Israel Doesn't Need Help, Plans To Investigate Itself

This should really get to the bottom of things:

JERUSALEM—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed a commission that includes two international observers to investigate the bungled raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that left nine dead last month.

The May 31 raid by Israeli naval commandoes triggered one of Israel's worst diplomatic crises in decades. The U.S. joined the United Nations Security Council in condemning the raid and called for a credible and transparent investigation.

The commission, announced late Sunday night by Mr. Netanyahu, is unlikely to satisfy some in the international community, however, including Turkey, which has called for an international investigation. All nine passengers killed during the raid were Turkish, including one who had dual U.S. citizenship.

The whole world, with the usual exception of Israel's chief defender and enabler, the United States, has demanded an international investigation of Israel's killing of nine aid activists in international waters. Israel has refused, saying that it will investigate itself, as though that could ever be done in a meaningful way. It has appointed a commission of Israelis, who will be joined by two international observers as a sop to those who demanded a fair inquiry.

Those observers? One is the British Lord David Trimble, who was last noted for founding the "Friends of Israel" initiative, only last month. The other is Canadian General Ken Watkin, of which little seems to be known. It should be sufficient to point out that all of the members of the commission were hand-picked by the Israeli government-the same government which has confiscated all audio and video recordings of the event that it could find, and whose main goal is to ensure that the only story ever told is the one they are telling.

So far, it's working.

The Israel Ambassador Defend Poor, Helpless Israel

The New York Times has a shameful editorial contribution about the recent Israel assault on the humanitarian aid flotilla that was attempting to deliver aid to Gaza. It's written by none other than Michael Oren, who is the Israeli ambassador to the United States. It says a lot about the current state of media affairs  when the reaction of the "liberal" New York Times is to give a national platform to the Israeli ambassador to spew his propaganda, as though Israel has trouble getting heard in the United States.

Needless to say, there is nothing from anyone representing the Palestinians side, or the side of the outraged international community in general.

PEACE activists are people who demonstrate nonviolently for peaceful co-existence and human rights. The mob that assaulted Israeli special forces on the deck of the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara on Monday was not motivated by peace. On the contrary, the religious extremists embedded among those on board were paid and equipped to attack Israelis — both by their own hands as well as by aiding Hamas — and to destroy any hope of peace.

There is so much that is wrong with paragraph that I hardly know where to begin.

First, he calls them a mob, but the rest of the world knows that the group included European legislators, peace activists, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. These people were not armed, and the idea that they were some some of angry mob bent on invading Israel in ludicrous.

Second, the notion that these people assaulted the Israeli commandos is would be laughable if it were not so outrageous and disgusting. These people were unarmed, were in international waters, and were assaulted by Israeli storm troopers rappelling out of helicopters in the middle of the night. Numerous reports have been made that the Israeli's fired their weapons from the helicopters before they even reached the ship. The most obvious explanation is that the peace activists were defending themselves. And it simply boggles the mind that any sane person could believe that a bunch of unarmed activists could pose any resembling a threat to the Israeli Defense Force, which is one of the most ruthless, well-armed, and unstoppable military forces on the planet, much less could be assaulting them from the deck of a small boat.

What does he think happened here? Does he think that those Israeli special forces guys were just innocently hanging from helicopters in the Mediterranean when a boat full of politicians and peace activists swooped in with ferry boat and attacked them with sticks? Because that's what he's saying.

Millions have already seen the Al Jazeera broadcast showing these “activists” chanting “Khaibar! Khaibar!”— a reference to a Muslim massacre of Jews in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century. YouTube viewers saw Israeli troops, armed with crowd-dispersing paintball guns and side arms for emergency protection, being beaten and hurled over the railings of the ship by attackers wielding iron bars.

I haven't seen this video, but it's not surprising that people who were being assaulted and murdered would say things like that. And there is frankly nothing that can believed about any of the videos that the Israelis have released, because they are out of context and because the Israelis have seized all journalistic evidence, and are controlling the flow of information completely.

What the videos don’t show, however, are several curious aspects Israeli authorities are now investigating. First, about 100 of those detained from the boats were carrying immense sums in their pockets — nearly a million euros in total. Second, Israel discovered spent bullet cartridges on the Mavi Marmara that are of a caliber not used by the Israeli commandos, some of whom suffered gunshot wounds. Also found on the boat were propaganda clips showing passengers “injured” by Israeli forces; these videos, however, were filmed during daylight, hours before the nighttime operation occurred.

First of all, when did it become a crime or even suspicious behavior to carry money? And is this really that much money? That averages out to 10,000 euros apiece. If I was going to a place like Gaza, I'd probably want to have some cash with me, too. Is that supposed to be some sort of justification for murdering a bunch of aid workers in cold blood?

As far as spent bullet casings and video clips go, well, does anyone with any knowledge of how Israel operates doubt for a second that could easily be a plant? And Israel, of course, is insisting that all of this "evidence" and, indeed, the whole massacre, be investigate by none other than Israel.

The investigations of all this evidence will be transparent, in accordance with Israel’s security needs.

Note that he does not say that the investigation will be transparent, but that it will be transparent as long as the transparency serves Israel's interests.

There is little doubt as to the real purpose of the Mavi Marmara’s voyage — not to deliver humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, but to create a provocation that would put international pressure on Israel to drop the Gaza embargo, and thus allow the flow of seaborne military supplies to Hamas.

So the real intent of this mission was to spotlight the cruelty and inhumanity and criminality of Israel's denial of vital food and medicine to Gazans, and we're supposed to think that there is something wrong with this? Of course, Israel is not only trying to starve Gaza, but it's also trying to deny them weapons. This is what any genocidal government would do to a population that it has been brutally occupying for decades. I'm sure the Nazi's tried to keep guns out of the Warsaw Ghetto, too. It doesn't make it right.

Just as Hamas gunmen hide behind civilians in Gaza, so, too, do their sponsors cower behind shipments of seemingly innocent aid.

What is only "seemingly innocent" about a boatload of medical supplies? Did the Israelis find a weapons cache and forget to tell the world?

This is why the organizers of the flotilla repeatedly rejected Israeli offers to transfer its cargo to Gaza once it was inspected for military contraband. They also rebuffed an Israeli request to earmark some aid packages for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held hostage by Hamas for four years.

Or maybe it's because Israel has repeatedly refused to allow these exact same kinds of supplies to get through, and has even publicly claimed it plans to put the Palestinians people in Gaza "on a diet". And so what if they refused to bring an aid package to Shalit? It's a group of international aid workers and politicians. If Israel wants to deliver aid to Shalit, they can drop it off themselves. They're in Gaza shooting people every day anyway.

In the recent past, Israeli forces have diverted nine such flotillas, all without incident, and peacefully boarded five of the ships in this week’s convoy. Their cargoes, after proper inspection, were delivered to non-Hamas institutions in Gaza. Only the Marmara, a vessel too large to be neutralized by technical means such as fouling the propeller, violently resisted.

Wait, I though they were assaulting the Israelis? Now they're only resisting these heavily armed commandos? With sticks?

It is no coincidence that the ship was dispatched by Insani Yardim Vakfi (also called the I.H.H.), a supposed charity that Israeli and other intelligence services have linked to Islamic extremists.

You'll have to excuse me for not believing the Israeli intelligence service. So who are these "other intelligence services"? Is he trying to say that Al Qaeda is mixed up in this? Because Oren knows damn well this isn't true, and is just trying to spread rumors that he knows will get America's thoroughly-terrorized wing nuts foaming at the mouth.

The real intent of breaking the embargo is to allow rockets to be transported to Gaza from Hamas’s suppliers in Syria and Iran. Israel has already intercepted several such ships laden with munitions. Since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, Hamas has fired more than 10,000 rockets and mortars at our civilian population. This week, two Hamas rockets exploded near Ashkelon, one of Israel’s largest cities.

I'm sure Hamas would love to have some more rockets, as ineffectual as they have been. A few dozen Israelis have ever been killed by these rockets, and that's over the entire history of Israel's brutal occupation of Gaza, a history which includes a recent war against the defenseless Palestinians in which 13 Israeli soldiers died, while 1300 Palestinians, many of them civilians and children perished and what was left of the Gazan infrastructure was left in rubble- the ruins of which the Israelis are condemning the Palestinian people to live in while denying them food, medicine, clean water, and any hope of rebuilding.

But apparently, we should all be outraged that the Palestinians would want to get a few homemade rockets to fight back against the world-class military that the United States has so graciously provided for Israel. And this outrage is somehow supposed to obscure the fact that there were no rockets on these ships, as the whole world already knew.

Israel has a right and a duty to defend itself from Hamas and its backers.

But not by committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

Our struggle is not with the people of Gaza but only with the radical regime that overthrew the legitimate Palestinian Authority and has pledged to seek Israel’s destruction.

No matter how many times Israel says this, it doesn't change the fact that it is the civilian population of Gaza that pays the price.

Each day, Israel facilitates the passage into Gaza of more than 100 truckloads of food and medicine — there is no shortage of either.

100 truckloads-for a population of 1.5 million, and in a territory that has been reduced to rubble and desperately needs to rebuild. The notion that there is no shortage of food in Gaza is laughable; report after report from independent agencies have shown that there is a massive ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

We, too, want a free Gaza — a Gaza liberated from brutal Hamas rule — as well as an Israel freed from terrorist threats.

Hamas was put in power because they got the electricity working. The Palestinians don't seem to think they're brutal, and it would be hard to imagine anything as brutal as the Israeli army's treatment of Gaza. It's preposterous for Israel to claim that they are concerned about the freedom of Gaza.

As far as Israel being free from terrorist threats, the next time they complain about rocket attacks or suicide bombers, we should all remember that they have overwhelming regional military superiority, they have nuclear weapons, the have the world's only superpower backing them regardless of what they do, and that they have been brutally occupying Gaza for decades. They have denied the Palestinians any method of self-determination, and have denied them a conventional military with which to defend themselves.

How can they complain that it's somehow "unfair" when the Palestinians fight back with stick, stones, rockets and suicide bombs?

What other options have they been left with?

The Shameful Silence Of The United States

I thought that this week's commando assault on an international group of unarmed peace protesters and aid workers in international waters, which was perpetrated by the terrorist state of Israel, might finally elicit some criticism from the Obama administration.

I was wrong.

The president and high ranking members of his administration have made it very clear in the past that there is noting, literally nothing, that Israel could do that the United States would condemn. The billions of dollars worth of weapons and aid which the United States sends to Israel each year will not stop, nor will the United States' ever stop enabling Israel commit war crimes with impunity.

What is the end result of our policy of aiding and abetting a country that has done more to harm the security of the United States than any other nation on earth besides our own?

First, we can expect more terror attacks. Our shameful support for Israel as it commits a slow form of genocide against the Palestinian people probably does more to radicalize Islam than any other policy, and there are plenty of shameful American policies to choose from.The whole world knows what Israel has done, as it commits war crime after war crime, and the whole world knows that the only reason Israel is able to continue doing these things is because the United States has told the rest of the world that it will not allow anyone to do anything to stop Israel.

We have seen case after case of terror attempts by radicalized Muslims, some successful, some not, who are motivated by a deep hatred of the United States, because they correctly see us as the sole reason that Israel can keep an entire people living in a virtual concentration camp, even as the rest of the world cries out for justice.

Our leaders and the media, of course, willfully ignore what motivates these terrorists, as though the reasons for these attacks are unimportant. And the American people, by and large, accept this, as though the last thing we should worry about are the stated reasons for these continued and escalating attacks.

But no one in Washington really cares about doing anything about the threat of terrorism. The Obama administration, like the one before it, has realized that it is able to claim vast imperial powers for itself as long as the "War on Terror" continues, and so it has a vested interest in continuing the "war" forever, if possible.

The military/security/industrial complex is a profit making enterprise for whom terrorism and fear is a form of marketing. It's greatest fear is that peace will come.

And most members of Congress refuse to do anything positive, either because they have been bought off by the military/industrial complex, or because they are petrified of ignorant voters who can't stand to hear anything other than that the United States is the greatest nation that ever was, and that it can never, but never, do wrong.

And so nothing happens. What will be the response of the United States when Israel detonates a nuclear weapon inside Iran? It will have the choice of siding with Israel against the entire world, including a comprehensively radicalized Islamic population, or of siding with civilization against Israel. Is there any question which choice it will make?

Soon, the United States will indeed find itself and its client state of Israel isolated against the international community. In fact, this is arguably the case today, but the degree of isolation and its effects can become radically worse. In the short term, the result will be more and worse terror attacks, more civil rights taken away from American citizens as the country slips closer and closer to an armed police state, and a more rapid consolidation of power in the elite.

This sounds bad enough, but the long term is even worse. The US is a fading empire, and like all fading empires, the cost of incessant war will suffocate its economy. The US is already held hostage to foreign oil, and is being rapidly eclipsed by economies like China, which are light years ahead of us in the race to develop clean, efficient energy. The US no longer knows how to make things. The largest sector of its economy -by far- is a virtual house of cards, pretending to make money by shuffling paper around.

What happens in 10 or 20 years, when the rest of the world sees the United States crumbling? One thing is for sure-if we continue on the path we are on, we will have no friends, and our enemies will show us no mercy.

Why We Will Pursue The Wrong Strategy With Iran

Roger Cohen, in an excellent piece on how to approach Iran, says this about sanctions:

I’m told that’s how Obama, who remains intellectually committed to the idea of an Iran breakthrough, views them: a necessity in the light of Congressional and Israeli pressure, but not a likely means to get sanctions-inured Iran to change course.

Now sanction for Iran are worse than useless. They serve mainly to enrich the political leadership which can get around them and profit by selling things ordinary citizens can't get. It's a perfect way to further alienate the Iranian people. This is widely known. But we're going to get them anyway. Why? Because Israel and their allies in Congress (who put Israeli interests before American) want it. 


When it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East, Congress no longer serves the American voter. It serves Israel.


Stratfor has a very interesting suggestion on how to deal with Iran. I'll excerpt a little, but you should really read the whole thing. (Stratfor is a leading global intelligence consulting company.)

Iraq, not nuclear weapons, is the fundamental issue between Iran and the United States. Iran wants to see a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq so Iran can assume its place as the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf. The United States wants to withdraw from Iraq because it faces challenges in Afghanistan — where it will also need Iranian cooperation — and elsewhere. Committing forces to Iraq for an extended period of time while fighting in Afghanistan leaves the United States exposed globally. Events involving China or Russia — such as the 2008 war in Georgia — would see the United States without a counter. The alternative would be a withdrawal from Afghanistan or a massive increase in U.S. armed forces. The former is not going to happen any time soon, and the latter is an economic impossibility...

It is said that Ahmadinejad is crazy. It was also said that Mao and Stalin were crazy, in both cases with much justification. Ahmadinejad has said many strange things and issued numerous threats. But when Roosevelt ignored what Stalin said and Nixon ignored what Mao said, they each discovered that Stalin’s and Mao’s actions were far more rational and predictable than their rhetoric. Similarly, what the Iranians say and what they do are quite different.

When it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East, Congress no longer serves the American voter. It serves Israel.

Rapprochement with Iran, and an acceptance of that nation's desired position of relative power in the Middle East could have great benefits for Iran and the United States. But it will never happen, at least not anytime soon, because Israel doesn't want it. And Israel, ultimately, decides what American policy will be-not Americans.

It's the Killing, Stupid

From Juan Cole, via Glenn Greenwald:

In 1996, Israeli jets bombed a UN building where civilians had taken refuge at Cana/ Qana in south Lebanon, killing 102 persons; in the place where Jesus is said to have made water into wine, Israeli bombs wrought a different sort of transformation. In the distant, picturesque port of Hamburg, a young graduate student studying traditional architecture of Aleppo saw footage like this on the news [graphic]. He was consumed with anguish and the desire for revenge. As soon as operation Grapes of Wrath had begun the week before, he had written out a martyrdom will, indicating his willingness to die avenging the victims, killed in that operation--with airplanes and bombs that were a free gift from the United States. His name was Muhammad Atta. Five years later he piloted American Airlines 11 into the World Trade Center. (Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, p. 307: "On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque.l It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged,and by filling out his last testamentd during the attack he was offering his life in response." ).

On Tuesday, the Israeli military shelled a United Nations school to which terrified Gazans had fled for refuge, killing at least 42 persons and wounding 55, virtually all of them civilians, and many of them children. The Palestinian death toll rose to 660.

You wonder if someone somewhere is writing out a will today

.

Read the Greenwald post which is linked above for more.

Bottom line: if you think the Muslim world detests America because of our movies and our decadent way of life, then you really need to change your general frame of reference. Ask yourself if that makes any sense.

Maybe, just maybe, it's because we invade, bomb, kill, imprison, and generally wreak total havoc and destruction on Muslims all over the world. If someone in the government starting talking about America's War on Islam, would many of us even notice the slip?