American Jihadists and Israel's Lone Soldiers:Come for the Perks, Stay for the War Crimes

(Margarita Korol)

In his 2011 book entitled Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, author J.M Berger (purportedly in his own words) "uncovers the secret history of American jihadists."  Berger, who refers to himself as a "specialist on homegrown extremism," tells us that these traitorous terrorists are "Muslims [who] have traveled abroad to fight in wars because of their religious beliefs."

Please read that definition again. Ok, just one more time.

Now read this from Tuesday's New York Times:

On Tuesday, with talk rampant about the possibility of an imminent Israeli attack on Iran, Mr. [Josh] Warhit became a citizen of Israel to enlist in its army.

"Our parents were freaking out," Mr. Warhit, now 22, recalled of that first trip [to Israel] during the war against Hezbollah. "It only made us more thirsty. I love the Jewish people. Love involves commitment. Right now we need people to commit.

"Of course it's scary," he added, regarding Iran, "but if you feel a commitment, that's the thing to do."

Warhit explains his decision to leave the country of his birth in order to join the massively American-subsidized military of a foreign state this way: "I love my family, I love my friends and I love the Jewish people. The Jewish people don't need another Jew in suburban New York."

Apparently, according to Warhit, what the "Jewish people" do need are more Israeli soldiers using American-bought weapons to maintain a brutal 45-year-old occupation and apartheid legal system, facilitate ethnic cleansing, impose collective punishment upon millions of civilians by way of walls, checkpoints, blockade and siege, bulldoze homes, orchards and olive groves, protect colonists in violation of international law, oppress and dominate an already devastated and dehumanized indigenous population, conduct night raids, abduct, detain, and abuse children, use sonic booms to deliberately terrorize people, wage more aggressive wars and commit more crimes against humanity with total impunity.

If that's not terrorism then nothing is.

The article, headlined "Enlisting From Afar for the Love of Israel" and written by the Times' new Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren, states that "Warhit, who grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., and graduated from the University of Rochester after spending several summers in Israel, was one of 127 soldiers-to-be who landed Tuesday morning at Ben-Gurion International Airport."  The enlistees, referred to as "lone soldiers," were given "a hero's welcome that included a live band, balloon hats and a speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu," who praised them for deciding "to defend the Jewish future."

In Jihad Joe, Berger writes, "Since 1979, American citizens have repeatedly packed their bags, left their wives and children behind, and traveled to distant lands in the name of military jihad, the armed struggle of Islam."

Compare that to what Rudoren's Times report tells us of the young IDF cadets who "left behind parents, girlfriends, cars and stuffed animals to become infantrymen, intelligence officers, paratroopers and pilots in a formerly foreign land."

"Their motivation is often way higher than the average Israeli," Colonel Shuli Ayal, who oversees the lone-soldier program, told Rudoren. "They want to make their service as meaningful as possible."

With such zealous fervor and passionate commitment to his co-religionists and the ethnocentric, exclusivist nationalism of Zionism, it is no wonder that Warhit desperately hopes to join the Givati Brigade, an IDF military unit which Rudoren innocuously writes "has been active around the Gaza Strip" over the past ten years.  What she should have told her readership is that the commander of the Givati Brigade, Colonel Ilan Malka, was directly responsible for authorizing the airstrike that murdered 21 members of the Samouni family in Gaza on January 5, 2009 for which no one has been held accountable.

Soldiers in the Givati Brigade are also known to have custom t-shirts designed and printed for their units at end of training or field duty that bear such images as dead Palestinian babies, mothers weeping at their children's graves, guns aimed at kids and destroyed mosques.  These shirts glorify, celebrate, and mock the rape of Palestinian girls, the murder of Palestinian men, women (especially if they're pregnant) and children.

An anonymous Givati soldier was recently sentenced to a mere 45 days in prison for "illegal use of a firearm," a charge reduced from manslaughter through a plea bargain.  He had willfully murdered 65 year old Ria Abu Hajaj and her 37 year old daughter Majda Hajaj, after they were ordered to evacuate their home in Juhr ad-Dik with their families during the Gaza massacre in early January 2009.  They were waving white flags and moving slowly in an area in which there was no combat whatsoever when the Israeli soldier opened fire on the group of 28 Hajaj family members, which included at least 17 children.  Apparently, the use of his firearm was illegal, not the execution of civilians.

Clearly, for Warhit, it's all about the love.

The article continues, "[A]ccording to a military spokeswoman, Israel has enlisted 8,217 men and women from other countries since 2009, 1,661 of them from the United States, second only to Russia's 1,685," adding, "They receive a host of special benefits: three times the typical soldier's salary, a personal day off each month, a free flight home and vouchers for holiday meals."

How's that for incentive? Come for the perks, stay for the war crimes.

A March 2012 article in the Jewish online journal Tablet chronicles "Aluf Stone, an organization for Diaspora-born soldiers who have served in the Israel Defense Forces" that was formed in 2008 and is affiliated with the American Veterans of Israel (which is something that apparently exists).  The report quotes Aluf Stone co-founder Marc Leibowitz describing service in the Israeli military as "a specific and meaningful shared experience.  Deeper than an alumni group or a fraternity, which people are fanatical about."

Fanatical.

Leibowitz explained that most Jewish groups are wary of associating with Aluf Stone since "[n]o organization wants to be seen as if they are encouraging Americans to fight in a foreign army."  Still, the article's writer Adam Chandler reveals, in 2011 "the group was invited by the Friends of the IDF to speak at a synagogue in New York and share their stories with an audience composed of family members of IDF soldiers from the States."

One member of Aluf Stone told Chandler that American-born former IDF soldiers "don't belong in U.S. veterans' groups and networks, as they didn't [all] serve in the American military."  Consequently, "Aluf Stone occupies an interesting middle ground in the U.S."  More accurately, perhaps, the members of Aluf Stone were actually occupying Palestine.

While it's clear that these Jewish foreigners who join the Israeli military do so out of some sort of fervent compulsion and perceived obligation to their own religious tribe, so much so that they leave their own nation to bear arms on behalf of another, it should be noted that numerous studies have found religious ideology not to be a prime motivating factor in terrorist attacks credited to Muslims.

An unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004 determined that:

Muslims do not "hate our freedom," but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.

Professor Richard Jackson of The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Zealand concurs that "terrorism is most often caused by military intervention overseas, and not religion, radicalization, insanity, ideology, poverty or such like."

Political Science professor at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, Robert Pape, who has conducted some of the most comprehensive research and written the most respected analysis of terrorist motivation, concluded in a 2010 study that "suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance."   His data reveals that "[m]ore than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation."

That U.S. and Israeli policies of invasion and occupation rather than religious extremism are the guiding forces behind acts of terrorist violence is evidenced in a letter allegedly written by those responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and published in The New York Times. It stated, "This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel, the state of terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region."

The letter adds, "The American people are responsible for the actions of their government" and "all of the crimes that their government is committing against other people."

Tragically, those American lone soldiers, that zealous minority of homegrown ideologues who - in J.M. Berger's words - "travel abroad to fight in wars because of their religious beliefs," will now be personally responsible for the actions and crimes of the Israeli government and military as well.

(h/t Glenn Greenwald)

*****

Points of No Return, Zones of Immunity, & Windows of Opportunity: The Constant Israeli Hype Over Iran

"For the greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic."

- President John F. Kennedy, Yale University Commencement Address, June 11, 1962

"Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions...The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. He who wants to provoke a war not only proclaims his own peaceful intentions but also accuses the other party of provocation."

- Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, 1965

A report in The Times of London, with the headline "Israel steps up plan for air attacks on Iran", enumerates the various "options" and "military contingency plans" available to the Israeli military in order to "neutralise" Iran's "nuclear weapons programme."  Journalist Christopher Walker writes that Israeli "[m]ilitary planners are studying" the possibility of "hitting Iranian missile plants...with the 'long arm' of its airforce or targeting foreign scientists at the facilities rather than the buildings themselves."  He adds that "surgical air strikes" would be carried out by "advanced F-15I fighter planes."

The piece also quotes the Israeli Defense Minister as warning, "A country like Iran possessing such long range weaponry - a country that lacks stability, that is characterised by Islamic fundamentalism, by an extremist ideology that is striving to become a superpower in the Middle East - is very dangerous."

Another alarming article, this one in The Washington Times, begins this way:

Reports that Israel is preparing for pre-emptive air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities and is now able to fire nuclear missiles from submarines were seen as reflecting deep anxiety in Israel for Tehran's nuclear program.

Israeli newspapers said officials appear to have leaked the reports in an attempt to focus the attention of the international community on the dangers of Iranian nuclear weapons development.

In The New York Times, Hebrew University professor Martin van Creveld writes of the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran, explaining, "With the United States now in the midst of a hotly disputed election campaign," if the Israeli Prime Minister "wanted to act, the time to do so would be between now and November."

The first report is from December 9, 1997.  The second from October 13, 2003.  The third was published on August 21, 2004.

It is now August 2012.  Another election cycle is nearing an end and with it as always comes the same tired fearmongering and war hysteria.  Threats and predictions of an unprovoked, illegal Israeli assault on Iran are once again flooding the media with dire warnings of fabricated and meaningless - but sufficiently spooky - phrases such as Iran's supposedly looming "zone of immunity," which until recently was ominously dubbed the "point of no return."  We've been through this charade for three decades with no end in sight.

Early this month, Israeli national security adviser Ephraim Halevy, who was once director of Mossad, was quoted as saying that if he were Iranian he "would be very fearful of the next 12 weeks."  Meanwhile, Iranian diplomats continue to assert that the Islamic Republic has no intention of attacking Israel.  "We will react if there is any provocative act from the other side," Mohammad Khazaee, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, told reporter Laura Rozen just a month ago. "We will not initiate any provocative steps."

Iran's defense doctrine has been reaffirmed at the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence community.  Earlier this year, Defense Intelligence Agency chief Ronald Burgess told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his agency continues to assess that "Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict."

On the very same day that the editors of the New York Daily News took their cues from Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren to warn that "Tehran is on the verge of being able to produce a bomb," a spokesman for the White House National Security Council maintained that U.S. intelligence "continue[s] to assess that Iran is not on the verge of achieving a nuclear weapon."

Last week, reliable Netanyahu administration mouthpiece Barak Ravid reported in Ha'aretz that "[n]ew intelligence information obtained by Israel and four Western countries indicates that Iran has made greater progress on developing components for its nuclear weapons program than the West had previously realized."  He also published an article claiming that "President Barack Obama recently received a new National Intelligence Estimate report on the Iranian nuclear program, which shares Israel's view that Iran has made surprising, significant progress toward military nuclear capability," adding that the alleged report contains "new and alarming intelligence information about military components of Iran's nuclear program."

Not only was Ravid's reporting - tactlessly and transparently planted by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak - full of evidence-free claims by the MEK and over-hyped falsehoods about a secret detonation chamber and atomic particles washed away from an Iranian military installation legally off-limits to IAEA inspectors that have long been debunked, its main scoop was immediately denied by the Obama administration.  In response to Ravid's claims, Reuters reported a National Security Council spokesman as saying that "U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran's nuclear activities had not changed since intelligence officials delivered testimony to Congress on the issue earlier this year."  Both the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Ronald Burgess have consistently assessed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.

Essentially confirming suspicions that he was the source of Ravid's information, Ehud Barak told Israel Radio,  "There probably really is such an American intelligence report...making its way around senior offices" in Washington that, "makes the Iranian issue even more urgent and (shows it is) less clear and certain that we will know everything in time about their steady progress toward military nuclear capability."

That's right: probably really.

Ehud Barak even resorted to totally inapplicable and inappropriate historical analogies to anonymously fear-monger about Iran.  Utilizing the ultimate in Zionist emotional blackmail and hasbara, Barak evoked the threat of Nazi Germany: "What happened in the Rhine in 1936 will be child's play compared to what will happen with Iran," he declared.

Seemingly responding to former Mossad head Meir Dagan's January 2011 determination that Israel "should use military force only if it is attacked, or if it has 'a sword at its neck,'" Barak also pulled the phony, backed-into-a-corner, self-defense card: "The sword at our throat is a lot sharper than the sword at our throat before the Six-Day War," he told Ha'aretz.

Neither of these claims makes any sense.  That Iran is not the industrialized, military powerhouse that Nazi Germany was, nor does it have any expansionist or genocidal goals, hardly merits attention.  With regard to the Six-Day War, Barak is hoping his audience knows nothing of history.  The Israeli attack on Egypt that began the war was not a preemptive act of self-defense, but rather an aggressive military action.  Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin even admitted in 1982, "In June 1967 we again had a choice.  The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us.  We must be honest with ourselves.  We decided to attack him."  He added, "Who knows if there would have been an attack against us? There is no proof of it."

Speaking to reporters on August 10, White House spokesman Jay Carney revealed that, with regard to U.S. intelligence on the Iranian nuclear energy program, "we have eyes, we have visibility into the program, and we would know if and when Iran made a -- what's called a 'breakout move' towards acquiring a weapon."

Furthermore, Carney bragged about his administration's deliberate imposition upon the Iranian people of "the most stringent sanctions ever imposed on any country," which he said are "designed to take advantage of what we believe remains to be a window of opportunity to persuade Iran through these sanctions and through diplomatic efforts to forego its nuclear weapons ambitions."

Window of opportunity. Zone of immunity.  Point of no return.  All options on the table.  Credible military threat.

Such hype, based on dubious claims and false information, is nothing new when it comes to American and Israeli warmongering.  For instance, a CBS News report from August 18, 2002 stated, "Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, said [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon aide Ranaan Gissin."  The article quotes Gissin: "Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose.  It will only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction."

Similarly, this past weekend, The New York Times reported that Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon called upon the P5+1 (the five nuclear-armed permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany) to "declare today that the talks [with Iran] have failed" and demand Iran cease all nuclear activity within a matter of "weeks."  When Iran obviously does not comply, as such a demand is ludicrous and a direct abrogation of Iran's inalienable rights, Ayalon said "it will be clear that all options are on the table."

The threats of war come not only from politicians, but also - as it has before - from pundits and the press.

In a memorandum highlighting a particularly alarmist and dishonest speech delivered by Vice President Dick Cheney to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention on August 26, 2002, neoconservative rainmaker Bill Kristol wrote, "The time for action grows near. Congressional leaders should seriously consider a resolution authorizing use of force when they return next week. Passing such a resolution as soon as possible would provide the president with maximum flexibility and an opportunity for tactical surprise, would strengthen his hand vis-a-vis our allies, and might embolden internal opposition in Iraq."

Nearly a decade later, a Weekly Standard opinion piece published July 2, 2012 and co-authored by Kristol declared, "Time is running out and the consequences of inaction for the United States, Israel, and the free world will only increase in the weeks and months ahead. It's time for Congress to seriously explore an Authorization of Military Force to halt Iran’s nuclear program."

The repetition of rhetoric advocating military violence in the form of initiating a "war of aggression" - long considered "the supreme international crime" - has never been limited only to neoconservative hawks.  For example, the warmongering of so-called "liberal" Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is virtually indistinguishable from that of Kristol.

In February 2003, following Colin Powell's dazzling display of lies before the United Nations Security Council, Cohen wrote that Iraq "without a doubt" maintained an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Such was Cohen's certainty that he added, "Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."

This year, Cohen has been at it again, this time arguing that Israel has good reason to attack Iran, claiming that, while "the ultimate remedy is Iranian regime change," which Cohen insists is "not as improbable as it sounds," in the meantime, an Israeli assault "could accomplish quite a lot."  His reasoning is based on a total misunderstanding of historical events, wholesale contempt for international law, blind acceptance of selective Israeli and American allegations, and willfully ignoring consistently reaffirmed assessments of U.S. intelligence and IAEA inspections.

Inexplicably, this man still has a job.

As it was, so it is again.  An incumbent president is in full campaign mode and a challenger is pledging eternal fealty to Israeli militarism and Zionist expansionism.  Such was 2004, so it is again.  And through it all, the Israeli government, despite making its preferences clear, feigns neutrality.

In a September 7, 2004 interview with The Jerusalem Post, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared, "I don't interfere in elections. I never interfere in elections in other countries, and I hope that they will never interfere here either. I have no need to interfere and it is forbidden to interfere."  He added, "It is no secret that the US is Israel's devoted friend. There is a traditional friendship between the US and Israel. It is mutual."

In a letter to The New York Times published on April 12, 2012, Israeli ambassador Michael Oren wrote, "Israel does not interfere in internal political affairs of the United States...and greatly values the wide bipartisan support it enjoys in America."

And yet Oren continues to insist that the Israeli clock "is ticking faster" and claims "Israel, not the United States, is threatened almost weekly, if not daily, with annihilation by Iranian leaders."  He declares diplomacy dead and suggests "that truly crippling sanctions together with a credible military threat - and that I stress, that's a threat; not that we just say that it's credible, the folks in Tehran have to believe us when we say that - may still deter them. But we also have to be prepared, as President Obama has said, to keep all options on the table, including a military option."

Oren's explicit call for not only collective punishment but a "credible military threat" - echoing the demands of his boss Netanyahu - is in fact a direct violation of the Chapter 1, Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter which declares, "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."

Nevertheless, the threats and speculations continue unabated with Israel always residing safely within its own zone of impunity.  Though highly-credentialed foreign policy experts, in addition to many military and defense officials, warn against the wisdom of an Israeli attack, rarely - if ever - does anyone explain that such action would unequivocally constitute a war crime.  This same scenario repeats year after year.

In his 1997 book Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies, Holocaust survivor and Israeli professor Israel Shahak wrote,

Since the spring of 1992, public opinion in Israel is being prepared for the prospect of a war with Iran, to be fought to bring about Iran’s total military and political defeat. In one version, Israel would attack Iran alone, in another it would 'persuade' the West to do the job. The indoctrination campaign to this effect is gaining in intensity. It is accompanied by what could be called semi-official horror scenarios purporting to detail what Iran could do to Israel, the West and the entire world when it acquires nuclear weapons as it is expected to a few years hence. (p.54)

Shahak appears to be referencing a The Washington Post report from June 15, 1992 which quoted Israeli Major General Herzl Budinger as declaring that unless "Iran's intensive effort to develop atomic weapons is not 'disrupted,'" it would "become a nuclear power by the end of the decade."  In order to avoid this outcome, Budinger insisted on "the greatest disruption possible, whether military or political," either in the form of "international political action" or even "aggressive action, if needed."

Later that year, a November 30, 1992 article in The New York Times revealed that officials in the George H.W. Bush administration were frustrated with Israel "for fanning the recent alarm by portraying Iran as the most dangerous threat to both the region's and Israel's security," when such a threat didn't exist.

We've been seeing exactly this situation play out with increasing frequency.  Last summer, Ha'aretz reporter Ari Shavit, this regarding the constant Israeli "threat of a military attack against Iran," wrote:

This threat is crucial for scaring the Iranians and for goading on the Americans and the Europeans. It is also crucial for spurring on the Chinese and the Russians. Israel must not behave like an insane country. Rather, it must create the fear that if it is pushed into a corner it will behave insanely. To ensure that Israel is not forced to bomb Iran, it must maintain the impression that it is about to bomb Iran.

Yet the Iranian government isn't falling for the bluff, despite the fact that, with inhumane sanctions, the murders of Iranian civilians, drone surveillance, covert operations, support for Iranian terrorist groups,  and continuing cyberwar, the United States and Israel are already violating Iranian sovereignty and imposing lethal violence and forced deprivation on the Iranian people and their country.

But even an air strike, let alone a full-scale war, won't happen.  Probably really.

Aboard Air Force One last week, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that "the President remains committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and that we are leading an international effort to -- yes, something exciting happened in soccer.  Sorry, excuse me, now I'm distracted."

Carney had the right idea.  We should all be so distracted.

*****

Is Barak Ravid the new Judith Miller?

From The New York Times on September 8, 2002:

From Ha'aretz on August 9, 2012:

*****

StandWithUs' Dishonest Train Campaign:The Resurrected Roman 'Renaming' of Palestine Ruse

Henry Clifford's advertisement at the Chappaqua Metro-North train station July 10, 2012.

(Photo: Seth Harrison / The Journal News )

Hasbara outfit StandWithUs, as reported late last month, has placed its own billboards at Metro-North train stations in New York and Connecticut in an attempt to counter a much-discussed awareness campaign depicting the loss of Palestinian land over the past sixty-six years, paid for by Henry Cliffords' Committee for Peace in Israel/Palestine.

StandWithUs' counter-campaign, aimed at denying the validity of Palestinian ties to its own homeland by presenting the Old Testament as a divine land deed (in addition to lauding Israel's technological achievements and resurrecting the "no partner for peace" talking point), includes this ad:

No one disputes that Jewish presence in Palestine has been continuous since antiquity, albeit in varying degrees of population percentage whereby Jews often represented a very small minority of the total population of Palestine.  In 1517, when the Ottoman Empire seized control of Palestine, Jewish inhabitants of the region made up only 1.7% of the native population.  By 1882, Jewish Palestinians comprised 8% of the population.

When the State of Israel was unilaterally established in May 1948, after decades of massive Jewish immigration from Europe and Russia and months of the deliberate ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinian Arabs from their ancestral villages, the Jewish population of Palestine was still only about 30% of the total.

Regardless of population density and demographic distribution, of course, all inhabitants of the land should be granted the same human and civil rights and identical protection under the law.  The establishment of the State of Israel, a declaration by a minority of Zionist ideologues, destroyed any semblance of equality among the population of historic Palestine, with the minority Jewish population obtaining first-class citizen status in the nascent state and Jews worldwide gaining the ability to immigrate to a place they had never been.  Meanwhile, indigenous Palestinian Arabs were aggressively stripped of self-determination and sovereignty and prevented from returning to the homes and places of birth from which they had been violently expelled, in direct contravention of international law.

No historic connection to a land that has been home to countless tribes, cultures and communities over the course of millennia can ever excuse the deliberate, systematic and institutional discrimination against an indigenous people merely because they happen to be adherents to the "wrong" faith.

But this particular billboard is even more dishonest as one reads further.  It claims, "Ancient Israel was renamed 'Palestine' by the conquering Romans in 135 CE."  This is a common refrain, trotted out time and again by those who try to deny the existence of an indigenous Palestinian people.  The point is to present a version of history whereby the term "Palestine" was fabricated out of thin air by an imperial occupying power and applied to an entire region of land that was formerly populated and controlled solely by ancient Hebrews.

This claim demonstrates a distinct lack of historical knowledge and deliberate denial of known and verifiable facts.  As I noted a year ago, when The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a media pressure group and Zionist advocacy organization, bullied The Los Angeles Times into issuing a correction based on false information, specific references to "Palestine" date back nearly six hundred years before the 2nd Century CE.

In the 5th Century BCE, Herodotus, the first historian in Western civilization, referenced "Palestine" numerous times in his chronicle of the ancient Greek world, The Histories, including his documentation that "the coastal parts of Syria...and all that lies between it and Egypt is called Palestine." (VII.89, trans. Henry Carter, Heritage Press, 1958)

Furthermore, the name Palaestina was not of Greek origin, but has even more ancient roots.  According to the late University of Chicago professor Gösta Ahlström in his seminal book The History of Ancient Palestine, "Clearly Herodotus did not invent the name but used an already common term," derived from the Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaean, and Egyptian words for Philistines.  "Herodotus' use of the term shows that its content had expanded in the Persian period and that it referred to the people of the coastal areas from Gaza to Carmel," explains Ahlström.

A century after Herodotus, Aristotle affirms the commonality of the term when, in his Meteorology, he describes the Dead Sea as "a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink." (II.3)  The mid-4th Century Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax, an obscure geographical journal and circumnavigation manual of the ancient world (and most likely of Athenian origin) details the Phoenician communities inhabiting the coast of Palestine and Syria, referencing by name the cities of Joppa (Jaffa), Dor (Dora), and Ascalon (Ashkelon).

In the mid-2nd Century BCE, ancient geographer Polemon wrote of a "part of Syria called Palestine," while Greek travel writer Pausanias wrote in his Description of Greece of "the dates of Palestine." (9.19.8)

The name Palestine was also referenced in Roman literature well before 135 CE, when StandWithUs says the land was suddenly "renamed."

For instance, in the first decade of the 1st Century CE, the Roman poet Ovid mentioned Palestine in both his famed mythological poem Metamorphoses and his erotic elegy The Art of Love. He also wrote of "the waters of Palestine" in his calendrical poem Fasti. Around the same time, Latin poet Tibullus wrote of "the crowded cities of Palestine" in his poem Delia.

Even the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, writing around the third decade of the 1st Century CE, referred to "Syria in Palestine" as being inhabited in part by "the very populous nation of the Jews." (XII.75)

Perhaps the most well-known Jewish historian of the 1st Century is Josephus (c.37-100 CE), born and raised in Jerusalem, who was a military commander in Galilee during the First Jewish Revolt against the occupying Roman authority, a negotiator during the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and later wrote extensively of Levantine Jewish history. His The Jewish War, Antiquities of the Jews, and Against Apion all contain copious references to Palestine and Palestinians.

Towards the end of Antiquities, Josephus writes that he has documented historical events "from the original creation of man, until the twelfth year of the reign of Nero, as to what hath befallen the Jews, as well in Egypt as in Syria and in Palestine" and beyond. (XX.11.2)

While the StandWithUs Metro-North billboards seek to establish the notion that "Ancient Israel" was exclusively Jewish and the direct precursor to the modern State of Israel, historical fact does not bear this out.  According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Palestine during antiquity was a "demographically mixed region" that was "understood to be the homeland of the Jews throughout the period, though in fact housing a minority of them." It continues, "More precisely, the Jews belonged to the small area around Jerusalem known in Greek as Ioudaia, whence the name Ioudaioi."

Also, historian Gösta Ahlström notes that, while Palestine long referred to the region south of Carmel, including "the Jezreel Valley, the Beth-Shan Valley and Pella down to Raphia in the south and the western part of Transjordan south of Pella to the Dead Sea in the east," the term "Canaan" was also used in antiquity to refer to "the lowlands and the coastal area of Palestine," a region in which "the largest ethnic group was non-Semitic."  Moreover, "Canaan was a name for the more densely populated areas of the land, where the cultural and urban centers were located.  The central hill country did not really count, because it was very sparsely settled."  This "central hill country," Ahlström tells us, "was probably called Israel."

The term Palestine was long used by Roman authorities to refer to the region, as evidenced by the establishment of the Limes Palaestinae, or frontier border of Palestine, in 70 CE following the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, son of Roman emperor Vespasian.

The claim that the Roman emperor Hadrian officially changed the name of the region to "Syria Palaestina" or simply "Palestine" in a spiteful effort to punish Jewish inhabitants of Judea after the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE and forced the native Jewish community into exile is also dubious, if not wholly erroneous, especially when, by that time, the terms "Syrian Palestine" and "Palestine" had already been in common use for over six hundred years and Romans were not in the habit of exiling entire native populations from lands they occupied and administered.

Ahlström adds, "In the Roman period, the understanding of the name Palestine had widened and included also the interior; thus it was natural that Palestine became the official name for their provinces after 135 CE."

In its attempt to counteract the simple truth of Henry Cliffords' maps campaign at Metro-North stations, StandWithUs has revealed not only its shabby knowledge of the history of the region, but also demonstrates its clear disinterest in advocating for the implementation of equal rights and international law in historic Palestine.

*****

Some of this post was either excerpted or adapted from an earlier article of mine from September 29, 2011.

*****

UPDATE:

August 11, 2012 - Commenter "FreddyV" over at Mondoweiss points out another wholly dishonest aspect of the StandWithUs poster that I totally meant to address but forgot to include.

The image depicted on the billboard of a relief of the honorific Arch of Titus in Rome, is often described as proof that the Jews of antiquity were exiled from their homeland following the siege, sack, and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. (Note how StandWithUs even associates the "renaming" of Palestine and supposed "exile" of Jews with an event totally unrelated to and occurring 65 years after the events depicted on the relief.)

But that's not what the relief shows. In fact, the procession seen above is not of Jews being expelled, but rather of Romans themselves plundering the city. The menorah, trumpets and other spoils are being carried away in triumph by the victors. However, hasbara groups like StandWithUs would have you believe that these are defeated natives, tragically taking their belongings into exile.

But they're wrong. That's actually what this shows:

Nakba 1948

*****

The Universality of Bigotry:My Opinion Piece on Al Jazeera English

The following article was originally posted on the Al Jazeera English Opinion page.

*****

Racism and ignorance know no nationality
Nima Shirazi | 26 Jul 2012

Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi, U.S. Representative Sue Myrick, and Israeli Knesset Minister Michael Ben Ari

In late June, when Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi spouted anti-Semitic comments at a Tehran forum marking International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, his offensive rhetoric was rightfully ridiculed and condemned. Rahimi declared his belief that the Talmud, the central holy scripture of Judaism, "teaches [Jews] how to destroy non-Jews so as to protect an embryo in the womb of a Jewish mother", and also to "destroy everyone who opposes the Jews". Jews, according to Rahimi, "think God has created the world so that all other nations can serve them".

Midway through his speech, Rahimi decided to distinguish between Jews who "honestly follow the prophet Moses" and the Zionists who are "the main elements of the international drugs trade".

"While the Zionists utilise the narcotics to devastate other societies," Rahimi stated, "they safeguard their own society against such drugs" - noting incorrectly that "you cannot find a single addict among the Zionists. They do not exist".

Commentary such as this should be called out for what it is: racist, ignorant, and appalling. Yet, Rahimi's tirade was also disingenuously elevated to the level of an Iranian government official statement, and used as "proof" that the Iranian government is not merely vehemently anti-Zionist, but venomously anti-Semitic.

So if the bigoted comments of government officials are evidence of a country's inherent backwardness and barbarism, one must wonder what all those who were so offended by Rahimi's comments about the holy scripture and belief system of the Jewish people have to say about the comments and actions on July 17 of Israeli Knesset Minister and Meir Kahane devotee Michael Ben Ari.

"Rahimi's tirade was ... used as proof that the Iranian government is not merely vehemently anti-Zionist, but venomously anti-Semitic."

'The King's Torah'

After all Knesset members received a new edition of the New Testament, gifts from of a Christian Israeli publisher, Ben Ari (who is also leading the staggeringly racist pogroms against Africans living in Israel) reacted by tearing the Bible to shreds and throwing it in the trash, making sure to have the episode photographed. He then proudly sent the pictures to the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv.

Ben Ari was quoted as declaring: "This abominable book [the New Testament] brought about the murder of millions of Jews in the Inquisition and autos-da-fé." He added: "This is a provocation by church missionaries and there is no doubt that this book and those who sent it belong in the garbage can of history."

The Jewish Daily Forward, in its report on the incident, appropriately asked: "Does one dare imagine what the reaction would be from Jews if a non-Jewish Knesset member, or perhaps a politician in another country, publicly destroyed and disposed of a volume of Talmud?"

For all the condemnations of Rahimi's statement regarding Jewish doctrine, it seems that no one has attempted to trace the comment back to its possible (and, I stress, possible) origin in the much publicised writings of Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, an Israeli settler who lives in the illegal West Bank colony of Yitzhar near Nablus, whose ultra-fundamentalist Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva has received a massive amount of funding from the Israeli government.

In November 2009, Shapira published The King's Torah, which - according to Ha'aretz - "describes how it is possible to kill non-Jews according to halakha (Jewish religious law)". Ma'ariv reported that "the book contains no fewer than 230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guide for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew" and states that, as non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature", attacks against them curb "evil inclination".

Shapira's book lists hundreds of sources from the Bible and religious law, as well as quotes from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the fathers of religious Zionism, and Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli, a dean of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, the stronghold of national-religious Zionism located in Jerusalem.

According to Shapira and his co-author Rabbi Yossi Elitzur: "In any situation in which a non-Jew's presence endangers Jewish lives, the non-Jew may be killed even if he is a righteous Gentile and not at all guilty for the situation that has been created … When a non-Jew assists a murderer of Jews and causes the death of one, he may be killed, and in any case where a non-Jew's presence causes danger to Jews, the non-Jew may be killed..."

"'One must consider killing even babies,' the book says, 'because of the future danger that will be caused if they are allowed to grow up to be as wicked as their parents.'"

Even innocent civilians and children are determined to be legitimate targets for murder. "One must consider killing even babies," the book says, "because of the future danger that will be caused if they are allowed to grow up to be as wicked as their parents."

Recently, an investigation into allegations of racism, bigotry and calls to violence found within The King's Torah was officially closed.

Islamophobia has also reached high levels within the US government.

Asleep to the danger

In October 2009, US congressmen Sue Myrick (Republican-North Carolina), Paul Broun (Republican-Georgia), John Shadegg (Republican-Arizona) and Trent Franks (Republican-Arizona) issued a call for a federal investigation into the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for placing interns in the Committees on the Judiciary, Intelligence and Homeland Security. The call was triggered by a book named Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that's Conspiring to Islamise America, by Dave Gaubatz, an anti-Islamic activist who posed as an intern for CAIR in an attempt to prove that the group is trying to infiltrate Congress.

Myrick also wrote the forward to Gaubatz's book, in which she avers that radical Muslim terror agents live among us and are "carrying out their subversive plan". She continues: "America is asleep to the danger that confronts us. Since the 1960s there has been a concerted effort on the part of radical Islamists to infiltrate our major institutions."

Myrick writes of "their secret plot to take over the United States from within", establish "an impressive infrastructure of support", and "to infiltrate all areas of our society" in order to replace the constitution with "Sharia law". She urges government officials "to stop hiding behind political correctness and keep the American people informed" about "the threat to our sovereignty and our way of life", concluding: "We Americans must wake up before it is too late!"

When asked about potential "domestic security threats" back in 2003, Myrick replied: "Look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country."

In 2011 in Yorba Linda, California, an US-Muslim group held a fundraising event for relief work in the US, attended by local families and their young children. Outside, an appalling anti-Muslim protest raged. Among the speakers addressing the crowd were California Congressmen Ed Royce and Gary Miller and Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly.

Pauly described the Muslim charity event as "pure, unadulterated evil" and, after boasting that her son was serving in the Marine Corps, said: "As a matter of fact, I know quite a few Marines who would be very happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise."

Royce told the rabid, hateful crowd: "I'm gonna say this too, a big part of the problem that we face today, is that our children have been taught in schools that every idea is right, that no one should criticise others' positions no matter how odious, and what do they call that? They call that 'multiculturalism'. And it has paralysed too many of our fellow citizens to make the critical judgment we need to make to prosper as a society." One need only think about where Anders Breivik's views on "multiculturalism" led him to see how dangerous this sort of talk actually is.

Miller, who said he was there to support the protest and hand out American flags, told those gathered: "I am proud of you, I'm proud of what you're doing, I'm proud of this country and what we believe in, and let's not let people who disagree with us destroy it."

Net of suspicion

The country Miller is so proud of is the one in which Peter King holds congressional hearings encouraging racial profiling, inciting Islamophobia, and promoting vicious stereotypes of an already targeted, terrorised, and tormented minority community. It's the nation that reacts to the perceived threat of Muslim-American terrorism "by casting a wide net of suspicion over entire communities based solely on their religious beliefs, race, or national origin" and conducts secret, illegal surveillance of those communities.

It's where the "future leaders" of the most powerful and aggressive military on the planet have been taught "that a 'total war' against the world's 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists" and that "using the lessons of 'Hiroshima' to wipe out whole cities at once" and "targeting the 'civilian population wherever necessary'" may be required. It's a country whose secretary of defence hand-delivered to the former president a daily report of critical, classified military intelligence with cover sheets featuring Biblical quotes to emphasise the Crusades-like effort of US soldiers in the Middle East.

Iranian Vice-President Rahimi's comments about the Talmud are unacceptable. So are Ben Ari and Shapira's interpretations of both the Torah and New Testament. The same goes for Binyamin Netanyahu's incessant repetition that the Iranian government is inherently "irrational" due to its faith, and Ehud Barak's misunderstanding of the Shia concept of taqiyya, which he erroneously described to CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an April interview as "a kind of permission, from heaven, to the leader to lie [and] mislead partners as long as it's needed in order to reach the objective, the political objectives of the movement, the group or the tribe or the clan or the nation".

So next time the media overreacts to something blurted out by some Iranian official, let's make sure to remember that Iranians certainly have no monopoly on ignorance. There's plenty to go around.

Source: Al Jazeera

*****

The Washington Post's Racism Problem:Op-Ed Writers Fear 'Flood' of Arabs & Africans Pose Demographic, Existential Threat to a Pure Paradise

Washington Post opinion writers Jennifer Rubin and Ruth Marcus

The Washington Post seems to be incapable of preventing its opinion writers from making racist statements about Palestinians and Africans in columns about the demography of Israel.

In yesterday's Post, Ruth Marcus published a column from Tel Aviv entitled, "Israel confronts a flood of African refugees," in which she laments the current anti-African pogroms in Israel, but also gives credence to Zionist worries that, without forcibly and explicitly engineering population demographics, Israel may very well cease to be a majority-Jewish state.  Marcus opens by painting a picture of an impoverished South Tel Aviv neighborhood with a large migrant community as "seedy" and resembling "another country," due to her observation that there is "trash spilling out of dumpsters," there are "peddlers hawking batteries and blue jeans from sidewalk mats," and most importantly, that "nearly every person is African."

Marcus also describes the growing numbers of Sudanese and Eritrean refugees and migrant workers in Israel as "a flood" which has "created a serious social problem." Marcus continues:

Israel faces a demographic threat to the Jewish state from its fast-growing Arab population, even without a deluge of African refugees with no religious ties or political loyalties to the country. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that "60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and lead to the eradication of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."

That birth-rates of an indigenous population present such a terrifying "threat" to a super-militarized, settler-colonial, ethnic-cleansing, apartheid state should be enough to be make it perfectly clear just how important equality, human rights and "democracy" are to the "Jewish State." Ali Abunimah of The Electronic Intifada has already pointed out the clear racism and bigotry present in Marcus' words:

Not one mainstream commentator in the US has dared argue that white supremacy in the United States faces a "demographic threat" from Latinos because California and Texas have become "majority-minority" states, or had truck with the notion that the US faces "eradication as a white and democratic state" just because most babies now born in the US are non-white.

Beyond that, Marcus' choice of terminology, namely her use of "flood" and "deluge," is reminiscent of language used by her Post colleague, right-wing commentator Jennifer Rubin, who has described the inalienable Palestinian Right of Return as "the demand to flood Israel with the children and grandchildren of Arabs who fled during the war of aggression on the infant Jewish state."

Historical revisionism aside (the tired Zionist tale of Palestinians fleeing at the behest of their "leaders" after poor little nascent Israel was savagely attacked by hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs for simply declaring independence has long been debunked – anyone who repeats this absurdity is being willfully dishonest), and taking Rubin's unbridled racism and hatefulness for granted, the use of the word "flood" by both Rubin and Marcus is instructive and revealing.

Not only does a "flood" conjure images of inhuman waves of invasion and destruction (ironic, to say the least, considering the entire history of Israel is that of invasion, settler-colonialism, aggressive territorial expansion, deliberate ethnic cleansing, and the destruction of Palestinian history and culture), but it is also unoriginal.

In late November 1935, Adolph Hitler gave an exclusive interview to Hugh Baillie, president of the United Press, which was featured in the New York World-Telegram. In his attempt to justify the recent passing of the 'Nuremberg Legislation', including the racist 'Reich Citizenship Law' and 'Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor', Hitler stated, "This legislation is not anti-Jewish, but pro-German. The rights of Germans are thereby to be protected against destructive Jewish influences." He then continued,

The Jews, who formed less than one per cent of the population, tried to monopolize the cultural leadership of the people and flooded the intellectual professions, such as, for example, jurisprudence and medicine. The influence of this intellectual Jewish class in Germany had everywhere a disintegrating effect. For this reason in order to bar the spread of this process of disintegration it became essential to take steps to establish a clear and clean separation between the two races.

(Interview quoted in N.H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1942, Volume I, pp.732)

The supposed threat of "flooding" a pure population with such unsavory and dangerous types as "Jewish intellectuals" (if you're a Nazi), Palestinian "children and grandchildren" (if you're a proud ethnosupremacist like Rubin), or African refugees (if you're an oh-so-concerned Liberal Zionist like Marcus) is clearly common to racist and discriminatory ideologies that rely on the perception of eternal victimization and subsequent need for demographic engineering in order to preserve righteous purity, privilege and dominance.

Marcus rightly condemns the racist rhetoric of "Knesset member Miri Regev of Netanyahu's Likud Party [who] termed the Africans a 'cancer in our body'" and notes that "although she later apologized, a poll found 52 percent of Jewish Israelis agreeing with that ugly sentiment."

Yet that very same "ugly sentiment" has been a staple of Israeli terminology for years when it comes to the presence of indigenous Palestinians within Israel itself - yes, the "demographic" and "existential" threat that both Marcus and Rubin fear.

In August 2002, then-IDF chief Moshe Ya'alon also described Palestinians as an "existential threat" and a "cancer" during an interview with Ha'aretz's Ari Shavit entitled "The enemy within."  Ya'alon said that the "solution" to such "cancerous manifestations" in the West Bank and Gaza is a combination of "amputation" and "chemotherapy."

A couple of years later, right-wing Israeli politician/Golan Heights colonist Effi Eitam was also interviewed by Ha'aretz and declared, "I say that the Israeli Arabs are a time bomb underneath the whole democratic system in Israel. The state of Israel now faces an existential threat that has the character of an elusive threat; and the nature of elusive threats is they resemble cancer." 

Note, again, that the cancerous, existential threat to Israeli "democracy" is Palestinian babies being born in their ancestral homeland. That same year, Eitam - who has defended the lethal use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by the IDF as "very moral" and routinely calls for the aggressive ethnic cleansing of even more (ideally all) Palestinians from the entirety of historic Palestine - revealed his own prescription for Israel's policy toward Palestinians: "We will have to kill them all," he said.

Such sentiments are so similar to Nazi ideology as to be virtually indistinguishable.  Both Ya'alon and Eitam's statements echo Hitler's assertion that "The Jews are a cancer on the breast of Germany," while Netanyahu's warning that a growing African population will eventually lead to the "eradication of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state," quoted in Marcus' op-ed, resembles what Adolph Hitler told a crowd in Salzburg in August 1920.  He said that, for Germany to "recover its health...the Jewish spirit" must be "eradicated," and continued:

Don't be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus.  Don't think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis.  This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.

That a minority community - whether indigenous or immigrant - should be considered a deluge, a cancer or a threat to the desired demographic make-up of a state reveals far more about those who feel threatened than it does about that demonized and dehumanized community.

When will The Washington Post insist its columnists refrain from using such racist rhetoric?

*****

Portions of this piece were previously posted as a comment here.

*****