The Many Faces of Palestine

3P-057 Show Information (includes MP3 download link)

Welcome to the 57th episode of Third Paradigm, entitled "The Many Faces of Palestine." Last week, my family and I watched a film called "Occupied Minds." It tells the story of two journalist-friends who live in San Francisco. Both are originally from Jerusalem but one is Palestinian and one is Israeli. 


They go back together and interview a number of people, including a militant leader of Zionist settlers, a militant young Palestinian, an Israeli soldier for truth, a young woman changing Palestinians self-perception as victims, an Israeli mother whose son had been killed as a soldier, a Palestinian farmer walled off from his land, and an Israeli surgeon half-blinded by a suicide bomber.

The Israeli mother writes a letter to the General asking him to look her in the eye and tell her that her son died for a good cause. Getting no response, she ends up becoming an advocate, helping sick and injured Palestinian children get medical care. Jamal, the Palestinian journalist, asks why, for other Jews, their history of victimization doesn't make them more sympathetic to the Palestinians. She compares it to a child who sees their mother beaten, but grows up to beat their own wife. She also says that being a victim doesn't make someone good. 

The Jews killed in the holocaust weren't all good. People aren't good or bad, she says, they're just victims; that's what she focuses on.

In a rare interview, the militant Palestinian tells of his early work for Israeli-Palestinian peace, love, and understanding. In Jenin, he led youth groups and held co-religious workshops, brunches, and dialogues. But on the day that Jenin was attacked, none of his Israeli friends even called. Those who his mother had cooked for suddenly didn't know him. At that point he realized that words meant nothing. He holds his six-month-old baby and hopes that true dialogue would be possible in his era.

The interview with the injured Israeli surgeon was the first he'd ever given. He talked about the suicide bomber who blinded him – a girl standing in line ahead of him at the store that day, only 22-years old with all of life ahead of her. The Palestinian journalist pressed him to compare her to the Israeli soldiers, who kill for a cause they wouldn't die for, and ask what would motivate someone to take their own life. The surgeon took his point but felt that some things were beyond forgiveness. Yet the film ends with his statement that he envisioned some day when both sides would be able to laugh and dance together.

Let's pause for three poems from Palestine. These are by Mahmoud Darwish, Ibrahim Nasrallah and Hiyam Noir. These are dark poems – not as graphic as images or videos, but hard-hitting nonetheless. Hiyam Noir's blog, Palestine Free Voice, quotes from Kahlil Gibran, "Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls, the most worthy characters are seared with scars." The music is Djivan Gasparyan, "I Have Planted an Orchard in Yerevan".

Photo Fady Adwan/PalestineFreeVoice Images

I Am There

I come from there and remember,
I was born like everyone is born, I have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the godsent food of birds and an olive tree beyond the kent of time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there, I return the sky to its mother when for its mother the
sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home

~ Mahmoud Darwish ~



* * * * * * * *

Photo Fady Adwan/PalestineFreeVoice Images

A Beautiful Morning

A beautiful morning is one that passes and I am not killed. A city street following the sun at sunset is obstructed by a roadblock and soldiers. Another street runs after her and never returns.

A beautiful morning...
***
On the road I embrace an old woman's sadness and woo her. Yesterday laughs inside her as she whispers: Am I still youthful? Then she smiles and prays for me.
***
I ruffle the hair of a small boy selling newspapers and ask: Anything new? Like every other morning he hands me the chronicles of thirty years and a thousand moons. He argues with me, then goes away shouting: Newspapers. The inspectors kill him, but it is his habit to return to the streets selling newspapers the following morning.
A beautiful morning...
***
At the abyss of long waiting I slip into a restaurant on a side street and turn my eyes to the faces of passersby and as I lean back in my metal chair the fear of her not showing up gnaws at me. With my last bite of bread she surprises me briefly in the face of an excited young woman, but I realize the difference between them. At the abyss of waiting the road branches out in my body and traffic lights blink on and off. Many people cross but no one is here.
***
Her sorrow makes her come at last and like a flower she bids me good evening. I say: You are late. - You know the wide streets are clogged with security points. We walk together with her hand in mine. She permeates the pores of my flesh. The street becomes noisy: Soldiers, soldiers! They surround me and shoot at my forehead, then read out my rights! I am left in her arms like a corpse on an open road. A beautiful morning...
***
Tomorrow, when the sun touches my forehead, I will ruffle the hair of a young boy and like every other morning he will hand me the chronicles of thirty years and a thousand moons and together we will sell his wares.My beloved will pass by..to buy the daily paper for me.She will ruffle my hair and like the seasonal trees go to her appointment.


A beautiful morning...

~ Ibrahim Nasrallah ~


From Rain Inside

* * * * * * * *

In the Toxic Garden

those dead uncountable

The impossibilities

of my dreams

did not discourage me

from continuing to believe

so I am returning

as in my worst nightmares

I entered the toxic garden

surrounded by dirt-yellow walls

I could feel I could smell

the sinister presence

of the predators

the brand of human beings

who are mindless brutes

self-hating socio-paths

whose only language

divulges in deception

their hard fists

and killer machines

their language

have wallowed

in consuming

and humiliating

this very Holy

godforsaken place

I entered the lines

in a secret revenge

to erase those forces

who is trying to erase

the entire existence

of my people

I have been taught

to stay confident calm

not to move my face

in my new face

the stitches are gone

healed are the scars

my eyes cold observes

fearless I use caution

and maintain in silence

empty streets are littered

with remnants of lives

invisible remnants of lives

lives transformed

into tiny molecules

left from the predators

toxic uncollected trash

and human feces

traces of INN and MDMA*

in small plastic"5"bags

shattered every where

still remain as a reminder

of their unwanted presence

preying eyes behind glass

of broken windows

gaping holes in walls

from missiles fired

missiles made to explode

into human flesh and bones

into the brain and heart

of the Palestinian resistance.

Gaza 2005

~ Hiyam Noir ~

From Poetry4Palestine

The music was Djivan Gasparyan, "I Have Planted an Orchard in Yerevan" from his Apricots in Eden CD. Djivan is an Armenian master of the dudek, a wooden wind instrument like a flute. Thank you for to David Anton Savage, who does the Middle Eastern music program Unfiltered Camels, for recommending him.

The poems were "I Am There" by Mahmoud Darwish, "A Beautiful Morning" by Ibrahim Nasrallah and "In the Toxic Garden" by Hiyam Noir.

"A Beautiful Morning" is from a collection called Rain Inside: Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London. It's is a very cinematic poem – I keep seeing it in scenes and camera angles. In 2006, Ibrahim republished a 1984 collection of poetry called Anemone Regains Its Colour. It was suddenly banned in Jordan, being seen as referring to Black September, which he had lived through at sixteen. He faced charges of insulting the state, inciting dissent, and reporting inaccurate information to future generations.

In an interview with The Guardian, Ibrahim commented on the charge, saying: "I was completely shocked, I did not know how to respond... I was confused and angry and also afraid." Due to pressure from other Arabic writers, the charges were eventually dropped. But Ibrahim says he always expects trouble, because Muslim writers face a trinity of taboos – sex, religion, and politics.

I first heard of Mahmoud Darwish on Democracy Now, just after his death in 2008. Besides being the Poet Laureate of Palestine, his poetry and prose transcend issues of place and time, and include tragedies of other indigenous people, including Native Americans. In an interview in Jean-Luc Godard's film, Notre Musique, Mahmoud says,

"Truth has two faces. We've listened to the Greek mythology, and at times we've heard the Trojan victim speak through the mouth of the Greek Euripedes. As for me, I'm looking for the poet of Troy, because Troy didn't tell its story. And I wonder, does a land that has great poets have the right to control a people that has no poets? And is the lack of poetry amongst a people enough reason to justify its defeat? Is poetry a sign, or is it an instrument of power? Can a people be strong without having its own poetry? I was a child of a people that had not been recognized until then. And I wanted to speak in the name of the absentee, in the name of the Trojan poet. There's more inspiration and humanity in defeat than there is in victory. If I belonged to the victor's camp, I'd demonstrate my support for the victims."

Another world-renowned voice for the silenced has died – Howard Zinn, who changed the game we call history forever. He changed it from a polite private club sport, like golf or badminton, to a gladiator event with the ruling class in the center ring. Bring on the lions!

In The Optimism of Uncertainty Howard writes:

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. 
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

Let's break for a song by the Scottish musician Dougie MacLean called Turning Away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYKB6L6JJ-A

That was Dougie MacLean with a song called Turning Away. It says,

"There's a well upon the hill from our ancient past,
where an age is standing still, holding strong and fast.
And there's those that try to tame it and to carve it into stone, Ah, but words cannot extinguish it however hard they're thrown."

I've been dipping into my own well of the past with a radio show called History Counts. So far, I've downloaded my way back to 2007 of this excellent monthly series. Ken McDermottRoe does in-depth interviews of authors who've challenged the conventional view of people and events. 
Ken's thorough understanding of the topics is reflected in his questions, which set the authors up to explain their finer points.

He includes many of my favorite topics – Michael Parenti on Julius Caesar, John Taylor Gatto on Dumbing Us Down, and James Loewen with Lies Our Teachers Tell Us.

I'd just brought out Loewen's book from my library to see if memory served that Haiti was Christopher Colombus' first exploit. Indeed, it was. He enacted genocide on over a million Arawaks by cutting off their hands if they didn't bring their quarterly quota of gold dust or cotton. Haiti therefore signifies the beginning of slavery in the European's so-called new world, and the beginning of its end with the Haitian revolution. With luck, the earthquake may shake off the last chains of neo-colonialism, ushering in a new phase for Latin America.

[History Counts – Assault on the U.S.S. Liberty part 3/3]

Most of the books Ken reviews are about things I never heard before – and can't believe I've gone this long without knowing. One is called The Opium Wars, or How the West Hooked China. A Peace to End All Peace is the role of the West in creating the modern Middle East. There's How to Pull Off a Coup. I think I'm beginning to see a pattern here. If you prefer an island theme, the show Plum Island talks about a facility two miles from Long Island used to create bioweapons. Some were against livestock, for the purpose of starving out an enemy, with suspicious evidence that Lyme disease escaped from here. The Creature from Jekyll Island looks at the history of the Federal Reserve. There's one that we can hope crawls back into the swamp. Another one that really intrigued me is called Populism: Not Right, Not Left. In this quote, it describes a third way:

Populists, ancient and modern, believe that a truly democratic government cannot be based on any model in which power is concentrated at the top. Rather, they argue for a decentralized system of government and, equally important, a decentralized monetary and economic system which leaves real power with individual citizens.

So I guess the third paradigm has been around at least since ancient Greece. I'll be looking for the book by Adrian Kuzminski, called Fixing the System, A History of Populism, Ancient and Modern. We don't have to reinvent the democratic wheel to make it round. Viva la history!

But back to our poems for Palestine. I was surprised to discover that the hardest-hitting poet, Hiyam Noir, is a beautiful woman. I had pictured the author as grizzled and sinewy. Her blogs are Palestine Free Voice and Poetry4Palestine. The latter has one softer poem telling of a man watching a butterfly emerge from a cocoon. After several hours of watching it struggle, the man takes a pair of scissors and snips the cocoon. The butterfly emerges easily but with a swollen body and shriveled wings. The struggle of pushing through the opening was needed to force fluids into the wings. Struggle, goes the moral, is God's way of making us strong enough to fly.

The website also has a post on Haiti with two of the most evocative photos I've seen of the earthquake – eerie and surreal, posted on the thirdparadigm.org website.

Photo Zoriah in Courtesy to PalestineFreeVoice

I've been thinking about the comparison between Haiti and Palestine. Haiti defeated three imperial armies to win their independence. If they'd marched in the streets and practiced nonviolent resistance, would it have shamed France into freeing them? I don't think so. France wasn't ashamed to still punish them for winning by collecting five generations of debt servitude as their blood price.

Can Israel be shamed into freeing Palestinians? A Counterpunch article by Jonathon Cook looks at how it treats its own Jewish Holocaust survivors. He investigates the potentially billions of dollars that Israeli banks, companies, and state bodies may have withheld from the families of Holocaust victims. In the pre-war era, European Jews invested heavily in British-ruled Palestine, opening bank accounts and buying land, shares, and insurance policies. During the war, Britain seized them as enemy property because the owners were living under Nazi rule. In 1950, Britain paid the new state of Israel $1.4 million to make reparations to Holocaust survivors. But little effort was made to find them. After the war many Israelis showed little sympathy for the European Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel. An Israeli investigative journalist said, "David Ben Gurion notoriously called them 'human dust', and I remember as children we referred to them as sabonim, the Hebrew word for soap. In fact, I can't think of any place in the world where [Holocaust] survivors are as badly treated as they are in Israel."

Their lost assets included some of the most desirable real estate in Israel. In the 1950's, the finance ministry destroyed its real estate files, apparently to conceal the extent of the state's holding of Holocaust assets. Welfare organizations say that 250,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel, with a third in abject poverty. If this is how Israel treats those whose victimization it hides behind, what chance do Palestinians have? A Radio Islam article describes how Israel is also behind the holocaust in the Congo, which has taken six to ten million lives, through a web of faith-based diamond czars, off-shore tax havens, and "security forces" for ruthless dictators in exchange for mineral monopolies.

All this leads me to agree with Hiyam Noir, who says: "A people under siege by an illegal occupier, are entitled in international law to take up arms against the oppressor. NOBODY have the right to interfere and deny the Palestinian people it's right to self defense."

And I agree with a project called Face2Face, which took silly close-ups of Israelis and Palestinians, made them billboard size and plastered them together in public places. The perpetrators, who work for Israeli and Palestinian NGO's, say, "These people look just the same, like twin brothers separated at birth. So why are they fighting?"

Bethlehem, Palestine
http://www.jr-art.net/
GILLES, Israeli ONG: Life is worth being lived only if we struggle to make tomorrow's world better than today's world. We must be utopian. That's how the world progresses.
ISHTAR, Palestinian ONG: Do what your first feeling tells you to do.

For Third Paradigm, 
Tereza Coraggio. 

Thanks to Skidmark Bob for sound production, and to Mike Scirocco for all things web.

Thanks to Ernest Gusella for the Jonathan Cook article, to Ken MacDermott Roe of History Counts, and to David Anton Savage of Unfiltered Camels.

Thanks also to the poets and bloggers quoted, and to the unknown photographers.
Our closing song is "Mars Declares" by Makana. 

Although we couldn't find a video of the song, you might enjoy Makana's video for his CD Different Game, from which "Mars Declares" comes. I'm looking forward to buying it myself.

[Makana – Different Game]

Thank you for reading and listening.

© PalestineFreeVoice Copyright reserved 2003 - 2011

Intellectual Rights Retained

A New Capture of a Mossad Agent in Lebanon

By Kawther Salam • Jun 29th, 2010 at 23:24

Lebanese security arrested a newly uncovered Mossad agent (Charbel Q.) who had a sensitive post at “Alpha”, the Lebanese telecommunications sector company. The Lebanese authorities described the capture of the new Mossad agent as a big catch saying that we are in the vanguard of uncovering a very precious treasure in terms of the services and information which was provided during the past 14 years to the Israelis and the Mossad, including information that helped the Israeli army to identify their targets during the criminal war of 2006.

Another Hollandese Mossad agent, Anneke Potter, served as executive director of the “Alpha” company. She escaped from Lebanon at the end of 2007 just a few hours before the implementation of the arrest warrant against her.

Mr. Charbel Q. was born in 1954 in Alma- Al-Shouf. In details revealed about the arrest of this Lebanese Mossad agent, the directorate of the intelligence of the Lebanese army, proceeding on preliminary information about him, monitored him and collected evidence about his collaborating with the Mossad, and Israel. In coordination between the intelligence assessment, the Attorney General and the Lebanese army commander, General Jean Kahwagi, decided to capture the spy (Charbel Q.). The spy (Charbel Q.) admitted his collaboration with Mossad and Israel since 1996.

On Friday June 25 2010, the Lebanese Attorney General authorized the directorates of intelligence in the army to raid the building of "Alpha" company in the “Cheveroleh” in “Furn Al-Shabak”. They confiscated the computer of Charbel, some documents which were found in his office and other communication equipment which was found with him.

The preliminary investigations showed that Charbel Q. enabled the Israeli enemy to enter the Cellular Communications Network and in wire-tapping and monitoring the people who they wanted to spy on during the July criminal war of 2006. Alpha Communications services was able to determine the whereabouts of any person carried on its communications lines throughout all of Lebanese territory, as well as giving access to the names, numbers, addresses, and biographies of the people. Charbel Q. allowed the Israelis access to all these services during the past 14 years.

“Charbel Q.” was responsible for a particular section of the company (BTS). A section that all the communication passes through in the first phase in the company. It controlled more than 650 sending stations in the Lebanese regions and maintains their connections to each other.

The preliminary investigations with Charbel, show that he planted technical equipment in all the stations of the company, through which he provided Israel with the working frequencies which are used in the stations. Through this theft, the Mossad and Israel were able to control all the processes from the cellular company's Alpha. The investigators are trying to find out who “Charbel Q.'s” partners are. They are expecting that his arrest will lead to uncovering new spying network(s).

_____________

Kawther Salam is a Palestinian journalist. She had a career of over 20 years working for various newspapers and TV stations in Palestine. She forced to live in the Exile in Vienna since 2002.

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Hamas: Don’t Give In On Shalit

Commentary by Khalid Amayreh
1 July, 2010

The cruel Israeli regime is organizing a fresh campaign to demand the release of one of its occupation soldiers, detained in a secret Gaza location.

The new campaign, publicized by the Jewish-controlled media in Europe and North America, is assuming many expressions, including protests led by the soldier’s family, a propaganda ship organized by the American Jewish followers of the Nazi-minded rabbi Meir Kahana, and a call by happy-go-lucky French President Nicolas Sarkozy for the unconditional release of the Israeli soldier.

This is the same Sarkozy who kept silent during the murderous Israeli onslaught against the defenseless people of Gaza eighteen months ago. He is now invoking humanitarianism and charity as if the thousands of Gaza children, men and women, annihilated or maimed by the Israeli army were non-humans.

It is true that Gilad Shalit is not being accorded a five-star treatment. But this is not due to any presumed sadistic urges on Hamas’s part to torment the young soldier who is likely to have the blood of many children on his hand.

In Israel, it is difficult to find an adult Israeli male whose hands have not been stained with Palestinian blood. After all, Israel is a society of murderers and child-killers. It is a society whose members Zionism has transformed into racists, cannibals and Nazi-minded murderers and child killers.

Indeed, were it not for the fact that Israel has been making constant and meticulous efforts to discover his whereabouts and liberate him by force, there is no doubt that Hamas would allow the International Commission of the Red Cross, even his family, to visit him.

But Israel, a country that murders peace activists on high seas and then calls the cold-blooded murder “armed confrontations with terrorists,” can’t be trusted.

Palestinians have had a long and bitter experience with Israeli treachery. This is why Hamas can’t allow itself to make the slightest risk in this regard. Yes, one might sympathize with Shalit at a certain human level. However, Shalit is only one person while the entire Palestinian people are held hostage by an evil regime that can only be compared with history’s worst.

There are, of course, other aspects to this sensitive issue. Israel detains thousands of Palestinian political and resistance prisoners in its dungeons. And as the recently-freed Palestinian Islamic leader Sheikh Nayef Rajoub revealed, many of these prisoners are being subjected to Medieval savagery at the hands of those claiming to be “a light upon the nations.”

For those who have forgotten, Shalit was taken prisoner in battlefield. Moreover, had Israel succeeded in carrying out a rescue operation, he would have most likely got killed.

This is probably the endgame that Israel wishes for its imprisoned soldier. A dead Shalit would be a Hasbara bonanza for the Zionist propaganda machine. On the one hand, it would allow Israel to torture and kill more Palestinian political prisoners (several Palestinian prisoners died recently due to torture, medical negligence and other causes). It would also absolve Israel from freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as demanded by Hamas and insisted by the vast bulk of the Palestinian masses, irrespective of their political orientation.

To be sure, Hamas had been negotiating in good faith with Israel, hoping to reach a dignified breakthrough that would see the repatriation of Shalit to his family in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian detainees to their families. That would be a win-win formula for everyone.

However, the Israeli government consistently and arrogantly rejected this logical proposal, making racist arguments which even the leaders and ideologues of the Third Reich didn’t dare to make.

For example, Israeli leaders routinely invoke the mendacious canard that the Judeo-Nazi state cannot free prisoners who have Jewish blood on their hands. Well, what about the thousands or tens thousands of Israelis who have Palestinian, Lebanese and now Turkish blood on their hands? Is non-Jewish blood less red than Jewish blood?

Israel doesn’t dare indulge in a genuine argument in this regard. The reason is simple. Israel views the blood and lives of non-Jews as insignificant, at least in comparison to Jewish blood and Jewish lives. Just try to have a brief conversation with a rabbi and you will be more than shocked hearing what he will be saying in this regard.

In any case, Hamas must not show the slightest sign of fatigue vis-à-vis Israel because the lives and freedom of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are at stake. Hamas has been successfully managing this Shalit affair for over three years. Israel committed untold massacres and has been imposing a manifestly criminal siege on 1.7 million human beings, in the hope of creating a crack in Hamas’s wall of steadfastness. But neither Israeli pressure, nor western conspiracy, nor Arab collusion and Palestinian Authority treachery, have succeeded in pressurizing Hamas to give in or give up.

In the final analysis, Hamas has a huge moral responsibility toward thousands of Palestinian families whose children are languishing in Israeli concentration camps and dungeons.

Needless to say, these people have spent the prime of their lives in Israeli prisons so that their people will be able to live in dignity and in order to maintain the hope for freedom and liberation from evil Zionism.

Hence, we must not hesitate to proclaim and reassert the Palestinian position in this regard, namely that Shalit must stay behind bars as long as Israel insists on keeping our men, and women and children behind bars.

This position may not be popular in New York and Paris. But why show the slightest concern about what Paris and New York think in the firs place. They have always been and continue to be our direct or indirect tormentors. Our responsibility is first and foremost toward these tortured Palestinian prisoners and their suffering families who have kept our national just cause alive.

In a nutshell, our prisoners are not children of a lesser God.

(end)

___________

Editors comment:

An anti-Sarkozy "Wanted" poster casting Sarkozy as "Sarkoleon Bonapartheid" saying; Be careful.

Despite his nice looks, this is a dangerous individual. Do not vote for him!

The " happy-go-lucky French President Nicolas Sarkozy" is of Sephardic Jew descent. Sarkozy's dealings with Israel should be a cause for concern, not only for Palestinians but for the world.

Hiyam Noir

-------------------------------------------

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Lieberman’s “Peace" Plan: Strip Palestinians of Citizenship Blueprint Requires Pure Jewish State

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

29 June 2010

Jonathan Cook reports on Israel’s Moldovan bouncer-cum-Foreign Minister Avigdor Leiberman’s so-called “peace plan”, which entails stripping Israel’s Arab citizens of their citizenship and expelling them from the country.

Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister, set out last week what he called a “blueprint for a resolution to the conflict” with the Palestinians that demands most of the country’s large Palestinian minority be stripped of citizenship and relocated outside Israel’s future borders.

Blackmailing the international community

Warning Israel faced growing diplomatic pressure for a full withdrawal to the Green Line, the pre-1967 border, Mr Lieberman said that, if such a partition were implemented, “the conflict will inevitably pass beyond those borders and into Israel”.

He accused many of Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of acting against Israel while their leaders “actively assist those who want to destroy the Jewish state”.

Mr Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party campaigned in last year’s elections on a platform of “No loyalty, no citizenship” and has proposed a raft of loyalty laws over the past year targeted at the Palestinian minority.

True peace, the foreign minister claimed, would come only with land swaps, or “an exchange of populated territories to create two largely homogeneous states, one Jewish Israeli and the other Arab Palestinian”. He added that under his plan “those Arabs who were in Israel will now receive Palestinian citizenship”.

Unusually, Mr Lieberman, who is also deputy prime minister, offered his plan in a commentary for the English-language Jerusalem Post daily newspaper, apparently in an attempt to make maximum impact on the international community.

Making room for Jewish squatters

He has spoken repeatedly in the past about drawing the borders in a way to forcibly exchange Palestinian communities in Israel for the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

But under orders from Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, he has kept a relatively low profile on the conflict’s larger issues since his controversial appointment to head the Foreign Ministry more than a year ago.

In early 2009, Mr Lieberman, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, upset his own supporters by advocating the creation of “a viable Palestinian state”, though he has remained unclear about what it would require in practice.

Mr Lieberman’s revival of his “population transfer” plan – an idea he unveiled six years ago – comes as the Israeli leadership has understood that it is “isolated like never before”, according to Michael Warschawski, an Israeli analyst.

International isolation

Mr Netanyahu’s government has all but stopped paying lip service to US-sponsored “proximity talks” with the Palestinians after outraging global public opinion with attacks on Gaza 18 months ago and on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla four weeks ago in which nine peace activists were killed.

Israel’s relations with the international community are likely to deteriorate further in late summer when a 10-month partial freeze on settlement expansion in the West Bank expires. Last week, Mr Netanyahu refused to answer questions about the freeze, after a vote by his Likud party’s central committee to support renewed settlement building from late September.

Other looming diplomatic headaches for Israel are the return of the Goldstone report, which suggested Israel committed war crimes in its attack on Gaza, to the United Nations General Assembly in late July, and Turkey’s adoption of the rotating presidency of the Security Council in September.

Worms turning in the can

Mr Warschawski, a founder of the Alternative Information Centre, a joint Israeli-Palestinian advocacy group, said that, faced with these crises, Israel’s political elite had split into two camps.

Most, including Mr Lieberman, believed Israel should “push ahead” with its unilateral policies towards the Palestinians and refuse to engage in a peace process regardless of the likely international repercussions.

“Israel’s ruling elite knows that the only solution to the conflict acceptable to the international community is an end to the occupation along the lines of the Clinton parameters,” he said, referring to the two-state solution promoted by former US president Bill Clinton in late 2000.

“None of them, not even Ehud Barak [the defence minister and head of the centrist Labour Party], are ready to accept this as the basis for negotiations.”

On the other hand, Tzipi Livni, the head of the centre-right opposition Kadima party, Mr Warschawski said, wanted to damp down the international backlash by engaging in direct negotiations with the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank under Mahmoud Abbas.

Mr Lieberman’s commentary came a day after he told Ms Livni that she could join the government only if she accepted “the principle of trading territory and population as the solution to the Palestinian issue, and give up the principle of land for peace”.

Mr Lieberman is reportedly concerned that Mr Netanyahu might seek to bring Ms Livni into a national unity government to placate the US and prop up the legitimacy of his coalition.

The Labour Party has threatened to quit the government if Kadima does not join by the end of September, and Ms Livni is reported to want the Foreign Ministry.

Mr Lieberman’s position is further threatened by a series of corruption investigations.

However, he also appears keen to take the initiative from both Washington and Ms Livni with his own “peace plan”. An unnamed aide to Mr Lieberman told the Jerusalem Post that, with a vacuum in the diplomatic process, the foreign minister “thinks he can convince the government to adopt the plan”.

Undermining Israel’s Arab citizens

However, Mr Warschawski said there were few indications that Mr Netanyahu wanted to be involved in any peace process, even Mr Lieberman’s.

Last week Uzi Arad, the government’s shadowy national security adviser and a long-time confidant of Mr Netanyahu, made a rare public statement at a meeting of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to attack Ms Livni for “political adventurism” and believing in the “magic” of a two-state solution.

Apparently reflecting Mr Netanyahu’s own thinking, he said: “The more you market Palestinian legitimacy, the more you bring about a detraction of Israel’s legitimacy in certain circles. [The Palestinians] are accumulating legitimacy, and we are being delegitimized.”

Mr Warschawski doubted that Mr Lieberman believed his blueprint for population exchanges could be implemented but was promoting it chiefly to further damage the standing of Israel’s Palestinian citizens and advance his own political ambitions.

In his commentary, Mr Lieberman said the international community’s peace plan would lead to “the one-and-a-half to half state solution”: “a homogeneous, pure Palestinian state”, from which Jewish settlers were expelled, and “a binational state in Israel”, which included many Palestinian citizens.

Palestinians, in both the territories and inside Israel, he said, could not “continue to incite against Israel, glorify murder, stigmatize Israel in international forums, boycott Israeli goods and mount legal offensives against Israeli officials”.

International law, he added, sanctioned the partition of territory in which ethnic communities were broken up into different states, including in the case of the former Yugoslavia. “In most cases there is no physical population transfer or the demolition of houses, but creating a border where none existed, according to demographics,” he wrote.

Surveys have shown that Palestinian citizens are overwhelming opposed to “population transfer” schemes like Mr Lieberman’s.

Critics note that Mr Lieberman has failed to show how the many Palestinian communities inside Israel that are located far from the Green Line could be incorporated into a Palestinian state without expulsions.

Legal experts also point out that, even if Israel managed to trade territory as part of a peace agreement, stripping Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship as a result of such a deal would violate international law.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi. The version on this website is published by permission of Jonathan Cook.

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Kenneth O'Keefe Straight Talk: BBC Interview About the Flotilla Attack

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Zionist Air Strikes Across Gaza - Two Dead one Injured

GAZA - Zionist warplanes targeted and bombed Gaza at dawn on Friday. Two airstrikes caused severe structural damage to buildings in the Jabalaya refuge camp in the northern parts of Gaza, and in Beit Hanoun in the south. Also two Rafah life-line smuggling tunnels where bombed by F16 war planes also targeting and bombing an industrial zone.

Emergency personal pulled out two bodies from a Rafah tunnel following the early Friday mornings Zionist air strikes.Three young men who were inside the tunnel, were crushed by falling walls of rocks and sand.One of the dead found in the collapsing tunnel,was 23 year-old Amer Abu Hadid, while the second victim remains unidentified. A third young man survived the attack, and is according to hospital officials injured. All three victims has been taken to the An-Najjar Hospital in Rafah.

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Devouring al-Quds in Broad Daylight

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Thursday, 24 June 2010 11:15

by Khalid Amayreh in East Jerusalem

The recent decision by the Israeli government to banish four Palestinian lawmakers from Jerusalem to areas in the West Bank run by the Palestinian Authority (PA) is another repugnant expression of the Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing in the city, holy to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

This undeclared but clear policy aims to minimize as much as possible the city's non-Jewish population so that Israel can realize its routinely-invoked mantra of Jerusalem being "Israel's eternal and undivided capital."

The four Arab lawmakers, Muhammad Abu Tir, Ahmed Atwan, Mohammed Totah and Khalid Abu Arafeh, didn't violate any laws, committed no crimes and certainly did nothing to warrant extirpation from their natural homeland, the city of their birth.

Israel claims the four are affiliated with a political organization deemed "terrorist" by the Jewish state. Israel deems anyone and everyone, including peace activists carrying milk powder and food to blockaded Gazans as "terrorist." Indeed, Israel effectively classifies Palestinians into two categories: Terrorists, who ought to be annihilated, and collaborators or informers. There is nothing in between.

This is why the politically-motivated charge (affiliation with a terrorist organization) is really a mere pretext since Hamas is a legitimate political party with hundreds of thousands of supporters.

Hence, what Israel really wants goes far beyond vilifying and weakening Hamas? Israel simply wants to attain the following goal: Getting as many Palestinians as possible to leave East Jerusalem, by hook or by crook, and seizing as much as possible of Arab land and property, mainly under the rubric of hounding and fighting Hamas.

In fact, one can claim rather candidly that the unmitigated demonization of Hamas by Israel has very little to do with the Islamic movement's involvement in active resistance against the plainly cruel Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Hamas is an honest organization. Its doesn't accept anything less than a total Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories pursuant to international law, The movement refuses to be cajoled or bullied by Israel to give up inalienable Palestinian rights usurped by Israel. It wouldn't be bribed by carrots or coerced by sticks, which help keep the Palestinian hope for true independence and freedom alive. This, not the issue of terror, is the real reason behind Israel's mad fixation on Hamas, a group molded in reaction to Israeli oppression and savagery against the Palestinian people.

It is for these reasons that the decision to deport these democratically-elected MPs ought to be viewed in the context of larger efforts to ethnically cleanse Jerusalemite Arabs from their city, which is home to al-Masjidul Aqsa, the world's third most important Islamic shrine.

Indeed, the decision to banish the four Jerusalemite leaders is only one expression of the ongoing Israeli drive to make Jerusalem free of Muslims and Christians as much as possible.

In recent days, the Israeli authorities decided to demolish more than 88 Arab homes at the Silwan neighborhood. The declared purpose of this act of war against Arab demography is to build a Talmudic park in the area. However, there are ample signs that the real ultimate goal is to enforce Jewish settler's presence in the area as well as coerce more Arabs to leave.

According to the Israeli human rights organization B'tselem, Israel confiscated the residency rights of more than 6 thousand Palestinian residents in the past three years alone.

Other draconian measures meant to drive Palestinians away include excessive taxation, property seizure, as well as promulgating laws that would lead to shattering Palestinian daily life and force as many Palestinians as possible to leave.

Israel, for example, is never content with demolishing Palestinian homes and confiscating residency rights at the slightest pretext. It is now outlawing protests against these manifestly illegal, indeed criminal, measures. According to reliable sources in Jerusalem, the Israeli occupation authorities have begun to enforce new penalties against Palestinian Jerusalemites, including revocation of residency rights, re-evaluation of taxes owed and reduction in welfare benefits.

According to Ziad al Hammouri, Director of the Jerusalem Center for Legal Rights, he latest racist decision may well be a "test case" that would determine subsequent acts of ethnic cleansing by Israel.

"They are trying to extirpate us from our homes. We are facing the real danger of being uprooted simply because Israel want Jerusalem to be exclusively Jewish and we are not Jews. So it seems that the Israeli message is like this: Either you leave or convert to Judaism."

Like Palestinians everywhere, the Palestinians of Jerusalem are ostensibly successfully protesting the latest measures of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem. However, Israel can not be trusted to deal justly with Arab grievances. In fact, experience shows that in the absence of massive international pressure, Israel would pay no attention to the most elementary human and civil rights of its victims.

This is why, meaningful international efforts are vital to stop the latest Israeli campaign targeting the very existence of the native Arab community in East Jerusalem.

The American government has half-heartedly protested Israeli plans to demolish numerous homes at Silwan. However, the Israeli authorities don't seem to take the Americans truly seriously.

The Obama administration, which had demanded that Israel freeze Jewish settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, mainly in order to provide an appropriate atmosphere for the resumption of the clearly moribund peace process, has effectively succumbed to Israeli arrogance and insolence.

Hence, it would be naïve and self-defeating for Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims to pin any genuine hopes on the Obama administration to force Israel to reconsider its criminal designs in Jerusalem.

To be sure the American impotence vis-à-vis Israel is not intrinsic in nature. The US, which is Israel's guardian and ally, simply sees no urgent need to get tough with Israel especially as long as its vital interests throughout the Muslim world are not scathed the least as Arab regimes are vying to please and appease Washington.

This is happening while the frustration and indignation of Arab and Muslim masses are rising to new levels, especially in the aftermath of the criminal Israeli assault on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla on 31 May, which killed at least nine Turkish activists and injured dozens others.

In the final analysis, the Arab and Muslim masses, although unable to reverse their tyrannical regimes subservience to Washington, can at least demonstrate to the Americans that hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world will never forgive the US government its scandalous embrace of Israeli criminality toward the Palestinian people.

As to the Palestinians themselves, it is time they turn their backs on the so-called two-state solution strategy.

Israel has simply killed the two-state solutions by rendering unrealistic or virtually impossible the creation of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank due to the ubiquitous proliferation of Jewish colonies in occupied Arab land.

Perhaps a sustained popular struggle similar to that which eventually terminated the defunct White minority apartheid regime in South Africa, ought to be tried by the Palestinians.

True, Israel may look somewhat invincible and powerful. However, there are many signs that Israel is also disintegrating from within and losing at many fronts. In the end, Israel is moving on a losing track. I am sure many Jewish intellectuals know this.

(End)

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Noam Chomsky's Hypocrisy

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By Ghali Hassan

“I don't regard myself as a critic of Israel. I regard myself a supporter of Israel ... I think the U.S. should continue to support Israel”. [1]

- Noam Chomsky

The American linguist Noam Chomsky is often described by Western media as “arguably the world's most influential intellectual today”. To his friends, Chomsky is a “relentless thorn” in U.S.-Israel Zionist policies. But reading between the lines of his repetitive and recycled propaganda, Chomsky is an opportunistic hypocrite.

On May 16 2010, Noam Chomsky was illegally denied entry to the Israel-Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank. Chomsky was scheduled to meet with members of the Palestinian Authority (PA), including the unelected U.S.-imposed and Israel-backed collaborationist “Prime Minister”, Salam Fayyad.

We know that the Israeli military controls all the borders of Israel-Occupied Palestinian Territories, and subjects Palestinians to prison-like living conditions. Thousands of Palestinians, pregnant women, the elderly, and the sick are denied free movement every day. While Chomsky failed to condemn this Israeli illegal behaviour, he could have entered via Tel Aviv (as he did many times in the past) and gone on to meet Salam Fayyad in Ramallah. Israel has since apologised to Chomsky. In an interview with Democracy Now on May 17, 2010, Chomsky said:

“I was going to meet with the [unelected] Prime Minister. Unfortunately, I couldn't. But his office called me here in Amman this morning, and we had a long discussion. He is pursuing policies, which, in my view, are quite sensible, policies of essentially developing facts on the ground. It's almost – I think it's probably a conscious imitation of the early Zionist policies, establishing facts on the ground and hoping that the political forms that follow will be determined by them. And the policies sound to me like sensible and sound ones. The question, of course, is whether – the extent to which Israel and the United States, which is a determining, factor – the extent to which they'll permit them to be implemented. But if implemented, and if, of course, Israel and the United States would terminate their systematic effort to separate Gaza from the West Bank, which is quite illegal, if that continues, yes, it could turn into a viable Palestinian state”. Noam Chomsky sounds like Shimon Peres.

Chomsky's argument does not withstand the slightest scrutiny. How could Chomsky, who claims to defend the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, be prepared to meet with an unelected stooge of a Vichy-like collaborationist regime? To present Fayyad as a saviour for the Palestinian people is to ignore his despicable record of collaboration with the criminal oppressors of the Palestinians.

The PA is a corrupt administration and has no significant support among the Palestinian population. Its security apparatus is a brutal militia acting to enforce the Occupation on behalf of Israel. Fayyad was a U.S. servant at the World Bank from 1987 to 1995 and remains so in a different capacity. He is known in Israel as “the Palestinian Ben-Gurion”. David Ben-Gurion – a criminal Zionist much admired by Noam Chomsky as a “great statesman” – was the architect of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes and lands in 1948. This period of Palestinian history has come to be known as al-Nakbah (Arabic for ‘The Catastrophe') which was, according to Chomsky, a “war of independence”. More than 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes, thousands of defenceless Palestinians were murder in countless cold-blooded massacred by Jewish terrorists, and more than 500 villages were destroyed. The same continues today.

Chomsky is said to be “encouraged” by Fayyad's recent ranting that “the birth of a Palestinian state will be celebrated as a day of joy by the entire community of nations ... it will come around August 2011”. It is a repackaged Camp David proposal, which was concocted in 2000 by Bill Clinton and his Zionist handlers and courageously rejected by the late Yasser Arafat. According to Fayyad, the new state will:

recognise Israel as a Jewish “biblical country”;

allow Israel to build Jewish colonies ‘within the valleys and hills of the West Bank';

suppress – using U.S.-trained and Israeli-approved Palestinian militias (Keith Dayton-trained death squads) – all forms of resistance to Israel's Zionist colonisation of Palestine; and

relinquish the Palestinian people's right of return to their homes from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948.

The so-called “two-state” solution, which Chomsky supports, is a Zionist fraud. It has been around for decades. Israel and the U.S. use this fraud to manipulate the world's public opinion and to continue forcing more Palestinians out of their homes and land. Most of the Palestinian arable land and water resources have been stolen and colonised by illegal Jewish colonists (‘settlers') from the U.S., Poland, and the former Soviet satellite states. The new Palestinian “state” will be just a collection of Nazi-like ghettoes similar to the South African Bantustan hemmed in by Jews-only highways and the Apartheid Wall. Like the “peace process”, the “two-state” solution enables Israel to stall for time and continues the ghettoization of the Palestinians.

The largest of these ghettoes, Gaza, is now complete. Gaza is a state of the art Concentration Camp. It has been under complete Israeli military blockade since 2006, essentially imprisoning 1.5 million men, women, and children, and denying them food, medicine, and essential materials for building their demolished homes. Even the pro-Israel Western humanitarian agencies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Amnesty International (AI), described the Israeli blockade is an illegal collective punishment , and an economic warfare aimed at terrorising the civilian population and toppling the democratically-elected administration of HAMAS. Even the Nazis wouldn't resort to such wholesale brutality against 1.5 million innocent civilians. Instead of bragging about his meeting with Fayyad, Chomsky should call for an immediate and total end to the Israeli-imposed blockade and the withdrawal of the Israeli army and the illegal Jewish settlers from Palestinian lands.

For his support of the Palestinians, Chomsky opposes pressure to force Israel to behave according to international law and civilised norms. For example, Chomsky is against the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Campaign against Israel. Chomsky believes the boycott will hurt Israelis. The Campaign is based on the international boycott campaign used to end South Africa's Apartheid rule. The BDS Campaign is a call by Palestinian and international civil societies, human rights organisations, unions, and NGOs to boycott Israel and expose Israel's ongoing crimes against the Palestinians. The Campaign is calling upon people of conscience around the world to boycott Israeli products and Israeli institutions that are complicit on Israel's brutal oppression and war crimes. Successive Israeli regimes have violated international law and committed more crimes against the Palestinians. Without international pressure, Israel will not end the Occupation.

The Campaign is part of peaceful international resistance to force Israel to end its Occupation of Palestinian land and end Israel's apartheid system. Chomsky is against boycotting a state with a regime that is enforcing an apartheid system worse than that of South Africa. “Under Israeli military occupation, repression is worse than South Africa's. It's a sophisticated form of social, economic, political and racial discrimination, strangulation, and genocide, incorporating the worst elements of colonialism and apartheid as well as repressive dispossession, displacement and state terrorism to separate Palestinians from their land and heritage, deny them their rightful civil and human rights, and gradually remove or eliminate them altogether”, writes the American writer, Stephen Lendman. Chomsky's objection to the Campaign only underlines the hypocrisy and doublespeak of his alleged support for the oppressed people of Palestine.

For all Israel's crimes and flagrant violations of international law, Chomsky blames the U.S., precisely the White House and the President. Chomsky has no quarrel with the powerful U.S. Congress, where the Zionist Jewish Lobby (the ‘Lobby') exerts complete control. Indeed, the U.S. Congress is far more pro-Israel than the Israeli Knesset. For example, the recent premeditated barbaric murder of at least nine defenceless humanitarian aid volunteers on board the Free Gaza-bounded Mavi Marmara Flotilla by Israeli commandos is unconditionally defended by U.S. Democrat and Republican congressional leaders as an act of “self-defence”, not an act of state terrorism. Chomsky rejects the role of the Lobby and Zionist Jewish Organisations controlling U.S. foreign policies, particularly in the Middle East. Chomsky argues fiercely that the U.S. supports Israel because of Israel's strategic position (close to the oil-rich region) and is “a reliable pro-Western military force protecting Arab dictators”. This argument is flawed and its aim is to deflect attention away from Israel and the Zionist Jewish organisations defending Israel's terror. Credible research by respected scholars shows that Israel is unconditionally supported – financially, militarily, and politically – by the U.S. and European governments because of pressure from wealthy and powerful Zionist Jewish Organisations who are also in total control of nearly all mainstream media outlets, including the Internet, TV channels, and the print media. Indeed, Zionist control over the mainstream media is clearly demonstrated by the biased reporting through an Israel-Zionist lens [2, 3, & 4].

The U.S. does not need Israel to control the oil-rich region of the Middle East. For decades, the U.S. directly dominated the region through its massive military bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The U.S. does not need to pay Israel more than $3 billion a year in order to commit war crimes. It is true: Israel doesn't act and commit crimes without the approval of its allies, particularly the U.S. government. They are accomplices to murder.

On Iran, Chomsky is very unclear. While he rightly argues that the U.S. and Israel are seriously threatening Iran, Chomsky has yet to show any evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Quoting Martin van Crevel, the Zionist military historian at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and adviser to the Israeli military, Chomsky argues that Iran is developing nuclear weapons to deter any U.S.-Israel aggression. If not, the Iranians “are crazy”. There is absolutely no evidence that Iran is enriching uranium for military use. Iran has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. The rest is anti-Muslim Zionist warmongering propaganda. Iran has broken no agreement and is fulfilling all its obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The real violator is Israel which stands in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and IAEA safeguards obligations. To date, Israel is refusing to open its nuclear facilities for inspection and threatening to use nuclear weapons against Iran.

Furthermore, Chomsky's attack on the Iranian Government is unjustified. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the choice of the majority of the Iranian people (3-1), according to an analysis of multiple polls of the Iranian public conducted by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). [5] Like most Western “Leftists”, Chomsky believes the elections were rigged and supports the opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who was complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity at the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. Chomsky's reliance on anti-Muslim propaganda organs, such as the BBC, FOX News and CNN shows that he is a propagandist.

Given Chomsky's defence of freedom and democratic principles, it was ironic that in 2005 Chomsky and his leftist friends supported the U.S.-staged fraudulent elections in Iraq to install a puppet government as “democratic” and “worthy of praise”. If people like Chomsky fail to condemn fraudulent elections staged by foreign military occupation, then the U.S. will continue to manipulate democracy to serve U.S. imperialist interest. He called the murderous Occupation “incompetence” and attacked the Iraqi Resistance as a “violent insurgency”. It is sad that Chomsky, a leading critic of U.S. imperialism and injustice, could have ignored U.S. imperialist motives.

Furthermore, according to Chomsky, Iraq has become ‘an incubator or a university for advanced training for terrorists'. Where is the evidence? And since when is legitimate resistance to illegal aggression called terrorism? Instead, Chomsky and his leftist friends should condemn the Occupation and demand the immediate and full withdrawal of U.S. troops and mercenaries from Iraq.

It is important to remember that while Chomsky protested against the criminal U.S. invasion of Iraq, he later justified the illegal invasion on the basis that it has “removed” not only Saddam Hussein but also the genocidal sanctions. Seven years after the criminal U.S. invasion, Iraq is far worse today than under Saddam Hussein and the genocidal sanctions. An entire nation has been deliberately destroyed. More than 1.5 million Iraqis have been killed and at least 5 millions Iraqis are refugees, including 2.7 million internally displaced Iraqis. According to the U.S. think-tank, the Brookings Institute, only 20 per cent of the Iraqi population have access to proper sanitation, 45 per cent to clean water, 50 per cent to more than 12 hours a day of electricity, 50 per cent to adequate housing, and 30 per cent to health services. A quarter of Iraq's population is living in extreme poverty. Iraq remains under murderous U.S. military Occupation. The motive remains conspicuous; defending the Zionist state of Israel and enforcing long-lasting imperialist-Zionist control of the region.

It is important to acknowledge that despite Chomsky's contradictions, he is a respected scholar. In addition to his contribution to the field of linguistics, Chomsky has on many occasions provided useful analyses of U.S. terrorism, propaganda, and U.S. imperialist foreign policy. However, his contradictions are not possible to redress.

As a scholar, Chomsky has admitted that all intellectuals (including Chomsky himself) are propagandists who serve power by manipulating the public. “Chomsky feeds our need for truth by providing analysis, an intellectual framework that resides in inaction. [He] feeds the false notion that one can understand the world and one's place in it and oneself by reading books”, writes Denis Rancourt, a former professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa.

Finally, in an opinion poll conducted by the European Union Commission in Brussels between 8 and 16 October 2003 (published in the El Pais and the International Herald Tribune newspapers), a majority of 7,500 Europeans polled from 15 European Union countries (500 citizens from each EU member) said that Israel posed the most serious threat to regional and international peace, ahead of North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan. The poll proved to be accurate. On 02 March 2010, Martin van Crevel, the Zionist military historian and adviser to the Israeli army, told the Western media: “We [Jews] possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets of our air force … The Palestinians should all be deported ... The people [Israeli Jews] who strive for this are waiting only for the right man and the right time. Two years ago only 7 or 8 percent of Israelis were of the opinion that this would be the best solution, two months ago [January 2010] it was 33 percent and now, according to a Gallup poll, the figure is 44 percent”. The comment shows that Israeli Zionists and those who defend their crimes lack morality and respect for international law.

How can any progressive-minded person support a state that was built on the ruins of Palestinian villages, genocide, and dispossession? How can anyone support a state that openly espouses a racist and fascist ideology and is in flagrant violation of international law and civilised norms?

“I don't think there is one moral person in the world that supports what Israel stands for”, said Ilan Pappé, a Haifa-born Jewish history scholar at the University of Exeter in the UK and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. It is not unfair to describe Chomsky as the most influential pro-Israel propagandist.

Notes:

???? ?????? ??????? ????? Noam Chomsky interviewed in Israel

John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt, The Israel lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy , Middle East Policy . 13(3),29-87, 2006 ;

James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States , Clarity Press, 2006;

M. Shahid Alam, Chomsky on Oil and the Israel Lobby , Dissident Voice , 31 January, 2009.

Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, Stephen Weber & Evan Lewis, An Analysis of multiple polls of Iranian Public , The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), WorldPublicOpinion.org, Washington DC, February 2010.

Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.

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