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Bringing Death and Destruction to Muslims
Leader and Vassal
By
Paul Craig Roberts
17/01/08 "ICH" -- --
After pandering to Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s
right-wing government last week, US president George W. Bush
carried the Israeli/neoconservative campaign against Iran to
Arab countries. Sounding as authentic as the “Filipino
Monkey,” Bush told the Arab countries that “Iran is the world’s
leading state sponsor of terror,” and that “Iran’s actions
threaten the security of nations everywhere.”
To no effect. Every country in the world, except America,
knows by now that the US is the world’s leading state sponsor of
terror and that the neoconservative drive for US hegemony over
the world threatens the security of nations everywhere. But
before we get into this, let’s first see what Bush means by
“terrorist” and Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism.
Bush considers Iran to be the leading state sponsor of terror,
because Iran is believed to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas
in the Palestinian ghetto. Hezbollah and Hamas are two
organizations that exist because of Israeli aggression against
Palestine and Lebanon. The two organizations are branded
“terrorist” because they resist Israel’s theft of Palestine and
Israel’s designs on southern Lebanon. Both organizations are
resistance organizations. They resist Israel’s territorial
expansion and this makes them “terrorist.”
They are terrorists because they don’t receive billions in US
military aid and cannot put armies in the field with tanks,
fighter jets and helicopter gunships, backed up by US spy
satellites and Israel’s nuclear weapons--although Hezbollah, a
small militia, has twice defeated the Israeli army. However,
Palestine is so thoroughly under the Israeli heel that Hamas can
resist only with suicide bombers and obsolete rockets. It is
dishonest to damn the terrorist response but not the policies
that provoke the response.
The US is at war in Iraq, because the neoconservatives want to
rid Israel of the Muslim governments--Iraq, Iran and Syria--that
are not American surrogates and, therefore, are willing to fund
Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israeli aggression.
Israel, protected by the US, has disobeyed UN resolutions for
four decades and has been methodically squeezing Palestinians
out of Palestine.
Americans do not think of themselves or of Israel as terrorist
states, but the evidence is complete and overwhelming. Thanks
to the power of the Israel Lobby, Americans only know the
Israeli side of the story, which is that evil anti-semite
Palestinians will not let blameless Israelis live in peace and
persist in their unjustified terror attacks on an innocent
Israeli state.
The facts differ remarkably from Israel Lobby propaganda. Israel
illegally occupies Palestine. Israel sends bulldozers into
Palestinian villages and knocks down Palestinian houses,
occasionally killing an American protester in the process, and
uproots Palestinian olive groves. Israel cuts Palestinian
villages off from water, hospitals, farmlands, employment and
schools. Israel builds special roads through Palestine on which
only Israelis can travel. Israel establishes checkpoints
everywhere to hinder Palestinian movement to hospitals, schools
and from one enclave or ghetto to another. Many Palestinians
die from the inability to get through checkpoints to medical
care. Israel builds illegal settlements on Palestinian lands.
Israeli Zionist “settlers” take it upon themselves to evict
Palestinians from their villages and towns in order to convert
them into Israeli settlements. A huge wall has been built to
wall off the stolen Palestinian lands from the remaining
isolated ghettos. Israeli soldiers shoot down Palestinian
children in the streets. So do Israeli Zionist “settlers.”
All of this has been documented so many times by so many
organizations that it is pathetic that Americans are so
ignorant. For example, Israeli peace groups such as Gush Shalom
or Jeff Halper’s Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
provide abundant documentation of Israel’s theft of Palestine
and persecution of Palestinians. [
http://icahd.org/eng/articles.asp?menu=6&submenu=2&article=332
] Every time the UN passes a resolution condemning Israel for
its crimes, the US vetoes it.
The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees’ film, “The Iron
Wall,” reveals the enormity of Israel’s crimes against
Palestine.
President Jimmy Carter, Israel’s friend, tried to bring peace to
the Middle East but was frustrated by Israel. Carter was
demonized by the Israel Lobby for calling, truthfully, the
situation that Israel has created “apartheid.”
Historians, including Israel’s finest, such as Ilan Pappe, have
documented “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” the title of
Pappe’s book published in 2006.
Israelis, such as Uri Avnery, a former member of Israel’s
Knesset, are stronger critics of Israel’s policies toward
Palestine than can be found in America. The Israeli newspaper
Haaretz is more outspoken in its criticism of Israeli policies
than any newspaper would dare to be in North America or Europe.
But it is all to no avail in brainwashed America where Israelis
wear white hats and Arabs wear black hats.
The ignorance of Americans commits US foreign policy to the
service of Israel. As Uri Avnery wrote in CounterPunch (January
14, 2008), a visitor from another planet, attending the recent
press conference in Jerusalem, would conclude that Olmert is the
leader of the superpower and that Bush is his vassal.
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery01142008.html
Americans don’t know what terror is. To know terror, you have
to be a Palestinian, an Iraqi, or an Afghan.
Layla Anwar, an Iraqi Internet blogger, describes what terror is
like. Terror is families attending a wedding being blown to
pieces by an American missile or bomb and the survivors being
blown to pieces at the funeral of the newlyweds. Terror is
troops breaking down your door in the middle of the night,
putting guns to your heads, and carrying off brothers, sons, and
husbands with bags over their heads and returning to rape the
unprotected women. Terror is being waterboarded in one of
America’s torture dungeons. Terror is “when you run from
hospital ward to hospital ward, from prison to prison, from
militia to militia looking for your loved one only to recognize
them from their teeth fillings in some morgue.” [
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19073.htm
]
For people targeted by American hegemony, terror is realizing
that Americans have no moral conscience. Terror is the lack of
medicines from American embargoes that led to the deaths of
500,000 Iraqi children. When asked by Lesley Stahl if the
American policy was worth the children’s deaths, Madeleine
Albright, President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, said “we
think the price is worth it.”
In the feeble minds of the White House Moron and his immoral
supporters, the massive deaths for which America is responsible,
including those inflicted by Israel, have nothing to do with
Muslim enmity toward America. Instead, Muslims hate us for our
“freedom and democracy,” the real threat to which comes from
Bush’s police state measures and stolen elections.
There is dispute over the number of Iraqis killed or murdered by
Bush’s illegal invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg
standard, but everyone agrees the number is very large. Many
deaths result from American bombing of civilian populations as
the Israelis did in Lebanon and do in Gaza. There is nothing
new about these bombings. President Clinton bombed civilians in
Serbia in order to dictate policy to Serbia. But when Americans
and Israelis bomb other peoples, it is not terror. It is only
terror when the US or Israel is attacked in retaliation.
The Israeli assault from the air on Beirut apartment houses is
not terror. But when a Palestinian puts on a suicide belt and
blows himself up in an Israeli cafe, that’s terror. When
Clinton bombs a Serbian passenger train, that’s not terror, but
when a buried explosive takes out an American tank somewhere in
Iraq, that’s terror.
Aggressors always have excuses for their aggression. Hitler was
an expert at this. So are the US and Israel.
Unfortunately for the world, there’s little chance for change in
America or Israel. The presidential candidates (Ron Paul and
Dennis Kucinich) who would bring change in Washington, without
which there will be no change in Israel, are not in the running
for their party’s nomination. As John J. Mearsheimer noted on
January 12
[
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/13/6349/
], the candidates in the running are as much under the thumb of
the Israel Lobby as Bush. The candidates are Bush clones as
strongly committed as Bush to hegemony, war, Israel and
executive power.
The possible exception is Obama. If he is an exception, that
makes him a threat to the powers that be, and, as we might have
witnessed in the NH primary, the Republican- supplied,
Republican-programmed Diebold electronic voting machines can
easily be rigged to deny him the Democratic nomination. Hillary
will not resist Israel’s wishes, and her husband’s presidency
bombed at will his demonized victims.
There is no essential difference between the candidates or
between the candidates and George W. Bush. Alabama Governor
George Wallace, a surprisingly successful third party candidate
for the presidency, said as long ago as 1968, “There’s not a
dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican
Parties.” Today, four decades later, there’s not a penny’s
worth of difference, not an ounce of difference. Both parties
have revealed themselves to be warmonger police state parties.
The US Constitution has few friends in the capital city.
Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for
Economic Policy in the Reagan administration. He is credited
with curing stagflation and eliminating “Phillips curve”
trade-offs between employment and inflation, an achievement now
on the verge of being lost by the worst economic mismanagement
in US history.
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