America – Freedom to Fascism

UN: Israel used precision bomb to hit UN officers

By Evelyn Leopold
2 hours, 11 minutes ago

Israel used a precision-guided bomb to launch a direct hit on four U.N. peacekeepers killed in southern Lebanon last July, the United Nations said on Friday of its probe into the incident.

But a report by a special U.N.-appointed board of inquiry could not affix blame because Israel did not allow the access to operational or tactical level commanders involved in the July 25 disaster at Khiam. Four military observers died, officers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland.

Therefore, the board was “unable to determine why the attacks on the U.N. position were not halted, despite repeated demarches (communications) to the Israeli authorities from U.N. personnel, both in the field and in U.N. headquarters,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement.

Annan said the U.N. bunker at Khiam “was struck by a 500- kilogram precision-guided aerial bomb.”

Despite not drawing any conclusions, a senior U.N. official briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said precision-guided munitions were “precision-guided and meant to hit the targets they hit, which was the United Nations.”

“War is hell, peacekeeping is not supposed to be,” the official said.

Israel has accepted full responsibility for the incident and apologized to the United Nations for the army’s “tragic operational mistake.” But Annan and other officials made clear they were not able to verify if and how the error occurred.

The report was released only to Austria, Canada, China and Finland because such investigations are not publicized to preserve the confidentiality of informants in future probes.

“In this particular case, since the Israeli government also conducted its own investigation which they released, we also felt it’s necessary to speak about the conclusion of ours,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

Israel presented its findings on September 15 to the four countries that lost peacekeepers and then briefed reporters.

‘HOSTILE ACTIVITY’

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said maps of the area had been incorrect. “There was a mishap on the Israeli side where in duplication of maps, the U.N. position on the maps was not marked as it should have been and that created the tragedy,” he said.

Israel launched an offensive into Lebanon after Hizbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.

Regev said the investigation found that about 100 metres (yards) from the U.N. position there was a Hizbollah position where there was “hostile activity.”

U.N. officials agreed Hizbollah guerrillas were at a base in the area as well as in a nearby prison. But they said there was no activity from the militia on July 25 and the U.N. bunker was clearly marked.

Jane Holl Lute, a deputy head of U.N. peacekeeping operations, told the U.N. Security Council on July 26 there were 21 strikes within 300 metres (yards) of the observer post during the six hours before it was completely destroyed.

Twelve of the 21 struck within 100 metres, including four that scored direct hits, Holl Lute said.

While there was speculation Israel may have been targeting Hizbollah positions near the Khiam post, Holl Lute said there was no Hizbollah firing coming from near the outpost.

An Irish army officer in south Lebanon warned Israeli forces six times that its strikes threatened the lives of the four observers, Ireland’s Foreign Ministry said.

Source: Reuters via Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060929/wl_nm/mideast_lebanon_report_dc

Mumbai – Musharraf’s In The Line Of Fire flies off shelves

Megha Chaturvedi
Wednesday, September 27, 2006 23:48 IST

Book is a runaway success in Mumbai and Delhi.

Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf’s book, In the Line of Fire, has set the publishing world on fire, literally.

On the very first day of its debut on Tuesday, more than half the books have been sold in major bookstores across the city. Book sellers are calling the memoir, which is priced at Rs950, a sell-out.

The general’s book is already the second best seller on the non-fiction list of Amazon.com, behind Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky.

Every popular bookstore in Mumbai has seen record crowds, jostling to get their hands on the book.

Ameesha Prabhu, head of buying and merchandising with Shoppers’ Stop Limited, a Crossword franchisee, says, “We had initially ordered 150 copies, and we sold 80 per cent of the stock in less than a day. We have ordered additional books, which should reach our stores by October 2.”

Oxford, which owns six book stores in India, ordered 2,000 books for all its stores. The books went flying off the shelves even before hitting the stores. Rajiv Chowdhry, chief executive officer of Oxford Book Stores in India, says that readers in New Delhi and Mumbai have been most enthusiastic about the book.

“Delhi being the political capital and Mumbai being the financial capital has stirred up great interest,” he explains.

“Excerpts from the book itself has generated tremendous amount of publicity, especially regarding the Agra Summit, Kargil, and the relationship between India, US, and Pakistan. There was a lot of advance booking in Mumbai, especially in Calcutta where the book was also released on Tuesday.”

Those clamouring to get their hands on the book include politicians, military men, and professors, adds Chowdhry.

“The price of the book is not deterring buyers,” he says. “We expect to sell all 2,000 copies by month-end, and we will be ordering more.” Interest was also high at Granth bookstore on Tuesday afternoon.

Hiren Modi, assistant store manager, says, “We have sold 60 per cent of the books. We have also got many queries on the Hindi version of the book.” The Hindi version, Agnipath, is priced at Rs350. It is expected to be hit the shelves next week.

Source: Daily News & Analysis
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1055578

AIPAC, the Religious Right and American foreign policy

By Rodrigue Tremblay
Online Journal Guest Writer

Aug 24, 2006, 00:39

“Most citizens are unaware of the startling fact that for years our U.S. Middle East policy has not been crafted by seasoned experts who are committed to America’s basic national interests.” –Paul Findley, U.S. Republican Congressman, (1961-83)

“Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world,” –Ehud Olmert, Israel’s Prime Minister

“Either I make policy on the Middle East or AIPAC makes policy on the Middle East.” –Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter administration National Security Advisor

Nobody can understand what’s going on politically in the United States without being aware that a political coalition of major pro-Likud groups, pro-Israel neoconservative intellectuals and Christian Zionists is exerting a tremendously powerful influence on the American government and its policies.

Over time, this large pro-Israel Lobby, spearheaded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has extended its comprehensive grasp over large segments of the U.S. government, including the vice president’s office, the Pentagon and the State Department, besides controlling the legislative apparatus of Congress. It is being assisted in this task by powerful allies in the two main political parties, in major corporate media and by some richly financed so-called “think-tanks,” such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy .

AIPAC is the centerpiece of this coordinated system. For example, it keeps voting statistics on each congressional representative and senator, which are then transmitted to political donors to act accordingly. AIPAC also organizes regular all-expense-paid trips to Israel and meetings with Israeli ministers and personalities for congressmen and their staffs, and for other state and local American politicians. Not receiving this imprimatur is a major handicap for any ambitious American politician, even if he can rely on a personal fortune.

In Washington, in order to have a better access to decision makers, ‘The Lobby’ even has developed the habit of recruiting personnel for senators and House members’ offices. And, when elections come, ‘The Lobby’ makes sure that lukewarm, independent-minded or dissenting politicians are punished and defeated. It is a source of such political power, campaign financing and media propaganda that no U.S. politician can dare ignore its demands without fear of being destroyed. As veteran columnist Robert Novak recently pointed out, thanks to the influence of AIPAC and ‘The Lobby,’ “Washington remains largely a bipartisan, criticism-free zone for Israel.”

This is understandable. AIPAC’s techniques are so efficient that one can easily have the impression that it is a ‘parallel government’ in Washington, D.C. In the words of its president, Howard Friedman, consigned in a hubristic bulletin to supporters, it relies on two techniques in particular:

1. “AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel’s predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a ‘position paper’ on their views of the U.S.-Israel relationship, so it’s clear where they stand on the subject.”

2. “Members of Congress, staffers and administration officials have come to rely on AIPAC’s memos. They are very busy people and they know that they can count on AIPAC for clear-eyed analysis. We present this information in concise form to elected officials. The information and analyses are impeccable, -after all our reputation is at stake. This results in policy and legislation that make up Israel’s lifeline.”

I doubt that there is any democratic country in the entire world where candidates have to pass an ideological litmus test, if they want to have a chance of being chosen candidates and being elected. Thus, who could blame AIPAC from being convinced that it has the U.S. Congress on a very short leash? If AIPAC were a company, it could be subject to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust and anti-cartel investigation for cornering the market.

Therefore, it should be no surprise that, on Capitol Hill, ‘The Lobby’ seems to be in charge, so much so that its near complete control of U.S. foreign policy and other policies, such as defense, has become the equivalent of a joke. We are not witnessing consensus here, but rather a situation tantamount to unanimity in the desire to align American policies to Israeli policies, each time Israel’s interests in the Middle East are on the line. A totalitarian country would not function differently.

AIPAC has such a grip on Washington that sometimes one can be forgiven for confusing Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C. A recent example: AIPAC penned a resolution of support for Israel in its savage and illegal bombings of Lebanon. On July 20, 2006, the resolution was voted unanimously by the 100-member Senate and the vote in the House was 410 to 8. Case closed.

For many years, the influence of ‘The Lobby’ remained under the radar, being ignored or concealed by the media it controlled and by most commentators. On March 10, 2006, however, two respected American scholars, professors Stephen Walt from Harvard University and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago published a study in The London Review of Books, entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, about the disproportionate influence that this special interest Lobby has on American foreign policy. It said that AIPAC was “the most powerful and best known” organization in a pro-Israel lobby that systematically distorts American foreign policy. The study concluded that Israel played a major role in pushing the Bush administration toward a war with Iraq, and it argued that the pro-Israel lobby’s influence on U.S. foreign policy was bad both for Israel and for the U.S. Thereafter, nobody could feign ignoring the corrosive influence of this powerful lobby on U.S. foreign policy.

Another example of the type of power ‘The Lobby’ carries these days in Washington, D.C., is its success in establishing within the State Department, with taxpayers’ money, a special interest agency, called the ‘Office of Global Anti-Semitism‘. In a move reminiscent of what happened during past centuries under totalitarian regimes, this new ‘agency’ is totally devoted to monitoring around the world instances, among other things, of criticism of Israel or of American pro-Israel policies. The creation of this new department of Inquisition was mandated by a law, [H.R. 4230], that President George W. Bush signed on October 16, 2004. Who says that reality is not stranger than fiction!

So-called Christian Zionists also have a significant influence on American foreign policy, especially as it relates to the Middle East. Their propaganda has been so successful that today, 40 percent of Americans believe that Israel was directly given to the Jewish people by ‘God’. One-third of Americans even believe that the creation of the state of Israel, in 1948, after a terrorist campaign against Great Britain, was a step towards the ‘Second Coming of Jesus Christ’ and the ‘End of the world’. For the most fanatical ones among them, the ‘war on terrorism,’ whatever it means, is a war of religion between Christianity and Islam. With such thinking, the world is thrown back four centuries, since the last war of religion was the 1618-1648 Thirty Years’ War between European Protestants and Catholics.

These days, the American religious Right has its own special interest office within the State Department. It is called the ‘Office of International Religious Freedom,’ whose principal mission is to meddle in the domestic affairs of other countries. Such a state agency would seem to run contrary to the “wall of separation“ between church and state that President Thomas Jefferson thought he had erected with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Such governmental forays in religious matters are in addition to the state-financed ‘Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives’ that the Bush administration created soon after it took office.

Since the current occupant of the White House is a born-again Christian who harbors ideas which are close to those advanced by the American Christian Right it should not be too surprising if the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East has very strong religious overtones.

In any government, one has to look behind the curtains to see who is really pulling the strings and who is steering the policies. In the case of the Bush-Cheney administration, one has to know about ‘The Lobby’ and the ‘religious Right’. Without that knowledge, one is in the dark when it comes to understanding the direction taken by certain policies.

Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@ yahoo.com. He is the author of the book ‘The New American Empire‘. Visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.

Source: Online Journal
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1135.shtml

Robert Fisk: How Middle America made me feel safer

Here were 32,000 Muslims saying they were proud to be Americans

By Robert Fisk | 09/09/06 The Independent

Every time I enter the United States, I wonder what the lads in Homeland Security have in store for me. But last week, Chicago was a piece of cake. I was arriving from Lebanon, I told the young man at the desk, and I was to address a Muslim conference. “Gee, you must have had a bad time out there in Lebanon,” he commiserated, stamping my passport in less than 30 seconds and handing it back to me with a scriptwriter’s greeting: “There you go, partner.” And so I passed through the barrier, saddled up my white Palomino in the parking lot, and rode off towards the crescent Islamic moon that hung over Chicago. Hi Ho Fisk, Away!

I had forgotten how many American Muslims were south-west Asian rather than Middle Eastern in origin, Pakistani and Indian by family rather than Syrian or Egyptian or Lebanese or Saudi. But the largely Sunni congregation of 32,000 gathered for the Islamic Society of North America’s annual gig were not the hot-dog sellers, bellhops and taxi drivers of New York. They were part of the backbone of middle America, corporate lawyers, real estate developers, construction engineers, and owners of chain-store outlets.

Nor were these the docile, hang-dog, frightened Muslims we have grown used to writing about in the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. To about 12,000 of these Muslims in a vast auditorium, I said the Middle East had never been so dangerous. I condemned the Hizbollah leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, for saying he had no idea the Israelis would have responded so savagely to the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of three others on 12 July. Later, a worthy imam told me: “I thought what you said about Sheikh Hassan (sic) was almost an insult.” But that clearly wasn’t what the audience believed.

When I told them that as American Muslims, they could demand a right of reply when lobby groups maliciously claimed that a network of suicide bombers was plotting within their totally law-abiding community, they roared. But I warned them that I would listen carefully to their response to my next sentence. And then I said that they must feel free to condemn – and should condemn – the Muslim regimes that used torture and oppression, even if these dictators lived in the lands from which their families came. And those thousands of Muslims rose to their feet and clapped and yelled their agreement with more emotion and fervour than any rabble-rousing non-Muslim yelling about “Arab terrorism”. This was not what I had expected.

Signing copies of the American edition of my book on the Middle East some hours later – the real reason, of course, for going to Chicago – these same people came up to me to explain they were not American Muslims but Muslim Americans, that Islam was not incompatible with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Some had stories of great tragedy. One young man had written out a short sentence for me to inscribe in the front of his copy of my book. “To my parents and siblings,” he had written on a pink slip, “who perished in the hands of the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Yousos Adam.” I looked up to find the young man crying. “I am against war, you see,” he said, and vanished into the crowd. There were other more ingratiating folk around: the Pakistani broadcaster, for example, who wanted me to talk about his country’s peace-loving principles – until I began describing the continued secret relationship between Pakistan’s intelligence service and the Taliban, at which the interview was swiftly concluded.

Then there was the young man with Asiatic features who said softly that he was “Mr Yee, the Guantanamo imam” – who turned out to be the same Mr Yee foully and falsely accused by the US authorities of passing al-Qa’ida type messages while ministering to the prisoners of al-Qa’ida at America’s most luxurious prison camp. But there was no bitterness among any of these people. Only a kind of growing pain at the way the press and television in America continued to paint them – and all other Muslims in the world – as an alien, cruel, sadistic race.

One woman produced an article of June this year from the Toronto Star about the Israeli town of Sderot, the target of hundreds of Palestinian missiles from Gaza. “Under fire at Israel’s Ground Zero,” ran the headline. “Do you believe in this kind of journalism, Mr Fisk?” the woman demanded to know. And I was about to give her the “both sides of the picture” lecture when I noticed from the article that just five Israelis had been killed in Sderot in five years. Yes, every life is equal. But who at the Star had decided that an Israeli town with one dead every year equalled the Ground Zero of Manhattan’s 3,000 dead in two hours? All dead are equal in the American press it seems, but some are more equal than others.

And I couldn’t help noticing the degree to which The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman is stoking the fires. This is the same man, an old friend, who wrote a few years ago that the Palestinians believed in “child sacrifice” – because they allowed their kids to throw stones at Israeli soldiers who then obligingly gunned them down. Most egregiously for the Muslims I spoke to, Friedman was now “animalising” – as one girl put it beautifully – the Iraqis, and she presented me with a Friedman clipping which ended with these words: “It will be a global tragedy if they (the insurgent Iraqi enemy) succeed, but … the US government can’t keep asking Americans to sacrifice their children for people who hate each other more than they love their own children.”

So there we go again, I thought. Muslims sacrifice their children. Muslims feel hate more than they love their children. No wonder, I suppose, that their kiddies keep getting Israeli bullets through their hearts in Gaza and American bullets through their hearts in Iraq and Israeli bombs smashing them to death in Lebanon. It’s all the Arabs’ fault. And yet here in Chicago were 32,000 Muslims, dismissing all the calumnies and sophistries and lies and saying they were proud to be Americans. And I guess – for a man who wakes each morning in his Beirut apartment, wondering where the next explosion will be – that I felt a little safer in this world.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Source: The Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1431090.ece

How Israel is Engineering the “Clash of Civilizations”

From the New “Anti-Semitism” to Nuclear Holocaust

How Israel is Engineering the “Clash of Civilizations”

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth.

The trajectory of a long-running campaign that gave birth this month to the preposterous all-party British parliamentary report into anti-Semitism in the UK can be traced back to intensive lobbying by the Israeli government that began more than four years ago, in early 2002.

At that time, as Ariel Sharon was shredding the tattered remains of the Oslo accords by reinvading West Bank towns handed over to the Palestinian Authority in his destructive rampage known as Operation Defensive Shield, he drafted the Israeli media into the fray. Local newspapers began endlessly highlighting concerns about the rise of a “new anti-Semitism”, a theme that was rapidly and enthusiastically taken up by the muscular Zionist lobby in the US.

It was not the first time, of course, that Israel had called on American loyalists to help it out of trouble. In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein documents the advent of claims about a new anti-Semitism to Israel’s lacklustre performance in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. On that occasion, it was hoped, the charge of anti-Semitism could be deployed against critics to reduce pressure on Israel to return Sinai to Egypt and negotiate with the Palestinians.

Israel alerted the world to another wave of anti-Semitism in the early 1980s, just as it came under unprecedented criticism for its invasion and occupation of Lebanon. What distinguished the new anti-Semitism from traditional anti-Jewish racism of the kind that led to Germany’s death camps, said its promoters, was that this time it embraced the progressive left rather than the far right.

The fresh claims about a new anti-Semitism began life in the spring of 2002, with the English-language website of Israel’s respected liberal daily newspaper, Haaretz, flagging for many months a special online supplement of articles on the “New anti-Semitism”, warning that the “age-old hatred” was being revived in Europe and America. The refrain was soon taken up the Jerusalem Post, a rightwing English-language newspaper regularly used by the Israeli establishment to shore up support for its policies among Diaspora Jews.

Like its precursors, argued Israel’s apologists, the latest wave of anti-Semitism was the responsibility of Western progressive movements — though with a fresh twist. An ever-present but largely latent Western anti-Semitism was being stoked into frenzy by the growing political and intellectual influence of extremist Muslim immigrants. The implication was that an unholy alliance had been spawned between the left and militant Islam.

Such views were first aired by senior members of Sharon’s cabinet. In an interview in the Jerusalem Post in November 2002, for example, Binyamin Netanyahu warned that latent anti-Semitism was again becoming active:

“In my view, there are many in Europe who oppose anti-Semitism, and many governments and leaders who oppose anti-Semitism, but the strain exists there. It is ignoring reality to say that it is not present. It has now been wedded to and stimulated by the more potent and more overt force of anti-Semitism, which is Islamic anti-Semitism coming from some of the Islamic minorities in European countries. This is often disguised as anti-Zionism.”

Netanyahu proposed “lancing the boil” by beginning an aggressive public relations campaign of “self-defence”. A month later Israel’s president, Moshe Katsav, picked on the softest target of all, warning during a state visit that the fight against anti-Semitism must begin in Germany, where “voices of anti-Semitism can be heard”.

But, as ever, the main target of the new anti-Semitism campaign were audiences in the US, Israel’s generous patron. There, members of the Israel lobby were turning into a chorus of doom.

In the early stages of the campaign, the lobby’s real motivation was not concealed: it wanted to smother a fledgling debate by American civil society, particularly the churches and universities, to divest — withdraw their substantial investments — from Israel in response to Operation Defensive Shield.

In October 2002, after Israel had effectively reoccupied the West Bank, the ever-reliable Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, lumped in critics who were calling for divestment from Israel with the new anti-Semites. He urged a new body established by the Israeli government called the Forum for Co-ordinating the Struggle against anti-Semitism to articulate clearly “what we know in our hearts and guts: when that line [to anti-Semitism] is crossed”.

A fortnight later Foxman had got into his stride, warning that Jews were more vulnerable than at any time since the Second World War. “I did not believe in my lifetime that I or we would be preoccupied on the level that we are, or [face] the intensity of anti-Semitism that we are experiencing,” he told the Jerusalem Post.

Echoing Netanyahu’s warning, Foxman added that the rapid spread of the new anti-Semitism had been made possible by the communications revolution, mainly the internet, which was allowing Muslims to relay their hate messages across the world within seconds, infecting people around the globe.

It is now clear that Israel and its loyalists had three main goals in mind as they began their campaign. Two were familiar motives from previous attempts at highlighting a “new anti-Semitism”. The third was new.

The first aim, and possibly the best understood, was to stifle all criticism of Israel, particularly in the US. During the course of 2003 it became increasingly apparent to journalists like myself that the American media, and soon much of the European media, was growing shy of printing even the mild criticism of Israel it usually allowed. By the time Israel began stepping up the pace of construction of its monstrous wall across the West Bank in spring 2003, editors were reluctant to touch the story.

As the fourth estate fell silent, so did many of the progressive voices in our universities and churches. Divestment was entirely removed from the agenda. McCarthyite organisations like CampusWatch helped enforce the reign of intimidation. Academics who stood their ground, like Columbia University’s Joseph Massad, attracted the vindictive attention of new activist groups like the David Project.

A second, less noticed, goal was an urgent desire to prevent any slippage in the numbers of Jews inside Israel that might benefit the Palestinians as the two ethnic groups approached demographic parity in the area know to Israelis as Greater Israel and to Palestinians as historic Palestine.

Demography had been a long-standing obsession of the Zionist movement: during the 1948 war, the Israeli army terrorised away or forcibly removed some 80 per cent of the Palestinians living inside the borders of what became Israel to guarantee its new status as a Jewish state.

But by the turn of the millennium, following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and the rapid growth of the oppressed Palestinian populations both in the occupied territories and inside Israel, demography had been pushed to the top of Israel’s policy agenda again.

During the second intifada, as the Palestinians fought back against Israel’s war machine with a wave of suicide bombs on buses in major Israeli cities, Sharon’s government feared that well-off Israeli Jews might start to regard Europe and America as a safer bet than Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. The danger was that the demographic battle might be lost as Israeli Jews emigrated.

By suggesting that Europe in particular had become a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, it was hoped that Israeli Jews, many of whom have more than one passport, would be afraid to leave. A survey by the Jewish Agency taken as early as May 2002 showed, for example, that 84 per cent of Israelis believed anti-Semitism had again become a serious threat to world Jewry.

At the same time Israeli politicians concentrated their attention on the two European countries with the largest Jewish populations, Britain and France, both of which also have significant numbers of immigrant Muslims. They highlighted a supposed rise in anti-Semitism in these two countries in the hope of attracting their Jewish populations to Israel.

In France, for example, peculiar anti-Semitic attacks were given plenty of media coverage: from a senior rabbi who was stabbed (by himself, as it later turned out) to a young Jewish woman attacked on a train by anti-Semitic thugs (except, as it later emerged, she was not Jewish).

Sharon took advantage of the manufactured climate of fear in July 2004 to claim that France was in the grip of “the wildest anti-Semitism”, urging French Jews to come to Israel.

The third goal, however, had not seen before. It tied the rise of a new anti-Semitism with the increase of Islamic fundamentalism in the West, implying that Muslim extremists were asserting an ideological control over Western thinking. It chimed well with the post 9-11 atmosphere.

In this spirit, American Jewish academics like David Goldhagen characterised anti-Semitism as constantly “evolving”. In a piece entitled “The Globalisation of anti-Semitism” published in the American Jewish weekly Forward in May 2003, Goldhagen argued that Europe had exported its classical racist anti-Semitism to the Arab world, which in turn was reinfecting the West.

“Then the Arab countries re-exported the new hybrid demonology back to Europe and, using the United Nations and other international institutions, to other countries around the world. In Germany, France, Great Britain and elsewhere, today’s intensive anti-Semitic expression and agitation uses old tropes once applied to local Jews — charges of sowing disorder, wanting to subjugate others — with new content overwhelmingly directed at Jews outside their countries.”

This theory of a “free-floating” contagion of hatred towards Jews, being spread by Arabs and their sympathisers through the internet, media and international bodies, found many admirers. The British neo-conservative journalist Melanie Philips claimed popularly, if ludicrously, that British identity was being subverted and pushed out by an Islamic identity that was turning her country into a capital of terror, “Londonistan”.

This final goal of the proponents of “the new anti-Semitism” was so successful because it could be easily conflated with other ideas associated with America’s war on terror, such as the clash of civilisations. If it was “us” versus “them”, then the new anti-Semitism posited from the outset that the Jews were on the side of the angels. It fell to the Christian West to decide whether to make a pact with good (Judaism, Israel, civilisation) or evil (Islam, Osama bin Laden, Londonistan).

We are far from reaching the end of this treacherous road, both because the White House is bankrupt of policy initiatives apart from its war on terror, and because Israel’s place is for the moment assured at the heart of the US administration’s neoconservative agenda.

That was made clear last week when Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel, added yet another layer of lethal mischief to the neoconservative spin machine as it gears up to confront Iran over its nuclear ambitions. Netanyahu compared Iran and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler.

“Hitler went out on a world campaign first, and then tried to get nuclear weapons. Iran is trying to get nuclear arms first. Therefore from that perspective, it is much more dangerous,” Netanyahu told Israel’s anti-terrorism policymakers.

Netanyahu’s implication was transparent: Iran is looking for another Final Solution, this one targeting Israel as well as world Jewry. The moment of reckoning is near at hand, according to Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, who claims against all the evidence that Iran is only months away from posssessing nuclear weapons.

“International terrorism is a mistaken term,” Netanyahu added, “not because it doesn’t exist, but because the problem is international militant Islam. That is the movement that operates terror on the international level, and that is the movement that is preparing the ultimate terror, nuclear terrorism.”

Faced with the evil designs of the “Islamic fascists”, such as those in Iran, Israel’s nuclear arsenal — and the nuclear Holocaust Israel can and appears prepared to unleash — may be presented as the civilised world’s salvation.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State” published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/cook09232006.html

We’ll bomb you to Stone Age, US told Pakistan

The Times      September 22, 2006

From Tim Reid in Washington

Musharraf reveals post-9/11 threat in book serialised by The Times

PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, the President of Pakistan, claimed last night that the Bush Administration threatened to bomb his country “into the Stone Age” if it did not co-operate with the US after 9/11, sharply increasing tensions between the US and one of its closest allies in the war on terrorism.

The President, who will meet Mr Bush in the White House today, said the threat was made by Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, in the days after the terror attacks, and was issued to the Pakistani intelligence director.

President Musharraf of Pakistan

“The intelligence director told me that [Armitage] said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age’,” President Musharraf said. “I think it was a very rude remark.” The claims come at the end of a week in which relations between the US and Pakistan have sharply deteriorated, and days ahead of the publication of President Musharraf’s memoir, In the Line of Fire, which will be serialised in The Times from Monday.

On Wednesday, President Bush, in an interview with CNN, said that he would not hesitate to authorise immediate American military action inside Pakistan if he had intelligence of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Asked if he would give an order to kill the al-Qaeda leader, Mr Bush said “absolutely”.

President Musharraf was clearly angered by Mr Bush’s declaration that the US would act independently of his authority inside Pakistan.

“We wouldn’t like to allow that. We would like to do that ourselves,” he said. The President’s potentially incendiary claim of US threats comes at a particularly sensitive time between Washington and Islamabad, amid suspicion in Washington that Pakistan is not doing enough to curb a resurgent Taleban in Afghanistan, or in the hunt for bin Laden.

Before the 9/11 attacks Pakistan was one of the only countries in the world to maintain relations with the Taleban, which was harbouring bin Laden, and the Pakistani intelligence services had close relations with the Taleban regime.

In recent days Islamabad has vehemently denied US media reports that it has struck a deal with al-Qaeda and Taleban militants inside Pakistan, and even one report that it has assured bin Laden that if captured, he would not face prosecution. President Musharraf told the CBS 60 Minutes programme that when he was told of Mr Armitage’s threat, he reacted in a responsible way. “One has to think and take actions in the interest of the nation, and that’s what I did,” President Musharraf said.

Documents showed that Mr Armitage, who last night disputed the language but did not deny the claim, met the Pakistani Ambassador and the visiting head of Pakistan’s military intelligence service in Washington on September 13, 2001, and asked Pakistan to take seven steps.

President Musharraf told CBS that he was irked by US demands that Pakistan turn over its border posts and bases for the American military to use.

He said some demands were ludicrous, including one insisting that he suppress domestic expression of support for terrorism against the United States. “If somebody’s expressing views, we cannot curb the expression of views,” he said.

The official 9/11 commission report on the attacks, based largely on government documents, said that US national security officials focused immediately on securing Pakistani co-operation as they planned a response.

Within days of 9/11 President Musharraf cut his government’s ties to the Taleban regime in Afghanistan and co- operated with US efforts to track and capture al-Qaeda and Taleban forces that sought refuge in Pakistan. President Bush often praises Islamabad for being one of Washington’s greatest and most crucial allies in the war on terrorism.

President Musharraf also spoke about his embarrassment when informed at the UN in 2003 by George Tenet, who was then CIA Director, that Pakistani nuclear weapon technology had been passed to Iran and North Korea by the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, A. Q. Khan.

“[Tenet] took his briefcase out, passed me some papers. It was a centrifuge design with all its numbers and signatures of Pakistan. It was the most embarrassing moment,” President Musharraf told CBS.

He learnt then, he says, that not only were blueprints being given to Iran and North Korea, but that the centrifuges themselves — the crucial technology needed to enrich uranium to weapons grade — were being passed to them.

“[Khan] gave them centrifuge designs. He gave them centrifuge parts. He gave them centrifuges.

“[The shipments] were not done once. They must have been transported many times.”

Source: The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2369505,00.html