Saturday, December 30, 2006

Why the Lobby is uniquely dangerous





Thursday, December 28, 2006

So typically Noamesque as to sound like a parody

Noam Chomsky comments on the Iraq Study Group Report.  After pointing out that poll results display overwhelming Iraqi desire for American withdrawal, he proposes a referendum in Iraq to decide the issue.  This is so typically Noamesque as to sound like a parody.  While maintaining his usual attacks on the American Empire, Noam proposes a precondition that he knows will never happen (what Empire is going to ask for a referendum guaranteed to prove how unpopular it is with the people it is supposed to be helping?), thus ensuring the fulfillment of the Zionist goal of keeping American troops in Iraq until the country is forced into Yinon-style non-threatening (to Israel) statelets.  As usual, fiendishly clever.

I think the best way to view Chomsky is as a one-man Zionist ‘sleeper cell’.  He started to write about the American Empire at about the same time as the extreme Israeli right was planning its campaign of taking political power in Israel and creating Greater Israel over the dead bodies of a lot of Arabs.  The long-term plan involved seizing control of American politics through the use of the Christian Zionists (thus Begin’s courting, and financing, of Christian Zionist leaders), at the same time quietly infiltrating the bureaucracy of government through the use of those people we now know as the neocons (it is a huge mistake, but one encouraged by the Zionist media, to regard them as Republicans).  All the while, Noam was working on his completely ineffectual critiques of the American Empire, building up his street cred for when it would be needed in the service of the Israeli Empire.  We hardly need a referendum to know that the Iraqis don’t want a continued brutal American occupation, and suggesting an impossible precondition to utopia is more of what Noam has been doing for the last thirty years.  The brilliance of the conception of the sleeper cell is that much of Noam’s most trenchant criticism remains directed at Israel, thus fooling many into thinking that he is working against Israeli colonialism.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

More bad faith from Israel

From Reuters:

“Israelis are puzzling over the prospect of peace with Syria after their two foreign intelligence agencies gave dramatically different assessments of recent diplomatic overtures from Damascus.

While the Mossad spy service said Syrian President Bashar Assad had no genuine interest in peace talks, Israel's Military Intelligence said it believed Assad was ready to negotiate if this leads to the return of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.”


“A poll published by the best-selling Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper over the weekend found that while 67 percent of Israelis think the Olmert government should respond to Syria's peace overtures, an almost equal number – 66 percent – would be opposed to giving up the Golan under a future peace accord.”

Remember this is the same trick pulled by Amos Gilad, who misinformed Clinton and Barak that Arafat wasn’t ready to agree to a deal at the 2000 Camp David summit, when his own intelligence showed just the opposite.  The difference is that it is now the Mossad that is lying, with the military arguing that a deal is possible.  Obviously, if Israel agrees to return the Golan Heights, Assad will agree to just about anything, so the conflicting Israeli views are the ‘realists’ versus the imperialists who don’t want to return any part of Greater Israel.

While the intelligence spinning is going on, Israel continues to try to spin the Palestinians, demonstrating such goodwill as returning some of the money Israel has stolen from them, and suddenly removing some of the checkpoints (you know, the ones that are sadly necessary for Israeli ‘security’).  All this in an effort to prop up the Palestinian Authority, which, unlike Hamas, has demonstrated its usual flexibility over collaborating with the enemy in return for access to corruption.  Hamas won’t go along with any part of Israel outside the 1967 borders, so it is vilified in the Zionist press and needs to be replaced in a new, completely unnecessary, election.  The Zionist manipulation is so obvious – and puts the lie to the proposition that the checkpoints have anything to do with security, proving that they are just another part of the Israeli ethnic cleansing program by making life intolerable for the Palestinians – that you have to wonder if the Palestinians will be fooled (they weren’t fooled the last time, which is how Hamas got elected).

Monday, December 25, 2006

The Able Danger cover-up

The Senate Intelligence Committee has finished the Able Danger cover-up, concluding that Curt Weldon’s allegations of prior knowledge by military analysts of Atta were completely baseless.  As I have already described, it was necessary to dismiss Able Danger, and get rid of Weldon (not an accident that the guy who defeated him is a retired Navy vice admiral; don’t you think it odd that Weldon won with 59% of the vote in 2004, but lost in 2006, getting only 44% to the admiral’s 56%, all in a very conservative district?), as the implications of Weldon’s allegations undermined the entire Official Story of September 11.  It wasn’t incompetence in not following up on Atta; it was the fact that ‘Atta’s’ presence in the United States before he is supposed to have arrived means that ‘Atta’ can’t be the Egyptian student connected to the Hamburg cell, and thus the entire hijacking crew can’t be identified with Islamic terrorists.  They could be anybody, and almost certainly were a hired group of mercenaries, operating on the assumption they were just hijacking the planes.

Metaphorical bulldozer

Toronto theater company CanStage, which was to have staged "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" in its coming season, has cancelled the play, obviously at the request of the Lobby.  I actually feel sorry for the artistic director, who announced that the play was on the schedule, innocently failing to take into account the awesome power, and Absolute Evil, of the Lobby.  He must have been reading too much Noam.  He is so terrified of the Lobby that he had to make up a ridiculous excuse for the cancellation.  Now, by censoring Rachel Corrie’s words, he is driving a metaphorical bulldozer.

The Zionists have a ‘Demographic Problem’ in Israel, and they have one here.  There are many more decent people than Zionists in Toronto, particularly amongst the theater-going community.  CanStage appears to be on the brink of insolvency.  If CanStage were to lose a significant number of subscribers over this outrage, it would send a clear message to artistic directors everywhere that there are dangers in kowtowing to the Lobby.

Friday, December 22, 2006

More unsolved criminal mysteries

More unsolved criminal mysteries, mostly from the DOE Network:

  1. Unidentified White Female discovered on March 25, 1887 in Rahway, New Jersey;
  2. Jodi Sue Huisentruit (and here and here);
  3. Vicky Fay Hamilton;
  4. Genette Tate (see also here and here and here);
  5. Unidentified Native Female discovered May 25, 2003 in Mammoth Lakes, Mono County, California (pioneering use of a number of techniques including bone testing developed by Henry P. Schwarcz to determine the isotope geochemical signature of the water she drank during her life to determine where she came from);
  6. Unidentified White Female located on May 3, 1975 in Casselman, Ontario, Canada (I’ve mentioned this one before but the Ontario Provincial Police are putting a new push on to solve it);
  7. Baby Hope”;
  8. The Chillingworth murders (perp caught, but interesting story);
  9. The Sodder children;
  10. John and Shelly Markley;
  11. April Marie Tinsley (message on a barn door and notes in baggies);
  12. Tara Leigh Calico (spooky photos);
  13. A success, the identification of Richard (Dickie) Hovey, from an Ontario Provincial Police attempt to identify two murder victims who were killed forty years ago (part of a larger program to clear up old cases).

The police in Hamilton, Ontario have just used YouTube to help solve a crime, by posting a surveillance video which led to the surrender of a suspect.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

All interested parties except Israel

A Middle East peace conference that involved all interested parties except Israel would be:

  1. the ultimate death of Zionism (Israel would finally have to accept the 1967 borders);
  2. the only way peace can be achieved in the Middle East (Israel has avoided, undermined and sabotaged every other peace attempt, and is guaranteed to do the same as long as it is involved, as peace constitutes the death of Zionism);
  3. the only way to avoid a conflagration in the region which will destroy the wealth and power of the American Establishment (you’ll see a lot of denials of the connection, but the Establishment has come to the conclusion, obvious to all non-liars, that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the only way to save the entire Middle East from disaster and preserve American wealth).

The Americans have to obtain a consensus minimum acceptable proposal from everybody except Israel, wrap it in a package with some security guarantees, put a bow on it, and present it to the Israelis as a fait accompli.

The American Establishment may have finally figured out what it has to do in order to save itself from the fate of the old British Establishment (selling the family silver in order to pay the monthly wine bill).  It remains to be seen whether they have the courage to fight the Zionist propaganda war they are going to encounter (needless to say, it will be brutal).   It is not a given that Empires always survive.  Sometimes the decadence sets in, and there is simply not enough energy left for an Empire to do what it must do to save itself.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006


It has taken almost a month, but the bureaucrats in the U. S. State Department have finally gotten around to authorizing their agents, a bogus human rights advocacy group known as ‘Human Rights Watch’, to (sort of) apologize for its outrageous November 22 Press Release in which it complained about the use of non-violent resistance by Palestinian civilians against war crimes being committed against them on a daily basis by the State of Israel.  The obvious intent of HRW was to remove any hope of any resistance by the Palestinians, thus leading to the ethnic cleansing desired by the Zionists.  HRW can quibble all it wants, but we all know that any legitimate advocates for human rights would never even dream of issuing an obscenity like the November 22 press release. 

HRW reminds me of the phony advocacy groups created by advertising agencies for large corporations.  These groups pretend to be ‘grass roots’ citizen advocacy groups, thus hiding their support for the corporate agenda (‘astroturfing’).  HRW takes appropriate positions on many issues, thus gaining credibility, but is notable in always following the U. S. State Department line.  As in the case of Reporters Without Borders, it is not worth the effort to attempt to sort the legitimate work from the State Department propaganda.

No comparison

You probably should realize you’re doing something wrong when people engage in long debates whether you should be compared with Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa.  The German comparison is supposed to be somehow ironic, which I guess it would be if Israel was a victim of the Nazis, instead of their chief beneficiary. 

The comparison with South Africa is, frankly, odious.  Without giving the racist South Africans any credit whatsoever, there is no way that the Apartheid government can in any way be compared to the evil of the Israelis.  The South African government had separate beaches, but they didn’t drop bombs on families trying to take some comfort there.  They created bantustans, but they didn’t drop bombs on civilian houses in those bantustans, or fire tank shells at groups of school children.  They didn’t use their army to conduct long campaigns of violent mayhem against civilians, farms, infrastructure, and businesses.  They didn’t make up bogus reasons to attack the civilian population of their neighbors, and then try to insult our intelligence by claiming it was in ‘self-defense’.  They created one of the most immoral political systems in history, but they saw the writing on the wall and voluntarily gave up power and allowed for fair elections. Jimmy Carter’s use of the word ‘apartheid’ is, if anything, far too kind to the State of Israel. 

In the future, long after Israel commits suicide and disappears to Oklahoma, it will be used, like Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa, as one of the key cautionary examples of the evil and inhumanity that human beings are capable of.  It only singles itself out by the self-righteousness of its apologists.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Olmert pwnz Prodi

You have to wonder whether Israeli Prime Minister Olmert’s ability to tell Italian Prime Minister Prodi exactly what to say relates to the Mitrokhin Commission, the Berlusconi dirty tricks campaign against Prodi slurring him as a KGB agent, an effort involving Litvinenko’s pal, Mario Scaramella.  Blackmail of European leaders like Prodi would explain the bizarre European attitude towards the Middle East, following the Zionist line even though it is clearly both immoral and against European self-interest (not to mention angering a large number of Muslim voters in Europe).  The battle lines would be:

  • Jewish Billionaries Club (especially those thieves hiding from Russian justice in London and Israel)
  • Berlusconi (and employee Scaramella), with CIA, or rogue-CIA, ties
  • Israeli government
  • neocons


  • Russia and Putin (the Litvinenko assassination was part of the wider plot)
  • Prodi and other European leaders (under an Israeli-oriented blackmail campaign)
  • Europeans
  • Palestinians

Berlusconi is in the United States, ostensibly for medical treatment (as if they don’t have cardiologists in Italy, and a pacemaker operation requires American know-how; note the peculiar message from Prodi to Berlusconi), but he may find the time to sneak off to some Jewish Billionaries Club/neocon meetings.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Anti-Chomsky blog

Found via Yayacanada, an anti-Chomsky blog by ‘an anti-Zionist Israeli of Jewish background’ who lives in Australia.  He’s not a fan of Uri Avnery either, and favors a one-state solution (of course, as a practical matter, a one-state solution will eventually be a no-Jews-in-the-Middle-East solution, which is arguably a contradiction if you are relying on international law to assert the rights of the Palestinians and other victims of Zionism).

None of the Above

Time’s Person of the Year is, er, None of the Above.  In a year when the two dominant candidates are Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it was politically necessary in the context of current American politics to pull some sorry excuse out of their ass, so that’s what they did.  It would be difficult for the CIA to assassinate a ‘Person of the Year’.  In the long term, Hugo Chavez may well turn out to be the ‘Person of the Millennium’, and is certainly the ‘Person of the Decade’.

Meyrav Wurmser on the Qana massacre

Meyrav Wurmser is the wife of David Wurmser, who seems to be the primary intellect behind the Zionist Plan for the Middle East.  Meyrav Wurmser is a prominent neocon in her own right.  She is interviewed (or here, but I don’t think she is the “Principle Author of A Clean Break” as the title indicates) by Ynet.  The interview is just as amazing as you would think it would be – a combination of great insight and utter cluelessness – but I particularly liked the very end, where, in the context of discussing whether the U. S. would have allowed Israel to attack Syria, she honestly comments on something even the usually very honest Israelis have trouble admitting (my emphasis in red):

“No one would have stopped you. It was an American interest. They would have applauded you. Think why you received so much time and space to operate. Rice was in the region and Israel embarrassed her with Qana, and still Israel got more time. Why aren't they reading the map correctly in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?”

I doubt we’ll see too many neocon memoirs about their time running American foreign policy, as such admissions could be used as evidence in American treason trials, or in international war crimes trials.


Saturday, December 16, 2006

A few things

A few things:


Friday, December 15, 2006

Duke versus Blitzer

If you think that Wolf Blitzer is a prominent American political analyst and news anchor because of his brains, you probably think Lindsay Lohan is a Hollywood star because of her looks, her natural acting ability or her devotion to her craft.  Look at the Zionist connections in his biography (I was shocked to see how blatant it is).  The Zionist Imperial Project is in deep trouble in the United States (more on that later), and it is now the job of all loyal to the homeland (Israel, of course), to use the usual media methods to deceive the American people.  The Iranian Holocaust conference comes just at the right time, and David Duke is just the right guy to prove how Holocaust denial means that Israel is entitled to kill as many Muslims as it can.  Note from the transcript (the Duke-Blitzer part itself is here, but you need to read the Snow introduction) how Duke is set up by Mary Snow to be the devil himself.  Also note how Duke fights back, and manages to struggle through Blitzer’s efforts at obfuscation, subjecting the sensitive ears of the American public to a lot of things that those ears must never hear.  Duke’s analysis is spot on (I think he means Iraq):

“BLITZER: ... if we invited you on, why is there a Zionist conspiracy if we're letting you on television right now? How do you explain that?

DUKE: How do I explain that? I think that you can't affect the news. You've got – I think you have to put some spin on what's happening in Iran.

BLITZER: But we didn't have to invite you on CNN.

DUKE: And you want to – it's an attack mode, always an attack mode when people like myself come on there. But you thought you could handle me with your 11 connotations of the Ku Klux Klan.” 

This is exactly right.  The Zionists let him on the air because they needed to spin Iraq, a disaster which they can no longer hide (although they continue to seriously underreport the immensity of the disaster), and hoped that they could paint the problem of a Zionist war by portraying an opponent of Zionist policy as a racist nut.  They didn’t count on Blitzer being unable to deal with an onslaught of pure truth.  I would not be in the least surprised to see Blitzer ‘retiring’ in the near future, as the Lobby can’t trust him to keep the truth away from Americans.

Draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism

Chomsky’s discussion with a ‘ZNet Sustainer’:

“ZNet Sustainer: A question that arises for me is that regardless of this issue, how do I as an activist prevent myself from getting distracted by such things as conspiracy theories instead of focusing on the bigger picture of the institutional analysis of private profit over people?
Noam Chomsky: I think this reaches the heart of the matter. One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state, and their institutional background, crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for serious critical and activist work. How do you personally set priorities? That's of course up to you. I've explained my priorities often, in print as well as elsewhere, but we have to make our own judgments.”

Alexander Cockburn seems to think that, were it not for September 11 conspiracy theories, Americans would be manning the barricades, waving the red flag, and singing the Internationale.  What’s with these people anyway? 

We now know that a large part of Chomsky’s problem is that he is a covert Zionist agent, something proved by his denial of the importance of the Israel Lobby (since confirmed by people like former Senator Abourezk – what would he know? – and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert).  Since Chomsky supports the efforts of the Lobby to create the Zionist Empire, but doesn’t like the American Empire, what it comes down to is that Chomsky doesn’t like Americans.  Fair enough, but hardly the basis for an entire political philosophy, especially one sold as having a much greater value. 

Of course, Cockburn obviously isn’t a secret agent for Zionism, so we need a wider explanation for the headinthesandism of ‘progressive’ America over what happened on September 11.  You have to remember that during the time that both Cockburn and Chomsky have been active in writing about American politics, the United States has gone from Nixon, to Reagan, to Bush.  If neither Chomsky nor Cockburn had written a word, does anyone really believe that things would be –  or could possibly be – worse?  Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.  The abject failure of both Chomsky and Cockburn in making anything even the slightest bit better over the last thirty years ought to be an indication that these are not writers that intelligent people should pay any attention to.  The idea that you can’t even consider the truth because it might confuse or distract you is so ridiculous – it only makes sense to old washed-up Marxists – that it does not merit a reply.  Chomsky’s response to Senator Abourezk’s perception of Lobby pressure would no doubt be that the Senator’s brain has been clouded by a false consciousness caused by years of capitalist oppression.  Senator Abourezk and his colleagues only think they are under immense Lobby pressure; really they are just capitalist running dogs working for the Establishment. 

There is a distraction, but it is the other way around.  The idea that the only possible solution to any problem is some kind of socialist revolution has made it impossible for ‘progressive’ analysts to use the political tools at hand to deal with conspiracy problems.  The laws exist to find out who did the crimes, and it has always been possible to put the guilty parties in jail.  If this had been done even once in the long series of conspiracies from the JFK assassination to September 11 and the Zionist war conspiracies which followed, the United States – not to mention its victims – wouldn’t be in the deep shit it is in now.  While we wait for a glorious time when private profit is not put over people, a lot of these people are dying.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Most European capitals are targets for our air force

Mordechai Vanunu is claiming that the ongoing restrictions on his freedom – including prohibition from even talking to reporters – are as a result of his having revealed that Israel has the bomb, something which the Prime Minister of Israel has now confirmed.  The confirmation was not a mistake, but is a veiled threat to the rest of the world, particularly Europe (see also here or here, and here). The intentional ambiguity over the issue had been destroyed – no doubt in Zionist minds as part of a Baker-directed American Establishment ‘anti-Semitic’ plot – by Robert Gates, and the Israeli strategists had to fall back on Plan B, which is to try to make the most of the threat.

Vanunu makes an excellent point:  if Israel doesn’t grant him his full freedom, shouldn’t it put Olmert in jail for at least the length of Vanunu’s sentence?

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Zionist divide-and-conquer no longer works

There is some curious, but predictable, fallout from the election of Stéphane Dion as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada (Dion has bounced the Liberals well above the Conservatives in popularity, and we would see a Liberal majority government if an election were held now).  Tarek Fatah, a somewhat controversial figure who supported Bob Rae, the candidate who finished third, writes (my emphasis in red):

“Another religious group, the Canadian Islamic Congress, organized by Mohamed Elmasry, sent out a mass e-mail to its members with the subject line: ‘More Canadian Muslims than ever before will help determine Liberal Leadership Outcome.’

A religiously observant breakfast was arranged for Muslim delegates to the convention, and one Kennedy delegate organizing among the Muslim community sent out a letter to the country's mosques, asking for Muslims to vote ‘en masse’ for one candidate. The Islamic Congress had given Mr. Kennedy an A grade, while listing other hopefuls on a scale from a B to an F.

This led to a spirited response from Ignatieff delegate Salma Siddiqui, who is a vice-president of the secular Muslim Canadian Congress. ‘Muslims are not a herd of cattle to be sold to the highest bidder,’ she responded.

Then, during the convention, the president of the Canadian Arab Federation, Khaled Mouammar forwarded a mass e-mail to Muslim delegates. The e-mail, with the subject line, ‘Don't elect a Leader who supports Apartheid,’ had a picture of Bob Rae with the following text plastered over his face:
‘Rae's wife is a Vice President of the CJC, a lobby group which supports Israeli apartheid and Israel's illegal Apartheid Wall. . . . Bob Rae supports Israeli Apartheid. Don't elect a leader who supports Apartheid.’

It became a popular refrain. On Friday, a group of delegates coming from a breakfast arranged by the Canadian Islamic Congress taunted me: ‘Is Bob Rae going to be the prime minister of Israel or the prime minister of Canada?’

Two rookie MPs, Omar Alghabra, a Muslim, and, Navdeep Bains, a Sikh, held the strings of as many as 400 delegates in the Kennedy camp. When the time came, these delegates moved as a bloc to Mr. Dion.

Stéphane Dion may not know this, but his victory came in part through a political process that feeds on racial and religious exploitation. I respect the diversity of Canada, but I want to celebrate what unites us, not what divides us into tiny tribes that can be manipulated by leaders who sell us to the highest bidder.”

Bob Rae is certainly entitled to take a strong line of support for racist Apartheid Israel, but he, and those of his ilk, can no longer assume that they will be able to sneak through because of divisions within the Muslim community (Rae must now be thinking that he could have been Prime Minister of Canada had he been able to temper his enthusiasm for Israeli violence against Muslims).  This terrifies the Lobby – the branch office in Toronto, the supervising office in Washington, and the head office in Tel Aviv – as the main weapon of Zionist manipulation has been exploiting the Sunni-Shi’ite divide (we’re seeing this in operation right now with Israeli management of the Saudis to create a Sunni-Jewish alliance against Iran).  The Muslims – and the Sikhs, who had their own separate reasons for disliking Rae – stuck together to defeat an expressly Islamophobic candidate.  United Muslim support was instrumental in getting Dion elected, something he no doubt will take notice of.  Since there are a lot more Muslims than Jews in North America (the ‘demographic problem’ doesn’t only exist in Israel!), Muslim solidarity against Zionist racism must be very disturbing for the Lobby.

The Jewish Billionaires Club is fighting back, the only way it knows how, by using spin and lies.  Its new house organ, the Toronto Star, has bizarrely depicted Muslim solidarity as another example of anti-Semitism (ho-hum; if a neo-Nazi candidate had been running and all the Jewish delegates had refused to vote for him, would the Canadian Jewish Congress call that ‘shameful identity politics’?).  This is just another attempt at confusion by wearing out the ‘anti-Semite’ label, something that Jews are going to regret once that epithet no longer has any meaning.


The state of the womb of the mother of a future King

Generally speaking, when you see one intelligence agency surveilling a prominent target from a closely allied country, the surveillance is being done at the behest of the allied country.  The reason for the complication is legislative or PR difficulties for the allied country in performing its own surveillance.  In the case of Diana, she had specifically requested that the British stop watching her, so there would have been big problems if it were revealed that the British spies had failed to obey the request of the popular Diana.  Her romantic involvements were, or course, of particular interest in Britain.  The state of the womb of the mother of a future King is always going to be of interest to the Court.  Don’t believe the nonsense that the Americans were doing this on their own, and that the British government is angry about it, as international protocol would necessarily require the Americans to seek permission before following somebody as important as Diana.

We’re seeing a lot of these intelligence shenanigans lately.  The CIA can’t spy domestically, so the FBI or the Pentagon does the job for it and passes on the information.  In the case of the Israelis following the September 11 ‘terrorists’, it is quite possible that Israel was doing this for some American government agency.  This comfortable reciprocity probably partly explains why all the Israelis caught doing suspicious things in the United States are quietly deported back to Israel.  If American spies want the continued (apparent) cooperation of Israeli intelligence, they have to play along.

Ever since Reinhard Gehlen convinced the CIA and the Pentagon that international intelligence interests were more important than the interests of any one particular country, and that the community of spies should stick together against claims of national sovereignty, the real enemy of everybody has become the collective of intelligence agencies. 

Sunday, December 10, 2006

If Canadians only knew

Yayacanada directed me here, which directed me here, which led to my reading a l-o-n-g article by Marci McDonald called “Stephen Harper and the Theo-cons”, on the creepy relationship between the current Canadian government and American-influenced (and, often, American-financed) Christian evangelists.  I’ve always assumed that Harper uses these people in the same way that the neocons use the American Christian fruitcakes, but McDonald outs Harper as a True Believer, a fruitcake in his own right, and not just a user of fruitcakes.  It is possible to see many otherwise inexplicable aspects of Canadian politics as manifestations of the Fruitcake Agenda:

“In 2004, more than four hundred thousand evangelical tourists flocked to Israel, outnumbering any other visitor group, including North American Jews. According to Israeli sources, they poured an estimated $1.4 billion into the economy. So vital has the influx of Christian Zionists become that the Knesset now boasts a Christian Allies Caucus, and the Jerusalem Post has launched a new monthly Christian edition. ‘It’s a tremendous message of solidarity,’ says Canada’s ambassador to Israel, Alan Baker. As Joseph Ben-Ami points out, ‘The Jewish community in Canada is 380,000 strong; the evangelical community is 3.5 million. The real support base for Israel is Christians.’

Hagee’s congressional lobbying blitz in Washington last July was, in fact, directly inspired by a strategic blueprint drafted by former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin three decades ago. At a time when Washington was pressuring Israel to relinquish the West Bank and East Jerusalem and create an independent Palestinian state, an Israeli report fingered the US evangelical community as Tel Aviv’s best hope to counter those demands. In 1978, Begin invited Hagee and other American televangelists to Jerusalem to point out their common theological stake in the geography they saw as essential to the unfolding of Biblical prophecy. As Hagee likes to say, he went as a tourist and ‘came back a Zionist.’ Three years later,when Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor provoked a global outcry, Hagee held his first rally for Israel in San Antonio. Since then, both the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition have made support for Israel a key plank in their domestic political mandate. As Falwell told 60 Minutes, the American Bible belt is ‘Israel’s safety belt.’

In Canada, one of the chief links in that safety belt is Reverend John Tweedie, an evangelical pastor from Brantford, Ontario, who now chairs a Netherlands-based charity called Christians for Israel International. Not only does Tweedie lead regular tours to the Holy Land, but his group has also sponsored the immigration of hundreds of Jews from the former Soviet Union to settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. Four years ago, Tweedie teamed up with B’nai Brith to organize Canada’s first joint mission to Israel by Jews and evangelicals. It was no coincidence that he chose to partner with one of the most conservative wings of the Jewish community. Like most Christian Zionists, Tweedie opposes the creation of a Palestinian state or an Israeli pullout from Gaza and the West Bank. ‘I have a Biblical worldview,’ he says, ‘so I don’t agree with trading land for peace.’”

and, referring to Preston Manning, who used to be the leader of a predecessor party of the party that Harper now leads (my emphasis in red):

“As Manning watched last winter’s election from the sidelines, he fumed at what he likes to call the ‘sham tolerance’ of the national media. ‘There was considerable receptivity to the argument that Mr. Harper comes from the wrong part of the country,’ he says, ‘and holds these religious convictions which are dangerous.’ For Manning, it brought a sense of déjà vu. In Reform’s earliest days, he’d dodged sly digs about his religious ‘wing nuts’ and later watched as Stockwell Day, the outspoken Pentecostal who had snatched the Canadian Alliance from him, was caught in a creationist quagmire. After the CBC resurrected footage of Day opining that Adam and Eve once walked with dinosaurs, Warren Kinsella, then a Liberal operative, promptly went on TV with a purple Barney doll to crack, ‘I just want to say to Mr. Day that The Flintstones was not a documentary.’ Day’s leadership was swamped in a gusher of guffaws. ‘There’s a taboo in the House of Commons that you do not talk about your deepest spiritual convictions,’ Manning says in exasperation. ‘Part of the reason is that people who open themselves up just get hammered.’

Now Manning is doing his part to ensure that his spiritual protege and the estimated seventy evangelicals in the Conservative caucus – however well muzzled – don’t suffer the same fate. Last year, he set up the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, a $10-million Calgary-based non-profit aimed at training Conservatives how to run ridings and campaigns, then staff MPs’ offices. He calls it ‘a school of practical politics,’ but one of the centre’s main preoccupations is tutoring the Christian evangelicals now flooding into Ottawa on how to survive the perilous waters of public life.

In February, less than a month after Harper’s victory, Manning took over Ottawa’s Holiday Inn to kick off his centre with a three-day seminar called Navigating the Faith/Political Interface. A sold-out group of more than one hundred MPs, aides, and public-policy researchers turned up to take notes at what the Ottawa Citizen dubbed ‘Mr. Manning’s Charm School for Unruly Christians – or What Not to Say.’

While Manning blames media hostility and intolerance for much of the fix in which evangelicals find themselves today, he also concedes that some Christians bring on their own image woes. ‘Some of these faith-oriented people conduct themselves in such a way that they scare the hide off the secular,’ he confided later. He counselled newly elected MPs to curb their zeal. ‘The preference is to ride into Parliament with a speech that will peel the paint off the ceiling,’ he told them, ‘but you’ll set your cause back fifty years.’ Much of his advice amounted to spin control: ditch the God talk and avoid the temptation to play holier-than-thou. ‘You have to advocate righteousness,’ he said, ‘without appearing self-righteous.’

For the seminar’s theme, Manning chose Matthew 10:16, in which Jesus is about to send his disciples out into the world ‘like sheep among wolves’ to carry on his work. ‘He said, ‘I’m going to give you a few guidelines first,’’ Manning explains. “And one of the major ones was, ‘Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.’ In other words, be shrewd – be as smart as the other guy – but be gracious. Be non-threatening.’ Manning promptly illustrated the difficulty of following his own advice. ‘In a moment of spontaneity, Mr. Manning went off his notes,’ the Ottawa Citizen reported, ‘and said many people become gay after ‘horrific’ experience with heterosexual relationships.’

Harper and Manning have done a tremendous job in misleading Canadians about just how nutty the Theo-cons actually are.  Canada has a long tradition of avoiding mixing politics and religion, which goes back to the conscious decision of wise 19th century politicians, many of them quite religious themselves, who wished to avoid the problems they saw at the time in places like Ireland.  The fruitcakes are lying in order to introduce their evil and destructive ideas into Canadian politics.


Thursday, December 07, 2006

The Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline

Strange as it may seem, Israeli interests still owe Iran a considerable amount of money for oil supplied to Israel before the fall of the Shah (another motive for a debt-clearing Israeli war on Iran?).  There are a series of secret ongoing arbitrations, which have already resulted in an award in favor of the Iranians, but there are possibly hundreds of millions of dollars left to be awarded.  Needless to say:

“The approach Israel adopted since the start of the discussions on the various issues is one of deliberate foot-dragging. For years Israel even refused to pay the salaries and expenses of the arbitrators. Only recently has the company begun to pay its share of the arbitration. Moreover, Israel raised counter-claims, accused Iran of dispatch responsibility for the situation that was created, and did everything possible to avoid paying Iran a single penny. The only ones benefiting from the situation are the lawyers and the arbitrators, who receive generous salaries for their efforts.”

By the way, in its entire existence, has Israel actually paid, using its own money, for anything?

There is a big plan (my emphasis in red):

“In effect, today there is a network of companies called the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company Group, whose chairman and president is Major General (res.) Oren Shahor. (He was preceded by Uri Lubrani and Ehud Yatom, for three months.) The subsidiaries are the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company (EAPC), whose general manager is Yair Waide, and Eilat-Ashkelon Infrastructure Services (EAIS).

EAPC is responsible for operating the pipelines and the terminals in the Eilat and Ashkelon ports, and for the storage container. EAIS is responsible for all the foreign franchise activity of the EAPC group. In other words , for everything not related to the franchise for transporting the oil in the pipeline and storing it.

Through EAIS, EACP has a 20 percent partnership in building the Dorad Energy power plant, which is supposed to be built in Ashkelon within three years. Its next goal is to purchase oil in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, in Central Asia and in the Caucasus, to transport it in tankers to Ashkelon, to channel it through the pipeline to Eilat and from there in tankers to Asia's energy-guzzling markets: China, India, Korea and Japan. So far these efforts have not been successful.

The pipeline was originally used to move oil from Iran around the Arabian peninsula and up through the Red Sea to Eilat, and then across Israel to the Mediterranean port of Ashkelon, where it moved on to Europe.  This route made sense when the Suez Canal was closed, and when Iran was pals with Israel, but makes no sense now.  The reversed route, south to Eilat and then by boat to Asia, only makes sense if there is some huge source of oil available to be piped from Ashkelon (there is an agreement with Russia for some oil to be shipped from the Black Sea to Ashkelon using tankers).  It has been speculated that the source of this oil would be the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, and then by a pipeline to be built south to Israel.  The only question is whether this pipeline would be underwater off the coast of Lebanon, or across Lebanon itself.  In fact, the pipeline may have been a motive for the summer attack on Lebanon, and for the subsequent attack Israel is planning (although it is impossible to see how the Israelis could subdue Hezbollah enough to keep a pipeline in one piece).

I’m becoming increasingly bored with the wild theories that these shenanigans have something to do with a great American geopolitical oil strategy against Russian/Chinese interests.  Although it may suit the Bush Administration to have Americans believe there is a strategy, if only to give the increasingly creaky Administration a patina of competence, there is not the slightest evidence of any real plan, and certainly no evidence of even a half-assed execution of such a plan.  It is impossible to comprehend how this Rube Goldberg-ish Israeli plan – l-o-n-g pipeline west (through hostile territory in Turkish Kurdistan and in Georgia), then a completely insecure pipeline south, then across Israel (using the existing pipeline:  the ‘Reverse Flow Project’), and only then onto a boat – could be competitive against direct boat shipments from Iran or Africa, or against direct pipeline shipments from Iran or Russia (through pipelines yet to be built).  The only people who would benefit from the Israeli dream scheme are certain specific Israeli financial interests that have ties to the completely corrupt Israeli government, and, by extension, and through the Lobby, to the completely corrupt American government.

Your cell phone needs a tin-foil hat

A court case has revealed that the FBI is able to remotely activate the microphone of a mobile phone and use it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.  The phone doesn’t have to be turned on.  It appears that the ability to use the phone as a bug can be installed using software remotely placed on the phone, without the knowledge of the phone owner, by the cell phone company.  There are ways to obtain an indication that your phone is transmitting when it is not supposed to be, but none of them are foolproof (if you don’t mind looking like a dork, you can buy a sticker or antenna attachment that flashes when your phone is transmitting).  The only secure way around surreptitious transmitting is to remove the battery from the phone. 

There is a debate whether the FBI is already using RFID transponders embedded in tires, coupled with a program to connect RFID tag numbers with the names of tire owners, to monitor vehicle movement.  If they are not already doing it, you can be sure that they will.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

New banana republic

One of the two reasons why Ignatieff was sent north to break up Canada (the other was oil, or more accurately, the danger than environmentalists might block the exploitation of Canadian oil sands).

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

House demolitions in the West Bank


Monday, December 04, 2006

How Dion won

Duncan Cameron considers how Stéphane Dion won the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada against the wishes of the Toronto Liberal Establishment (which includes a dominating influence from the Canadian branch of the Lobby).  Dion is particularly impressive as he overcomes his underdog status by hard work and meticulous attention to detail.

Bob Rae was the guy Toronto was pushing, including commissioning bogus polls showing how electable he was.  Any Canadian would find this hilarious, and we have to seriously consider the fact that the Toronto Establishment was backing Rae because they wanted him to lose the next federal election.  The Conservative positions on a lot of issues, including the Middle East, suit the Toronto Liberal Establishment better than traditional Liberal policy positions.  It took the grass-roots Liberal delegates to make the common sense declaration that Dion – or either Dion or Kennedy –  was the only possible choice.  It is telling that the Liberal Establishment hack writers are all doom and gloom about Dion’s election, while random delegates interviewed after the convention were uniformly happy about the choice.  As usual, the Liberals in the field – who have to decide who their neighbors will be prepared to vote for – had to save the Liberals from their own clueless, or corrupt, Establishment leaders.

The attempted assassination of John Gunther Dean

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad has a good analysis of the probable culprits behind the Gemayel assassination, including a comparison to the 1979 attempted assassination, by Israel, of John Gunther Dean, the US ambassador to Lebanon.  Andrew I. Killgore writes:

“Dean apparently mused to himself on the irony of an American ambassador being subjected to an Israeli assassination attempt with American weapons supplied to Israel for defense.”

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Stéphane Dion

The Liberal Party of Canada held its leadership convention and elected Stéphane Dion as its new leader (and presumably, the next Prime Minister of Canada; the last Liberal leader who didn’t immediately become Prime Minister or didn’t become Prime Minister as a result of a subsequent election was in the 1880’s!).  This wasn’t a huge surprise as there were indications that Dion would slip in between the two front runners, the evil Michael Ignatieff (Harvard professor and supporter of torture, the Iraq war, and George Bush), and the hopeless bungler Bob Rae (former failure as socialist premier of Ontario who left the socialists in favor of the Liberals because the socialists took too sane – i.e., pro-Palestinian – a position on the Middle East).  It has been fairly clear that Ignatieff was sent by the Americans to break up Canada, something that was confirmed when Ignatieff, out of the blue, introduced Quebec nationalism into the campaign (immediately picked up by the Conservatives, who have much the same agenda).  Dion, on the other hand, is the principle intellectual opponent of Quebec separatism in Canadian politics, having demolished the separatist position by turning their own arguments against them (if Quebec can separate from Canada, why can’t federalist parts of Quebec separate from Quebec?).

The best candidate would have been Gerard Kennedy, who will make a fine Prime Minister one day, but was never given a chance by the mainstream media (the media barons are terrified of the guy, as he expressly fights the influence of stupid American ideas in Canadian politics; btw, why do all the stupidest ideas in the world come out of the United States?).  He and Dion concocted an Axis of Anti-Evil, in which the one more likely to win would get the support of the other.  The problem with the two front runners was that they had no second or subsequent ballot support; anyone who didn’t really like them, really hated them.  Kennedy’s supporters were very loyal, and almost all went over to Dion.

While Dion wouldn’t be my first choice (he was a so-so environment minister, though his dog is named Kyoto!), he’s a good man (not to mention extremely smart and the kind of policy wonk that it is good to see in politics), and you don’t have to hold your nose to vote for him just to remove the Conservatives.  The Toronto Liberal establishment really wanted either Ignatieff or Rae, and the party was bailed out by the grass-roots Liberals from across the country (the recent massive Toronto establishment mistakes were their support for losers John Turner and Paul Martin).  Dion represents a return to the Trudeau-Chrétien line of moderate-left positions, with a clear emphasis on the environment, just what Canadians appear to want.  

The mainstream press has been consistent in counting out the Liberals, despite the fact that the Liberals are now leading in the polls, and despite the facts that:

  1. the party has not had a leader for months; and
  2. it has not put up any real opposition to Conservative policies.

With every dead Canadian soldier in Afghanistan the Conservatives are losing about a quarter percentage point in relative support to the Liberals, meaning we are drawing ever closer to another Liberal government.  Dion ran on a campaign supporting just social policy and environmental sanity, the two biggest problems, besides Afghanistan, for the Conservatives. To appease the knuckle-draggers, the Conservatives are also going to reopen the same-sex marriage debate, another losing issue for them (former mayor of London, Ontario, and famous homophobe and Christian fruitcake, Dianne Haskett, just returned from working for Elizabeth Dole in Washington to lose in a London area by-election to both the winning Liberal candidate, and, in a new development, to the revitalized – i. e., de-conservatived - Green Party candidate; apparently even the people in the most conservative area of Ontario don’t want to be regarded as hillbillies!).  Just in the past couple weeks, Conservative leader Harper has managed to piss off all European leaders, the leaders of China, and the Canadian business establishment.  His obeisance to the Americans is also becoming noticeable (this cartoon might as well have been about Canadian politics, with Bush being the standing figure).  All Dion has to do is keep his foot out of his mouth, and the natural order of Canadian politics will be restored.

Friday, December 01, 2006

The Litvinenko poisoning puzzle

The answers to the Litvinenko poisoning puzzle are falling into place nicely, despite the efforts of the British police to muddy the waters:

  1. All the people who met with Litvinenko on the day of his poisoning were associated with anti-Putin forces, and most, if not all, with wanted criminal fugitive Boris Berezovsky.
  2. Mario Scaramella, the fellow who met with Litvinenko at the sushi restaurant (in fact, initiated the contact on what may have been a ruse, suggested the meeting, and picked the restaurant), didn’t eat, but just watched Litvinenko eat.  He has a dodgy resume, but claims to be an expert on nuclear materials.
  3. The Russians have been trying to extradite Boris Berezovsky for years, without success.  They have just signed a new agreement with the British which may make extradition requests procedurally easier, something which may have made the oligarchs nervous. Extradition was always technically possible, but was rejected by British courts on the basis that defendants would not get a fair trial in Russia.  Suddenly, a wrench is thrown into the works of British-Russian relations.  A nuclear attack on British soil!  Extradition to Russia suddenly becomes much more difficult.
  4. Polonium was detected at the offices of Boris Berezovsky, and at the offices of Erinys, one of the mercenary companies used by the Bush Administration in Iraq.  The connection is that Neil Bush is a business partner of Boris Berezovsky.  Now the FBI is involved, so the cover-up is getting serious!
  5. After finding traces of polonium at places where they shouldn’t have looked, the police confused the issue by searching planes, and basically determined that planes flying all over Europe had had this stuff on board.  Therefore, they proved nothing, and unnecessarily alarmed the British public.
  6. Litvinenko had been making wild allegations about Putin for years, and was ignored as another crank.  Boris Berezovsky was actively looking for another writer to pen another book of anti-Putin slurs.  Such a book will certainly sell now!  As I’ve already said, Putin had no reason to care about this guy, and certainly no reason to kill him in a way to give any credibility to his allegations.  The entire PR campaign, including all the allegations, has been run by Boris Berezovsky’s usual advertising agency, called in by Berezovsky to turn an unknown incident into a cause célèbre.  Even the original Thallium-spouting toxicologist was hired by Boris!

You have to remember the context of the fight between Putin and Boris Berezovsky.  A group of crooks arranged for Yeltsin to run Russia, and then Yeltsin looked the other way while the oligarchs robbed the country blind.  It was the single largest theft in the history of crime.  A large part of Putin’s popularity in Russia is based on the fact that he is perceived as standing up for Russia and the Russian people, something almost unheard of in the last thousand years of Russian history.  A major part of his reputation is based on his attempts to jail the crooks and recover the stolen assets.  Putin has one of the main oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in jail, but has been thwarted in his attempts to capture most of them due to the fact that most of them are claiming to be Jews and are hiding in Israel under Israeli protection (part of the habitual Israeli mockery of international law is that it usually won’t extradite Jews, or very rich people who claim to be Jews, which is part of the reason it is such an international organized crime haven).  Boris Berezovsky has been sheltered by the British.  It is only the oligarchs who have the criminal history, as well as the motive, means and opportunity, to commit this crime.

I note that the Israeli angle to the case is pure DEBKA disinformation intended to cast more slurs on Putin’s righteous recapturing of the oligarch-stolen assets of Yukos (ask yourself, why would DEBKA point a finger towards Israel?).  This Cold War nonsenseCryptome, which usually has exemplary instincts, has been publishing a lot of crap lately! – is going to be the subject of a lawsuit by the defamed Romano Prodi.  Finally, the idea that the murder had to do with upcoming revelations about Putin involvement in a dirty war against the Chechens is the height of nonsense.  The Russians, who are more hip to conspiracy theory than those decadent progressives in the decadent West (largely because the long-suffering Russian people don’t have the luxury of ignoring the truth because it doesn’t match the color of their political drapes), know all about that stuff, including the idea that the Russian government blew up buildings in Moscow in order to help Putin get elected.  Revelations about Putin’s dirty tricks would increase Putin’s popularity in Russia.

I doubt that his crime will ever be solved.  The Labour Party, which is in the middle of a scandal involving selling House of Lords seats to rich people for cash loans, is bankrupt (due to the hilarious fact that some of the rich guys, one of whom got arrested rather than a peerage, want their money back!), and presumably can be bought at record low prices.  The British police are following the usual corrupt practice of barking up the wrong tree.  The one thing the oligarchs have a lot of, due to their raping of the Russian people, is cash.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Russian coincidences

Russian coincidences:



Strategic peace initiatives


The Zoggiest one of all


Saunders on Borat


Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The big problem with using polonium 210 as an assassination weapon


Chalk another one up for the neocons

Philip Zelikow, the prominent aide to Condoleezza Rice who advocated:

  2. closing secret CIA prisons;
  3. negotiating with the North Koreans; and
  4. talking to Iran;



Monday, November 27, 2006

ZOG, again


