Babylon

Zie ook: Gilad Atzmon en het Tribalisme

Rede van Bashar Assad, president van Syrie

Mr Speaker of the Peoples Assembly,
Ladies and gentlemen, members of the Assembly,
Sisters and brothers

The tragic events engulfing our region and our peoples have become part of the daily scene, particularly in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. We are convinced that the international community lacks the will for the implementation of its resolutions and for shouldering its responsibilities when it comes to our rights and causes, because there are big powers which control its fate to the extent that this community no longer exists in the sense we understand and which is guaranteed by international law. These powers have turned it into a public relations community based on a great degree of deception and misleading where things are portrayed outside their natural context and where the media machine distorts facts and confuses people so that they forget their rights.

Since there is no international community which brings everyone under its fold, there are no international policies that provide conditions of justice and respect in relations among states. The world's superpower lacks a reasonable and fair vision, while some effective European countries have tended to make an automatic link between their policies and the policies of the United States towards our region and the world.

Despite the numerous discussions we conducted with these countries at the conclusion of which we arrived at similar perceptions of certain positions and events, despite the fact that these countries realize the reality of the conditions in the region, and despite the fact that they were introduced to a number of ideas which can help in finding solutions to the region`s problems, they still lack the initiative to put these ideas into action.

We talked about political developments in the last speech, and there is nothing new. But there are certain things which are useful to know: details which show us existing international politics. When we say there is no international politics based on justice and respect, it is the reality. For instance, an official visits us and talks about certain issues in the meeting, and he is fully convinced. Then he addresses the media and says something different, because the statement is prepared in advance. He is not interested in dialogue. He did not come for dialogue. They come to pass messages not for dialogue. We discuss things with them, they are convinced on the personal level, but when they speak publicly, they say the things which they are asked to say by their government or by a different government which wanted them to do so....

There was recently some talk about Israel's intention to resume the peace process on the Syrian track. We once again stress our adherence to our positions and that we are prepared for just and comprehensive peace in accordance with international legitimacy as a prelude to the establishment of security and stability in the region. In case the Israeli side expressed clear and unambivalent commitment to this, we support the resumption of negotiations in order to achieve the main principle which regulated the process from the beginning, I mean land for peace, in a manner that guarantees the return of the whole of the Golan...
They come with messages from the Israeli prime minister that he wants peace. Some of those used to be fierce supporters of Israel, even during the war, as one of them told me. And most of them are Jewish Americans or come from other countries. Of course we explained to them that Arab Jews are different from Zionists, etc. I am saying this so that this is not taken out of context in the speech. But they are enthusiastic for the peace process. They said literally, 'we used to support Israel, even during the war, but now we realized that Israel has no other option but peace.' We said, that is great, since we see this change, this intensive effort during the past ten months on the part of people who used to support Israel. This is positive. But our position remains constant. We do not support secret negotiations for the reasons I mentioned earlier. There is no reason why we should hide things from the Syrian people. But the Israeli officials are required to declare their desire for peace officially and clearly. To say that they will not negotiate with Syria and then send us secret messages is unacceptable.
Then, first, we need a clear and serious declaration. Second, they should provide guarantees about the return of all our land. We will not enter into negotiations with Israel not knowing about what. We do not trust them in the first place. All our experiences with them have added to the mistrust which was non-existent in the first place before peace. Our negotiations with them and our political experience are not assuring at all. What is required as a bottom line is to provide a deposit like that of Rabin, or something written, so that we are assured that they are not talking about the land which will be returned, because the land will return in full. ...

Uri Avnery & Tony Blair

All that is happening now is theater.

Everybody knows that there is only one way to strengthen Abu Mazen: immediately to start rapid and practical negotiations for the establishment of the State of Palestine in all the occupied territories, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Not more discussions about abstract ideas, as proposed by Olmert, not another plan (No. 1001), not a "peace process" that will lead to "new political horizons", and certainly not another hollow fantasy of that grand master of sanctimonious hypocrisy, President Shimon Peres.

If all the world is a stage, as Shakespeare wrote, and all the men and women merely players who have their exits and their entrances, that is true even more for Israel and Palestine. Sharon exited and Olmert entered, Wolfensohn exited and Blair entered, and everything is, as Sakespeare wrote in another play, "words, words, words." (Column 28 juli 2007)

"Defeating Hitler"
Reviewed by By Ina Friedman
The Jerusalem Report 31 juli 2007

Burg begins by arguing that Israel's understanding and approach to the Shoah (the Holocaust) has warped its psyche and values almost to the point of mirroring those of Hitler and his cohorts.
He then launches a frontal attack on what he regards as the Jewish racism (derived from the notion of being God's "Chosen People") that is fostered, he argues, by Israel's rigidly fundamentalist religious establishment and has been echoed from the podium of the Knesset (in calls for ethnic cleansing couched in the euphemism of "transferring" the Arabs out of the Jewish patrimony). ...
He advocates dismantling the classic constructs of the Jewish nation-state (such as the Law of Return), imploring his countrymen to embrace, and truly eternalize, the humanist values embedded in Judaism and thus join - and place their trust in the fidelity of - the family of enlightened nations.

The gist of Burg's opening argument is that, rather than view the Shoah as part of a broader campaign of genocide propelled by the Nazi doctrine of the master race [..] Israel has chosen to portray it as a unique and exclusively Jewish tragedy, the climax of a millennium of European anti-Semitism. ... This insistence on the uniqueness of Jewish victimization, he charges, has led Israel down strange and unacceptable paths.
Worse yet, Burg charges, by portraying the Shoah as proof of abiding Jewish vulnerability, Israel has exploited it as an excuse to justify its own acts of brutality.
"The Shoah is our life," he writes. "We have removed it from its historical context and turned it into a claim and reason for every deed. Everything is compared to the Holocaust."

In nigh-apocalyptic language, he argues that the warped, fundamentalist reading of the liturgical verse, "You have chosen us from among all the nations" has given rise to a "Jewish racist doctrine" positing the innate superiority of the Jewish people. ...
He sees Israeli society as "somewhere quite close to the initial stages of the collapse of the humane and cultured Germany" when Hitler rose to power. So alarmed is he by his assessments that he even predicts "the day is not far off when the Knesset may well enact the equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws..."

The Law of Return is an unfortunate echo of the Nazis' Nuremberg Laws. Burg calls for altogether rejecting the tradition of "genetic Judaism" in favor of a "Judaism of values" that will readily accept into the fold anyone committed to practicing its humanistic creed. (www.rense.com)

More Iraqis flee as figure tops four million: UNHCR
28 augustus 2007

David Bromwich - Iraq, Israel, Iran
Posted September 4, 2007 | 10:38 AM (EST)

The truth is that many new facts are in this book, and many surprising facts. By reconstructing a trail of meetings and public statements in 2001-2002, for example, the authors show that much of the leadership of Israel was puzzled at first by the boyish enthusiasm for a war on Iraq among their neoconservative allies. Why Iraq? they asked. Why now? They would appear to have obtained assurances, however, that once the "regime change" in Iraq was accomplished, the next war would be against Iran.
A notable pilgrimage followed. One by one they lined up, Netanyahu, Sharon, Peres, and Barak, writing op-eds and issuing flaming warnings to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was a menace of world-historical magnitude. Suddenly the message was that any delay of the president's plan to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq would be seized on by "the terrorists" as a sign of weakness. Regarding the correct treatment of terrorists, as also regarding the avoidance of weakness, Americans look to Israelis as mentors in a class by themselves.

So a war projected years before by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz--a war secured at last by the fixing of the facts around the policy at the Office of the Vice President--was allowed to borrow some prestige at an intermediate stage by the consent of a few well-regarded Israeli politicians. Yet their target of choice had been Iran. They accepted the change of sequence without outward signs of doubt, possibly owing to their acquaintance with the Middle East doctrine espoused by the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute--a doctrine which held that to create a viable order after the fall of Iraq, regime change in Iran and Syria would have to follow expeditiously.

To sum up this part: the evidence of Mearsheimer and Walt suggests that Israel was never the prime mover of the Iraq war. Rather, once the Cheney-Wolfowitz design was in place, the Israeli ministers who trooped through American opinion pages and news-talk shows did what they could to heat up the war fever.

But now the American war with Iran they originally wanted is coming closer. Last Tuesday, when the mass media were crammed to distraction with the behavior of a senator in an airport washroom, few could be troubled to notice an important speech by President Bush. If Iran is allowed to persist in its present state, the president told the American Legion convention in Reno, it threatens "to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." He said he had no intention of allowing that; and so he has "authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities." (Bron: Bromwich blogsite)

Arab News Editorial: Replay of Old Charade
9 September 2007

Washington seeks to pressure UN inspectors into quitting their search for weapons of mass destruction. Washington says a terrorist regime is bent upon WMD and poses an imminent danger to world peace. Washington makes no secret of its belief that the only option to end the threat is military action. This is how it began in Iraq and now the whole awful charade is starting to be played out again — over Iran.

Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been working hard for months to edge a suspicious Iranian government toward a resumption of full inspections of its nuclear facilities. The IAEA has an international mandate to undertake this work, not primarily because of nuclear proliferation but largely on safety grounds...
The cooperation deal the IAEA has just cut with Tehran may not be ideal. It may seem to allow Iran to continue to bypass the international obligations to which it has signed up. But El-Baradei insists that the agreement does represent progress. He also says that if the Iranians are acting in bad faith, it will quickly become evident.

What the IAEA chief wants now is a period in which Washington ceases its belligerent rhetoric and its threat to call for much tougher sanctions to punish Tehran. The Bush White House, unfortunately, seems incapable of letting the matter go. Just as in the final period of the UN weapons inspections in Iraq, Washington may be turning up the heat in preparation for precipitate action.

Bush and his neocons have lied to and tricked Americans into one disaster of epic proportions. Are those same Americans to be panicked and duped into a second greater folly by phony propaganda that is an echo of the very lies that led to the current horrors in Iraq? (Arab News website)

9/11 - the big cover-up?

Even the chair of the 9/11 Commission now admits that the official evidence they were given was 'far from the truth'. Peter Tatchell, September 12, 2007

Six years after 9/11, the American public have still not been provided with a full and truthful account of the single greatest terror attack in US history.
What they got was a turkey. The 9/11 Commission was hamstrung by official obstruction. It never managed to ascertain the whole truth of what happened on September 11 2001.
The chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, respectively Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, assert in their book, Without Precedent, that they were "set up to fail" and were starved of funds to do a proper investigation. They also confirm that they were denied access to the truth and misled by senior officials in the Pentagon and the federal aviation authority; and that this obstruction and deception led them to contemplate slapping officials with criminal charges.

The Guardian Website

Zbigniew Brzezinski defended attack on US Jewish lobby
Yaakov Lappin Published: 09.16.07

Nog altijd worden Amerikaanse presidentskandidaten door de Israelische media behandeld als kleine kinderen, die bij gedrag dat als niet netjes wordt beschouwd, stevig op de vingers worden getikt. Dat vreemde, vals-paternalistische gedrag, dat blijk geeft van een bazige, ondemocratische mantaliteit (de weigering het als fundamenteel ervaren recht op een eigen mening te respecteren) wordt gezien als een soort aristocratisch privilege - hetgeen weinig meer is dan de ontkenning van de idealen van de verlichting, die een einde wilden maken aan de bijzondere voorrechten van de adel en de clerus.

Concerns have been raised among Israel supporters in the US following the appointment of a controversial veteran political advisor by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Last week, Obama introduced Zbigniew Brzezinski as "one of our most outstanding thinkers" during a policy speech in Iowa on the Iraq war. Brzezinski, aged 79, has been selected by Obama to advise him on foreign policy affairs. Previously, he served as a national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter.

One of the most troubling aspects of Brzezinski's appointment for allies of Israel is his defense of the book, 'The Israel Lobby,' authored by academics Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. In it, they attack what they say is an overly powerful Jewish lobby which , they claim, is damaging America's interests. Their case has been accused of echoing traditional anti-Semitic thought and critics say it is based on faulty scholarship. But Brzezinski has described critics of Walt and Mearsheimer as "McCarthyists."

In an article in the Foreign Policy publication, Brzezinki wrote: "Given that the Middle East is currently the central challenge facing America, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have rendered a public service by initiating a much needed public debate on the role of the 'Israel lobby' in the shaping of US foreign policy." Walt and Mearsheimer responded by thanking Brzezinksi. For his part, Obama has distanced himself from the book. (YETnews website)

Norman Finkelstein interviewed by
George McLeod - September 16, 2007

"There is nothing unusual about the Israel/Palestine issue, apart from the fact that there is a lobby here that prevents any kind of rational debate and discussion about what goes on there..."

Finkelstein: There is nothing unusual about the Israel/Palestine issue, apart from the fact that there is a lobby here that prevents any kind of rational debate and discussion about what goes on there. The conflict itself is not particularly unusual. And its main features are fairly well-known, especially outside the US.
There is no other field where a gang of hoodlums use their money and their brass knuckles to prevent tenure appointments, and that’s very odd. There are other politicised fields like Cuba studies or China studies – but these kinds of jihads and witch hunts – they just don’t go on in other fields.
In Israel/Palestine academia, in the past few years, you have the Juan Cole case at Yale, you have the Joseph Massad case, you have the Nadi Abuel-El-Haj case, you have my case, and you have the Rashid Khalidi case. But you take other fields that are politicised, like China studies and Cuba studies where there is a lobby at work, they just don't engage in these sorts of mafia tactics...

McLeod: One of your most controversial positions has been your contention that pro-Israel groups and individuals are using the holocaust for political purposes. Could you discuss your views on this?

Finkelstein: I’ve written a whole book on that topic – The Holocaust Industry, which basically tries to document and show how the Nazi holocaust has been used since the June 1967 war as a political weapon to suppress criticism of Israel.
I argue that it takes basically two forms. First is the claim of Holocaust uniqueness, which is that no people in the world have ever suffered the ways Jews have. The purpose of this doctrine, which has no intellectual or MORAL foundation, is to basically immunize Israel from criticism. That is, if Jews suffered uniquely during the Holocaust, then they should not be held to the same moral standards as others.
The second aspect of this Holocaust dogma is the claim that all the gentiles want to kill the Jews – the thesis of Daniel Goldhagen Hitler’s Willing Executioners. And therefore, all gentiles are latently or flagrantly anti-Semitic, so their criticism of Israel cannot be credited.

McLeod: And what sort of response did the book receive?

Finkelstein: When the book came out, it was the object of a vicious attack. A lot of name calling, a lot of ad homonem attacks on me. But now, I think a large part of what I wrote back then has become mainstream... (ZNet website)

Hassan Hanizadeh: Napoleon Kouchner

Indeed, it is widely believed that the recent Iran-IAEA agreement should put an end to the nuclear row. But unfortunately, setting aside all diplomatic protocol and following the White House bandmaster, the French foreign minister started beating the drums of war and accused Iran of attempting to gain access to nuclear weapons. Despite the fact that Iran has opened all its nuclear facilities to IAEA inspectors, France is trying to fabricate a new crisis in the Middle East.
Now, which country is really responsible for the current and past crises in the Middle East?
Many people still remember that on October 3, 1957, France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 megawatt reactor (although the cooling systems and waste facilities were designed to handle three times that power) and, in protocols that were not committed to paper, a chemical reprocessing plant. This complex was constructed clandestinely, outside the IAEA inspection regime, by French and Israeli technicians at Dimona in the Negev desert... (Mehr News 17-9-2007)

Tehran Times 20-9-2007

U.S. on the warpath with the IAEA
By Dr. Shireen M. Mazari

Iraq Daily 19-3-2003

War Costing $720 Million Each Day
By Kari Lydersen - Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 22, 2007

CHICAGO, Sept. 21 -- The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, according to the American Friends Service Committee, which displayed those statistics on large banners in cities nationwide Thursday and Friday.
The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group's analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.
The estimates made by the group, which opposes the conflict, include not only the immediate costs of war but also ongoing factors such as long-term health care for veterans, interest on debt and replacement of military hardware.

Some supporters of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq say that even if the war is costly, that fact is essentially immaterial.
"Either you think the war in Iraq supports America's national security, or not," said Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "If you think national security won't be harmed by withdrawing from Iraq, of course you would want to see that money spent elsewhere. I myself think that belief, on a certain level, is absurd, so the question of focusing on how much money we are spending there is irrelevant." (www.washingtonpost.com)

Iran Shows Off Might in Military Parade By ALI AKBAR DAREINI

"Those (countries) who assume that decaying methods such as psychological war, political propaganda and the so-called economic sanctions would work and prevent Iran's fast drive toward progress are mistaken," Ahmadinejad said.

Ahmadinejad, who is to appear at a forum at Columbia University in New York on Monday and address the General Assembly on Tuesday, also repeated his call for foreign forces to leave the region and urged the United States to acknowledge it has failed in Iraq.

An old Zionist dream: the partition of Iraq
By Gabriele Zamparini

We know the Israel Lobby is not a very convincing thesis, at least for Noam Chomsky. So, let’s talk about coincidences. In 1982, Israel Shahak, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, wrote:

The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Ze'ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha'aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the "best" that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: "The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi'ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part" (Ha'aretz 6/2/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old.
Israel Shahak’s The Zionist Plan for the Middle East is based on Oded Yinon's A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, an essay originally appeared in Hebrew in KIVUNIM (Directions), A Journal for Judaism and Zionism; Issue No, 14--Winter, 5742, February 1982, Editor: Yoram Beck. Editorial Committee: Eli Eyal, Yoram Beck, Amnon Hadari, Yohanan Manor, Elieser Schweid. Published by the Department of Publicity/The World Zionist Organization, Jerusalem. (www.thecatsdream.com, 28-9-2007)

Baath Party condemns US Senate decision on Iraq
SyriaTimes, 2-10-2007