I found this brief description of the Israeli intelligence agencies and their exploits in an old copy of Focus, dating from September 1993. It’s nearly 30 years out of date, but nevertheless gives an indication of what they’re like which I think is still relevant. It runs
The Shin Bet is responsible for security at home. Mossad, a highly notorious secret service, conducts clandestine operations abroad. Agents infiltrated the PLO and killed some of its leaders. In 1986 in London, a female Mossad agent abducted Mordechai Vanunu, who had blown the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons programme. He was flown secretly to Israel and sentenced to 18 years. Questions remain about Britain’s prior knowledge of the operation. Mossad agents have also taken torpedo boats from a French port, stolen the design of the Mirage jet fighter and hijacked cargoes of uranium at sea. In 1988 a Palestinian student living in Britain was found with a cache of explosives. He was a Mossad agent, a discovery which briefly soured MI6 and Mossad relations.
They’ve also been caught spying over here. Once was under Maggie Thatcher, who threatened to throw them out of the country. They did it again a few years ago, and nothing was done. They were allowed to get away with it. And I very well remember the scandal over Vanunu’s revelation that Israel had broken the anti-nuclear proliferation treaty and his subsequent abduction. It’s all very murky indeed. What comes across from this is that the Israeli intelligence agencies have scant regard for their supposed allies and pretty much do whatever they like.
And now Starmer has got one of these clowns in the Labour party, searching for anything he thinks is anti-Semitic which he can use to purge the left.
One of the points made by Jewish supporters of the Palestinians is that there at more Christian than Jewish Zionists in America. Indeed, Prof. Norman Finkelstein has pointed out that support for Israel amongst Jewish Americans was marginal until the late 1960s, when Conservative activists worked hard to engineer support for the country after its victories against the surrounding Arab nations. Mike made a similar point in his defence of himself and his commenter, Paul Mabbo, against the accusations of anti-Semitism flung by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Not everyone making the accusations was necessarily Jewish.
In fact there has been an alliance between right-wing American Christian groups and militant Zionists since before the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980s. Reagan’s election was partly due to his support from these right-wing Christian groups, brought about by the fundraisers and PR men Richard Viguerie, Terry Dolan, Howard Phillips and Ed McAteer. These men founded, led or advised a slew of conservative Christian organisations such as Conservative Caucus, Religious Roundtable, National Conservative Political Action Committee, Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Christian Voice, Young Americans for Freedom and the Moral Majority. The term ‘Moral Majority’ was coined by either Weyrich or Phillips when McAteer arranged for them to meet Jerry Falwell. McAteer was then the head of the Christian Freedom Foundation, which was funded by money from the Pew and DeVos families, who owned Sunoco and AmWay respectively. It isn’t surprising that Betsy DeVos has now popped up as Trump’s Education Secretary, with a militant right-wing plan to privatise all American public schools into Charter Schools with an explicitly right-wing Christian curriculum. Weyrich was also a member of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which was financed by money from the Coors and Richard Scaiffe. As well as being a member of Young Americans for Freedom, Phillips had also been a minor member of Nixon’s administration. They chose Falwell because he had helped Anita Bryant defeat the Dade County Gays Rights Bill in 1977.
Falwell was one of the most notorious of the right-wing televangelists of the 1980s. He was actually the least popular of them, became the most influential through his contacts with Ronald Reagan. He first came to public attention for his 1965 speech denouncing Martin Luther King. However, it was the series of rallies he conducted in 1976 and ’77 which brought him to the attention of the leaders of the American Christian right. In 1983 Reagan allowed Fallwell to attend National Security briefings on the possibility of nuclear war with Russia, and discussed theology and nuclear war with him in his presidential limousine. Fallwell was also active establishing links with the Israeli leadership to the point where he became the most influential gentile lobbyist for Israel and Israeli expansionism.
As part of this, Falwell began arranging tours to the Holy Land. One of these was attended by a journalist, Grace Halsell, in 1983. She noted the prominent role apocalypticism played in the tours, with many of her fellow tourists believing that Christ’s return, and the end of the world were imminent. These tours also had an explicit agenda in drumming up support for Israel. The Israeli guide referred to Palestinians as Arabs, following the official Israeli line set by Golda Meir that there were no Palestinians. He then went on to state that the ‘Arabs’ preferred to live in poverty, had repeatedly refused Israeli friendship and bluntly stated that ‘all Muslims were terrorists’. When the tour bus stopped at Nazareth, it was only to use the toilets there. Halsell suspected that they were being prevented from speaking to any Palestinians or Christians living in Israel. This is not unlikely. One of the ministers at our church said that if you go to Israel, you will be kept from meeting Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians. The tour finally met Falwell at a hotel in Jerusalem, where they were treated to a speech by the Israeli defence minister, Moshe Arens, boast about Israeli victories in the invasion of Lebanon.
Falwell was richly rewarded by the Israelis for his services to them. A forest was named after him, he was showered with free trips to the country, and was also given a private jet by the Israeli government. He became the only gentile to receive the Jabotinsky medal, named after the Zionist leader, who advocated waging a war of extermination against the Palestinians in order to set up an Israeli empire that straddled both sides of the Jordan. It was Falwell who turned Jesse Helms, another prominent Reaganite, from a militant anti-Zionist into an enthusiastic supporter of Israel.
Falwell also visited the West Bank, where he had his photo taken with a Jewish American family, who had recently immigrated there. He set up a convention in Annapolis in 1983 to organise support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This was attended by James Watt and Richard Allen, two members of Reagan’s administration; Yehuda Hellman and other Jewish leaders; Viguerie, Phillips and Weyrich; and former presidential sleazebag Richard M. Nixon. Falwell also told a Texan newspaper that same year that Israel had a divine mandate, through the covenant between the Lord and the patriarch Abraham, to parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan, and that the whole of Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait should also belong to Israel. This would have to be achieved through force. Falwell stated that ‘good intentions are acts of stupidity’.
Extremist American Christian groups have also given support to Jewish terrorists, such as Gush Emunim, who have attempted to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem in order to restore Solomon’s Temple, whose site they believe the mosque occupies. In 1984 18 members of the terrorist group were convicted of trying to blow up the mosque, with the covert support of the Shin Bet and other members of the Israeli army and police. The group also attacked three Palestinian mayor, wounding them.
The terrorists were received as popular heroes in Israel, including by the judge who sentenced them. There were pleas for mercy from Yitzhak Shamir, and American right-wing Christians and Jews began sending money to finance their defence. Wealth American Jews also fund Gush Emunim and Meir Kahane’s extreme right-wing Kach party. Gush Emunim is also funded by Marcus Katz, a Mexican arms salesman, who made immense profits from selling guns and other armaments to Iran and various South American countries. Ruben Mattus, the head of the ice cream firm Haagen-Dazs, is one of the major backers of Kahane’s Kach party in Israel and his Jewish Defence League in the US.
The foremost Christian supporter of Israeli terrorism, at least in the 1980s, was the Jerusalem Temple Foundation, headed by the self-declared new Nehemiah, Terry Reisenhoover. Reisenhoover’s an Oklahoma speculator in oil and land, and styles himself after the Biblical Nehemiah, who was the first governor of Jerusalem after the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon. The land Reisenhoover has speculated on, along with his Israeli partner, Shony Braun, includes land taken from Palestinians on the West Bank. Reisenhoover appointed as secretary Stanley Goldfoot, once implicated in the Stern gang’s 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem Temple Foundation aimed to raise $100 million annually to rebuild the Temple and establish a yeshiva to teach the future priests the correct way to sacrifice animals there. They also supplied funds to Gush Emunim’s defence lawyers after the 1983 attack.
Another right-wing Christian group funding Israeli terrorism is the International Christian Embassy, who lobbied their governments to move their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This group were also financed by South Africa.
Yesterday’s I newspaper reported that the Iranians’ supreme leader had returned to making hostile speeches about America. The article stated
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has accused the United States of creating “myths” about his country’s capability for nuclear weapons. The highest authority in Iran said: “They created the myth of nuclear weapons so they could say the Islamic Republic is a threat. No, the threat is America itself.”
The Islamic Republic’s attitude towards America, and the language it uses about the Land of the Free, has always been extremely hostile. Back in the 1980s and 1990s America was ‘the Great Satan’, and the regime staged mass demonstrations with protestors chanting ‘Marg Bar Amrika’ – ‘Death to America’.
This time, however, the Iranians are right. The Republicans in America and Israel’s Netanyahu have been lying about Iranian nuclear capability in order to provoke a pre-emptive strike against Iran. I’ve reblogged a report from The Young Turks about Netanyahu’s speech to the UN in 2012 arguing that the Iranians were on the brink of creating a nuclear bomb that was totally false. The Iranians had no such capability and no such ambitions. Mossad had told Netanyahu this. So had Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, and the chief of the Israeli armed forces.
I’ve also put up another video from The Young Turks on a speech by Sheldon Adelson, a multimillionaire donor to the Republican party, also stating that the Iranians were developing nuclear weapons. In his speech, Adelson makes the monstrous suggestion that America should threaten Iran with a nuclear strike unless they comply and close down their nuclear programme. If the Iranians refuse, they should be punished with a nuclear attack. The Americans should first drop a nuclear bomb on an uninhabited area to demonstrate the seriousness of their intentions. If the Iranians still went ahead and refused to comply, Adelson recommended that the next bomb should be aimed at Tehran, the nation’s capital.
Absolutely unbelievable.
But unfortunately, the Republican’s rhetoric of nuclear strikes has not diminished. In the report below, The Young Turks discuss a campaign video made by a Republican organisation against Rand Paul, for siding with Obama about trying to solve this issue with the Iranians through negotiation. Again, there’s the scaremongering about a possible Iranian nuclear attack on America.
The report doesn’t stop there. It also discusses the comments made about Rand Paul by other members of the Republican party, who also don’t think he’s sufficiently pro-war. Like a Republican senator from Texas, who states that Rand Paul needs to show his willingness to launch a nuclear attack on a Muslim country, in order to show his fitness for the presidential office. He qualifies his bloodthirsty demand by saying, ‘I don’t know how he would do this’. This does not diminish the enormity of the Repug’s demand. Here’s the video.
Nobody should be threatening anyone with nuclear annihilation. The world’s come far too close before to total nuclear Armageddon. If there’s one thing that should definitively rule out somebody from entering the Oval Office, it should be the willingness to use nuclear weapons.
After the Fall of Communism, for a brief moment it looked like the world would be safe. The terrible arms race between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was over. Nuclear missiles were being scrapped and the silos abandoned. The world and its billions could look forward to a brighter future, without the fear of a terrible death, and the absolute end of the planet.
Now it seems the Republicans are taking us back in that direction. Their extreme belligerence to Iran and by extension, the entire Islamic world, is taking us back to the era of the Cold War. It’s a betrayal of the dreams of peace that generations of campaigners, politicians and ordinary people had living for decades under the shadow of the bomb.
Iran also has its hard-liners, who also want a chance to fight a war against the Great Satan. And the Ayatollah Khamenei is a brutal tyrant, whose regime stifled any kind of humanitarian progress or change. In this instance, however, he’s right about the Americans and their scaremongering in order to provoke yet another war.
I’ve put up a number of posts over the past few weeks reporting the Israeli’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and his supporters in the Republican party in America have been trying to drive America to war against Iran. They have tried to undermine and discredit Obama’s peace deal with the Iranians limiting their nuclear programme. Before then, back in 2012, Netanyahu lied to the UN about supposed Iranian readiness to develop nukes. Even Mossad, the Israeli internal security service, the Shin Bet and his own generals denied that the Iranians had the nuclear capability he claimed.
Needless to say, Netanyahu and his warmongering doesn’t speak for all Israelis, just as the Repugs don’t speak for every American. I thought I’d post the video below to show the other side of the situation, that there were Israelis who also want peace and friendly relations with the people of Iran.
I don’t speak Hebrew, but the blurb for it put up by the poster on Youtube states that it roughly reads that ‘In reality this is not yet possible. But it happens on the internet all the time’.
Here it is
I first saw it about two decades ago when it was broadcast here in Britain on Tarrant on TV. That was a late night show looking at sleaze and general weirdness on television around the world. It was mostly lurid, tabloid entertainment, but here and there it did include pieces that made a genuine moral point. One of these was this Israeli ad.
The video’s message is exactly right. Apart from ISIS and the preachers of hatred and violence, the Net has also brought nations together in ways that their rulers don’t like and can’t allow. It’s why the Iranian government during the Green Revolution attempted to censor the internet. It’s why countries like Egypt and others in the Gulf are trying to hack into mobile phones, aided with software developed by Western companies like Nokia.
Through the Net, people in widely separated countries, divided by deep historical and religious hatreds, can nevertheless meet each other in peace and friendship. Nation, can indeed, speak peace unto nation.
And it’s got a rocking soundtrack by the tartan terror himself, Rod Stewrt.
The Republicans’ campaign against Obama’s talks with the Iranians over limiting their nuclear programme and preventing them from acquiring atomic weapons continues. In this video, Cenk Uyghur of The Young Turks discusses the latest attempt by three Repugs and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to whip up war fever by raising the terrifying spectre of nuclear terrorism.
They have produced an advert showing a van driving through New York. On the radio can be heard the voices of two of the Repugs and Netanyahu warning of the consequences of a terrorist, nuclear Iran. When the van reaches its destination, it explodes.
It’s a vile, mendacious video. As Uyghur states, the Iranians don’t have nuclear weapons, nor are they anywhere near getting them. Netanyahu was lying when he gave a speech to the UN several years ago that they were. The Israel’s own secret services, Shin Bet and Mossad, and the Israeli Defence Force, have also made it clear that Iran is not a nuclear threat.
Yet still the Repugs, or at least a section of them, claim they are. The Young Turks point out that the three politicos involved have connections to the defence industry. They and their paymasters stand to make millions if America launches a war on Iran. And thousands, if not millions, will be killed, including the children and partners of ordinary, regular Americans, who will be sent to fight in this war.
All for nothing, except to boost the profits of another bunch of multinationals.
If America attacks Iran and sparks another war, then they will have succeeded in just about destabilising the entire northern sector of the Middle East, from Iraq to the borders of Pakistan. And the chaos spread by the destabilisation is going south. Yemen has been beset with the problems of tribal rebellions long before Bush’s invasion, but ISIS has entered the country to cause even more death and destruction. the situation can only get worse with a war with the Islamic Republic.
The Repugs aren’t promising America safety from a real and present threat. Their promising something worse – a world beset by violence and endless, a-symmetrical war. That’s terrorism, to you and me.
Fortunately, The Young Turks report that the advert was too much for most of the TV networks, who refused to run it. Except one. Faux News. Which tells you all you need to know about Rupert Murdoch. He really is like the villain in one of Piers Brosnan’s Bond outings, who was a newspaperman, played by Geoffrey Rush, intent on setting up a war between America and China so that he could make megabucks covering it. He ended up going down with his stealth yacht in a demise curiously similar to that of the very shady Robert Maxwell. It’s long past time Murdoch did likewise and vanished from the world scene.
Netanyahu has been at it again today. According to the I, he criticised Obama’s attempts to make an agreement with Iran over the country’s nuclear programme. He told a meeting of AIPAC – the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee – yesterday (2nd March) that Iran’s nuclear project threatens Israel’s very existence. He accused Iran of ‘threatening to destroy Israel’ and that it was ‘devouring country after country in the Middle East, that is exporting terror throughout the world and is developing as we speak the capacity to make nuclear weapons.’
This isn’t the first time Netanyahu has raised fears of a nuclear attack on Israel by Iran. Three years ago in 2012 he told the UN that the Iranians were only a year away from developing an atomic bomb, that would be used against Israel. He came complete with a diagram showing Iran’s growing nuclear capability, shaped like the stereotypical bomb from thousands of old cartoons.
He was lying. About a fortnight ago, the Guardian revealed that, according to leaked documents from Israel’s spy service, Mossad, and their internal security agency, Shin Bet, no such threat existed. The head of the Iraeli army, in much more guarded language, actually cautioned Netanyahu against taking any military action against Iran. The Young Turks discuss these revelations in the video below.
Iran’s Nuclear Power for Generating Electricity Only
Others have come to the same conclusion. Shirin Ebadi, a left-wing critic of the Iranian regime, who has its oppression of women and its exploitation country’s ordinary, working people, made the same point. In her book Iran on the Brink, she argues against an invasion of Iran. According to her, the mullahs governing the country aren’t interested in developing atomic weapons. Their claims that they want to develop it simply as a domestic power source are true. The country is indeed an oil producer, but they use it primarily for export. They intend to build nuclear power plants so that less oil is consumed by the country itself. The oil saved can then be exported, boosting the country’s economy and their own profits.
Netanyahu’s Claims of Iranian Terrorist Threat Exaggerated
Now let’s examine Netanyahu’s claims about Iran exporting terrorism, and ‘devouring country after country’. It’s true that Iran has exported terror around the world. In the 1990s the Iranian secret services were responsible for a massacre of Kurdish separatists meeting in a German restaurant. As for militaristic expansionism, it has been suggested that the Iranians are, or have, given military support to the Shi’ah minority in Iraq. The majority of Iranian Muslims are Shi’ah, and so they wish to support and bolster the power of their co-religionists in Iraq. There have also been claims that they would like to take control of the country. I can also remember reading articles in Private Eye speculating that British forces in Iraq or Afghanistan have also come into contact with Iranian troops there.
Iran has not, however, taken control of Iraq and has absolutely no links to the Taliban or al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. In fact liberal Iranians went to the polls in 2008 to vote out Ahmedinejad as a religious hard-liner who, they feared, would turn their country into a ‘Taliban state’. Afghanistan is a Sunni Muslim nation, a different form of Islam to Shi’ism. As for al-Qaeda and ISIS, they are militant Sunni, and so hostile to Iran and its political ambitions. Given the brutal intolerance of ISIS, the Iranians probably have good reason to fear them.
The mullahs in Iran are deeply hostile to Israel, and much of their rhetoric is poisonously genocidal. However, they aren’t the danger that Netanyahu is presenting them as.
Western Invasion of Iraq Responsible for Increased Persecution of Religious Minorities
If anything, Netanyahu’s rhetoric is also extremely dangerous, and likely to make the tense situation in the Middle East much worse, especially for its ethnic and religious minorities. Twenty years ago the Likud party with the Republicans in America drew up plans for the invasion of Iraq. Likud wished to see Saddam Hussein overthrown as he was supplying arms to the Palestinians. The invasion instead destabilised the region, and made possible ISIS’ emergence. About ten years ago, Dan Cruikshank journeyed to Iraq as part of a BBC TV series looking at the world’s great architectural heritage. He spoke to the patriarch of one of the Eastern Orthodox Christian churches. The interview was strained, with ominous silences where none of them spoke. The patriarch said that previously, relations with Muslim Iraqis had been quite harmonious. They had since become much worse, largely because of the invasion. The Islamic state has butchered the Christian population in the areas they’ve overrun. Iraq’s ancient Christian people, who speak Syriac, a Semitic language descended from Aramaic, have been forced out of their ancient homelands, like Mosul.
And they haven’t been the only people ISIS have persecuted. They’ve also attacked the Yezidis, a faith which contains elements of Sufi Islam and Zoroastrianism.
Iran also has its non-Muslim religious minorities. About 3 per cent of the population are Armenian Christians. Like the Syriac-speaking churches, these are one of the most ancient branches of the Christian faith. There is also an Anglican church in Tehran. These churches have also suffered persecution at the hands of extremists and bigots. Iran was also the ancient home of Zoroastrianism, the state religion of the Persian Empire. Zoroaster was the prophet, who reformed the Iranian religion and instituted the worship of the god Ahura Mazda, the good deity responsible for the creation of the world and its good creatures. I think there are even one or two Jews left in Iran, for all that most of them emigrated when the Ayatollah Khomeini declared they were free to leave after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Netanyahu’s belligerent rhetoric threatens to make the situation worse in Iran for all its religious minorities, and for liberal Muslims wishing to create a more open, tolerant and modern country. It stands to provoke even further suspicion and resentment. And by making such claims, Netanyahu also makes the situation worse for Israel by increasing international tension and the possibility of further violence.
But as The Young Turks point out, Netanyahu really isn’t interested in promoting peace or securing Israel’s safety. He wants to stoke fears of an Iranian nuclear threat in the hope of gaining further domestic votes. It’s a cynical attitude that threatens the safety of everyone in the region. Especially as the leaked documents to the Guardian have shown, it’s based on lies.
Obama reassured AIPAC that he had no intention of allowing the Iranians to build nuclear bombs. He should be believed, as should the Iranians, when they say that it really is all about generating electricity. The real liar is Netanyahu, and his lies threaten everyone.
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