The world prays for wisdom and cool of Iranians

By: Martin Love

TEHRAN, Nov. 10 (MNA) – An Iranian friend, a photographer known internationally for fine documentary work, asked plaintively last week when the US might stop trying to sink Iran and Iranians. I had no ready answer, but the question was painful to hear because I could also hear concern, grief and empathy for others.

No question the re-imposition of extreme sanctions is damaging, particularly for average Iranians. The Trump Administration would have the Iranian people believe it is on their side (it’s not) as the administration also tries to claim Iran’s government is the cause of all the troubles. (Clearly, Trump and gangsters want chaos in Iran and the fall of the current leadership.) But claiming that the government is largely at fault is simply a lie.

Iran is historically and resource rich and has a talented population, but one currently and primarily beleaguered by US sanctions and hostility from the Saudis, Israelis and Emiratis, the sole serious US allies in the Middle East. Sure, things look grim currently to most Iranians like my famous Iranian photographer friend, but one might argue that the situation for the US is potentially even grimmer.

There are Middle Eastern natives right here in my hometown in North Carolina who understand the situation far better than most Americans. One happens to be the elderly manager of a BP gasoline station who arrived in the US from Jordan long ago. Whenever I stop by we talk and he said this week, “The US is not that far away from becoming a ‘Third World’ country.” And in some ways, he is correct even if such a judgement seems implausible.

Consider what a box the US has put itself in to since the early 1970s. It’s a box long in the making. Richard Nixon’s decision in the early 1970s to cancel the gold standard and Washington’s arrangement with the Saudis to have oil priced in dollars, which in part allowed the US to finance its economy through the simple action of printing fiat currency, supported by the Petrodollar, required other countries to buy US Treasury bonds.

The pricing of oil in dollars has been crucial, but the US has in effect been printing waste paper (fiat dollars) and obtaining consumer goods and resources in return, a situation that has permitted the US to squander many trillions of dollars on wars without suffering economic consequences so far. Yet those economic consequences are looming like never before because in many respects the US is so heavily in debt now it is virtually broke – unless the fiat money printing can continue in exchange for valuable resources.

This explains why the US cannot easily scale down its relationship with Riyadh, and why the Saudis have been allowed to erect such a now widely recognized corrupt, undemocratic and repressive regime and also promote jihadism, even as the murder of Jamal Khashoggi last month has provoked many, even in the US, to condemn the Saudis. And remember, many of the 9/11 operators were Saudis, and Saudi Arabia was not sanctioned as a result of 9/11 and its longstanding statecraft of using jihadist terrorism as its primary geopolitical methodology.

It’s a “box” alright that the US cannot extricate itself from given the risk that extrication would likely crash the lynchpin of US imperialism and economic power – the dollar. And in the background the Zionists have been wielding enormous influence in Washington as the sole other serious “ally” of the US in the Mideast, and that country, too, is certainly one of the most reviled on earth for its aggressions and war crimes and human rights violations. No country has ever had such horrible “allies” in the Mideast as the US now has, and it can’t easily let go of either. And it’s sad the US did not use the JCPOA towards additional accords with Tehran.

Meanwhile, Iran has long been the prime target of US, Saudi and Zionist ire, especially since the revolution in 1979. The propaganda has been intense against the Islamic Republic for decades mostly because Iran has refused to cave to US demands and has remained independent and has not jumped in to the toxic “box” of craven users and abusers in league with US efforts to maintain its destructive Empire of Chaos.

From the US and its “allies” point of view, nothing Iran has done has been met with favor, including the widely respected signing and negotiation of the JCPOA, which the US rejected last May. But most of the rest of the world community has and remains in favor of Iran and is trying to maintain the JCPOA, and respects Iran for its adherence to it. Iran, in fact, has been looking far better to the world community and the US propaganda against it has been looking to many increasingly like, well, bullshit.
It’s a world that is growing mighty tired of US, Saudi and Zionist military aggressions. This is above all a delicate, slow PROCESS wherein the US and its allies in the Mideast are losing their credibility, friends and respect, and above all, this process must be allowed to continue. (Foreign minister Javad Zarif has suggested Iran is willing to negotiate with the US but only on a basis of US respect for Iran.)

And this process could be interrupted, even reversed, by hardliners in Iran who, feeling defensive and set upon and fearful of losing their power, use threats to try to fend off the US and its two Mideast allies.

Iran quite possibly will “win” this current challenge eventually provided it maintains a cool posture and continues to reach out to sympathetic countries, Muslim or not, great powers like China and Russia or not, for ways to circumvent the sanctions and maintain some balance even while Iranians suffer unfairly for a while.

And even while Iran’s leaders feel threatened, and rightly so under current circumstances, they can further their cause, one must imagine, if they are also willing to address and reduce internal discord and repressions that have been so wildly announced and grossly amplified by the US and allies as false “proof”, relatively, of a “bad” Iranian government.

The fact remains that the Saudis and Israelis have horrific governments, far most troubled and undemocratic than Iran’s. As for the US, it now has a relatively shallow patina of real democracy and its warmongering in recent decades will be seen for what’s it has been – utterly criminal – in time.

Feeding ‘the Monster’

Dr. Philip M. Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, has written an interesting article on the fact that Washington's spinelessness enables Israeli brutality. What follows is all from Dr. Giraldi’s own tongue and words.

I, Dr. Philip M. Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, have just spent a couple of days in New York City. Returning to Virginia a few days ago, I had a somewhat strange experience. I cleared through my emails before leaving the hotel and also read through a number of the featured news articles. One, in particular, caught my eye. It described how the US Democratic Party primary in Queens New York had returned a startling result. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won over mainstream incumbent Joe Crowley, signaling that not everyone in the Democratic Party is buying into the Clinton model of good governance by big donors and powerful interest groups. Many want change and even a radical departure from the political game whereby media savvy pressure groups and narrow constituencies are pandered to create a governing majority. 

 One paragraph in particular in the article I read was highly suggestive, the claim that Ocasio-Cortez had been strongly opposed to the Israelis’ routine slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, which has by now become of such little import that it is not even reported any more in the U.S. media. She is also allegedly a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement (BDS), which pressures the usurper regime of Israel to end its theft and occupation of Palestinian land. The article expressed some surprise that anyone in New York City would dare to say anything unpleasant about Israel and still expect to get elected. 

 This is what Ocasio-Cortez, who called the shooting of more than 130 Gazans a “massacre,” actually said and wrote: 

“No state or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can’t be silent about this anymore. I think I was primarily compelled to speak out on moral grounds because I could only imagine if 60 people were shot and killed in Ferguson. Or if 60 people were shot and killed in the West Virginia teachers’ strikes. The idea that we are not supposed to talk about people dying when they are engaging in political expression just really moved me.” 

 Five hours later, when I arrived home in Virginia I went to pull up the article I had read in the morning to possibly use it in a piece of my own and was somewhat surprised to discover that the bit about Israel had been removed from the text. It was clearly yet another example of how the media self-censors when there is anything negative to say about the brutal Zionist regime of Israel and it underlines the significance of the emergence of recent international media reporting in The Guardian and elsewhere regarding how Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson largely dictates U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. That means that the conspiracy of silence over Israel’s manipulation of the United States government is beginning to break down and journalists have become bold enough to challenge what occurs when pro-Zionist guys obtain real power over the political process. Adelson, for what it’s worth, wants war with Iran and has even suggested detonating a nuclear device on its soil to “send a message.” 

 I, Dr. Philip M. Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, personally would have liked to see Ocasio-Cortez go farther, a lot farther. The occupied lands called “Israel” is a place where conventional morality has been replaced by an alleged ‘theocratically’ and culturally driven sense of entitlement which has meant that anything goes when it comes to the treatment of “inferior” Christian and Muslim Arabs from the Zionists’ eyes. It also means that the United States is being played for a patsy by people who believe themselves to be superior in every way to Americans. 


 The question of the relationship with Israel comes at a time when everyone in America, so it seems, is concerned about children being separated from their parents who have illegally crossed the border from Mexico into the United States. The concern is legitimate given the coarse and sometimes violent justifications coming out of the White House, but it’s a funny thing that Israeli abuse and even killing of Arab children is not met with the same opprobrium. When a Zionist fanatic/Israel settler kills Palestinian children and is protected by his government in so doing, where is the outrage in the U.S. media? Settlers and soldiers martyr Palestinians, young and old, with impunity and are almost never punished. They destroy their orchards and livestock to eliminate their livelihoods to drive them out. They bulldoze their homes and villages. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency does none of that and is yet subject to nonstop abuse in the mainstream media, so what about Israel? 

 A recent story illustrates just how horrible the Israelis can be without any pushback whatsoever coming from Washington objecting to their behavior. As the United States is unfortunately the only force that can in any way compel Israel to come to its senses and chooses not to do so, that makes U.S. policymakers and by extension the American people complicit in Israel’s crimes. 

The UN is in fact manipulated in a way, the US has vetoed several anti-Israel bills at the UN Security Council. The particularly horrible recent account that I, Dr. Philip M. Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, am referring to describes how fanatical Zionist settlers burned alive a Palestinian family on the West Bank, including a baby, and then celebrated the deaths while taunting the victims’ surviving family when they subsequently appeared in court. The story was covered in Israel and Europe but insofar as I could determine did not appear in any detail in the U.S. mainstream media. 

 Israeli settlers carried out their shameful deed outside a court in the city of Lod, chanting “’Ali was burned, where is Ali? There is no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill!” referring to the 18-month old baby Ali Dawabsheh, who was burnt alive in 2015 by Zionist settlers hurling Molotov cocktails into a house in the West Bank town of Duma. Ali’s mother Riham and father Saad also died of their burns and were included in the chanting “Where is Ali? Where is Riham? Where is Saad? It’s too bad Ahmed didn’t burn as well.” Five year-old Ahmed, who alone survived the attack with severe burns, will have scars for the rest of his life. 

 The Zionist settlers were taunting Ali’s grandfather Hussein Dawabsheh, who accompanied Ahmed, at a preliminary hearing where the court indicted a man who confessed to the murders and a minor who acted as an accomplice. A video of the chanting shows Israeli policemen standing by and doing nothing. The court appearance also revealed that there has been another Molotov cocktail attack by settlers on another Dawabsheh family house in May that may have been an attempt to silence testimony relating to the first attack. Fortunately, the family managed to escape. 

 And by all accounts this outrage was not the first incident in which the burning of the Palestinian baby was celebrated. A December 15th wedding video showed settlers engaged in an uproarious party that featured dances with Molotov cocktails and waving knives and guns. A photo of baby Ali was on display and was repeatedly stabbed. A year later, 13 people from what became known as the “murder wedding” were indicted for incitement to terrorism, but as of today no one has actually been punished. Israelis who kill Arabs have never been indicted or tried. If it is a soldier or policeman that is involved, which occurs all too often, the penalty is frequently either nothing at all a slap on the wrist. Indeed, the snipers who fired on Gazans recently were actually ordered to shoot the unarmed civilians and directed to take out anyone who appeared to be a “leader,” which included medical personnel. 


 The Trump Administration could, of course, stop the Israeli brutality if it chooses to do so, but it does not think Benjamin Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity are on the agenda. Nor did Clinton, Bush and Obama dare to confront the power of Israel’s lobby, though Obama tried a little pushback in a feeble way. 

 Someone in Washington should be asking why the United States should be fighting unnecessary wars and becoming an international pariah defending a brutal Zionist and usurper regime that believe they are “chosen” by God? One can only hope that the shift in perceptions on the Middle East by liberal Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez has some legs and will lead to some real change in U.S. foreign policy. To succeed the liberal Democrats will need to push against some formidable obstacles within their own party, most notably the Clinton wing and people like Senator Chuck Schumer, Minority leader in the Senate, who describes himself as Israel’s “shomer” or defender in the Upper House. Perhaps someone on the New York Times editorial board should publicly suggest to Schumer that he go and run for office in Israel since he seems to prefer it to the country that has made him rich and powerful. But of course, the Times and all the other mainstream media, which is responsible for what we are not allowed to know about Israel and its American mouthpieces, will never entertain that suggestion or anything like it.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134