in the interim, they’ve gone on a killing spree in Gaza.

…

If they had wanted to instigate violence against themselves they could not have done better than to assassinate Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas commander who’s prevented attacks on Israelis for the past five years. With his killing they’ve raised the probability of these attacks resuming, as is happening now. They can then try to hijack the narrative of the Arab spring and wind the clock back to “Islamist terrorists v civilised Israelis”. Meanwhile, they take the heat off Bashar al-Assad’s murderous activities in Syria – and, of course, score hawkish points for Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak before the coming elections.

But they have served to remind the world that Israel is a democracy where politicians may order the murder of children to score electoral points. [emphasis added]

So, for Soueif, murdering Palestinian children is quite popular among the Jewish electorate.

The enormity of this smear – a staggering moral inversion which evidently was unchallenged by Guardian editors – is difficult to even fathom.

Speeches which literally call for the murder of ‘every last Jew on earth‘ have been made by Hamas leaders and other leading Islamist figures - calls for genocide which can be found on several reputable websites.

And, such extreme, homicidal antisemitism isn’t confined to Palestinian leadership, as suicide bombing, for instance, against Israeli civilians remains disturbingly popular among the Palestinian electorate.

In fact, after Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank butchered five members of the Fogel family in 2011 – brutally stabbing to death parents Udi and Ruth and their children aged 11, 4 and 3 months – there was celebrating on the streets of Gaza.

A Palestinian man distributes sweets in the streets of the southern Gaza town of Rafah to celebrate murder of five Israelis (Getty Images)

Not only is there no celebrating on the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem when Israeli strikes against Hamas terror targets inadvertently injure or kill Palestinian civilians, but the IDF goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties during anti-terror operations.  This is one of the reasons why, according one leading British military expert, the ratio of civilian deaths to combatants killed in Gaza wars has been unprecedentedly low.

While there are no Israeli electoral benefits for causing Palestinian civilian casualties, you have to wonder which political crowd Guardian editors are trying to appease by sanctioning Soueif’s hideous smear against the Jewish state.

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Oct 12 2012

Patriotism, real & imagined: Glenn Greenwald on American “bloodlust” & Iran’s ‘peace’ bomb

Mural in Iran

One of the greatest conceits of Americans on the far left who never tire of demonizing their own country is that their obsessive criticism is actually an act of love.

They often suggest that, despite engaging in the most vitriolic, incendiary rhetoric about their own nation -critiques completely out of proportion, and devoid of context – they are the true patriots.

For such commentators, of course, crimes committed by other nations and political actors don’t concern them much.

Glenn Greenwald is a perfect example of this brand of American politics.

In Greenwald’s anti-American universe, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 is not just a mistake, but is arguably on the same moral plane as the Nazi conquest of Europe.

He believes that America is racist against blacks and Latinos by design, that US Muslims are the victims of routine, systemic and horrific injustices, and that most Americans are fooled by the illusion that they enjoy real democracy. 

In his world, Bradley Manning, a U.S. soldier charged with “illegally downloading [and disseminating] tens of thousands of classified U.S. military and State Department documents, is not a traitor who betrayed his oath, but an American hero deserving of a medal.

And, naturally, Islamist extremists and their apologists throughout the Arab and Muslim world aren’t enemies of progressive thought – and a clear danger to the West – but victims of “extreme violence” at the hands of the US and Israel.

Greenwald, in an Oct. 2 piece at ‘Comment is Free’, ‘The true reason US fears Iranian nukes: They can deter attacks‘, explains the ‘real’ reason why the US is attempting to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

“Every now and then, they reveal the real reason: Iranian nuclear weapons would prevent the US from attacking Iran at will, and that is what is intolerable. The latest person to unwittingly reveal the real reason for viewing an Iranian nuclear capacity as unacceptable was GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the US’s most reliable and bloodthirsty warmongers.”

Greenwald then quotes Graham, the “bloodthirsty warmonger”, explaining why Iranian nuclear weapons should be feared:

“They [the Iranians] have two goals: one, regime survival. The best way for the regime surviving, in their mind, is having a nuclear weapon, because when you have a nuclear weapon, nobody attacks you.”

Greenwald then sums up what he believes to be Graham’s argument:

“[Graham believes that] we cannot let Iran acquire nuclear weapons because if they get them, we can no longer attack them when we want to and can no longer bully them in their own region.

Graham’s answer is consistent with what various American policy elites have said over the years about America’s enemies generally and Iran specifically: the true threat of nuclear proliferation is that it can deter American aggression.

The No 1 concern of American national security planners appears to be that countries may be able to prevent the US from attacking them at will, whether to change their regimes or achieve other objectives. In other words, Iranian nuclear weapons could be used to prevent wars – ones started by the US – and that, above all, is what we must fear.” [emphasis added]

Yes, Greenwald is suggesting that an Iranian nuclear bomb could actually serve to prevent wars.

Such political calculus, however, completely ignores the fact that – far from wanting to avoid war – the Iranians would likely use their nuclear umbrella to make resistance to their ongoing wars throughout the Middle East more difficult to deter and combat.

Iran’s foreign military adventures, aimed at exporting the Islamic revolution by arming, funding and training terrorists – and assisting in state terror – around the world (including the Taliban, Hezbollah,  Hamas, Shia militias in Iraq, and even by sending Iranian forces to assist Bashar al-Assad’s bloody crackdown in Syria), would be emboldened if Western governments faced a nuclear armed Islamic Republic.

Nonetheless, Greenwald sees Iran, the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world and one of the worst human rights violators on the planet, as the victim of American aggression and imperialism.

Greenwald, schooled by Noam Chomsky, believes that the Islamist rage which fuels terror attacks against US forces is understandable, and that the obsessive anti-Americanism represents an organic reaction to their victimhood.

Indeed, Greenwald perfectly represents the anti-American left, those who mock Americans for their love of country, and their belief that they live in a vibrant and prosperous democracy, while convincing their fellow citizens that the US is, in fact, one of the worst violators of human rights at home and around the globe.

Critics such as Greenwald arrogantly declare America’s every fault and misstep as proof that she is not the single most powerful force for freedom.  

However, don’t be tempted by his faux-progressive, completely ahistorical revisionism.

Though, to their credit, Americans are indeed prone to self-criticism, as realists they need to acknowledge that their country’s faults are small in comparison to her contributions.  Pride in America is indeed well founded.

While protest is clearly consistent with patriotism, it is unpatriotic to engage in gratuitous criticism completely divorced from any reasonable sense of balance or proportion.

It is not enough for such professional critics to love a mere “ideal” of America, or some lofty abstraction disconnected from the actual place Americans call home. True patriots love the land, the rises and falls, the real history of an entirely human people – the particular, imperfect citizens of the United States.

Real American patriots, and, indeed, all genuine liberals, would acknowledge and properly contextualize the reality of America’s faults, while cherishing (and fiercely defending) American values and enthusiastically celebrating the nation’s contributions to freedom and democracy in the world.

America is, of course, maddeningly imperfect, but, by any reasonable political standard, is also one of the least imperfect lands on earth. 

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Sep 24 2012

In every generation: Guardian advances historically familiar refrain that Israel is ‘beating war drums’

The United States has long regarded Iran as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.  

Most recently U.S. officials blamed Iranian sponsor Hezbollah for a deadly suicide bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists

Indeed Iran backs many such Islamist groups – including the Lebanese Shiite militants of Hezbollah (which Iran helped found in the 1980s), which has an arsenal of 60,000 rockets aimed at Israel. The U.S. Defense Department estimates Iranian support to Hezbollah at roughly $100 million to $200 million annually.

They also provide financial support and training to Palestinian terror groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - groups which have killed Israelis in terror attacks and fired thousands of rockets into Israeli communities over the years.

And Iran is suspected of providing training and arms to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, including “small arms and associated ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives.”

Iranian leaders have also openly declared that their forces were “propping up Syrian President Basher Assad’s murderous regime”. Members of the Iranian Qods Force are helping Assad fight the rebels. “We are proud to defend Syria, which constitutes a resistance to the Zionist entity,” Jafari told reporters.

Additionally, a semi-official Iranian religious institution announced it was increasing the reward to $3.3 million for anyone who acts on a fatwa and murders British author Salman Rushdie.

Most disturbingly, a website with close ties to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khomenei recently outlined why it would be religiously acceptable to kill all Jews in Israel – a doctrine, as reported by the Mail Online, which details why the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of all its people would be legally and morally justified, and in accordance with Islamic doctrine. [emphasis added]

As the Washington Times reported:

“The article, written by Alireza Forghani, a strategy specialist in Khomeini camp, is now being run on most state-owed conservative sites, including the Revolutionary Guard’s Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses the doctrine.”

The government approved essay on Fars News Agency (seen here, which is in Farsi, though you can read it via Google Translate) cites the last census showing Israel has a population of 7.5 million, of which roughly 5.8 million are Jewish. Then it breaks down the districts with the highest concentration of Jews, indicating that three cities (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa) contain over 60 percent of the Jewish population that Iran could target.

So, Iran is perhaps the largest exporter of terrorism on the planet, supplies terror groups with deadly weaponry to use against Israeli civilians, sends arms, as well as their own soldiers, to Syrian to kill and brutalize the population, and has issued a fatwa of sorts on the lives of six million Jews.

If you were to think that this sound like an aggressive, militaristic, malevolent regime which is constantly beating the drums for war, you’d be wrong. At least according to the Guardian.

The Guardian’s security correspondent, Julian Borger, published the following on Sept. 4:

The opening passage sets the tone for the piece:

The odds against an Israeli military strike on Iran in the next few months appear to be lengthening, and perhaps the strongest evidence comes from none other than Binyamin Netanyahu, the man who has beaten the war drums loudest over the past few months. [emphasis added]

The moral inversion is simply stunning. 

Netanyahu, along with other Israeli leaders and the citizens of the state, are not beating the drums for war, but merely acting as any responsible state would in the face of an Iranian regime promising the Jewish state’s annihilation (while developing the nuclear means to do so), and engaged in proxy wars against the state on its norther and southern borders.

Such rocket attacks, which have killed, injured and terrorized thousands of Israelis, along with belligerence threats by their top leaders – which include calls to genocide – are more than a cause belli, but represent acts of war, and most nations on the receiving end of such aggression would have launched retaliatory strikes long ago.

Indeed, how many missile attacks from its northern or southern border, by terror groups committed to its destruction, would the United States absorb before retaliating and neutralizing the threat? 

Further, recall that in October 1962 the U.S. was prepared to launch a major military assault upon discovering that Cuban and Soviet governments had built bases in Cuba for a number of ballistic nuclear missiles with the ability to strike most of the United States.  The U.S. deemed it unacceptable, demanded that the Soviets remove the missiles and initiated a naval blockade of all Soviet ships.

The Soviets, sensing American resolve, and aware of the massive might of the U.S. military, eventually backed down and removed all nuclear weapons from Cuba.

President John F. Kennedy swore an oath to protect and defend the United States from all enemies, and his decisions during those tense 13 days in October were thoroughly consistent with his duty to protect his nation. Most of the world, it should be noted, was squarely behind the U.S. response to the dangerous Soviet gambit 100 miles from American shores.

Unlike the U.S., however, Israel is not a world superpower, so must be much more judicious in both its diplomatic maneuvering (soft power) and its potential use of force (military power) to neutralize the Iranian threat.

In June of 1967, when Prim Minister Levi Eshkol was debating with his cabinet how best to respond to a massive build up of 230,000 Arab troops   and thousands of tanks on Israel’s porous borders – buttressed by threats of annihilation form Arab leaders in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad – U.S. President Johnson told Eshkol, who was still hoping for U.S. military help to prevent a war, rebuffed Israeli requests for military aid and diplomatic approval for an Israeli preemptive attack on Egypt.

Though Israeli military officials were convinced they couldn’t absorb a first strike by the combine Arab forces amassed along their borders, and that their only hope for survival was a such a preemptive attack, Eshkol received a cable from President Johnson warning against such an Israeli attack, warning that “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone.”

In the early hours of June 5, Israel acted, destroying the Egyptian Air Force on the ground in a matter of hours, and gaining a stunning victory over the combined might of Egypt, Jordan, Syria (and smaller contingents from other Arab states) in six days of fighting.

Israel, under Eshkol, was concerned about public opinion, and the need not to unnecessarily alienate their U.S. ally, but his overriding concern was the survival of the Third Jewish Commonwealth.

Similarly, today, Israel doesn’t have the luxury to outsource their defense to another country, nor concern themselves too much with disapproval, and sanctimonious outrage, expressed by diplomats and intellectuals safe in their New York and London salons.

If Jewish history has taught us anything it’s that when our enemies threaten us with destruction they should be taken at their word; that we must be masters of our destiny; there is nothing noble, moral or righteous in Jewish victimhood; and we simply can not surrender to the dangerous vices of resignation, fatalism or moral vanity.

Though in every generation there are those who seek our destruction, in this generation we have the military means to prevent such malevolent designs, and, if need be, Israel won’t hesitate to exercise that power.

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Sep 2 2012

The Guardian tells a porky about the Golan Heights

A guest post by AKUS

(“to tell a porky” — tell a small lie, to fib – rhyming slang? Porky pie/tell a lie)

As we have watched Harriet Sherwood wrestle with the problem of reporting from Israel while possessing very little knowledge about the country and region (and unable to speak Hebrew or Arabic), it has become apparent that she also has a problem with statistics and geopolitics.

Even if Sherwood and the Guardian’s sub editors have all ten fingers and all ten toes, it seems it’s difficult for them to use numbers greater than 20 with any accuracy at all. She and the Guardian also have trouble remembering which bits of Israel are “occupied” and which are annexed, like Jerusalem and the Golan. They also have a major problem simply checking the facts behind the porkies they tell about Israel.

Recently Sherwood bravely ventured up on to the Golan Heights, reporting from Majdal Shams, only 40 km from Damascus, that the Golan Heights [are] divided by support for Assad’s Syria.

She (or, as often seems to be the case, one of the lazy, biased sub-editors at Guardian HQ in London) wrote in the sub-header:

In the Israeli-occupied area, where most people call themselves Syrian, Bashar al-Assad opponents say they are being intimidated.

One problem with that sub-header is that Golan is not “occupied” but, rather, annexed by Israel – a part of the state. Just as the Guardian has had problems finding Israel’s capital, it seems to have a problem understanding which bits of Israel’s territory go where.

A second problem is with the math. A very good estimate for the population of the Golan is that there are approximately 40,000 people living in the towns, villages, kibbutzim, and moshavim there. Of those, Sherwood mentions, correctly, that about 20,000 are non-Druze Israelis (she refers to them incorrectly as “Israeli Jewish settlers”), and therefore about 20,000 may be Druze. 

But this is a much bigger number than the number of fingers and toes Sherwood or a sub-editor at the Guardian most likely has, so a porky creeps in.

As Sherwood could easily have discovered, as many as 10% of the Druze have Israeli citizenship, so only a possible 18,000 do not have Israeli citizenship and may be “Syrians”.  

Additionally, children born to Druze automatically have Israeli citizenship.  So, if they are included in the count of all Druze, the number of adult Druze may be less than 18,000.  

Also, a very reliable source has informed me that the real number of Druze adults secretly holding Israeli citizenship for convenience or “just in case” has been rising, especially during the last 18 months as they’ve gotten a better idea of what it might be like to live in Syria rather than in the “Zionist entity”.

So, taking into account 20,000 non-Druze Israelis (Jews and others) plus 2,000 Druze Israelis, only about 18,000 potentially “Syrian Druze” can be counted on the Golan. With a high degree of confidence I can say that it would be hard to find enough non-Druze and Druze Israelis calling themselves Syrian to make Harriet’s (or the Guardian’s) claim that  “most people [on the annexed Golan Heights] call themselves Syrian” true.

Now, you may think this is nit-picking. But the reason for this porky is that it is rather easy to ignore those “other Israelis” and tell your biased little fib when you do not really see Israelis as “people”, but only as amorphous “settlers”.

This is the third problem for Sherwood and the drones back in the UK. Not only do they struggle with simple math and geography, they find it difficult to remember that Israelis are people too.

So it is time for yet another shame-faced Guardian correction. To help them, I’ll write it for them:

 

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Jul 22 2012

The Guardian’s lunatic fringe: Ian Williams lobbied for Syria to join UN Security Council (UPDATED)

A major H/T to UN Watch for pointing out that Guardian journalist Ian Williams was “one of the figures on the international stage shilling loudest for Bashar al-Assad’s election to the U.N. Security Council”  in 2001.

Williams is a prolific anti-Israel conspiratorialist and a long-time contributor to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs; a publication known for consistently running interference for Libya, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East dictatorships – and also for advancing explicit antisemitic tropes.

Per CAMERA:

“The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, for example, regularly describes American supporters of Israel with such words as “cancer,” “alien intrusion,” “Israel-firsters,” “subversion,” and “perversion.” It has referred to the State Department and Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory.” It has alleged that Israel’s “friends in the US government are working secretly for Israeli interests … against the interests of the US,” and that some “governmental and congressional personalities [are] so obsessed with helping Israel that they are ready to betray their colleagues, their employers and even their country.” 

Like any Guardianista in good standing, Williams - who once praised in a 2010 CiF essay the late Hezbollah spiritual leader, and Holocaust denier, Hussein Fadhallah as (yes) a “liberal” –  is continually outraged by the reactionary forces of the American pro-Israel community; an anger he expressed in the following witticism in a January 2011 CiF essay titled “Obama must call Israeli settlements illegal“:

“Obama…must face not only a rabidly pro-Israeli Republican party but also a majority of his own party that would sign up to a resolution declaring the moon to be made of blue cheese if the Israeli lobby demanded it.”

Williams’ January CiF piece also evoked the ugly stereotype of the ruthless, money-grubbing Jew.

 ”[Zionists such as]Irving Moskowitz…[who] recycles the proceeds of inner-city gambling in the US to buy and demolish property in East Jerusalem, such as the Shepherd Hotel….”

A Williams’ essay at CiF in November 2011, titled “Obama will rue his lack of principle on Palestine’s UNESCO membership“, argued that only the “lunatic fringe” would oppose the Palestinians’ UNESCO bid.

Regarding Williams’ role in pimping for Syria, UN Watch notes:

“Writing a few months before the U.N. vote, Williams’s role in the well-circulated Washington report was to bolster Bashar al-Assad’s chances of victory by pressuring U.S. State Department officials to drop any idea of opposing Syria’s bid — which is exactly what American diplomats did last year, successfully, to keep Assad off the Human Rights Council.

Using the same methods as the Assads themselves, Williams reframed the discussion away from Syria’s despicable record by pointing at the Israeli bogeyman. It worked: Syria was elected by a huge majority of 160 out of 177 votes.”

Williams, in his WRMA essay defending Syria’s bid to be on the Security Council, wrote:

“When Israeli politicians get a bee in their bonnet, the buzzing usually can be heard loudly around the domes of Capitol Hill. The credibility of this Israeli administration, however, must leave something to be desired—or perhaps the Knesset’s angry froth has subsided in the face of reality. For, regardless of Israel’s campaign to discredit Syria, Damascus is pretty much assured of a place in the Security Council next year.

The Council’s temporary seats are allocated according to regional groups. Because the Arab states straddle Asia and Africa they have a complex rotation system which ensures that candidate states usually are elected unopposed. To block the election, Israel and the U.S. would have had to find another Asian Arab state prepared to contest the seat. Amazingly enough, none of them is rushing to fulfill Israeli whims.”

…

“Israeli accusations about Syria being a “terrorist” state will carry little weight in the international community, coming as they do from a country whose cabinet has just blithely sat down and publicly authorized the assassination of several dozen Palestinian leaders and officials—not to mention a country that itself is in defiance of so many U.N. resolutions! So far, the State Department seems wisely to have resisted any urgings to launch a campaign against the Syrian candidacy that would so surely fail. Arab unity is often almost an oxymoron, but in this case, at least, it should hold the line.”

As UN Watch observed:

“How is it that the Assad regime, led by father and son, was able to retain the international legitimacy needed to retain power over 42 years, despite perpetrating systematic brutality, such as the killing of an estimated 20,000 citizens of Hama in February 1982, and being listed as a leading state sponsor of terrorism?

A key factor was that the world body mandated to hold such criminal regimes to account — the United Nations — turned a blind eye to Syrian murder.”

The current death toll in Assad’s bloody campaign against the Syrian opposition is now reported to top 17,000 – nearly 12,000 of whom have been civilians.

Interestingly, Williams’ Guardian profile notes the following:

“[Williams] is currently writing a book on the Americans who blame the UN for all the US’s ills.”

Perhaps Williams can write a follow-up on Brits who blame Israel for the Middle East’s woes, while advocating that brutal Arab dictators who slaughter their own citizens should gain important leadership roles at the UN.

UPDATE: Williams left a comment beneath the original UN Watch post which motivated ours.  Here it is.

Related articles
Jul 4 2012

BBC and the Guardian cover for Baby Assad

Cross posted by our friends at Simply Jews

(By now it should be Bloody Baby Assad, of course, but the force of habit…)

Anyway, I am really not into the issue of biased/not biased BBC and Guardian’s obsession with all things anti-Zionist. This case is so ridiculous it’s too funny to get on a high horse of injured dignity. The story of the Turkish F-4 downed by Syria is probably coming to a close with profuse expressions of regret from Baby Assad in his interview given to a Turkish newspaper. The world newspapers are reporting Assad’s words in slightly different translations. Let’s go to a Turkish source, Hurriyet, first:

“The plane was using a corridor which Israeli planes have used three times before. Soldiers shot it down because we did not see it on our radar and because information was not given.”

“Of course I might have been happy if this had been an Israeli plane,” Assad said

Now let’s check out CNN:

“The Turkish people are our brothers and something that would make them sad would never make me happy and it did not. If this was an Israeli plane, of course, I would have been happy.”

Fair enough. And what about Israeli Ynet? Here it goes:

“Soldiers shot it down because we did not see it on our radar and because information was not given. Of course I might have been happy if this had been an Israeli plane,” Assad said.

Now check out the articles on the subject by BBC and The Guardian. Hint – search for the word “Israel”…

Tee hee… really!

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Jun 26 2012

‘Comment is Free’ or PressTV? CiF contributor portrays Iran as a force for peace & reform in Syria

Even by Guardian standards the propaganda value of a recent ‘Comment is Free’ essay, June 26, titled “Iran is trying to broker a political solution to Syria“, by Mohammad Ataie, is off the charts.

The first clue was the breathtaking claim in the strap line:

Consistent with the title, Ataie, an Iranian journalist with Diplomacy-i-Irani, argues that Iran is working tirelessly to end the violence in Syria, a brutal crackdown on opposition by Bashar al-Assad which has resulted in a death toll of up to 15,000.

Here are some of the passages in his essay worth noting:

Iran’s leaders are frustrated with the slow pace of reform in Syria:

“But, particularly since the recent parliamentary election in Syria, there has been an increasing sense of frustration in Tehran with the sluggish Assad-led political reforms.”

Iran, the peacemaker:

“During the past few months, Iranian diplomats have contacted the Syrian opposition to assist the Assad-led reform and facilitate negotiations between the president and the opposition.”

Iran, the champion of political dissent:

“The recent “multi-party parliamentary election” – which was devoid of meaningful participation by opposition groups – and the formation of the new Syrian government by a member of the ruling Ba’ath party, have in particular disenchanted Iranian officials with Assad’s strategy for a political solution.”

Iran opposes the violent crackdown by Syria, and urgently wants nothing more than to end the bloodshed:

“Iran, though certainly intent on safeguarding its key regional ally, does not see its fundamental interest in a security crackdown, but rather in reform and serious dialogue between Assad and the opposition.”

“Iran is not on the same side of the Syrian conflict as the US and its allies, but it does have a big stake in ending the bloodshed and finding a political solution to the crisis.”

Of course, anyone familiar with Iran’s military assistance to Assad would immediately understand that Ataie’s claims are nothing but fiction, a polemic designed to deceive the gullible or provide comfort to those who view Iran sympathetically as an anti-imperialist counterweight to U.S. hegemony.

It’s simply not in dispute that  Iran continues to provide major assistance to Assad specifically, per a recent Reuters report, “to help him suppress anti-government protests, [and is providing] high-tech surveillance technology, guns and ammunition”, according to U.S. and European security officials.

(Photo–http://www.presstv.ir/detail.fa/144902.html)

A well documented report just published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, titled “The role of Iranian Security Forces in the Syrian Bloodshed“, details the Islamic Republic’s assistance to the Assad regime.

Among their findings: 

  • “Amid the…massacres of the civilian population in various parts of the country, Iranian military, propaganda, and economic assistance keeps flowing in, and its aim is to help President Bashar al-Assad survive. Iran views the confrontation in Syria as a critical battleground with the West regarding the reshaping of the Middle East and its own role in the region as a key, vital and influential player.” [emphasis added]
  • “Hizbullah weapons are serving – under Iran’s command – as part of Assad’s apparatus of violent repression. Esmail Ghani, deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corp – Qods Force (IRGC-QF), is the most senior Iranian military official so far to have revealed its activity in Syria. In an interview…he acknowledged that elements of the IRGC-QF have been involved in Syrian events.” [emphasis added]
  • “This marked the first time a senior IRGC-QF commander had confirmed reports by Syrian opposition elements and Western sources about active involvement of elite units of the IRGC-QF, together with the Syrian army, in violent repression of the protests. The opposition, especially the Free Syrian Army, sometimes presents testimonies of direct Iranian involvement in the fighting.  Iranians and  Hizbullah operatives have been captured in the main centers of fighting including Homs. In their confessions they admit that they belong to the IRGC-QF and were sent to put down the disturbances in Syria.” [emphasis added]
  • “Iranian assistance to the repression of the Syrian uprising, which has included consultation as well as guidance in the “field,” began shortly after the protests first erupted. This aid was already reported by Iranian opposition elements, who claimed that the repression in Syria was being carried out by a Syrian contingent of the IRGC-QF that had been operating in the country, and had been responsible over time for military, intelligence, and logistical assistance to Hizbullah in Lebanon.”
  • “In a May 29, 2012, press briefing, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland pointed to Iran’s involvement in the Houla massacre, linking the Qods Force to the incident and implicitly to other incidents in Syria as well. She noted the great similarity in structure and operational methods between the Shabiha forces that stood behind the massacre, according to various testimonies,  and the Basij, the volunteer arm of the IRGC-QF.” [emphasis added]

Finally, Ataie’s CiF essay included this claim:

“In the eyes of Iran…civil war and sectarian violence in Syria only benefit Israel.” [emphasis added]

So, based on this criteria, is it now safe to characterize the Islamic Republic of Iran itself as a tool of the Zionists?

Jun 8 2012

A festering ‘SOHR’: Does the word “journalism” still apply to the Guardian?

A guest post by AKUS

Scanning the ME Live blog apparently run by Brian Whitaker I noticed a comment by SantaMoniker about one of the sources for a report repeated on the blog. The source was an organization called “The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR)”. If you are interested, the report is at 11:02 a.m., and starts:

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that report, as far as it goes, and the report may even be true, but SantaMoniker took the trouble to look up the “British-based group” that provided the update. This is what she found about this “group” of one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Observatory_for_Human_Rights

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR from herein) is a UK-based group opposed to the rule of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. …SOHR is run out of a two-bedroom terraced home in Coventry by one man using the name Rami Abdulrahman (or Rami Abdul Rahman, or Rami Abdelrahman).

So this “group” is nothing more than a one-man blogger operating out of one of the bedrooms in his two bedroom home in Coventry, England, reading and repackaging other peoples’ blogs and tweets.

It gets better – the Wiki reference was provided, it appears, by someone not very fond of “Rami Abdulrahman (or Rami Abdul Rahman, or Rami Abdelrahman)” who noted, I feel a little unkindly, though it cracked me up, that

“He also runs a clothes shop”

So the Guardian’s source is a draper operating out of a two room house somewhere in Coventry retyping other peoples’ tweets …

But it gets worse (or, as SantaMoniker noted, funnier, depending on your sense of humor). The long knives of inter-factional fighting soon come out.

Apparently,  “Rami Abdulrahman (or Rami Abdul Rahman, or Rami Abdelrahman)”  is not even the blogger’s name, something that disturbs whoever provided the Wiki entry, but not Mr. Whitaker or the Guardian:

The website Syriahr.org now claims that Rami Abdulrahman is in fact called Osama Ali Suleiman and he merely used the name Rami Abdulrahman, a pen-name that the website claims to have been initially used by all “SOHR members”

That’s not all. Syriahr.org  is an “organisation claiming to be the ‘real’ SOHR”. Mind you, I could not find a web poage for this “real” SOHR. Anyway,  the “real SOHR” accuses “Rami Abdulrahman (or Rami Abdul Rahman, or Rami Abdelrahman or Osama Ali Suleiman)” of Assange-like tactics – hacking into its former website ….

Syriahr.org claims that Abdulrahman was able to wrest control of the SOHR website Syriahr.net in August 2011 by changing all the passwords

So in response the “real SOHR” stole a march against the hated hacker by the brilliant move of changing its URL from Syriah.net to Syriah.org!  

Apparently in response to this attempt to undermine its legitimacy, syriah.net now claims that it is “The Only Official Website of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” (TOOWSOHR?). So there!

It gets worse. Not content with hacking Syriah.net, Syriah.org adds another accusation of perfidy aimed at its rival:

“Rami Abdulrahman (or Rami Abdul Rahman, or Rami Abdelrahman or Osama Ali Suleiman)” proceeded to make himself the chairman of the SOHR …

(O, the horror of it)!!

To drive its points home, Syriah.org decided to unleash its artillery and tell readers a few home truths about “Rami Abdulrahman (or Rami Abdul Rahman, or Rami Abdelrahman or Osama Ali Suleiman)” and the “unreal” SOHR by impugning his qualifications for the job of Chairman of his one-man group:

This new website Syriahr.org then proceeded to launch a smear campaign against Abdulrahman, claiming he only had a “very modest level of education”,

If that is not bad enough, the “Real” SOHR” decided also to condemn his…“lack of professionalism”.

Just in case you missed the point, they brought out the heaviest artillery they are, even “alleging that he is a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party”.

Of course, anyone belonging to a “Workers’ Party” is immediately “Persona grata” at the Guardian, so this tactic may have backfired on the “real SOHR”.

Despite all this, back at the Guardian, ME Live continues on its merry way providing dubious information to its readers, though the murder of thousands in Syria garners but a fraction of the readership of Rachel Shabi’s disgusting attempt to suggest Israel is a proto Nazi state (136 comments vs 375, one with 1,821 recommends for agreeing that the white colonialist Israelis have no right to Israel).

So, following SantaMoniker’s lead, I decided to take a look at additional sources on Whittaker’s “ME Live Blog”. For example, I found this site providing information: 

The Damascus Center for Human Rights.

Sound impressive, right? So, who are they?

Our board:

- Dr. Burhan Ghaliun
Director of the Center for Contemporary Oriental Studies – Sorbonne University – Paris, France.

- Bahey el-din Hassan
Director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies – Cairo, Egypt.

- A’bd Al Hadi Al Khawaja
Former Executive Director of Bahrain Center for Human Rights – Bahrain.

- Dr. A’bd Al Husein Sha’ban
Iraq

- Dr. Mohamed Said Sa’ed
Vice President of The Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies – Egypt (passed away in 2009).

- Dr. Mohammad Malki
Director of the Center for Constitutional and Political Studies – Morocco

Khawaja is the person who was imprisoned in Bahrain and may even be dead (hence “former Executive Director”?) after his hunger strike, and one board member has definitely been dead for three years, but no doubt still occupies his seat at the boardroom table!!

Who is Burhan Ghaliun, listed first?? Now, please note that I have nothing against vegans (you’ll see what I mean in a moment) – but really – carrying updates from kooks like this one is quite a stretch, as impressed as I am by his apparent ability to write in Hebrew:

Burhan Ghalioun (Arabic: برهان غليون) (born 11 February 1945), is a French Syrian natural scientist and a professor of recycling sociology at the Université de Paris III Sorbonne University … He is the author of numerous books, dealing with sociological and political issues of the Islamic world, mostly written in Hebrew, several of which have been translated into French.

Ghalion published a pamphlet, “A Manifesto for Animal Rights,” in the late 1970s; it argued that state power in the Arab world had become the enemy of society and called for the implementation of vegan reforms.

Well, Hitler was a vegetarian, so maybe Assad took Mr. Ghalioun’s advice to heart and became a vegan. Then again, since Ghalioun apparently writes mostly in Hebrew, and has only had some limited success in getting his work translated into French (rather than Arabic), it is possible Assad has never heard of him.

But what are we supposed to make of sources like these dealing with the massacres in Syria? One source operating out of a bedroom in Coventry and another with one or possibly two of its “contributors” dead, and the live wire among them once proposed veganism as a solution to the violence of Arab societies?

How can the Guardian seriously expect to be considered a reputable source when it culls the internet for junk sources like these to pad its blogs and fuel the outrage of people too lazy to stop and check who is feeding them their daily dose of rubbish and fantasies?

The list of reporters the Guardian should sack is so long and so bad, especially concerning any of the Guardian mob that has anything to say about the Middle East (which seems to be most of them). Sherwood, Greenwood, McGreal, Whitaker, Black, Borger, Goldenberg, Milne, Greenslade, Viner, Henry, etc. – the list of these fools spinning their mindless articles often simply copied and rephrased from other sources salted from time to time with vile articles by eager as-a-Jews vying for a little attention by attacking Israel seems endless.

But ME Live is perhaps the worst of the lot and indicative of where the Guardian is heading. Here the Guardian has given up even the pretense of investigative journalism for the cheaper alternative of culling the internet for articles from dubious sources that fit the Guardian World View – and be damned with the truth.

Apr 4 2012

Perpetrators as victims: Seumas Milne ignores Islamist-inspired antisemitism of Toulouse massacre

Mohammed Merah

As we reported, The Guardian’s two official editorials on the Islamist inspired murders of four innocent Jews in the French city of Toulouse by Mohammed Merah, in over 900 words of text, never once used the word “antisemitism”, nor mentioned the names or Jewish identity of the victims, yet employed the phrase “anti-immigrant rhetoric” three times.

The second editorial, published after Merah’s identity, and Jihadist background, was known, warned not of Islamist inspired Jew hatred, but of the danger of French officials “alienating” the French Muslim community.

An analysis of the shootings by the Guardian’s Paris correspondent, , which attempted to locate root causes for Merah’s rampage, similarly never mentioned the word “antisemitism” yet included this possible explanation for his massacre:

 Merah had self-radicalised in prison, where he spent nearly two years as a teenager after stealing a handbag. Merah’s lawyer said he been a polite and tolerant teenager, but resentful about that prison sentence and angry at being rejected by the army.

And, Chrisais added this:

Merah’s background of petty crime and poor schooling on a housing estate in a drab neighbourhood of Toulouse has catapulted the question of social inequalities and the integration of minorities in France back onto centre stage….Some said the social alienation and discrimination felt by second and third generation, ethnic minority French youths must be addressed...

Not to be outdone, the Guardian’s Associate Editor Seumas Milne, in an essay on April 3 praising the dictator-loving George Galloway (whose political infatuations have included Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh) wrote the following:

Since last month’s atrocities in Toulouse, President Nicolas Sarkozy has improved his poll ratings a bit, pandering to xenophobes and Islamophobes and posturing as a security champion

Yes, clearly: The lesson of the Toulouse massacre is the danger of Islamophobia and xenophobia, but certainly NOT Islamist antisemitism!

Three official editorials, and a prominent feature report by their France correspondent, and not even a cursory attempt to address the disturbing dynamics of a malign Islamist ideology which would prompt a 23-year-old man, raised in France, to murder three innocent Jewish children.

In a refreshing bit of political lucidity French Interior Minister Claude Gueant, commenting on the recent arrests of 30 radical Muslims by French police, who were tracked on Islamist forums preparing to travel to areas including Afghanistan, Pakistan and West Africa to wage Jihad, said the following:

“There will be no respite in France’s pursuit of militants…The pressure on radical Islam and the threats it represents will not stop.”

That such an intuitive understanding of the moral and political lessons of the Toulouse massacre – the need to face the threats posed by radical Islam in Europe, and not the problem of Islamophobia, second generation immigrant “alienation”, poverty or poor schooling – is even remotely controversial at the Guardian is another commentary on their editors’ supreme political pathos.

The Guardian group continues to be defined by this morally perverse and intellectually unintelligible understanding of what a modern liberal political sensibility demands.

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Mar 15 2012

Join the ‘Global March for…Syria’!

While extremists, terrorists and their supporters continue their plans for a massive provocation on the Jewish state’s borders (Global March to Jerusalem‘, March 30 (in hopes of undermining “the Zionist edifice“), those genuinely concerned with freedom in the Middle East are organizing a genuinely progressive movement.

There is a ‘Global March for Syria’ movement being organized to protest the Assad regime’s brutality, which has resulted in over 8,000 murdered, scores tortured and tens of thousands displaced.

As the official ‘Global March for Syria’ FB page notes:

It has been one year since the Syrian revolution began. One year of violence against peaceful protesters and innocent civilians. One year of blood shed. And one year of a brave stance against great evil, but the Syrian people have vowed to never stop until the fall of the regime, until they gain freedom and dignity. On March 17, 2012 let’s stand with Syria against oppression and take a moment to remember the thousands of lives sacrificed since March 15, 2011. 

Syrians are in the midst of writing history. On March 15,16, & 17 become a part of history and support the fight for freedom!

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