Zionists Kill Palestinians and Steal Their Land

Editor

Zionism poses an existential threat to the very survival of the Palestinian people. Hardly a day passes by without a Palestinian being killed or maimed. The heavily armed Israeli soldiers and settlers do not care whether they target men, women, or children. Israeli snipers have shot and killed more than 300 Palestinians in Gaza and injured another 30,000 since the Great March of Return protests were launched in March 2018. Most of the victims have been unarmed children or youth as well as paramedics.

Last month Israel intensified its attacks on Gaza with a missile strike on an apartment building in which Islamic Jihad commander Baha’ Abu al-‘Ata and his wife were killed. Four of their children including two little girls were badly injured. In two days, Israeli attacks killed 34 Palestinians and injured more than 110.

Despite such atrocities, Western rulers parroted the standard line that Israel has the “right to defend” itself. It is not Palestinian snipers that are shooting and killing Israelis. It is Zionist Israel’s heavily armed military machine that is shooting and killing Palestinian children. And on November 12, Israel committed another crime by targeting an apartment building in the heart of besieged Gaza. The following day it killed a family of eight.

When the Palestinians retaliated against such Israeli crimes, even the UN jumped into the fray and said rocket fire against civilians was unacceptable. Nickolay Mladenov, the UN envoy to the Middle East peace process (sic), was furious at Palestinians firing rockets into Israel in retaliation. Were Palestinians the only ones firing rockets and projectiles, all homemade? What about Israel’s US-supplied missiles and artillery being fired at Palestinian homes and apartment buildings blowing the occupants to pieces?

The UN Middle East “peace process” is a sick joke. There is no peace process; the only process underway is Israel’s killing of Palestinians. The UN and indeed the West in general want to maintain the fiction of the “peace process” while Israel continues to kill Palestinians and usurp their land. Palestinians are accused of not being ready to make peace. The peace on offer comes through the barrel of the Israeli gun; it is the peace of the graveyard. It is Israel that does not want peace. With peace, the Zionists will have to live like normal human beings giving Palestinians equal rights. That is something Israel refuses to accept.

Intensification of attacks on Palestinians is the result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to divert attention from investigations into corruption charges against him. Killing Palestinians wins him the support of fellow Zionists that he hopes will enable him to retain power. Such are the cynical ways of the Zionists.

The Zionists are committing two other egregious crimes in Colonized Palestine: encroachment and attacks on al-Masjid al-Aqsa, and expansion of illegal colonial land grabs on the West Bank. Even though Judaic law prohibits Jews from trespassing on the Holy Sanctuary, the illegal squatters have intensified their encroachments of the holy compound. Heavily armed Israeli soldiers provide protection to the equally heavily armed Zionist sqatters. When Palestinians resist such encroachments, they are attacked and beaten up. There is no limit to Zionist cruelty.

During and after the election campaign, Netanyahu had promised to intensify colonization activities and to not return any of that land illegally usurped from the Palestinians. The US regime led by the foulmouthed Donald Trump who is facing possible impeachment, announced on November 18 that Washington no longer considers Israeli settlements as illegal. This is in complete violation of international law, which from now on Washingtion will just officially ignore.

The cynicism at work is mindboggling. To save their hides, both Netanyahu and Trump are resorting to totally illegal acts. When Palestinians react against such criminal conduct and take steps to defend their rights, they are accused of being terrorists and not willing to make peace. Netanyahu and Trump are partners in crime. To expect legality or decency from either is unrealistic. What needs to be done is to confront their illegal acts through determined resistance. This is what the Palestinians are doing.

The Palestinians have every right —legal, political, and moral — to resist their colonizers by “all means necessary.” Even the UN has recognized this right despite its so-called Middle East peace envoy (Mladenov) suffering from dementia and siding with the colonizers. No colonial force has ever voluntarily vacated occupied lands; it has had to be driven out by valiant resistance. Despite facing great odds, the Palestinians are doing what is their fundamental right.

The Zionists have a choice: live like normal human beings and accept the Palestinians’ rights or be taught this lesson the hard way, even if it will take some time. History is not on Israel’s side.

Zionist Israel’s New Racist Education Law

Brainwash them into believing they are interlopers

Maksud Djavadov

Last month, Israel’s Education Minister Rafi Peretz, announced new regulations to teach at Palestinian schools the law “that demonstrates our [Zionist] historical right as a sovereign people and constitutes a legal basis for the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The apartheid ethos of this policy is clear from its wording — as if non-Jews did not live in Palestine prior to arrival of the Zionist squatters from Europe, Russia and North America.

The announcement should not come as a surprise. The Zionist entity is aware of its illegal colonial occupation of Palestine. The new law is designed to brainwash Palestinian children as well as Zionists to normalize the narrative of “original inhabitants.” Many Israelis hold two passports. In 2008, the “Jerusalem-based Menachem Begin Heritage Center found that 59% of Israelis had approached or intended to approach a foreign embassy to ask for citizenship and a passport.” This is one of the main reasons Israel fears and avoids a prolonged armed conflict, as most Zionists would flee to the country whose passport they are holding.

At present, education in Israel is segregated between Palestinians and Zionists. Israel does not consider Palestinians with Israeli passports as equal citizens. In March 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu declared via Instagram, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law we passed [in July 2018], Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people — and not anyone else.” There is a long-list of apartheid laws in Israel; Adalah, the Haifa-based human rights organization has made a long-list of those laws available online.

In Israel, the school system is a political and security project of the Zionist security agencies. Israel’s security agency is directly involved in the screening, appointment of teachers and principals, and monitors implementation of the curriculum in Palestinian schools. The Israeli attempts to control the Palestinian education system fits well into their overall ghettoization and siege of Palestinians. The former education minister of Israel declared in July 2019 that education of the Israeli youth is part of Israel’s PR work, known as the hasbara.

The policy, however, is already showing malfunction. For example, Israel only allows its students to go abroad on an exchange program if they have completed the course promoting Israel’s racist politics. Thus, many Israeli students take the course simply for checklist purposes in order to qualify to go abroad. Thus, the program is not achieving its intended purpose.

One of the reasons Israel has the legal flexibility to institute all sorts of racist laws is because the entity lacks a proper constitution. The Zionist entity has a veneer of legality known as a set of “Basic Laws” with a quasi-constitutional status. This allows Zionist officials to practice all sorts of verbal and mental gymnastics when trying to justify the apartheid nature of their regime to the global public. This framework though is a double-edged sword, as it often manifests logical inconstancies and outright racism of Israel’s policy, since every official can spin the laws and regulations of Israel in a manner, he/she sees fit for a particular moment. There is no centralized legal framework and this exposes inconsistency of the Zionist PR efforts.

In 2014, 30 private Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem faced closure unless they paid a fine of one million dollars, which was imposed by the Israeli Education Ministry. Israel also cut support for Palestinian teachers. The executive of Quds Arab al-Furqan School, Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ala, said that the main reason for forcing closure of the schools was the Palestinian curriculum, which does not use books published by Israel, and instead uses books published by the Palestinians themselves. UNRWA schools, which were responsible for educating 55,000 Palestinian students, began to close within weeks of the Trump regime cutting funding in 2017.

The fact that educational issues in Palestine are part of a political project does not apply to Palestine only. As a Muslim educator, with international teaching experience, this writer can attest to the fact that international education is first and foremost a socio-political engineering project of Muslim countries. It is a soft nudge of Muslim societies towards secularism and the aim is to undermine the Muslims’ confidence in Islam.

Western educational institutions that develop curricula for schools in Muslim countries have a secular bias and a secular agenda. Most Muslim governments lack the political integrity to boot such organizations out of the country and lack competent cadre to replace them. Anyone who has taught in the Persian Gulf countries can easily observe Western dominance over the education system there.

Gaining control of education through the UN and the international education route has always been a political project in the Muslim world. As pointed out by a research paper of the Berkley Institute of Islamic Studies, Bernard Carra de Vaux, the French orientalist [read Islamophobe], wrote, “colonization is a business that requires time, and in which any abruptness could become fatal.” Everlyn Baring, better known as Lord Cromer, was the British Proconsul-General in occupied Egypt between 1877 and 1907 who he took de Vaux’s ideas even further and prescribed specific soft policies to re-educate Muslim societies.

No matter how distasteful the Israeli brain-washing policies in Palestine are, they are directed at a society that is awake to the spirit of resistance and can immediately understand the issues. In other Muslim societies where education is as politicized and colonized as Palestine, people are not even aware of it.

 

Maksud Djavadov

Gaza’s Alarming Statistics: Time to Sanction Israel

Ayman Ahmed

Ignoring Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza supposedly brings political dividends. As the situation in the tiny sliver on the Mediterranean deteriorates rapidly, most so-called Muslim regimes especially in the Muslim East remain impotent and the rest of the world looks the other way.

Let us consider some statistics about Gaza. On September 5, the Istanbul-based Gaza Aid Association (GAA) held a conference dedicated to and publicizing the harrowing statistics of the besieged Strip that has been referred to as the largest open-air prison in the world.

According to GAA, Gaza’s figures are “the highest in the world in the fields of unemployment with 52%, poverty 53%, and water pollution 95%, and the daily power outage rate that reached 75%.” The Turkish-based NGO pointed out that the “rate of medicines shortage is 50% and lack of medical supplies is 27%; also, 77% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed and damaged by Israeli attacks.”

The data presented by the GAA is corroborated by other sources, such as the UN. The UN website states that “the Gaza blockade (through land, air and sea) is a denial of basic human rights in contravention of international law and amounts to collective punishment… over 90% of the water from the Gaza aquifer is undrinkable.”

Mondoweiss, a news website co-edited by Philip Weiss, a Jewish American journalist, regularly highlights Israel’s genocidal policies. In a report posted on Mondoweiss in August 2018, Israel’s leading, anti-Zionist historian, IlanPappe, shed light on the driving ideology behind this genocidal policy. Pappe stated that “in some places, such as North America, annihilation was literally a genocide of the native; in Palestine it was a different kind of elimination, obtained through segregation, ethnic cleansing and enclavement.”

In 2012, the Israeli not-for-profit organization Gisha, published documents showing that Israel used to calculate the calories for Palestinians in Gaza just enough to put the population “on a diet” but not to cause famine. According to the Electronicintifada.net, “there was chronic malnutrition among some of the most vulnerable populations.”

In May 2019, Gisha reported, “since March 2015, Israel has also allowed an even smaller number of products from Gaza to be sold in Israel. From 2007–2014, only exports abroad had been permitted. The monthly average number of truckloads of goods exiting Gaza to all destinations in 2018 was about 20 percent of the monthly average in 2007, before the closure was imposed.”

Zionist officials do not hide their genocidal ambitions in Palestine; they are quite open about them. Ayelet Shaked, the Zionist entity’s “justice” minister, in 2014 wrote on her Facebook page, “Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

The genocidal nature of Zionist policies is an open secret. The question is why is it being tolerated? If Muslims were to utter such sentiments or subject other people to the conditions Zionists are subjecting the Palestinians to, there would be international outcry. In addition to charges of anti-Semitism, a “coalition of the willing” would be formed sending cruise missiles and bombs to deliver democracy and lessons in human rights.

The reason behind Western silence over Israeli crimes is clear. The Zionist lobby wields enormous power in many countries. The US offers a prime example. David Ochs, founder of HaLev, which helps send young people to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference, was recorded on tape, saying, “Congressmen and senators don’t do anything unless you pressure them. They kick the can down the road, unless you pressure them, and the only way to do that is with money.” Imagine a Muslim activist saying this about mobilizing Western politicians to back Muslim causes?

Zionist influence is not limited to the Western world, perhaps one of the most fundamental reasons for Gaza’s horrible situation today. It is also because there is a pro-Zionist regime in Egypt. If the Egyptian people were to free themselves from the autocratic system and establish a people’s representative government, it would be difficult for it to participate in the siege of Gaza. The plight of the people in Gaza would be very different. It would require Egypt to act like a sovereign state and refuse to allow its policies toward Gaza to be dictated by Zionist Israel.

Egypt’s astonishingly brutal role has surprised people of non-Muslim faith as well. As far back as 2010, the Christian Science Monitor wrote that while people mainly focus on Israel’s role in the siege of Gaza, Egypt’s important role is often forgotten. In January 2019, as reported by the Jerusalem Post, Egypt’s dictator, ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, openly declared that security cooperation with Israel was the closest ever.

Let us now address the question raised at the beginning of this article: what political dividends do regimes get by turning a blind eye to Palestinian suffering? The primary advantage is that these regimes tap into the Zionist lobby’s global influence and believe they can derive benefit from their connections.

Let us take Turkey’s example. If it were to cut its trade ties with Israel, it will be scolded by Western powers and perhaps subjected to sanctions. However, due to the Western world’s shaky economic situation and the emergence of means of global communication, if Turkey and other self-respecting states were to cut ties with the Zionist entity, there is little the Western regimes could do for a prolonged time period. For example, Turkey dominates the hazelnut market with an estimated share of 67.1%. Would Germans and Italians accept paying triple the price for Nutella if Turkey retaliates by raising the price of hazelnuts because Western governments put Israel first?

With the means of modern communication, if Muslim countries explain to people in the West that they are paying triple the price for hazelnuts, olive oil, petrol, and palm oil because their regimes see Zionist impunity as more important than their own peoples’ well-being, few governments in Europe or North America will be able to justify their pro-Zionist stance to their public.

There is a real opportunity to put Zionists on the defensive; what is lacking is political will. This political will can be cultivated through pressure, thus forcing governments to cut trade ties with the Zionist entity. Israel is a subsidized entity, it would not last long if even a few self-respecting states were to sever trade relations with it. Gaza’s harrowing statistics should motivate people to pressure their governments to cut trade ties with the Zionist regime.

Why Pakistan should not Recognize Israel

Principle, an inconvenient impediment for realpolitik

Waseem Shehzad

At a time when Pakistanis should be focusing on Indian atrocities in Kashmir and the lynching of Muslims in India, some people have begun a campaign clamoring to recognize the Zionist State of Israel. Triggered by the notorious journalist Kamran Khan through a tweet, the issue is now widely discussed in Pakistan’s secular circles.

Numerous arguments are advanced, all revolving around India’s unilateral usurpation of Kashmir and how to confront it. All of them are flawed and merely reflect the ruling elite’s inability to deal with challenges in a clear and courageous manner.

Let us enumerate these arguments advanced by the secularists. They also miss no opportunity to bash Islam and the Ummah calling it dead. It is their understanding of the Qur’anic concept of the Ummah that is flawed. They have assumed that Muslim rulers lording over nation-states that emerged from the bowels of colonialism constitute the Ummah. It is the Muslim masses, not their oppressive rulers, whose hearts ache for suffering fellow Muslims everywhere. But such concepts are beyond the comprehension of drawing room revolutionaries.

Those Pakistanis clamoring for Israel’s recognition advance one or more of the following arguments:

1. We have no quarrel with Israel; it is the Arabs’ problem and they have stabbed us in the back by not supporting us on Kashmir. By recognizing Israel, we will get even with the Arabs.

2. If Pakistan has diplomatic relations with Israel, its diplomats would be able to neutralize Indian machinations by freely interacting with their Israeli counterparts.

3. The Israeli lobby in the US is very strong and it would help Pakistan’s case in Washington.

4. If Pakistan has diplomatic relations with India, our most impla-cable enemy, what is the harm in having relations with Israel?

Let us consider each argument individually. Firstly, Pakistan’s non-recognition of Israel is not to appease the Arabs. Israel is a colonial settler entity, exactly what India is in Kashmir. True, Arabian rulers have abandoned the Palestinians but that is no reason for Pakistan to follow suit. By recognizing Israel, Pakistan would lose the legal and moral ground to argue that India should quit Kashmir. If Pakistan recognizes one occupation, how can it argue against the other?

Secondly, the argument that Pakistani diplomats would be able to neutralize Indian propaganda if they interacted with the Israelis is false. If these diplomats, for whatever reason, have failed to convince Arabian rulers with whom they have deep religious, cultural, and historical links, what chance would they have with the Zionists? Senior retired Pakistani military officers are currently serving in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Both regimes and many others also rely on Pakistan for protection with Pakistani troops deployed there. Despite such close links, Pakistani diplomats have failed to make much headway.

Thirdly, there is no doubt that the Israeli lobby in the US is very strong but it requires a stretch to assume that this lobby would help Pakistan. The Israeli lobby acts to advance only Israeli interests. It does not care even about US interests. Does Jonathan Pollard ring a bell? The navy analyst in possession of sensitive intelligence data was secretly passing it on to Israel despite the US financing the Zionist entity for decades and sharing much intelligence data with it. And Israel in turn was selling this information to the Russians. No two countries in the world have deeper relations than the US and Israel yet Israeli lobbyists do not hesitate to bite the very hand that feeds them.

Fourthly, to say there is no harm in Pakistan establishing diplomatic relations with Israel when it has relations with archenemy India is equally false. Consider this. Suppose a Muslim is addicted to alcohol that is forbidden in Islam. Unfortunately many Muslims in positions of power and authority are fond of drinking; it is considered a sign of “progress” and “modernity.” Could that person then argue that since he drinks alcohol, he should eat pork as well? Even the most secularized Muslims would recoil in horror at such a suggestion. The correct approach for Pakistan would be to cut off diplomatic relations with India until it relinquishes its illegal occupation of Kashmir and not establish relations with Israel.

In the only publicly acknowledged talks between the two states, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri (during the Musharraf regime), left, shakes hands with his Israeli counterpart, Silvan Shalom, in Istanbul, Turkey, 2-9-2005 — a process initiated by Musharraf himself who had felt that Israel was a fait accompli and Pakistan was at a disadvantage in world affairs by not having formal relations with it. Based on official Pakistan’s inane response to the Ansarullah bombing of the Aramco refineries and other indications, one would be amiss if he didn’t realize that the Imran Khan administration is the one floating trial balloons through its preferred media channels and talking heads.

Pakistani secularists often take refuge behind Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s example. Let us recall what he did when David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, wrote to him soon after Israel was established seeking recognition. Jinnah did not even bother to respond to Ben Gurion’s message.

Pakistani secularists also habitually bash Islamic groups and organizations accusing them of being responsible for all of the ills afflicting society. While religious groups have many faults, they are not responsible for the mess the country is in. It is the secularists that formulate Pakistan’s policies, which have created these problems. They must take full responsibility for the ill-conceived policies that have engulfed Pakistan in so many crises.

The current debate about Pakistan’s recognition of Israel while intensified recently, dates back to the time of General Zia ul-Haq. He allowed the Israelis to work with the Afghan mujahidin during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. General Pervez Musharraf took up this policy when he grabbed power. On September 14, 2005, he had shaken hands with then Israeli prime minister Arial Sharon (the butcher of Beirut) at a reception hosted by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. He even introduced his wife Sehba to the Israeli war criminal.

Two weeks earlier, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri had met his Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom for dinner in Istanbul to advance Musharraf’s pro-Israeli agenda. Even today, the former dictator is vocal in pushing this line even as he has taken refuge in Dubai, escaping from serious charges at home.

Pakistani decision makers must internalize a few basic points. Kashmir will not be liberated through the UN, by the US, or with Zionist or Arabian support. It will require the collective effort of the Kashmiris as well as Pakistanis and their friends worldwide to bring about meaningful change. India can be forced to withdraw its occupation forces from Kashmir but it will require a lot greater effort than has hitherto been demonstrated.

One final point is in order. The West in general and the Zionist State of Israel in particular will never reconcile with a nuclear Pakistan. By recognizing Israel, Pakistan will be exposing itself to increased Zionist sabotage. Given the number of Pakistanis willing to sell their souls for a loaf of bread, the Zionists will be busy looking for ways to destroy Pakistan’s nuclear potential.

Far from gaining any benefit from recognizing Israel, Pakistan will expose itself to mortal danger. It is important to think through this policy carefully before plunging onto this disastrous course.

Exposing the Origins of Islamophobia

All roads lead to the security of the Zionist cancer in the Holy Land

Hayy Yaqzan

In 1979, a symposium was organized in Jerusalem by the Jonathan Institute, headed by one Benjamin Netanyahu. Influential political leaders from across the world were invited to Jerusalem to discuss “terrorism” as the new global threat. Netanyahu had founded the Jonathan Institute, “a private foundation dedicated to the study of terrorism,” in 1977, and named after his late brother.

The 1979 conference was the Jonathan Institute’s first foray into trying to shape the definition of “terrorism” to serve Israeli interests, and among those who came to get their instructions were George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr.) and several high-level European officials. Richard Pipes, father of the notorious Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, was also in the crowd.

There was little effort at this first conference to start the mental gymnastics of stringing together Islam and terrorism. While many speakers denigrated Palestinians and Arabs, there was only one overt mention of “Islamic terrorism.” However, in 1984, a follow-up conference was organized, this time in Washington, DC. Many scholars have argued that this is where the Islamophobia project as we know it today was launched.

This time, the crafty Netanyahu said in his opening remarks that modern terrorism had its roots in “communist totalitarianism and Islamic (and Arab) radicalism.” The success in 1979 of the Islamic Revolution in Iran had certainly convinced this cult, in the five years since the previous conference, to speed up their process of conjuring up the Muslim boogeyman. To do this, they sought the help of the orientalist so-called scholars Bernard Lewis and Elie Kedourie. These two helpfully explained that to claim the existence of “Christian terrorism” and “Jewish terrorism” was inappropriate, but “Muslim terrorism” was certainly real because “Islam is a political religion” and “Muhammad founded a state and governed it.”

The 1984 conference made it clear that the US would lead in defining and dismantling “Islamic terrorism” around the world. But it is important to remember where this entire initiative began. As scholars such as Deepa Kumar have suggested, Israel had started to realize by the mid-1970s that the best way to sustain and justify its inhumane treatment of Palestinians was to use the smokescreen of a global Islamic threat. “By the late-1980s and the early-1990s it did, therefore, appear as if Israel was locked into an overarching battle with the Islamic world,” wrote Fred Halliday in his Islam and the Myth of Confrontation. Israel’s key weapon in this battle was misinformation about Islam and Muslims — the fuel for Islamophobia — and its key objective was (and is) to keep the winds of public opinion in the West blowing in Israel’s favour.

The results have been spectacular. According to Sarah Marusek of the University of Leeds, of the 60 known leading US charities or foundations that fund the Islamophobia industry, the data clearly indicates that 45 of these also finance organizations that directly support Israel’s colonization of Palestine (particularly by funding Zionist colonies), generously giving almost $169 million just between 2009 and 2013.

As discussed in the previous article in this Crescent series on Islamophobia, Zionists have thus been some of the leading funders of the Islamophobia industry. But before returning to our effort to familiarize ourselves with some of the sickening people involved in this game, let us turn to one very important component of it: the sayanim.

The Hebrew word sayanim (sing. sayan) refers to “helpers.” These are Zionists who do not necessarily have the means to fund Islamophobia on a large scale, but have achieved influential positions in US, Canadian, and European societies from which they can support the Islamophobia industry, especially when they cooperate among themselves. As the pro-Palestinian activist Paul Larudee has explained, “for example, friendly journalists can work with lobbyists and others to quickly and massively spread influence, information, analysis, and disinformation that are useful to Israel.”

And as Telegraph reporter Gordon Thomas has written about their role in Israel’s assassinations, “In practical terms, a sayan who runs a car rental agency will provide [the assassin] with a vehicle on a no-questions basis. An estate agent sayan will provide a building for surveillance. A bank manager sayan will provide funds at any time of day or night, and a sayan doctor provides medical assistance.”

Larudee notes that “that there are as many as 4,000 sayanim in each of the major centers of power and influence, such as London and New York. A concentration of sayanim in important sectors of society that inform the public, such as film, entertainment, journalism, education and social media permits them to help shape public opinion.” These “helpers” thus run the “Brand Israel” campaign, continuing to build a positive image of Israel through the media and, for good measure, demonizing and vilifying the Muslims.

A good example of the significant influence even non-donors can have on promoting Israeli interests is that of Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook. In 2016, Zuckerberg privately met with Netanyahu, and shortly afterward news broke that “the Israeli government and Zuckerberg have agreed to work together to determine how to tackle incitement on the social media network.” Zuckerberg even hired a long-time advisor of Netanyahu and former chief of staff at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC to be in charge of censoring “fake news” on Facebook. The outrageous conflict of interest in this case was tossed out the window, and it was considered acceptable that the leading source of news for millions of people around the world should have a Zionist as a gatekeeper. Good luck to any positive stories about Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims!

At the same time, the Israeli lobby tries to decriminalize Islamophobia anywhere it can. France is a good example. In France, you can be arrested for wearing a t-shirt that says “Free Palestine.” This is because “anti-Semitism,” as vaguely and manipulably defined there as it is anywhere else, is illegal, and can get you fined and jailed. However, Islamophobia is free speech, and therefore must be allowed.

The CRIF (the French equivalent of the Israeli lobby group AIPAC) maintains that “Islamophobia is not a form of racism” and that recognizing Islamophobia “would impede all criticism of Islam, such that the fundamental rights of [other] religions could not be respected.” Jacob Cohen, a French researcher, has written about the role of Israeli operatives and French Zionists in promoting Islamophobia in the country — but the only way he could get it published was presenting it as a work of fiction!

It should by now be clear that not only does the present-day Islamophobia industry have its origins in Zionist efforts to continue oppressing the Palestinian people, but that Zionists at all levels of society — not only those with enough money to fund the industry — are doing their part to keep the hate factory running. In the next article in this series, I will return my focus to the big funders of Islamophobia, but the “small fish” should never be ignored, especially because they are the ones against whose day-to-day efforts we are more likely to be effectively put down.

Lest We Forget Al-Aqsa

Editor

Last month marked the 50th anniversary of the arson attack on al-Masjid al-Aqsa in Jerusalem by an Australian Zionist, but far from dousing those flames of hatred, they have spread to other parts of the Noble Sanctuary. The Zionists make no secret of their desire to destroy the Noble Sanctuary to build their mythical third temple in its place.

As the Muslims’ — and indeed the world’s — attention is focused on other trouble spots in the world (and there are many), it is easy to forget that al-Masjid al-Aqsa in under serious threat. Indeed, the entire city of Jerusalem is being targeted as part of the Zionist policy to eradicate the Islamic heritage of the city through a systematic program of Israelisation. Christian heritage sites that for centuries were protected by Muslims are no less threatened. The Zionists do not wish to see anyone else there; they want the entire city to themselves hence their total disregard for the sacred connection that Muslims and Christians have with the city.

The Zionists are using multiple strategies including ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by destroying their properties, refusing to allow Palestinians who have been absent for more than three months to return, and forcible occupation and confiscation of their properties.

The central tenet of this policy is the creeping annexation of al-Masjid al-Aqsa. It includes Zionists barging on to the Noble Sanctuary under the protection of heavily armed Israeli soldiers. This must be stopped.

Inside Zionism’s Murder Incorporated

Israeli assassination program a tactical success but a strategic failure

Kevin Barrett

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronan Bergman; Pub: Random House, New York, 2018, 784 pages. Price: $16.35 Hbk.

The Zionist entity squatting in Colonized Palestine is, in essence, a terrorist enterprise. Its goal has always been to massacre, terrorize, and expel the native population to make room for invading squatters (a good historical overview of Zionist terrorism is Thomas Suarez’s State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, which I reviewed in an earlier issue of CI).

In response to the genocidal Zionist terror campaign against Palestine, militant counterterrorism movements have arisen among Palestinians and their supporters. Military resistance to occupation, after all, is a right guaranteed by international law. It is also a moral right, even a duty, “To those against whom war is made, permission is given [to fight] for they have been oppressed, and verily Allah is well able to assist them” (22:39).

The long war against Zionist terrorism has been ongoing for a century and will undoubtedly continue until Palestine is free, “from the river to the sea.” Among the most righteous struggles in human history, the fight for Palestine will ultimately triumph in sha’ allah thanks to the courage and dedication of the countless heroes willing to face martyrdom in service to a just and necessary cause.

The history of Palestinian martyrdom, when it is finally written, will fill hundreds or thousands of volumes. A small part of that history, viewed through the eyes of the murderous oppressor, is grippingly told in Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman’s Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations.

Bergman, one of the Zionist entity’s top journalists, spent almost a decade gaining unprecedented access to the professional murderers of the Israeli intelligence services. The result is 784 pages of detailed mayhem. Bergman begins by noting that “Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world.” That is an impressive feat, given its relatively minuscule population. Israel is also a world champion in its reckless willingness to slaughter innocent civilians while hitting a target; commit innumerable crimes in supposedly friendly and neutral as well as hostile countries; and generally flout international law and common decency.

What rationale could elicit and excuse such behavior? Zionist Jews are clearly in the grip of a mass psychosis that combines belligerent paranoia with delusions of grandeur. The Zionists imbibe, along with their mothers’ milk, two closely related obsessions: that they are God’s chosen, and that the subhuman goyim (non-Jews) are out to kill them. Therefore, they must, as the Babylonian Talmud insists, “rise and kill first.”

Even belligerent homicidal paranoiacs with delusions of grandeur sometimes do have real enemies. After all, who would want to be their friends? Through his own atrocious behavior, the Zionist elicits opposition that he imagines as “eternal irrational terroristic anti-Semitic Jew hatred” or some such nonsense. The notion that everyone is out to get him becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By committing genocide against Palestine, the Zionist ensures that not only Palestinians, but decent people everywhere, will seek his demise.

Bergman explains it in slightly gentler terms, “The lessons that the new Jews of Palestine learned from the Holocaust were that the Jewish people would always be under the threat of destruction… A people living with this sense of perpetual danger of annihilation is going to take any and all measures, however extreme, to obtain security, and will relate to international laws and norms in a marginal manner, if at all” (p.17). The ongoing “extreme measures” — including the epidemic of assassinations of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance fighters chronicled in Rise and Kill First — ensured that survivors of such atrocities would emerge even more dedicated to the struggle against Zionism. Over and over, Bergman notes the same pattern: the Zionists succeed in killing a “dangerous enemy” only to discover that an even more dangerous enemy has taken his place. He concludes that the whole assassination program can be summarized as “tactical success, strategic failure.”

This view is also the view of Bergman’s single most important source, ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who locked horns with Benjamin Netanyahu in 2011 over what he saw as Netanyahu’s politically-motivated strategic idiocy, starting with attempts to launch a war on Iran code-named “Operation Deep Waters.”

Dagan and other Zionist military and intelligence commanders stymied Netanyahu’s orders to bomb Iranian nuclear installations, arguing that while it might deliver votes to Likud, such a war would be disastrous in the long term. Despite his pride in the targeted killing operations he directed, including the murder of several Iranian nuclear scientists, Dagan saw that the ongoing pattern of “tactical success, strategic failure” would inevitably delegitimize the Zionist project and lead to its eventual destruction.

Though Dagan and most of the other professional murderers represented in Rise and Kill First came to identify with what passes for the Israeli moderate left, their dream of a two-state solution is now dead in the water. What Bergman terms the Likudnik-leaning “new elites,” supported by “the majority of the people of Israel,” is now locked on course for ever-greater strategic failure leading ultimately to the termination of Zionism.

To hasten that process, the anti-Zionist resistance can learn and apply some important lessons from Bergman’s book. The first and most obvious is that the entity’s new Likudnik elites, more rabid and less sophisticated than the previous generation of generals, will undoubtedly continue to inadvertently delegitimize “Israel” in the eyes of international public opinion in general, and American and European Jews in particular. This process can and must be helped along. The majority of Western Jews, unlike the majority of Israelis, espouses relatively humane, universal values. The truth about Israel’s accelerating criminality under the Likudnik heirs of Jabotinsky (and the messianic heirs of Abarbanel) is guaranteed to horrify and alienate them.

Another important inference that can be drawn from Rise and Kill First is that the grotesque ethnocentric racism of the Zionist chosenness complex represents a strategic vulnerability at two levels. First, such racism is abhorrent to most people. The reader of Rise and Kill First will be repeatedly shocked by examples of histrionic handwringing over the spilling of “Jewish blood” combined with callous disregard for the value of non-Jewish life, especially Arab and Muslim life. Bergman notes that “more than a few (assassination plans in Europe) were dropped” due to concerns about killing white civilians, perhaps even Jewish ones; whereas in Lebanon the more civilians killed the better: “Raful’s attitude was that it made no difference which Palestinians we killed in Lebanon — they either were terrorists or would become terrorists or they gave birth to terrorists,” David Shiek, a commander of the assassination program Flotilla 13, told the author (pp. 230–231). A Mossad officer, speaking of Sharon’s mayhem in Lebanon, admitted that “terrible things were done… since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces?” (p. 243). The double standard of worthless non-Jewish life vs. sacred Jewish life is displayed repeatedly throughout Rise and Kill First, “I am ready to shed countless tears on the grave of a Lebanese who was killed on a mission for us, as long as no Jew’s life is endangered” (Meir Dagan, p. 243); “I prefer to see them (non-Jewish proxies) dead than my [Israeli-Jewish] operatives dead” (Dagan, p. 582). Ronan Bergman himself condemns the King David Hotel bombing of July 22, 1946 not so much because it killed 91 innocent people, but because, “Most damningly, many Jews were among the casualties” (p. 19).

Clearly the Zionists are prepared to kill thousands or even millions of non-Jews, especially Arabs and Muslims, without much regret. But they are intensely, religiously averse to “the spilling of Jewish blood.” This reluctance to take casualties, which could be uncharitably described as cowardice, points the way to a possible solution: the anti-Zionist resistance, to the extent that it develops the means to inflict unacceptable casualties on the Zionists, will win, preferably Sun Tzu style, that is, without having to actually fire that “unacceptable” shot.

Another insight gleamed from Rise and Kill First is the power of Islamic resistance. Prior to the rise of Hamas and especially Hizbullah, the secular Palestinian resistance was a relatively easy target for infiltration, subversion, and assassination. Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin explained how in the 1990s Islamic passivity…

gave way to activism and preaching for struggle, for jihad. From humble doormats, they turned into very energetic activists. It happened here in Gaza as well as across the entire Middle East and Africa. They were on a higher personal level and were more ideologically dedicated than the PLO folks, and their need-to-know compartmentalization capability was infinitely better than anything we’d seen.

By murdering much of the PLO leadership, the Zionists inadvertently cleared the way for the rise of the vastly more formidable Islamic resistance — a prime example of the theme of “tactical success, strategic failure” that runs throughout Rise and Kill First.

Though Bergman’s book offers useful insights, its detailed accounts of many dozens of Zionist murders, and the political and military events surrounding them, may not be entirely accurate. That is not surprising, since his sources are professional liars and murderers. What’s more, Bergman himself admits that he cannot tell the truth about some things (such as the poisoning of Yasir ‘Arafat) due to Israeli military censorship. Two important topics he cannot approach honestly, but drops hints about, concern outrageous Israeli attacks on America: the attempted assassination of US Ambassador to Lebanon John Gunther Dean in 1980, and the false flag attack of 9/11/2001.

John Gunther Dean has always insisted that Israel was behind the August 28, 1980 attempt on his life. And without directly saying so, Ronan Bergman offers evidence that Dean is right: the group that claimed credit for the attack, the FLLE, was indeed an Israeli front.

As for 9/11, it is the barely-mentioned elephant in the living room of Rise and Kill First. Bergman quotes ex-Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin, “The attacks on 9/11 gave our own war absolute international legitimacy. We were able to completely untie the ropes that had bound us” (p. 515). Given the abundance of evidence that Israel and its American partisans orchestrated the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that Meir Dagan’s contempt for Benjamin Netanyahu stemmed in part from Netanyahu’s alleged direct personal involvement in the murderous 9/11 operation — a “tactical success” that is engendering long-term strategic failure as awareness of Israel’s orchestration of the massacre gradually spreads.

As Bergman and his sources unhappily recognize, increasing consolidation of power in the hands of such reckless and strategically incompetent leaders as Netanyahu offers the Islamic resistance unprecedented opportunities to finally achieve a world free from Zionism. As for how many more martyrs it will take, that is a question whose answer only Allah (swt) knows.

 

Kevin Barrett

Zionist Genocide of Palestinians Continues

Kevin Barrett

On July 12, 2019, a nine-year-old Palestinian boy, ‘Abd al-Rahman Shtaiwi, was sitting in front of a West Bank home in the village of Kafr Qaddum. Suddenly a Zionist-Israeli bullet ripped through his head, exploding into more than 70 fragments leaving him in a long-term coma.

A Palestinian demonstration was ongoing more than 200 meters away. Israeli soldiers in body armor and helmets responded to the “threat” of a handful of children harmlessly throwing stones from a distance of dozens of meters with a mixture of rubber bullets and live fire. Did they fire live rounds into the air, one of which, through bad luck, accidentally killed ‘Abd al-Rahman, who was not even participating in the demonstration? Or did an Israeli sniper murder the boy as a sick attempt to terrorize Palestinians in hopes of quelling the demonstrations?

It is a well-established fact that Israeli snipers deliberately murder Palestinian children with impunity as a matter of de facto national policy. A 2004 article in the British Medical Journal documented more than 600 cases of Palestinian children shot by Israeli snipers,

Two-thirds of the 621 children (two-thirds under 15 years) killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of the cases to the head, neck and chest — the sniper’s wound. Clearly, soldiers are routinely authorised to shoot to kill children in situations of minimal or no threat.

Journalist Chris Hedges, in “Gaza Diary,” offers a graphic account of several such murders,

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered…but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

Israel’s Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, calls Palestinian children “little snakes” who must be killed. She also advocates killing their mothers. Her wardrobe presumably includes the popular IDF T-shirt depicting a pregnant Palestinian woman with a target on her belly, featuring the slogan, “One shot two kills.”

Clearly the Zionists harbor genocidal intent. But are Zionists actually committing genocide, as that crime is defined in international law? The unequivocal answer is “yes.” In August 2013, international law professor Francis Boyle successfully argued before the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, “The Palestinians have been the victims of genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” According to that Convention,

…genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group such as:

a. killing members of the group;

b. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…

The modern Zionist movement, from its inception, has been dedicated to annihilating the Palestinian people through mass murder and threats thereof; the destruction of livelihood; the destruction of religious and cultural heritage; and the destruction of life-supporting infrastructure. As Professor Boyle argued before the Tribunal,

For over the past six and one-half decades, the Israeli government and its predecessors-­in­-law — the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs — have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive military, political, religious, economic, and cultural campaign with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and different religious group (Jews versus Muslims and Christians) constituting the Palestinian people.

The modern West has been taught to abhor genocide. It has even raised the Nazi genocide against European Jews to the status of a post-Christian secular religion! The crucifixion has been replaced by the gas chambers; Jesus (a) has been replaced by the Jewish people; the killers of Jesus have been replaced by the Nazis; and the miraculous resurrection has been replaced by the rise of the so-called state of Israel. The religion of Holocaustianity even features its own Holy Trinity: six million victims, gas chambers, and an official Hitler extermination order and bureaucratic plan for its implementation. Revisionist historians who question this Holy Trinity of Holocaustianity are deemed heretics and mercilessly persecuted by Zionist Torquemadas.

Yet even as the West drowns in a flood of Holocaustianity propaganda about a horrific but brief event that happened 75 years ago, the Zionists continue their century-old genocide of Palestinians. The genocide perpetrators get away with their crime by shamelessly posing as victims.

When the world watched thousands of Gazans take to the Israeli border last year in massive demonstrations, very few, including the march’s organizers, could have imagined that people would still be protesting one year later.

The cruelty of the Zionist genocide of Palestinians is deliberately hidden by Western mainstream media. If you follow corporate media you probably never heard of Nasir Majid Taqatqa, a 31-year-old Palestinian who was abducted by the Zionists on June 19, 2019 and tortured to death, his martyrdom occurring on July 16. According to the Palestinian Prisoner Society, Zionist torture of Palestinian prisoners is rampant, with at least 200 dying in custody since the Society began keeping records. Currently there are roughly 5,800 Palestinian prisoners held by the Zionists under atrocious conditions, of whom 700 suffer from chronic diseases without receiving adequate healthcare.

It isn’t just IDF snipers who murder Palestinian children. On July 15, 2019, one day before Nasir Majid Taqatqa’s death in prison, an Israeli squatter-driver ran over and killed seven-year-old Tariq Zebania while the boy was riding his bicycle near al-Khalil (Hebron). The Israeli police made no effort to identify, much less apprehend, the suspect. Such events are a regular occurrence in Colonized Palestine.

Since March 2018 the most active site for Zionist murders of Palestinian children has been the border of the Gaza open-air concentration camp, where the nonviolent Great March of Return demonstrations have faced murderous Zionist repression. Of the almost 300 unarmed protestors murdered by Zionist snipers, at least 41 were children (according to Jewish Voices for Peace).

More than 30,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, have been injured by Zionist forces during the Great March of Return. Many of those 30,000 injured were intentionally maimed and will remain crippled for life. Amnesty Internationalhas denounced the Zionists’ “deliberate efforts to kill and maim,” describing countless victims, among them “23-year-old football player Muhammad Khalil ‘Ubayd, who was shot in both knees as he filmed himself with his back toward the border fence at a protest east of al-Breij Camp on 30 March. The video, published on social media, shows the moment he was shot. In the footage, he appears to be standing in an isolated area, far from the fence, and not seeming to pose any threat to the lives of Israeli soldiers. He is currently in need of a knee replacement operation to be able to walk again.”

After the Zionists cripple them, Palestinians return to the demonstrations in wheelchairs — and the Zionists shoot them dead. That’s what happened to Ibrahim Abu Thurayya, a double amputee (from a Zionist airstrike) who was shot dead in his wheelchair for the crime of peacefully protesting Trump’s delusional claim that Jerusalem al-Quds belongs to the Zionist entity.

Palestinians, even after what may be the worst century of oppression that any people on earth has ever suffered, will continue to resist Zionist genocide. But when will the Muslim Ummah, consisting of almost two billion people — more than enough to consign Zionism to the proverbial rubbish bin of history — finally rise up in their defense?

 

Kevin Barrett