Israel hiding behind the "Iranian threat"
Steven Zhou
The Canadian Charger
July 22, 2010
With the recent formation of The Emergency Committee for Israel, the neoconservative and Likudnik characters on the American right have stepped up their anti-Iranian lobbying efforts. Among other things, they have again brought up how a nuclear Iran would pose an "imminent threat" that would tear the region apart.
This renewed exaggeration of an Iranian threat to Israel comes at a time when Israel is clearly being shown to be a strategic liability to the U.S., a fact the Israel Lobby has so far concealed with great success.
Israel’s obsession with Iran, though, is two-sided. While some perceive a nuclear Iran to be a major existential threat, others on Israel’s far right cite pragmatic, if not cynical, reasons for this rancid rhetoric.
The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is undoubtedly using the threat of Iran to create a climate of fear that will distract world attention from The Gaza Massacre and the Flotilla incident, both of which have seriously undermined Israel’s standing in the world.
This tactic also reinforces the rhetoric about Israel’s “sacred bond” with the U.S. in the war against “Islamic Terrorism,” while not having to answer for its own nuclear arsenal
Since Israel’s American-backed arsenal of nuclear weapons does not receive nearly as much attention as does Iran’s attempts to acquire nuclear power, it might be useful to look at things from Iran’s perspective.
For its part, the U.S. has managed to have weak, but still damaging, sanctions imposed on Iran, while Israel, a genuine nuclear power, constantly shouts about bombing it.
Recently, the U.S. navy shipped missiles and more than 300 “bunker busters” to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which is within striking distance of Iran. Furthermore, several of the countries that border Iran have U.S. troops.
Considering these factors, along with the fact that Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, even hawkish analysts within the Israeli establishment have noted Iran’s need to have at least the option of a nuclear deterrent.
Israeli strategist Martin Van Creveld, for example, has noted that Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “not crazy at all,” and that he would essentially do what Ahmadinejad is doing if he were in his position.
Furthermore, Iran can cite UN Security Council Resolution 1887, which states that threats of force are illegal when settling nuclear disputes. No amount of anti-Iranian hysteria, though, can hide the fact that Israel is at a crossroads.
Its only chance of preserving a Jewish state is through a two-state solution with the Palestinians, but settlement-building throughout the years has pretty much destroyed that option.
Israel’s unpopularity is also costing the U.S. all kinds of strategic leverage in the region and precipitating hatred toward both countries. Given its need for oil, a complete lack of U.S. allies in the Middle East would prove disastrous.
Confronted with an insoluble domestic problem and the possibility of having no friends in the world, we see why Israel is forced to hide behind the “Iranian threat” to prove its “strategic worth” to the U.S.
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Zionist Jews manufacture fear and teach hate
The Canadian Charger
July 7, 2010
Yoav Shamir's documentary Defamation has been added to The Canadian Charger's recommended summer book/movie list. The film is a must-see for anyone wanting to understand how Zionist Jews manufacture fear, and teach Israeli schoolchildren to hate.
In his review, Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli Jew who participated in the occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s, writes:
“The film is an astonishing exposure of the morbid conditions that entangle contemporary Jewish secular identity. It explores and ridicules the current notion of anti-Semitism and the lobbies that are engaged in disseminating such a fear. It also exposes those Jewish ethnic campaigners who, for some reason, insist on shaping their identity around the phantasmic idea of being ‘racially’ persecuted, defamed or hated.”
One of the ethnic Jewish campaigners that Shamir exposes is Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Shamir, a young Israeli Jew, goes to New York to interview Foxman to get an answer to the following question: Could a Jew today lose his or her job just for being a Jew? If not, why is anti-Semitism still an important concern for the Anti-Defamation League.
Foxman says anti-Semitism comes from even “self-hating Jews,” who are critical of the Israeli government’s policies.
All anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian Jews are targeted by ADL, including Dr. Norman Finkelstein, whom Shamir also interviews.
Finkelstein, you will remember, lost his job as a professor because of a concerted smear campaign and has been barred from entering Israel.
Shamir even joined Foxman on his mission to the Ukraine, and filmed the ADL director lecturing that country’s leaders on the lack of moral equivalence between Stalin’s genocidal starvation of 11 million Ukrainians, and the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.
The highlight of Defamation, though, comes when Israeli high school students are taken on a tightly scripted and closely supervised indoctrination tour of Auschwitz before joining the army.
“I want to kill,” said one student afterwards. The lesson of the trip—the world is the enemy of the Jews—is accomplished.
That lesson was put on display following young Israeli soldiers killed nine civilians on the Gaza flotilla on May 31.
As described by Dr. Ilan Pappé in Scotland’s The Herald: “[There were] official parades celebrating the heroism of the commandos who stormed the ship and demonstrations by schoolchildren giving their unequivocal support for the government against the new wave of anti-Semitism.”
