ISRAELI FASCIST GOVERNMENT TO BE SWORN IN TODAY

At 5.00 pm Israeli time today Israel’s extreme right-wing government headed up by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be sworn in.

Netanyahu’s government will likely be the most overtly right-wing government the nation of Israel has ever had. It is outwardly racist, insisting that the state of Israel is exclusively a Jewish state, and has no intention whatsoever of ever allowing the Palestinian people to have a state of their own preferring instead to eventually be able to incorporate the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in to what they hope will become Greater Israel as the openly expansionist Zionists move into the West Bank and Jerusalem.

From this day on Israel’s declared enemies, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, together with Syria and Iran, should be prepared for attacks against them by Israel. Netanyahu has said that, “Iran is seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon and constitutes the gravest threat to our existence since the war of independence”, and, referring to Hezbollah, added that, “The terrorist forces of Iran threaten us from the north. For decades, Israel has not faced such formidable challenges,” making it clear that war will be inevitable. Netanyahu and his right-wing cohorts have dedicated themselves to the destruction of all of Israel’s enemies.

Despite the change of Presidency in the US the world should be under no illusions about where President Obama stands. Obama might come across as the complete opposite to Bush’s warmongering ways but one can rest assured that, when push comes to shove, the US will be behind Israel regardless of what Israel does. When Israel decides to attack its enemies Obama will do all in his power to protect Israel regardless of how reckless or ill-advised Israeli action may seem. Once Netanyahu attacks his enemies, even if it is against the advice of Obama himself, the US will come to Israel’s aid especially if Israel is threatened by Iranian retaliation.

With the swearing in of the Netanyahu Israeli fascist government comes a new era of extreme danger for the Palestinian peoples and the peoples of the Middle East generally.

U.K. GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCES INQUIRY INTO IRAQ WAR.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband has announced that the British government will have an enquiry into the Iraq war at some time after most of the remaining British troops in Iraq return home after 31 July 2009.

While Andrew Porter of the UK ‘Daily Telegraph’ reports that “Number 10 strategists believe that announcing a full inquiry is vital in persuading the many Labour voters who turned away from the party after the 2003 invasion that the same mistakes will not be made again”, there are no details of how wide-ranging the enquiry is likely to be. Other reports, however, suggest that the enquiry will be held in private.

What is clear is that the enquiry will be more for political reasons inasmuch that it aims to attract those Labour voters that turned away from the party because of the invasion of Iraq rather than be a sincere enquiry into the true circumstances surrounding then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s insistence on allying Britain to Bush’s determination to invade Iraq and the ruses and downright lies that Blair used in his efforts to get British public opinion to support the invasion. One wonders, therefore, just how far the enquiry will really go in terms of making an effort to determine the extent of lies and falsehoods Blair and his pro-war supporters used to involve the UK in the war that a large majority of Britons did not support.

OBAMA AND AFGHANISTAN: DOES HE HAVE AN EXIT PLAN OR IS HE GOING TO BE THERE FOR YEARS OR IS HE GOING TO TALK?

There seems to be a lot of mixed and confusing messages coming from President Obama over the last few days about what he plans to do about Afghanistan – and all seem to contradict each other in some way or another.

In the UK ‘Daily Mail’ there is a report that Obama is now beginning to talk in terms of there having to be an ‘exit strategy’, something that has rarely been mentioned over the last seven years since the Bush administration and their allies decided to invade the place.

Meanwhile, in an interview after having had talks with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Obama tells the world that ‘the war in Afghanistan will go on for years’ adding that the world must not back down in the face of “vicious killers”.

And to top off the confusion, not three weeks ago Obama was saying that “there could be talks with moderate elements of the Taleban in Afghanistan as part of a process of reconciliation”.

Obama seems to have little idea of what to do in Afghanistan.

The war has been raging there for over seven years now with the end result being that the Taliban is now enjoying a popular resurgence. It seems, while the Afghan people had very little time for the old style hard-line Taliban, they have even less time for the US and other foreigners that are on their dirt killing more and more of their innocent civilians, and being governed by a corrupt puppet government that has even less respect for the people of Afghanistan than the US claimed the Taliban had. But, despite the years of fruitless war, Obama has considered sending another 17,000 US soldiers there from Iraq just to become more canon fodder for a war that cannot be won.
His best options are to talk and come up with a quick exit strategy. But Obama is clearly confused and his aggressive talk will be welcomed by the warmongering hawks in our world. Rudd has told Obama that the war is not popular with Australians, especially over the last week or so when two more Australian soldiers were killed and three more badly wounded just today. Obama should also be aware that the war is not popular anywhere else in the world either, particularly in the US who are likely to bear the brunt of any increase in casualty numbers a result of any increase in troop numbers ‘surging’ the place.

ISRAELI LOBBY CONCEDE THEY ARE ABLE TO INFLUENCE U.S. ADMINISTRATIONS BUT NEOCONS ARE STILL IN DENIAL.

When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their book, ‘The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ in 2007, the Israeli Zionists and their neocon supporters both in the US and around the world vehemently denied their was any such influential lobby and they even labelled Mearsheimer and Walt, and anyone else who agreed with them, as ‘anti-Semites’ for suggesting there was.

Earlier this month Chas Freeman, nominated for the position of chair of the US National Intelligence Council was forced to withdraw his acceptance of the position because of direct pressure from the Israel lobby in the US. What’s interesting is that the Israel lobby is now openly bragging about its success.

This success, however, seems to have confused the pro-Zionist hard right neocons. Writing in the US pro-Zionist neoconservative journal ‘Commentary’ this month, Jonathan Tobin says on the one hand:

Walt, in particular, and those who buy into his “Israel Lobby” thesis will take Freeman’s withdrawal as evidence that Israel’s friends have once again undermined U.S. foreign policy. In reality, all that has happened is that a pro-Saudi extremist who has no place in the government of a democratic nation was belatedly weeded out from a chaotic and poorly run administration. Rather than evidence of the “Lobby’s” hegemony, Freeman’s case shows that for all the talk about Obama’s competence replacing Bush’s incompetence, the Democrats are no slouches in coming up with lemons.

And then, on the other hand says this:

Freeman’s appointment didn’t collapse just because the pro-Israel right screamed bloody murder, though without the criticism that was heard from that quarter there is little doubt that Freeman might have slipped through. Rather, he’s gone because there are still more than enough pro-Israel Democrats in Congress who want nothing to do with a policy based on hostility to Israel.

What’s confused Tobin and his friends at Neocon Central is that they worked so hard at trying to deny any existence of an Israel Lobby after Mearsheimer and Walt published their book by demonising them as being anti-Semitic that now they have to continue their denial of An Israel lobby per se by saying that such decisions as pushing Chas Freeman out of the job are made because of America’s love for the Israeli-US relationship.

Neocons don’t adapt well to being exposed as liars and frauds; instead they simply plant their feet deeper into their mouths.

SO MUCH FOR ‘DEMOCRACY’ IN AFGHANISTAN.

After more than seven years of war in which thousands have died, including 1117 coalition troops, the US and their allies, by considering appointing a ‘prime minister’ to bypass the originally appointed and now totally corrupt President Hamid Karzai, have conceded that there has been nothing achieved over those seven years of bloody war. This is simply one puppet leader being replaced by another while all along the US and their allies have been trying to tell the world that they wanted to capture bin Laden, oust the Taliban and bring democracy to the region.

Well, there’s been no democracy and now it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any for some time yet to come and, if the war goes on for much longer, it is going to be increasingly difficult to actually recall what it was all about in the first place. (Readers might recall the events of 11 September 2001 being blamed on people that came from a group whose leader was purportedly based in Afghanistan.) Well, that was the original reason we were told the US and their allies were going into Afghanistan but then George Bush lost interest in chasing the elusive Osama bin Laden as Bush turned his attention to invading Iraq. The propaganda shifted from specifically ‘let’s get bin Laden’ to the broader and more convenient ‘War on Terrorism’. But as time has gone by the world saw that it wasn’t so much a ‘war against terrorism’ but more terrorism against the Afghan people by the Western coalition as horrifying stories of coalition attacks against innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan emerged. And, as for the ‘Taliban’, they are back now with a vengeance and stronger than ever they were before having morphed away from their original extremism and intent now on simply ridding their country of foreigners and those that have collaborated with them.

The Taliban resurgence has been so successful that some Western leaders have now resorted to the original propaganda line that suggested that failure to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan will result in terror attacks on, if Britains Prime minister Gordon Brown is to be believed, UK soil, and if Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is to be believed, even on Australian shores as well.

So, what’s it really all about? It’s about what it has always been about; hegemony over the regions natural resources. It never was about anything else.

FUMING OVER OBAMA SAYING NICE STUFF TO IRANIANS, CHIEF NEOCON LETS SLIP IT’S ABOUT REGIME CHANGE.

It didn’t take too long for Murdoch’s chief neocon propagandist, William Kristol of the neocon comic ‘The Weekly Standard’, to pen his response to President Obama’s televised offering of a tentative hand of peace.

According to Kristol, Obama didn’t offer the Iranian people ‘liberty’ nor ‘freedom’ nor ‘democracy’ nor ‘human rights’. The reason for that is because Obama doesn’t have it to offer. Every where else the neocons have talked about giving people these things has turned to utter disaster. Why would Obama offer more of the same to Iran?

And does Kristol really expect the Iranian people to welcome the US and their allies after having seen what they have done to Afghanistan and Iraq?

Liberty? Freedom? Democracy? Human Rights? Kristol has no idea what the words even mean. Kristol goes on:

Indeed, "the United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations." Note: "the Islamic Republic of Iran." Does Obama routinely refer to Pakistan as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, its formal name? Of course not. But Obama goes out of his way to mention (twice) "the Islamic Republic of Iran." He's kowtowing to a regime that is anything but republican, implicitly forswearing any plan--any hope--of regime change to free the Iranian people.

Regime change? What regime change? Wasn’t it all about Iran’s so-called nuclear weapons program?

Of course it’s about regime change. It has, for the Israelis and their neocon supporters, never ever been about anything else. Regime change in Iran means the Israelis get to have their Greater Israel sooner. Iranian support for Hezbollah and Hamas disappears and resistance by the Palestinians and the Lebanese to Israeli aggression all but disappears as well.
Kristol exposes the neocon and Israeli fraud – it’s not about Iran’s nuclear weapons program at all; it’s all about regime change.

A BIG TECHNICAL PROBLEM WITH AMERICA’S STORY ABOUT THE IRANIAN DRONE SHOOT-DOWN.

According to reports that began to emerge just a few days ago, the US air force claimed to have shot down an Iranian drone (unmanned aircraft) on 25 February 2009. Most reports say the drone was operating over an area some 60-70 miles northeast of Baghdad and was shot down after having operated over the area for 70 minutes. The US military identified the Iranian drone as an Ababil 3 unmanned aircraft. While the aircraft can be used as a type of flying bomb capable of delivering some 45kgs of explosives, its usual use is as a reconnaissance aircraft fitted out with cameras and other such equipment.

But, wearing my aeronautical engineers hat, here’s the problem with the story as the US is telling it: The Ababil 3 drone is capable of a speed of 300 kph and an operational radius of just 150 kms. or 300 kms. all-out straight flight range. Since the aircrafts maximum speed is only 300 kph this would give the aircraft an operational duration of just one hour (60 minutes) at full speed and full power yet we are told that the drone was flying around for 70 minutes and that, even if it included its flight time from the launch place in Iran to the place it was monitored operating over, is over the aircraft’s duration ability even if the motor had been throttled back to increase duration. And if the 70 minutes is the time it spent over the operational area and excluded the time it took to fly to there from the launch site in Iran, and presumably the time needed to fly the drone back to Iran for recovery, then we have a technical impossibility if we assume that the specs for the Ababil 3 are correct. (See ‘Janes All the Worlds Aircraft’.)

The US has not provided any physical evidence that supports their claim of having shot down the drone. Certainly there seems to be no photographic evidence of the wreckage that may identify the drone type. All we have is their claim.

To top it off there is also Iran’s denial that any of their drones was shot down over Iraq. While they are hardly likely to put their hands up and admit that they had, it does seem in this case that the US story has been fabricated as part of a propaganda campaign to prepare the West for the possibility of an attack against Iran in the future.


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AUSTRALIA’S ISRAEL LOBBY CONTINUES ITS RELENTLESS PROPAGANDA OF ‘ANTI-ZIONISM IS ANTI-SEMITISM’.

The other day Murdoch’s flagship Australian propaganda newspaper, ‘The Australian’, published another piece from the Australian Israeli Lobby shoving the ‘anti-Israel is anti-Semitism’ meme in support of the Australian Israel Lobby’s push to get Australia to withdraw from the Durban Review conference on racism.

In this case the article is aimed at the least well informed of Australian society and, appropriately enough, was written by an academic. Nick Dyrenfurth, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sydney writes:

As I entered the grounds of the University of Sydney during Orientation Week, plastered across virtually every pole leading up to the university's entrance was a poster signed off by the far-left group Socialist Alternative.

Headlined "War: Why capitalism is to blame", the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine were presented as exhibits A, B and C. In the poster's foreground, a ubiquitous Uncle Sam figure loomed, his all-powerful hand resting on, you guessed it, his menacing pet bulldog, Israel.

The message was clear. Israel, the US's proxy in the Middle East, is to blame for all the problems of the Middle East, if not the woes of the world. Get rid of Israel and we'll all live happily ever after, presumably on a strict diet of lentils and tofu. The more serious and indeed frightening symbolism at play was the clearly racist, anti-Semitic linkage of Israel, and by association Jews, with the machinations of "evil" capitalism.

Here Dyrenfurth is attempting to be clever with his propaganda. He attempts to kill several birds with one stone linking, for example, Jews ‘by association’ with Israel. Well, of course, Israel is Jewish but that’s not to say that all Jews are Israeli which is what Dyrenfurth attempts to imply. There is also a not-so-subtle allusion to the ‘Far-left being anti-Semitic’. Dyrenfurth reinforces this notion with this which attempts to align the far-Left with the far-Right:

None of this of course is new. The far Left and, more often, the thugs of the far Right have long peddled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which an all-powerful Zionist cabal controls the world's financial levers, a "fact" hidden, of course, by its control of Western media outlets and compliant governments.

Of course the far-Right have peddled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; that’s what they do. They are Jew-haters and have always been around. But to attempt to align the Left who are anti-Zionist with neo-Nazis and Jew-haters is just plain transparent and blatant Zionist propaganda and to suggest that the Left have peddled ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy theories’ is a deliberate lie.

The reality is this: Jew-hating Nazis have absolutely nothing in common with the anti-Zionism of the Left. Anti-Zionism is political, not racial, and is reviled by the Left for exactly the same reasons as the Left revile the politics of Nazism.

Dyrenfurth, far from being clever with his attempt to malign the Left at his university in order to promote lies and propaganda to support calls for Australia to boycott the Curban Review conference, merely exposes himself to be nothing more than just another Israeli Lobby propagandist who uses lies and deceit to push his pro-Zionist nonsense on Australians who don’t know any better.

Thankfully the world is beginning to wake up to this ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism’ nonsense. Hopefully the world’s leaders will too.


This article is also posted at Murdoch’s Propagandists.

SO MUCH FOR ISRAELI ‘DEMOCRACY’.

According to a report in Ha’aretz, Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli Defence Force Chief of Staff who has recently visited the US, said during his visit ‘that while Israel was interested in exhausting diplomatic options against Iran's nuclear program, the army must nevertheless prepare itself for a military attack’.

Israel is fond of frequently telling the world that it is the only real democracy in the region yet here is its unelected military commander visiting Israel’s greatest ally espousing what is essentially Israeli policy toward Iran.

If Ashkenazi had said something to the effect of; ‘Israel is preparing itself for the possibility of an attack against Iran if our government exhausts all diplomatic options against Iran’s nuclear program’ then (leaving aside any argument about why Israel is telling the world that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to them in the first place), such a statement would have been acceptable from even a military officer of a truly democratic nation. In this instance Ashkenazi would simply have been speaking as a messenger. However, in the original context as reported, Ashkenazi is displaying himself more as a political decider empowered to negotiate with the US about issues of Israeli foreign policy.

Now, this may seem like nitpicking and, if it were in isolation, it would be just that and it would not have been mentioned. The fact is though, it is not in isolation and Israel has a long history of its military playing a significant role in its political affairs. Indeed, many of Israel’s political leaders have come from military backgrounds; most notably Moshe Dyan and Ariel Sharon. Other military leaders have also been extremely influential in Israeli politics above and beyond merely offering advice to political leaders in the government. Both Dyan and Sharon before they became political leaders fell in to this category, while Dan Halutz, Israel’s defence chief during the 2006 Lebanon War also was politically influential though his failure to meet Israel’s war aims of destroying Hezbollah and occupying Lebanon up to the Litani river, aims that he himself had been a part of defining, eventually cost him dearly. Failure in Israel is rarely tolerated.

The military still have a very powerful political role to play in Israeli politics. It has the power to censor the media about its activities. It can enforce this censorship without recourse to the government unless the government changed the laws – which it would be unlikely to do on account of the military’s extensive influence. Since Israel seems always to be at war with somebody or another Israeli’s get to hear very little about some of the more unsavoury aspects of Israel activities against their enemies except as anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Zionism dominates Israeli politics and Israeli ‘democracy’ tends only to revolve around the Zionist concept. Virtually all the political parties that are represented in the Knesset are staunchly Zionist. This means that Israelis get the opportunity in the main to vote only for Zionists with the only differences between them being the method by which a Greater Israel can be created and/or the concept of a Jews-only apartheid racist state can be maintained. The rest of the trappings of ‘democracy’ in Israel are a façade. The military of any true democracy acts only in strict accordance with the instructions of the government. How the military operates is generally left up to the military but it does so within a framework clearly defined by government only policy. A military should advise on how best to achieve a governments desired outcome but not on what that outcome should be which is what Ashkenazi was advocating.

Israel, among other so-called ‘democratic’ nations, is a classic example of how the concept of the separation of powers has all but disappeared – to the detriment of humankind the world over.


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AT LAST! THE IDEA THAT TALKING TO PEOPLE MIGHT BE A BETTER IDEA THAN KILLING THEM IS BEGINNING TO SINK IN.

Though it might be hard to believe in the light of the recent warcrimes committed by Israel in the Gaza and the continued violence in both Afghanistan and Iraq what with the neocons calling for a massive increase in violence in Afghanistan, there is a definite trend away from thinking war all of the time and some consideration is now actually being given to talking.

The notion of actually talking to the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran would have been out of the question just a few months ago but now there are some whispers trickling down through the mainstream media that some senior and influential advisors to Western governments are suggesting that it might be worth giving it a try.

‘Ha’aretz’ today reports that several senior officials and advisors including Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzenzinski and Paul Volcker, had written to President Obama before he took office saying that there is no reason that they could see why there can’t be talks with Hamas. Tony Blair, Britain’s ex-Prime Minister and warmonger-in-chief for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as early as the end of last January thought it was a good idea to talk to Hamas. And, taking the idea of talking just a step further, Britain’s Foreign Office has even suggested talking to Hezbollah though this may have been pushing the friendship (with the US and Israel) just a bit too far. Nonetheless, the idea was there, and it simply wouldn’t have been just a few months ago.

And, of course, Obama wanting talks with the mortal enemy of Israel and the neocons, Iran, is already very well known. Who knows; next they might well be talking about talking with the Taliban – the moderate ones, that is. (Who would have believed just a few months ago that there were any ‘moderate’ Taliban? My, how the rhetoric is changing.)

And, just to top it off, Hamas and Fatah are talking about talking, albeit rather tentatively and in an on-again-off-again sort of way, but, at least talking about talking.

If all this talking actually happens then it will most definitely leave Israel out on a limb. But that’s another story.


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DURBAN REVIEW CONFERENCE TO BE BOYCOTTED BY THE WORLD’S MOST RACIST NATIONS.

The UN Durban Review Conference, billed as a ‘World Conference against Racism, Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance’, due to begin in Geneva on 20 April, is shaping up to be one that exposes who exactly the worlds most racist nations actually are – by them being conspicuous by their absence.

Naturally, Israel will not be there. Nor will the US be there. Nor Canada. And now it looks like Australia may not be there either. As one Ha’aretz reader points out; “What do the U.S., Canada, Australia and Israel all have in common? All were created through ethnic cleansing and apartheid. No wonder they all stick together.”

It will come as no surprise to learn that other countries that have threatened to also boycott the conference include the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, France and, with the irony noted, Germany; all nations that over the past few centuries have demonstrated their own propensity to establish racially orientated empires. And, of course, all of them are now supporters of the racist Jews-only apartheid state of Zionist Israel.


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U.S. INTELLIGENCE CHIEFS RAIN ON ISRAEL’S ‘LETS BOMB IRAN’ PARADE.

The issue of Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ continues to be propped up by the Israeli propaganda machine and is unlikely to be resolved until, if Israel has its way, Iran has been bombed into regime change.

Unfortunately – for the Israelis at least – and fortunately for the rest of the sane world, it seems as though the more sensible and realistic members of the US intelligence community’s hierarchy are raining on Israel’s ‘lets bomb Iran’ parade by telling the US Congress that Iran does not have any material with which they can build a bomb; that Iran is not known to have any facilities by which it is able to produce uranium enriched to the levels required for a nuclear weapon; that Iran has not made any decision to build a nuclear weapon, and that Irans recent launching of the Safir Space Launch Vehicle, while helpful in ballistic missile technology, was unrelated to Iran’s current nuclear project.

The US intelligence officials that spoke to Congress, Dennis Blair, who is Director of National Intelligence, and Lieutenant General Michael Maples, director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, also ceded that it would not be in Russia’s interest to allow Iran to be nuclear armed inferring that Russia would hardly be likely to be assisting Iran with its nuclear energy program if it believed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.

Messrs. Blair and Maples have effectively, for now at least, put a big dampener on Israel’s expectations of direct support from the US with regard to any imminent military action against Iran.

However, it does not preclude Israel from taking unilateral pre-emptive action against Iran; though Israel, while it may have the means to destroy some of Irans nuclear sites, does not have anywhere near the wherewithal to bomb Iran into ‘regime change’ short of using nuclear weapons.

Israel would now be taking a big gamble if it were to decide to unilaterally attack Iran in the hope that, in order to prevent an Iranian counter attack or retaliation, the US would feel an obligation, no matter the reluctance, to come to Israel’s aid by launching a massive aerial bombardment against Iran in the hope of deterring further Iranian retaliatory attacks against Israel.

Any war instigated by Israel against Iran is likely to escalate rapidly and ultimately involve the US. It can only be hoped that the words of cooler realistic heads in Washington DC will be heard in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The reaction by the Zionist propaganda in the Israeli and US press will soon tell us if they’ve listened or not but with Benjamin Netanyahu waiting in the wings to become Israel’s Prime Minister, one should not be holding ones breath. There still some very dangerous days ahead despite Israel’s party having been rained on.

$5.2 BILLION RAISED BUT WILL THE GAZAN PEOPLE SEE ANY OF IT?

The international community has managed to raise some $5.2 billion for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip but the people of the Gaza Strip are unlikely to see much of it, if any at all.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made it quite clear that no monies will be made available to Hamas who govern the Gaza but only to President Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority (PA). This straightaway presents a dilemma for the international community since the PA has no authority whatsoever in the Gaza Strip since it was booted out in June 2007 after trying to usurp political power from the elected Hamas government.

For years Fatah have been known to be corrupt to the core; indeed, to a large extent it was Fatah’s corruption that gave Hamas victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections in the first place. Why then would the international community want to hand over $5.2 billion to an organisation that has a long history of being corrupt?

The answer is simple: The promise of money (no one has actually coughed up the money yet; it has only been pledged) is being used for political purposes and has little to do with the actual reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. It is cynically being used to manipulate a series of political outcomes that will benefit only Israel, not least of which will be the hopeful sidelining of Hamas as a political power in the Gaza.

With Hamas unlikely to cede power in the Gaza to the Fatah-run PA, Israeli propaganda, backed by the western media, will accuse Hamas of denying the Gazan people of the prospect of rebuilding the Gaza. Israel will then close up the borders to put more pressure on Hamas to capitulate which, in turn, will result in more rockets and mortars being fired into Israel and so the whole cycle of violence and destruction is perpetuated yet again. The aim ultimately is for a situation to evolve whereby Israel, which by then will be under an extreme right-wing Zionist regime, will tell the world that it has no option but to permanently occupy all of the Gaza Strip and transfer the Palestinians ‘for their own good’ elsewhere.

The world must demand that Israel opens its borders and the world must accept the authority of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. There will be no reconstruction in the Gaza until these demands are made and accepted.

IF PUMMELLING THE GAZANS INTO REJECTING HAMAS DOESN’T WORK, TRY BRIBING THEM.

Not content with attempting to bomb the Gazans into rejecting Hamas, now they’re going to try and buy the Gazans into rejecting Hamas.

The Israelis tried to destroy Hamas by deliberately bombing the Gazan people together with their homes, their means of industrial and agricultural production and by destroying their utilities infrastructure. The Israelis literally tried to terrorise the Gazan people into rejecting Hamas as their government in an effort to get the people to support the far more compliant Fatah movement that currently controls the West Bank under the tenuous leadership of Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. Their attempts, however, despite the destruction and the massive and horrific casualties, failed miserably.

Now, in the light of that failure, Israel’s bankers, the US government, has followed up very conveniently with plan ‘B’. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is offering a massive bribe to the Gazan people of around a billion dollars, but with a catch; only the Palestinian Authority gets to spend it on reconstructing the Gaza. The aim, quite blatantly, is to ‘sideline’ Hamas.

Apart from wanting to sideline Hamas, one has to wonder what makes Secretary Clinton believe that Fatah are the right people to give this money to. For years Fatah have been known to be corrupt to the core; indeed, it was as much Fatah’s corruption that gave Hamas victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections in the first place. The Gazan people know that if Abbas and the Palestinian Authority get their hands on the money, very little of it will actually end up rebuilding the Gaza.

One of the reasons Hezbollah’s popularity increased in Lebanon after the 2006 Israeli attack against the Lebanese people, and despite the carnage the Israelis inflicted, was Hezbollah’s massive effort in reconstruction. However, Hamas has not been in the same position as Hezbollah and has been hamstrung in their efforts to attempt to rebuild the Gaza due to the blockade by Israel. What little money Hamas had tried to bring into the Gaza, money raised by donations to the Gazan people, to help get the economy going was stolen at the border between the Gaza and Egypt by the Egyptian authorities.

This blatant attempt by the US to get the Gazan people to abandon Hamas will be as much a failure as the Israelis attempt to bomb them into rejecting Hamas. Surely now it must be obvious to the leaders of the world that if there is going to be any headway at all then Hamas must be included. But, of course, we know exactly what Israel’s true intentions are; nothing less than the destruction of not just Hamas but also the Palestinian people in the Gaza as part of the process of creating a Greater Israel that includes the Gaza Strip for colonisation by Israelis only.

OBAMA ACCUSING IRAN OF SUPPORTING ‘TERRORISM’ IS NOT A GOOD STARTING POINT FOR TALKS

The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, has said that ‘President Obama’s administration will seek to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its support for terrorism.’

Accusing Iran of supporting ‘terrorism’ is really not a good way to kick off talks aimed at easing tensions in the Middle East and demonstrates just how insincere the US really are about talking with the Iranians. Beneath the façade of goodwill gestures like ‘talks’ lies the determination to continue, regardless of the outcome of such talks, the demonisation of Iran. The Israelis have even indicated that the talks should end quickly so that they can then move on to the next stage whereby they and the US bomb the Iranians into regime change. The ‘talks’ are merely a prelude designed for propaganda purposes to build public support for military action when the ‘talks’ inevitably fail.

And why will they fail? They’ll fail because they were never intended to succeed.

Labelling Hamas and Hezbollah ‘terrorists’ and then accusing Iran of supporting ‘terrorists’ puts Iran in a ‘can’t win’ situation before the talks even start. The same applies to Irans so-called nuclear ambitions. Iran has repeatedly told the world that it has no nuclear weapons program and that it’s only ‘nuclear ambition’ is to produce electricity yet Israel, the US and their western allies continue to accuse Iran of having a ‘nuclear weapons program’ despite the continued total lack of evidence of Iran having any such weapons program.

The ‘talks’ are doomed to fail before they even start. They are just window dressing to placate those who insist that they at least try to talk before bombing them into regime change.

The rhetoric Obama uses is no different from the rhetoric that Bush used. Both accuse Iran of supporting ‘terrorism’ and both accuse Iran of having a ‘nuclear weapons program’.

It is time for the world to insist that the US stop supporting the real terrorists of the Middle East – the Israelis.

The world should also insist that Israel give up its nuclear weapons before it starts accusing other nations in the region of having a ‘nuclear weapons program’.

“We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense. And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken -- you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”

These words could well have been spoken by any Hamas leader after the Israeli onslaught into the Gaza. In fact they were spoken by President Obama at his inauguration speech.

It’s not so much the West’s so-called values that ‘they’ hate about ‘us’; it’s the hypocrisy and self-righteous arrogance that expose ‘us’ as the true terrorists in this world.

One should be reminded that the only people on this planet standing on land that doesn’t belong to them and who are killing the owners of that land in droves are the US, the Israelis and their Western allies. Yet, somehow, it is Iran that is to be demonised and then bombed into oblivion.

THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION WAS NEVER EVER AN OPTION.

A lot of hope over the years has been placed in the idea of a ‘two-state solution’ whereby the state of Israel would exist peacefully side-by-side with an independent Palestinian sovereign state. However, as the true face of Zionist extremism emerges after the recent Israeli elections, we see now that the dream of a two-state solution has been only an illusion designed to buy time for the Israelis to find ways to marginalise the Palestinians further with the ultimate aim of clearing the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Palestinians and creating an area completely under Israeli control that would eventually be settled by Jews only to become part of a Greater Israel.

While the one-state bi-national solution has always been an option, it never really gained any real traction – until now – because of the unwillingness of either side to allow such an option to work. The position of both sides seemed intractable and, to a certain extent, still does. However, the geopolitical reality on the ground has deemed it necessary for the one-state solution to be seriously reconsidered if, for no other reason, than it is now the only viable option left. The alternatives are that there will either be a one-state solution, but it will not be one that Palestinians will have any role in, or things will carry on as they are for another sixty years or so.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that the reason a one-state bi-national solution is looking more attractive now than ever it was before is because the very people that are so dead-set against it, the Zionist Israelis, have already begun to create the physical foundations needed to create just such a state and that is by building their settlements, albeit as Jews-only communities, inside of Palestinian lands while, at the same time, there are already Palestinians living as Arab Israelis, in Israel.

While Kadima and other earlier Israeli governments may have talked about a two-state solution, the reality has always been that they would never accept the conditions Palestinians – Hamas or Fatah – had laid down for such a solution to be realised. It simply never was going to happen and, as we now know, now that the right-wing Zionists have the upper hand in Israel, it never will.

Slowly but surely progressives, both Israeli and Palestinian, are coming to the conclusion that the one-state bi-national solution is, indeed, the only solution but they are going to have a hard job convincing their respective fellow countrymen. It is, therefore, up to the rest of world to help the peoples of the region to see that it is the only option.
Netanyahu and his right-wing Zionist allies both in Israel and elsewhere have made it quite clear that there will never ever be the option of a two-state solution. All that Palestinians can expect now is the destruction of what little is left of the Palestinian communities that are in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It is now up to the people of the world to demand the only viable solution left to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the one-state bi-national solution is clearly the only solution.

KILLING GAZANS DIDN’T WORK TO BRING ON THE FINAL CONFRONTATION WITH IRAN SO IT’S BACK TO PROVOKING HEZBOLLAH.

Israel’s navy commander, Maj. Gen. Eliezer Marom, said in a rare statement reported in Ha’aretz: "An axis of evil coordinated between Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas will require Israel to wage a campaign against it that will require our best efforts and abilities."

The remarks go to the heart of what Israel’s ulterior motives really are when it comes to discussing Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’. Israel is desperate to keep up the pressure against Iran in any way it possibly can even if it means provoking Hamas or Hezbollah or Syria, or even all of them, in order to escalate the confrontation to ultimately involve Iran and the US. The aim, of course, is not to eliminate Iran’s ‘nuclear weapons program’ – Israel, the US and the West all know that Iran doesn’t actually have a weapons program – but to achieve regime change in Iran just as it did in Iraq in 2003. And, just as in the run up to the invasion and destruction of Iraq, the Israelis and the US and their allies are accusing Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

Just as Israel, with the help of Zionist Israeli citizens that happened also to be in the US administration under George W. Bush, wanted regime change in Iraq in order to be rid of Saddam's influence and support of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, so the Israelis are manipulating affairs in and around their region in order to be rid of Irans influence and support of Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah.

In 2006 the Israelis tried to provoke their final confrontation with Iran by attacking the Gaza when they claimed one of their soldiers had been ‘kidnapped’ and then, just days later, they attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon when they again tried the old ‘kidnapped soldiers’ routine as casus belli for the attack. All of this was done in the hope of provoking Iran to retaliate either directly or indirectly by supplying Hezbollah with increasingly sophisticated arms.

But Iran didn’t bite.

Then the Israelis got desperate. They tried again to provoke Iranian ire by massively and indiscriminately attacking the Palestinian people bottled up in the Gaza in the hope that Hezbollah might come to their support and then, as that escalates, the hope then was that Iran would be drawn in.

But Hezbollah didn’t bite and nor did Iran.

So twice now Israel has failed to draw Iran into a final confrontation. And twice now Israel has failed in its war aims of destroying Hezbollah and Hamas despite the shocking and disgusting loss of innocent lives in Lebanon and the Gaza.

But now Israel looks likely to have a new Prime Minister, the right-wing Zionist and extremist Benjamin Netanyahu, who is even more determined than Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak to realise the final confrontation with Iran in order to destroy Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria.

It now seems that it is Hezbollah’s turn again to receive special attention from the Israelis as they renew their efforts for their final confrontation with Iran.

Besides talking the talk by ratcheting up the propaganda generally against both Iran over its ‘nuclear weapons program’ and Hezbollah having got new rockets from Iran ready for their next ‘war against Israel’, the Israelis are also doing their bit to physically provoke Israel by constantly flying their attack jets low into Lebanese airspace.

Obama too is ramping up the Iran nuclear issue with his office recently ‘expressing concerns’ about Iran’s increased stockpile of ‘enriched uranium’ demonstrating that the Obama administration is also willing to attempt to hoodwink the people of the world, despite all the talk about ‘negotiations’ with Iran, by using the ‘enriched uranium’ scare tactic of propaganda when they know that the uranium the Iranians do have is enriched only for use in electrical power generation and not anywhere near the levels of enrichment needed for nuclear weapons. Nothing has really changed at the White House.

During Israel’s onslaught into the Gaza a number of rockets were launched from just inside the Lebanese border into Israel. Hezbollah denied all knowledge of these unsophisticated weapons and no other group in Lebanon made any claim of responsibility. It was strongly speculated that Israel may have launched these rockets themselves using munitions from their arsenal of captured weapons from the 2006 war. Only yesterday another Katyusha rocket, again, more than likely launched by Mossad operators or collaborators in Mossad pay from inside Lebanon, hit Israel. Israel launched an immediate artillery barrage into Lebanon in response in a deliberate attempt to provoke Hezbollah into a counter attack. Again, Hezbollah didn’t bite.

It’s just a matter of time before Israel claims that Hezbollah has launched a much larger rocket into Israel. It will kill Israelis and give Israel the excuse it needs to launch another even more terrible war against the Lebanese people in the hope that it will escalate into the final confrontation they so desperately seek against Iran.

NAZI GERMANY AND ZIONIST ISRAEL: THE UNMISTAKABLE PARALLELS

Until recently, many commentators on Palestinian-Israeli affairs had been loathe to discuss the parallels between Nazism and Zionism out of respect for those European Jews that perished during World War 2 at the hands of the Nazis. It was, perhaps, always hoped that the Palestinian-Israeli debacle might have been resolved peacefully and equitably for all before the parallels became too apparent.

Regretfully, there has been no such resolution and, particularly in the light of recent events in the Gaza and the resurgence of the extreme right-wing at the recent Israeli polls, the parallels are now inescapable and can no longer be ignored.

The most striking parallel between Nazism and Zionism is its basic aims. While Hitler and his Nazis sought to create a state of racial Germans and to expand the nation into a Greater Germany via ‘Lebensraum’ at the expense of peoples that occupied nations to his east, the Zionists seek to create a Jews-only racial nation at the expense of peoples that occupied the lands and the nations adjoining to create living space for a Greater Israel.

Just as Hitler and his Nazis were not content with the provisions of what they considered to be the restrictive terms of the Treaty of Versailles that created the post-First World War Weimar Republic of Germany, so the Israelis were not content with the provisions of the restrictive conditions of the 1948 UN Partition of Palestine that created the post-Second World War state of Israel.

Just as Hitler believed there was not enough living space for a future Germany to properly function and prosper under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles so Israel’s leader, David Ben-Gurion, believed that there was not enough living space for a future Israel to thrive and prosper within the terms of the UN Partition Plan.

And so within days of the Partition Plan having been approved by the UN on 29 November 1947, Palestinians protested and the Israelis used the protests as an excuse to attack Palestinians beyond the borders of the partition delineating the new Israel from Palestine and by December 1947 the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands by Israelis had begun in earnest with some 75,000 Palestinians being made refugees even at this early stage of the ethnic cleansing. By January 1948 there were mass expulsions of Palestinians by Israelis from several villages accompanied by several massacres including the Deir Yassin massacre. A hastily assembled Arab irregular volunteer army attempted to thwart the Israeli onslaught to little effect.

By the time the British mandate ended the Israelis had already grabbed substantial tracts of Palestinian lands. The day before the British mandate ended, Israel, on 14 May 1948, declared itself and independent state. The following day the British formally withdrew.

From day one the new Israeli state continued to move into Palestinian allocated lands. The Arab League, supported by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq, sent troops into Palestine to help the Palestinians protect themselves from Israeli invasion and aggression. Again, their intervention which became known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, achieved little by way of stopping the Israelis grab more land that was not theirs or stopping the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their lands, indeed, the Arab League’s intervention served only to give the Israelis further justification to annex even more of the Palestinian’s land and towns.

Just as Hitler’s armies moved in to newly occupied lands and began to ethnically cleanse it of Jews so Ben-Gurion and his thugs ethnically cleansed newly occupied Palestinian lands of Arabs.

Prior to the 1967 war, Israel had spent years provoking Syria over the Golan Heights where the Israelis sent bulldozers into the demilitarised zones gradually ploughing into Syrian territory testing and prodding Syrian patience. In the Gaza the Israelis provoked the Egyptians under whose jurisdiction the Gaza belonged. As the Arab nations reacted and began to gather their forces to deter the Israelis from further provocation, the Israelis used the ‘crisis’ as a casus belli to pre-emptively attack its Arab neighbours and seize the Gaza, as well as the rest of the Sinai from the Egyptians, the Golan Heights from the Syrians and the West Bank from Jordan who the Israelis had provoked earlier in November 1966 by attacking Samu in the West Bank, then under Jordanian control.

Like Hitler, Israel always blamed the nations they went to war with for having started it yet such blame is totally transparent and merely used as excuses for invasion and annexation of land that did not belong to them.

Like Hitler, during times of relative quiet, the Zionists talked of peace but at the same time secretly planned for war. The Zionists still eyed the Lebanese lands to their north and pondered how Israel might flourish from the waters of the Litani River. In 1978 Israel used the civil war that had been raging in Lebanon since 1975 as an excuse to invade the country; the invasion was called Operation Litani but the occupation was cut short when the UN ordered the Israelis to leave. However, they left behind a militia loyal to the Israelis who vowed they’d return. In 1982, they did just that.

In early 1982 the Israelis secretly planned another invasion but the then US Secretary of State, Alexander Haigh, told the Israelis that such an invasion could not happen without there being some major provocation. By June 1982, Israel had manipulated just such a provocation from Yasser Arafat’s PLO, then based in Lebanon. On 6 June 1982 Israel again invaded Lebanon. This time the UN demand for the Israelis to withdraw was vetoed by the US. Ariel Sharon, then Israeli Defence Minister, used the opportunity of invasion and occupation to destroy the Palestinians in Lebanon where Arafat and his PLO were based. Israeli forces, supported by Lebanese fascist Phalangists, forced out the PLO which fled to Tripoli, and then attempted to murder all the remaining Palestinian civilians that were in the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila.

The Israelis struggled to hold on to south Lebanon and by 2000 had found that the resistance movement Hezbollah was too much for the Israelis to sustain their occupation.

By around this time the Zionists had come to the realisation that their dream of a Greater Israel needed to be modified. The Sinai was returned to the Egyptians but the Israelis hung on to the Gaza Strip that they had by now begun to colonise with settlements. They had also begun to expand into the occupied West Bank with settlements and outposts. The Golan Heights, already taken during the 1967 war, had been thoroughly colonised and annexed into Israel.

Clearly, the Israelis had adopted a far more cautious approach to their expansionist dreams. Resistance to their expansionism had been much tougher than they had expected especially after having experienced how easy it had been for them in the early days in 1947 and 1948. With the world taking a keen interest in what was going on in this part of the world the Israelis knew that they would not be able to continue getting away with the crimes that they had managed to get away with so far. A new approach was called for; one that essentially involved taking two steps forward then one back in order to make it look as though Israel was actually conceding ground to the Palestinians. In September 2005, then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, withdrew all the settlements from the Gaza ostensibly to demonstrate that he was willing to seek peace with the Palestinians. In reality the pullout was for far more practical reasons. The cost of keeping troops in the Gaza to protect the few settlers there was far too prohibitive. The hope was that, after pulling out, the Palestinians in the Gaza would continue to attack Israel thus providing a casus belli at a later date to launch an all-out invasion of the Gaza and the eventual transfer of its inhabitants. The ploy was to quietly put increasing pressure on the Gazans to make life intolerable for them in order to provoke them into launching attacks against the Israelis to deter them from continuing to pressure the Gaza. At the same time Israel used propaganda against Hamas by trying to expose the Gazans as being unreasonable due to the Israelis having given them their land back yet ‘they still choose to attack Israel’.

Just as the Nazis ghettoised the Jews of Europe into Warsaw and began to squeeze them into extinction and deportation for those that survived, so the Zionists of Israel have been planning the same for the Gazans. Just as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto resisted the Nazis so the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip ghetto resisted Israeli attempts at deprivation, starvation and the destruction of any economy and production in the Strip. It is exactly the reaction that the Nazis wanted from the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and it is exactly the reaction that the Zionists wanted from the Palestinians in the Gaza Ghetto. Ultimately the aim of the Zionists is to clear the Gaza ghetto of the Palestinians just as the Nazis ultimately cleared and razed the Warsaw Ghetto with the intention of rebuilding it and filling it with ethnic Germans.

Just as the Nazis used overwhelming military force to bomb their enemies into submission so the Zionists have used their overwhelming military might, particularly in recent years, to attempt to bomb their enemies into submission. In 2006, the Israelis claimed that one of their soldiers, Gilad Shalit, had been ’kidnapped’ by Gazan fighters. This was used as a casus belli to launch a Blitzkrieg on the Gaza which killed many innocent civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure. Less than three weeks later, on the pretext that two of their soldiers had been captured, Israel launched a Blitzkrieg against the Lebanese people with their propaganda claiming that they were only attacking Hezbollah over the ‘kidnapping’. Despite their claims, the vast majority of those killed in the onslaught were civilians and, again, most of the destruction was to civilian infrastructure.

These attacks were designed to provoke Iran in to taking action against Israel by supplying Hezbollah with increasingly more sophisticated weapons to use against Israel in order to provide an excuse for the US and Israel to attack Iran to bring about regime change in Iran. This would then leave Israel free to deal with Hamas and Hizbollah hoping that their resistance would collapse without Iranian support.

But the Iranians didn’t bite. Hezbollah put up a stiff resistance and Israeli casualties began to mount. In the end the Israelis were unable to prevail and the US had to call a reluctant end to Israel’s escapade in to Lebanon via the UN after international condemnation of Israel’s actions.

But it hasn’t stopped the Zionists from trying again to rouse the Iranians by attacking Palestinians. In December 2008 Israel, on the pretext of claiming Hamas had broken a ceasefire agreement (when, in fact, it had been Israel that had broken the agreement) again launched a devastating attack against the hapless Gazan people. Again, the Nazi-like Blitzkrieg took its toll on Gazan civilians including many women and children. After the intial aerial bombing of civilians the ground forces rolled into the Gaza in tanks destroying and killing anything in their path including women and children that had come out of their homes waving white handkerchiefs in surrender whom they shot in cold blood.

Just as the Nazis had executed captured fighters in Eastern Europe and in the Warsaw Ghetto during the uprising there, so the Zionists executed captured fighters in the Gaza. Others were taken to Israel and are still yet to be accounted for.

Commentators and critics of Zionism have every right now to demonstrate and highlight, without any fear of being labelled an ‘anti-Semite’, the unmistakable parallels and comparisons between modern Zionism and twentieth-century Nazism. The Zionists and their supporters have abused for far too long the ‘anti-Semite’ label which they believe has protected them from accusations of behaving like the Nazis that once persecuted them.

The real shame now is that the term ‘anti-Semite’, which once was in legitimate usage to describe white-supremacist Jew-haters and their like, has now been reduced to a transparent propaganda label used to distract the world from the abuses and crimes of the Zionists as they emulate those that once persecuted them and who really were anti-Semites.

Despite being Semites themselves, one has to wonder if the true anti-Semites of the twenty-first century aren’t the Zionist criminals of Israel.

SURGE INTO AFGHANISTAN MAY MEAN ESCALATION INTO PAKISTAN.

President Obama’s not entirely unexpected announcement regarding extra troops into Afghanistan has finally been made. This confirms that the President has failed to learn the lessons of previous world leaders that no amount of extra troops in that most rugged of countries, defended by some of the worlds most tenacious people, will ever be able to prevail in an invasion where the invaders are not wanted.

It’s a shame that somehow the US managed to con many of the Western world’s leaders into helping them in their hapless cause. So far tens of thousands have been killed on all sides including thousands of innocent civilians and children and over a thousand coalition forces. And the war hasn’t been confined just to Afghanistan. Many of the Taliban fighters are actually Pakistanis who cross the border into Afghanistan from Pakistan to fight the Westerner invaders and then retreat back into Pakistan when their enemy gets the better of them. It’s classic guerrilla tactics which can rarely be beaten by foreign invaders.

The problem stems from the fact that most Taliban fighters from that region don’t actually regard themselves as ‘Afghanis’ or ‘Pakistanis’ but, rather, Pushtans. To them the border is simply some arbitrary line drawn by a British colonialist, Mortimer Durand, (the border is known as the Durand line) who didn’t have a clue what he was doing (indeed, it has been said that he was drunk at the time he drew the line). These borderlands are extremely rugged, which the Taliban know like the back of their hand, and very ‘porous’ which they use to great advantage knowing that, up until recently, they have been relatively safe once back inside Pakistan territory.

The reality is that the Taliban now has as much influence in the border regions of Pakistan as it does in Afghanistan, if not more, to the point where the Pakistan government, much to the chagrin of the US and their allies, have conceded that Sharia Islamic law may now dominate in the region.

So far, US and allied actions inside Pakistan against the Taliban and their supporters has been, if not quite covert, then very low key with the Western media not widely reporting allied incursions that take place beyond the Afghan borders. In the main, attacks against the Taliban inside Pakistan have been via UAV aircraft that have launched missiles at various targets, many of which have only succeeded in killing innocent villagers sometimes with entire families being wiped out in by a single bomb as it mistakenly hits a family home.

Recently the Taliban have taken to destroying US and NATO supplies that use routes from Pakistan into Afghanistan to supply the allies inside Afghanistan. The Pakistan government had made only half-hearted attempts, at the insistence of the US, to stop the attacks on the allied supply lines but as soon as the Pakistani troops turn up, the Taliban simply melted away and then returned once the troops had gone. But this latest development, whereby the Pakistan government have allowed Taliban dominated areas to have Sharia law, is, crucially, being viewed by NATO, as a truce between the Pakistan government and the Taliban. While, for now, the US has taken a rather quieter stance preferring to not comment on the new relationship between the Pakistan government and the Taliban, it is clearly of considerable concern to the US.

The US need to maintain a rapport with the Pakistani government which clings only tenuously to power in Pakistan. It is this that is of major concern to the allies. Pakistan is teetering on the brink of being governed by a strongly Islamic government that has strong links and sympathies to the Taliban if the present government fails. A nuclear-armed Pakistani government with strong Taliban sympathies horrifies the Western governments. (Recently a very senior Assistant Secretary for International Policy with the Australian Defence Department personally told me that the Australian government have very strong ‘concerns’ about Pakistan and that ‘Pakistan is going to be big, big, trouble for the West in the near future’ though my feeling now is that it is actually going to be the West that is going to be big, big, trouble for Pakistan.)

It is Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, of course, that is of the biggest concern to the allies. The US cannot invade Pakistan so its only alternative is to maintain a strong relationship with those elements within Pakistan that are friendly with the US and to provide massive amounts of money to the Pakistani government to keep them on side. In short, the US, if they haven’t done so already, need to pay off Pakistani individuals who would be able to assist US and allied special forces to locate and ‘secure’ all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons before they fell into the hands of a Taliban-sympathetic Pakistani government.

The recent treaty between the Taliban in the North-West of Pakistan and the Pakistani government will certainly not instil confidence in the US administration to feel secure with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in the hands of a government that is happy to do deals with the Taliban. It is with this in mind that the troop ‘surge’ in Afghanistan may be viewed with more in mind than simply confronting the Taliban with increased force just on Afghan soil.

MORE ISRAELI CHUTZPAH. THEY’RE UPSET BECAUSE HAMAS ‘STOLE’ UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE ORIGINALLY DELIVERED TO HAMAS!

Apparently the Israelis are very upset over the fact that unexploded ordnance that the Israelis dropped on the Gaza during their last criminal onslaught into the ghetto, and subsequently gathered up by Hamas, has gone missing or, as the Israelis would have us believe, ‘stolen’.

Never mind that this ordnance was delivered by Israel to Hamas’s door, literally in most cases, but now they accuse Hamas of stealing it. The inference is they actually want it back once the UN discovers where it’s been taken to!

I’m sure Hamas will find a way of returning the explosives to Israel. One shouldn’t be surprised if it is via the same way as it was delivered to Hamas – by air mail. One can only hope that in doing so it causes less damage than when it was first used. At least the message will get through.