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https://scheerpost.com/2021/05/14/chris-hedges-israel-the-big-lie/

Israel, the Big Lie

Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.  

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.  Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 

Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage. 

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror.  And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia.  Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.  

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” 

This is the truth.  Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy.  Saudi Arabia, a country that  produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.  

Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges.  The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions. 

Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people.  From the 7^th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land.  The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.  Israel is not defending the rule of law.  Israel is not a democracy.  It is an apartheid state. 

That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves. 

The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.  

The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country.  The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement.  Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.  

The investment by Israel and is backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East.  These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.   

The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel.  This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites. 

Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous.  It is not only bad for the Jews.  It is bad for everyone.  It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes.  Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other.  They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence.  The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence.  These extremists are ideological twins.  

This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society.  It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security.  Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States.  It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.

It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.” 

Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims.  This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military. 

There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States.  The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies.  The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society.  We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down.  It will be devastating for the Palestinians.  It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street. 

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56539.htm

Syria and Russia Won the War, But America Legitimizes Ongoing Looting

The Syrian people are well aware that they must persist in defying Western aggression if they are to avoid the total collapse inflicted on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya by the Americans and their accomplices.

Irish peace activist Dr Declan Hayes explains what’s at stake in Syria’s forthcoming presidential election this month. He predicts incumbent President Bashar al-Assad will win re-election from having strong popular support because the Syrian people view this defiance as their best way to repel the American-led NATO covert war on their nation. The covert war for regime change has been defeated in the battlefield by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies, principally Russia. Peace prevails in much of Syria. However, as Hayes explains, the United States and the foreign enemies of Syria are stepping up economic warfare through sanctions and the looting of resources. The objective is to “keep Syria off balance”. The hostile Western agenda towards Syria fits into a bigger geopolitical picture of the U.S. and its allies trying to destabilize Iran, Russia and China. As Hayes points out, the Syrian people are well aware that they must persist in defying Western aggression if they are to avoid the total collapse inflicted on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya by the Americans and their accomplices.

Declan Hayes is a retired British university lecturer. He has travelled to Syria many times during the decade of war where he documented the reality of the Western covert terrorist aggression, contradicting the Western media narrative that sought to demonize the Syrian government while lionizing illegally armed militants as “pro-democracy activists”. He was the only Western observer present when the Syrian Arab Army liberated the ancient Christian city of Maaloula from NATO-backed militants in April 2014. Hayes has facilitated visits to Ireland by Syrian religious leaders who have explained at public meetings what the real nature of the war is about, and how Western governments have tried to foment sectarian divisions among the Syrian population. Hayes has also organized direct humanitarian aid from Ireland to communities in Syria providing life-saving medical operations for countless children. For his endeavors, he has been labelled in the British corporate media as an “Assad apologist”, a “dangerous extremist” and a “Putin apologist”. Labels which he considers to be “medals of honor”.

Interview

Question: The Syrian Arab Republic is holding presidential elections on May 26 with two candidates now officially declared who are contesting the re-election bid by incumbent President Bashar Hafez al-Assad. Who are these two challengers and what are their main policy differences with President Assad?

Declan Hayes: Aligned against President Assad are former deputy cabinet minister Abdullah Salloum Abdullah, and Mahmoud Ahmad Mar’ai, neither of whom have the support of the ruling Ba’ath Party, which is embedded in Syrian civil society and which the Western powers had no great problem with prior to the start of the ongoing crisis, which will be the election’s focus. It is the policies of the Ba’ath Party regarding the crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic which will determine the election’s outcome.

As regards the spurious charge that Syria is a one-party state, so too has the American state of Illinois since the days of Al Capone but the NATO military alliance is not bombing them.

Syria is, in fact, a multi-party state. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), which was thoroughly repressed in 1955-56, allied itself with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Lebanese Communist Party. Over 12,000 of the Eagles of the Whirlwind, the SSNP’s armed branch, have fought alongside the Syrian Arab Army against Islamic State (ISIS) and NATO’s other “jihadi” proxies. They, therefore, do have a formidable political presence. Like other legitimate opposition parties, being patriots, they prefer to save their country rather than sell it off piecemeal to NATO’s carpetbaggers.

Question: Western governments and media disparage Syria’s elections as not being “free or fair”. How do Syrian citizens view their nation’s elections?

Declan Hayes: Because Western governments and media have a habit of disparaging elections they disagree with, whether they be in Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, Gaza, Lebanon or Syria, they have no credibility in such matters. And Syria’s people are well aware of the Western hypocrisy.

Question: President Assad appears to retain strong popular support. Is that support due to the Syrian people viewing him as a courageous and principled leader during the last 10 years of war?

Declan Hayes: I was an observer at the 2014 presidential election and I was amazed to see voters lining up at 6am in Damascus to vote. Later that day, I was in the old city of Homs, which had only been recently liberated from the terrorists, who had the BBC’s Paul Conroy and the late Marie Colvin whitewashing their war crimes, which included the ritual execution of Dutch Jesuit priest Frans van der Lugt only days before the Syrian Arab Army liberated it. Despite the city being little more than a pile of rubble, Homs’ network of civil society groups was firmly behind their liberators, the Syrian Arab Army and Bashar al-Assad, the candidate who best exemplifies their defiance, and their desire to live in peace and in freedom. In 2014, Assad won with over 88 percent of the national vote.

Although the Syrians have suffered unspeakably as a result of NATO’s criminal sanctions and the unjust war NATO continues to wage against them, they have no choice but to back their president and their army until they regain their freedom from NATO and its satellites.

NATO’s favored candidates are but concoctions, as they were in Iraq and as they are in Bolivia and Venezuela, puppets and charlatans at best, dangerous war criminals at worst.

Question: Western governments accuse Assad as being a “war criminal” who has waged a civil war against opposition groups thereby bringing disaster to Syria. By contrast, the Syrian government maintains that the nation has been subjected to foreign aggression led by the United States and other Western powers who deployed terrorist proxies for the criminal objective of regime change. How do most Syrian people explain the catastrophe that has engulfed their country over the past decade? Do they share the view that the disaster has been fomented by foreign-backed aggression?

Declan Hayes: To see how ludicrous such charges are against President Assad, one need just recall that The Economist magazine branded Asma, his wife, as a warlord. Even if we forget for a moment that Asma Assad is a woman and therefore that she cannot be a lord, the charge against Syria’s First Lady helps show how ludicrous all such charges are. Irish independent European parliamentarians Mick Wallace and Clare Daly raised the suicide bombing of children in Idlib and the suicide bombing of kindergartens in Homs in the Irish Parliament – war crimes instigated and committed by Irish passport holders – and the Irish government and its EU overseers refused to act. These foreign British, Irish, French and American jihadists have been exposed time and again and, instead of being called to account, they are lauded in the British, Irish, French and American Parliaments, whose members are not concerned with war crimes but with securing their share of the spoils. The Western colonialist rape of the Fertile Belt (Lebanon to Iran) is no different from the 19th-century Western colonialist rape of Africa.

The Syrian people know all of this. They have heard the testimonies of the six million internally displaced and of their own relatives who have served in the Syrian Army. They have spoken to the maimed and the gang-raped, the victims whom the West silences because the truth does not fit the Western narrative. Though they know the West is responsible, they can do little more than vote for Assad and, therefore, for their defenders, the men and women of the Syrian Army.

Question: How bad are the socio-economic conditions in Syria? There are worrying reports of shortages of food, fuel and electrical power.

Declan Hayes: Things are dire. Electricity supply is often down to an hour a day. Food is scarce as the Israelis and Americans are attacking merchant shipping relieving the siege of Syria’s civilians. A Yankee dollar currently gets you 1,300 Syrian pounds compared with 350 only three years ago. The financial crash is because NATO’s economic terror campaign has destroyed not only Syria but the banks in Lebanon, where most Syrian reserves were stored. Syrians are barely hanging on as the West and their aid agencies starve them out, steal their resources and deny them medicines and Covid-19 vaccines.

Question: Do most Syrian citizens see the economic hardships being a result of Western sanctions? Has the general deprivation made Syrians more defiant towards external interference in their country?

Declan Hayes: There is no question that NATO is totally to blame for the destruction in Syria like they are to blame for the destruction in Libya and Iraq. Syrians have the choice of standing behind their army or seeing their country fall to the same type of slave trading flotsam NATO helped install in Libya. It is, as they say, a no-brainer.

Question: How is the security situation in most parts of Syria now? There are reports of sporadic terror attacks. Do most Syrians feel the war is over?

Declan Hayes: The Syrian Army and their allies won the war, not least because the war was a lie and a fabrication from its very beginning. This can be evidenced by the peace now prevailing in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and other cities, towns and villages across Syria. Idlib in the northwest would also be at peace, save for the malign intervention of the USA and Turkey. The spates of ISIS-style terrorism in the Syrian desert is a direct result of the USA’s collusion with ISIS to ensure Syria stays off balance.

Question: The Western governments and media portray the Syrian Arab Army as a repressive tool of the “Assad regime”. How do Syrian people view the role of the army during the past 10 years of war?

Declan Hayes: The Syrian Arab Army are the saviors of Syria. They have been so preoccupied fighting the more than 500,000 foreign terrorists NATO sent into Syria that they have had no time to oppress anybody in real or even in virtual time. The idea is as ludicrous as claiming the British Army oppressed London during World War Two.

Question: How do Syrians view the role of Russia and its military intervention to support the Syrian state?

Declan Hayes: All Syrians know that Russia saved Syria from suffering the same American fate as Libya and Iraq. Though some Syrians might favor Russia over Iran, or vice versa, such issues could be important if Syria was allowed to live in peace and free from NATO’s constant attacks. The hope has to be that Assad’s re-election will bring that day nearer.

Question: There are credible reports of U.S. military forces running truck convoys of stolen oil and wheat into Iraq from the eastern part of Syria where the Americans occupy. What is the purpose of this contraband? Do Syrian people view it as brazen imperialist theft?

Declan Hayes: This is, as former U.S. President Donald Trump candidly admitted regarding Syrian oil, not only brazen imperialist criminal theft but it is a continuation of how Turkey looted all the Syrian lands that their terrorist proxies controlled. Not only did Turk-backed militants steal entire factories in Aleppo but they uprooted and stole train tracks and, as I saw in the Armenian town of Kassab, they even stole children’s toys and the copper handles of the doors. The Armenians had to sell the cars they fled in to pay for beds to sleep in and chairs to sit on. The Americans are simply streamlining and legitimizing such looting.

Question: Former British ambassador to Syria Peter Ford in a recent interview for this site condemned the Western sanctions as “economic warfare”. He said they were as harsh as those imposed on Iraq before the U.S. and Britain finally launched a war on Iraq in 2003. How is the morale among the Syrian people and are there concerns that the Western powers might try to launch an all-out war since its covert terrorist-proxy war has failed to achieve regime change?

Declan Hayes: Because the Syrian Army and its gallant allies held the line, there will be no all-out war. Rather, there will be a continuation of low-intensity operations, along the lines that the notorious British SAS “godfather” General Sir Frank Kitson formulated in his covert war doctrine. Coupled with that will be increasing incitement of Russophobia, Shiaphobia and Sinophobia to weaken the resolve of Syria’s allies not only along the Fertile Belt (Lebanon to Iran) but in Southern Russia and Western China as well.