ABOUT 'THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY'

THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Written after years of extensive research, THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY contains over 550 pages, including more than 1200 footnotes and some 120 pages of bibliography. The book has been meticulously researched with every aspect of the history fully supported with primary evidence, much of it from the neoconservatives themselves.

The book is a must for all those interested in the history of neoconservatism, the recent history of Israel and conflict between the West and Islam in the Middle East during the first ten years of the NEW AMERICAN CENTURY.

Despite being originally written as a successful doctoral thesis, the book avoids academic jargon and uses plain easy to understand language  

It details the rise of neoconservative influence within the US government particularly from the Reagan era through to the presidency of George W. Bush, when neoconservative power reached its zenith. It details the strong connections neoconservatives have with right-wing Israeli Zionism and the way in which neoconservatives were able to manipulate American power to benefit the Greater Israel cause. The book details how various interests including the Military Industrial Complex, the American religious right, US big business and US/Israeli Zionists converged into a coalition under George W. Bush and his administration that set out to determine the future history of the Middle East in such a way as to benefit Israel and the economic interests of the US.

Click here to read the introduction.

Available now from AMAZON KINDLE for US$9.99

SICK NEOCON PROPAGANDISTS ATTEMPT TO TWIST NAKBA KILLINGS

On 15 May 2014, Nakba Day for Palestinians around the world who commemorate the loss of their lands to the Israelis, two Palestinian youths were shot dead in Beitunia, a small town near Ramallah in the West Bank, while demonstrating against Israeli occupation. The killings were captured on CCTV and the footage has gone viral around the world to a point where even the US government are insisting on a full enquiry over the killings by the Israeli government.

What happened is plain to see; two youths were shot by Israeli soldiers who were among a group that were throwing rocks harmlessly toward the Israeli soldiers who were quite obviously too far away to have actually have been hit by the rocks but clearly not so far away enough as to be able to shoot at Palestinian demonstrators.

Now, despite the killings clearly being cold blooded, US neoconservative full-time Commentary magazine propagandists Jonathan Tobin and Evelyn Gordon, are trying to twist it to suggest that the whole incident was set up to deliberately demonise the Israeli defence forces. Tobin says:

…unlike the kangaroo court of international public opinion in which the Israelis already stand convicted, a more sober and less prejudiced probe of what happened may well reveal something very different than the narrative of Israeli brutality and Palestinian victimization. Until we know how much the film produced as evidence was edited and just what the Palestinian demonstrators were doing prior to the shootings, it would be a mistake for anyone, including the Israeli government, to assume that the soldiers were in the wrong.

He goes on to say:

The only point of throwing rocks and bombs at armed soldiers is to get them to fire and thus create an international incident. At best, the two Palestinians were merely the latest example of youths who were needlessly sacrificed in order to generate bad publicity for the Israelis. At worst, the story is yet another fraud.

Tobin can’t imagine that all the teenaged Palestinian lads were doing was throwing stones at the Israelis in some vain and naïve attempt to deter them from continuing their presence in the West Bank and to show the Israelis that they won’t be giving up their lands without a fight no matter how fruitless that fight might be. For Tobin and Gordon the incident was deliberately staged by some master manipulator of Palestinian youth who desired their deaths for propaganda purposes. The irony, of course, is that it’s Tobin and Gordon who are using the incident in order to push their own anti-Palestine propaganda.

NEOCONS CONTINUE PUSH FOR WAR AGAINST IRAN

Top neocon propagandist Jonathan Tobin, writing online in Commentary today argues that America’s ‘gift’ of the Iron Dome defence system designed to counter rocket attacks from Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, does not mean that Israel should abstain from attacking Iran if Israel believes Iran is close to a ‘nuclear breakout’. Tobin writes:

It’s not clear what, if anything, Netanyahu will believe Israel is capable of doing in response to a “bad deal” with Iran up to and including a strike on the Islamist regime’s nuclear facilities before it is too late to stop their drive to a bomb. But whatever his decision might be, no one in Washington should labor under the illusion that Israeli acquiescence to an Iran deal can be bought with an anti-missile system even if some cash is thrown in on the side.

Once again Tobin also claims that Iran may be only months or even just weeks away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon – a claim neocons and their so-called expert supporters have been making for years.

Stirring the anti-Iran pot further is Michael Rubin, another regular propagandist writing in Commentary, who today claims that Iran is looking at targeting US satellites with laser weapons. Well, why wouldn’t they if they believe that the US could quite conceivably attack them? It’s not as though the American’s don’t have the same technology. 

ANOTHER PUSH FOR WAR AGAINST IRAN

It has got to the point that the only way the US is likely to go to war against Iran – albeit reluctantly – is if Israel attacks Iran first. Any hope by the Zionists and their supporters of the US making a pre-emptive strike against Iran have long gone.

The Israeli-Palestinian stand-off has reached a stalemate as far as talks are concerned. The Israelis are never going to allow a Palestinian state to exist and the Palestinians are never going to recognise Israel as a Jewish state. It was all very inevitable. As a result, the Palestinians have adopted a new strategy of building an alliance with Hamas and seeking membership of a number of international conventions as a step toward recognition as a nation by the international community. These are moves that tend to marginalise and even delegitimize Israel especially if Israel takes steps to counter these moves. The Palestinians have also adopted a strategy of not resorting to violence to counter Israeli aggression and expansionism into the West Bank. In short, the table seems to have turned against Israel and, as Israel’s aggression against Palestinians has become exposed, so world opinion has swung against the Zionist cause.

Israel has painted itself into a corner. It has tried to provoke war against the Palestinians in the Gaza by randomly shooting unarmed civilians. A few rockets have been fired into Israel in futile retaliation but nowhere near enough to provide Israel with an excuse to launch a full on attack and occupation. In the West Bank the Israelis have threatened more settlement building. But the Palestinians generally have not reacted with the kind of violence the Israelis needed to justify harsher measures. The new strategies are frustrating the Israeli right-wing. As a result the Israelis are once again looking to Iran to provide a casus belli for a war that will provide them with an opportunity to realise the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel.

Elliott Abrams writing, in the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine, reiterates Israel’s position. He tells how once again Netanyahu threatens action against Iran. Abrams says that, while Netanyahu has made this threat many times before, this time he has support from senior Israeli security chiefs who in the past have been hesitant in attacking Iran.

As the tide turns against Israel, so Netanyahu will become increasingly desperate to do something turn things around. A war against Iran based on what Israel sees as Iran’s intransigence over its so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ might well become Netanyahu’s final option pinning all his hopes on the US coming to his aid to prevent Iranian retaliation.

It will be a bad move for the Middle East, for the world and not least for Israel. 

WHY IS NETANYAHU PUSSYING UP TO PUTIN?

Just a quick thought today. It seems that Americas are a bit upset with Netanyahu at the moment and its not just about the peace talks with the Palestinians breaking down. Apparently Netanyahu has adopted a neutral stance over the Ukraine crisis.

One has to wonder why.

One really good reason I can think of is because Netanyahu doesn’t want to upset Putin because he doesn’t want to give Putin an excuse to provide sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. Russia has already cancelled the S300 missile sale to Iran but could just as easily reinstate the order if Israel decided to side up with the US and the West against Russia over the Ukraine business. The last thing Netanyahu wants is Iran to armed with sophisticated Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) prior to Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.

NEOCONS WANT ISRAEL TO START WORLD WAR THREE

In an article in the Washington Post today, right-wing Zionist extremist and neoconservative columnist, Jennifer Rubin, writes that America should give Israel a bunch of their latest bunker busting bombs with which to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. And not only does she want America to provide the weapons, but she also wants America to provide the Israelis with the B52 bombers needed to deliver the bombs.

For the most part in the past Jennifer Rubin has been simply written off as a neocon nutjob because of her outlandish and often outrageous ideas and the chances of this particular idea getting off the ground – literally or figuratively – is about zilch. However, while America is very unlikely to pull any B52’s out of mothballs for the Israelis to use as she suggests, US Secretary of State John Kerry is making noises about not being very optimistic about getting a deal with Iran and saying that, if Iran were to decide on ‘a breakout’ to build a bomb, ‘the president would respond immediately’. Kerry didn’t allude to exactly how Obama would respond though Obama has in the past told the Israelis that no matter what, he’d ‘always have their back’.

Netanyahu, of course, would be more than happy to take America’s bombs and bombers and, if they were given to him, Netanyahu would take that as a green light to go ahead and actually use them. Not only that, but Netanyahu would also likely presume that after Israel kicks off the war by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, the US would then finish off the regime in Iran while Israel takes on their other enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah.

As I wrote last week, Israel have already put Iran back on the front burner and have also been provoking Hamas in the Gaza Strip by shooting non-combatant Palestinians as well as prodding Hezbollah by making low-level flights over Lebanon. The next round of talks with the Iranians aren’t looking too hopeful and the Israelis and their neocon and Republican supporters in the US are getting restless.

It’s just a matter of time before something gives.

IRAN: THE CRISIS ISRAEL HAS WHEN THINGS DON’T WORK OUT FOR THEM

With the Israel-Palestine talks in tatters due to Palestinian president Abbas threatening to put a halt to Netanyahu’s stretching out of the process to buy time, the Israelis have resorted to bringing the issue of Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ back to the forefront in an effort to provoke instability that may lead to the war the Israelis so desperately want. Abbas’s threat to go to the UN to seek membership of various international organisations seems to have been the tipping point which has caught Israel off balance.

US Secretary of State, John Kerry, has spent the last fourteen months trying to get a peace settlement between Israel and Palestine but with neither side actually wanting any kind of settlement that didn’t give each all that they wanted, the talks were doomed to failure before they even started. The two main sticking points, one for each side, was the Israeli demand from the Palestinians that they recognise Israel as a Jewish state and, on the Palestinian side the demand for the right of return of the refugees. Then, of course, there was the issue of the settlements; Israel refuses to abandon them while the Palestinians insist they go.

The only reason the Israelis went along with the talks was to buy time while they waited for the right geo-political environment to evolve in which they could launch an attack on Iran. In order to buy that time the Israelis mumbled stuff about freezing settlement building without actually doing it, and also released some Palestinian political prisoners knowing that at any time they could be rearrested – especially when Israel decides to go to war against Iran and fully occupy the West Bank to prevent Palestinian retaliation from West Bank Palestinian fighters for attacking Iran. For the Palestinians it was an opportunity to show the world how intransigent the Israelis are wanting more and more of land earmarked for a Palestinian state and dictating what the final form a Palestinian will take. It also brought time for the BDS movement to take hold in terms of opening debate about Israeli oppression even if it’s not doing much to actually hurt the Israeli economy.

But now the talks have faltered, Netanyahu and his right-wing cohorts have got impatient. They see the opportunity of striking at their enemies slipping away. Events are overtaking the Israelis. International support for the Palestinian cause, particularly in the West, is gathering pace. The BDS movement’s actions are beginning to bring awareness of the Palestinians plight into the glare of the mainstream media. This is having the effect of delegitimising Israel for its actions persecuting and oppressing the Palestinian people both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As Thomas Friedman has recently written, the world is beginning to see Israel as nothing more than colonisers and the backlash to that is the increasing demand from the world for there being a one state solution with full democratic rights for all.

Israel has gone beyond the point of no return. After decades of trying to blame the Palestinians for there not being a Palestinian state, the West has finally woken up to the fact that all the while Israel has been holding up the Palestinians as being intransigent, it has been the Israelis that have insidiously been ensconcing themselves on lands that they claim are god-given to them that all along have had been earmarked to be part of a future Palestinian state.

The Zionists of Israel have painted themselves into a corner. Their wars, most of which, contrary to Israeli propaganda, had actually been provoked by Israeli actions, have succeeded only in proving to the world that their intentions have never really been about anything else other than creating an expansionist Greater Israel. They’ve annexed the Golan Heights and they have gradually taken over the West Bank. They have invaded several times south Lebanon but have always failed make good their occupation there. The Israelis hold up their withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as being an expression of their desire for peace but in reality all they created was the world’s largest prison on a tiny strip of land surrounded by a fence and a vast no-mans land as well as being blockaded from using the sea in order to trade.

Israel, of course, could march back into the Gaza Strip at any tick of the clock but cannot without some casus belli to do so. The same with the West Bank.

With the cards now stacked against them, the Israelis need to resort to their usual stunt of creating – or, in this case, recreating – an existential threat that would allow them to take on all of their enemies while at the same time realise their goals of re-occupying the Gaza Strip, fully militarising the West Bank and annexing the settlements as well as invading and occupying south Lebanon al with a view of creating a Greater Israel in the future.

And so it’s back to Iran which, as I reported last week, Israel has put back on the front burner. At the same time, Israel has also begun provoking Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Over the last few months Israel has shot dead several innocent Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In retaliation Palestinian fighters have launched rockets into Israel. Israel in turn has launched air strikes into the Gaza Strip. In explaining their reasons for the attacks the Israelis simply say they are in retaliation to the rocket strikes on Israel. Not mentioned is the reasons why Palestinian fighters launched the rockets in the first place.

Meanwhile, Israel have resumed the frequency of their low level mock air attacks over Lebanon in a bid to provoke a response from Hezbollah, a tactic they used to start their 2006 war against Hezbollah when Hezbollah responded to Israeli provocation by capturing several Israeli soldiers on the Lebanon-Israel border and launching thousands of rockets into Israel.

Israel’s position is now desperate. With the six months nearly up on the agreement between the P5+1 and Iran over Iran’s nuclear program, Israel are likely to insist that they reserve the right to unilaterally strike Iran if deems it is a threat in anyway. Such a strike would then trigger the all-out war Israel has been all along been hoping for.

Time, it seems, may be running out for the Israelis. The world needs to be aware that they might lash out at any time.

AUSTRALIA'S CHOICE: STOP THE BOATS OR STOP RACISM

Australians are slowly edging toward facing the reality of what the boatpeople saga is really all about.

The catch-cry of the right-wing Australian commentariat and politicians has been ‘Stop the Boats’. They have claimed in their rhetoric that by stopping the boats the drownings will stop.  They have said that, in order to deter others from making the perilous journey across the sea in leaky boats, those that do safely make it to Australia’s shores must be treated harshly by being told they will never be able to settle in Australia and that they’ll be placed in camps in places that are alien and inhospitable to them and where they may face an unknown future which may remain unknown for a very long time. All this, so we are told, is necessary ‘to stop the drownings’.

Accompanying the rhetoric of ‘Stop the Boats’, there has been a relentless tirade of commentary from both commentators and politicians demonising boatpeople by accusing them of being ‘queue jumpers’, ‘economic refugees’, ‘country shoppers’, and even ‘terrorists’. From Australia’s right-wing government the rhetoric has been no less relentless. Policies have been wrapped in nationalistic slogans and titles such as ‘Border Protection’ and ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ as though Australia was being invaded by some kind of sneaky guerrilla force attempting to stealthily infiltrate Australia rather than desperate people merely seeking asylum.

Along with the ‘Stop the Boats’ and the ‘Stop the Drownings’ rhetoric, a new catch-cry was heard: ‘Stop the People Smugglers’ and ‘Put the People Smugglers out of business’, both slogans clearly designed to shift  attention away from the actual refugees.

Both the Abbott Coalition government and the former Labor government of Rudd and Gillard have fallen over themselves to placate a now negative Australian public opinion about boatpeople.

But all of these slogans and excuses avoid saying what this is really all about.

For some reason, the non right-wing mainstream media to a very large extent have also avoided mentioning it while the right-wing media have gone to great lengths to deny that which the Left in the blogosphere and social media have been saying all along; that Australia’s policies are not about ‘Stopping the Boats’ or ‘Stopping the Drownings’ or ‘Border Protection’ or ‘Stopping the People Smugglers’ or ‘Stopping Queue Jumpers’ or ‘Stopping Economic Refugees’, they’re about stopping non-European, non-white, Muslims from coming to Australia and threatening the very core of what can only be called ‘Australianism’. In other words it’s about racism – pure and simple.

The cheerleaders for this racism – and the main source of the swing in public opinion away from the ‘fair go’ attitude of the post-White Australian era of the 70s and 80s – has been the emergence of extreme right-wing columnists in the mainstream media dominated by the Murdoch-owned newspapers.

Ironically, one of the reasons Australians are now edging toward facing the reality of the boatpeople saga really being about racism is because of the current debate over the change to Australia’s laws about racial discrimination and vilification.

Much of the debate about changes to the racial discrimination and vilification laws has be been brought about by the judgement of a Victorian court against one of the most vocal of the mainstream media’s anti-boatpeople protagonists, Andrew Bolt of the Herald-Sun newspaper. The judgement was not related to boatpeople but to one of Bolt’s other hobby horses, the demonisation of light coloured Indigenous persons who choose to identify as Aboriginal for cultural purposes, though Bolt actually accuses them of choosing to identify as Aboriginal in order to obtain some kind of pecuniary advantage.

Bolt denies being a racist; indeed, he declares that he is anti-racist. He even goes so far as to say that those who say that he is a racist are, in fact, racist themselves because they are preventing Australia becoming a nation where all Australians, regardless of skin colour or ethnicity, should be treated equally as ‘Australians’. He argues that recognising ‘race’ differences – and that includes recognition of different cultures, heritage and religions as well as actual race – is dividing Australians and, therefore, is racist. He calls it the ‘New Racism’, a term purloined from Bolt’s arch-nemesis, the historian Robert Manne. Manne, who first coined the term ‘New Racism’ in an article written in 2002 entitled ‘Beware the New Racism’ in which he argues that racism is no longer restricted to just blood and biology but also to culture and religion. Bolt, who has had a long-standing argument with Manne about the ‘Stolen Generations’, has seen fit to usurp Manne’s tag for use in describing his own version of ‘New Racism’.

What Bolt refuses to accept is that recognising and acknowledging the culture and heritage of people from different ethnicities and racial backgrounds has absolutely nothing to do with being ‘racist’ from his peculiar viewpoint but has everything to do with the sharing of heritage and the tolerance and respect of Australians’ differences regardless of whether it’s blood and biology or culture and religion. It’s not about ‘racism’, it’s about embracing and recognising diversity within a nation’s peoples.

Bolt and his fellow right-wing commentators by virtue of having access to one of Australia’s largest media organisations have over nearly two decades managed to manipulate public opinion to such an extent that Australians have been turned from being a nation keen to give people a ‘fair go’ to being a nation of intolerant bigots. The problem for Australia now is how to turn Australia’s world-wide reputation of being racists and bigots around and that can only be done by recognising that Australia has, indeed, become racist, and that in turn can only be done by education.

The current debate about bigotry in Australia can provide an opportunity to turn things around. Hopefully, that process of education, a process which rebuts the notion of Bolt’s so-called ‘New Racism’ and rejects the creeping new trend of ‘democracy by public opinion’ which gives power to those that have the wherewithal to manipulate public opinion, has now begun.

The debates are not about Left and Right politics; it’s about the morality of right and wrong and the elimination of poll-driven politics.

It’s time for Australia to put this glitch in our reputation as an easy going fair-minded multicultural society behind us and rebuild a more tolerant Australia free of racial bigotry.

NETANYAHU PUTS IRAN BACK ON THE FRONT BURNER

After nearly five months of little being said about Iran by the Israelis while talks have been underway between the so-called P5+1 and Iran over Iran’s perceived ‘nuclear weapons program’, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put the issue of Iran well and truly back on to the front burner. It has been reported that Netanyahu and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon have ordered the Israeli military to continue preparing for an attack against Iran for ‘sometime this year’. A budget of some $2.89 billion has been allocated to the military for the purpose.

However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, Israel’s latest posturing has come at a bad time with at least one other issue, namely the crisis in the Ukraine and Crimea, taking global political prominence ahead of what Israel thinks is Iran’s supposed ‘nuclear weapons program’.

Since in reality Israel would be unable to unilaterally strike Iran without US help or back up, and since the US will be unlikely to provide such back up while the Ukraine crisis still threatens, Israel’s sabre rattling is far more likely to be just an attempt to bring the matter of Iran back to the world’s attention.

Nonetheless, once the Ukraine and Crimea crisis is resolved – and there’s very little the West can actually do about it anyway apart from threaten a few ineffectual sanctions – then once again the Israeli will be hoping it can lobby support in the US for an attack against Iran.

While it is possible that Israel could risk launching a unilateral pre-emptive strike against Israel in the hope that the US will then feel that it has no choice other than to enjoin Israel in an all-out regime changing attack against Iran, it is unlikely that Netanyahu would order such a strike without knowing for a certainty that Obama will ‘have his back’. 

WHO IS PROVOKING WHO ON THE GAZA FRONT?

Over the last few weeks the Israelis have been sending their strike aircraft at low levels over the Gaza Strip launching missiles at various targets. As a result several Palestinians have been killed.

The Israelis have said that these raids are in retaliation to Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel, but is this really the case?

B’Tselam, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reports that on 28 February 2014, Amneh Qdeih, a 57-year-old mentally ill Palestinian woman, wandered off from a wedding party in the village of Khuza’ah and walked toward the border fence with Israel. As she wandered closer to the border fence Israeli border guards opened fire on her and she was shot in the abdomen and died. She was the fifth no-combatant Palestinian to be killed by Israeli border guards while more than 50 other non-combatant Palestinians have been injured within the previous three months.

As a result of this upsurge in attacks against Palestinians, Palestinian fighters have retaliated by launching rocket attacks against Israel. Israel, in turn, have then launched air strikes against targets in the Gaza which killed at least eight Palestinians on 27 February 2014 and a further three Palestinians were killed in another Israeli air strike on the Gaza on 11 March 2014.

It is clear that Israel by killing Palestinian non-combatants in the Gaza Strip are deliberately trying to provoke Palestinian fighters into retaliating by firing rockets into Israel so that Israel can then attack targets in the Gaza in the hope that they further provoke the Palestinians to fire more rockets into Israel. The intent is clear; Israel is preparing to launch yet another major incursion into the Gaza Strip. However, they can only justify this after the Palestinians have increased the number of rocket attacks against Israel.

If and when the Israelis do unleash a full onslaught against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip it is likely this time to be a full-on invasion and occupation if they can get the Palestinians to escalate to that point.

Naturally, the full force of the Israeli propaganda machine around the world will be there to push the Israeli Hasbara that covers up the Israeli aggression that triggers Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel.

So far the Israelis have been thwarted in their attempts to provoke the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip into all-out war but one can rest assured that it won’t stop the Israelis from continuing with their efforts.

Keep an eye out for more Israeli shootings of innocent Palestinians.

AMERICA AND THE NEOCONS LIED THEN - AND STILL LIE TODAY

In an article today at Commentary online, senior neoconservative writer Michael Rubin attempts to perpetuate the lie that the US was given false intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs. Rubin writes:

The narrative of “Bush lied, people died,” is nonsense of course. The problem was that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein bluffed his own generals and aides. When Americans tapped into their phone calls, they heard Saddam’s lieutenants discussing such weapons as if they had them, and when American spies debriefed their Iraqi counterparts, there was no sign of deception because many of the defectors believed the information they conveyed.

Ignored here is the intelligence of the one defector that really knew all about Saddam’s WMDs – because he helped build them up and then later destroyed them after the end of the First Gulf War.

In August 1995 Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and Minister of Military Industries, defected to Jordan. There he was debriefed by UNSCOM. At his debriefing Kamel told his interrogators all about Saddam’s WMDs. In the run up to the war against Iraq in 2003, the US and their main allies, Tony Blair and John Howard, relied on this information to build their case for war. However, while the list of WMDs that Saddam had was revealed, what the public were not told was that Kamel, in the same debriefing, had had also said that all of these weapons had been destroyed and that he had personally overseen their destruction. The transcript of that debriefing can be found here.

Rubin then goes on to write:

Nevertheless, critics of the Iraq war are absolutely correct to say that the fact that the intelligence turned out to be wrong undercut American credibility on the world stage. The next time some future Colin Powell goes before the United Nations to reveal a case for war or for anything else utilizing American intelligence, conspiracy theorists will have a field day.

The fact is; the intelligence did not ‘turn out to be wrong’ but, rather, it was abused and twisted by Bush, Blair and Howard in order to support their push for war. Bush, Blair and Howard were all familiar with Kamel’s debriefing, indeed, Howard referred to it directly in his speech to parliament on 4 February 2003. Ignored by all three leaders was the part of the same debriefing document in which Kamel had said that all of the stockpiles of WMDs had been destroyed.

The next time America or any other Western nation tries to go war based on so-called ‘intelligence’ it won’t be just ‘conspiracy theorists’ that will have a field day; it’ll be people who are armed with the facts about how world leaders are prepared to use deceit and lies in order to destroy other people’s countries.

Why would anyone want to believe anything a neoconservative says ever again?

GAZA AND THE NEOCON LIE

Jonathan Tobin, a neoconservative propagandist with Commentary online magazine, has written a piece today that attempts to perpetuate the neocon myth that the Gaza Strip is a Palestinian State on account of it being run by Hamas. In his relentless tirade against there ever being a true Palestinian state, Tobin writes:

…the theoretical arguments about a Palestinian state tend to ignore the fact that one currently exists in all but name in Gaza. There, a Hamas government continues its tyrannical Islamist rule over more than a million people with no interference from Israel other than the imposition of a loose blockade on the strip (food, medicine, and other essential items enter it daily from Israel).

“…no interference from Israel other than the imposition of a loose blockade on the strip”?

Using helicopters to place Special Forces on boats trying to reach the Strip and killing many of its passengers is hardly a “loose blockade” and, while food, medicine and other essential items do, indeed, enter daily from Israel, it is firstly, nowhere enough and secondly, ignores the fact that Israel is interfering with the people of the Gaza Strip’s right to trade with whoever they wish to trade with.

Israel also interferes with Hamas and the running of the Gaza Strip in other ways. Israel has tight patrols around the Gaza’s entire fence that continually harass the Palestinian farmers who tend their fields close to the border. These farmers have been shot at and wounded or killed by Israeli soldiers on almost a daily basis. These provocations are rarely mentioned by the mainstream media but the Israelis and their neocon supporters in the West are very quick to condemn the Palestinian fighters when they retaliate in the only way they are able to by firing rockets into Israel in an attempt to deter further Israel aggression against the Gaza people. The Israelis then use the rocket attacks as an excuse to launch massive and deadly air attacks against the Gaza Strip.

Tobin goes on to write:

But as today’s barrage of missile fire aimed at southern Israel from Gaza shows, this Palestinian state presents a clear and present danger to both the Jewish state and regional stability. While no casualties resulted from the 50 rockets fired from Gaza, the incident not only terrorized southern Israel. It also demonstrated the inherent danger that an irredentist Palestinian state where armed terrorists are free to plan mayhem poses to Israel’s security. While peace activists claim all problems will be solved by Israeli territorial withdrawals, the example of Gaza, where every single settlement, soldier, and individual Jew was pulled out in 2005, continues to operate as a powerful argument against repeating the experiment in the West Bank as much of the world insists Israel must do.

Here Tobin pushes the lie about the Gaza Strip being a Palestinian state further.

The Gaza Strip represents only a small proportion of what one day will be a Palestinian State. Just because ‘every single settlement, soldier and individual Jew was pulled out in 2001’ doesn’t make the Gaza Strip a Palestinian state. A Palestinian state includes all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in its entirety as one homogenous entity. It is to this end that the Palestinian people in the Gaza are continuing to fight for. The fight’s not over until all of the Palestinian state is united as one – and that won’t be until ‘every single settlement, soldier and individual Jew’ has pulled out of all of the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip. Until then, Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have the right to at least defend themselves against Israeli harassment and aggression and to continue to fight for the liberation of their nation

UKRAINE: HAVE U.S. MERCENARY TROOPS ARRIVED TO BATTLE RUSSIAN MERCENARY TROOPS?

Several news sources are suggesting that troops from the US based mercenary company Academi, previously known as Blackwater and then Xe, have arrived by air at Kiev airport and have been deployed to eastern and southern Ukraine districts where the local populations are Russian speaking and generally more aligned to Russian influence than the Ukrainian tendency to align with the West.

The move follows the Russian’s deployment of what, according to the Daily Beast, seem to be mercenary troops from Russia’s own equivalent of America’s Academi mercenary outfit, a group called ‘Vnevedomstvenaya Okhrana’, who are currently deployed in Crimea ostensibly to protect Russian bases there and the Russian speaking people in the Crimea who align with Russia.

While diplomatic activity hopefully will diffuse the stand-off, the two opposing mercenary groups are consolidating their positions on the ground. Meanwhile, Russian regular troops are moving to the west of Russia and are engaged in various military exercises. As the US sends warnings against such ‘provocative’ exercises, neocon warhawks in America insist that the US move troops and airpower into former Warsaw Pact nations in east Europe and even post nuclear weapons to these now NATO nations.

On the diplomatic front, sanctions are being talked about. The big problem with sanctions, however, is that they are likely to hurt the West as much as it does Russia. Currently, Russia provides Europe with around a quarter of its gas, most of it via the Ukraine. Trade worth billions of dollars to both sides would be seriously disrupted. Sanctions in the long term could well be detrimental to Russia if Russia did not have anyone else to turn to. Sanctions though are only likely to push Russia even closer to China, and China, in turn, could make economic life in the West very difficult if it so chose to do in support of Russia.

At this stage, both sides are sabre-rattling with little likelihood of anything more than each side taking pot shots at each other. While this in itself can be dangerous and lead quickly to escalation, both sides realise that a full on hot war between Russia and the US is out of thee question. Both sides sending mercenaries to the region that may come to blows with each other may well be the extent of any further violence in the region.

Anything further is unimaginable.

SYDNEY ACADEMIC ENDORSES THE RHETORIC THAT VEILS AUSTRALIA’S RACISM

Yesterday I wrote about how Australians had surrendered their compassion with regard to boatpeople. I showed how they had become convinced by the rhetoric and propaganda of the right-wing of the commentariat and the right-wing of both major political parties that stopping the boats was imperative in order to ‘stop the drownings’ of refugees seeking asylum in Australia by boat. I showed how the ‘stop the drownings’ meme had become a useful catchcry to cover for the real reason for many Australians not wanting to allow non-European non-white foreigners into Australia and that racism was the unspoken real reason behind Australia’s attitude toward boatpeople.

I suggested that by the simple expediency of providing seaworthy boats to those seeking refuge or even just flying them in would solve the problem of deaths at sea. I suggested that quick and efficient on-shore processing based on humanitarian principles would extinguish the angst refugees currently are force to endure during detention prior to processing.

Today, Dr. Gordon Menzies of the University of Technology in Sydney in an op-ed piece in ABC News Online perpetuates the nonsensical myth of the government’s policies being for the boatpeople’s own good. He writes:

The driving force of the current policy regarding refugees emerges directly from consequentialism: tough treatment now will deter future arrivals down the track.

It is important to realise, too, that this line of thought can be compassionate, which is why it has penetrated some notably left-leaning political minds. Stopping people from risking their lives is surely a compassionate goal?

In reality, no self-respecting ‘left-leaning political mind’ would be falling into that trap.

Menzies also demonstrates the point about how the lies embedded in the rhetoric and propaganda of the right-wing about boatpeople have become entrenched in the psyche of many an Australian voter. Menzies writes: 

It has taken a while, but it now appears that both the major parties, and a good deal of their support base, have reached agreement in principle on a tough stance towards boat people. The majority of voters, assailed by the twin fears of terrorism and the "wrong kind of person" entering the country, are broadly supportive of a "whatever it takes" approach to dissuading asylum seekers from coming to our shores.

The ‘fear of terrorism’ and ‘the wrong kind of person’ notions were both introduced into the boatpeople narrative by the extreme right-wing commentariat. While the ‘wrong kind of person’ rhetoric transparently attempts to disguise outright racism, ‘the fear of terrorism’ idea is not supported by any actual evidence.

Menzies avoids asking the unasked question: Why do we want to stop asylum seekers arriving here by boat? He parrots the same old line about wanting to ‘stop the drownings’. But we know this is nonsense because there have always been Australians who have wanted to stop boatpeople coming to Australia even before any of them actually drowned and, besides, as I’ve already mentioned, the problem of stopping the drownings is very easily solved without having to send thousands off to places they don’t want to be housed in concentration camp-like conditions for indefinite periods of time and without any certainty of their future and where they still risk life and limb anyway.

The tone of Dr. Menzies piece is vague and the reader is left wondering if he’s just being cynical about government policies by parodying the right-wing view about boatpeople or if his words reflect his own thinking about the issue. Either way, he’s been unable to face the real test that determines an individual’s stance on the subject; he’s failed to face the reality of Australia’s racism and, in doing so, has conceded his own racism by virtue of perpetuating the myths about boatpeople.

THE AUSTRALIAN BOATPEOPLE CRISIS: THE UNSPOKEN REASONS FOR IT

This piece in The Drum the other day demonstrates clearly how democracy has been eroded and usurped by a media dedicated to manipulating public opinion with spin, half truths and outright lies.

It seems that most people who answered the question referred to in the article about whether or not they believed 'most of the refugees were genuine’ said they were not, whereas the reality is that the vast majority of them in fact actually are genuine refugees.

One needs to ask then; where are those people getting their information from that led them to making a factually incorrect decision? Clearly, these opinions are not informed and yet there is a tendency for politicians to formulate policy based on this uninformed opinion.

Furthermore, as the example shows, not only are their responses ill-informed, but they are based on their political allegiance.

Real democracy based on a properly enlightened people armed with facts has become obsolete. ‘Democracy’ today seems to revolve around those that have the means to successfully manipulate public opinion – and are able to do so with total disregard to the facts and, increasingly, with total disregard to any sense of morality or even reference to or respect for international law.

We have become a poll-driven ‘democracy’ that is dominated by the political commentariat in the employ of influential right-wing media barons for the benefit of their friends and associates in business and politics which, by its nature, is also predominately right-wing.

In the build up to the present refugee crisis, right-wing commentators have succeeded in developing an anxiety among the community based on xenophobic and Islamophobic fears bordering on paranoia. In the run-up to the last election this led to both sides of politics scrambling to pander to those fears in order to secure the votes of an electorate that had become misinformed about the realities of the boatpeople situation.

Australia’s responsibilities to asylum seeking refugees was overlooked in this scramble by both sides of politics to placate an electorate that had been whipped into a frenzy by the rightwing who had discovered that the ‘preventing deaths from drowning’ meme was a suitable vehicle to drive the anti-boatpeople propaganda.

Today, Jonathan Green in another article at The Drum takes a look at what the alternatives are to what is increasingly being seen as an entirely inappropriate system of dealing with boatpeople. He writes:

The compassion now shown to the miserable victims of circumstance and people smugglers is of course opportunistic and politically inspired. It is as genuine as the tears that flowed when Liberal members howled down the Malaysian people swap promoted by the Gillard government, only to sit back, smug and happily certain when more recent policy left people beaten to death, bloodied or shot while within the not-so-protective custody of a detention camp administered in our name. Camps, it should be said, established specifically to promote hopelessness, psychological trauma, degeneration and despair; the sum of these parts being deterrence.

Green sees the problem but, sadly, is unable to provide an adequate answer to it. Instead, he handballs the problem to Labor though he acknowledges that Labor’s initial answer to the problem of boatpeople was more or less the same as the Coalition’s. Green says that it is Labor that must rethink the problem and provide alternatives.

The main reason that both Green and the Labor opposition are unable to provide an alternative to deal with the problem is because of the way both define what the problem is. For them the problem is how to deter refugee boatpeople from attempting to sail to Australia to seek asylum yet, at the same time, deal with those that do turn up on our shores with compassion and with respect to their human rights.

Ignored is the real problem that has yet to be addressed and that is: why do we need to deter asylum seeking refugees from coming to Australia? For those on both sides of mainstream politics the answer has been to ‘stop the drownings’. For many this has become the whole reason for the entire off-shore processing exercise, but what if there had never been any drownings? What excuse then would there have been to lock people up in places they didn’t want to be for indefinite periods of time in the most appalling conditions? If there had been no drownings, would there then be no need to deter asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boat?

‘Stopping the drownings’ is just an excuse to cover the real reasons for deterring boatpeople from coming to Australia.

The unspoken bottom line lies in Australia’s innate fear and loathing of non-European foreigners coming to Australia. It is this that lies at the heart of the boatpeople problem. Everyone knows it but everyone denies it. Australians have put forward every excuse under the sun as to why boatpeople shouldn’t be allowed to come to Australia. They range from faux compassion over the drownings, to them not being real refugees, to them being queue jumpers or just rich country shoppers. It is with a certain irony that the only people being honest about their reasons for not wanting them in Australia are those monoculturalists on the extreme right who quite gleefully exclaim that they don’t want non-European non-white foreigners in Australia to dilute or change our existing culture – in other words, straight out racists the likes of which one will find commenting at blogs everywhere especially those run by Murdoch journalists like Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, et al.

The answer to the drowning problem is simple: provide seaworthy boats – something the navy is now actually doing – but instead of sending them back to Indonesia, allow them to come to Australia. Alternatively, fly them in. Once they are here they can be quickly processed and dealt with accordingly. Those that are genuine are then released into the community and allowed to work, and those that don’t meet the requirements are then detained in humane conditions until alternative arrangements are made for them.

But before any of this or any other alternative answers to the problem can be considered, the Australian people need to either own up to being racists or do the right thing and meet the obligations we signed up for with regard to refugees because this ‘tough to be kind’ nonsense simply isn’t fooling anyone.

Australia must declare itself: we are either a nation of out and out racists or we are a compassionate fair-go nation willing to give anyone a chance.

We cannot be one while pretending to be the other. Australians need to face its racist demons and drive them out.

There needs to be honesty in the media and the propagandists need to be exposed and shut down. There needs to be penalties for lying in the media. The Australian Press Council needs its powers strengthened to ensure the media tells us the truth. And, finally, we need to look to the long term future of a compassionate Australia – and that starts with education.