The Ugly Truth

TUT Podcast Jan 30, 2012

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:10:27 +0000

The Jewish threat to assassinate Obama–typical ‘out of the overflow of the heart the Jewish mouth speaks’ or something more organized? We are joined by Keith Johnson, Mark Dankof and Michael Collins Piper to discuss the latest threat from Israel that Obama better shape up lest he be shipped out in a pine box.

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Newt Gingrich’s Deep Neocon Ties Drive His Bellicose Middle East Policy

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:36:13 +0000

If elected, Gingrich would be the first American president to emerge from the dark think-tank world born in the Reagan era that gave us the Iraq war and lusts now for an Iranian reprise. The Daily Beast closely examines Gingrich’s long-time association with this discredited group.

The Daily Beast

Casino king Sheldon Adelson’s multi-million-dollar cache of chips-on-the-table for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign has at last made him a household name outside of Las Vegas. But it isn’t just Adelson’s brand of pro-Israel, donor-driven saber-rattling that’s pushing Gingrich into far-out positions on virtually every Middle East-related question, from applauding the assassination of Iranian scientists to painting Palestinians as an historical concoction to requiring loyalty oaths from Muslim governmental appointees.

Since his days in the House, Gingrich has always attached himself to the most extreme neocon elements of American and Israeli politics. Adelson’s $18 million in contributions since 2006 only further fueled Newt’s already chronic case of bombast. And as record-making as Adelson’s super PAC and other gifts to Newt are, they wouldn’t cover the cost of a single airstrike on a single Iranian facility. The price tag on what Gingrich calls “maximum covert operations” and possibly a full-scale war on Iran—both acceptable to Gingrich–would surely compete with the human and fiscal costs of the last conflagration he helped drag us into—the war in Iraq that has gone almost wholly unmentioned this primary season.

If elected, Gingrich would be the first American president to emerge from the dark think-tank world born in the Reagan era that gave us the Iraq War and lusts now for an Iranian reprise. A Likudnik version of the Manchurian candidate, Newt has spent much of his post-Congress life in the grasp of warrior colonies like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the think tank where he became a senior fellow two months after he stepped down as speaker in 1999, remained until he declared for president last May, and worked at times alongside Dick and Lynne Cheney, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Michael Ledeen, and Paul Wolfowitz, the first Bush battalion to euphemistically land in Baghdad, self-dispatched well before 9/11.

As if spending three times as much time at AEI than he did as speaker wasn’t enough bloodless abstraction for him, Gingrich simultaneously became a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, where Don Rumsfeld was welcomed with open arms when George Bush finally had had enough of him and where Condoleezza Rice returned as a senior fellow after her eight years in the Bush administration. Gingrich was one of eight Hoover fellows to serve on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the official war incubator chaired by ringleader Perle, and he also signed on as a board member of the AEI-tied Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a front group recruited by the White House.

Gingrich rushed as well to join the Committee on the Present Danger, a suddenly reincarnated ex-Cold War lobby embarrassed when its managing director had to resign after revelations that he’d lobbied on behalf of a nativist Austrian party that still admired the orderliness of the Third Reich. The Present Danger group, which also included Perle, was closely linked to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, another post-9/11 intellectual arsenal that listed Gingrich as one of its four distinguished advisers, equal in rank to such other pro-Israel hawks as Joe Lieberman.

As early as October 15, 2001, four days before the Afghanistan ground war began, Gingrich was already writing that “defeating the Taleban (sic) without defeating Saddam is like defeating imperial Japan and leaving the Nazis alone.” That November, he helped lay the WMD groundwork for an Iraq invasion, claiming he’d personally talked to a defector who’d headed the Iraq nuclear program and that this unimpeachable source told him “there were 7,000 people working on nuclear weapons in Iraq.” Gingrich concluded that “any reasonable person would have to come to the conclusion” that Saddam “intends to use them the first chance he gets.” This is, said the sage who now makes the same speech about Iran, “Hitler in 1935.” In 2002, his Washington Times op-ed opposed U.N. inspections of WMD facilities, insisting that the case had already been so well established that “every day spent waiting” while inspections proceeded would be “another day for Saddam to expand” his WMD program.

Ken Adelman, another member of the Defense Policy Board, told Salon in 2006 that Rumsfeld “thought very highly of Gingrich” and that, unlike other members of the DPB, Newt was invited repeatedly to visit the U.S. military’s Central Command (Centcom) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and had actually “worked on war plans and proved very valuable,” a contention verified by Rick Tyler, the Gingrich spokesman then who is now running the super PAC funded by Adelson’s bellicose bounty. Gingrich himself told The New Yorker that he had “pretty remarkable access to all senior leadership” in the White House, from Rice to Karl Rove to his old House buddy Dick Cheney, whom he was scheduled to meet with on September 11, 2001.

Gingrich’s regular tipsheet emails to Rumsfeld during the war could run as long as 12 pages. Two ex-Gingrich military aides, William Luti and William Bruner, were ensconced in Doug Feith’s notoriously dubious Pentagon intelligence unit, and reportedly remained in touch with the ex speaker. In an hour-long 2003 interview with Charlie Rose, Gingrich offered an historical endorsement of pre-emptive war, describing it almost as an American habit, and said he was “fairly involved” in the Iraq attack, calling himself “the longest-serving teacher in the military” with “21 years of teaching brigadier and major generals” at the National War College. “I talk to people,” he explained.

One of the people he was talking to was Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a Shiite exile group. Chalabi was a prized pro-Israel Muslim dedicated to the overthrow of Saddam, who was widely seen by AEI hawks and elsewhere as the PLO’s banker, at one time trying to dump a reported $100 million into Yasir Arafat’s coffers. Chalabi convinced his neocon backers that his government in Iraq would end its trade boycott of Israel and even revive a flourishing Iraq-to-Israel oil pipeline.

Just a week after 9/11, Gingrich attended a two-day planning session of Perle’s Defense Policy Board, where Chalabi was the honored guest lecturer. Chalabi was unmistakably the supplier of Gingrich’s ballyhooed secret defector source, whose WMD information would prove as bogus as Chalabi himself. Chalabi’s “handler” inside the Bush administration was Gingrich’s former aide Bruner. In the buildup to the invasion and immediate aftermath, Chalabi, who met Gingrich, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld at AEI events in the late 90s, was a fount of misinformation, derided by intelligence professionals but revered within the Gingrich circle. No one embodies Newt’s and AEI’s clueless Iraq miscalculations better than Chalabi.

That circle had been campaigning for years to install Chalabi as Saddam’s replacement, despite Chalabi’s conviction-in-absentia on Jordan bank fraud charges, 45-year absence from Iraq, and the utter failure of his ++attempted 1995-1996 violent overthrow of the Iraqi regime. Perle, Bolton, Ledeen, Wolfowitz, and other neocons wrote President Clinton a 1998 letter urging him to back Chalabi’s coup, and Gingrich championed the siren call. Gingrich even helped steer one 1998 Iraq liberation bill through Congress, awarding Chalabi’s group up to $97 million in American aid to orchestrate an overthrow. The same crew left no doubt in 2003 and 2004 that dumping Saddam for Chalabi remained their goal.

It’s one thing for Newt, who gave his think-tank life a chatty frat aura during his Rose interview, to drink the AEI, Hoover, DPB, Present Danger, Liberation committee, Cheney/Rummy, Centcom, War College, Chalabi Kool-Aid. It’s quite another to take it intravenously in both arms until bloated.

What is most amazing about the national press corps is that we can have 19 debates and not hear a single memorable question about the war that is America’s greatest international debacle since Vietnam, with no moderator even wondering if Newt’s role as at least a junior planner schmoozing away at Centcom and in the AEI home office of its architects, merits questioning. Everyone agreed in 2008 that Hillary’s war vote and Obama’s early opposition helped decide that race; yet Newt’s enlistment in the Cheney/Rummy army that planned and boosted it goes unmentioned (as does Rick Santorum’s vote for it).

Aren’t we all entitled to learn, as my colleague Peter Beinart already suggested, if Gingrich thinks he made a mistake in the lead-up to the war and if he’s learned anything from it? Since the WMD language about Iran now used by Gingrich and his neocon allies is almost identical to war whoops that took us into Iraq, why should we listen to the same seers? It’s not just the Republican tax cut and deregulation answers on the economy that give us that déjà vu pre-meltdown chill, it’s the Iran drum roll as well. Do all of the media stars on the stage with these guys live in the same time warp, as lesson-learned adverse as the candidates themselves?

When President Obama announced the final pullout of troops from Iraq last December, Gingrich was asked about it on Face the Nation and, as usual, he cherrypicked from a wide variety of his post-invasion quotes to claim clairvoyance about the debacle, citing statements he made in December 2003 to Newsweek about Ambassador Paul Bremer taking the U.S. “off the cliff” by “giving us an assignment we couldn’t do,” ostensibly supplanting the Iraqi government with one of our own. “We’ve lost several thousand young Americans,” he mourned, noting how many more were wounded, “undertaking a project that we couldn’t do.” This remorseless and revisionist post-mortem, perhaps the low point in a gutter campaign, tried to turn the 2003 critique of easy target Bremer upside down, making it appear that Gingrich was a war opponent, though he vowed in that same Newsweek story that “victory” was the “only exit strategy.”

All Gingrich was urging back then, joined by his AEI colleagues, was that the U.S. invent an instant government with well-chosen Iraqis up front, preferably Chalabi, who was in Washington from Iraq when Gingrich did the Newsweek interview, making a pitch to be anointed president. In January 2004, Chalabi attended the state of the union speech as a balcony guest of Laura Bush, and Gingrich celebrated it on Fox that night. He pointed out that Chalabi was sitting right behind the first lady and that Bush had put Chalabi there to send a signal, adding: “That’s exactly what I was hoping for back in that Newsweek interview.” Perle and David Frum published a book that January with the same critique as Gingrich: “Our choice was either to work with Chalabi or to rule Iraq ourselves—and unfortunately we backed ourselves into that second alternative.”

A couple of months after Chalabi’s state of the union debut, U.S. military and Iraqi police, prompted by Bremer, raided Chalabi’s home and office in response to allegations that he was spying for Iran. Even though the Bush administration cut off the monthly stipend it was paying Chalabi after that raid, Gingrich stood by AEI’s man. Chalabi announced for president in 2005, but his party only won one fourth of one percent of the vote, actually slightly better than the one eighth of one percent it won a couple of years later. By 2008, General David Petraeus’s spokesman was declaring Chalabi “dead to us,” as the evidence of his disturbing Iranian ties continued to mount.

While Gingrich intermittently repeated his “occupation” objection into 2006, and continues to say now that he was a “go in and get out” kind of guy, that claim is flatly contradicted by his 2007 denunciations of any deadlines for withdrawal. He called the Democratic deadline bills “the most serious effort to legislate the defeat of America in a generation.” In a 2008 Human Events piece, inspired by the surge, Gingrich proclaimed “success is being achieved and victory is possible,” assailing those who “prefer defeat to continued struggle.”

The single constant of his Iraq potpourri of positions was that one war wasn’t enough. He reveled in references to a needed World War III, called for “a large worldwide strategy of victory,” and regretted that the Bush team “has yet to come to grips with how big and complex” this war on terror has to be, listing the Saudis, Syria, Iran, and others on his own target board. If Bush II felt an obligation to finish the job his papa left undone, Gingrich is ever ready to clean up behind both, facing down or fighting every citadel of terror.

In the January 7 ABC debate, it was Newt who brought up Iraq in response to a question about Afghanistan, noting that the situation there “began decaying within 24 hours of our last troops leaving,” making him sound as if he opposed withdrawal. That’s when Rick Perry had another “oops” moment, urging that we send troops back in, predicting that unless we did, “we’re going to see Iran move back in at the speed of light,” making Iraq an Iranian colony. Newt said, “If you’re worried about the Iranians in Iraq, develop a strategy to replace the Iranian dictatorship and Iraq will be fine.” With the same certitude that he and his sidekicks dragged us into the Iraq War, he was ready to start a new one to finally win the last one.

Gingrich’s ties to the cabal that gave us the Iraq War go back at least to the mid 90s, when he took over the House. In August 1994, he went to Israel with his then wife Marianne on an eight-day trip paid for by AIPAC, the premier pro-Israel lobby. By her own account, that’s when she met Robert Loewenberg, who ran both the Israel Export Development Corporation (IEDC), a business group championing a tax-free, high-tech trade zone, and the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies (IASPS), a think tank with ties to the Likud Party that resembled AEI’s ties to the Republican Party in the U.S. A job for Marianne with IEDC almost immediately materialized, offered shortly before Gingrich’s smashing victory that November, when the Republicans retook the House for the first time in 40 years and Newt was elected speaker. Newt was simultaneously discussing trade policy with Israeli officials. Marianne got a promotion soon after Gingrich became Speaker, though she’d only been with the company a couple of months.

Marianne later freely conceded that the think tank and export company were intertwined, with several of the same funders and staffers, many of which were American. Vin Weber, a former congressman and Newt insider, was both a Washington lobbyist for IEDC, rounding up support for it in Congress, and a trustee of the think tank. Though Marianne worked for the IEDC briefly, she was helping to put together fundraisers for the think tank as late as June 1997. Throughout the time of her varied associations with IEDC and IASPS, which ultimately led to a two-year, uneventful, FBI bribery investigation, her husband was growing closer and closer to Bibi Netanyahu, the Likud leader preparing to challenge either of the two Labor Party prime ministers who served during those years—Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995, and his temporary successor, Shimon Peres.

Netanyahu beat Peres in an exceptionally close election in 1996 and served until 1999, when he badly lost a reelection bid and left office a few months after Gingrich did (Netanyahu was elected again in 2009 and is serving as PM now). “I think Netanyahu and I are visionaries,” said Gingrich after their near-simultaneous demises, “and visionaries have mercurial careers.” Oddly, when Gingrich became speaker in 1995 and was so busy trying to implement the Contract for America in his first hundred days, it was reported that the only visitor he allowed to break his single-minded focus was Netanyahu, who was an opposition leader of a foreign country, an unusual selection. He also met Sheldon Adelson, Netanyahu’s most important American ally, in 1995. Itamer Rabinovich, Israel’s ambassador to Washington from 1993 to 1996, later observed, “At the time, Bibi used Gingrich to pressure the president when it came to issues relating to the peace process.”

The think tank IASPS, a leading peace process opponent with offices in Israel and Washington, prepared a manifesto for Netanyahu that was issued shortly after he took office in June 1996 called “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” that urged the end of “land for peace” negotiations. Gingrich was the only American political leader named in the treatise, which recommended policies it said could “electrify and find support” from a “broad spectrum” of congressional leaders, starting with Newt.

“Clean Break” was primarily written by IASPS’s research director David Wurmser, a little known commander with lots of firepower in Richard Perle’s neocon army. Having worked with Perle since he was in his 20s, Wurmser was recruited by him to found the Middle East Studies unit at AEI shortly after he finished “Clean Break.” He says Gingrich and Perle worked together at AEI on a project. Wurmser is particularly significant now because Gingrich not only named him to his campaign’s 13-member national security advisory team, but also designated him as his primary Middle East adviser. Wurmser told The Daily Beast that Gingrich “understands as an historian and a political observer much more clearly than anyone else” in the presidential field “what divides us” in the Middle East and “causes this tension.”

Perle, Feith, Loewenberg, and Wurmser’s wife, Meyrav, were among the six-member study group that produced “Clean Break,” and Perle hand-delivered it to Netanyahu, though he denied in a brief interview with The Daily Beast that he’d played much of a role in it. Netanyahu used some of its conclusions to undergird his first appearance before a joint session of Congress and in his initial policy discussions with the Clinton administration that July. In fact, IASPS and the related export company where Marianne worked, IEDC, were so tied into the Netanyahu administration that the IEDC lawyer became Bibi’s finance minister.

Though “Clean Break” was a master plan for a radically redrawn Middle East map affecting Syria and Palestine, its centerpiece was a breakthrough call for regime change in Iraq. Ahmad Chalabi was never named in the document, but its reliance on Shia with “strong ties” to Jordanian Hashemites to unseat Saddam was seen by Middle East commentators as a reference to Chalabi, with others noting that the details revealed “telltale intelligence” supplied by Chalabi. When Wurmser published an AEI book in early 1999 called Tyranny’s Ally, another think tank declaration of war against Saddam, he named Chalabi in the second paragraph as his mentor who’d “guided my understanding of the Middle East.”

Wurmser’s salute to Perle was more poignant, saying he’d known Perle since college and that Perle had liberated “many of my family members” from the Czech Republic. Perle wrote the foreword to Wurmser’s book, which celebrated the 1998 formalization of the alliance that “Clean Break” anticipated, with Jordan’s King Hussein and Chalabi having actually met in Washington to endorse a joint insurgency in Iraq, a widely dismissed neocon “fantasy” even at that time. Wurmser devoted a chapter to “Common Cause—Jordan and the Iraqi National Congress,” and Gingrich led the charge on the Hill to fund this dream. By late 2000, Wurmser was writing in the Washington Times that the U.S. had “to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza” to re-establish “that fighting with the U.S. or Israel is suicidal.”

Right after 9/11, Wurmser was retained by Wolfowitz as a Pentagon consultant, followed by a stint as senior adviser to John Bolton (who Newt has announced will be his secretary of state), and concluding with four years under Cheney. When he left in 2007, it was only after he’d already begun criticizing Secretary of State Rice’s new efforts to reignite a peace process and launch talks with Iran, strategies he deplored. He told The Daily Beast that he found Rice’s Palestinian peace talk efforts “inappropriate” and “surreal,” once more in agreement with Gingrich and Netanyahu, who blasted them even though the then Israeli prime minister, Ehut Olmert, participated in the talks. News accounts indicated that Wurmser testified in the grand jury investigating the leaks about CIA agent Valerie Plame and was even the subject of an FBI inquiry looking into the passing of secret information to Israel. Asked if he testified in the Plame case, Wurmser told us, “I am not sure what the legal stuff is—if I’m allowed to say or not. You can say I was affected by it.”

Gingrich’s views on Iran in the campaign are a reiteration of positions Wurmser took as far back as 2007, and are reminiscent of his Iraq advice. Limited strikes against Iranian nuclear targets would be useless, Wurmser said then and Gingrich says now. “Only if what we do is placed in the framework of a fundamental assault on the survival of the regime,” Wurmser declared, “will it have a pick-up among ordinary Iranians. If we start shooting, we must be prepared to fire the last shot. Don’t shoot a bear if you’re not going to kill it.” So, if this is the Iraq sequel Adelson’s seed money would fund in a Gingrich administration, Wurmser is supplying the script.

Since the WMD language about Iran now used by Gingrich and his neocon allies is almost identical to war whoops that took us into Iraq, why should we listen to the same seers?

In addition to Wurmser, another one-time researcher for the defunct IASPS and current Iran war booster, Ilan Berman, is on the Gingrich advisory team, as are two more former colleagues from AEI and one from Hoover. Also on it is ex-CIA director James Woolsey, whom Wurmser saluted in the acknowledgments of his Iraq book, and who was a member of four of the groups Newt joined—Present Danger, Iraq liberation, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Woolsey’s law firm represented Chalabi’s INC.Gingrich’s comfort level with advisers like Wurmser can only mean that he still shares the stubborn worldview inaugurated a decade and a half ago in “Clean Break,” unencumbered by a need to explain their disastrous decade in Iraq and elsewhere. The media treats Wurmser, Newt, and the rest of this hardline and hardheaded constellation of advisers as if none of this happened, as quiescent at the end of this nightmare as they were when it started. Once again, Netanyahu’s needs are the subtext, as they were in 90s, and as Ariel Sharon’s were in the lead-up to the war. In this arena, where trillions of dollars and thousands of lives are at stake, there is no accountability or memory. Even as the same voices call us to war one more time.

Israeli Racism Against Non Jews Especially Africans

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:36:09 +0000

by Laura Stuart

Report for the African Refugee Development Center (ARDC) to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) – submitted January 30, 2012

The State of Israel, which demands that non Jews will recognise it as “The Jewish State” has been involved in the ethnic cleansing of non Jews i.e. Palestine Christian and Muslim Arabs since its creation. Whilst the Israeli Government passes more and more laws which disadvantage non Jews, less well known is the situation of immigrants and asylum seekers from Africa. This video by the African Refugee Development Center is being presented to the United Nations today. The video explains in detail the basis for the racism of Israelis against non Jews.

Rehearsal for mass expulsion of Palestinian citizens? Israel’s deportation of South Sudanese

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:36:04 +0000

Ali Abunimah

electronicintifada.net

Israel has announced it plans to deport thousands of refugees from South Sudan. The reasoning behind the move suggests it could be a rehearsal for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel if an independent Palestinian state is ever established.

AP reports:

Israel’s Interior Ministry says thousands of people from South Sudan must leave or face deportation.

Spokeswoman Sabine Haddad says since the Southern Sudanese have an independent state, they will no longer be given protected status in Israel. The country gained independence from Sudan in July.

Some 7,000 South Sudanese are believed to be in Israel, part of a larger influx of African migrants who have poured into the country in recent years. Some are refugees, while others are seeking employment.

The report also says that the refugees “will be offered voluntary deportation and around $1,300.”

Ominous sign for Palestinians in Israel

This is bad enough for refugees from South Sudan – who whether or not they now have an independent state – come from a country still torn by war and violence.

But Israeli leaders have already hinted that they could use the same type of logic to justify removal of Palestinian citizens of Israel if a nominally independent Palestinian state is established on scraps of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In 2007, Tzipi Livni, then Israeli foreign minister, and now opposition leader, stated:

The Palestinian state to be established will not be a solution just for the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. It is designed to provide a comprehensive national solution – for those living in Judea and Samaria, and the refugees camps, and even for the [Arab] citizens of Israel.

Livni, often misrepresented as a “dovish” figure, has been consistent in her desire to get rid of Palestinian citizens of Israel in order to maintain Jewish ethnic purity, so much so, that even former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was shocked by Livni’s extreme views.

During Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in 2008, the Palestine Papers revealed, Livni was one of the foremost proponents of transferring areas populated by Palestinians from within Israel to the putative Palestinian state.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and other Israeli politicians openly advocate various kinds of “transfer” schemes.

Paying for “voluntary” transfer

Nor is the notion of paying people to leave “voluntarily” a new one. Israeli far-right leaders have long advocated paying Palestinians to leave – or making life so hard for them they have no choice but to do so – a phenomenon they call “voluntary transfer.” Moledet and other Israeli parties that have been part of, or supported the government, have long advocated this approach.

Last year the Israeli government announced it was even willing to pay third countries to take unwanted Africans off its hands.

Partition leads to ethnic cleansing

The prediction that Israel would use any kind of Palestinian “state” as a dumping ground for unwanted populations is by no means far-fetched. In a paper in the journal Ethnopolitics last year, I explained how a “two-state solution” would be more likely to lead to further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians than to peace.

More warning signs, in the just announced expulsion of the South Sudanese refugees, are there.

DU destroying Afghans’ gene pool’

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:36:00 +0000

I have seen people die without any physical signs of injuries on their bodies in Afghanistan. There were bizarre scenes of birds melting on trees.”

The United States’ use of radioactive munitions in Afghanistan has destroyed the people’s health and mutilated the genetic future of the country, Press TV reports.

Dr. Mohammad Daud Miraki, the author of Afghanistan After Democracy: The Untold Story Through Photographic Images, told Press TV’s Kabul correspondent on Monday that the US has committed horrific crimes against the people of Afghanistan.

He said the US used depleted uranium in the country and Afghan babies were being born with severe deformities.

Exposure to depleted uranium causes genetic damage, birth defects, cancer, diabetes, immune system damage, and other serious health problems.

Miraki has described this as genocide in his book, which provides an insight into the grimness of life under the US occupation.

He says that he has seen people die without any physical signs of injuries to their bodies in Afghanistan. “And then there were bizarre scenes of birds melting on trees,” he adds.

In his book, birth defects are depicted with graphic images. He said he was overwhelmed by the number of these cases.

Miraki noted that the US used a massive amount of depleted uranium weapons in late 2001.

He went on to say that US forces are still using these weapons in the country.

Miraki’s book also says that it was a lie that the war was launched to introduce democracy in Afghanistan and accuses the US of betraying the Afghan people under the pretext of democracy and reconstruction.

MK Eichler–Israeli media is ‘anti-Semitic’

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:35:55 +0000

MK Yisrael Eichler accuses media of using Nazi tactics to turn public against ultra-Orthodox sector

ed note–where do we even begin with something as insane as this?

Well, I guess the thing to note from this is that Jewish interests will use the ‘anti-Semite’ thing against ANYONE, even their own, and even when there is no ‘logical’ position from which to do it. The 2nd thing to note is the TYPICAL maneuver here–In this case, the haredim in Israel have painted themselves as the dictionary picture of obnoxious, unruly headcases, and yet, rather than do some sort of examination of conscience in deciding if there is the slightest possibility that their own behavior has played a part in the troubles existing, they AUTOMATICALLY throw it on ‘the other guy’, in this case, the more left-leaning Jews.

At the end of the exercise however, the one thing that all can take away from this spectacle is something which we say here often–which is that Jewish thinking is a mental disorder that births all sorts of secondary afflictions as well and it is no wonder these people have been driven out of every sane country which they have ever inhabited.

ynet

MK Yisrael Eichler (United Torah Judaism) accused the media on Monday of turning the Israeli public against the ultra-Orthodox sector by publishing “anti-Semitic talkbacks and incitement.”

Speaking before the Knesset plenum, Eichler likened the media’s conduct to that of the Weimar Republic, referring to the early Nazi regime in Germany.

The remarks were made during a sparsely attended Knesset session discussing a series nonconfidence votes, brought forth by the Kadima, Labor, Meretz, Balad, Hadash and United Arab List-Ta’al factions. The criticism was primarily directed at Housing and Construction Minister Ariel Atias’ proposed criteria for affordable housing eligibility, which some politicians claim favors the haredi sector.

Earlier Monday, the Israel Land administration unanimously approved the proposed regulations, which grant priority housing to those who have served in the army but do not favor households where both partners work.

The parties blasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for “violating the middle class’ basic right for … affordable housing.”

‘Shas cares for the weak’

The housing and construction minister deflected the criticism Monday, blaming his predecessors for failing to reform the eligibility criteria.

“We fought to reduce the price of land by 50%,” Atias argued. “We fought for the young couples. We aspired to make sure that the criteria benefit the widest cross-section of the Israeli population.”

Atias stressed that his party, Shas, does not represent any particular sector. “Shas is the only party that cares for the weak,” he said.

Atias also denied the claims that the new affordable housing standard favors haredi families because it prioritizes couples who have been married for years over newlyweds.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai addressed in his speech the housing shortage within the Arab sector, saying that the State must begin to “build upwards” to solve the problem.

“I don’t see it as a cultural issue,” Yishai said during the session. “Tall buildings are present across the Arab sector. When there is no space and the population grows, building upwards is necessary.”

Israel–Iran Must Be Attacked Before Summer

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:35:51 +0000

International sanctions on Iran are constraining Israel from taking military action against Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites, which must be mounted by summer, officials say

The one thing that has not been brought up for discussion within this entire debate over fighting Israel’s wars for her is this–

As the rest of the world is told on a daily basis–GOD GAVE THE JEWS THAT LAND, and the ’proof’ of this is the bible…

Now, the bible has ALL SORTS of stories detailing how ‘GOD’ interviened on the Jews’ behalf when they were being ‘poisecuted’ and oppressed…Remember all that ‘Egypt’ business, the plagues, parting the Red Sea and all the rest of it?

So the question that a sane, rational world should be asking right now is this–

WHERE IS ‘GOD’ IN ALL OF THIS NOW? HAS HE BECOME SO OLD AND WEAK THAT NOW HE HAS TO HAVE THE AMERICANS DO HIS WORK FOR HIM?

But, alas, these questions (as well as many others) will NOT be asked as the world continues to slide down the path to ultimate destruction as a result of the madness that afflicts these people. Indeed, the only questions that will be asked will come centuries later, as historians and others–freed of the mental illness afflicting so many in the west these days, will discuss amongst themselves the unaswerable question ’How did these people not see that they were participating in their own destruction?’

ynet

Israeli officials are quietly conceding that new international sanctions targeting Iran’s suspect nuclear program, while welcome, are further constraining Israel’s ability to take military action – just as a window of opportunity is closing because Tehran is moving more of its installations underground.

The officials said that Israel must act by the summer if it wants to effectively attack Iran’s program.

A key question in the debate is how much damage Israel, or anyone else, can inflict, and whether it would be worth the risk of a possible counterstrike.

Israel has been a leading voice in the international calls to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Like the West, it believes the Iranians are moving toward nuclear weapons capability – a charge Tehran denies.

Israel contends a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten its survival. It also fears an Iranian bomb would touch off a nuclear arms race in a region still largely hostile to Israel.

Israeli leaders say they prefer a diplomatic solution. But – skeptical of international resolve – Israel refuses to rule out the use of force, saying frequently that “all options are on the table.”

Is time running out?

After calling for tougher sanctions against Iran at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Friday: “We must not waste time on this matter; the Iranians continue to advance (toward nuclear weapons), identifying every crack and squeezing through. Time is urgently running out.” Key Israeli defense officials believe that the time to strike, if such a decision is made, would have to be by the middle of this year.

Complicating the task is the assessment that Iran is stepping up efforts to move its work on enriching uranium deep underground.

Several officials at the heart of the decision-making structure, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were discussing some of Israel’s deepest secrets, said they feel compelled to give the sanctions time.

In this way, somewhat paradoxically, the new economic sanctions the US and Europe are imposing – while meeting a repeated Israeli request – have emerged as an obstacle to military action.

An Israeli strike would risk shattering the US-led diplomatic front that has imposed four additional rounds of sanctions on Iran and jolt the shaky world economy by causing oil prices to spike. Still, the officials said that if Israel feels no alternative but to take military action, it will do so.

The US has sold Israel dozens of 100 GBU-28 laser-guided “bunker-buster” bombs. The 2.5-ton bombs are capable of penetrating more than 20 feet of solid concrete.

It’s not clear how much damage the bunker-busters could actually do. Iran’s main enrichment site at Natanz is believed to be about 25 feet (6 meters) underground and protected by two concrete walls.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told The Wall Street Journal last week that even more sophisticated US bunker-busters aren’t powerful enough to penetrate all of Iran’s defenses.

‘Strike won’t really delay Iran’

Many believe that in the event of a strike, Iran would likely unleash its large arsenal of missiles capable of striking Israel.

Iran’s local proxies, Hezbollah to Israel’s north and Hamas to the south, possess tens of thousands of short-range rockets and missiles. American soldiers in the Persian Gulf might come under fire. Islamist backers of Iran could target civilians all over the world.

The prospect of a new conflagration in the Mideast is one reason cited by some influential Israeli figures, like recently retired spy chief Meir Dagan, when arguing against an Israeli military attack.

Perhaps the biggest factor in the Israeli thinking is how much damage an airstrike could even cause.

“What will tip the scales in favor or against an attack is whether we will really be able to do inflict serious damage,” said Yiftah Shapir, an expert in nuclear arms proliferation at Tel Aviv University. “That will be more important than whether we are ready to absorb (the casualties) of an attack.”

Israeli officials believe the Iranian nuclear program is so far advanced that any attack would delay it by two to three years at best, but not destroy it.

“It’s a very advanced program with many facilities, some very large and some very fortified. To destroy them you need a series of massive assaults for two to three weeks, a month, something like that,” Shapir said.

A one-time surgical strike, the most likely attack by Israel, “can’t do more than politically declare that we aren’t willing to tolerate” a nuclear Iran, Shapir said.

That has raised speculation that Israel’s veiled threats are no more than attempts to get Iran to back down.

Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble: Eye of Newt and the ‘Invented’ Palestinians

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:35:46 +0000

“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble”

By Richard Edmondson

leftwing-christian.net

Normally I don’t write a whole lot on presidential politics for the simple reason that it’s such a Zionist-controlled cesspool it often seems hardly worth commenting on. Moreover, it has always struck me as intellectually dishonest to single out this or that Republican—as a lot of leftwing bloggers do—for criticism, when the Democrats, including the one presently in the White House, are just as bad if not worse. Even so, here are a few items I couldn’t let pass, the first having to do with Newt Gingrich’s comment about the Palestinians being an “invented” people.

Gingrich seems like a reasonably intelligent fellow, and I’m guessing he knows enough about American history to know that white Europeans were not the original Americans. Here are what the original Americans looked like:

Here is what Gingrich looks like:

Gingrich is a white European. For white Europeans to come to America and kill off and displace the original Americans, turn around and claim to be the rightful owners of the land, all the while designating themselves as “Americans” while consigning the original Americans to squalid reservations in the process—very much required a considerable amount of “inventing.” So where does Gingrich get off accusing another people of being “invented”?

Here is what those whom Gingrich dismisses as “invented” look like. These are the original, native, indigenous Palestinians. Notice the brown skin—very similar in shade to the original Americans…

…however, these are Semites. Semites are the people indigenous to the Middle East—just like Native Americans are the people indigenous to America. In other words, the Middle East is the part of the planet Earth in which these people originated. Am I going too fast for you, Newt? Slow me down if I am.

Now as it so happens, there is one other group of people I would like to mention—Ashkenazi Jews. Here is what an Ashkenazi Jew looks like (who happens to be named Benjamin Netanyahu.):

Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites. They are white Europeans. Compare the two photos. Notice a certain familial resemblance:

Let me repeat: Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites, they are white Europeans. For white European/Ashkenazis to come to Palestine and kill off and displace the original Semites, turn around and claim to be the rightful owners of the land, all the while designating themselves as “Semites” while consigning the original Semites to squalid reservations in the process—very much required a certain amount of “inventing.”

(Yes, I know—the terrain is starting to get repetitious, but given the subject matter, it’s inevitable.)

U.S. map showing Native American reservations

Occupied Palestine map showing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

Are “Ashkenazi Jews” an invented people? Gingrich should avail himself of a book written by a man named Shlomo Sand. And before he makes any more references to the Palestinians as “invented” he should actually, well, open the book and read it. Of course, we don’t know if he’ll bother to do that. Gingrich’s comment about the Palestinians is the bombast of an ignoramus, but rather than suffer public rebuke over his utterance, Gingrich, who in 1999 resigned from Congress after being found guilty of ethics violations, was rewarded with a $5 million check from Zionist Sheldon Adelson—with an additional $5 million donation recently being announced by Adelson’s wife.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives seems to have a history of deserting the women in his life precisely at moments they find themselves battling debilitating illnesses. Gingrich divorced his first wife, Jackie, as she was being treated for cancer, and then said adios to his second wife, Marianne, after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The 68-year-old is now on his third marriage. It was the second wife, Marianne, who recently offered some telling revelations about her former husband in an interview with ABC News, disclosing, among other things, that Gingrich wanted to have an “open marriage” in which he would be free to see other women while still remaining married to her—a request Marianne rejected. Moreover, it seems there was one woman in particular Newt was desirous of spending time with—the blonde congressional aide who went on to become his present wife, Callista.

Gingrich and wife Callista in photo from November of 2000—3 months after their wedding

Marianne today

Marianne told ABC her husband had been advised by the doctor treating her for MS that stress should be avoided, but that this evidently did not stop him from moving for a divorce just months after she had been diagnosed.

In her most provocative comments, the ex-Mrs. Gingrich said Newt sought an “open marriage” arrangement so he could have a mistress and a wife.

She said when Gingrich admitted to a six-year affair with a Congressional aide, he asked her if she would share him with the other woman, Callista, who is now married to Gingrich.

“And I just stared at him and he said, ‘Callista doesn’t care what I do,’” Marianne Gingrich told ABC News. “He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”

Marianne described her “shock” at Gingrich’s behavior, including how she says she learned he conducted his affair with Callista “in my bedroom in our apartment in Washington.”

He always called me at night,” she recalled, “and always ended with ‘I love you.’ Well, she was listening.”

Perhaps even more eye-brow-raising is that, according to ABC, all this was going on at the same time Gingrich was publicly denouncing Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. If you go to the ABC link and watch the video, you’ll see film footage taken from that era showing Gingrich declaring in a speech he delivered, “There’s no administration in American history with less moral authority than the Clinton-Gore administration.”

One would be hard-pressed to point to a more glaring example of hypocrisy. What are we to make of the fact that such an unscrupulous hypocrite has been embraced by a prominent and wealthy Zionist contributor? Does this not tell us something about, a) presidential politics in America, and, b) the state of Israel itself?

Adelson’s support is widely acknowledged as having been a key factor in Gingrich’s victory in the South Carolina primary. According to Wikipedia, the casino magnate, with a net worth of $21.5 billion, is the 8^th wealthiest American and 16^th wealthiest person in the world. Speaking of Gingrich, Adelson has said , “There is not a better advocate for Israel”—and now thanks to this spigot of wealth, the Georgia Republican has notched up his first presidential primary win. Could there possibly be a plainer, more illustrative example of how Zionism, and Zionist money, have corrupted American politics?

And here’s another rhetorical question: Why does Israel seem to draw so much of its support from some of the most corrupt people on the planet? What is it about the Zionist state that they find so likeable and praiseworthy? I’m not simply talking about the 535 members of the U.S. Congress. No. From France to Germany, from Britain to America, from Belgium to the Netherlands to Denmark, from Spain to Italy to Greece, and from the IMF to the World Bank to the UN Security Council—virtually throughout the entire Western world—the most seriously corrupt, repressive, and dishonest specimens of humanity walking upright on the earth all seem to share one thing in common: they all love Israel.

Imagine that.

All of which brings me to a second point—one which I very much wanted to make about the American political system (although it probably applies to the political systems in all the other countries mentioned as well): namely that it’s a rigged game. It is rigged to ensure that one outcome and one outcome only will occur. Moreover it’s an outcome that will occur repetitively, over and over, time and time again, regardless of the changing faces, the evolving issues, or the advancing body of human thought and knowledge. What I’m speaking of is this: that the system is geared to ensure that the only candidates who stand more than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected are the absolute dregs of American society. The most unprincipled. The most corrupt. The most deceitful, profligate, hypocritical, and immoral. The absolute dregs. This is the way the process has been engineered.

In her interview with ABC, Marianne expressed the opinion that Gingrich “lacks the moral character to be president,” but with all due respect to this good lady who endured 18 years of marriage to a hypocrite, she seems a bit confused as to what exactly the job qualifications are for serving as chief executive in this country. Certainly—as we all know—there are bright and talented Americans, Americans who, if given the chance, could, and definitely would, bring the country out of the morass in which it presently finds itself, people of courage, honor, and rectitude, people who remain true to their principles, who would react with indignation were someone to offer them money to invade another country and kill millions of its people, and who would probably even have the person offering such a bribe arrested. Yes. There are lots of Americans like that. They are all over the place. Quite literally. But the thing to keep in mind is that these are the very last people the top 1 percent would ever, ever want to see running the country. Far preferable to them are the moral degenerates. Moral degenerates and miscreants are invariably the ones who get the most money and most media attention, and don’t for a moment believe that’s by accident. As I say the system is rigged. There is no longer anything even resembling a democracy.

Another presidential issue I wanted to comment on, and which kind of ties in with everything I said about Gingrich,

is Mitt Romney’s recent impromptu encounter with an Occupy Wall Street protester. Here it is. Check it out. Now let me see if I understand him correctly. Romney is saying that the rich should continue getting richer and the poor poorer (the trend of the last 30 years or so), and anyone who objects to this state of affairs is being—“divisive”? It isn’t merely that his logic fails the infallibility test. The twin arguments he’s advancing—that wealth should be concentrated and that America should remain united—are diametrically, contradictorily opposed to one another. Wealth disparity, by definition, is a divide. It is a divide between rich and poor. America is very much a divided nation at this moment. It is a country in which CEOs make 325 times the average worker’s pay (up from 263 times as recently as 2009). By trying to reduce economic inequality, the OWS movement is essentially trying to restore unity to the country. If Romney really wanted a united America—rather than an America with a vast gulf between rich and poor—he would actually champion the OWS protesters rather than attack them, but we won’t hear anything like that from Romney because the richest 1 percent are funding his campaign. Romney, who by the way also insists that corporations are people , vows that if elected president, his first foreign policy trip will be to Israel. No surprise there. But perhaps we could expect him to make a stop at the Cayman Islands on his way home. According to his tax returns, Romney holds a stake in an enterprise called BCIP Trust Associates III, but regulatory filings show that the partnership, valued at $5 million to $25 million, is registered in the Cayman Islands. This presumably would render it sheltered from U.S. taxation. However, with the predictability of a military press office flack denying civilian casualties in the latest drone attack, Romney’s campaign spokesperson, Andrea Saul, has insisted everything is strictly legal and on the up and up.

“The Romney’s investments in funds established in the Cayman Islands are taxed in the very same way they would be if those funds were established in the United States. These are not tax havens and it is false to say so.”

Romney and his wife Ann made $27 million in 2010, and up until that same year held millions in a Swiss bank account. Despite this, their 2010 federal tax rate worked out to 13.9 percent, “a rate typical of households earning about $80,000 a year,” reported the New York Times.

As I said, it’s a bit intellectually dishonest to criticize Republicans while omitting the sins of the Democrats, so let’s talk for a moment about Obama. In his state of the union address last week (full text here ), the chief executive spouted a lot of faux populism, painting himself as a man of action who intends to impose new regulations on Wall Street and close loopholes favoring the rich (apparently hoping people will forget that Wall Street bankers have consistently been among his biggest backers), while championing average Americans. In fact this seems to be his strategy for defeating the Republicans this year: let them flap their jaws about the wonders of the “free market” system while in turn casting himself as a populist—when in fact he is every bit as pro-rich as the Republicans are. In this respect, Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And of course, significantly missing from his speech was any mention of his recent signing of the National Defense Authorization Act, giving the military the authority to arrest U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely without trial, essentially shredding the last remnants of our constitutional safeguards. It is an ominous, ill-boding development (one of many these days, it seems) that places all of us in jeopardy.

But bad as the NDAA is—and it is indeed bad—that is not the only issue pertaining to the current president that merits attention. A recent campaign video has been the focus of considerable discussion of late, a video so bad, so exaggerated in terms of its worshipful tones, its deference to the Israeli lobby, that it seems to have left some people almost literally cringing. We see images of Obama wearing a yarmulke, visiting the Western Wall, etc.—as well as footage from various speeches in which he extols the virtues of the Zionist state, not his own country mind you, but Israel. Take a look:

The tone is quite reverential, would you not agree? Particularly striking I think is this image:

Obama is in essence worshipping at the altar of the Holocaust. Ali Abunimah, at the Electronic Intifada, says the video “takes Israel pandering to dangerous levels,” but actually even more than that is going on. The video is in essence presenting the Zionist state as an object of religious adoration. This is the kind of thing you’d expect to see at a Christians United for Israel conference—not from the Obama campaign. “When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries in which the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland.” What we have here basically is adulation to a deity. Israel is being deified. And of course interjected through it all are Israeli officials bestowing their kosher seal of approval upon the U.S. head of state.

A question has arisen as to whether this is actually an “official” Obama campaign video—or possibly something put together simply to make the commander-in-chief of the United States look like a beggarly, brownnosing fawner. In point of fact, though, if you examine closely you will see that it appears to have been uploaded to YouTube by BarackObamadotcom. So yes, it does look as if it’s a genuine campaign video. But of course, what would you expect? Populist rhetoric is all well and good—it plays well to the masses—but it takes fawning to get Zionist money, and it takes Zionist money to get elected.

And so it goes in the rigged system of U.S. politics. And of course if all else fails, our 1 percent may always fall back upon the electronic voting machinesto ensure this year’s election results are the ones they desire…

“For a charm of power trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble…”

The Smirk

Thought I would throw this into the mix (or the cauldron, if you prefer) as well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human being smirk quite this often in a 23-minute time segment as does one of the guests on this program. Are facial expressions an indicator of what resides in the heart? Speaking purely subjectively here—and based upon my own limited contact with habitual smirkers—the thing we see forming and dissipating…forming and dissipating…at periodic intervals throughout much of the show, seems to suggest something abnormal, an almost psychopathological disgust for any and all things decent.

One statement made on the show is in fact correct, however. The American people are not sheep. They are in fact much worse off than sheep. Sheep follow a herd instinct, a trait that is in their DNA. The herd instinct is a product of nature, one that functions to help ensure the survival of the entire herd, not simply single individuals, and it is a behavior observable in many species of animals. What the American people have succumbed to is not an innate, naturally-occurring herd instinct, but something far more sinister.

Mossad chief holds secret U.S. meetings on Iran nuclear threat, Senate panel reveals

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:35:41 +0000

During a broadcasted meeting of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, CIA Director, panel Chairperson indicate they met Tamir Pardo in Washington this week; U.S. official: Iran willing to attack U.S. targets if threatened.

ed note–??????????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was barely 2 weeks ago that several mainstream news outlets in the US revealed that MOSSAD had been posing as CIA using American money and passports and were RECRUITING Jundallah terrorists to kill innocent people in Iran, a move that puts AMERICAN intelligence agents in danger, and yet that den of vipers known as the Senate is MEETING WITH THE VERY MAN HEADING THE AGENCY THAT WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS???????

Haaretz

Mossad chief Tamir Pardo held secret talks with top U.S. officials in recent days, cursory comments made during a public Senate hearing indicated on Tuesday.

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The clandestine Washington visit was exposed during a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was participated by CIA Director David Petraeus, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate panel.

During the meeting, Feinstein asked Clapper whether or not Israel intended to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, with the top U.S. intelligence official answering that he would rather discuss the issue behind closed doors.

Feinstein then indicated that she had met Mossad chief Pardo earlier in the week in Washington, with Petraeus adding that he too met Pardo and cited what he called Israel’s growing concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The CIA chief also said that it was important to note that Israel considered a nuclear Iran as an existential threat.

The entire exchange was broadcasted live on American television.

Referring to the Iran’s nuclear progress, Clapper told the Senate panel that “Iran’s technical advancement, particularly in uranium enrichment, strengthens our assessment that Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons, making the central issue its political will to do so.”

“These advancements contribute to our judgment that Iran is technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon, if it so chooses,” Clapper added, saying that the U.S. judged “Iran would likely choose missile delivery as its preferred method of delivering a nuclear weapon.”

Clapper also indicated that the 2011 Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi envoy to the U.S. indicated that the Iranian leadership “changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”

“We are also concerned about Iranian plotting against U.S. or allied interests overseas. Iran’s willingness to sponsor future attacks in the United States or against our interests abroad probably will be shaped by Tehran’s evaluation of the costs it bears for the plot against the ambassador as well as Iranian leaders’ perceptions of U.S. threats against the regime,” Clapper added.

News of the Mossad chief’s reported Washington visit came as, also on Sunday, President Shimon Peres said that Iran’s “evil” leadership mustn’t be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons capability.

Referring to Iran’s contentious nuclear program, the president called the issue “ours and the world’s central problem at this time, accusing Iran of attempting to achieve regional and “even global hegemony.”

“Nuclear weapons mustn’t be allowed to fall into the hands of Iran’s Ayatollah regime,” Peres said, calling Iran’s religious leadership the “most morally corrupt regime in the world.”

Hinting at the possibility of a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the president reiterated the Israeli stance, according to which “no option should be ruled out in our dealing with the Iranian danger. This is an existential threat.”

“It is the duty of the international community to prevent evil and nuclear [weapons] from coming together. That is the obligations of most of the leaders of the free world, one which they must meet,” Peres said.

Peres: Iran’s ‘evil’ leaders must not be allowed to gain nuclear weapons

crescentandcross — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:35:36 +0000

Speaking at Herzliya Conference, President urges resumption of peace talks with Palestinians, saying talks are the only way to end the Mideast conflict.

Ed note–Iran is not building nukes and Israel knows it, but she can’t say the REAL REASON she wants Iran destroyed.

Israel’s plans for the future including explanding her borders to those outlined in the bible, which is between the Nile and Euphrates rivers, bringing it almost right/smack-dab against Iran. She knows that Iran–if NOT destroyed–will oppose these moves, and as the US becomes increasingly unpopular in the region, that Iran serves as a focal point around which anti-American/anti-Israeli sentiments can coalesce. Therefore, Iran must be destroyed for this reason, so that Israel can continue with her plans of territorial theft unimpeded.

Haaretz

Iran’s “evil” leaders cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, President Shimon Peres said on Tuesday, calling the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions the world’s single most important issue.

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Peres’ comments came at the opening of the Herzliya Conference, which was attended by World Bank President Robert Zoellick, Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, and former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.

On what he called “the moral significance of this battle,” the president spoke of an Iranian regime which “executes people for their views. It funds, trains, and guides terrorists to spread terror and murder across the globe.”

“This is a way of operation that must be condemned by everyone everywhere,” Peres said, adding that, “eventually, the current Iranian leadership offers the future only destruction. It threatens human rights and the peace of nations.”

In his address to the Herzliya Conference, president Peres also spoke of the necessity to restart peace negotiations with the Palestinians, saying that ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the only way to ensure Israel isn’t made into the scapegoat of a rapidly changing Middle East.

If peace is not advanced, the president said, religious extremism could gain control of the region, “an extremism which Iran attempts to lead using its two proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, as well as other extensions throughout the region.”

“The terror organizations are trying to drag Israel into an Arab internal struggle so they can direct the masses’ rage against us. They have no rehabilitation plans, only incitement habits,” Peres added.

The only way to prevent this takeover of extremism, then, is “to put an end to the conflict between us and the Palestinians, similarly to the agreements with Egypt and Jordan.”

“When I say we must, I say so because I believe ending the conflict is possible. I’ve known the people heading the Palestinian Authority for decades,” Peres said, adding that he believed “[Palestinian] President Mahmoud Abbas and [Palestinian] Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are worthy partners who do not wish to see the conflict go further.”

Speaking of the reasons for the recent inability to restart peace talks, the president said that the two issues mainly holding up negotiations were “borders and security.”

“The borders must be set as to determine the security arrangements, and must be set soon. This kind of negotiations must take place outside the box, and away from the headlines. Through it both sides will achieve something which cannot be achieved without talks – an end to the conflict,” Peres added.

The president’s comments came after, on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that peace prospects with the Palestinians were looking poor.

“As things stand now, according to what happened over the past few days – when the Palestinians refused even to discuss Israel’s security needs with us – the signs are not particularly good,” he told his cabinet in public remarks.

Netanyahu’s remarks came after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told reporters in Ramallah on Saturday that Israel was to blame for the failure of the recent round of talks to relaunch direct talks.

Abbas claimed that during talks mediated by Jordan in recent weeks, Israel had presented an unclear position on security matters and on the question of borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state. Palestinian sources said Israel’s border proposal would have prevented the establishment a Palestinian state.

Palestinian officials said last week an Israeli negotiator’s verbal presentation on Wednesday of ideas for borders and security arrangements of a future Palestinian state was a non-starter, envisaging a fenced-off territory of cantons that would preserve most Jewish settlements.

Netanyahu said he still hoped the Palestinians would “come to their senses and continue the talks so that we can move on to real negotiations.”

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held five rounds of exploratory talks in Jordan, part of a push by international mediators to revive negotiations suspended in 2010 in a dispute over Jewish settlement building in the occupied West Bank.