The Bush administration using terror as a political weapon? Perish the thought:
In his new book, the first Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, accuses top aides to President George W. Bush of pressing him to raise the terror alert level to influence the 2004 presidential election.
So many in the Israeli (and Western) media like to exaggerate the Iranian nuclear “threat”.
The Forward newspaper reminds us that this kind of myth-making has a long pedigree:
The senior Israeli official’s tone was dire. In only a few years, the Iranians would be ready to launch a nuclear bomb. He minced no words. “If Iran is not interrupted in this program by some foreign power, it will have the device in more or less five years.”
The year this apocalyptic prediction was made: 1995.
As we all know, Israel survived the year 2000. Iran did not get the bomb.
Back in 2004, I interviewed disgraced New York Times journalist Jayson Blair, who was caught fabricating stories in the famed paper.
That was then. This is now:
His name is a byword for plagiarism and fakery and his career flame-out took the editor of The New York Times down with him, but Jayson Blair says you can trust him with your life.
The hotshot reporter was unmasked in 2003 as a serial fantasist, whose colourful articles with datelines from across the US were in fact routinely written in his Brooklyn apartment.
Today he has a startling new job: as a life coach, telling substance abusers and mental health patients how to get back on their feet. In what might be an understatement, his website says he has “struggled with career issues and many of the other areas where I coach”.
“It’s unique,” he says. “The way I practise, for better or worse, I am able to draw on coping mechanisms of my own. I don’t just understand things out of a textbook. When somebody comes in because they are struggling with their job, I can definitely relate to them. Particularly now, because of the recession, a lot of people are looking at a career change and a new direction and they are going through what I went through. Of course, without the scandal.”
God bless America.
A man with a heart of (less) gold:
Rupert Murdoch‘s pay has dropped 28% bringing his earnings down to $19.9m (£12.1m) from $27.5m, as the recession shreds advertising revenue at his News Corporation empire.
Leading Israeli academic and intellectual Neve Gordon, with a history of critical thinking, writes in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times that it’s time to boycott Israel:
It is indeed not a simple matter for me as an Israeli citizen to call on foreign governments, regional authorities, international social movements, faith-based organizations, unions and citizens to suspend cooperation with Israel. But today, as I watch my two boys playing in the yard, I am convinced that it is the only way that Israel can be saved from itself.
I say this because Israel has reached a historic crossroads, and times of crisis call for dramatic measures. I say this as a Jew who has chosen to raise his children in Israel, who has been a member of the Israeli peace camp for almost 30 years and who is deeply anxious about the country’s future.
The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. For more than 42 years, Israel has controlled the land between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Within this region about 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside. Out of this population, 3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967, and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews — whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel — are citizens of the state of Israel.
The question that keeps me up at night, both as a parent and as a citizen, is how to ensure that my two children as well as the children of my Palestinian neighbors do not grow up in an apartheid regime.
Joseph Bahout, professor at Sciences-Po Paris and researcher at Academie Diplomatique Internationale, writes in Bitterlemons:
Obama’s Middle-East sherpas would be well advised to get quickly rid of three illusions regarding a Lebanese-Israeli process. Any serious authority in today’s Lebanon is one that will not ignore Syria’s own progress in talks. Any talks that ignore Hizballah will backfire sooner rather than later, torpedoing the whole venture. And any structural solution that ignores the Palestinian dimension is a sure recipe for Lebanese turmoil.
Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard recently led a delegation to Israel. It was a trip of stunning insignificance. Slogans were expressed, Palestine was largely ignored and Israel was blindly supported.
This week’s Australian Jewish News features an “interview” with Gillard. It’s quite an achievement for the reporter and Gillard herself to say nothing of note whatsoever throughout the whole piece:
Gillard said the forum and the rest of her time in Israel demonstrated to her that, excluding the security situation, the two countries had wide-ranging commonalities.
“I think both countries visualise themselves as having a highly skilled, high-tech, high-innovation future,” Gillard said.
She echoed a thought that appears to be verbalised more and more in recent months: that Australia has a lot to learn from Israel, particularly in the high-tech field.
The Zionist establishment is pleased with platitudes and wholesome statements about Israel “striving for peace.”
Most political and media whores are more than happy to ignore the occupation (because the Zionist-led trip doesn’t take them there.)
Human Rights Watch on the lawless and viciously homophobic, “liberated” Iraq:
Who rules Iraq? If you ask Baghdad officials or the Obama administration’s proconsuls, they will tell you: a democratically elected Iraqi government, a triumphant product of the “purple revolution” that reflects the will of Iraq’s people.
If you ask Mashal, a shopkeeper from Baghdad’s al-Sha’ab neighbourhood, he has a different answer.
“Four men came into the shop,” he told us about one awful evening in April. “They pulled out guns. They were the Mahdi army.
“The place they took me to was very close to a mosque or actually in the courtyard – I could hear the call to prayer very clearly. When they hauled me out of the car, they beat me unconscious.
“Late the next day, they came to me and said, ‘We know you are gay.’ They pulled out a list of names and started reading them … I knew four who were still alive. One they had already killed.
“They interrogated me for three hours that night. They demanded I give them names of other gays. At night they got a broomstick. They used it to rape me.”
An Israeli official recently told the BBC on the ongoing blockade of Gaza:
The blockade, which is currently under review, may inadvertently benefit Hamas – but pointed out that easing it might be taken as a victory for the Islamic movement.
Jews, feel the power of the man upstairs:
Want to tweet God?
An Israeli university student has opened a Twitter site, twitter.com/thekotel, where prayers can be sent for placement in the crevices of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, a Jewish holy site that faithful believe provides a direct line to the Almighty.
“I take their prayers, print them out and drive to Jerusalem to put them in the Western Wall,” said Alon Nir, a resident of Tel Aviv.
The number of Western commentators – well, Zionists on the drip-feed, actually – who are proclaiming the wonders of an economically-buoyant West Bank is seemingly growing by the day. Why worry about ending the occupation and ongoing settlement building when you can see a new Hollywood film at the local cinema? Palestinians should be so pleased.
We can now add to the list Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the US, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal:
The people of Gaza will have to take notice of their West Bank counterparts and wonder why they, too, cannot enjoy the same economic benefits and opportunities. At the same time, Arab states that have pledged to assist the Palestinian economy in the past, but which have yet to fulfill those promises, may be persuaded of the prudence of investing in the West Bank. Israel, for its part, will continue to remove obstacles to Palestinian development. If the West Bank can serve as a model of prosperity, it may also become a prototype of peace.
This kind of “economic peace” is a sham dressed up as progress.
Aaron David Miller, former adviser to countless US administrations, issues the following comments on the Israel/Palestine conflict:
This (a two-state solution) is not going to last for 8 years. The facts on the ground, the facts in people’s minds, the hopelessness, the despair, the confusion of the politics on each side will, in my judgment, over the next 4 to 8 years make a two-state solution almost impossible. So it’s either going to happen with this administration or its not going to happen. And that makes this period truly consequential for the administration and for Arabs and Israelis…
What is relevant is whether or not a president can craft a national narrative on the Arab-Israeli issue that advances America’s national interest. If a president can do this and is smart, tough and fair about how he goes about it, then it seems to me the pro-Israel community, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, will come along, like the vast majority of other people who live in this country and supported the president…
Because he [Obama] is so persuaded that he is, in fact, a supporter of the State of Israel, and that he does understand them intellectually, that the emotive part of this, of what is required under these circumstances, simply got lost. He now has created a problem for himself which is going to have to be fixed, and the very fact that he’s going to have to fix this is not good for American interests or American credibility. But there’s no question that he’s created a problem. Toughness is absolutely essential and so is the quality of reassurance.
