American media: Islamic State’s devoted public relations team

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist based in Moscow, Russia. His articles have been featured in many publications, including Russia in Global Affairs, The Moscow Times, Russia Insider and Infowars.com. Bridge is the author of the book on corporate power, “Midnight in the American Empire”, which was released in 2013.

Published time: 20 Nov, 2015 13:25

© Akintunde Akinleye / Reuters

With every new manifestation of global terrorism, Western media outlets are dutifully serving as the mouthpiece for Islamic State, promoting its mad message and crazed claims without ever scrutinizing the group’s dubious origins.

Ever since Russia opened its bombing campaign against Islamic State forces in Syria all hell has broken loose on the planet. On Oct. 31, a Russian Airbus was brought down by an explosive device over the Sinai Peninsula, killing 224. On Nov. 12, a bomb exploded in Beirut, Lebanon killing dozens. On Friday the 13th Paris was hit by a string of terrorist attacks against public venues that left 129 dead and 352 wounded.

In each of these savage events, the Western mainstream media – with nothing more than breadcrumbs for evidence – rushed to name Islamic State as the perpetrator. One gets the feeling that if an ice cream truck ran over a puppy in Detroit and ISIS claimed responsibility, the Western MSM would be tripping over themselves to break the story first.

Trumpeting Islamic State’s claims of responsibility following every act of violence is promulgating an atmosphere of fearthat can be easily manipulated by the powers-that-be.

“We are being bombarded now with a media propaganda campaign, it’s just non-stop talk where we’re told not to go out on the street, we’re supposed to be fearful and keep quiet,” writer and journalist, Gearoid O’Colmain, told RT from Paris.

“This is essentially a propaganda campaign to make people in France fear Muslims.”

Geopolitical analyst Patrick Henningsen also expressed bewilderment with the“absolute flood of speculation” following the Paris attacks, saying “the Western media has already basically decided this is an ISIS attack.”

It’s going to be very hard to stop this juggernaut from a public relations point of view, even though we’d like to see a proper investigation to know exactly what happened here in Paris, but I dare say we might not be afforded that luxury,” he added.

The (Un)usual Suspects

The Western media fails to remind its viewers that there are many different groups in Syria –first and foremost, the Syrian people themselves – that are fiercely opposed to NATO bombing their sovereign territory. In fact, one of the gunmen in the course of the Paris attacks was reported to have yelled, “This is for Syria!” Does it sound logical that a fighter from Islamic State would utter a declaration of solidarity for the very country he is alleged to be fighting against?

It is highly reasonable to believe that the terrorists in the Paris attacks were in fact Syrian nationals seeking retribution for the US-led assault on their country (By way of example, imagine if an Arab military coalition decided to attack Canada because the country was experiencing political strife. Isn’t it safe to assume that some Canadians may be extremely tempted to seek vengeance against Arab targets?).

This possibility, however, is never mentioned by the mainstream media, nor will we be able to hear the killers defend themselves in a court of law because – as happens like precision clockwork in every such incident – the bad guys areduly,conveniently, permanently eliminated from the face of the earth.

Dead men tell no tales, nor do they have their day in court. The public is just expected to believe the ‘official’ version of events, despite the glaring lack of evidence not to mention defendants.

Another strange ‘coincidence’ involving this sudden tsunami of terrorism is how clumsy the terrorists are with their documents – documents, it should be added, that seem incredibly resistant to catastrophic conditions.

As with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Charlie Hebdo shootings, a crispy clean (Syrian) passport was found lying right next to one of the suicide bombers following the Paris attacks.

How convenient! Three terrorist attacks on three Western targets where passports are left at the scene of the crime identifying the culprits. Who needs detectives these days with such stupid criminals running around?

Moreover, what terrorist with a death wish would find it compulsory to bring along his passport on the mission? What passport could withstand the force of such a blast?

Needless to say, some people are expressing skepticism over such strange happenings.

“The ‘found passport’ worked for them for 9/11,” wrote Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy. “It worked again for Charlie Hebdo. So now they have used it a third time. They know that Americans are total dumbsh*ts and can be told anything. No matter how preposterous, the dumbsh*ts will believe it.”

There are still more reasons that the ongoing wave of terrorist attacks deserve more media scrutiny. Before Russia entered the fray against ISIS, such acts of terrorism outside of the Syrian theater were relatively tame by comparison to the last three weeks of hell on earth. This begs the question: If the US-led forces were really bombing ISIS, why were things so quiet on the Western front in terms of retaliatory actions during that time? Why did ISIS only start acting like a hornet’s nest being poked once Russia opened its shock-and-awe offensive?

It’s almost as if the global puppet masters, sensing that Russia’s bold incursion into Syria was disrupting its geopolitical designs in the Middle East, experienced a childish temper tantrum and flipped the chess board rather than continue with a game that was fast approaching checkmate (For the skeptical reader ready to scream ‘conspiracy theory,’ please reflect upon the words of the late US historian Gore Vidal who observed that “conspiracy theory is now shorthand for unspeakable truth”).

Now, with these very suspicious series of attacks on soft targets, this terrorist proxy army, which many commentators had said was “on the ropes,” appears to have been magically energized – despite the massive Russian attacks. Any journalist worth his salt should be questioning this inexplicable comeback at this particular juncture.

Yet today it is up to a handful of uncompromised world leaders and a few alternative media renegades to shed some light on the ugly truth behind the rise of Islamic State.

During the recent G20 Summit, President Putin said he shared Russian intelligence data on Islamic State financing with his colleagues that showed the terrorist organization is being financed from 40 countries – including some G20 member states.

“I provided examples based on our data on the financing of different Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) units by private individuals. This money, as we have established, comes from 40 countries and, there are some of the G20 members among them,” the Russian leader told a news conference.

Calling Seymour Hersh…

So why have the investigative journalists in the Western media matrix gone missing in action when it comes to investigating this global menace known as Islamic State? Why is this group being so readily accepted at face value? Just like the same-day claims that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Western media seems only interested in making the world tremble at the very name ‘Islamic State.’

This environment of fear and loathing gives NATO countries a free pass to continue with their wars of occupation and neocolonialism, while, at the same time, destroying civil liberties at home. Brace yourself, French people, because very soon you too will be the lucky recipients of your own undemocratic counterpart of the US PATRIOT ACT.

Until it can be proven otherwise, ISIS is a Western-made tool of oppression – a veritable crowbar being used to break down national boundaries and wreak havoc both at home and abroad.

“There is no war on terror,” Colmain went on to say. Instead, “there is a war being waged using terrorist proxy groups and they are being used against nation states that are resisting US and Israeli hegemony…”

“You now have terrorist attacks being committed by terrorists funded, armed and trained by Western intelligence agencies. There is no such thing as ISIS; ISIS is a creation of the United States. We know that from official sources of the US military themselves. Declassified documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed that.”

The declassified report mentioned above clearly states that for “THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION… THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME…”.

Western powers facilitating the rise of an Islamic proxy army should not surprise anybody since the exact same strategy was implemented in Afghanistan in 1980 against the Soviet Union.

American geopolitical guru Zbigniew Brzezinski, then national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, admitted to being the architect of the plan to arm the mujahedin, thus dragging the Soviet Union into a decade long struggle in the Central Asian country, which has been rightly dubbed “the graveyard of empires.”

In a 1998 interview with Counterpunch, Brzezinski scoffed at the idea that some“stirred-up Moslems” could somehow destabilize the global chessboard.

Counterpunch:  And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski:  What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

CP:  Some stirred-up Muslims? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

ZB:  Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Meanwhile, none other than Hillary Clinton, the Democrats hopeful in the upcoming presidential elections, left no doubt as to who was to blame for creating al-Qaeda, the very group that allegedly attacked the United States on 9/11.

In Clinton’s own words, “We had this brilliant Idea that we were going to come to Pakistan and create a force of Mujahedeen and equip them with stinger missiles and everything else to go after the Soviets inside Afghanistan and we were successful.”

“The people we are fighting today, we funded 20 years ago.”

It is no secret that Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State were trained in 2012 by American instructors at a secret military base in Jordan.

The German weekly Der Spiegel reported in 2013, that “some 200 men have already received such training over the past three months and there are plans in the future to provide training for a total 1,200 members of the ‘Free Syrian Army’ in two camps in the south and the east of the country.”

Jordanian intelligence services are also participating in the program, which aims to build around a dozen units totaling some 10,000 fighters to the exclusion of radical Islamists, Spiegel reported.

Meanwhile, reports continue to indicate that the United States is either being incredibly negligent in its training of “Syrian moderates,” which have a suspicious tendency for crossing over to the ISIS camp with their US field training and shiny new weapons, or willfully complicit in arming and protecting the group.

That is the main question the Western mainstream media needs to ask right now: What exactly is the relationship between Islamic State and the Western powers today?

@Robert_Bridge

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Paris Attacks: Another False Flag? Sifting through the Evidence

By Joachim Hagopian

Global Research, November 19, 2015

What do the globalists do when they want to create, reignite and keep their war on terror fought indefinitely? They simply carry out a series of false flag attacks using Muslim terrorist stooges as their hired guns to do their damage. That’s what 9/11 was all about in the US, 7/7 in UK, the3/11 train attack in Spain, the Hebdo Paris attack last January, and now this latest Paris encore reenactment part two.

In any unsolved crime the first question asked is who benefits by motive with an actual means to execute the crime?

In all of these tragic false flag events the global elite benefits in multiple ways. And it most definitely has the means by issuing marching orders to its owned and operated national governments, its favorite being the militaristic, brutal American Empire.

The elite’s agenda to polarize and destabilize the world politically and militarily manifests through the US foreign policy of regime change, nonstop war through divide and conquer methodology (i.e., Shiites vs. Sunnis, Euro-nationals vs. foreign migrants, Christians vs. Muslims, light skins vs. dark skins) and economic austerity through unpayable high interest from predatory IMF bank loans to debtor nations from both the developing and developed world.  Through global theft and destruction, the ruling elite reigns supreme in absolute power.

For decades after World War II US-NATO-Western European allies conspired and perpetrated state sponsored terrorism murdering their own citizens through a protracted series of Gladio operationsoriginally designed to falsely accuse Communist groups in Italy. Spanning over thirty years with violent incidents throughout Europe and Turkey, Gladio-like false flag operations never stopped. Gladio at home took the form of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Operation Northwoods that JFK abruptly halted, partially resulting in his own self-undoing, killing the diabolical military plot of murdering innocent US citizens in Miami and Washington DC in order to blame and start a war against Cuba. The US especially but numerous governments have regularly engaged in false flag operations killing their own to trigger wars, shape public opinion, conceal and divert attention away from citizens ever catching on to the dirty lowdown truth.

The Friday the 13th Paris massacres were highly organized, committed by heavily armed, closely monitored terrorist professionals unleashed onto an unsuspecting, culturally diverse group of young Paris victims. The coordinated attacks seem to carry all the earmarks as state of the art false flag terrorism having had lots of previous practice, most notably the Paris Charlie Hebdo edition. But the growing anomalies stacking up once again turn out to be no different from its predecessors.

All have promoted the same globalist agenda toward unlimited invasive authoritarian surveillance used to bring about increasing draconian measures in order to gain absolute tyrannical control over the populace. At the same time it exploits xenophobia and islamophobia amongst its citizenry that in turn increase hatred and tensions laying the groundwork for potential civil war. Today the elite is skillfully working its provendivide and conquer formula perfectly. In one fell swoop it creates the unstable conditions fomenting civil unrest and violent backlash that then increasingly justify oppressive, over-the-top counterterrorism and police state tactics that obliterate human rights.

Finally, false flag terrorism launches a militarized backed by a globally legislative crackdown targeting all dissidence and activism exposing the governments’ false narrative of lies and propaganda, labeling and criminalizing the dissenting truth as homegrown terrorism.

The surreptitiously obtained Syrian passport found so quickly after the fact in Paris has become a false flag trademark used in both Charlie Hebdo and 9/11. Because this pattern proved a serious liability for establishing any credibility, it was later disclosed that the passport actually came off the body of “a Syrian refugee,” as if that made MSM any more believable.

Even before the passport fiasco, the alleged terrorist’s quote from a supposed witness “this is for Syria” was obviously disclosed by mainstream media to shape and manipulate public opinion into quickly blaming Syria, ISIS and Syria’s targeted leader Assad. And then long before any of this alleged (dis)info began surfacing, barely an hour into the attacks while still actively underway, President Hollande kept repeating three times in the next several hours what appeared to be his scripted lines already declaring that France was at war against already identified terrorist attackers from Syria before any investigation had even begun. This rapid sequence of events smacked of false flag.

Furthermore, like the Hebdo attack earlier this year, reports immediately commenced disclosing that French intelligence had long been tracking the perpetrators prior to the attacks. Former antiterrorist judgeMarc Trevidic in a Sunday interview claimed that French authorities knew of an impending terrorist attack being planned by Islamic State jihadists “at a French rock concert” as early as August.

The judge had cross-examined militants three months earlier who revealed this rather critically important piece of information. This strongly suggests French intelligence had prior knowledge of the Friday night massacres. Turkey also warned the authorities in France twice about one of the three alleged suicide bombers but The Guardian reported that France only contacted Turkey for information after the Paris attacks. Again, it seems more than plausible that French security forces knew about the planned attacks but purposely failed to stop them or may have even played a sinister role in allowing them to occur.

A couple of other striking parallels with 9/11, when the BBC reporter announced that Building 7 went down 20 minutes prior to the event, the Paris attack was described on twitter dated a full two days in advance of the November 13th killings. Also Wikipedia within two hours from the very onset of the attacks already had posted a fully detailed account complete with footnotes specifying “Syria” being mentioned by a witness, “5 or 6 terrorists”, and “3 suicide bombers” all from the get-go pointing to the big bad Muslim villains yet again. The clinching evidence was Wikipedia running an early story version at 23:06 specifying:

     In a televised statement at approximately 23:58 (local time), French President François Hollande declared

     a state of emergency and closing of borders for the whole of France.

For that announcement on Wikipedia to be made nearly an hour prior to Hollande’s actual statement could suggest that Wikipedia was in fact being used by the French authorities as an information disseminator of a preplanned event, right away establishing an official narrative from the outset that Arab terrorists from Syria were the guilty murderers behind the attacks far in advance of the start of even a preliminary investigation.

It’s also been recently learned like in several previous false flags that security forces in Paris were simultaneously undergoing another live action emergency drill earlier that same day (as in Charleston, Baltimore, Boston, 9/11). Patrick Pelloux, an emergency medical services specialist and one of the first responders to the attacks, confirmed in a radio interview that a live drill had been conducted that morning of the 13th. These co-occurring government events timed perfectly to overlap so called acts of terrorism cannot be considered purely co-incidental.

Adding more weight to the false flag suspicion is the fact that just two weeks prior to Friday’s attack on October 29th CIA Director John Brennan met with his French counterpart along with UK’s MI6 former chief and former Israeli national security advisor. Additionally on Monday Brennan admitted that the international intelligence community expected a terrorist attack in Europe. Just as the Islamic terrorist mercenaries always “accidentally on purpose” leave their calling cards behind, so are the dirty CIA-Mossad fingerprints left indelibly written all over virtually every state sponsored terrorism on this planet. For years it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that US and Israeli intelligence forces have been covertly working directly with the Islamic State jihadists. NSA documents show that ISIS leader El Baghdadi was trained by Mossad. A recently captured IDF colonel was caught leading Islamic State forces. Overwhelming evidence has proven the US-Israeli-Saudi-Turkish-Gulf State connection to ISIS terrorists, documenting this intimate partnership in the manufactured war on terror.

In late September after Putin outed Obama’s fake war against ISIS at the UN, then throughout October actually destroying ISIS where Obama only pretended, the lost face of a humiliated Emperor’s new clothes turned US war policy in the Middle East completely topsy-turvy. Obama’s dubious leadership sank to an international all-time low when Putin exposed America’s deliberately failed MENA policy. Allied nations were cutting their losses and announcing plans to pull out of Syria. US Empire of Chaos and Destruction was fast losing its global control, its coercive power to subjugate its Euro-puppets into blind submission seriously and overtly eroding.  On top of that, while Europe is still reeling from the refugee mass migration crisis directly caused by the US imperial aggression, they were marveling over grandmaster Putin’s bold stroke of finally kicking some Islamic State ass. Stalwart US Euro-ally Germany was already shifting gears warming its relations with Russia, unwilling to follow Washington’s disastrous lead down doomsday road.

So what do the neocon goons in full damage control mode come up with?

While US-Israel are holding joint military exercises in the Sinai desert, did they coordinate with ISIS to make sure it shoots down the Russian airliner as immediate Putin payback?  Then came Defense Secretary Carter’s Russia bashing threats from the Ronald Reagan Library followed just hours later a few miles away with the Trident missile’s Saturday night LA bright light show seen around the world as an exclamation threat to Russia and China to back off from challenging US Empire’s global hegemony.

The DC warmongers are growing increasingly desperate, afraid of losing both their full spectrum dominance in the world as well as their precious proxy terrorist ally while Putin’s aid to Assad is putting the final kibosh on their fanatical OCD regime change operation.

So Brennan meets up with French and Israeli intelligence to conjure up the next Paris false flag. And since Hollande’s been Washington’s loyal go-to lackey with Hebdo already under his belt, heading up France’s active role in the imperialistic assault on both Libya and Syria, with Paris terrorism #2 France now becomes US Empire’s key catalyst to pull off another massive 9/11-like attack, in fact the biggest in France since WWII and be the justified driving force behind this newest “coalition of the willing” stepping up its next phase of war in Syria against both Assad and Putin. US bombs being dropped over Syria are now being joined by bombs from French jets as well as Israeli and Saudi warplanes. Timed purposely on the heels of the Paris tragedy, the ongoing G-20 meeting with the world’s most powerful nations in Turkey has turned into a war council to drum up intensified world war effort against nemesis Assad and Putin.

But the Western bombs are making sure that they do not destroy ISIS nor ISIS-controlled oil refineries selling black market oil to NATO member Turkey. Nor are they attacking the critical ISIS supply line in northern Syria that extends back into Turkey. It’s all too obvious that a renewed, heavily fortified allied offensive aggressively going head-to-head with Syrian and Russian forces clearly risks igniting a broader War.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.”  It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site athttp://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Joachim Hagopian, Global Research, 2015

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Israel’s international fifth column exposed

Ben Zygier, RIP

Israel’s international fifth column exposed
 

by Justin Raimondo, February 15, 2013

The shocking story of Ben Zygier, a 34-year-old Australian recruited by the Mossad and quite possibly murdered in an Israeli jail cell in 2010, has exposed Israel’s international fifth column to the light of day. This whale surfaces every once in a while. Remember the "passport farm" run by the Israelis in New Zealand back in 2004? Similar operations were uncovered in Australia and in Israel itself: regarding the latter, travelers to the Jewish state had their identities stolen, their passports duplicated and handed out like candy to Mossad agents. Then there were those two FBI raids on the Washington headquarters of AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobby, during the course of which agents surrounded the building and carted out boxes of documents and computer hard drives as part of the Steve Rosen-Keith Weissman affair, in which two top AIPAC officials were indicted and tried for stealing US secrets from the Pentagon, and only had their case dropped because a trial would have revealed those secrets to the world. And who could forget that 2001 Fox News four-part series reported by Carl Cameron, which concluded there was evidence the Israelis were watching the 9/11 hijackers on American soil and failed to report their movements to US authorities?

This time, however, the story has an unusual twist. It appears that Zygier, a fervent Zionist, discovered something that caused him to turn against his Mossad bosses – something so sensitive, of such importance to the Jewish state, that his incarceration in a Israel’s high security Ayalon prison – in a "suicide-proof" cell originally designed for Yitzhad Rabin’s assassin – was a closely-guarded secret. Prison personnel were not told his identity, and a media blackout was imposed shortly after the story of "Prisoner X" came out in the Israeli media. All mentions of the arrest were scrubbed from Israeli web sites.

That was two years ago. Now we learn Zygier "committed suicide" in his suicide-proof cell.
The Australians had been on his trail for a while. He and two other Australians who had emigrated to Israel and then returned after changing their names – and applying for Australian passports – were under investigation for engaging in espionage. An Australian journalist had questioned Zygier about his activities, and he furiously denied being involved in any covert activities on Israel’s behalf. There are reports of his interrogation by ASIO, Australia’s intelligence agency.

There seems little doubt Zygier was recruited by Mossad ten to twelve years ago: his friends are now recalling it. The New York Times says he used at least four names: Ben Zygier, Ben Alon, Ben Allen and Benjamin Burrows, traveling to Iran, Syria, and Lebanon on behalf of his Israeli paymasters. The nature of his transgression has yet to be definitively revealed, yet the story is coming out in spite of the Israeli government’s frantic efforts to stop it. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

"Australian security officials suspect that Ben Zygier, the spy who died in a secret Israeli prison cell in 2010, may have been about to disclose information about Israeli intelligence operations, including the use of fraudulent Australian passports, either to the Australian government or to the media before he was arrested.

“‘[Zygier] may well have been about to blow the whistle, but he never got the chance,’ an Australian security official with knowledge of the case told Fairfax Media yesterday.

"Sources in Canberra are insistent that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was not informed by its Israeli counterparts of the precise nature of the espionage allegations against Mr Zygier. However, it is understood that the former Melbourne law graduate had been in contact with Australian intelligence."

 There is much speculation surrounding the reasons for Zygier’s arrest: the most popular appears to be that he was about to reveal details of the 2010 Mossad hit job in Dubai, during which an entire team of some 20 Mossad agents succeeded in murdering an Arab arms dealer with links to Hamas.
The problem with this theory is that the facts about that case are pretty much known: the Israelis collected data from travelers to Israel and then used it to create bogus passports, which were then issued to Mossad agents. Photos of these agents appeared in the Kuwaiti media, and were published on the internet. A Kuwaiti paper is now claiming it was Zygier who turned over this information, including the photos, to the Kuwaitis, and that the Israelis kidnapped him in Kuwait. The paper quotes "a former Mossad commander" who contends Zygier was part of the Dubai assassination team until he "switched to the other side." Yet this tall tale hardly explains why the Israelis would keep the identity of "Prisoner X" such a closely-guarded secret, quashing press reports of his incarceration, and denying his very existence until now. It wouldn’t explain why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an "emergency" meeting with Israeli editors over their handling of the story. And it wouldn’t account for the fact that Zygier was apparently in contact with the Australian intelligence service prior to his arrest – or have they, too, "switched to the other side"?

I guess it all depends on what one means by "other side." Because, from the perspective of the increasingly isolated Israeli government – which cultivates a narrative of the Jewish state as besieged on every side – "the other side" means everybody else, including the West.

We don’t know the nature of Zygier’s "crime," but we know with reasonable certainty what it was not. In all likelihood it had nothing to do with the Dubai assassination, the forging of passports, or any of the other depredations against international law and morality that we already know about. It’s something new – and worse.

There is some speculation it had something to do with the impersonation of CIA officers by Mossad agents who were trying to recruit Jundullah terrorists in their campaign to destabilize Iran, and this may be more credible: after all, according to the report by Mark Perry in Foreign Policy, "The Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives – what is commonly referred to as a ‘false flag’ operation." (Emphasis added.)
So it isn’t just Australian, New Zealand, and European passports the Israelis are stealing – there’s an Israeli "passport farm" churning out American passports, too. But then again, why would Zygier – reportedly a committed Zionist, who had been recruited by Mossad and emigrated to Israel where he started a family – threaten to expose this type of operation? It doesn’t add up – unless the Israelis were mounting an operation against his native Australia, or other Western countries such as the US.
Israel’s Mossad is notorious for its ruthlessness, and its unwillingness to play by the rules: for example, when it comes to industrial espionage, Israel’s Western "allies" are considered fair game. A GAO report on Israeli espionage in the US concluded the Jewish state "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally." Australia presumably merits the same treatment. But Zygier didn’t "switch sides" because of a few stolen gadgets. It had to have been something that aroused his conscience, and perhaps reawakened long dormant loyalty to his Australian homeland – or to the concept of morality itself.

This is not the Israel we once knew, or thought we knew. We are dealing here with Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel, a country veering to the very edge of fundamentalist extremism, increasingly aggressive and impatient to assert itself as the dominant power in the Middle East. Their above-ground lobby is not only hyperactive, it is hyper-potent, strong enough to rule the US Congress with an iron hand – as Chuck Hagel pointed out, to his sorrow – and do much to push the US into a disastrous war in Iraq (as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt showed in their book on The Israel Lobby). Yet what about the clandestine aspect of this phenomenon – the covert complement to Israel’s overt fifth column? The Zygier affair gives us a brief, incomplete glimpse at this sinister subterranean creature, and a scary one it is.

No, we don’t know why the Israelis kept "Prisoner X" locked up in absolute secrecy, and then panicked when word leaked out about his "suicide." No, we don’t know for sure that he was murdered by his jailers – although his lawyer, who saw him days before his death, has said he seemed rational and not at all suicidal. We can’t know for certain what horror he uncovered, and caused him to rebel. Yet that horror, whatever it was, was no ordinary one: it motivated him to reject the views and actions of a lifetime, and reverse course with stunning abruptness.

Zygier was reportedly offered a plea bargain by the Israeli authorities, and turned it down because he was determined to clear his name. Was he an Israeli Bradley Manning, intent on exposing the crimes of the Jewish state – crimes we can only imagine?

NOTES IN THE MARGIN
 The Republican filibuster of Chuck Hagel reared its head too late for me to comment, and I’ll save my remarks for Monday, when the dust has cleared. Suffice to say here that I was far too optimistic to shout "How Sweet It Is!" — the title of my last column on the Hagel nomination. That’ll teach me to jump the gun when it comes to declaring victory over the Lazarus-like neocons. I have to take some grim satisfaction, however, in pointing out that the Senate vote underscores my political acuity when it comes to another topic I’ve been dealing with this week – the politics of Sen. Rand Paul, a.k.a. Paul the Lesser.

Sen. Paul voted "no," giving the Hagel-haters the one-vote margin they needed to delay the confirmation for another ten days. Phil Klein, neoconnish political reporter over at the Washington Examiner, tweeted "Rand Paul, neocon hero!" To which I can only say – with absolutely no relish – didn’t I tell you so? Heck, I nailed the Lesser Paul back in 2010, before he even made it to the Senate.
Yes, but my prescience – however much I brag and carry on about it – is really no fun at all: remember Cassandra, of Greek mythology, who offended the gods and was punished in a unique manner? The poor thing was granted the gift of prophecy, but cursed with the proviso that no one would ever believe her. These days I often recall the poet Robinson Jeffers’s conjuration of this ancient tale:

"The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers
Hooked in the stones of the wall,
The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra,
Whether the people believe
Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they’d liefer
Meet a tiger on the road.
Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion –
Vendors and political men
Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kind
Wisdom. Poor bitch be wise.
No: you’ll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men
And gods disgusting – you and I, Cassandra."
 A final note: In case you haven’t seen the front page, our fundraising drive is still in full swing – but we haven’t allowed it to take over practically the entire page, as per usual – we’re waiting to see if subtlety works. If it doesn’t we’ll go back to hitting our readers and supporters over the head with the works. I just hope it doesn’t come to that and for a very good reason: there’s too much going on. These are unusually active times in the world of foreign policy, and the question of war and peace is at the top of the national agenda. The debate has never been fiercer. And it has never been more important for us to carry out our primary mission: to keep our readers fully educated and up-to-date on matters dealing with America’s relationship with the rest of the world.

In short: please don’t make us devote 2/3rds of the front page to a freaking fundraising appeal. Please make your fully tax-deductible donation today – nay, right now. Before I go crazy.
I’m on Twitter quite a bit these days: you can follow me here.

Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Forward by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
Buy my biography of the great libertarian thinker, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books,2000), here.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian
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