Jerusalem is NOT the Capital of Israel

Zafar Bangash Even in a world gone mad, President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem is not only illegal, it proves beyond any doubt that he is a raving lunatic. It has already increased hatred for the US and Zionist Israel. To show how little regard Israel has for human life, especially Palestinian lives, its occupation forces slaughtered more than 60 Palestinians and injured thousands of others in Gaza the same day as the US “ceremony” to move the embassy was underway in Jerusalem. Here is why Jerusalem can never be the capital of Zionist Israel that claims to be a “Jewish” State. The overwhelming majority of Jewish people reject Israel’s claim to being a Jewish State, and for very good reason. The Jewish people are a religious not a national group, even though the Zionists insist on an ethnic identity. While Jerusalem is sacred to the Jewish people — as it is to Muslims and Christians — it is only in the religious and spiritual sense. People who have even limited knowledge of the Torah will confirm that by turning Jerusalem into a political issue, the Zionists are violating the teachings of the Torah. Observant Jews have stated this repeatedly although their voices are drowned out by the vulgar propaganda of the Zionists that has brainwashed or blackmailed many people into swallowing these nonsensical claims. Non-Jews are forced into silence by allegations of anti-Semitism if they criticize Israeli barbarism.

The time has come to state loud and clear that Zionist Israel and its backer, the US, are terrorist states. They are a threat to the entire world and need to be checked before they blow it up in smoke. Stopping them will not be easy but those with a conscience are left with no choice. The only thing America knows is how to kill innocent people. Since 9/11, it has slaughtered more than four million people worldwide. Even at home, some 36–40,000 Americans are killed each year in gun-related violence. That adds up to nearly 600,000 murdered at home in the same period. One would be hard-pressed to find a more accurate description for barbarism. And Zionist Israel has kept pace by slaughtering unarmed Palestinians with weapons provided by the US. It is revealing that on the day the Palestinians were observing the Nakbah, Israeli snipers perpetrated another blood bath of unarmed Palestinians. The Nakbah (Catastrophe) befell the Palestinians 70 years ago when Zionist terrorist gangs killed and ethnically cleansed them from their homes and villages. Zionist Israel was created in blood and Trump’s embassy move shed more innocent blood even while American officials and evangelical priests were blessing the opening of the US’ new embassy in Jerusalem as “God’s work.” One wonders what God do these demons worship that would take pleasure in the slaughter of innocents! Zionist Israel is an illegitimate entity; it has stolen the land of the Palestinians for settlement by illegal squatters from Europe, Russia, and North America. Like the European settlers in North America several centuries earlier, the same mentality is at work in colonized Palestine. The indigenous population has to be slaughtered, terrorized, and ethnically cleansed to make room for the marauders. This is being crowned by taking over Jerusalem to convey the message that the Palestinians have been totally defeated. But the Palestinians refuse to be defeated or go away silently to live on their Bantustan-type reservations. They are standing up and fighting back with their bare hands, like little Davids against the Zionist Goliath, and that day is not far when they will reclaim every inch of their land from the clutches of the Zionists.

This is the internal situation in Palestine. There is also another dimension to this tragedy: the external environment surrounding colonized Palestine. All Arabian regimes surrounding Palestine except Lebanon and Syria are in league with the Zionist colonizers, referred to as Israel’s “first line of defence” by David Ben Gurion. These regimes have to be dealt with in the same manner as Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi did more than 930 years ago when he confronted the Crusaders in Palestine. The great Muslim warrior first liberated the lands surrounding Palestine from the clutches of the tyrannical regime that had aligned itself with the usurpers before taking on the Crusaders. Before the liberation of Palestine can be realized, the Arabian regimes surrounding Palestine have to be reclaimed. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia top this list of traitors. The latter two are artificial entities carved out by European colonialists from the remains of the Ottoman Sultanate. These regimes have aligned themselves with the enemies of Islam and are acting as their praetorian guards against struggling Muslims. The situation is not as bleak as it may appear. The Palestinians have not surrendered; Syria has joined the resistance front after surviving the mercenary onslaught orchestrated by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and their henchmen. Zionist Israel is beginning to feel the heat in the colonized Golan Heights. How long will it be before these colonizers are driven out of there, opening the way for the liberation of the rest of Palestine? Zafar Bangash is Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT).

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