"...Two Lebanese newspapers have claimed that Mr Sader is in the custody of Lebanese military intelligence, although the army denies that it is holding him.(BUT THEY DO hold him) .....It also emerged last week that another suspected Mossad agent was arrested when military intelligence officers raided a petrol station near Nabatiyah ....Hezbollah's highly effective counter-intelligence unit is responsible for most discoveries of Mossad cells in Lebanon. ..Last November Beirut newspapers reported the arrest of a Lebanese man who had been spying for Israel since the early 1980s. ...The covert war works both ways, with Hezbollah building up a network of espionage cells in Israel and even recruiting Israeli soldiers.."
This holiday season the multiplexes, the art houses and the glossy for-your-consideration ads in publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter will be overrun with Nazis.
A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance of peaked caps and riding breeches, lightning-bolt collar pins and swastika armbands, as an unusually large cadre of prominent actors assumes the burden of embodying the most profound and consequential evil of the recent past.
The near-simultaneous appearance of all these movies is to some degree a coincidence, but it throws into relief the curious fact that early 21st-century culture, in Europe and America, on screen and in books, is intensely, perhaps morbidly preoccupied with the great political trauma of the mid-20th century.
The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?
David Thewlis, playing a death camp commandant in "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," will be joined by Willem Dafoe, who takes on a similar role in "Adam Resurrected," Paul Schrader's new film. In "The Reader," directed by Stephen Daldry and based on Bernhard Schlink's best-selling novel of the same name, Kate Winslet plays a former concentration camp guard tried for war crimes. Tom Cruise, the star of Bryan Singer's "Valkyrie," wears the uniform of the Third Reich though his character, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, was not a true-believing Nazi but rather a patriotic German military officer involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
And of course there will be plenty of room on screen for the victims and survivors of Hitler's regime. Adam, the title character in "Adam Resurrected," is a Berlin nightclub performer, played by Jeff Goldblum, who finds himself, after enduring the camps, confined to an Israeli asylum. And in Edward Zwick's "Defiance," Daniel Craig plays Tuvia Bielski, the real-life leader of a group of Jewish partisans who fought the Germans in the forests of Belarus. Meanwhile, the wave of European cinema dealing with Nazism and the Holocaust - most prominently represented on American screens in recent years by "The Counterfeiters," which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film back in February, and earlier aspirants like "Downfall" and "Black Book" - continued this autumn with the U.S. releases of "A Secret" and "One Day You'll Understand," two quiet, powerful French-language films exploring themes of memory and its suppression.
The moral imperatives imposed by the slaughter of European Jews are Never Again and Never Forget, which mean, logically, that the story of the Holocaust must be repeated again and again. But the sheer scale of the atrocity - the six million extinguished lives and the millions more that were indelibly scarred, damaged and disrupted - suggests that the research, documentation and imaginative reconstruction, the building of memorials and museums, the writing of books and scripts, no matter how scrupulous and exhaustive, will necessarily be partial, inadequate and belated. And this tragic foreknowledge of insufficiency, which might be inhibiting, turns out, on the contrary, to spur the creation of more and more material.
Shortly after the war the German critic T.W. Adorno declared that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." This observation has frequently been interpreted, aphoristically, as a fiat of silence, a prohibition against the use of the ordinary tools of culture to address the extraordinary, inassimilable fact of genocide. But those tools are what we have to work with. The perception that this catastrophe overwhelms conventional aesthetic strategies and traditions has led to the creation of a remarkable range of formally innovative work, including the lyric poetry of Paul Celan, the early prose works of Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary "Shoah," Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and Peter Eisenmann's Berlin memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazism.
To describe these as masterpieces is not especially controversial, but it is also, as Adorno perhaps anticipated, somehow unseemly. If the Holocaust can inspire a great work of art, then it can also incubate the ambition to achieve such greatness, and thus open itself up, like everything else, to exploitation, pretense and vulgarity. Worse, the aura that still surrounds this topic - the sense that it must be treated with a special measure of tact and awe - can be appropriated by clumsy, sentimental and meretricious films or books. Thus the immodest indecency of a movie like Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning "Life Is Beautiful" was, during its initial period of triumph, deflected onto those with the temerity to criticize it.
Israeli society between Ashkenazi Jews, whose families come from Eastern Europe, and Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews, who come from the Arab countries of the Middle East. 
Author Biography
Lieberman’s past declarations and actions explain this statement very clearly.
He resides in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, built in 1982 near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, with his wife and three children. The town is one of Israel's smaller settlements—home to about 700 Israelis—beyond which there are smaller caravan outposts of even more hard-line settlers. In 1999, one of his sons was apparently beaten by a neighbor’s son, who consequently was beaten (some say also bitten) by the Israel Beytenu leader. His thuggish behavior includes a strong anti-Arab rhetoric that led him to declare “At eight o’clock, we bomb all commercial centers, at 12 o’clock we bomb all fuel stations, and at two o’clock in the afternoon, we bomb all the banks, and we keep the border crossings open,” referring to occupied Palestinian territories.
In 1993 he became Likud’s Director General, and from 1996 and 1997 he was appointed Director-General of the Prime Minister's office during Benjamin Netanyahu mandate.
In 1999 he left Likud to found Israel Beytenu or Israel Is Our Home, a far right, ultranationalist and populist party that is now the third largest political party in Israel, in a bid to obtain 1 million Russian immigrant votes, by the fact that they support a harder line in negotiations with the Palestinians. According to the Leiberman website, his party “fulfills the three cardinal principles of Zionism: Aliyah (immigration), settlement, and defense of our homeland.”
In 2001, Lieberman was appointed National Infrastructure Minister in Ariel Sharon's government but resigned the post at the beginning of 2002 after declaring that Sharon was not acting forcefully enough against the Palestinians. In March 2002, Lieberman proposed an ultimatum to the Palestinians to halt all terror activities: “if it were up to me, I would notify the Palestinian Authority that tomorrow at ten in the morning we would bomb all their places of business in Ramallah, for example." This led Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to respond that excessive military measures could lead to accusations of war crimes.
Again, in 2003 he obtained the Transportation Ministry in Sharon’s Government. During the service Lieberman initiated water-treatment projects and he legislated the “Natural Gas Law” to create a more competitive energy industry. In July 2003, reacting to a commitment made by Ariel Sharon to the US, where amnesty could be given to approximately 350 Palestinian prisoners including members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Lieberman said "It would be better to drown these prisoners in the Dead Sea if possible, since that's the lowest point in the world," and continued, stating his willingness, as Minister of Transportation, to supply buses to take the prisoners there. He was fired by Sharon in June 2004 because he did not support the Disengagement Plan from the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the northern West Bank (Kadim, Ganim, Homesh and Sa-Nur).
He ran for elections in 2006 on a three issue campaign: the future of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the Israeli economy, and the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Lieberman, frequently compared to Austria's Jörg Haider and France's Jean-Marie le Pen, said: “The linkage between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli Arab population—it will destroy us, it is impossible. What is the logic of creating one and a half countries for one people and a half country for the Jewish people?". “The answer,” he stated “is exchanges of land and populations and making a homogeneous, Jewish country as much as possible,” adding that “The source of the conflict here is not territory, it is not occupation, it is not settlers. It is a clash between two peoples and two religions. Anywhere in the world where there are two peoples and two religions, whether it's the former Yugoslavia or the Caucasus region in Russia or in Northern Ireland, there is conflict.” He proposed to redraw Israel's borders by transferring many Israeli Arab towns to Palestinian jurisdiction and annexing large Jewish settlements in the West Bank to Israel. Our target is to create a Jewish state and provide security.”
In 2006, Olmert appointed him Minister of Strategic Affairs, a brand new ministry created to face the Iranian threat. The Sphinx of Minsk (as journalist Yossi Verter defined him) has a controversial idea about the atomic bombs, suggesting to bomb Gaza, Teheran, Beirut and also the Aswan Dam in order to flood Cairo. A Haaretz analyst in 2006 stated that “The choice of the most unrestrained and irresponsible man around for this job constitutes a strategic threat in its own right.” During a special Knesset plenary session, referring to the fact that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak never visits Israel, he stated : “Every self respecting leader would have conditioned such meetings on reciprocation. If he wants to talks to us, he should come here, and if he doesn't want to come, he can go to hell.” Once again, President Shimon Peres issued an official apology to the Egyptian President.
In 2008, Lieberman resigned from Olmert’s Government in protest to the peace talks undertaken with the Palestinian Authority, declaring: “I have said this dozens of times: Our job in the government is to stop the Annapolis process.” As soon as investigations concerning the Jericho Casino affair were dismissed, he became active again: he was accused of taking a 650,000$ bribe through a South Africa based company which he controlled in 2001.
The star of the 2009 elections draws a program which puts first “Bringing the Zionist Dream to Life,” but also calls for expanding infrastructures, boosting the economy, and stopping crime and “locking it behind bars.” The main points of his campaign, however, referred to the Arabic population within Israel and outside the country.
Concerning the first point, he proposed the mottos “no citizenship without loyalty” and “only Lieberman understands Arabic,” stating that “in order to enjoy the full rights of an Israeli citizen, one must also take on responsibilities. We will work to enact a citizenship law, which will require all Israeli citizens to pledge allegiance to the State and perform military or alternative national service,” therefore “turning citizenship from a universal right into a benefit for certain sectors of the public” as Haaretz stated. He added later that this was not a racist campaign because “We do more to promote loyalty, we have to have the courage to be unapologetically patriotic. What is at stake is our ability to defend our country from a threat from within and to confer on our children an unambiguous sense of pride as Jews living in a land that is rightfully theirs.” He suggested, as in 2006, to take “responsibility for areas populated by an Arab majority, such as Umm al-Fahm in the Triangle, [which] will be transferred to the Palestinian Authority. In parallel, areas in Judea and Samaria and strongholds of Jewish settlement will be officially annexed to Israel.”
There is more than enough here to deduce that the negotiations process will be at risk with such a man in the government coalition.
Evangelical Zionism is our own descriptive term. It is not a denomination, but an acquired disease in the body of Christianity. The universal symptom is the belief that “the political state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophesies.” Jesus said, love you brother, even your enemy; Evangelical Zionism, in its extreme morphs, holds that Old Testament scripture allows the extermination of the Palestinians.
She wrote to us and called with several questions common to recovering Evangelical Zionists making them feel quite alone amid the hatred that is directed toward the people of Palestine and, in fact, toward all of Islam. She is learning to be a missionary for peace within her own church. Her story is not unique, but her tactful determination is. We have asked her to allow us to share her experience with you.
Elena was raised a Catholic and became an evangelical protestant during her years of child-rearing. There she stayed for most of her adult years until she discovered that the church she had joined had a primary dedication to evangelical Zionist teachings and beliefs. This became clear to her as she learned of Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians, and her church’s unconditional and unquestioning support of Israel.
Like so many of us she had left one or more churches she found infected with Evangelical Zionism, looking for the prefect church. She did not find it. She finally settled into a small congregation with a Reform theology. She became an active part of the congregation and started a home bible study to encourage other church members. Strangely, it was here she was to discover her worst frustration. While her denomination’s theology denies evangelical Zionism, some of its members believe and teach a form of it.
“if it was up to me I would kill them all.”
On the positive side, her pastor says he shares her anti-war view and sympathy for Palestinians, but does not discuss it from the pulpit. He does not seem to have the disease but perhaps he fears to speak out against it. However, the volunteer leader of the Bible study, Carl, is a denominational church planner assigned to her church. When war became a hot issue, Elena discovered that all the class supported the U.S. wars and Israeli occupation. The study leader horrified her by telling her privately, “if it was up to me I would kill them all.”
Elena responded by purchasing and giving away a detailed secular book on Zionism in an attempt to show her friends what Zionists privately think of Christians, but it did not work. Elena’s letter ended with familiar and painful words asking if we can recommend another church for her and saying,
“I feel like an outcast and I did nothing wrong! I know I believed the scoffed, dispensationalist lie for almost my entire Christian life, but when you read the truth you just can’t turn your back on it.”
She provided an exchange of messages with their Bible study leader, Carl. In it he denies he told her he would kill all the Palestinians; Instead he now asserts “he would cut off food and water to them.”
Saints Bibi and Obama 
Photomontage made on 22 Nov 2008
As ludicrous as it may have seemed for the ultra-hawkish Bibi, the man who described the 9-11 twin tower attacks as “very good”, to attempt to emulate the messianic persona put out by the Obama propaganda machine, Natanyahu’s election website and his entire campaign was an imitation of Barky’s, down to even hiring two of Obama’s election campaign staff, Josh Isay and Bill Knapp .
Kadima gained one seat more than Likud’s 27 seats, due to the fact that in Israel Occupied Palestine, the voting public doesn’t choose its leaders based upon projected good deeds and miracles, not even with the assurance that the candidate can walk on water, given enough time and votes.
The voters in Israel Occupied Palestine want more than promises. They want to count the actual bodies, hence the higher number of votes which went to Livni for her undeniable achievements in certain crucial categories, including:
1. number of recently accumulated Palestinian cadavers, preferably civilian, with a proportion of at least one third small children
2. number of amputations
3. number of orphans, widows and severely wounded
4. number of destroyed homes, hospitals, schools, playgrounds and UN buildings
5. number of new cholera cases
6. number of newly created refugees
7. and last but not least of course, the ability to hobnob at EU dinner parties with other mass murderers
However, with the support of Avigdor “Kingmaker” Lieberman’s party forming a right-wing coalition with Likud, Bibi has managed to become Israel’s new PM, and the world now grits its teeth in anticipation of even worse atrocities than those committed by the previous gang of war criminals.
Added by Reham Alhelsi on February 21, 2009 at 8:40pm
“OPEN THE FLOOD GATES FOR IMMIGRATION,” declared the Jew, Senator Jacob Javits of New York, in his and the Jewish Lobby’s promotion of the Immigration Law of 1965. In plain terms, Javits & US Jewry were declaring war on America’s dispossessed majority, white Christian Americans.
American Jewry, a highly organized, intensely ethnocentric & abominably wealthy minority, is hell bent on ruling over a pummeled and guilt-ridden white majority.
Jewry accomplishes this by diluting and fragmenting the white Christian population through ‘multiculturalism’ vis-a-vis acts of Congress and the Jewish-run mass media. Jews fear and will do anything in their power, (and they now have all the power in America), to eradicate any semblance of nationalism emanating from white Christian Americans.
“Diversity Is Our Strength!” is the Jewish-conceived media/law-making campaign of Jewry’s beloved pluralistic society, yet another Jewish-inspired agenda for an America society expunged of a white Christian dominating presence.
But while “diverse” Americans, whether naturalized or illegal immigrants, are now competing with American born whites in the job market, it is the Jews, and the Jews only, who grow stronger in such a scenario, while diverse groups grow economically and politically weaker and serve only to dilute any opposition to Jewish-Zionist hegemony.
In his classic work, The Dispossessed Majority, Wilmot Robertson points out that since the Anti-Semitic taboo has made it impossible to submit the Jewish question to open inquiry, Jews have set themselves above the rules of conventional democratic conduct.
Robertson’s parting shot to the Jewish minority is his profound observation that “the most truly disadvantaged are those who are hated for their virtues not their vices, who insist on playing the game of life with opponents who have long ago abandoned the rules.”
Having grown up as a Jew in an upper middle class synagogue, I can attest from my experiences within Jewry, that there is only one “rule” that Jews subscribe to. And this rule is faithfully observed by Jews under a question they ask themselves regarding all American issues: “Is it good for the Jews?” But Jews never ask, “Is it good for America?”
Take for instance the concept of the immigration dream of an American “melting pot.” This slogan was put forth by the Jew, Israel Zangwill, in his 1909 book, From The Ghetto To The Melting Pot.
Though Jews will tout the “melting pot” idea to the highest heavens, they themselves do not want to “melt.” Jews would rather die than live in a black suburban neighborhood. Rather, the Jews are intent on retaining their ethnocentric identity in their own wealthy neighborhoods and they use this identity to present themselves, (though abominably wealthy), as a “persecuted” racial group.
The current economic crisis is a two-edged sword for American Jewry. On the one hand, Jews fear that an economic downturn will provoke a backlash against them for being responsible for the crisis. This fear was justified recently in a November 2008 poll which showed that 31% of Europeans blame Jews for the global financial crisis.
But on the other hand, an economic crisis coupled with a rising military state under the Zionist puppet-president, Barack Obama, ensures that Jews will be protected from a civil uprising against them.
Accentuating this scenario, the New York Times reported on February 14, 2009, that the American military will begin recruiting immigrants who are living in this country with temporary visas, offering them the chance to become US citizens in as little as six months. These immigrants will have no loyalties to white American citizens and no concern for American freedoms AND they will be biased toward the all-powerful Jews.
Should Americans blame the Jews for the current economic crisis as 31% of Europeans now do? Some Americans are inclined to do so when pointing out that the loss of America’s manufacturing base due to offshoring of American jobs is a significant cause of the economic downturn. The Jewish-dominated garment industry, a leader in offshoring, is one of the most globalized industries existing today.
In recent years, Jewish-owned American chains such as The Gap, The Limited, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Tommy Hilfiger, and Reebok, have been purchasing from sweatshops located in China, East Asia, and Bangladesh. By the year 2000 at the turn of the century, over 60% of America’s clothing needs were imported from overseas.
The Jewish-dominated toy industry has also been outsourcing their toy-making since the 1990’s. Both the garment and toy industries, run mostly by Jews, have been among the first to outsource their products and thus began destroying America’s tax revenue base.
The dispossession of white Americans from their former spheres of influence in the work place, political affairs, and banking, (the Saving & Loans banks, now defunct, for instance), has been usurped by a small elitist group using the cover of Judaism to protect them from criticism of their affairs. To censure Jewry’s activities is to invite the wrath of the Jewish community upon oneself as being guilty of “persecuting” a “downtrodden” minority.
And: How Zionist Jews Control America Click Here
And: 6 Stages Of America’s Decline Click Here
And: America’s Coming Civil Anguish Click Here
And: Federal Reserve: A Private Jew Bank Strangling America! Click Here
And: A Military Dictatorship Coming To America Click Here
...And the keffiyeh makes headlines once again. After last summer, when conservative freakshow Michelle Malkin threw a hissy fit over a Dunkin' Donuts commercial featuring Rachael Ray in a keffiyeh-ish scarf and Dunkin' Donuts pulled the commercial, I thought it was over. As the winds of autumn began, I noticed more keffiyehs wrapped around the necks of American fashionistas and thought "well, at least mainstream means I won't get dirty looks." But now, it seems that the ignorant bigots of America are at it again.
Earlier this week, two Pittsburgh high school students were forced to meet with administrators after it was determined that the red and white keffiyehs they were wearing around their necks were "disruptive to class."
Ah yes, the disruptive keffiyeh. I know mine's always talking and passing notes...I can hardly get any work done!
The students, both Arab-American, say they've worn the keffiyeh for years as a sign of their heritage, rather than of politics. And although one of the students was sent home the week prior for wearing an "RIP Israel" t-shirt to school, he admits he was aware that violated school rules...but that this doesn't.
The students also defend themselves in this video by CAIR:
As Pierre Tristam explains in this piece, the keffiyeh is "as old as the sands of Sudan and Saudi Arabia." It only gained political significance in the past century. As Tristam also notes (and I agree):
“Terrorism” and Palestinian militancy are a convenient excuse for a more unseemly, unspoken objection—the much more ordinary objection to Arabs and Arab culture as acceptably desirable by American consumers. Making symbols of Arab culture desirable and acceptable to mainstream consumers makes it immediately more difficult to vilify Arabs and, by obvious extension, Palestinians, Shiites, Sunnis (or whatever fills the blanks of reigning American prejudice). And vilifying Arabs is one of the last overtly permissible prejudices in American culture these days, because it more easily justifies the country’s immense and mounting investment in blood, guts, steel and dollars at Arabs’ expense (in Iraq primarily, in the greater Arab and south Asian region where the American military is deployed generally).The way I see it, school administrators have two choices: ban scarves in school entirely, just as they did with bandannas in my youth (as they risked "gang affiliation"), or let it go. Forbidding the keffiyeh alone is discrimination.
On February 2, 2009, then foreign minister Tzipi Livni, one of the architects of the 2008-2009 Gaza Massacre and Israel’s recent election winner, addressed a gathering that draws together both Israeli and international participants from the highest levels of government, business, and academia to discuss Israel’s pressing national, regional and global strategic issues -- known as the Annual Herzliya Conference.
As her theme centered on how the world around Israel is changing, on how its threats are evolving, and thus how the state was presented with fresh ‘opportunities’, she said something that keeps replaying in my mind:
“Being used to feeling secluded in the Middle East, with the whole Arab world against us, we look around and suddenly notice other countries alongside Israel - Arab, Islamic countries, who no longer view Israel as the enemy, countries who understand that Iran is the main enemy, seeing Iran as no less a threat than we do. Radical Islam is a threat of which these nations understand the meaning better than others do, because they are familiar with the same radical elements at home. And these nations are on the same side as us.”
Broadly speaking, the massacre in Gaza has further bisected the Arab governments along two major ideological lines: One that directs surrendering government to abide by Zionist orders --referred to as “moderates” in Western lexicon; and a second that follows a more pragmatic approach by insisting on appropriate reaction and practical solutions to addressing Israeli Apartheid policies in Palestine.
The Accomplices
According the Palestine Information Centre – an independent media group aiming to balance the often distorted pictures presented in mainstream media’s coverage of the Middle East conflict – while Livni gave her address at Herzliya, the Egyptian government detonated tunnels and installed surveillance cameras along the infamous Rafah border crossing with Gaza. As Israel continues its 20-month blockade of Gaza, the Egyptian government also halted the supply of desperately needed fuel citing the Apartheid State’s demands for security. Mark Lavie of the Associated Press (AP) states: “Responding to Israel's concerns, U.S. Army engineers arrived at the Gaza-Egypt frontier on Sunday to set up ground-penetrating radar to detect smuggling tunnels. Inside the Rafah terminal four army trucks loaded with wooden crates and drills could be seen accompanied by four U.S. Army engineers. The Egyptian officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity”. In fact, on December 31, 2008 the Israeli daily Haaretz even confirmed Ehud Olmert saying that “a number of Arab leaders have encouraged him to continue military pressure on Hamas, and not to stop the military operation against Gaza”.
According to Ali Abunimah, a Middle East expert and author of “One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse”, part of the reasoning behind Arab support of the attacks on Gaza is to send a clear message to their own people; that all forms of dissent against them would also be brutally crushed. He writes that “the US-backed ‘moderate’ dictatorships and absolute monarchies led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia supported the Israeli plan hoping to demonstrate to their own people that resistance -- whether against Israel or their own bankrupt regimes – [would be] futile”.
It is worth pointing out that the Saudi-Zionist alliance dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. In his book entitled “Churchill & the Jews”, Michael Joseph Cohen exposes the Philby Plan of 1939: an scheme devised by Jack Philby – a British colonial office intelligence operative and advisor to Ibin Saud [the first ruler of the kingdom] – that effectively got the Zionists to set up a £20 million fund that ensures the new king’s succession across the Arabian peninsula, provided that the surrounding Arab nations absorb the fore-seeable creation and misery of the Palestinian refugees. The meeting was held in London with David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizman, where Philby offered substantial Jewish immigration to Palestine if they would support Ibn Saud's son and eventual successor, Faisal. Months later, accompanied by Saudi foreign affairs official Fuad Bey Hamza, Philby proposed to Weizmann that they pay Ibn Saud the £20 million to be used to resettle Palestinian Arabs. According to Philby, the Zionist leadership accepted the Philby Plan whilst Ibn Saud insisted that the plan be kept secret for fear of being accused of treason against the Arab cause. The short term goals of this agreement were for political and territorial control. Yet there is existed a longer term agenda, the roots of which date much further back; an agenda that Livni categorically exposed in her speech at Herzliya.
The Shia-Sunni division is being nurtured by the state of Israel to further isolate Iran’s role in the region. Interestingly, as Israel’s latest elections demonstrate a clear shift towards fascism, extreme right-wing elements have pushed Sunni leaders in Saudi Arabia and Egypt to revive old rifts between Muslims at the expense of thousands of dead, injured, and displaced Palestinians in Gaza; their own co-religionists sacrificed for a fear of “Persian influence” in the Middle East. On January 17th 2009, Sami Moubayed wrote a brilliant piece published in the Asia Times entitled “Old Battles, New Contenders in the Gulf”. In it, he highlights that “the main reason for animosity was Iran. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah argued that Iran was flexing its muscle in the Arab world - via Syria - in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories. They feared Iranian power and its pledge to expand the Islamic Revolution of 1979 would inspire Saudi Shi'ites, exposing the weaknesses of Saudi Wahhabi Islam and perhaps bringing down the House of Saud”. In fact, when Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, top Saudi and Egyptian officials saw the war as a blessing in disguise, hoping the Israeli Occupation Forces will complete the job of removing the Shia influence in internal Lebanese politics. The complicit nature of their policies colludes them with the Apartheid state to satisfy American over-lordship in the region.
The Pragmatics
The growing concern over the continuous division between the Arabs and Iran has inspired others to have a more pragmatic approach to deal with Israeli policy (i.e. war crimes) in Palestine. Qatar’s role as the prime broker between the region’s political rivals has emerged as a fresh and much needed alternative to the sell-out regimes of the Middle East. Its popularity had risen dramatically following its engagement and eventual agreement of Lebanon’s political factions. And when the war on Gaza started in late December, Qatar and Syria were the first to demand a ceasefire even though Cairo and Riyadh reasoned that if Hamas was not annihilated, Iran would have gained full control of the Gaza Strip. In fact, Qatar’s ruler Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani “appear[ed] on national television [and] called on Arab states with ties to Israel - a clear reference to Egypt - to sever these links and insisted that all Arabs should attend the summit in Doha [that] Friday - this time a message to Saudi Arabia. Countering his plans, the Saudis called for an Islamic summit in Riyadh on the Thursday to drown the Qatari initiative. Firing back, Hamad called for freezing the Arab Peace Initiative, which was once called the Abdullah Plan”, Moubayed writes. To back up his rhetoric, and as Venezuela and Bolivia expelled the Israeli ambassadors from their capitals, the Emir of Qatar ended trade relations with the Israeli state by closing down its commercial office in Doha.
Despite Turkey’s military, economic, and political ties with Israel, the Gaza Massacre has ignited its streets with demonstrations so passionate and vocal that they’ve exposed the uneasy diplomatic relation with the Apartheid State. As a key mediator in the region stepping up its efforts to promote the channel of dialogue with Hamas, Turkish authorities openly admitted that there will be no cutting ties with Israel. Rather, it chose a more strategic route to engage the Jewish state with diplomatic force, exposing its war crimes to the international community, and seeking an immediate end to the suffering in Gaza. Most of the world has witnessed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s lambasting of Israel to its President Shimon Peres at Davos. And given that Turkey’s real power is centered on its military and security establishment that remains close the US-Zionist alliance, many argued that Turkey's vocal role was nothing but a false facade without power to instill strong action.
Yet according to Oxford Professor Avi Shlaim (a former IOF soldier), Israel needs Turkey more than Turkey needs Israel. It is this imbalance that not only elucidates Turkey’s strategy, but puts Israel’s right-wing tendencies in a serious predicament. In an exclusive interview with the Turkish daily Today's Zaman on February 7th, Shlaim explains: “Turkey has begun to realize this role as a mediator particularly in the context of Israeli-Syrian relations. It is Turkey, not anyone else. Not the UN, not the US, not Britain, not the Quartet but Turkey who sponsored the indirect talks between Syria and Israel. It is a major contribution to the Middle East peace process. Turkey is an honest broker. Turkey has very good relations with Israel and with the Arabs. Turkey has a strategic alliance with Israel. It can be an honest broker -- unlike America, which has been a dishonest broker”. To drive this point further, on the same day a Shlaim’s interview, Iran’s Press TV carried a report of a law-suit based on Article 13 of the Turkish Penal Code that allows the country's courts to try those charged with committing genocide and torture, even if the crime was perpetrated in another country. Thus, Turkish state prosecutors have started an investigation into alleged Israeli crimes against humanity and genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Relation with Iran
What Israel is thus managing to achieve is an overhaul of the Pragmatic camp by cultivating a Shia or Persian threat in the form “Radical Islam” in the Sunni Arab world – when in fact it the expansionist ideology of the Apartheid State that poses the greatest threat to the region’s security, independence, and sustainability. The Egyptian and Saudi Arabian positions continue the Israeli rhetoric on Gaza, instead of representing the will of their people, aggressively denouncing the massacre, and join the united stance with the pragmatic players. To them, the enemy is Iran and its supposed influence over the region, playing a tune that compliments the American and Zionist rhetoric, and completely neglects the religious, cultural, and ethnic ties with the Persian state.
For it is a commonly known fact that many Khaleejis (Arabs from the Gulf) either speak Farsi or are Shias. Countries like Bahrain, the UAE, and Qatar have strong, peaceful, and vibrant Shia communities. In fact, while growing economic and financial sanctions have led to a reduction of trade between Iran and Europe in recent years, the volume of trade between Iran and GCC countries has steadily increased. Bilateral Iran-GCC trade has increased by five-fold from $1.71 billion in 2000 to $8.71 billion in 2007, according to the Middle East Times. Whilst the Iranian nation counts its historical presence in the region in the thousands of the years, colonial Zionism officially exists for only 61 years. Similarly, whereas the cultural exchange between Arabs and Persians is timeless, the Arab-Zionist alliance is a modern phenomena bent on the dispossession and ethnic-cleansing of its own kind.
When I heard Livni’s speech, I remember asking myself: Are we, as Arabs, finally reaching the point where the unconditional normalization with the Apartheid State of Israel is just around the corner? Is the complete liquidation of Palestinian human rights therefore in the vicinity? And if Palestinian capitulation is what the US and Europe call a ‘true partner for peace’, is the Arab world finally admitting defeat and allowing the Zionist movement to achieve its imperialistic goals in the region? Is Eretz Israel – an Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates – next for us all? Is this the steady state that world leaders and the international community at large refer to when they talk about “peace in the Middle East”?
I then – rather nervously – smirked to myself and thought: Well if anyone could lay out the bottom line, it might as well be Livni. What she said could not have been further from the truth. And for her to address her own supporters with such blatant honesty and revealing statements, not only effectively embarrasses certain Arab leaders, but it quite simply reveals their true nature as part of the same political establishment and world order that Israel’s Apartheid system has come to represent.
- Mohannad El-Khairy is a Palestinian who moved to Dubai after living in Canada for 18 years. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
"....One of the Mossad's most important missions from the day of its inception was Israel's "special relations" with countries that did not recognize it and with minorities like the Christians in Lebanon and the Kurds in Iraq. This was the declared policy of the governments of Israel: Israel will be prepared to come to the aid of any threatened minority that is fighting for its existence - but it will not fight in its stead..... Iran, under the shah, took an interest in Lebanon and flew in arms to defend the Christians.....
The Mossad's relations with the Christians enabled the senior IDF brass, including the commanders of the forces in the field, to reconnoiter as far as Beirut, and to receive the necessary intelligence.....
In January 1982, at a meeting in Beirut with top Christian leaders - Pierre Gemayel, Camille Chamoun, Georges Adwan and Etienne Saqr (Abu Arz) - Sharon set forth the battle plans......"Posted by G, Z, & or B at 9:46 PM
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