Friday, 10 April 2009

Iraq: Six Years On


Huge Protest Marks Baghdad's Fall

09/04/2009 Tens of thousands of followers of anti-American Muslim Shi'ite cleric Sayyed Moqtada al-Sadr thronged Baghdad on Thursday to mark the sixth anniversary of the city's fall to U.S. occupation troops, and to demand they leave immediately.

"Down, down USA," the demonstrators chanted as Ali al-Marwani, a Sadrist official, denounced the U.S. occupation of Iraq that began with the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdos Square.

The crowds of Sadr supporters stretched from the giant Sadr City slum in northeast Baghdad to the square around 5 km (3 miles) away, where protesters burnt an effigy featuring the face of former U.S. President George W. Bush, who ordered the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

"God, unite us, return our riches, free the prisoners from the prisons, return sovereignty to our country ... make our country free from the occupier, and prevent the occupier from stealing our oil," Sadr said in a message read by a Sadr movement aide Asaad al-Nassiri.

"God, make us the liberators of our land," the message said before exhorting the demonstrators to shake hands with each other and Iraqi police overseeing the march.

President Barack Obama, who flew into Baghdad on an unannounced visit on Tuesday, has ordered all U.S. occupation combat troops to leave Iraq by the end of August 2010, leaving a residual force of 35,000-50,000 trainers, advisers and logistics personnel.

Under a bilateral security agreement signed with Bush, all U.S. occupation troops must withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Sayyed al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army fighters fought pitched battles against U.S. occupation forces during the U.S.-led invasion but have retreated from the frontlines after Sadr called on them to abandon armed combat and turn themselves into a social welfare organization.




'Fallujah never leaves my mind'

By Laith Mushtaq, cameraman, Al Jazeera


Fallujah was almost flattened after the US assaults that intensified in 2004 [EPA]

"We heard people screaming inside the hospital, they did not have any drugs left. They had to cut legs without anything at all"

Laith Mushtaq was one of only two non-embedded cameramen working throughout the April 2004 'battle for Fallujah' in which 600 civilians died.

Five years on, he recounts the events he witnessed and filmed.

"What you saw on your TV sets at home reflects only ten per cent of the reality. Also, if you watch those pictures at home, you can change the channel.

But we were in the middle. We smell. We feel, see, and touch everything. We could touch the bodies, but we couldn't change the channel. We were the channel.

When I think of Fallujah, I think of the smell. The smell was driving me crazy. In a dead body, there is a kind of liquid. Yellow liquid. The smell is disgusting, really. It sticks in your nose. You cannot eat anymore.

And you can't get the pictures off your mind, because every day you see the same: Explosion, death, explosion, death, death.

After work, you sit down and notice there are pieces of flesh on your shoes and blood on your trousers. But you don't have time to ask why.

In April 2004, I remember I was in the Baghdad office and my boss said: "We have information that the Americans will attack Fallujah. We need a crew to go inside Fallujah immediately. Who can go there?"

I said: "Yes. Me. I can go there." I didn't hesitate at all.

Filming was a 'duty'


Laith filmed this family attempting to flee Fallujah - ten minutes later they were dead

I knew the price to pay was high. Maybe my life. But if I'm afraid to die, then I shouldn't hold a camera in any dangerous place. I know some day I will die. Tomorrow. Next month. Next year. Or in ten years. I don't know.

But the point is that maybe I will die in my bed. Or maybe I will die doing something good.

Fallujah was my duty. I had to show the truth to people outside of Iraq.
By truth, I mean what really happened in the streets. Not a political message, just what I could see with my own eyes. Because some people were talking about Fallujah and said "there is nothing happening," or "the people are okay" and "everything is stable".

It would be great if everything had been stable. I would be happy if nothing had happened. I would shoot it and show it, with pleasure. But the reality was very different.

One day, I think it was April 9, 2004, someone with a loudspeaker in Fallujah's main mosque said: "The Americans will open a gate and women and children can go out."

As soon as he had finished, all the women and children of Fallujah tried to find a car to leave the city but when they were in the streets, the US forces opened fire.

There's a picture that I cannot forget. An old woman with three children, I saw her on the street and took a picture of her and the children.

She said: "We don't have any men here, can anyone help us?" Many of the men from Fallujah worked in Baghdad, once the city was sealed off they could not get back to their wives and children.

So, some men helped her, I decided to film the scene and then I sat down to smoke.

Ten minutes later, an ambulance came down the road. I ran to follow the ambulance and when they opened the door, I saw the same woman and her children - but they were in pieces.

I still remember the nurses couldn't carry the woman because she was in too many pieces, people were jumping back when they saw it. Then, one nurse shouted: "Hey, she looks like your mother."

In the Iraqi language that means: "She could be your mother, so treat her like you'd treat your mom." Everyone stood up and tried to carry a piece because they needed to get her out quickly, because the ambulance was needed for other people.

We were standing in front of the main hospital, but we would have needed 12 cameramen in order to cover all that happened that day.


There were five, six ambulances coming and going with dead and injured people. When I filmed people inside the hospital, there were so many outside. When I filmed outside, there were so many inside.

Me and all of the Al Jazeera crew, we felt paralysed. It was bigger than us. We were only two cameramen and two reporters. It's not enough.

Reporters, editors in Doha and Baghdad, the people of Fallujah, all of them kept calling for us to film what was happening, and the ambulances just kept coming and going.

We heard people screaming inside the hospital, because they did not have any drugs left. They had to cut legs without anything at all.

At some point, I couldn't move anymore. I sat down on the street and kept smoking. I couldn't move. I see what's happening around me, but I can't move. Khallas [enough]. I didn't have any energy left.

Corpse-strewn streets

But then you remember the heroes of Fallujah that nobody talks about.

Like this old man. He had a pick-up truck and every day, he drove through the streets and listened to the people who told him there is a dead body in this or that street, but nobody can go there because there's a sniper.

Then he went there, stopped his car, and on his knees, he'd crawl to the body and carry it to his pick-up car. One day he brought five bodies.

Some of them had died more than a week ago, but no one had dared to carry them away. Some, the dogs had started eating them.

While I was inside Fallujah, I knew that every single move of my camera is not for me. It's for the people inside. And the people outside who should know what happened. It's like an SOS.

The Americans said our pictures stirred up hatred against them. But what I did was only showing what their army did on the ground.

I don't hate them, I don't want vengeance, I just wish they had understood what they were doing.

And sometimes I wish my mind was more like a computer that you can reformat. Or that you can go to hospital and get pieces of your memory removed.

In Fallujah, there were moments when I held my camera beside a dead body and I felt I haven't got a heart anymore. Because of the dose of war that I've seen. It was something like an overdose.

Not just for me inside, also for my family in Baghdad.

The month that I spent in Fallujah, my mom was watching TV all the time, because she knew her son was there and she knew those were the pictures that he had shot. Sometimes we couldn't talk for a couple of days.

One day, she heard on the news that the Americans would try to reach the middle of the city. She couldn't bear it anymore. She went to the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad and cried: "Give me my son back!"

I was embarrassed, but my mother is, well, a mother.

Around the same time, in the evening, we got a phone call from the general manager of Al Jazeera. He wanted to talk to every member of the crew. The driver. Me. Everyone.

He said: "Thank you very much, we appreciate what you're doing." And then he said: "If you want to leave Fallujah, we'll send someone and will try to get you out of there."

We all refused. Everyone wanted to stay.

Why should we be better than the women and children of Fallujah? No one had called them to ask whether they wanted to leave."

In a written statement given to Al Jazeera, Lieutenant Colonel Curtis L Hill, public affairs director for the multi-national force in the west of Iraq, denied US-led forces fired on "unarmed civilians" .

"Coalition forces were there to capture the terrorists responsible for the death of four American contractors. They would not have fired on unarmed civilians attempting to leave the city," he said.


Specifically asked if a ceasefire had been called on April 9, he said troops had "halted the advance although I believe the date was 11 April".
Interview compiled by Stephanie Doetzer

Laith Mushtaq is from Baghdad and joined Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel in 2003. He is now based in Doha.

UNVEILING OF THE B'NAI BRITH by WM COOPER

Source



THIS SERIES IS DEDICATED TO CANADIAN PM STEPHEN HARPER

IN THE HOPE THAT HE WILL SEE THE LIGHT


WITH REGARD TO B’NAI BRITH CANADA.


ADL - DEFENSE ARM OF B’NAI BRITH

William Cooper

THE AUTHOR

MILTON WILLIAM COOPER
May 6, 1943 ~ November 5, 2001

[Editor’s Note: William Cooper was murdered by police on November 5th, 2001 at the age of 58. He was an American writer, shortwave broadcaster who came into public awareness in the late 1980s. William was also a radio host, author and political activist known for his best-selling underground book titled Behold A Pale Horse and his worldwide shortwave radio show Hour of the Time. Cooper was also known for his court battle with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the recorded attempts to dissuade him from pursuing his case.

William Cooper founded Harvest Trust, the CAJI News Service, Veritas newspaper, The Intelligence Service, and Harvest Publications. Under his leadership Harvest Trust ventured into publishing. The first book under the Harvest Trust imprint was Oklahoma City: Day One (ISBN 0-9653307-1-0), by Michele Marie Moore about the Oklahoma City bombing.

An advocate for free radio, Cooper operated the unlicensed Independence Foundation Trust at 101.1 FM in Eagar, Arizona. Cooper claimed to have helped over 700 low power FM affiliate stations get equipped and on the air.

My belief is that Cooper was murdered by the Illuminati because of his work to expose the Beast to the public. This series of talks on B’nai Brith and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was part of his work to enlighten the public on who’s who behind the veil. Right at the beginning of this series he makes a comment about just such a scenario arising for many who did what he did. God willing he’ll be the last one to die for such efforts. Bless his soul.

The title of the series on RadicalPress.com is mine. Seeing as the ADL is but an offshoot of B’nai Brith and many people here in Canada think of this organization as B’nai Brith I’ve decided to use it in the title.]

ADL #2

THE HOUR OF THE TIME
Tape No. 384 “ADL No. 2″
June 27, 1994

This broadcast was taken in whole or in part from investigations conducted by the CAJI News Service, and the Intelligence Service, and from reports published by The Executive Intelligence Review entitled “The Ugly Truth About The ADL”, and “Dope Inc.”.

Folks, tonight’s program is based upon a report by the “Executive Intelligence Review” ~ a special report by the editors of the “Executive Intelligence Review”.

This report was first published in 1992, entitled “The Ugly Truth About the ADL”. It has taken CAJI this long to duplicate the research and verify that every single fact in here is absolutely, 100% correct and true.

The fact that none of the people, nor the ADL, has ever sued the “Executive Intelligence Review” over this information further substantiates the value and the truthfulness of this report.

And folks, it is baloney. Someday you will all wake up to that fact.

Gangsters and traitors from the start, ladies and gentlemen, the ADL had been founded shortly after the turn of the century as a Jewish defense arm of the B’nai B’rith ~ at least that’s what the Jews were told ~ the nominally Jewish secret society which is sponsored and controlled, in all actuality, by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and by some of the leading British and American families who are not Jewish at all, but subscribe to the British Israelite philosophy.

B’nai B’rith Washington, D.C. representative, Simon Wolf ~ the man whom Lincoln’s Secret Service Chief, Lafayette C. Baker, had arrested as a Confederate spy and Union blockade runner during the Civil War ~ was now working closely with President Theodore Roosevelt in mobilizing Jewish American support for the overthrow of the Russian Czar.

According to Wolf’s 1918 autobiography, he had met secretly with President Roosevelt in his Sagamore Hills estate in New York, and had launched an international drive to brand the Czarist regime as, quote “anti-semitic”, end quote.

They’ve done the same thing to me, ladies and gentlemen, as you all know.

After a series of meetings and correspondence with Russia’s Prime Minster, Count Sergei Witt ~ arranged by Roosevelt ~ Wolf had denounced the Russian regime for reneging on its promises to curb anti-Jewish pogroms ~ after which American Jewish organizations, led from behind the scenes by the B’nai B’rith, began funneling guns to the anti-Czarist insurrectionists.

Thus, B’nai B’rith played an active role in the Russian Revolution of 1905. This activity, ladies and gentlemen, would lead to widespread allegations that prominent American Jews were pro-Bolshevik.

The Warburg family of Kuhn-Loeb and Company did, in fact, fund V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

And father and son Bolshevik agents, Julius and Armand Hammer, who helped found the United States Communist Party, did actively spread the Bolshevik cause in America, and spent a decade in the Soviet Union following the 1917 Revolution.

These allegations of pro-Communist sentiments, while grounded in well-publicized and scandalous actions by prominent Jewish families, actually missed the mark.

In fact, ladies and gentlemen, the plot to bring down the Czar and install the Bolsheviks in power in Russia served long-standing British Imperial and geo-political interests of the sort advanced by the Scottish Rite and the Illuminati.

Britain, in fact, feared the development of a Eurasian alliance among France, Germany, Russia, Japan and China, based on economic cooperation and facilitated by the building of a transcontinental system of railroads linking the east to the west. Such a transcontinental railroad system would render Britain’s domination over the seas relatively unimportant.

B’nai B’rith joined in the effort to sink the Czar for the same reasons the Order joined in the Confederates secessionist plot to destroy the Union 40 years earlier ~ because B’nai B’rith was an arm of the Illuminati Freemasonic treason, and still is.

In fact, one of the most compelling reasons for the hatred of Russia was the role played by Czar Alexander II in coming to the aid of Abraham Lincoln during the darkest days of the United States Civil War.

In 1863, Czar Alexander dispatched the powerful Russian Navy to the United States ports of New York and San Francisco, and threatened to go to war against Britain if the Crown joined the war on the side of the Confederacy.

This probably ~ this probably, without any public recognition whatsoever ~ is what eventually enabled the North to win the war, for Britain stayed out. They didn’t want to stay out. They were forced to.

At the same time, the so-called Jewish Bolshevik ties were being targeted, frequently by people with actual anti-semitic biases. Diligent local police around the United States were becoming legitimately alarmed at the growing crime problem.

New York City Police Commissioner, Theodore A. Bingham, in September 1908, penned an article for the prestigious “North American Review”, titled “Foreign Criminals in New York”. The article detailed the rise of gambling, prostitution, and drugs on New York’s Lower East Side, emphasizing the role of Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrant gangsters in that crime explosion.

Bingham was not alone in his concern about the rise of gangsterism in the Jewish communities of the metropolitan New York area and beyond.

You see, in April 1910, the leading Jewish families of the United States, Germany, France, and Great Britain sent delegates to a Jewish International Convention on the Suppression of the Traffic in Girls and Women in London. Key-note speaker, Arthur R. Morrow, delivered an alarming report on the involvement of Jewish gangsters in the world-wide white slave trade and in big-time prostitution.

Now, for those of you who believe that this is all being brought about by the Jews, remember, these were the leading families ~ the leading Jewish families ~ of the United States, Germany, France, and Great Britain ~ who sent delegates to a Jewish international convention and brought the spotlight to this illegal and criminal traffic in girls and women. They were not guilty of participation. They, in fact, wanted it stopped. Quote:

“I wish I had time to tell you all I know, which goes to show that the traffic of Jewesses is almost world-wide; but I must restrict myself to a few incidents to prove that an extensive traffic does exist.

“In 1901, a rabbi came from the Transvaal and told me that the amount of Jewish prostitution and traffic in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Larinko , Marksberia , and Salisbury are appalling.

“In later years, the same story came from another rabbi regarding Capetown.

“In 1903, a Jewish school master, who had spent some time in Egypt, said that the traffic by Jews of Jewesses to Alexandria, Cairo, and Port Said was an absolute scandal. There were Greek, Italian, and French prostitutes, but they were far out-numbered by the Jewesses.

“We have received and have correspondence to show that this awful condition of affairs exists in Calcutta to a large extent, and also all along the free ports of China.

“From the Chief Rabbi of Constantinople, from a distinguished Jewish American scholar, from a prominent London gentleman, and from a school mistress in Colatta , we have had letters during the past six months describing an outrageous condition of affairs in Constantinople, where traffic in prostitutes is carried out openly and shamelessly, and where the traffickers have their own synagogue. They say things in Damascus are even worse.” End quote.

Already, in 1909, the leading ~ quote “Our Crowd”, end quote ~ families of New York had established their own bureau of social morals, headed by Rabbi Judah P. Magnis .

The bureau hired private detective Abe Shoenfeld, an investigator for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to infiltrate and profile the organized crime structure centered on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Shoenfeld’s mission was hardly that of crime buster, folks. In 1922, Rabbi Magnis took those voluminous files with him when he moved to Jerusalem and founded the Hebrew University. To this day, the genealogy chart of organized crime remains a part of the University’s most closely guarded archives.

It was during this same period of mounting concern over the exposure of Jewish surnamed gangsters that the Anti-Defamation League was founded ~ not to protect the Jewish people, but to protect the Jewish criminal element.

One of the very first targets of the ADL was New York Police Commissioner Bingham, whom the ADL smeared as an anti-semite for his efforts to quell organized crime on the Lower East Side.

Bingham’s crime fighting efforts were by no means targeted exclusively against Jewish gangsters. His Chief Detective, Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, was assassinated in March 1909 in Sicily while meeting with Italian police to establish cooperation, and probing links between criminal elements and anarchist networks operating in both the United States and Italy.

In 1901, Petrosino had warned the Secret Service about an imminent assassination attempt against President William McKinley. Petrosino had learned of the plot by infiltrating his agents into the Henry Street Settlement House in New York, a hot bed of British Fabian Society and international anarchist activity.

The Secret Service ignored his warnings, and McKinley was assassinated months later, leaving British agent and B’nai B’rith ally, Teddy Roosevelt, to assume the Presidency.

The nascent ADL, still formally called the “Publicity Committee of the B’nai B’rith”, had assailed Bingham’s crime fighting efforts for maligning Jews, and eventually succeeded in having him ousted as Police Commissioner.

Now, remember, ladies and gentlemen, the ADL is not an arm of the Jewish community; but is an arm of a secret society, a branch of the Illuminati, known as B’nai B’rith, which is controlled by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.

Organized crime got a big boost as a result. What’s more, the effort to establish the links between organized crime, international anarchist circles, and perhaps the Scottish Rite and B’nai B’rith secret societies, was stillborn.

The man who founded and headed up the ADL for its first 30 years was Sigmund Livingston, a prominent Chicago attorney, who had headed up the powerful B’nai B’rith Midwest Lodge No. 6. Livingston was the lawyer for the Chicago and Alton Railways, a company owned by William Moore of the prominent Episcopalian family.

From the 1890s, the Moore family had forged a business alliance with the J. P. Morgan banking interests. The Moores, with Morgan financing, founded the National Biscuit Company ~ now R.J.R. Nabisco ~ and United States Steel Corporation.

Within two generations, members of the Moore family would also control Bankers Trust Company and sit on the board of the International Business Machines Corporation that you know as IBM.

The Moore family sponsorship of Livingston, ADL Chairman from 1913 to 1945, was a reflection of the underlying relationship between the leading WASP Freemasonic families and the ADL that continues through to the present. The Moore’s family Nabisco and United States Steel are on record today as major financial backers of the Anti-Defamation League.

Ironically, Bishop Paul Moore, of the same Moore family, served for years as the Episcopal Bishop of New York. Based at the Cathedral of St. John Divine, he was the superior to Cannon Edward West.

Now, remember folks, what I’ve told you about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Mystery School series.

Cannon West’s promise to get his Jewish friends to take care of Lyndon LaRouche provided crucial evidence that the real power behind the ADL and its organized crime confederates is the Scottish Rite.

With the ADL’s successful drive to oust New York Police Commissioner Bingham, organized crime began to spread its tentacles out into New York City and across the country.

By the onset of Prohibition in 1920, the undisputed chief of the New York rackets was Arnold Rothstein , the son of a prominent garment manufacturer and a junior member of the elite “Our Crowd”.

Many of the “Our Crowd” families, like the Lehmans, had come to New York from the South in the post-Civil War period. They were transplanted Confederates, who capitalized on the power of the British Rothschild family’s Wall Street representative, August Belmont, to quickly establish themselves among the city’s leading bankers and stock brokers.

They had participated in the unsuccessful Confederate secessionist plot against the Union. Now, they would take a leading role in the British effort to direct a new opium war against the American people.

Rothstein, ladies and gentlemen, operated a gambling and prostitution syndicate out of the Metropol Hotel in midtown Manhattan, far from the teaming ethnic ghetto of the Lower East Side.

He ran the unofficial Gambling Commission for Tamanny Hall boss Timothy Sullivan. He hobnobbed with some of the country’s wealthiest,legitimate businessmen, like Julius Fleischmann, the yeast manufacturer; Joseph Seagram, the Canadian distiller; Harry Sinclair, of the Sinclair Oil Company; and Percival H. Hill, head of the American Tobacco Company.

In 1919, Rothstein engineered the fixing of the baseball World Series on behalf of his gambling cronies in what became known as the “Chicago Black Sox Scandal”.

At the behest of Lower East Side gangster, Irving Wexler ~ also known as Waxy Gordon ~ and Detroit mobster, Max Greenberg , Rothstein put up the initial $175,000 to establish the first bootlegging operations of the Prohibition Era, servicing the Midwest and the east coast with British whiskey transported across the Atlantic. Rum-running ships, owned by Rothstein and his partners, would smuggle the British whiskey from Long Island Sound into the U.S.

Rothstein’s British contacts included Winston Churchill who, at the time, headed the Royal Commission in Charge of Liquor.

In 1921, Rothstein also opened up a British pipeline for smuggling heroin into the United States via his business agent in China, Jacob Katzenberg .

Katzenberg hooked up with the British opium cartel, then headed by Lord Keswick of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Jardin and Matheson Trading Company, and arranged the transit of the illegal drugs through Marseilles into New York City.

The route, later known as “The French Connection”, would remain the primary pipeline of heroin into America up through the 1960s.

The period of Prohibition, folks, marked the syndication of organized crime. It also marked the emergence of illegal money as a major source of investment capital and so-called legitimate business.

As the proceeds of the billions of dollars in illegal whiskey and dope sales were funneled into such lucrative, straight investments as the Hollywood motion picture and music industries, the Nevada gambling casinos ~ Nevada conveniently legalized casino gambling just as Prohibition was coming to an end ~ and post-Prohibition legal alcohol distilleries, the ADL was on hand to directly reap the benefits.

In 1929, ladies and gentlemen, one of Meyer Lansky’s New York City crime lieutenants, Frank Erikson, founded the Sterling National Bank.

Erikson was a specialist in money laundering. After Lansky replaced Arnold Rothstein ~ for he was assassinated in 1926 ~ as the chairman of the board of the national crime syndicate, Erikson had been put in charge of the nation-wide bookkeeping operations. Erikson handled Lansky’s hidden interests in gambling casinos, race tracks, and other businesses around the country.

Sterling National Bank served as the mob’s factor bank in the New York City garment center, doling out high-interest/short-term loans to thousands of small clothing manufacturers to purchase their raw materials. The loans were collateralized by the garment firm’s accounts receivable.

On paper, it was a benign, barely legal, form of loan-sharking. The victims were Jews.

In practice, it was the syndicates foot in the door for taking over the entire garment industry through violence and intimidation. Again, the victims were Jews.

Erikson’s relationship with Lansky gave Sterling virtually unchallenged control over the garment center.

In 1934, Theodore H. Silbert went to work for Sterling National Bank. Within a decade of his arrival, Silbert was the bank’s Chairman, President, and CEO ~ posts he would retain up until his death in early 1992.

You see, Silbert was the ADL’s man-on-the-scene. He would serve as the ADL’s National Commissioner, Treasurer, and Chief Fund-Raiser. The ADL established its bank accounts at Sterling National, and according to IRS records, invested in bank stock.

The only other outside investment into which the ADL would ever put its own money would be the American Bank and Trust Company, another New York City bank, which listed ADL National Commissioner and B’nai B’rith International President, Philip Klutznick , as a Director.

ABT would go under when shady Mossad financier Davy Gravier made off with all the bank’s deposits, and then ostensibly died in a mysterious airplane crash over Mexico.

Gravier’s so-called death was so suspect that New York State listed him as a co-conspirator in the ABT bank fraud investigation for years. For, you see, they didn’t then, and they don’t believe now, that he really died in that plane crash.

Although Silbert’s emergence as the leading figure at Sterling National was part of a campaign to cleanse the bank’s public image by replacing a known gangster with a philanthropist and civic-minded banker, Sterling continued to be entangled in shady financial dealings ~ sometimes leading to high-visibility civil suits.

The most explosive of these scandals hit in January 1982 when the Italian government filed suit in United States District Court in New York City against Sterling, charging it with constructive trust conspiracy to defraud, fraud, and breach of fiduciary duty. This case, ladies and gentlemen, revolved around Italian banker, Michel Sindona’s looting of $27 million from the Banca Privata in 1973 to 1974.

The theft had repercussions across the Atlantic as well. The Franklin National Bank on Long Island, New York, went bust as the result of Sindona’s involvement. Sterling National Bank was one of the laundromats through which Sindona washed the stolen cash.

Not surprisingly, Sindona would later be exposed as a pivotal figure in the Propaganda 2 Freemasonic Lodge ~ a secret Italian branch of the Scottish Rite with strong ties to the Mafia.

Its antecedent, the nineteenth century Propaganda 1 Lodge, had been founded by Giuseppi Mazzini , the founder of the Sicilian mafia, as a branch of the European Illuminati, a leading member of the first Communist Internationale, and an agent of Britain’s Lord Palmerston, the Grand Master of the Scottish Rite.

Giuseppi Mazzini was in close communication with the Confederate General, Albert Pike, who was the head of the Illuminati in the United States.

Some things, folks, just never, ever change.

The ADL’s shady links to Sterling National Bank went beyond Theodore Silbert.

Another long-time Director of the bank and ADL man, Maxwell Robb, was a business partner of Meyer Lansky in a company called the International Airport Hotel Corporation.

The Vice Chairman of the powerful New York State ADL, Robb weathered the airing of his Lansky links, and went on to be the United States Ambassador to Italy during the Reagan Administration.

Talk about putting the fox in the henhouse!

Arnold Burns was another ADL asset on the Board of Sterling. Burns’ law firm, Burns & Summit, got caught up in a tax evasion scheme in the early 1980s that almost landed both partners in jail.



Arnold Burns


Under a loophole in the federal tax codes written into law ~ thanks to the Zionist lobby in the United States Congress ~ American investors in Israel research and development firms could claim their investments as tax write-offs, but nobody else could investing in the same type of business in other countries and in the United States.

Arnold Burns set up a string of tax shelters in the Bahamas ostensibly to fund these Israeli research and development projects. However, the money ~ minus a hefty fee to Burns & Summit ~ never, ever reached Israel. It was laundered right back into the United States where it could be used by its own owners, tax-free. And when the scheme became the subject of a federal grand jury in New York, Burns pointed a finger at some of his cohorts and walked away, completely unscathed.

A few months later, Arnold Burns was named Deputy Attorney General of the United States, a post he held throughout most of the Reagan Era ~ Deputy Attorney General of the United States of America.

Burns’s name had been placed before Ronald Reagan by John J. McCloy, a power-house in the New York City White Anglo Saxon Protestant establishment, a leading Anglophile, British Israelist, ex-head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the former Chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Nor is Sterling National Bank the only ADL bank implicated in the dope trade and organized crime.

Leonard Abbess of Miami, Florida is another honorary National Chairman of the ADL. He’s the Chairman of City National Bank of Miami, one of many Florida banks caught laundering big-time drug money.

A top aide to Abbess at City National, Alberto Duke, was jailed in the late 1980s for laundering dope dollars.

Another senior bank official, Donald Beasley, was hired by Abbess on the basis of his former work for the Nugen Hand Bank in Australia.

And if you’ve read my book, you know all about Nugen Hand Bank and the Central Intelligence Agency, and the laundering of drug money.

Nugen Hand went bust in the mid-1980s when one of its founders, Frank Nugen, was found dead in his car, the victim of what police labelled a suicide.

And the other partner, former Green Beret and CIA agent, Michael Hand, a veteran of Delta Force, disappeared into thin air with $26 million in bank assets.

Nugen Hand had been set up during the final days of the Vietnam War by ex-Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon officers, including Ted Shackley , to launder black-market profits and do shady intelligence operations throughout Asia.

The 1985 Mo Delitz Award Dinner was a kind of coming-out party for the ADL’s friends in the national crime syndicate. It was, ladies and gentlemen, by no means the first time the League publicly flaunted its deep ties to the gangster world.

You see, in 1963, as part of an effort to vastly expand its fund-raising reach, the ADL appointed Hollywood producer Dore Schary as its National Chairman.


Dore Schary


At the time, Schary was the reigning superstar at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Among the Hollywood insiders, however, Schary was known as a life-long pal of syndicate higher-up, Abner Longey Zwilmann of New Jersey.

Zwilmann was one of the first of the Prohibition Era bootleggers and Lansky aids to get involved in the Hollywood motion picture industry.

An original member of Murder, Incorporated, and the head of the powerful Reinfeld bootlegging syndicate in New Jersey, Zwilmann expanded into labor racketeering during the waning days of Prohibition.

By 1930, he had seized control over the Screen Operators Union up and down the east coast and parlayed that into shares in some of the big Hollywood studios.

And you don’t think there’s any mind control in America?

At this time, Dore Schary ran an amateur drama group at the YMHA in Newark, New Jersey. Childhood friend, Zwilmann, sent Schary out to the west coast and installed him at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ~ MGM.

When Zwilmann got into trouble with the IRS in the late 1950s, some of his syndicate associates became convinced that he might betray some of the mob’s most closely held financial secrets. And on February 27th, 1959, he was found hanging from a pipe in the basement of his 20-room West Orange, New Jersey mansion.

According to Federal Bureau of Investigation reports, Schary attended the funeral. In the FBI memo citing Schary’s appearance at the Zwilmann funeral, the Bureau delivered a kind of eulogy to the mobster. Citing an article from the “New York World Telegram”, the FBI memo read, quote:

“Nobody followed so successfully for so long the approved underworld formula for success: from rags to rackets, to riches, to respectability.”

End quote. And folks,


if the rags-to-respectability formula were


to be applied to organizations,


the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith


would be first on the list of success stories.

For the past two decades, Wall Street lawyer, Kenneth Bailken, has been Mr. ADL. A long-standing member of the League’s National Executive Committee, Bailken served from 1982 through 1986 as the League’s National Chairman.



Kenneth Bailken, Drug Dealer Extraordinaire,


ADL National Chairman, 1982 ~ 1986


It was on his watch that gangster Mo Delitz got the ADL’s prestigious “Torch of Liberty” prize; that junk bond swindler, Michael Milken, poured millions of dollars into the launching of the League’s “A World of Difference” propaganda campaign to wreck American public education; and that accused drug money launderer, Edmond Saffra, got Bailken and the ADL to mediate a corporate divorce between his banking empire and the American Express Company.

In return for Bailken’s effort to salvage Saffra’s badly tarnished reputation, the ADL received a $1 million tax-exempt pay-off from him.

But Bailken’s real claim to fame, folks, is that he was a central figure in the doping, the drugging of America.


Without Kenneth Bailken’s behind-the-scenes


legal maneuvering, the Medellin Cartel


would have had a far more difficult time


establishing a beach-head in the United States.

In much the same way Bailken quieted the potentially stormy divorce between Edmond Saffra and American Express, he brokered the marriage between renegade financier, Robert Vesco, and the Medellin Cartel’s Chief of Logistics, Carlos Ledder Rivas .

As a result, the dope smuggling routes through the Caribbean into the United States were consolidated, and the streets of America were flooded during the 1980s with marijuana and cocaine.

Now, this sordid story began in 1970 when Kenneth Bailken, the senior partner at the Wall Street law firm of Wilkie, Farr and Gallagher, helped engineer Robert Vesco’s take-over the Investors Overseas Service, a Swiss-based mutual fund that was founded by Bernie Cornfield, with start-up funding from the Swiss-French branch of the Rothschild family.



CIA Mugshot of Meyer Lansky


IOS was a front for Meyer Lansky’s international crime syndicate. IOS salesmen traveled the globe carrying suitcases full of cash, across international borders.

Some of the money came from local investors, but the bulk of it was hot money gained from the Lansky syndicate’s dope, gambling, prostitution, and extortion rackets.

Now, if this method of money laundering was labor-intensive and primitive compared to today’s high-speed electronic wire transfers, it was, nevertheless efficient. The cash eventually ended up in numbered accounts at some of Switzerland’s most corrupt and secretive banks.

Some of the banks, ladies and gentlemen, linked to the IOS apparatus ~ like the Geneva-based International Credit Bank (or BCI) and the Nassau/Bahamas-based Bank of World Commerce ~ were flagrant fronts for the Lansky syndicate.

While BCI was owned by a senior officer of the Israeli Mossad, named Tybor Rosenbaum, BCI’s office manager, Sylvian Ferdmond, was identified by “Life” magazine in 1967 as one of Lansky’s top bag men. And World Commerce Director, Alvin Malnick, was Lansky’s accountant.

When Lansky and his controllers decided to shift the center of their underground banking operations from Switzerland to the Caribbean as part of the planned expansion of cocaine and marijuana smuggling into the United States ~ with the cooperation and the help of the intelligence community and the military ~ it was the ADL and Bailken that engineered the move.

First, the ADL’s Minneapolis, Minnesota apparatus ~ known inside the League as the “Minneapolis Mafia” which ran the notorious “Kid-Can” ~ or Isodore Bloomenfeld organized crime ring ~ provided the money for a local Hebrew school teacher-turned-business-entrepreneur named Meschelam Rickless to buy up a large block of shares of IOS stock.

Once Rickless had amassed enough stock to control the company, he turned around and sold all his shares to Vesco.

Vesco was represented in the transaction by Kenneth Bailken.

You see, the circle is now complete.

Vesco’s next step was to oust Bernie Cornfield as the President of IOS and take over the job himself.

Over the next several years, ladies and gentlemen, a total of $270 million was siphoned out of IOS accounts in Switzerland. Officially, the money was never found; and Robert Vesco conveniently fled the United States ~ one step ahead of the FBI and the IRS. The Cornfield-to-Rickless-to-Vesco transaction may have been largely a wash of Lansky syndicate dollars.

From Prohibition onward, the Minneapolis Kid-Can Gang had been handlers of Lansky money. Kid-Can eventually moved to the Miami area, and was a key player in Lansky’s big-time move into southern Florida Gold Coast real estate.

However, folks, not all of the money siphoned out of IOS by Vesco was family cash. A lawsuit was brought in U.S. District Court in New York City in 1980 by some of the independent investors who had lost their shirts in the looting of IOS.

While not revealing the whereabouts of the missing millions, the civil suit identified Bailken and the Bank of New York as partners of the fugitive financier in the scheme.

On July 31, 1980, Federal Judge D. J. Stewart ordered Wilkie, Farr and Gallagher to pay $24.5 million to a group of IOS investors, and ordered the Bank of New York to pay $35.6 million.

The case file, which fills 20 cartons, stored at the Federal District Court Warehouse in Bayonne, New Jersey, shows that Bailken was the evil genius behind the entire looting scheme.

A year before the court ordered Wilkie, Farr and the Bank of New York to pay-up for their role in the looting of IOS, some of that money had been used by Vesco to purchase Norman’s Cay in the Bahamas. Vesco’s partner in the deal was Carlos Ledder Rivas, a small-time Colombian car thief and marijuana smuggler who had recently gotten out of jail in Florida.

Ledder, an unabashed supporter of Adolf Hitler, who would later use some of his smuggling profits to found a neo-Nazi, radical, environmentalist political party in Columbia, fit neatly into the ADL scheme with his family ties back in Colombia to leading figures in the then-emerging Medellin Cartel.

By 1980, the Vesco-Ledder owned Norman’s Cay was serving as the command center and trans-shipment depot for a massive marijuana and cocaine trafficking operation ~ protected by the intelligence community ~ from Medellin into the United States.

For several years, while running the Norman’s Cay operation, Vesco skipped from the Bahamas to Costa Rica to Nicaragua, buying up local politicians and newspaper editors, and always miraculously staying one step ahead of an FBI that never really seemed intent upon capturing the fugitive money-man.

In fact, it was just a show.

On one occasion on Antigua, Vesco was hosting a lavish party on a boat that he had bought from Saudi financier, Adnan Kashogi ~ isn’t is funny how the same names always crop up in all of these investigations ~ while the FBI agents were combing the island looking for this illusive fugitive.

Well, I hope you can sleep well tonight. I hope you’re beginning to get the message. I hope you’re beginning to understand things just aren’t as you thought they were.

And they use this branding of “anti-semitic”, “anti-semitism”, to control the Jews, and to keep you in your place.

You see, you will learn, later in this series, that when the ADL needs to rally the Jewish community around a cause, it is sometimes Jews (or the ADL itself) that paints the swastika on Jewish synagogues and on the gravestones in Jewish cemeteries.

Good night, and God bless you all.

My PhotoPosted by Barbara L at 9:23 AM Links to this post

“So much for Lebanon’s so-called Cedar Revolution…”

Syria will win Lebanon's elections

By Lebanon's resident-neocon, in the Daily Star, here

"...the forthcoming Parliament will be much friendlier to Syria than the current one is, representing a marked return of Damascus' hegemony over Lebanon...Saudis sought to isolate Syria (and with it Iran) in Lebanon and the Arab world. However, that effort largely failed. The Saudis, instead, found themselves isolated as they and the Egyptians proved unable to derail the Arab League summit in Damascus in March 2008, before later seeing another rival, Qatar, host Lebanese reconciliation talks in May, after Hizbullah's military onslaught against western Beirut.....The Saudis want to unify Sunni ranks, but in a way where the Syrians will be able to have their say with the Lebanese. That's why, whoever wins the elections, the next prime minister is likely to be Mikati, whom the Syrians trust but who won't stray away from the Saudis or from the Lebanese Sunni consensus. .... with Jumblatt realigning on Syria and strengthening his ties to Berri, who with his bloc will represent a substantial Syrian stake in the system, alongside Hizbullah, the Assad regime will find that a substantial share of Muslim parliamentarians either support close ties with Syria or are in no position to effectively oppose them....

For all intents and purposes, the momentum of the Hariri legal case has been lost, and given renewed Saudi friendliness toward Syria, we shouldn't expect the Hariri family to complain about this. ..So much for Lebanon's so-called Cedar Revolution, never a revolution in the first place,...."

cedar revolution...

Michael Young had an article in yesterday’s Daily Star entitled “Syria Will Win Lebanon’s Elections.” Young-haters will gleefully read it as a sign of surrender by one of March 14th’s most ardent and eloquent spokesmen, while his fans will tell you that there’s nothing new about this latest offering: Michael Young has been sour on March 14th for a good long while. Here’s the take-away:


“The March 8-March 14 dichotomy no longer seems appropriate today, despite the furious debate in Lebanon over who will win next June. Whoever wins, Syria will emerge on top, its crimes forgotten and its interests protected. That may sound benign when expressed this way, but those interests will certainly expand in the future, to Lebanon’s detriment. So much for Lebanon’s so-called Cedar Revolution, never a revolution in the first place, and now as exposed as any old tree to being cut down.”

I seem to meet a lot of bitter March 14ers these days. Michael Young is not alone in his frustration with the coalition and its changing fortunes. The departure of the Bush administration and the Syrian-Saudi rapprochement have yanked the rug out (so people say) from beneath the feet of the Independence Intifadists, who now sit and wait for an election that will almost certainly give them a less convincing mandate than the 2005 polls, assuming that they even win at all. To be frank, I can identify with this embittered group, in certain ways. Sure, I seem to spend quite a bit of time and energy on this blog criticizing the leaders of M14 (both politicians and “messaging strategists”), but, at the risk of sounding duplicitous, I can explain.

(Exiting Syrian/Iranian apologist mode… entering USA/Saudi collaborator mode).

I know few people who were not, at one point or another, if only for a day, “believers” in the March 14th movement. This includes many people who have long since drifted away from their earlier convictions, or indeed renounced them vehemently. However, what I’ve found is that even when speaking with people who currently define their political alignment in terms of being against March 14th, the conversation eventually winds up producing, curiously enough, some kind of conciliatory position vis-à-vis the “original spirit” of the movement: a spontaneous social uprising against a perceived historical injustice. I wrote an article on the psychological effect of this phenomenon, about a year ago for Syria Comment. Here’s an excerpt.


“What is often lost in the day-to-day analysis of Lebanon’s current despair and hopelessness, is the extent to which its paralysis stems, paradoxically, from two moments of staggering hopefulness. Beneath the surface clutter of parliamentary sessions postponed, foreign sponsors maligned, and electoral laws rejected, lie two emotional currents of deep nationalist aspiration, two currents which flow beneath the landscape of Lebanese politics like parallel subterranean rivers, welling up and intersecting at various points, then diverging once again and disappearing from sight.

I am speaking, of course, of the two monumental events which precipitated the current conflict, namely the “Cedar Revolution” of March 2005 and the “Divine Victory” of July 2006… In many ways, these two episodes were twin revolutions, remarkably similar to each other in their structural outlines and emotional resonance. They each represented a defining moment for a sizable portion of the Lebanese population, in which a dense set of accumulated resentments, anxieties, and righteous anger was focused upon a single historical injustice, and then exorcised – successfully – through a shocking and sublime victory. These twin revolutions made visible, for many Lebanese, a political reality previously unimaginable in Lebanon, a reality in which ordinary citizens were the masters of their own fate, where the dominance of foreign powers could be resisted successfully, and where national unity was not a purely hypothetical construct.

For the hundreds of thousands of people who would come together under the March 14 banner, the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri was a great crime, not against one sect but against the nation as a whole. The huge “Independence 05” rallies displayed an unprecedented degree of national unity… Having yoked their hopes and aspirations to the idyllic prospect of a new national beginning in Lebanon free of foreign tutelage, these citizens could not bear to see their gains dashed by what they perceived to be Syria’s attempt to bring Lebanon under its wing, once again.”

I suppose that this is my way of saying that I can understand Young’s bitterness vis-à-vis the state of the March 14th coalition and his paranoia about what the coming months will bring. However, at the same time, I think that he does not lay enough blame for the movement’s demise at the feet of its leadership. Like Young’s own editorials, March 14th’s leaders have continually looked beyond Lebanon’s borders to situate the source of the movement’s inertia. This was a state of affairs that the United States and the Sunni Arab regimes were only too happy to exploit in order to destabilize a despised regional opponent. As such, the movement never focused its energy on attending to Lebanon’s systemic dysfunctions, and instead tried to shoot the moon by exorcising all of Lebanon’s problems through regime change in Damascus.

It’s probably slightly unfair of me to give Joshua Landis the last word in an article about March 14th and Michael Young, but I believe that he made a strong point along these lines, in a recent email to me. He writes:


Syria is both a blessing and curse to Lebanon. It is a blessing because it acts as the Sultan, stepping in to halt the damage done by Lebanon’s za`ama system and emulous factionalism It is a curse because it is the Sultan. Authoritarianism is good for stability but not for freedom.

Lebanon has proven that its political system does not produce stable self-government. Its za`ims need an outside arbitrator to mediate their squabbles which turn to violent. Whether the Ottoman Sultan, the French, the Americans or more recently the Syrians, an outside authority has been drawn into Lebanon’s battles to resolve conflicts that Lebanese politicians seem incapable of resolving on their own.

Obama, like Clinton, will buy Syrian good behavior in Lebanon through the promise of lifting sanctions that Bush imposed and by pushing for peace with Israel and the return of the Golan. This will work for a period of time.

Ultimately, the only cure for Lebanon, in my humble opinion, is to reform the confessional system that pits one Lebanese community against another in such a fashion as to undermine a common sense of national identity and purpose. Only then will the Lebanese abandon their need for an external arbiter and inoculate themselves against Syrian influence. So long as the za`ama system leads to deadlock and a zero sum approach to politics, Syria will remain a blessing and curse to Lebanon.

Apologies for a long and rambling post. Happy Easter.


American propaganda in An-Nahar

Typically, An-Nahar (the right-wing, sectarian Christian, anti-Syrian (people), anti-Palestinian (people) newspaper which has been in decline and which is now below Al-Akhbar on Alexa among the top sites for Lebanon), carries a headline about the delivery of US heavy weapons to Lebanon. But you read the news item and you realize they are intended for the Lebanese election and to protect Israel from the Lebanese--not vice versa.

Posted by As'ad at 9:34 AM


In the WSJ, here

"The U.N. plans are getting attention in Washington because the U.S. is hoping for Syria's help in stabilizing Middle East hot spots, and would face a dilemma if the court demanded the handover of Syrian suspects. Damascus denies allegations of involvement in the attack...

This tribunal is hanging over Syria's head," says David Schenker, a specialist on Lebanon and Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "If they are not cooperating with the U.N., it will be hard for the U.S. to make any progress with Damascus and still maintain international credibility for engagement."

The Obama administration wants Syria's help in stabilizing Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. President Barack Obama has announced his desire to help broker peace talks between Syria and Israel over the disputed Golan Heights region..."

Posted by G, Z, & or B at 9:29 PM

MUSLIMS TO OBAMA: NOW WHAT?




Reflections on Obama’s Speech to the Muslim World

By Khalid Amayreh

Journalist — Occupied Palestine

Editor’s Note: Obama’s recent speech in the Turkish parliament - in which he directed some words to the Muslim world - has triggered some different reactions; some saw that Obama while extending a firm hand of friendship to the Muslim World has placed the ball in the Muslim court (click here to read Muqtedar Khan’s article), while others more skeptically waiting to see the American President walk the talk. Khalid Amayreh goes in this opinion piece beyond Obama’s speech to question the policy.

US President Barack Obama and Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visit the Blue mosque, Apr. 7, 2009. (Reuters Photo)

President Obama should be lauded for the generally positive remarks he made during his current visit to Turkey.
Speaking before the Turkish Parliament on April 6, Obama declared that the United States “is not and will never be at war with Islam.”

Needless to say, this tone represents a laudable departure from the hateful anti-Islamic rhetoric that more or less characterized the general discourse of the Bush administration. Bush, undoubtedly one of the most ignorant Presidents in the US history, spoke of “Islamo-fascism” and claimed that Muslims “don’t like our freedoms.”

However, for Obama to leave a lasting impact on American-Muslim relations, he will have to make a real departure, not only from Bush’s poisoned rhetoric, but also from Bush’s odious policies.

Muslims and all people of goodwill around the world don’t expect Obama to transform himself into a paragon of virtue. The American political environment is simply too structurally morbid to allow the appearance, even evolution, of politics based on honesty and virtue.

Universal Need: Less Power Politics

Nonetheless, Obama must realize that America itself, and the world at large, are badly in need of more honesty and more justice and less, I would say much less, power politics.
This is because a world order based on military might, economic power, and realpolitik balances is doomed. Indeed, the present economic mega-crisis haunting the economies of the world is a clear and painful refutation of the present international political order.

In surah Ar-Rum (The Romans) 30:41, the Quran speaks of the appearance of corruption on earth as a result of the actions of men. ” Mischief has appeared on land and sea because of (the meed) that the hands of men have earned, that (Allah) may give them a taste of some of their deeds: in order that they may turn back (from Evil).”

Hence, it is necessary that the leaders of the world, especially those in whose hands lies power, adopt an entirely new approach to world politics since the current system has both outlived its usefulness and proven its destructiveness.

It is in this spirit that billions of people around the world are looking to Obama for a real change; a change that, as the second Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr said, would render the “weak” strong until his rights are properly restored and grievances are properly addressed; and render the “strong” weak until he is forced to give up that which is not his.

It is no secret that America is so much hated in this part of the world due to the policies of greed, rapacity, and oppression adopted for too long by successive American administrations.

This is why President Obama needs to do a lot of soul-searching in order to reach the right conclusion and act on it.

What Needs to Be Changed

Generally speaking, there are three main cardinal problems contributing to the bad chemistry between Arabs and Muslims on the one hand and the United States on the other that need to experience some change.
First, the enduring embrace by the United States of the manifestly criminal entity called Israel, a bellicose and brutal state that lives and thrives on murder, theft, and mendacity.

Thanks to unlimited and unrestricted American support for Israel, the evil state has arrogated our land, destroyed our homes, bulldozed our farms, and transformed our population centers into open-air detention camps.

And whenever we — the aggrieved Palestinians — seek redress at the United Nations’ Security Council, the US government routinely and ritualistically uses its veto power to perpetuate oppression, encourage Israel to keep up its criminal behaviors, and force us to do things that we shouldn’t be doing.

We don’t demand and we don’t expect the United States to completely reverse the course of its relationship with Israel. However, we do expect the Obama administration to tell Israel in no mistakable language that murdering and maiming thousands of innocent civilians with White Phosphorus, even under the false rubric of fighting “terror”, is wrong.

We do expect the American government to tell Israel that building Jewish-only colonies on occupied land is wrong.

And we do expect the American government to make sure that the awesome machines of death given to Israel by the United States are not used to murder civilians and destroy their homes.

And above all, we expect America, Israel’s guardian-ally, to tell Israel that the continued military occupation of another people is unacceptable and inconsistent with American ideals, if indeed this is the case.

For the Sake of True Peace

Unfortunately, the enduring American embrace of Israeli Nazism (the epithet is more than justified in light of recent Israeli actions in Gaza) has created a lasting impression among most Arabs and Muslims that the United States is as evil as Israel and that it is futile and pointless to appeal to the American sense of justice and fairness.
To be sure, there are a thousand examples of American duplicity, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and even schizophrenia pertaining to US policy in the Middle East. It is this highly ugly, immensely unjust, and brazenly immoral policy that eventually brought us to where we are now.

Hence, it is imperative, for the sake of true peace, that the United States espouse a new policy based on simple fairness and honesty toward the Palestinian cause, a policy free of the diabolic restrictions of AIPAC and other Jewish lobbies.

This is what Obama must do if Muslims are to give his proclamations in Ankara the benefit of the doubt.

Secondly, there is the enduring American embrace of Arab tyrannies, these hateful despotic regimes that torment and enslave their own masses in order to stay in power.

In fact, apart from the Israel factor, there is no greater cause for Arab-Muslim antipathy toward the United States than such support for tyrants.

By supporting these corrupt and bankrupt regimes and sustaining them in power, the United States is simply robbing Arab masses from Bahrain to Casablanca of their God-given right to liberty, the very paramount value that the ignoramus Bush claimed Muslims hate.

It is really sad and lamentable that while people around the world are allowed to freely elect their governments and leaders, hundreds of millions of Arabs are denied that right.

In light, Muslims appeal to Obama in the strongest terms to desist from backing and supporting these hateful regimes that constantly torment and humiliate their own people for the sake of remaining in power.

Yes, the United States is worried that true democracy in the Muslim world might bring to power a new breed of leaders that may not be sympathetic to US geopolitical interests. Well, this could be true in the short run, but in the long run any democratically-elected government would have to be pragmatic and take into consideration the cool calculations of governance.

In fact, I am completely sure that a strategic decision by the US to abandon these impotent and bankrupt regimes would be eventually reciprocated with lasting feelings of gratitude by hundreds of millions of Muslims and Arabs.

One Step in the Right Direction

Finally, the United States will have to terminate its anti-Islam policies and discriminatory behavior against Muslims both in the United States and abroad. The latest statements by President Obama are undoubtedly a step in the right direction.
We Muslims understand that countries must do what it takes to protect their legitimate security interests. However, it is amply clear that many of these measures are more vengeful than preventive and more vindictive than objective.

In fact, a smart, wise, objective, and successful anti-terrorism approach should endear itself to the masses, not alienate them.

Eventually, however, terrorism is a tactic not an ideology. And in order to vanquish the lesser terror committed by individuals or groups, the bigger terror committed by states must also be terminated.