>

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is one of the few up there who’s got a sane view on what’s going on in Israel and Iran. Quotations from TIME January 30, 2012:

Are you optimistic about Israel’s future?
No, I’m not. The U.S. has the least influence in the Middle East now than it’s had since Israel was formed. We are totally immune to any sort of influence from the Palestinians or from the Arab world. We are completely in bed with the Israelis, who are persecuting the Palestinians horribly, and this is contrary, I think, to the best interest of Israel.

What do you think it means that Iran seems to have its first nuclear fuel rod?
Well, of course, the religious leaders of Iran have sworn on their word of honor that they’re not going to manufacture nuclear weapons. If they are lying, then I don’t see that as a major catastrophe because they’ll only have one or two military weapons. Israel probably has 300 or so.

What concerns you most about America today?
Every one of my successors has been in gratuitous wars. I think we could have resolved most of those conflicts in a peaceful way. And we share very little of our wealth with other people. These are a violation of the teachings of the Prince of Peace.

How much can a President do to fix the economy?
The President’s a distant third after the Federal Reserve and the Congress – except when we do something like go into Iraq and have an unnecessary war.

Noam Chomsky on Alan Dershowitz’ “Jihad” against Norman Finkelstein Part 1
Noam Chomsky on Alan Dershowitz’ “Jihad” against Norman Finkelstein Part 2
Ny Moral on Norman Finkelstein

So, in other words: Hail Ron Paul!
Unfortunately, Ron Paul will never become the President of the U.S.A., because he makes too much sense. Sad but true.

>

We have hundreds of thousands coming back from these wars that were undeclared, they were unnecessary, they haven’t been won, they’re unwinnable, and we have hundreds of thousands looking for care. And we have an epidemic of suicide coming back. And so many have – I mean, if you add up all the contractors and all the wars going on, Afghanistan and in Iraq, we’ve lost 8,500 Americans, and severe injuries, over 40,000. And these are undeclared wars.
Ron Paul, 2012

Ron Paul’s anti-interventionist foreign policy views are in a way supported by a majority of Americans, who don’t think the Iraq war was worth the cost in lives and taxpayer dollars. 58% said no, 27% said yes and 15% did not have an opinion.

So, as the warmongering elite (neocons and Zionist scum, also known as chickenhawks (people who strongly support war and gladly send kids off to kill and be killed, but who actively avoided military service when of age)) are putting as much pressue on Iran as possible to make Iran strike first and simply goad Iran into war, making Obomba the war hero right before the election, the video below should be of great interest.

As for the war in Iraq… You think it’s over? The title for this post is stolen from The War is Over; Let It Begin, where Ron Jacobs writes:

Meanwhile, in Iraq the number of bombings is increasing as various groups fight over turf and control while the democracy and freedom promised by George Bush and heralded by Barack Obama continues to be a figment of some DC speechwriter’s pen.  The world’s largest CIA station outside of Langley, VA. operates at will from Baghdad, stirring up trouble in Iraq, Iran, Palestine and other nations in the region while the US client state in Tel Aviv continues to ramp up the war rhetoric against Iran while tightening its grip on the people of the West Bank and Gaza (and the political system of the United States).  Let’s not forget Saudi Arabia, whose autocratic monarchy just purchased 84 F-15s at the cool price of approximately $25 billion.  Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the guerrilla war waged by the Taliban and other anti-occupation forces continues, as does the close-to-$200-million-per-day US effort to destroy that resistance.  Over the Afghan mountains the people of Pakistan wonder if they will be the next targets of US ground troops while US-armed drones fly and kill almost daily into some areas of that country.

Mainstream news media is as always more interested in the presidential horse race than in the candidates positions on certain issues, so we have to rely on blogs and such for valuable information. You’ll find some of them in the blog roll to the right.
Now, check the video:

RELATED POSTS
Ahmadinejad disclaimer
Ahmadinejad and honesty
The demonized Ahmadinejad
Nuclear war games for real
Propaganda for war
Gilad Atzmon – Taking Elder Peres apart
The Israeli and the US warmongers
All articles about the Israel Lobby (see the “Selected articles” section to the right)
McCain or Obama – Does it really matter in the long run?
Obama + Clinton = Change?
Obama – Hope or hopelessness?

>Impending doom. As for the riots in London, I refer to this article:

Chomsky on demoralized societies – October 9, 2008

As for the American chaos, you may want to read this one:

The Crash, The Israel Lobby and The Change of Attitude – November 25, 2010

—

Now, let’s not forget about discussing who and what made Breivik a terrorist.

Here are two opposing views.

1. On the Radicalization of Anders Breivik by David Wood at Answering Muslims, who claims that ”none of the people being blasted by the media [Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders etc] had anything to do with Breivik’s extremism” and singles out mainstream media as the beast to blame.

2. Who inspired Anders Breivik? by Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com, who in previous columns ”clearly assigned them [Spencer, Geller etc] their share of guilt” and now reexamines the issue ”in light of their vigorous denials”.

Watch and read them both.

The fact that David Wood is not even mentioning Fjordman (Peder Jensen) is very odd, since Fjordman’s influence on Breivik’s ideology is massive. Anyone who cares to read the manifesto (PDF) must see that, and anyone reading the manifesto should come to the conclusion that Breivik is an extreme narcissist with a Messiah complex. What he writes about himself and others has proven not to be trustworthy.

Hence, when David Wood speaks so eloquently about Breivik it’s all based on Breivik’s own words in the manifesto, which is also very odd. I’m not saying Breivik’s a complete liar, just that he’s lying. A lot.

The publishers of the Gates of Vienna blog (where Fjordman is a frequent contributor) encourage us to read their articles and check their links. Justin Raimondo did just that, and found some really sick stuff written by some freak named ”El Inglés”. Here are some quotes from an article entitled On Vigilantism – Part One, published on Gates of Vienna, April 5 2010. There are many more.

Altering the response of the apparatus of state to Muslim crime may well emerge as one of the most obvious motivations for vigilante activity. If one is concerned about Somali drug-dealing and the lack of effective response by the state, then executing a few Somali drug-dealers and then calling a national newspaper with a) the justification for the killing and b) the calibre of the handgun used in the executions (for purposes of establishing one’s identity) will be likely to focus a certain amount of attention on the problem. […]

In contrast, any group of European vigilantes intent on taking the law into their own hands vis-à-vis Muslim crime would not suffer this restriction. Exceptional brutality will always have the potential to repel supporters and potential supporters, but it stands to reason that vigilantes in, say, Denmark, visiting impromptu justice on Arab street thugs in Copenhagen will have a much higher threshold of violence they have to cross before such revulsion starts to work against them. Indeed, everyday Danes tired of the Muslim crime now contaminating their country may well look to such people as their saviours, affording them support of various types. This will open up the potential for exceptional violence. […]

The efficacy of non-lethal violence in persuading these people to behave themselves in a more civilized manner is likely to be close to be zero. This leaves vigilantes with only one obvious option, which is to kill off the people in question. This will have the twin effects of a) making it impossible for them to engage in further crime, and b) creating at least some possibility that others like them might decide on a change of career.

The first comment on this article is by Fjordman. He does not condemn the maiming, beating and killing, but rather:

A thought-provoking essay from Inglés, as usual. May I also suggest that we cultivate a form of pan-European ethnic solidarity when it comes to stopping and reversing Third World immigration and removing the Globalist traitor class. Perhaps we can call it “white Zionism.” Since European group solidarity appears to be what the powers-that-be fear the most, perhaps that’s what we should give them.

I’d like to see a video by David Wood where he discusses the influence of Fjordman and Gates of Vienna in relation to what Breivik actually did.

>In Sweden we have this blog named Politiskt Inkorrekt (Politically Incorrect), which is one of the most visited sites in our country. ”We tell it like it is, straight, without any kind of censorship.”

This blog is now being run by leading people of Sverigedemokraterna (SD, the Sweden Democrats), and it’s filled to the brim with hatred and lies. Lately they’ve been running this ”terrorism against Israel is more justified than terrorism against Norway” crap, for example.

Today they published an article entitled Något är ruttet i Norge – elitens anti-semitism (”Something is rotten in Norway – the Anti-Semitism of the elite”). In short, they praise the freaks in a Canadian TV-show who blame the people of Norway for being anti-Semitic. In other words, they sympathize with what Anders Behring Breivik did, saying that the young people who participated in the AUF summer camp at Utøya had themselves to blame for taking a stand for the suppressed people in Palestine.

This is not the stance taken by extremist underground Muslim-hating websites only (like David Horowitz’s Frontpage, to pick one of many examples). In many ways, this is the official Zionist stance. Jerusalem Post:
”The youth camp he attacked was engaged in what was essentially (though the campers didn’t see it that way, no doubt) a pro-terrorist program.”

It would be interesting to hear what the people who voted for and sympathize with Sverigedemokraterna think about this. Are you against your own people, all of a sudden? Are you against your fellow Norwegians? Because that’s what SD is all about these days.

>
Whoa, 500+ visitors on this blog yesterday, and all because of this one giant loser named Anders Behring Breivik. It’s sad, really.

Indeed, he got the attention he wanted, but hopefully not the way he wanted it, because I’ve yet to find one person of true relevance who seriously takes this loser’s side. That being said, Breivik is not stupid. He’s crazy, but not stupid.

His actions must be taken seriously, of course, but I believe it’s very important not to feed his ego. I’ve read a lot of comments saying he’s ”academic” and such, but when studying the manifesto it’s quite easy to distinguish his own personal writings from what is just plain copy/paste work (I’d say about 70%). He is nothing, yet thinks he is everything, therefore he must be ridiculed and exposed as a fraud. Also, he is everything but a deep thinker, and therefore the comparisons some people have made with Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, are just plain silly.

Two lessons to be learned so far:

The Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jonas Gahr Støre, made an important point early on:
We’ve seen in Europe in recent years that politicians have been jumping to conclusions about suspects before investigations have been conducted, and we will not commit that error.

Unfortunately, a lot of people were not that bright.
Yes, I admit, my very first thought was ”Fuck, I hope it’s not the Islamists!”… But I didn’t cry it out loud, making a complete fool of myself. Hence, the second lesson: Terrorists come in all sizes, heritages, shapes and skin colors. Or as Counterblast put it some 16 years ago: Terror has no shape.
Most of us already knew that, but it still was an important reminder, since our minds are clogged up by the war on terror. Jan Guillou writes about that here (in Swedish).

Until further information has been revealed I thought I’d gather some articles and websites that have helped me when trying to understand what’s going on. I hope you too find them helpful.

• Document.no – A complete list of comments Behring Breivik has left at Document.no (in Norwegian). Rough translations in English here and here.

• 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence (PDF, 8.1 Mb, 1518 pages) – The infamous manifesto. Bear in mind that at least 70% (my guess, Breivik himself admits to about 50%) is copy/paste work from other people’s writings. In my opinion, the most disturbing part is the diary, or Knights Templar Log as he prefers to call it (starting at p. 1413).
• Fjordman (the old blog) – Most of the well written texts in the manifest are written by Fjordman (Wikipedia), at least 35 of them (most of them between paragraph 2.50 and 2.99 in the manifesto). Fjordman is an anonymous extreme Zionist blogger and has obviously been a huge influence on Breivik. Perhaps there are several people using the Fjordman monicker. There have been claims that Breivik himself is Fjordman, but in my opinion that is highly unlikely.
  The Fjordman files – Everything written by this dude.
• Gates of Vienna – Fjordman resides here for now, alongside some other Islam-critical writers. Read his Thoughts on the recent atrocities.

• Norway, Islam and the threat of the West – Aljazeera is almost always on point.

• The irrelevance of the Knights in a global society – What Breivik says about the Knights Templar is in my opinion the most irrelevant topic in the manifesto, but Juan Cole still writes excellent about it. Maybe that Christian fantasy stuff is more important in America?

• Terrorn och den europeiska nyfascismen – A summary of Breivik’s mishmash of ideologies. (in Swedish)
• Åter till frågan om Europas två extremhögrar – Rasmus Fleischer’s take on the two European extreme right-wing ideologies, as he sees it. (in Swedish)
• EDIT
  Konsten att läsa statistik om brottslighet – It’s almost impossible to compare criminal statistics between countries, simply because what counts as a terrorist attack by ETA in Spain, for example, does not necessarily count as a terrorist attack in another country. It’s a matter of definitions. That’s why the link of statistics that’s been spreading (and seems to do so everytime there’s a terror attack) may be misleading. Read a discussion about that right here. (in Swedish)

Swedish site EXPO (“founded in 1995 with the aim of studying and mapping anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and racist tendencies in society”) is as hypocritical as always. To my knowledge, still nothing about Breivik’s own claim that ”the Jews/Israel” (p. 1373 in the manifesto) is his main ally, or his possible connections to and/or utmost inspiration from extreme Zionist websites. Absolutely nothing about Fjordman.

To be continued.

>

The United States are facing a lot of internal problems at the moment, and the economic crisis probably hits and hurts the most. Can America really afford the $5 billion-plus that it annually provides to Israel? Its foreign policies are intended to benefit Israel, and the United States of course, but many of them have damaged relations and interests for both countries. It’s pretty obvious that the current level of U.S. support for Israel cannot be justified, especially not in times of despair.

43 million Americans live beneath the poverty level, including one in every five children. America’s richest one percent of the population own over 40 percent of America’s wealth. Hence, wealth is concentrated in too few hands, and the general public is burdened by too much debt to be able to buy goods produced by the corporations, where the wealthiest hold 81 percent of the stock… Of course there is a great CRASH because of this, and the end game of this massive wealth concentration is nothing but economic misery. You cannot tame the Wall Street greed machine.

Me, I’m not very good at economics, but the much spoken about Money as Debt film made me realize a few things. I highly recommend watching it, as well as its sequel Money as Debt II – Promises Unleashed.

However, going back to the Israel issue, American attitudes towards Israel are changing, pretty much with each Israeli outrage, such as the bombing of Lebanon and Beirut during the July 2006 war, and the civilian slaughter – more than one-third women and children – in Gaza 2008/2009. Americans are also becoming weary of Israel constantly moving the goal post in the ”peace negotiations”, and seem to realize how Israel always ridicule Obama whenever he tries to condemn Israeli settlements. Within days, Israel often announces more settlement construction. The Israel Lobby plays a big part here, and the fact that Obama is actually criticizing Israel will probably mean that his time as a President will be a one-term only. The Israel Lobby won’t tolerate that kind of behaviour.

Just the other week, Obama criticized Israel for announcing the process of 1,300 housing units in Jerusalem. He warned: “This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations.  I’m concerned that we’re not seeing each side making the extra effort involved to get a breakthrough.”
Israel’s reaction: Knesset members as well as AIPAC staff attacked Obama, saying that he is ignoring the reality of Israel’s needs in Jerusalem.

At the same time, Zeinab Hajj, a 30 something Palestinian born, raised and still living in Shatila Camp and known for hosting many visiting thinking Americans in her family’s already crowded rooms, explains her situation: ”We know the American people are fair minded but their government has been hijacked by Zionists as surely as our land has been stolen by Zionists. In one sense the American people and the Palestinian people share the same dilemma and we have the same need to liberate ourselves.”

The collapsing American economy is also a huge factor when it comes to the American public distancing itself from Israel. Many do no longer believe in the American dream. Apple and Coca-Cola, Google and Microsoft are putting their money in Asia, where labor is cheap and markets are growing, and very little in the United States. It is rumoured that the Tea Party will insist on terminating foreign aid of all kinds if the U.S. unemployment level rises above 4 per cent. The times they are a changing…

The ADL is not changing, though. They are terrified, and recently sounded the alarm at the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Anti-Semitism, where fifty countries from six continents sent delegations to help combat what ADL’s Abe Foxman claims is ”a dangerous softening of US public opinion for Israel”. Apparently they were talking about ”cyber hate” and the usual bullcrap used in their campaigns of fear…

>

There’s this common old accusation that ”Jews control the media”. Not quite so. If they were, why would the Israel lobby work so hard to monitor and influence what the mainstream media says about Israel? 


However, by looking at mainstream media in the United States, it is clear that the lobby’s perspective is widely reflected there since most American commentators who write about Israel are themselves pro-Israel. The U.S. mainstream media has no Robert Fisk, so to speak. Neither Time nor the Washington Post – arguably the two most influental daily newspapers in America – employs any full-time commentator who even remotely favors the Arab or Palestinian side, or is critical of Israel. As is written in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt: ”The point here is not that these individuals [Fisk et al] are always right and pro-Israel commentators are wrong; the point is that voices like theirs are almost entirely absent from major American newspapers.”

Fact is that whenever something is written about Israel that is not in favour of Israel (in the American mainstream, that is) the lobby organizes letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts against these news outlets. In 2006, CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in the Middle East Reporting in America), one of the lobby’s most energetic media watchdog group, ran full-page advertisements in the New York Times and New York Sun criticizing Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. These ads included the publisher’s phone number and encouraged readers to call and complain. Likewise, one CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets six thousand e-mail messages in a single day complaining that a story is anti-Israel. Many papers, such as the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald, have faced boycotts over their Middle East reporting. The former spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York, Menachem Shalev, once put it, ”Of course, a lot of censorship goes on. Journalists, editors and politicians are going to think twice about criticizing Israel if they know they are going to get thousands of angry calls in a matter of hours. The Jewish lobby is good at orchestrating pressure.”



Huge organizations keeping a watchful eye on anything anti-Israel, dominating the public discourse,  is nothing new, and is naturally not only restricted to media. In the early 1980s, AIPAC recruited students to help identify professors and campus organizations that might be considered anti-Israel. The findings were published in 1984 in The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus. This is an ongoing project which still exists today. Campus Watch, a website which invites students to report anti-Israel behavior at U.S. colleges, is probably influenced by the AIPAC project. This site started off by publishing dossiers on suspect academics in an attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars. It’s still up and running, loving the word ”conspiracy theory”… 

Note that these aren’t small organizations whose work go unnoticed. These are lobby groups with immense power. To be able to shut up the whole American mainstream media about controversial policies in Israel, you definitely need power. Management by fear.

RELATED POSTS

>

Jews must be treated like everyone else. Israel must be treated as a normal and legitimate country. It is nothing odd with Pro-Israel organizations acting for the sake of Israel’s good. Hence Jews, Israel and Pro-Israel organizations must be praised when acting well and criticized when not. It’s as simple as that. Here lies no double standard, no conspiracy theory.
So let’s continue our treatment of the Israel Lobby.

Related posts:
An introductory video (featuring additional links to previous posts of interest)
The Israel Lobby – What it is
The Cash
A letter from John Mearsheimer
The Israel Lobby 2009
The Israel Lobby 2009 – Part Two

We’ve seen how Israel benefits from economical aid which is ”beyond compare in modern history” (Yitzhak Rabin). Now let’s check out the diplomatic and military support provided by the United States.

Between 1972 and 2006, Washington vetoed forty-two UN Security Council resolutions that were critical of Israel. That’s more than the combined total of all the vetoes cast by all other Security Council members for the same period and amounts to more than half of all American vetoes during these years.
A typical example: Among the many nations (114) supporting the resolution ”Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People” were Japan, Germany, France, China, and Great Britain. The resolution passed by a vote of 149-7 (with 22 abstaining and 13 nonvoting). The six countries that joined the United States to oppose the resolution were Israel, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau… That pretty much says it all.

Every year Arab countries try to raise the issue of Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal within the International Atomic Energy Agency, but due to Washington’s influence on the board the matter is constantly prevented from being placed on its agenda.

As for military assistance, there is no doubt that Israel is the military supremacist in the Middle East. The United States has provided Israel with nearly three billion dollars to develop weapons like the Lavi aircraft, the Merkava tank, and the Arrow missile. The Israelis have access to top notch U.S.-weaponry such as the F-15 and F-16 aircraft, Blackhawk helicopters, cluster munitions, smart bombs, etc., and they are also linked to the U.S. defense and intelligence establishments through formal agreements, making Israel’s armed forces one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world. Please compare that to the weaponry of Hamas, for example the homemade Qassam rockets…
Here is an article about Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel. Human rights groups obviously condemn these attacks as war crimes, which they also do with Israeli attacks, especially the ones launched in the 2008-2009 Gaza war. In September, the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict determined that both Israel and Hamas had committed serious violations of the laws of war, some amounting to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Read more about that here.

America has been stockpiling weapons in Israel for many years (by 2008, the economic aid for stockpiling U.S. military supplies in Israel was 400 million dollars). This policy has been justified as a way to enhance the Pentagon’s ability to respond quickly to a regional crisis. However, Israel only permits the storage of materiel that may also be used in an emergency by Israeli forces. In this way, the Pentagon can never be sure if their arms and ammunition will be available in a crisis – it may already be in use by the Israeli forces…
And yes, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported in December 2006 that ”a great portion of the American equipment stored in Israel… was used for combat in the summer [2006] war in Lebanon.”

U.S. support in favor of Israel during wartime comes down to an endless list of death, suffering and tragedy that I won’t even be able to summarize. Please, read the ”The Great Benefactor” chapter in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
This support (economic aid, diplomatic protection and military assistance) has accomplished one positive end: it has helped Israel prosper. On the other hand, according to a 2003 poll, twenty out of twenty-one countries – including close U.S. allies like Britain, France, Canada, and Australia – found that a majority of the population believes that U.S. Middle East policy ”favors Israel too much”.
It is also perfectly clear that the United States has given far more than it has gained.

Is this generosity understandable?
What do the people of the United States say?