WORLD’S HOPES DASHED AS THE REALITY OF OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY SLOWLY EXPOSES ITSELF.

As the end of the Bush Presidency finally drew into sight in the run up to the 2008 US Presidential election, the entire world – not just the American people – but the entire world pinned their hopes on a Barack Obama win, a win that would at last bring some peace to a world turned upside down by Bush and his Zionist-inspired neocon administration.

Now, it seems, those hopes have been dashed.

Sure, he’s made all the right noises and, as a result, his popularity remains high as he continues to make the right noises. But mixed in with what seems to be the right noises is the geo-political realities of an expanding war in Afghanistan, a continued occupation in Iraq despite the nonsensical rhetoric about ‘withdrawal of combat troops’, continued talk of an ‘Iran seeking nuclear weapons’, and of course, the continued support of an expansionist Israel led by an ultra-right wing Zionist who has ruled out any notion of a Palestinian state and which has sworn to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah and put an end to ‘Irans nuclear weapons program’.

The rhetoric of talk is easy, but without backing it up by accepting that the basic premise for threats and war were wrong, such talk is meaningless.

Obama wants to talk about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. What’s to talk about? Iran has said it has no nuclear weapons program and there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that it has, so why talk? To insist that they talk about something that doesn’t exist is merely to play for time before resorting to more threats of sanctions and war. Nothing has really changed.

The same applies to a certain extent to the war in Afghanistan. The war there is completely unwinable, yet Obama is going to shift more troops in to expand the fighting. Not only that, but he’s going to expand the war into Pakistan as well creating even more enemies for the US. The Pakistani government might be happy to take their thirteen pieces of silver from the American government to let them bomb the North West Frontier but the vast majority of Pakistanis aren’t at all happy about it.

It’s slowly becoming apparent that the only difference between Obama and Bush is the rhetoric but very little else. Slowly this is dawning on a disillusioned world and American people.

OBAMA’S THREAT TO BUILD AN ANTI-MISSILE SHIELD IN EUROPE – IRAN NEEDS TO WORRY ABOUT THIS BECAUSE…...?

One wonders about the logic of US President Obama saying that, if Iran stops its uranium enrichment program, the US will not go ahead with building an anti-missile shield in Europe.

Why on earth would Iran lose sleep over whether or not America builds an anti-missile shield in Europe? First, Iran, contrary to the propaganda and rhetoric of Israel, the US and their Western allies, is not building any nuclear weapons and nor is their any evidence to suggest that it is; second, Iran has no means of delivering a weapon even if it had one (building a bomb is one thing, building it small enough to be a payload atop any of Iran’s missiles is something else); third, why would Iran want to launch any missile, nuclear armed or otherwise, at any European country? And finally, why would Russia help Iran build a nuclear plant if it thought Iran was going to build nuclear weapons? A nuclear armed Iran is not in Russia’s interest and less than anyone else’s.

Why should Iran care about an anti-missile shield in Europe? It will never be used on Iran’s account, so why is Obama’s threat to go ahead with building it if Iran doesn’t stop enriching uranium for its power generation program going to be of any interest to Iran?

Or is it just all part of the propaganda and rhetoric against Iran? If it is, and Iran goes on enriching uranium as is its right to do, then it’s going to be an expensive exercise for the already hard pressed American taxpayer. The Iranians have absolutely nothing to lose by calling Obama’s bluff.

But, of course, it’s more than just a simple bluffing game isn’t it –especially when the anti-missile shield is on Russia’s doorstep.

But that’s another story.

ISRAELI ANTI-HAMAS FEARMONGERING PROPAGANDA GETS INCREASINGLY DESPERATE.

There was an article in today’s ‘Jerusalem Post’ that said that ‘Hamas wants to smuggle long-range rockets into the Gaza in one piece’.

This is Israeli propaganda that is getting very desperate – and one has to wonder why.

The inference is that Hamas are interested in smuggling into the Gaza the Iranian missile known as the Fajr. Since it is too complex to breakdown and reassemble, the Israelis want us to believe that it will be smuggled in while fully assembled. The Israelis go on to say that special tunnels are being dug between the Sinai and the Gaza within the so-called Philadelphia Corridor, a 4 kilometre strip of land separating the Gaza from the Sinai, in order to cater for the giant missile.

Of course, the biggest problem for Hamas is not so much getting the missile through the tunnel – that would be a feat in itself but not altogether insurmountable – but how to get a rocket over 10 metres long fully fuelled and ready to go across the Sinai, sneak it past the Egyptian authorities into the Philly corridor and then down a massive tunnel while it is all in one piece. None of this is explained by the Israelis. One imagines that they hope no one would ask; after all, this nonsense is aimed at people who are far more interested in how they’re going to meet their next mortgage repayment or if they’ll have a job to turn up to next Monday.

The story doesn’t explain either why the Iranians would attempt to range their rockets against Israel via Hamas in the Gaza when it would be far simpler and less riskier to transport them by sea to Lebanon where they could easily be unloaded and transported to firing locations much closer to the Israeli heartland. Or maybe that’s going to be the next propaganda storyline to be used as the Israelis ratchet up the ante for war against Hezbollah later.

Overall, the story when viewed with a critical and analytical eye is a complete nonsense, but the important question is; why are the Israelis resorting to this kind of desperate fearmongering?

The report comes after claims that Israel had destroyed an arms convey in the Sudan recently that was in transit to the Gaza for Hamas. The Israelis claimed the convey was carrying Iranian-built rockets. This somewhat suspicious story had its detractors even in Israel with Ha’aretz doubting its honesty suggesting the whole story was just ‘an exercise in propaganda’. Transporting large high-value munitions overland through over a thousand miles of unfriendly territory is a hard ask to believe. High-value munitions simply wouldn’t be put at risk in that way.

No. It is clear that Israel is brewing up another ‘lets get Hamas before they get us’ propaganda scenario prior to attempting to finish off the job Olmert attempted to do in the dying days of the Bush regime – destroy Hamas, provoke Hezbollah, draw in Iran, draw in the US, provoke the final confrontation with all of Israel’s enemies. They don’t need the support of world public opinion; they only need the support of Israelis, which they hope to get through fearmongering, and support from the US Obama administration which they’ll get after the fait accompli of Israeli attacks on their enemies.

Time is running out for the Israelis. The call for a bi-national one-state solution is getting louder. Desperation is setting in.


UPDATE ONE

Ha’aretz is reporting that the Israeli Defence forces are planning the largest defence exercise ever undertaken in Israel with “the Home Front Command hoping to convince the population that in a future war the entire country can become a front without warning”.

If that isn’t fearmongering, then what is?



CHECK OUT THE ‘MURDOCH’S PROPAGANDISTS’ BLOG

Readers are invited to contribute articles for this new blog aimed at exposing the biggest liars and propagandists behind the Murdoch media empire.

THE MYTH OF THE ‘TWO-STATE SOLUTION’: A PLAY FOR TIME BY THE ZIONISTS AND A DELUSIONAL FANTASY OF WESTERN LEADERS.

For over sixty years the Zionists of Israel and their supporters around the world have played the leaders of the Western world for suckers. While the Israeli Zionists talked of peace with the Palestinians via the ‘Two State Solution’ in which Palestine would have its own state next to Israel, Israel’s actions demonstrated that, far from wanting peace with the Palestinians or allowing a Palestinian state to be created, the Israelis really wanted only to have the lands that belonged to the Palestinians and to the extent that precluded any notion of a real Palestinian state.

Ever since the 1948 Nakba Israel has done nothing but grab as much land from the Palestinian people as possible; it has done nothing else from that day to this sixty-one years later. And yet during that entire time there has always been talk of a Palestinian state – but it has never progressed beyond talk.

With the benefit of over sixty years of history that can now be seen in hindsight, a distinctive pattern has emerged that clearly demonstrates that Israel has over that time maintained a deliberate ruse by which they have offered hope to Palestinians but never anything more and, at the same time, have created for the West and its leaders the illusion that Israel has always been the victim of Palestinian antagonisms and that it has been those antagonisms that have either prevented Israel from accepting a Palestinian state or delayed further talks about it.

The reality is that the Israelis have never themselves actually offered Palestinians a state of their own; it has always been asked for by Western powers and the Israelis have always agreed to talk about it but then have always found a reason later to abandon those talks, usually when some Israeli-provoked violence occurs. This cycle of talks, hopes, then violence and breaking off of talks and then more talks and renewed hopes has been going on for six decades and got nowhere. All the while the insidious expansion of Israel into lands that do not belong to them has been relentless.

Today, however, a turning point has been reached. The Netanyahu government in Israel has stopped beating around the bush over Palestinian statehood and has clearly said there will be no Palestinian state.

If there is to be no Palestinian state, what then is to be the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? Netanyahu is playing for more time while he waits for an opportunity to fulfil his promise of destroying Hamas and Hezbollah; a goal that can only be accomplished after regime change in Iran. Netanyahu’s ruse is to talk of ‘economic partnership’ with the Palestinians. After having spent years destroying what little there was of any Palestinian economy, the Zionists and Netanyahu now cynically extends an economic hand to the Palestinians in exchange for peace on the Zionists terms. (Incidentally, there are no prizes for guessing where this money to help the Palestinians would be coming from nor are there any prizes for guessing which hands the money, if it ever actually happens, will end up falling in to.)

Despite Netanyahu’s blatant insistence that there will be no Palestinian state and despite the glaring sixty year history of Israel’s deliberate equivocation coupled with territorial expansion into Palestinian lands, US President Obama and other Western leaders are just the latest in a long line of successive US Presidents and Western leaders that have laboured under the delusional fantasy that there is still hope for a two-state solution.

TIME TO BURY THE LONG-DEAD TWO-STATE SOLUTION ONCE AND FOR ALL; THE ONE-STATE SOLUTION IS NOW THE ONLY SOLUTION.

With Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing fellow Zionists now in power in Israel the notion of two states, Israel and Palestine living side by side, is now dead.

The reality, however, is that it was never at any stage actually alive. For the most part the idea was merely a ploy to buy more time; indeed, it still is as the US continues to push the idea despite it being made quite clear by Netanyahu and his cohorts that it will not happen.

The fact is; the Israeli Zionists want to have the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and, so they hope, south Lebanon up to the Litani River incorporated into a Greater Israel while the Palestinian people, on the other hand, simply want the lands that were taken from them during the Nakba in 1948, and later, returned to them.

Ever since the Nakba the Israelis have inched their way on to more and more land that was not even given to them by the UN. They have found a myriad of pretexts to attack their Arab neighbours providing themselves with excuses to slowly expand their apartheid empire into Palestinian and Syrian lands by taking three steps forward as they invade and then two steps back to make it seem as though it is they that are making the concessions. This has been their way for more than sixty years now.

They are slowly chewing away at the West Bank, slowly but surely building and enlarging their settlements and confiscating increasingly larger tracts of land to provide Jews-only corridors connecting the settlements. Soon the corridors themselves will be come enlarged and settled and the Palestinians slowly squeezed in to ever diminishing areas that will eventually become overcrowded ghettos. One of two things will then happen; either the frustrated and impoverished Palestinians in the new ghettos will leave to become refugees in Lebanon or Jordon or elsewhere, which is what the Zionist want, or they will turn on the Israelis, just as the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip ghetto have done, in a fight that they will unlikely be able to win.

The Palestinians, despite sixty years of oppression and occasionally having the whole world ranged against them through clever manipulation of the world press, have proven to be a tenacious people who will not give up easily that which is theirs nor walk away from those that have taken away that which is theirs.

Only now, at last, does it seem that the world is seeing what the Israeli end-game really is. All the talk of peace has been just that – talk. Nothing whatsoever has come of any of the ‘talks’; indeed, all the while that there have been talks the Palestinians have only ever seen their lands, their rights and their means of surviving diminish further still. Israel’s slaughter against a virtually unarmed people in the Gaza Strip has finally demonstrated to the world all too clearly Israel’s true colours and intentions, and now with Netanyahu clearly telling the world there will be no Palestinian state, the Palestinian people and their plight are being seen in a totally different light.

The Palestinian people now desperately need the support of the peoples of the world in order to lobby the world’s governments and the UN to finally demand an end to the apartheid racist state of Israel and to create one state that incorporates the West Bank and the Gaza Strip where Arabs and Jews live as one in a bi-national single truly democratic and secular state, and with the Golan Heights being returned to Syria.

The fear, of course, for the Israelis is that they will lose their dominance over the Arabs. Ultimately, however, they should have no real reason to complain – the process is called democracy which the Israelis have been telling the world for the last sixty years is what the entire Middle East should be like.

The UN must concede that they got it wrong, acting hastily and with much guilt after the events of the Second World War, when they created the racist state of Israel in 1948. Millions have died since as a result of Israel’s creation in this way. It’s time to create a new state where Jews and Arabs, those that want to, can live together.

FROM P.N.A.C. TO F.P.I.: THE REINVENTING OF NEOCONSERVATISM FOR THE ERA OF OBAMA.

The cry seems to be: ‘The neocons are dead; long live the neocons!’, as they reinvent and adjust themselves for a presidency that doesn’t quite reflect the exact same image that the Bush presidency did.

The old grandly named and now all but defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was founded by the staunchly pro-Zionist neoconservatives in early 1997 for the purpose of deposing the Democrat administration of the time (Clinton) and influencing a prospective Republican administration into strongly supporting the cause of right-wing Israeli Zionism by projecting US influence directly into the Middle East on behalf of Israel and ridding Israel of its enemies, Iraq and Iran.

While they partly succeeded in their quest inasmuch that the Democrats lost out in the 2000 Presidential race – albeit by cheating at the polls and using a corrupt court to install a Republican administration – and getting the new compliant administration to attack and invade Iraq at a time when Saddam Hussein was providing support to a desperate Palestinian Intifada, time ran out for the neocons as Bush exhausted his usefulness at the end of his Presidency with the main part of the neocon agenda unfulfilled.

By the end of the Bush era Iran still remained a barrier to Israeli dreams of a Greater Israel that incorporates the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and, so they hope, the south of Lebanon up to the Litani River, because of Iranian support of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Despite two desperate attempts by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to provoke a war against Iran by attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas in the Gaza in 2008/09 in the hope that President Bush would intervene against Iran in the event of Iran intervening against Israel on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah, the dying Bush administration, seeing that Iran was not going to oblige the Israelis, had no option but stand on the sidelines and watch Israel morally lose two wars with none of their war aims being achieved. Their last attempt at provoking Iran when they mercilessly attacked an almost unarmed Gaza Strip ended almost literally on the dying day of the Bush administration.

With these failures, coupled with a new presidency voted in on the backs of an electorate that was thoroughly sick of the neocon’s and Bush’s endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention a world economy that is on the verge of collapse, the neocons were in dire need of reinventing itself to cope with the new political era.

And reinvent themselves they indeed have attempted to do, though their aims and rhetoric have the same old familiar warmongering ring about them as they had during the Bush years. The recently launched and far less grand-sounding Foreign Policy Initiative headed up by arch-neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan, has taken a different tack from the old PNAC. In there Mission Statement for the new FPI the neocons renew their old animosities toward those they considered past threats. For them Russia and China are once again a threat to US hegemony and influence in our world. But most notably in their Mission Statement the neocons have made a deliberate attempt to put a little less emphasis on the enemies of the Bush era. Conspicuous by its absence in their Mission Statement is any mention of Israel’s arch enemy, Iran. Neither Iran nor its so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ get any mention – at least not yet. Of course, the neocons continue to perpetuate the myth of al Qaeda as the ever-threatening and perennial enemy responsible for any non-state military actions against the US, Israel and their allies and there is reference to assorted though unnamed ‘rogue’ and ‘failed’ states leaving the list open to additions as and when required.

Promoting China and Russia once again as ‘threats’ to the US is merely a useful distraction. The threat from China and Russia during the Cold War was grossly exaggerated during that period and both nations are even less a threat today than ever before. The world should not be fooled; the neocons real enemies remain those that oppose Israeli Zionism. Their rhetoric is for a strong America but what is left unsaid is that a strong America means a strong Israel. If the US withdraws into itself to become isolationist again then it will leave Israel exposed. The neocons need to have enemies around the globe and need to project America as a nation ‘indispensable to international peace, security and stability’ in order to protect the future of what they hope will be a Greater Israel dominating the resource rich region of the Middle East.


CHECK OUT THE ‘MURDOCH’S PROPAGANDISTS’ BLOG

Readers are invited to contribute articles for this new blog aimed at exposing the biggest liars and propagandists behind the Murdoch media empire.

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.


CHECK OUT THE START OF THE ‘MURDOCH’S PROPAGANDISTS’ BLOG

Readers are invited to contribute articles for this new blog aimed at exposing the biggest liars and propagandists behind the Murdoch media empire.

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.


CHECK OUT THE START OF THE ‘MURDOCH’S PROPAGANDISTS’ BLOG

Readers are invited to contribute articles for this new blog aimed at exposing the biggest liars and propagandists behind the Murdoch media empire.

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.


CHECK OUT THE START OF THE ‘MURDOCH’S PROPAGANDISTS’ BLOG

Readers are invited to contribute articles for this new blog aimed at exposing the biggest liars and propagandists behind the Murdoch media empire.

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.


CHECK OUT THE START OF THE ‘MURDOCH’S PROPAGANDISTS’ BLOG

Readers are invited to contribute articles for this new blog aimed at exposing the biggest liars and propagandists behind the Murdoch media empire.

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.