Tag: middle east

Israel’s government, which has undertaken, with prevaricative impunity the illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian water sources, farmland, homes, property, and energy resources through ethnic cleansing and the execrable crimes of mass starvation and genocide in Gaza, has further escalated a world crisis by the preemptive bombing attack on Iran, through a self-proclaimed “Operation Rising Lion.”

This deadly deceit is of monumental proportions that one must struggle with the horrific reality it presents.

Attempting to label such crimes as a defensive strikes does violence to reason. The historical record will show that Israel’s oft-repeated insistence on the Iranian nuclear weapon threat was a contrivance to justify an arms buildup funded almost entirely by the American taxpayer.

America’s so-called defense of Israel’s freedom has been turned into a protection racket of such dimensions as to make the mafia blush. That racket has its own devises. Democratic and Republican Administrations, alike, have been contemplating an attack on Iran for decades. President Trump’s assurances of avoiding war while working closely with Netanyahu damages the President’s credibility, either he was not telling the truth or he was misled by people in his own foreign policy establishment.

Israel’s government now defines freedom thusly: Freedom to commit genocide, freedom to starve a defenseless population, freedom to wage aggressive war, and freedom to posture and to lie about all of their inhuman actions before the entire world and to demand everyone agree or be smeared as “anti-semites.”

Demanding Iran remove its nuclear energy production was an intentional nonnegotiable demand, which all participants in the JCPOA understood. It was the first Trump Administration which cancelled the agreement to limit Uranium production to 3.6% enrichment, necessary for the production of electricity for Iran’s nearly 90 million people.

Once that agreement was terminated, Iran was continually subjected to charges they were seeking to enrich uranium for the purposes of building a nuclear weapon, which gave the US and Israeli hawks opportunities to conjure mad mullahs with nukes whose sole purpose was to destroy Israel. So, the attack on Iran would be a practiced deception of a morally depraved “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

There is a body of international law which forbids preemptive strikes, but when it comes to Israel, international law does not apply, which makes one wonder why in the world Israel would want to remain in the United Nations or, conversely, why the UN would want them in. But that is an issue for the General Assembly.

Imagine Iran’s predicament if it had acquiesced to Israel’s other non-negotiable demand that it remove its ballistic missile systems. It would not have been able to respond to the attack. Israel sought the unilateral disarming of Iran, in order to bring about its own version of “shock and awe,” heavy bombardment, then with U.S. help, invasion and regime change.

Keep reading

For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has driven the Middle East into war and destruction.

The man is a powder keg of violence.

Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu [who is wanted by the International Criminal Court] has always dreamed of the big one: to defeat and overthrow the Iranian government.

His long-sought war, just launched, might just get us all killed in a nuclear Armageddon, unless Netanyahu is stopped.

Netanyahu’s fixation on war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin. The older generation believed that Zionists should use whatever violence — wars, assassinations, terror — is needed to achieve their aims of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.

The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, called for exclusive Zionist control over all of what had been British Mandatory Palestine.

At the start of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, the Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted roughly 87 percent of the population and owned 10 times more land than the Jewish population.

As of 1948, the Arabs still outnumbered the Jews roughly two to one. Nonetheless, the founding charter of Likud (1977) declared that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

The now infamous chant, “from the River to the Sea,” which is characterized as anti-Semitic, turns out to be the anti-Palestinian rallying call of the Likud.

The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist aims despite their blatant illegality under international law and morality, both of which call for a two-state solution.

Keep reading