Linda Heard

Russian President Vladimir Putin was recently quoted as saying, “No one can seriously think that Iran would dare attack the US. Instead of pushing Iran into a corner, it would be far more sensible to think together how to help Iran become more predictable and transparent”. Finally, a voice of reason amid a cacophony of belligerence!

Indeed, the way Iran is being treated by the so-called “international community” a euphemism for nations hanging onto the coattails of Uncle Sam, does little except provide fodder for hard-liners and their incendiary rhetoric. As long as Iran is under siege it will lock down rather than open up.

I’m reminded of the competition between the sun and the wind that saw a man pulling his coat around him. Both boasted that they would be the one to force the man to remove his coat. The wind whipped up a gale but the man simply held on tightly to the garment. Then the sun shone brightly and you know what happened next.

Iran is being demonized for a purpose. The deliberately orchestrated hype and fear mongering obscures the reality. There is no evidence that Iran is working toward the production of nuclear weapons as a US National Intelligence Estimate clearly stated and far from threatening its neighbors it is going out of its way to extend the hand of friendship to all except Israel, which, by the way, President Ahmadinejad did not advocate wiping off the map. His words were mistranslated and the Western media shirked its duty to correct the mistake.

The fact is Iran remains the last obstacle to America’s complete domination of this region. If Washington could force Iran to do its bidding its hegemonic ambitions in this part of the world including control over its resources would be attained. This, my friends, is the bottom line. This is why Iraq was invaded and occupied and this is why Iran is being groomed to go the same way.

Weakening Iran is just another phase of the neoconservative New Middle East itinerary, which has nothing to do with spreading freedom and democracy and all to do with increasing US power and that of its regional satellite Israel. If you look at it from the American/Israeli perspective, a defanged Iran might translate into a compliant Shiite population, and the eventual demise of Hezbollah and Hamas due to a lack of funding and weapons.

But this truth isn’t palatable to most ordinary people and flies in the face of international law. So, just as the US contrived to come up with a pretext — or rather a series of pretexts — to invade Iraq, it has had to find excuses to sanction Tehran, perhaps as a prelude to military action.

Indeed, a military assault on Iran looks ever more likely. Now that the nuclear weapons pretext has been shelved, US officials have changed tack and are now accusing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard of supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with weapons, cash and training with which to attack US forces. They say Iran is using surrogates to wage a de facto war on the US. Gen. David Petraeus and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker are expected to reinforce this message to Congress today; not that President Bush requires approval from lawmakers to launch strikes on Iran.

The Daily Telegraph has quoted “a Whitehall assessment” to the effect “a strong statement” from Gen. Petraeus “about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian military facilities”.

Indicators that there may be a looming conflagration include the recent resignation of head of CENTCOM Adm. William Fallon, who famously said “there will be no attack on Iran on my watch”.

Then came the botched attack by the Iraqi military backed up by the US on pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Basra, which defeated the purpose of eradicating hostile entities by, instead, bringing them together to expose the feebleness of the Iraqi Army whose members deserted or switched sides in large numbers.

At the same time, Israel is engaged in a five-day homeland security exercise that, according to Ha’aretz will “include a simulated missile attack on civilian areas — some missiles with chemical warheads”. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has urged his army to remain alert, while Hezbollah believes the emergency drill is a precursor to a new war.

The Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert is trying hard to allay Lebanese and Syrian suspicions but when it comes to Iran he has made his position clear. He says he is absolutely certain Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and has called for a “concerted world action” to prevent it from attaining such “nonconventional capacity”.

Another piece of the puzzle may be found in the presence of US warships off the coast of Lebanon, while, according to reports, the USS Abraham Lincoln strike force is heading for the Gulf along with a US nuclear submarine. It’s also worth noting that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Minister Robert Gates have recently been touring the region and holding discussions with its leaders.

Countries here are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea on this issue. Most moderate predominately Sunni states fear the unencumbered rise of Iran that would empower Shiite populations and result in a power play. But at the same time, they don’t want another war on their doorstep in which they will be coerced to take sides for when the dust settles Iran will still be their neighbor and memories in this part of the world tend to be long. The mistrust between Sunnis and Shiites engendered by the occupation of Iraq has tragically fueled this divide, which plays right into the hands of the US and Israel.

A visiting alien might wonder why Muslim nations sharing the same turf and seas and with so much in common can’t get together preferring instead to allow a foreign power to set their neighborhood alight to further its geopolitical interests with virtually no risk to itself. On second thoughts, one doesn’t have to be an extraterrestrial to be shocked at the ridiculousness of that.

Seth Freedman

Though my detractors often claim otherwise, I see myself as anything but a “self-hating Jew”, and the more vocal I am in my criticism of the Israeli government’s crimes, the more credence I give that claim. I passionately love my religion, and just as fervently defend its teachings to the hilt when it comes to how to treat our fellow man. That Zionism has come along, hijacked Jewish doctrines, and twisted them to form part of an all-out supremacist movement is not something I can swallow if I want to stay loyal to the true values of Judaism.

Unfortunately, by demanding that the world sees Zionism as a philosophy essentially based on Jewish principles, Zionists have managed to unforgivably drag the religion’s name through the mud for over 60 years. However, I drew some comfort from an unlikely source after talking to a boy in the Deheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem.

I was there as part of a marathon tour that took in Hebron, the village of Al-Nueman, the Machpelah Mosque, the Church of the Nativity and various other stops along the way — including the pitiful, crumbling buildings of Deheisha. Half-way through the trip, my eyes began to glaze over, as I sought to put a barrier between myself and the relentless barrage of proof we were shown of how cruelly the authorities deal with the Palestinians.

Sneering soldiers manning checkpoints, freshly-demolished family homes, welded-shut shop fronts, blood-thirsty settler graffiti crudely daubed on Palestinian houses … the list was endless, and the evidence was overwhelming. While it was clearly an invaluable experience for those on the tour who’d never seen the awful truth of the occupation up close and personal, I’d seen it all before — not that it gets any easier to take, however many times I am exposed to the reality.

But that was before I met Jihad, a young man charged with showing us round the garbage-strewn streets and decrepit homes of Deheisha. The first thing I noticed about him were his eyes, which were as dead as any I’ve seen in all my four years living here. As he sat on a chair facing our 10-man semicircle, his face was utterly devoid of emotion, and he simply went through the motions as he reeled out his clearly well-polished introduction to life in the camp.

I could hardly begrudge him his lack of enthusiasm; we were probably the hundredth group he’d spoken to about his community’s plight, and what difference had all the lip-service made to their situation? He and his people were still here, still caged in their concrete prison, still at the mercy of the Israelis, and still no nearer to achieving their dreams of independence and freedom from the shackles of their overseers.

“I just want to be like you,” he said tiredly as he gazed into the middle distance, and with those seven words summed up the eternal plight of the downtrodden and discriminated against. “I’ve got two arms, two hands … why am I any different from other people?” he went on — and, of course, the answer was staring us in the face from the gun turrets of the guard towers overlooking the camp.

As we wended our way up the narrow alleys where skinny children clad in ill-fitting clothes played among the refuse, I asked Jihad to elaborate on how he could be “like us”. His answer was simple, and — he said — representative of the views of the majority of Palestine’s millions of refugees. “We want to go home”, he said flatly. “There is no other way (that will suffice). A two-state solution will not bring peace — the fight will go on.” He told me that although he’d chosen to use pen rather than sword to get his message across, he had no truck with those who chose to join the armed resistance.

He was vicious in his condemnation of those at the helm of the Israeli government, castigating them for their decades spent keeping his people down and subjugating them with brute force and bloodshed — however, he was adamant that he did not view their actions as emanating from Jewish sources. “Zionism is far, far removed from the Jewish religion,” he assured me. “I have no issue with Jews — just as I have no problem with Christians or Buddhists. I don’t mind Jews living here, just so long as they do it peacefully.”

He echoed the words of another local I’d met earlier, who had asked why Zionists had felt the only way to emigrate to the region was via conquest and control, rather than “the way my brother moved to the United States. He went there not to kill, not to occupy, but just to live there in peace and be a citizen like anyone else.” Both his and Jihad’s ability to clearly distinguish between Zionism and Judaism is a chink of light in an otherwise pitch black situation — and must be capitalized on by those with an interest in bringing this 60-year-old conflict to an end.

The window of opportunity won’t stay open forever. Islamic radicals and fundamentalists are highly adept at conflating the Zionist philosophy with the Jewish faith, and Israel’s hiding behind a façade of acting on behalf of World Jewry only plays into their hands. Which is why it’s essential that those Jews who recoil at the criminal actions of the Israeli government make it quite clear that this is not being done in their names.

The dominant form of Zionism might be a racist, supremacist ideology — but Judaism is most definitely not. And the more Jews who make this distinction, the better — both for the security of their fellow Jews, as well as to prove to the Israeli authorities that they most definitely do not have carte blanche to crush the Palestinians for ever more under the guise of religious values.

Ramzy Baroud

A memorable quote in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) still carries a wealth of relevance. He writes, “They own the (Holy) land, just the mere land, and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it. It’s a shame and we ought not to stand it a minute. We ought to march against them and take it away from them.”

Recently an influential pastor John Hagee, of the Dallas’ Cornerstone mega-church, followed his endorsement for Republican candidate for president John McCain with some telling remarks. “What Senator McCain, I feel, needs to do to bring evangelicals into his camp is to make it very clear that he is a strong defender of Israel and that he has a strong 24 years of being pro-life. And I think on those two issues they will get on common ground and have a common understanding.”

Such were the views of a man who has an ever-growing influence among an ever-swelling culture in the US — the Evangelical Christian bloc. Nothing was mentioned about the well-being of Palestinians, even those Christian Palestinians, many of whom are descendants of the early church.

And for that matter, human rights and recognition of the needs of Palestinians are quite rarely addressed by American officials, and on the rare occasion that they are, any such support must be closely linked to a strong condemnation of Palestinian terrorism.

Welcome to America’s parallel reality on Israel and Palestine, barefaced in its defying of the notions of common sense, equality and justice, ever-insistent on peeking at the Arab-Israeli conflict from a looking glass manufactured jointly in the church, in the Congress and in the news room, where the world is reduced to characters interacting in a Hollywood-like movie set: good guys, well groomed and often white-skinned vs. bad guys bearing opposite qualities.

One may become accustomed to watching, reading and listening to the chorus of support that America — its politicians, most of its mainstream media and a large conglomerate of its churches and clergies — tirelessly offer Israel. While the advocacy for Israel by various evangelical churches is both bizarre — since the ultimate objective of this crowd is the annihilation of most Jews and the conversion of some as prerequisites for the Rapture — and widely acknowledged, their influence on the political culture of America is not equally recognized. For example, Pastor Hagee — a televangelist to 99 million viewers — established Christians United for Israel (CUFI) in 2005 following the publication of his book, ‘The Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World.”

US writer Robert Weitzel explains, “Hagee envisions CUFI as the Christian version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby whose political clout has significant influence on US foreign policy in the Middle East.”

Journalist Max Blumenthal took his cameras to the CUFI’s Washington-Israel Summit held July 2007, in Washington DC. The result was a documentary entitled, “Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour.” It opens with a dialogue with former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay, who was asked how important the Second Coming is in his support of Israel. “Obviously, it is what I live for. Really, I hope it comes tomorrow. Obviously, we need to be connected to Israel to enjoy the Second Coming of Christ.”

Weitzel reports, “John Hagee is not without fawning friends in Washington. Presidential hopeful John McCain made a campaign stop at the summit and admitted to the audience that, ‘It’s very hard trying to do the Lord’s work in the city of Satan . . .’ House Minority Leader Whip Roy Blunt followed McCain to the podium and assured the faithful that “This is a mission, this is a vision that I believe is a vision for God’s time.” Sen. Joe Lieberman was there and described Pastor Hagee as an “Ish Elokim,” a man of God.” Even President Bush sent his best wishes, “I appreciate CUFI members…for your passion and dedication to enhancing the relationship between the United States and Israel. Your efforts set a shining example for others…”

While most US politicians are self-seeking, power-hungry and would do whatever it takes to be elected, the average American, unlike what it may seem, is not born “pro-Israel,” and “anti-Palestinian.” Most Americans are pro-the-manufactured, yet misleading, images of Israel that reach their homes through television, wait at their doorsteps in the morning and confront them through the web. Israel has mastery over the language of the Western media, which, again, helped create a parallel reality that has little correlation to the real world, that of facts, numbers and actual events. That alternative universe only exists on newspapers’ editorial pages, mega-churches and the blabber of Fox News “experts.”

There is no serious or equitable debate regarding Palestine and Israel in the US corporate media, nor any other cultural, political and religious circles. If the existing narrative is to be called a debate, then it’s one with an imagined, not real, language, almost entirely irrelevant to the realities in Palestine and Israel. It’s one that is largely predicated on a narrow-minded, apocalyptic religious discourse which for decades has found itself an accepted point of departure for most politicians, even those who falsely pose as liberals.

Between the two discourses, that of misguided religious fantasies and pandering politicians, there maybe exists enough room for alternative narratives. Unfortunately, that space is too overwhelmed by cultural misconceptions, institutional bias and deliberate confusion, introduced and instilled deliberately by media producers, pundits and the other manufactures of American popular culture. Until the gatekeepers of US culture are seriously challenged, Palestine will continue to reside in the American imagination as a battle between good and evil, a “Holy Land” that must be wrestled from the hands of those who might have owned the land, at one point, but now, they “haven’t any business to be there defiling it.”

— Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).