The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
Engage In Sex, Not War
By Paul Craig Roberts
October 12, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- During the sexual scandals of Bill
Clinton—the “bimbo eruptions” as Hillary
called them—the Democrats and progressive
opinion ruled out a person’s sex life as a
political factor. Now suddenly nothing more
than juvenile locker room banter without the
actual sex has become the determinant of
political unfitness.
Where did the 11-year old recording of
locker room talk between Donald Trump and
Billy Bush come from? Who recorded it and
kept it for 11 years for what purpose? Why
was it released the day prior to the second
debate between Trump and Hillary? Was the
recording an illegal violation of privacy?
What became of the woman who recorded Monica
Lewinsky’s confession to her of sex with
Bill Clinton? Wasn’t she prosecuted for
wiretaping or some such offense? Why was
Billy Bush, the relative of two US
presidents, suspended from his TV show
because of a private conversation with
Trump?
You
have to take men’s sexual banter with a
grain of salt, just as you do their fish
stories. President or candidate Bill Clinton
himself publicly engaged in sexual banter.
If memory serves, in a speech to blue collar
workers, Bill said that the bed of his
pickup truck was covered in artificial turf
and “you know what that was for.” In the
Clinton White House according to reports
there were a number of female interns
seeking Bill’s sexual attention. The
scantily clad young women came to work sans
underwear until Hillary put her foot down.
One wonders if the Secret Service was told
to inspect compliance with the dress code.
The
One Percent masquerading as prudes want to
remove Trump as the Republican candidate.
Just how the people’s choice of presidential
candidate is removed in a democracy prior to
election, the prudes do not say. No one
wanted to remove Clinton from the presidency
despite the sexual use of the Oval Office,
called at the time the “Oral Orifice.” The
House Republicans wanted to remove Clinton
not for sex but for lying about it, but the
Senate would not go along with it. As
senators all lied about their sexual
liaisons, they saw no harm in it.
What disturbs me about the importance
attributed to Trump’s sexual banter is that
we have in front of us the dangerous
situation of the neoconservatives pushing
for Washington to attack Syrian and Russian
forces in Syria and the chief Washington
propagandist, neocon Carl Gershman, calling
publicly for the US to “summon the will” to
bring regime change to Russia. The tensions
between the two nuclear powers are currently
at all time highs, and this dangerous
situation is not a factor in the US
presidential election! And some people
wonder why I call Americans insouciant.
The
US media, 90% owned by the One Percent, have
teamed up with their owners against the
American people — the 99 Percent. As Trump
observed during the second presidential
“debate,” ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s
Anderson Cooper teamed up with Hillary
against him: “Nice, three on one,” Trump
said.
Do the 99 Percent understand
that the anti-Trump hysteria fanned by the
presstitutes is intended to keep the people
in economic bondage and at war?
https://www.rt.com/usa/362298-media-endorsing-hillary-clinton/
We all know that the hysteria
over the Trump-Billy Bush locker room banter
is orchestrated for political purposes. But
consider the absurdity of it all. Trump’s
private expression of sexual interest in an
attractive member of the opposite sex has
been declared by the presstitutes to be
“extremely lewd comments about women.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-billy-bush-today-show-20161009-story.html
Is
what is going on here the criminalization of
heterosexual sex?
Feminist say that women do
not want to be regarded as sex objects, but
much of womankind disagrees, judging by the
provocative way some of them dress. Clothes
designers, assuming they are good judges of
the apparal market for women, also disagree.
At the latest Paris fashion show (October 1)
Vivienne Westwood displayed a dress on which
the female sexual organs are displayed on
the dress.
https://sputniknews.com/photo/201610071046086772-pictures-week-october-07/
Vivienne Westwood is a woman, a British
fashion designer. She has twice earned the
award for British Designer of the Year. The
Queen of England awarded her the
aristocratic title of Dame Commander of the
British Empire (DBE) “for services to
fashion.”
At
a ceremony honoring her at Buckingham
Palace, Westwood appeared without panties
and twirled her skirt in the courtyard of
the palace. Photographers caught the event,
and in Vivienne’s words, “ the result was
more glamourous than I expected.”
As
recently as 2012, Vivienne was chosen by a
panel of academics, historians, and
journalists as one of The New Elizabethans
who have had a major impact on the UK and
given this age its character.
In
18th century England, if historians are
correct, young women would appear at evening
social functions in wet gowns that clung to
their bodies the better to indicate their
charms. Some of them died of pneumonia as a
consequence. They did this on their own
accord to attract the attention of the
opposite sex.
According to reports, robotic sexual
partners are being created for men and women
that are superior to the real thing. Other
news reports are that young Japanese men go
on vacation with their sex apps, not with
girlfriends. There are indications that as
the advancement in social approval of
homosexual, lesbian, and transgendered sex
progresses, heterosexual sex is acquiring
the designation of queer. If Trump had
expressed sexual interest in a male or a
transgendered person, it would be
politically incorrect to mention it. Only
heterosexual sexual impulses are a political
target.
We
have reached that point in which women can
appear in high heels with skirts that barely
cover their nether parts and their braless
breasts exposed, and men are lewd if they
notice.
Do
women really want it this way?
Is
Hillary really going to win the election
because Trump is sexually interested in
women?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts editor of was
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
Economic Policy and associate the Wall
Street Journal. He was columnist for
Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service,
and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet
columns have attracted a worldwide
following. Roberts' latest books are
Dissolution of The Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic the West,
How
America Was Lost,
and
The
Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
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