Holocausts: Theirs and the Many Ours

By Dr. Elias Akleh

April 28^th, 2012 

The month of April commemorates many historical genocides. Among these is the Zionist total destruction and massacre of Palestinian town of Deir Yassin that ushered the beginning of the still-going on Palestinian Holocaust. As a Palestinian I could not help but revisit, research and re-evaluate the role of Zionists in the many other Holocausts around the world and compare them to the Jewish Holocaust.

The Holocaust; the burning of the round figure of 6 million Jews in Nazi gas chambers, is considered by many to be the most unique event in the whole human history. This event had morphed into multiple shapes. It had become a religion with memorials and museums erected in every Western country to drill the idea in the minds of new generations especially Jews. It had become a vendetta with Jewish “detectives” with the mindset of “never forget and never forgive” chasing Nazi Holocaust criminals all over the world to bring them to “Jewish justice” in Israeli courts. It has become a taboo, whose study and research, as a historical event, by academics has become a punishable crime in European countries. It has become a psychological tool to pin heavy blame on the World for letting it happen. It has become a political game where enormous amounts of Jewish money would go to politicians, who sympathize with Holocaust survivors and with Israel. It has become a colonial weapon justifying Zionist occupation of Palestine.  It has become an industry by which Israel and the millions of so-called Holocaust survivals embezzle large sums of money as reparation from Germany, its corporations, its insurance companies, its people, and from other European corporations.

Lately these Holocaust survivors in the US are pressuring the Congress to formulate legal bills that allow them to use American courts to sue European companies who allegedly cooperated in any way with the Nazis leading to the Holocaust. American legislators had produced such bills as the Holocaust Rail Justice Act and the Holocaust Insurance Accountability Act allowing these survivors to sue insurance companies for $20 billion and European rail companies such as the French Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF). It is interesting to note that such bills came after SNCF had won a bid on a $2.6 billion rail projects linking some major American cities together.

The rounded 6 million number is in itself a very interesting figure. It brings to memory other 6 million Jews who were allegedly slaughtered after WWI according to one former governor of the State of N.Y., Martin Glynn, who published such story in “The American Hebrew” in October 31^st 1919 under the title “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop”. He stated that six million Jewish men and women and eight hundred thousand Jewish babies whose blood “ran like gutters of a slaughter house” in cities of Romania, Poland and Ukrainia. Between 1919 and 1927 the figure of 6 million Jewish victims was reported many times in the American media. It was reported in New York Times issues of October 31^st, November 12^th, December 3^rd of 1919 issues, in 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 7^th May 1920 issues, and in April 21^st and December 4^th 1926 issues, just to mention only one media outlet. It is, paradoxically, interesting to remember that Chaim Weizmann, then the president of the Zionist World Organization, addressed the 1936 Peel Commission that partitioned Palestine, affirming that 6 million Jews were living in all Europe as if in a prison (Thomas Mann; “Sieben Manifeste zur judische Frage, Seven Manifests about the Jewish Question”; Jos. Meizer Verlag, Darmstadt 1966. P. 18).  The 6 million figure seems to have a significant symbol in the alleged saga of Jewish suffering. According to Benjamin Blech’s book “The Secret of Hebrew Words” ;(Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 1991, p. 214) there is a Jewish prophecy promising Jewish return to their alleged promised land after the slaughter of 6 million of them. It seems that this 6 million figure is based on mythical religious colonial ambition rather than any verifiable factual statistical knowledge.

A brief study of the three thousand years of Jewish history leads one to the realization that Zionism is just another modern term given to the religious-Jewish-world-control dream. Starting with their Old Testament and up to their terrorist colonial Israeli project in Palestine one cannot help but conclude that exploitations, sexual degeneracy, theft, treachery, brutality, murder, random killing, communal massacres, total destruction, and the death of all non-Jews (Goyims) are only parts and parcels of the daily life and existence of this Jewish religiously racist collective. Since their descendant onto the land of Canaanites the Jews had perpetrated the most egregious total annihilation not just of its indigenous population but also the annihilation of other nations around the world that surmounted any alleged Holocaust of their own.

Detailing these Jewish crimes, whether perpetrated directly by Jews or in proxy, requires large volumes. This article will deal only with few and the most recent.

The annihilation of at least 20 million Russian citizens (Russian Holocaust) by Jewish officers during the Zionist planned Bolshevik Revolution is a well known case. The American Hebrew Magazine, New York, September 10^th, 1920 confessed that “The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was the work of Jewish planning and Jewish dissatisfaction. Our plan is to have a New World Order. What worked so wonderfully in Russia is going to become Reality for the whole world”. Winston Churchill, himself, warned in an article published in February 8^th 1920 issue of the London Illustrated Sunday Herald that Bolshevism is a Jewish worldwide conspiracy. The Israeli leading ynetnews addressed this Russian Holocaust in 2006 by stating that “… some of the greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish”. In December 1917 Stalin established The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage known as Cheka, renamed later as GPU, MKVD, MVD and finally KGB, whose around 80% of its rank-and-file agents were Jews.

Due to Stalin’s collectivization orders many Russian towns were confiscated, their citizens,  whose majority were Christians, arrested, tortured and killed, their churches were destroyed, while synagogues were preserved, by these Jewish agents. Among the worst mass murdering Jewish agents were Genrikh Yagoda, Christian butcher Lazar Kaganovich, Lavrentija Berija, and Ilya Ehrenburg just to mention few. Yagoda was responsible for the murder of 10 million Russian citizens.  Kaganovich destroyed the entire Ukrainian farming and peasant population; 14 million of them (Der Spiegel, Germany, 35/1991 p. 151). Berija murdered 27,500 Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians in what is known as Katyn-Massacre (Der Spiegel, Germany, 8/1996 p.147). Ehrenburg murdered 3 million women, children, and old people in eastern territory of Germany (Frankfut Allgemeine Zeitung, Franfurt, Feb. 28^th, 1995 p.7).

Many may be surprised to read that the Armenian Genocide (Holocaust) was perpetrated, not by the Turks, but by Turkish Jewry known as Crypto-Jews, or Marranos, or Donmeh. For political reasons many Jews in many countries pretend to convert to other religions in order to rise to influential political positions in order to adopt pro-Zionist policies. Israel Zangwill, a prominent and influential Zionist, explained this tactic in his article “The Jewish Race” in The Independent, volume 71, number 3271, dated August 10^th 1911.  Those crypto-Jews formed the “Committee for Union and Progress” (Ittihad ve Terakke) that led the Young Turk Revolution overthrowing the Turkish Empire. The Young Turk Revolution was financed and led by the Salonika Committee that was established by Zionist Masonic Jews of Salonika, Greece, such as Emmanuel Carasso, Salem, Sassun, Fardji, with the cooperation of influential Turkish crypto-Jews Djavid Bey and the Baldji family. Sir Gerard Lowther, UK Ambassador to Ottoman Empire from 1908 – 1913, exposed this Jewish takeover in numerous letters to the British Foreign Office revealing the names of Jews from Salonika and crypto-Jews, whose ultimate goal was to acquire Palestine for the Jews through the eliminating of Sultan Abdulhamid II, who rejected Herzl’s offer to give Palestine to the Zionists as a debt repayment. All this was reported by The London Times (July 11^th, 1911 p. 5) under the title of “Jews and the Situation in Albania”.

Armenians were running the major businesses and professions in Turkish Empire keeping it economically successful. They formed a rich class; an intelligentsia that gained influential political positions in the Empire. Zionists wanted to control the empire by inciting internal ethnic conflicts to get rid of Armenians and to take over their businesses and political positions. So they promised Christian Armenian leaders to regain independent Armenia if they help dismantle the empire, and at the same time they promised Muslim Kurdish leaders to form independent Kurdistan if they exterminated Armenians. In this way Zionists incited religious war to weaken and to drain the empire financially. The Armenians were duped by Zionists’ promises and publically endorsed the Balfour Declaration hoping that UK would protect them from the Turks and support them in forming an independent Armenian State. Crypto-Jews, then, led Sultan Abdul Hamid to believe that Armenian revolutionaries were conspiring with foreign Christian missionaries to take over the empire, and prompted him to order the Young Turks, mainly crypto-Jews, to commit atrocities against Armenians to put down any revolution.

Zionist crypt-Jews, not Turks, were principally responsible for the Armenian Holocaust. Lord Bryce stated in 1915: “High Muslim religious authorities condemned the massacres ordered by Abdul Hamid. In some cases the Governors, being pious and humane men, refused to execute the orders that had reached them, and endeavored to give what protection they could to the unfortunate Armenians.”

Yair Auron wrote in his book “Zionism and the Armenian Genocide: The Banality of Indifference”: “The fact that Jews were involved in the acts of murder of Armenians in 1895 and 1896 is confirmed by internal Jewish archival documentation.” To get more in depth details about Zionist Jewish genocide of Armenians follow the link to read Christopher Jon Bjerknes’ research “The Jewish Genocide of Armenian Christians”, and his interview.

The African Holocaust perpetrated by Jewish slave traders is still unknown by many. In his book “Jews and Judaism in the United States; a Documentary History” (New York, Behrman House, Inc., 1983) Rabbi Raphael stated on pages 14 and 23-25 that “Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade … In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade.  In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.”

The first documented Jew immigrant to America came from Holland in 1654 and settled in what was known, then, as New Amsterdam (New York). Many other Jews followed and settled along the East Coast forming six Jewish communities in Newport, Charleston, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Savannah. They engaged mainly into the business of alcohol distillery and/or slave trade. There was a period when Newport, Rhode Island, was commonly referred to as “The Jewish Newport-World center of Slave Commerce.” The most known of these Jewish slave traders were Aaron Lopez, Felix (cha-cha) de Souza (known as the Prince of Slavers), Isaac Gomez, Abraham Touro, Moses Hays, Abraham Mendes among others.

These traders send their ships to Africa loaded with alcohol selling it cheap to tribal leaders to intoxicate them in order to help them hunt and capture as slaves members of other tribes preferably young and women. They chuckled the slaves and drove them through the jungles to the coast, where they load them onto the ships on top of each other like cattle immersed in their excrements with little food and water to endure the long voyage back to the American colonies to be auctioned out.

Many of these slaves did not survive the trip and died out of exhaustion, hunger, sickness and torture. It was estimated that nine out of ten had died. Reports of the 1764 Chamber of Commerce of the “Rhode Island Colony” estimated the number of captured slaves was one million a year. During 113 years between 1661 to 1774 a conservative number of 110 million African natives were snatched out of their homeland away from their own families. Only about 10%, or eleven million, of them reached the Colonies alive. The rest, about 99 million perished on the way.

To become more informed of this holocaust one can refer to “The Secret Relationships between Blacks and Jews” by J. & L. T. Levin, “The Jewish Onslaught” book by Tony Martin, or to “Who Brought the Slaves to America” by Walter White Jr.  Better yet, one can turn to the official main source; The Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. contains public authentic documents entitled “Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade in America” with sales receipts and letters between Jewish slave ships owners, such as Aaron Lopez, and his ship captains Nathaniel Briggs, David Mill and Abraham All.

The Palestinian Holocaust perpetrated by Zionist Israeli Jews under the watchful eyes of the whole world is still an on-going graduated Holocaust for the last 65 years (history). Religiously racist fundamentalist Jews claim that their racist god had chosen and elevated only the Jews over the rest of the nations and had promised them Palestine as their pure-Jewish state. Israeli Jews are sparing no effort and are using all lethal and devastating weapons to massacre as much Palestinians as they could (also here), evict them from their homes, destroy their cities and raze every trace of their existence, destroy all Christian as well as Muslim religious sites, in order to build their racist Jewish-only state. In their attempt, and since 1947, they had murdered at least 2 million Palestinians, evicted another million out of the country, destroyed and completely razed about 500 towns (400 towns in 1948), violated all the international laws and UN resolutions, and committed international crimes.

Worse than the alleged Nazi crimes, Israeli Jews intentionally and pre-meditatively committed massacres of civilians targeting mainly children (google: “Palestinian children killed by Israel”) and women in particular. They used napalm and phosphorous bombs to burn whole civilian neighborhoods and their civilian inhabitants. They erected the largest ever open-air concentration camps in Gaza Strip and turned every Palestinian town into isolated prisons surrounded by high cement walls and barbed wires with steel gates and remote electronically-controlled armed watch towers. Israeli army had attacked all the neighboring Arab states; Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon destroying their towns and committing massacres against civilians. Israeli Mossad agents committed terrorist attacks within all the Arab states, and reached even Turkey and Iran. They even hit Arab assets in European and even American cities. Israelis had built hundreds of nuclear bombs and keep threatening regional as well as world peace.

The greatest Holocaust that dwarfs all other holocausts is the physical and cultural American Indian Holocaust; many hundreds of millions of the inhabitants of the whole continent of North America, who were fighting white European terrorism since 1492 in what is known as “500 years war”. I was not very surprised when I discovered that Jews had played a major part in this holocaust. See “Jewish Racism and the Genocide of American Indians”, by Richard Boyden; a Jewish Journalist, and “The American Holocaust; Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust” a historical research study by Lilian Friedberg a Jewish scholar.

The German Holocaust after WWII (The Unknown Holocaust) is unknown to many and is rarely talked about. After the end of the war 14 million Germans were systematically expelled from their towns, robbed, raped and killed or let die (Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, “A terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950”, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). There was also the pre-meditated deliberate murder of at least one million German POW on the hands of the allied forces in freezing open concentration prison camps at Sinzig and Rheinberg, (James Bacque’s “Other Losses”; General Paperbacks, Toronto, Canada, not allowed to enter USA), and (Giles MacDonogh’s “After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation”, New York: Basic Books, 2007).

These are just a few, a drop in the ocean, of the Holocausts perpetrated by the Jews. There are, also, other devastating atrocities that filled the human history. Gideon Polya’s impressive article enumerates many of them. Others include the American unnecessary nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that burned within minutes about 500 thousand Japanese civilians and later caused the death and mutilation of many other thousands. The Allied bombing of the non-military cultural German city of Dresden with phosphorous bombs burned at least 130 thousand German civilians. These two are real “shoahs” burning. There is also Churchill’s Holocaust of 2 million Bengali victims through his 1943 deliberate famine.  Let us not forget the Holocaust of WWII with 66 million victims, and the American Holocausts against countries like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq just to mention a few.

The realities of all these historical crimes, except the Jewish Holocaust, can be investigated, researched, studied, criticized, and corrected by anyone and by any organization such as historians, students, schools and universities, reporters, and all types of media outlets. Those, who dare to investigate the Jewish Holocaust on the other hand, are ridiculed, criticized, attacked, fined, punished, imprisoned, and persecuted. European countries have laws that criminalize any historian, who publishes a Holocaust historical study that contradicts the Zionist version no matter how scientific the study is. These laws of the alleged democratic countries contradict Article 19 of the UN Human Rights Charter that states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to see, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Criminalizing any study, investigation and denial of the Holocaust aims to cover the ugly facts of close Zionist Nazi cooperation in persecuting European Jews (“No Shame”,  “Min Hameitzar: The Millions That Could Have Been Saved”, and “Holocaust Victims Accuse”) forcing them to immigrate to Palestine, and to cover Zionist terrorist attacks against British troops occupying Palestine and against Palestinian citizens. Research proved that the German Nazi Party was heavily financed by Jewish financiers such as Kuhn Loeb & Company, J. P. Morgan & Company, Samuel & Samuel of London, and Royal Dutch Shell. Hitler had supported Zionism since the Zionist religious pure Jewish God’s chosen ideology resembled Nazi Germany pure Aryan Super race ideology. From 1933 to 1941 German SS and Gestapo were particularly enthusiastic in their support to Zionism, and supported and encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine (Mark Weber’s “Zionism and the Third Reich”). In cooperation with Zionist leaders they constructed a network of 40 camps and agricultural centers “Labor Camps” to re-educated young Jews with their Jewishness, and to train them militarily and agriculturally in preparation for their new communal Kibbutz life in Palestine. From 1933 -1941 the Nazi/Zionist Transfer Agreement “The Haavara” enabled 60 thousand German Jews to be transferred on German ships to Palestine with all their wealth. In 1941 Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine, such as Lehi or Stern Gang, offered Nazi Germany a political and military alliance and conducted terrorist attacks against British troops in Palestine.

The Jewish Holocaust is the major justification for financing, arming and building the Zionist colonial project of the state of Israel in Palestine. Exposing the Holocaust lie would collapse the Zionist dream of Greater Israel in the Middle East.

Major British supermarket chain announces boycott of produce made in West Bank settlements

Co-op, fifth biggest supermarket chain in Britain, emphasizes it will continue doing business with companies that can guarantee none of their products come from outside the Green Line.

Haaretz

One of the largest supermarket chains in Britain has announced that it intends to boycott Israeli agricultural exporters that market also produce from the West Bank settlements.

While British food retailers have for some years now been labeling products that are grown or manufactured in settlements and in some cases boycotting them entirely, this is the first move by a major company to end all dealings with companies that export products from within the Green Line and from the settlements. The main companies that will be impacted by this decision are Agrexco, Mehadrin and Arava.

The announcement came this weekend following years of campaigning by pro-Palestinian organizations in Britain that have been lobbying for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) of Israel. Co-op, the fifth biggest supermarket chain in Britain has emphasized that this is not a boycott of Israel and that it will continue doing business with companies that can guarantee none of their products originate from outside the Green Line.

The attempts to limit the export of settlement produce to Europe were led in the past by the European Union and the British government. In 2009, the British government, at the express instructions of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, issued guidelines to retailers on clear labeling of produce made in settlements, differentiating it from Palestinian produce and products that were made within the Green Line. These guidelines followed Israeli refusals to label settlement products before being exported to the EU. The issue of labeling settlement produce was a major bone of contention between the British and Israeli governments at the time.

In recent years, the BDS movement has targeted companies such as Agrexco, an export cooperative that serves thousands of farmers, kibbutzim and small agricultural companies in Israel that has continued to export settlement produce.

Hilary Smith, of the Boycott Israel Network welcomed the the Co-op’s decision saying that the chain “has taken the lead internationally in this historic decision to hold corporations to account for complicity in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights. We strongly urge other retailers to follow suit and take similar action.”

The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem responded saying that “it is a pity to see some, who ostensibly pretend to contribute to peace and reconciliation, advance a negative agenda of boycotts, inject an atmosphere of confrontation and widen the distance between the parties involved. It would be prudent to seek a more positive approach to conflict resolution.”

US Military Course Considering “US at War with Islam” Receives Objection

Al Manar

The Pentagon stated on Wednesday that the top U.S. military officer has ordered a review of training material after a course for officers was found to consider that the United States is at war with Islam, Reuters reported.

According to the agency, “Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey sent a letter on Tuesday to leaders of the Army and other services, along with regional commanders and officials heading the National Guard, ordering a review of relevant training and education material across the military.”

Dempsy said that “this review will ensure our professional education programs exhibit the cultural sensitivity, respect for religion and intellectual balance that we should expect in our academic institutions.”

The review was prompted by a soldier who sent a complaint after having completed an elective course entitled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamite Radicalism” at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

The course included an assertion “that the United States is at war with Islam and we ought to just recognize that we are war with Islam,” Pentagon spokesman, Captain John Kirby was quoted as saying.

Kirby added before reporters that “that’s not at all what we believe to be the case. We’re at war against terrorism, specifically Al-Qaeda, who has a warped view of the Islamic faith.”

Reuters quoted him as saying that “US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also felt deep concern over the discovery, which follows a string of incidents that, more than 10 years after the Afghan war began, have exposed a persisting gap between people in the conservative Muslim nation and the Western soldiers fighting Islamist militants there.”

Thrimilc

The New Month (Moonth) of Thrimilc starts 23/4/12

 

A rare admission from Israel

Al Jazeerah

Was it a momentary lapse of concentration or an honest admission?

Last week, in an interview with Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor in Jerusalem, I heard something I have not heard before.

Let’s start with the background.

With the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) talks on Iran’s nuclear programme about to kick off, and the air thick with talk of a military attack on Iran, it seemed appropriate to try to gain some perspective from the Israeli establishment. 

As Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy with a background in Iran issues, Meridor was the perfect man to talk to to.
An able and experienced politician, Meridor was mostly happy to skirt the direct questions and recite approved talking points.

It’s when I challenged him on the biggest talking point of all, Iran’s supposed determination to “wipe Israel off the face of the map,” that Meridor seemed to stumble outside the lines of the agreed narrative.

Meridor: [Iran’s leaders] all come basically ideologically, religiously with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say ‘we’ll wipe it out’, you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed;

Nabili: Well, I am glad you acknowledged they didn’t say they will wipe it out, because certainly Israeli politicians…

Meridor: … they say it will be removed, needs to be removed …

The minister spent much of the ensuing conversation arguing that for Iran to simply question Israel’s long term future amounts to an existential threat; there are many who agree with him.

But it’s his acknowledgement that there’s nuance in Iran’s position that’s so significant, and so rare.

Politicans from Binyamin Netanyahu through Britain’s William Hague and most of the US congress won’t do it; they have invested a great deal of political capital in arguing just the opposite, claiming incessantly that Iran will launch a nuclear weapon on Israel because, in their minds, Iran’s president has more or less said so.

As Gary Leupp, Professor of History at Tufts University in the US points out, this position has remained unmoved by contradictory facts:

Ahmadinejad himself has repeatedly said that his remark was misinterpreted. In January 2006, complaining about the ‘hue and cry’ over his statement, he said: ‘Let the Palestinians participate in free elections and they will say what they want.’ In July 2008, he told a meeting of the D-8 nations (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey) that his country would never initiate military action but that the Israeli regime would eventually collapse on its own.

But there’s little doubt which opinion is most heard, and most listened to.

The Guardian of April 13^, 2012, contained a remarkable example of this.

This article, questioning the legality of an attack on Iran, is unusual anyway, simply because it addresses the issue of international law at all.

But more surprising are the statements in it, made by some fairly learned lawyers, which are not so much legal analysis as verbal callisthenics.

That Alan Dershowitz gives Israel the legal green light to bomb Iran is to be expected, but here’s Anthony D’Amato, a professor of international law at Northwestern University:

Iran says it wants to push the Israelis into the sea and that they are constructing nuclear weapons. That’s enough for me to say that cannot be allowed. If the US or Israel takes the initiative to block that action, it can hardly be said to be violating international law. It can only be preserving international law for future generations.

The combination of factual error and partisan analysis here is remarkable.
Firstly, his characterisation of Tehran’s policies is almost unique.

If “Iran” (and he doesn’t actually clarify who he means here) has ever actually said that it wants to “push Israelis into the sea” he doesn’t point us to the source.

Secondly, he doesn’t explain why such comments from Iran should cause more existential anguish than similarly belligerent comments made by Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in reference to Palestinians, or by Hillary Clinton in reference to Iran. 

As for the concept of “preserving international law for future generations,” he does not clarify his thoughts on whether Russia and China might also be justified in unilaterally attempting such a feat, or in deciding what can and cannot be allowed in international politics.

But what’s most bizarre is his completely erroneous belief that Iran itself has said it’s constructing nuclear weapons.

It hasn’t

There’s no reason to believe that a man of D’Amato’s standing should lie, bare-faced, to an internationally respected newspaper; therefore it’s more likely that he’s simply accepted what someone with an anti-Iran agenda has told him.

So if a man who “has argued cases before the European Court of Human Rights” can fall prey to hearsay and mis-information, can we be surprised that the average consumer of mainstream media can buy into this “big lie”?

Let’s hope, as the latest round of nuclear talks gets under way, the people around the table will, like Meridor, admit the existence of nuance and allow for alternate opinions.

Because if Harvard’s Stephen Walt is right, and the P5+1 is intent on sabotaging the negotiations before they start … well …
Let’s just hope.

Iran arrests terror operatives tied to Israel

jpost.com

Official Iranian media reports “major terrorist group from the Zionist regime” uncovered and several members arrested “while preparing to carry out terrorist acts”; bombs, machine guns reportedly seized.

DUBAI – Iran said on Tuesday it had identified a “major terrorist group” it said was affiliated to its arch-foe Israel and had arrested some of its members, the official IRNA news agency reported, citing a report by the country’s Intelligence Ministry.

“Iran’s Intelligence Ministry announced it has identified a major terrorist group from the Zionist regime (of Israel) and has arrested some of its protected operational members inside the country,” IRNA reported without making clear when the arrests had taken place.

The semi-official Fars news agency said the suspects were arrested “while preparing to carry out terrorist acts”, adding that a considerable number of bombs, machine guns, military and communication equipments were seized.

Ahmadinejad: Iran can withstand oil embargo ‘for years’

President of Islamic Republic says country could manage two to three years without selling oil; nuclear talks with West scheduled to begin next week.

Haaretz

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran has enough funds to withstand a total embargo on its oil sales for several years, Iranian media reported on Tuesday.

“[Western powers] want to impose sanctions on our oil and we must say to them that we have that much saved that even if we didn’t sell oil for two to three years, the country would manage easily,” Ahmadinejad said during a visit to Hormuzgan province.

On Monday, the U.S. said that time is not infinite for nuclear talks between Iran and the West – five days before a planned round of talks was set to begin. The White House added that the window of opportunity in which a diplomatic solution can be reached is closing.

Iran’s nuclear chief Fereidoun Abbasi told state TV late Sunday that Tehran could stop its production of 20 percent enriched uranium needed for a research reactor, and continue enriching uranium to lower levels for power generation.

This could take place once Iran has stockpiled enough of the 20 percent enriched uranium, Abbasi said.

Late last week, the Washington Post reported that Obama recently passed a message to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which signaled that the United States would agree to an Iranian civilian nuclear program if they proved they were not developing a nuclear bomb.

Syria War Spills Across Borders into Turkey, Lebanon

 

Turkey Claims Deliberate Attack on Refugee Camp

antiwar.com

As Syrian rebel factions continue to lose ground to the military, fighting increasingly spills over to neighboring countries. This puts civilians on both sides of the border in the line of fire, resulting in deaths in both Turkey and Lebanon.

Two people were killed in Turkey, and four others wounded by Syrian military fire at the border near the Kilis refugee camp. Turkey’s government claims that the attack deliberately targeted the camp, but earlier reports suggested that it was simply fire that strayed across the border.

Meanwhile, Syrian troops attacked and killed a TV cameraman in neighboring Lebanon, firing across the border between the two nations. The incident occurred in Wadi Khaled, an area frequently used by Syrian rebels to hide from Assad’s forces and stage attacks into Syrian territory.

People with the camera crew said they explained to the Syrian troops that they weren’t fighters. Syrian state media reported that a nearby border post had come under attack shortly before the shooting.

Such incidents will surely embarrass the Syrian military, particularly coming just days before a scheduled ceasefire. But as fighting moves out of central cities and into the border regions, Turkey and Lebanon, too, could be dragged into the maelstrom.

Israel asks (DEMANDS) US for $700 million in military aid

ynet

Israel has asked the United States for assistance estimated at $700 million in order to produce more Iron Dome and Magic Wand missile and rocket defense batteries, sources told Ynet on Wednesday.

The Iron Dome is designed to intercept rockets fired from a relatively short range, while the Magic Wand intercepts missiles fired from a range of at least 70km, including cruise missiles and missiles with ballistic warheads such as the Squd, Shihab and Sejil.

According to sources privy to the deal, Jerusalem and Washington are currently discussing the aid package, which if approved will allow Israel to equip its defense apparatus with four additional Iron Dome batteries and accelerate the completion of the Magic Wand system, which is still under development.

The sources also noted that if the deal is approved, Israel will be able it to protect its territory from rocket and missile attacks until 2015. The US Congress and administration’s apparent willingness to allocate the funds may be seen as an attempt to incentivize Israel to delay its decision vis-à-vis a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

According to estimates, Israel will have six Iron Dome batteries instead of the four it currently has by the second half of 2013.

Stratfor Emails: Pentagon-Hired Mercenaries Intervening in Syria Since December

antiwar.com

Via Jeremy Scahill, this news from Alakhbar English (Lebanese paper) on the WikiLeaks Stratfor emails:

US government officials requested that an American private security firm contact Syrian opposition figures in Turkey to see “how they can help in regime change,” the CEO of one of these firms told Stratfor in a company email obtained by WikiLeaks and Al-Akhbar.

James F. Smith, former director of Blackwater, is currently the Chief Executive of SCG International, a private security firm with experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. In what appears to be his first email to Stratfor, Smith stated that his “background is CIA” and his company is comprised of “former DOD [Department of Defense], CIA and former law enforcement personnel.”

“We provide services for those same groups in the form of training, security and information collection,” he explained to Stratfor. (doc-id5441475)

In a 13 December 2011 email to Stratfor’s VP for counter-terrorism Fred Burton, which Burton shared with Stratfor’s briefers, Smith claimed that “[he] and Walid Phares were getting air cover from Congresswoman [Sue] Myrick to engage Syrian opposition in Turkey (non-MB and non-Qatari) on a fact finding mission for Congress.”

James Smith told Scahill “he’s been operating in both Syria & Libya the past year” but that “Stratfor’s internal description of his work was ‘inaccurate.’” The December date of the emails coincides withprevious Stratfor revelations about covert operations inside Syria.