Mosaic Intelligence Report: 2010 is far from over, yet the Middle East has witnessed a series of close encounters with major wars. What are Arabs afraid of? And why is Barack Obama’s popularity sinking fast?
Also see Jim Lobe’s analysis of the Brookings/Zogby ‘Arab Public Opinion Poll’.
Col. (ret.) Ann Wright warns against the United States waging another war for Israel. Reproduced below is a memo Wright co-signed with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) warning Obama against such a war.
by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
We write to alert you to the likelihood that Israel will attack Iran as early as this month. This would likely lead to a wider war.
Israel’s leaders would calculate that once the battle is joined, it will be politically untenable for you to give anything less than unstinting support to Israel, no matter how the war started, and that U.S. troops and weaponry would flow freely. Wider war could eventually result in destruction of the state of Israel.
This can be stopped, but only if you move quickly to pre-empt an Israeli attack by publicly condemning such a move before it happens.
We believe that comments by senior American officials, you included, reflect misplaced trust in Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu.
Continue reading “Not another war for Israel, intelligence professionals warn”
Tony Judt, a towering intellect, a moral giant, and a master of prose, has passed on. He did what only the greatest of thinkers do: he constantly evolved. More significantly, he never succumbed to orthodoxies, he was always on the edge. And that is what gave his writing its distinctive freshness. In his last years, he also outgrew his middle-of-the-road liberalism to adopt principled, at times radical, positions on war and capitalism. He fought successfully to erase the gap between passion and principle. The Zionism of his youth had led him to volunteer for the Israeli forces in 1967; he was disillusioned after realizing that the Israeli soldiers he worked with were ‘right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views’ or ‘just dumb idiots with guns.’
Judt’s disenchantment turned him into one of the most courageous and eloquent critics of the Jewish State. But unlike some luminaries of the left, he also had the moral courage to re-examine his own easy assumptions. A year after his first public statement on Israel-Palestine, in which he had called for a two-state solution, Judt acknowledged its unviability and issued a call for a single binational state in Palestine. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Evan Goldstein describes the essay’s impact.
According to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009), Judt’s essay placed the one-state idea “squarely and noisily on the table of international agendas.” The Forward described it as “the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Zionism.” Within weeks, The New York Review had received more than 1,000 letters to the editor. Suddenly, says Robert Boyers, editor of the quarterly Salmagundi and an observer of the liberal intellectual scene, Judt was a major voice weighing in on the Middle East. Indeed, if the death of Judt’s friend the literary critic Edward Said, in 2003, left a “yawning void” in the national conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the Palestinians, as Judt has suggested, then it is Judt himself who has filled that void.
In 2006, he was the only mainstream figure to come to the defence of Mearsheimer & Walt after they published their groundbreaking London Review essay. He later joined John Mearsheimer in a debate organized by the London Review of Books in which they argued against apologists for the lobby. In the same year an event organized by Network 20/20 at which Judt was slated to speak was cancelled following pressure from the ADL and AJC. This prompted Mark Lilla and 114 writers and intellectuals to write a letter of protest to the ADL. He also spoke eloquently in a must-see Dutch documentary on the lobby (in which he also recounts the Network 20/20 incident). Later, he would join Mearsheimer, Tariq Ali and others to stand up for Norman Finkelstein who was being unjustly denied tenure under Israel lobby pressure. He also wrote a burning indictment of Israel’s crime in the same year, calling it the ‘country that wouldn’t grow up.’
Five thousand US dollars. I know that because I know Germans are not racists. Germans don’t believe that their lives are worth any more or any less than the lives of others. Germans are good people. They value all life equally. Since they value all life equally, I know that a German’s life is worth $5,000. Because that is what they paid today to each one of the 100 Afghan families who lost members to their army’s violence. The victims were all innocent. But we can’t judge them on that: armies tend to be fanatic about tradition. Their reputation is built on consistency and reliability. When it comes to battling the unarmed, few armies are more reliable. But unlike the past, no one could accuse Germans of discrimination today. They showed none in killing the Afghans. Old prejudices have no place in the new Germany. Why, didn’t the German chancellor give unequivocal support to the Jewish State in 2009 when it went about killing over 300 terrorist children in Gaza? But I don’t want to get carried away with all this talk about equality. In the end, the Germans remain a worthier people. Duetschland Uber Alles! See, the United States also overcame its Jim Crow past, but an American life is still worth only $2,500.
by Tony Karon
In 2003, the United States launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, a country that had neither attacked nor threatened it — and we, and the Iraqis, are still living with the consequences. Going to war in Iraq was made possible — easy, even — for the Bush Administration not only by Republican hawks and neocon extremists (the wannabe Army Corps of Social Engineers) baying for blood, but even more importantly, by supposedly sober and moderate liberal voices — the Peter Beinarts, Ken Pollacks, George Packers and the editors of the New York Times — not only failing to challenge the basic logic of the case for war, but providing their own more elegant (although equally brutal when stripped of their high-minded rhetoric) rationalizations for invading Iraq.
It was the liberal “hawks” and the New York Times, by failing to ask the right questions of the case for war, that did more to make the war a “thinkable” option for America than any neocon. They allowed the question to be posed simply as one of whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or not. And because nobody could give an absolute assurance in the negative, the argument became “better safe than sorry”. The liberals and the New York Times offered no challenge, and asked no questions, of the basic assumption that if Saddam had, in fact, had a couple of warehouses full of VX gas and refrigerator full of anthrax, that necessitated launching a war that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of upward of half a million Iraqis (and thousands of Americans) and left America weaker and more vulnerable.
And the bad news is that they’re doing it again on Iran.
Continue reading “On Iran, Liberals Are Enabling Another Disastrous War”
Local health officials in Gaza say that millions of dollars in medication donated by the international community ultimately ends up as trash because 70 % of it is unusable. Doctors claim that approximately 20% of the donated medication has either expired or is near expiration, and that a large portion of the drugs simply do not address the healthcare needs of Gazans. A case in point was a recent two million dollar donation of H1N1 medication, which arrived in Gaza after the threat of the virus had passed. Amongst the list of 150 drugs that ARE urgently needed in Gaza are antibiotics and cancer treatment medication, both of which continue to be lacking in the donations being sent.
Perhaps the most unlikely support for the planned Muslim Community Center at ground zero (aka Cordoba Mosque) comes from Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Speaking publicly this morning at Governors Island off the tip of Lower Manhattan, Bloomberg presented several arguments in favor of the community center – arguments that were also intended to delegitimize at least some of the ‘Islamophobic’ assumptions that are so deeply embedded in the rhetoric of those opposing the plan; i.e.- coming from people like Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and the Anti-Defamation League (an organization which, at least in theory, claims to exist in order to combat anti-semitism.)
Although Bloomberg’s speech tends, more often than not, to invoke a rather romanticized conception of ‘American ideals,’ he also manages to cite other critical moments in U.S. history – moments when hysterical bigotry has similarly served to occlude the religious freedoms of communities that are now considered to be America’s erstwhile ‘Others.’ Accordingly, Bloomberg does a pretty good job of blending historical fantasy and fact in his attempt to sway American public opinion in favor of the community center. Here’s the transcript of his speech:
“We’ve come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that more than 250 years later would greet millions of immigrants in this harbor. And we come here to state as strongly as ever, this is the freest city in the world. That’s what makes New York special and different and strong.
Continue reading “Bloomberg defends Mosque Construction at Ground Zero”
Escalating criticism of Israel led its security establishment to declare a pr war on “delegitimization” (more excellent reports by Lia Tarachansky here).
After Israel’s major attack on Gaza in December 2008, it has faced criticism around the world. This criticism escalated after the publication of the Goldstone Report in 2009 that found evidence of war crimes in the attack. This year, Israel’s security establishment declared a full out PR war on criticism that it identifies as “delegitimization” of Israel. Israel’s most influential think tank, the Reut Institute, developed the strategy for how to fight this PR war. It published a massive report in preparation for this year’s Herzeliya conference entitled “Building a political firewall: against Israel’s delegitimization” which advocated that the Israeli intelligence agencies establish special units to collect information on critics of Israel. The report also advocates the establishment of pro-Israel networks in “hubs of delegitimization” which it named as London, Paris, Madrid, Toronto, and the Bay Area. The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky spoke to Morton A. Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America who talks about how American lobby groups help Israel fight its PR war.
by Max Blumenthal
AL-ARAKIB, ISRAEL — On July 26, Israeli police demolished 45 buildings in the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Arakib, razing the entire village to the ground to make way for a Jewish National Fund forest. The destruction was part of a larger project to force the Bedouin community of the Negev away from their ancestral lands and into seven Indian reservation-style communities the Israeli government has constructed for them. The land will then beopen for Jewish settlers, including young couples in the army and those who may someday be evacuated from the West Bank after a peace treaty is signed. For now, the Israeli government intends to uproot as many villages as possible and erase them from the map by establishing “facts on the ground” in the form of JNF forests. (See video of of al-Arakib’s demolition here).
Moments before the destruction of the Bedouin village of al-Arakib, Israeli high school age police volunteers lounge on furniture taken from a family’s home. [The following four photos are by Ata Abu Madyam of Arab Negev News.
One of the most troubling aspects of the destruction of al-Arakib was a report by CNN that the hundreds of Israeli riot police who stormed the village were accompanied by “busloads of cheering civilians.” Who were these civilians and why didn’t CNN or any outlet investigate further?
I traveled to al-Arakib yesterday with a delegation from Ta’ayush, an Israeli group that promotes a joint Arab-Jewish struggle against the occupation. The activists spent the day preparing games and activities for the village’s traumatized children, helping the villagers replace their uprooted olive groves, and assisting in the reconstruction of their demolished homes. In a massive makeshift tent where many of al-Arakib’s residents now sleep, I interviewed village leaders about the identity of the cheering civilians. Each one confirmed the presence of the civilians, describing how they celebrated the demolitions. As I compiled details, the story grew increasingly horrific. After interviewing more than a half dozen elders of the village, I was able to finally identify the civilians in question. What I discovered was more disturbing than I had imagined.
The death toll from Pakistan’s worst flood in living memory has exceeded 1,100. It is estimated that over 27,000 people are still trapped, and approximately 1.5 million people have been affected by the flow of waters that continue to wash away villages and trigger devastating landslides in Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa and parts of Punjab.
P U L S E 