Pandermonium! At AIPAC, Trump Makes Same Promise on Jerusalem We've Been Hearing Since 1972

Breaking news!

The news media is abuzz today with reports that, speaking before the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington D.C. - the annual gathering of rabid right-wing Israel supporters - a presidential candidate vowed to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

So who was it this time? Donald Trump.

"We will move the American Embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem," he bellowed, reading from a script written for him by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, publisher of the conservative, pro-Israel weekly The New York Observer. Kushner took over the business from his father Charles, a real estate mogul and convicted criminal once described by The Jewish Week as "one of the marquee names in American Jewish philanthropy."

Donald Trump: We will move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem https://t.co/5Maw9wLgag #AIPAC2016 https://t.co/JlLkpWvFtg

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) March 21, 2016

So why is this news? It's not.

Promising to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's undivided capital and to move the American embassy there is part of Pandering 101 for Oval Office hopefuls. It is one of those litmus test talking points; the thing a politician says to prove the depths of his or her obsequiousness to a minuscule but influential cadre of donors and king (or queen) makers.

Every candidate in the past few decades knows this. It's an easy vow to make, and no one ever pays any political price for inevitably breaking it (since half of Jerusalem remains occupied territory and actually moving the embassy there would be a clear violation of international law (and long-standing U.S. policy, recently upheld by the Supreme Court), which doesn't recognize Israel's claim over the historic city). Making such an absurd promise plays well to the writhing masses at AIPAC confabs, establishes one's Zionist bona fides, and is a quick and easy way to offend indigenous Palestinians living under occupation, apartheid and blockade without actually flipping them the bird.

Nevertheless, the press continues to report on this blustery promise, no matter who utters it, as if it actually merits attention.

While he repeated the promise today for AIPAC, Trump had already said it back in January. And Ted Cruz has too (and even introduced legislation mandating the move in early 2015):

So has John Kasich (though, he's made clear that might not be his first priority when it comes to foreign policy):

And Jeb Bush before him:

So did Mitt Romney in 2012:

And Ron Paul and Rick Santorum the same year before they dropped out of the race:

And Newt Gingrich and Michelle Bachmann (and Herman Cain) before them:

Unsurprisingly, both John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin made the promise back in 2008:

Even Barack Obama participated in this ritual before AIPAC, the day after clinching the Democratic Party nomination for president in June 2008:

Obama's statement was met with instant criticism and he wound up walking it back almost immediately. Five weeks after delivering those remarks, Obama effectively retracted them during an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, saying, "You know, the truth is that this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech. And we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given."

Four years earlier, John Kerry did the same (without the walk-back), while also touting his record of making similar demands during his tenure in the Senate:

Before that was Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000. As reported by The New York Times in May 2000:

(Supporters of moving the embassy were subsequently disappointed in Bush's failure to act on his promise.)

The year before, while beginning her campaign for New York's Senatorial seat, the then-First Lady Hillary Clinton weighed in on the matter herself:

The next summer, as election day neared, Clinton repeated her pledge, adding that "the embassy should be moved from Tel Aviv before year's end."

Every Republican Party platform in the past 20 years has maintained the fiction that the embassy would be moved to Tel Aviv at the earliest convenience. The 1996 platform even vowed that the next "Republican administration will ensure that the U.S. Embassy is moved to Jerusalem by May 1999," while four years later the party promised that "the next Republican president will begin the process of moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel's capital, Jerusalem."

In the mid-1990s, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich similarly pandered like pros:

Before that, in 1992, the Clinton/Gore campaign hit the incumbent Bush administration for balking at the official recognition of "Israel's sovereignty over a united Jerusalem." Their campaign promised voters that "Bill Clinton and Al Gore will... support Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel."

Even Mike Dukakis tacked to the right of both the outgoing Reagan administration and George H.W. Bush campaign in 1988:

Al Gore, who tried to win the Democratic nomination for president that year, reportedly said in September 1987 that "he would consider moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem."

In April 1984, during a heated Democratic primary season, Walter Mondale and Gary Hart bent over backwards to assure voters in New York City that they too supported moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (a position even Israelis themselves understood as hollow political posturing).

The New York Times reported at the time:

Walter F. Mondale said he had supported such a move for 20 years, and he asserted that Senator Gary Hart had changed his position on the issue five days ago. In the past two weeks, Mr. Hart has denied that he suddenly changed his position, but has said his position has ''evolved.'' He has said firmly that if he became President, he would move the embassy to Jerusalem.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is the only one of the three candidates who opposes moving the embassy. The Reagan Administration also opposes such a move because the status of Jerusalem has long been disputed and the United States does not support Israeli sovereignty over the city.

Despite efforts by New York Senator Daniel Moynihan and California Congressman Tom Lantos to introduce a bill mandating the move, Reagan was adamant about not relocating the embassy, as such a divisive policy would, according to his Secretary of State George P. Shultz, "be very bad for the United States" and "damage our ability to be effective in the peace process."

The pandering was so thick, however, that a month later the Reagan administration had to pretend to consider supporting the move in order to stave off losing votes in the upcoming election.

Though the bill eventually stalled, Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist Nick Thimmesch, who called the proposal "one of the dumbest ideas to be advanced in Congress this session," lamented that "some of the election-year pandering in the Republic verges on the obscene" and credited the ill-conceived gambit to the lawmakers' "blind obedience to the Israel lobby (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee)." That was October 3, 1984.

By 1986, another bill was introduced to move the embassy, this time brought to the Senate floor by segregationist Republican Jesse Helms.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan attacked the Carter administration for abstaining from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel's attempted annexation of East Jerusalem and calling upon all countries to remove their embassies from the city.

But even by the mid-1980s, though, this was an old political ploy. The New York Times pointed out that the 1976 Democratic Party platform - on which Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale ran for office - declared:

We recognize and support the established status of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, with free access to all its holy places provided to all faiths. As a symbol of this stand, the U.S. Embassy should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Before that, on March 17, 1972, Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford, then the Republican Minority Leader, told a Zionist Organization of America regional meeting in Cleveland that the Nixon Administration should transfer the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.

Two years later, after first replacing Spiro Agnew as Vice President and then becoming President himself following Nixon's resignation, Ford backtracked on his previous position. "Under the current circumstances and the importance of getting a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, that particular proposal ought to stand aside," Ford said at his very first presidential press conference on August 9, 1974.

It's been over four decades since then and, sadly, while Palestine remains under brutal occupation, Israeli colonies continue to expand with impunity, and Palestinians are subject to ongoing oppression and violence, election-year pandering and blind obedience to the Israel lobby has become more obscene than ever.

*****

UPDATE:

March 22, 2015 - In his own grotesque AIPAC speech today, Ted Cruz reiterated his promise regarding moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

"On my very first day in office," he declared, "I will begin the process of moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem, the once and eternal capital of Israel," using the AIPAC-approved epithets always used by fawning politicians to describe the historic city.
Nodding with acknowledgement of the fact that this vow is an repeated refrain for presidential hopefuls, Cruz sought to dispel any doubt that he would act on his illegal and immoral promise. "I recognize for years a whole bunch of presidential candidates, both Republicans and Democrats, have said that," he told the assembled Zionists. "Some have said that standing here today. Here's the difference: I will do it."

Thankfully, here's the thing: no, he won't. In fact, since he'll never ever be president, he'll never even get the chance.

*****

UPDATE II:

September 28, 2016 - During a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in New York City for his annual propaganda stand-up routine before the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump again declared his intention, if elected president, to have the United States government officially "recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel."

Such recognition would clearly violate both domestic and international law, as Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967 is considered illegal and illegitimate by the entire world, including the United States.

Trump's declaration - a common campaign promise by presidential hopefuls and constant refrain of AIPAC-funded Congressional blowhards - goes hand-in-hand with another absurd pledge routinely made by politicians: that the U.S. Embassy will be relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

It's a pandering platitude signifying nothing. But what else should we expect from this gilded nightmare?

(Credit: GPO)

*****

Putting A Lid On Clinton's Erroneous Iranian "Nuclear Weapons Program" Talking Point

Hillary Clinton walks onstage at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before the February 11, 2016 Democratic debate.

(Credit: AP Photo/Morry Gash)

Marco Rubio isn't the only presidential candidate who robotically regurgitates the same irritating sound bite over and over again.

In early July 2015, as negotiations over Iran's nuclear program and international sanctions entered their final stage, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was campaigning at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. "I so hope that we are able to get a deal in the next week that puts a lid on Iran's nuclear weapons program," she told the crowd.

On July 14, the day the deal was reached, she repeated the idiom twice, calling the agreement "an important step in putting the lid on Iran's nuclear program" and telling the press that while the accord "does put a lid on the nuclear program... we still have a lot of concern about the bad behavior and the actions by Iran."

Later that month, while stumping in Iowa, Clinton told a crowd of her supporters, "I don't trust the Iranians, nobody should trust the Iranians. We're not expecting some kind of transformation on their part. This is a hard-headed agreement to put a lid on their nuclear weapons program."

Back in New Hampshire that August, Clinton insisted, "We have a lot of other challenges posed by Iran. But personally as your future president, I'd rather be dealing with those challenges knowing that we have slowed down and put a lid on their nuclear weapons programs."

The following month, the Clinton campaign had returned to Iowa, where the presidential hopeful said, "I support the president's agreement with Iran," adding that "it's the best alternative we have to put a lid their nuclear weapons program."

On the January 17, 2016 edition of Meet The Press, Clinton told Chuck Todd, "Look, I have said for a long time that I'm very proud of the role that I played in getting us to the point where we could negotiate the agreement that puts a lid on Iran's nuclear weapons program."

During the February 4 Democratic debate, she again said the Iran deal "puts a lid on the nuclear weapons program."

At a debate in Wisconsin a week later, Clinton boasted (seemingly to the tune of "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly") that she "put together the coalition that imposed the sanctions on Iran that got us to the negotiating table to put a lid on their nuclear weapons program." She later said, "I think we have achieved a great deal with the Iranian nuclear agreement to put a lid on the Iranian nuclear weapons program."

During a Town Hall last night, Clinton laid out her version of Iranian nuclear history:

They had built covert fuel facilities. They had stocked them with centrifuges, all of that had happened while George W. Bush was president. And we had done, you know, sanctions, and everything that we could think of as the United States government and Congress, but it had not stopped them.

And there were a lot of other countries in the region who said they would take military action if necessary. So I led the effort to impose sanctions on Iran, to really bring them to the negotiating table, the negotiations started under my watch, ably concluded under Secretary Kerry, to put a lid on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Clearly, Clinton thinks this particular idiom will resonate with a largely uninformed American public that has been trained to believe that, before her heroic sanctions and the eventual deal, Iran had been desperately trying to build a nuclear weapon. "By 2009," her campaign website reads, "Iran was racing toward its goal—and a lot of Western nations felt powerless to stop them."

But here's the thing: none of that is true.

Iran Doesn't and Didn't Have a Nuclear Weapons Program - and Never Has

International intelligence assessments have consistently affirmed that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. What Iran does have, however, is a nuclear energy program with uranium enrichment facilities, all of which are perfectly legal and protected under international law. All Iran's nuclear facilities and fissile material is under international safeguards, strictly monitored and routinely inspected by the IAEA. No move to divert nuclear material to military or weaponization purposes has ever been detected. These facts have been consistently affirmed by U.S., British, Russian, and even Israeli intelligence, as well as the IAEA. In fact, the IAEA itself has said in the past that there is "no concrete proof" Iran's nuclear program "has ever had" a military component.

Hysteria over an imaginary Iranian "race" toward a obtaining a nuclear bomb has been exploited over the past three decades to justify sanctions, threats and covert actions against Iran in the hopes of overthrowing the government that came to power after ousting the U.S.-backed Shah in 1979.

Even claims that Iran had a dedicated nuclear weapons program before 2003 are dubious at best, and rely on evidence that is most likely completely fabricated and whose authenticity was repeatedly questioned by the IAEA. As former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei noted in his 2011 memoir, "Age of Deception," U.S. intelligence officials "did not share the supposed evidence that had led them to confirm the existence of a past Iranian nuclear [weapons] program, other than to refer to the same unverified set of allegations about weaponization studies that had already been discussed with the Agency."

In fact, even the "Final Assessment" of Iran's alleged past weapons work, published last December by the IAEA, was a dud. The agency concluded that "a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device were conducted in Iran prior to the end of 2003 as a coordinated effort, and some activities took place after 2003," and that "these activities did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities." Moreover, the IAEA affirmed - as it has for the past decade - that there were "no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material" from Iran's nuclear energy program to a possible parallel military effort.

After reviewing these findings, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter insisted, "There hasn't been a more meaningless conclusion of such an over-hyped issue since the CIA assessed that Iraq had 'dozens of WMD program-related activities' in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of that country." Beyond this, Ritter adds that even the supposed "range of activities relevant" to a nuclear weapon "are far less threatening than the ominous description provided by the IAEA would lead one to believe. In every case, the IAEA was either forced to concede that their information was baseless (allegations concerning the manufacture of "uranium metal," for instance), or else could be explained through 'alternative applications' involving Iranian commercial and military activities unrelated to the Iranian nuclear program."

Reading even further between the lines, nonproliferation expert and international law professor Dan Joyner has noted that the IAEA assessment wholly vindicates Iran against allegations that its past activities violated its legal obligations. He wrote that the IAEA has "now given its opinion that Iran has not violated NPT Article II through any of the alleged PMD activities, because none of the assessed activities can be said to rise to the prohibited level of the manufacture or other acquisition of a nuclear explosive device." Also, because there was never any diversion of nuclear material from peaceful to military uses, the IAEA had effectively "determined that none of these activities constituted a violation of Iran’s safeguards obligations. As Article 1 of Iran's comprehensive safeguards agreement makes explicit, the IAEA's safeguards activities in Iran are implemented 'for the exclusive purpose of verifying that such material is not diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.'"

Bet you don't hear that in the press or shouted from podiums often.

Iran Didn't Build 'Covert Fuel Facilities'

Neither of Iran's two uranium enrichment facilities - at Natanz and Fordow - was ever operational without strict IAEA safeguards in place. Both of them were declared to the agency well in advance of opening and long before any nuclear material was introduced to the plants or the centrifuges installed in them. Since coming online, both facilities have been routinely and rigorously monitored and inspected by IAEA personnel. No diversion of nuclear material to weapons work has ever been found or suspected.

No One Was Going to Attack Iran

A common refrain heard consistently for decades now is that the "clock is ticking" and "time is running out" to end the nuclear impasse peacefully because Israel, or the U.S. itself, is on the verge of bombing Iran. This is all bluster and chest-thumping.

It was never actually going to happen - and still won't. Such threats lent credibility to and deflected criticism of successive administrations' negotiations with Iran, nothing more. If the American public thought an attack was imminent, the reasoning went, they'd support diplomacy over war and any negotiated outcome could be seen as a victory for the West. The supposed pending attack on Iran is the ultimate straw man. This is literally how propaganda works.

Clinton Was Part of the Problem, Not the Solution

Hillary Clinton has long been touting her own role in kickstarting negotiations with Iran that eventually led to a multilateral deal. But Clinton did nearly nothing to advance the talks and, throughout her political career has done everything she could to threaten Iran, support confrontation and stall diplomacy.

It was Clinton who, during her time as Secretary of State, held fast to the Bush administration's (and Israeli government's) outrageous insistence that Iran forego its legal rights and curtail all domestic uranium enrichment. Iranian offers to negotiate a deal since 2005 were routinely rejected by the United States government, which long maintained the irrational position that Iran capitulate to the American demand of zero enrichment on Iranian soil.

Clinton also killed a potential deal over a nuclear fuel swap in 2009 because she refused to negotiate minor details with Iran, instead demanding that Iran "accept the agreement as proposed because we are not altering it." What a diplomat.

What made successful diplomacy with Iran possible was not, as so many like Clinton still erroneously claim, the devastating sanctions imposed on the Iranian people or even the 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani, it was the Obama administration's eventual abandonment of the "zero enrichment" demand.

Though Clinton did authorize (at the behest of President Obama) backchannel talks with Iran to proceed 2011 and 2012, no real progress was made toward a solution to the enrichment impasse. As Laura Rozen has revealed, it wasn't until early 2013, after John Kerry succeeded Clinton as Secretary of States, that talks bore fruit.

"At the March 2013 Oman meeting," Rozen reported in August 2015, "then-Deputy Secretary of State William Burns conveyed a message from Obama that he would be prepared to accept a limited domestic enrichment program in Iran as part of an otherwise acceptable final Iran nuclear deal."

This dropping of the "zero enrichment" demand effectively opened the door for acknowledging (albeit implicitly) Iran's right to enrich and for negotiations to move forward productively.

Clearly, the biggest obstacle Iranian negotiators had to deal with on their way to a deal was Clinton herself.

It's about time Clinton put a lid on her own lies.

*****

Clinton's Efforts Were Detrimental, Not Instrumental, to Reaching a Deal with Iran

"To be successful in the way that I expect, we're going to watch Iran like the proverbial hawk."
- Hillary Clinton, on Meet The Press, January 17, 2016

Ever since the signing of the Iran deal last summer, Hillary Clinton has been taking credit for it.

As the contest for the Democratic nomination for president heats up, Hillary Clinton continues to promote her foreign policy experience, acumen and expertise more and more, dismissing Bernie Sanders' own international affairs chops as either wrong-headed, too idealistic or simply nonexistent.

Surely, in an atmosphere where the specter of her Iraq vote still looms large and her chumminess with war criminals like Henry Kissinger is starting to raise eyebrows, there is still time for Hillary's hawkish record to come back to haunt her this primary season.

In the meantime, though, Clinton is hoping to cash in on - and partially take credit for - one of the Obama administration's signature diplomatic achievements: the Iran Deal.

"Look," Clinton told NBC News' Chuck Todd on January 17, "I have said for a long time that I'm very proud of the role that I played in getting us to the point where we could negotiate the agreement that puts a lid on Iran's nuclear weapons [sic] program."

That evening, at the Democratic debate in Charleston, South Carolina, Clinton said basically the same thing:

I'm very proud of the Iran Nuclear Agreement. I was very pleased to be part of what the president put into action when he took office. I was responsible for getting those sanctions imposed which put the pressure on Iran. It brought them to the negotiating table which resulted in this agreement.

At the next debate, on February 4 at the University of New Hampshire, Clinton went even further:

You know, I did put together the coalition to impose sanctions. I actually started the negotiations that led to the nuclear agreement, sending some of my closest aides to begin the conversations with the Iranians.

By casting her tenure at the State Department as instrumental in laying the groundwork for the nuclear accord, which lifts international and unilateral sanctions in return for the application of strict limitations on Iran's nuclear energy program, Clinton is attempting to rewrite history.

In reality, her lockstep adherence to neoconservative and Israeli demands regarding Iran's safeguarded uranium enrichment program during her four years as Secretary of State put a deal with Iran further out of reach, not closer to happening. It was not until an executive decision was made in the White House to change long-standing U.S. policy about Iranian enrichment - an about-face that Clinton herself opposed but was begrudgingly forced to accept, but never herself articulate - that progress could be made toward ending the nuclear impasse.

It was Hillary Clinton, after all, who scuttled a fuel swap deal in 2009 that would have greatly reduced Iran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium by delivering deeply patronizing ultimatums to Iran instead of dealing diplomatically and respectfully with a sovereign nation that has interests and concerns of its own.

And it was Hillary Clinton who, during the first Democratic primary debate last October, boasted of making enemies of "the Iranians."

Hillary on the enemies she's proud to have made: "The NRA, health insurance companies, drug companies, the Iranians...and the Republicans."

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 14, 2015

The truth is that the Iran deal was achieved in large part because the Obama administration shifted away from Clinton's hawkish antagonism and reliance on the failed policy of piling on illegal sanctions and so-called "coercive diplomacy."

Sanctions Didn't "Work"

Essentially, negotiations with Iran were able to succeed primarily due to the Obama administration's acknowledgment that Iran would continue to operate a fully-monitored, comprehensively safeguarded domestic uranium enrichment program. It had nothing to do with sanctions, which served only to deepen Iran's resolve to maintain and expand its nuclear program and create resentment toward the United States and harm the health, food security and livelihoods of Iranian citizens.

Sanctions were not only ineffectual from a political standpoint, they actually totally backfired. Forced to diversify its economy, Iran increased its non-oil exports and expanded privatization, in turn growing Iran's middle-class and reducing government control over the economy, thus rendering the pressure of trade sanctions even less effective. As a result, Moody's Investors Service recently reported that, due to its experience under sanctions, the Iranian economy is now far more resilient to low oil prices than other crude exporters and "won't suffer from capital flow volatility amid U.S. interest-rate increases because it has had minimal exposure to external debt and foreign direct investment."

Nevertheless, Clinton's own campaign website boasts about how "she twisted arms in the international community to impose the strongest-ever international sanctions on Iran."

Sanctions did not, as we are so often told, bring Iran to the negotiating table. Iran had been at the table for a decade already, offering its international interlocutors proposals that guaranteed a severe reduction in enrichment capacity, the setting of limits on enrichment levels, enhanced monitoring and inspections, expanded safeguards protocol, and the opening up of its program to international partnership and investment. The only condition consistently insisted upon by Iran before it accepted these stringent terms was the acknowledgement and acceptance of its inalienable right - as affirmed by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty - to a peaceful nuclear program, and full domestic control of its own nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment.

For 10 years, Iranian offers were routinely rejected by Western negotiators, who long maintained the irrational position that Iran capitulate to the American and Israeli demand of zero uranium enrichment on Iranian soil and refused to acknowledge Iran's national right to enrich uranium.

"We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran," declared George W. Bush's undersecretary of state for arms control Robert Joseph in early 2006. Such a stance had already scuttled chances for a comprehensive nuclear deal in 2005 and this outrageous precondition - that Iran give up all enrichment capability indefinitely until the West said so - poisoned subsequent talks until the Obama's White House officially changed course in early 2013.

It was Obama's realization that this was a failed policy, not the "crippling sanctions," that led to successful negotiations. That, and John Kerry taking the lead - both during his tenure in the Senate and subsequently as Clinton's successor.

Indeed, as recently as March 2015, Clinton was still indicating her preference for "little-to-no enrichment" in Iran and refusing to recognize Iran's inalienable rights.

Clinton's Backchannel to Nowhere

Despite being given - and eagerly taking - undue credit for laying the groundwork for a nuclear agreement with Iran, Clinton's role is far less impressive than it sounds.

Laura Rozen has laid out the timeline in articles for Al-Monitor, noting that it wasn't until March 2013 that the Obama administration officially let go of the "zero enrichment" demand and signaled that Iran's nuclear rights and domestic control of its nuclear fuel cycle would be respected.

This was the game-changer Iran had been awaiting for close to a decade, not Clinton's tentative and dismissive approach to opening secret talks with the Iranian government.

As former weapons inspector Scott Ritter has pointed out:

Ultimately, it was the United States that was compelled to change course and acknowledging not only Iran's right to enrich, but the fact that this enrichment would be allowed to continue in perpetuity. It wasn't economic sanctions that drove Iran to the negotiating table, but rather the reality of 20,000 spinning centrifuges inside Iran that drove the United States to the negotiating table. And far from capping a non-existent nuclear weapons program, the Obama administration had to surrender to the reality that Iran got what it always wanted — the ability to exercise its rights under the nonproliferation treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear energy.

This is the truth. But don't expect to hear much about it as this campaign season continues.

*****

Netanyahu's Zoomorphic Bigotry: A Retrospective

Benjamin Netanyahu pets his dog Kaia, a biter, at the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem. (Credit: Facebook)

"Anyone who approaches the Zionist problem in a moral aspect is not a Zionist."

- Moshe Dayan, quoting David Ben-Gurion

Ha'aretz correspondent Barak Ravid reported yesterday:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a tour to the construction site of a barrier on the eastern border on Tuesday that he wishes to surround the country with fences and barriers "to defend ourselves against wild beasts" that surround Israel.

Dehumanization of one's real or perceived adversaries, often in the form of animalization, has long been a hallmark of propaganda. As Netanyahu reinforces Israel's garrison mentality, he continues building a literal fortress by extending the apartheid wall further around the Zionist state, promising more division, segregation, discrimination, and violence.

Such rhetorical tactics are nothing new. In 1927, the influential communications theorist Harold Lasswell published his reflection on World War I, entitled Propaganda Techniques in the World War. "So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations," he wrote, "that every war must appear to be a war of defence against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about whom the public is to hate." Lasswell added, "Guilt and guilelessness must be assessed geographically, and all the guilt must be on the other side of the frontier."

"For most human beings, it takes an awful lot to allow them to kill another human being," Anthony Pratkanis, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told ABC News back in 2003, as the United States was gearing up to invade Iraq. "The only way to do it is to justify the killing, to make the enemy look as evil as possible."

The report also quoted Hayward communications professor James Forsher, an expert on propaganda films. "The secret in propaganda is that when you demonize, you dehumanize," Forsher explained. "When you dehumanize, it allows you to kill your enemy and no longer feel guilty about it. That is why during World War II, a lot of caricatures became animals... You can kill a monkey a lot more easily than you can kill a neighbor."

Nazi dehumanization of Jews as "vermin" to be exterminated and American anti-Japanese caricatures of rats and snakes from the 1940s are especially grotesque, but the phenomenon was around long before that. Anti-Tsarist and, subsequently, anti-Soviet propaganda often employed the image of an octopus, spreading its imperial tentacles across the globe. During World War I, Germany was depicted as a crazed, club-wielding gorilla in a U.S. Army poster encouraging enlistment.

In their 1994 book, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam note that the common colonial/racist trope of "animalization" was "rooted in a religious and philosophical tradition which drew sharp boundaries between the animal and the human" and "renders the colonized as wild beasts... projected as body rather than mind."

Zionist colonists and Israeli officials have for years employed this type of rhetoric to dehumanize those they seek to forcibly displace, dispossess, disenfranchise, oppress, occupy and subjugate. The Zionist project is always presented as a bulwark of civilization against the savagery and barbarism of the brutish Eastern, Arab, African, and/or Muslim hordes; the settlement on the hill; the light amidst the darkness; the "villa in the jungle," as Ehud Barak once said.

"At the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence that spans it all," Netanyahu fantasized yesterday. "I'll be told, 'this is what you want, to protect the villa?' The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts."

The animalization of Palestinians, and other perceived enemies, in Israeli rhetoric goes back decades.

Dogs, Animals, Roaches, Grasshoppers and Worms

Shortly after Israel seized military control over the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan told officials in his center-left political party, Rafi, that unless Palestinians in the newly-occupied territories make "peace" with Israel, they "shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads."

On June 8, 1982, two days after Israel invaded Lebanon, Prime Minister Menachem Begin delivered remarks before the Knesset justifying the military assault as a defense of Jewish lives worldwide. Begin insisted that the widespread rallying cry of terrorists around the globe was that "there is no innocent Jew. Every Jew is doomed - he must be killed." In response, he declared, "This terror must be eradicated." Setting Jewish people apart from the rest of humanity, Begin said:

The fate of a million and half a million Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents.

In April 1983, outgoing Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan (who was losing his post due to his responsibility for the 1982 Sabra-Shatila Massacre) reportedly told the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, "The Arabs will never win over us by throwing stones. Our response must be a nationalist Zionist response. For every stone that’'s thrown, we will build ten settlements. If 100 settlements will exist, and they will, between Nablus and Jerusalem, stones will not be thrown. If this will be the situation, then the Arabs will only be able to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle."

During the First Intifada, on March 31, 1988, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told reporters at the ruins of an ancient Herodian fortress in the occupied West Bank, "Anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head smashed against the boulders and walls," adding that Palestinians who resist the Israeli occupation "are like grasshoppers compared to us."

In late 2004, Yehiel Hazan, a Likud minister and leader of the biggest settler lobbying group, declared on the floor of the Knesset, "The Arabs are worms. You find them everywhere like worms, underground as well as above," adding, "Until we understand that we're doing business with a nation of assassins and terrorists who don't want us here, there will be no let up. These worms have not stopped attacking Jews for a century."

On June 30, 2012, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked of the religious nationalist Jewish Home party posted a Facebook message that identified "the entire Palestinian people is the enemy" and calling for the total elimination of Palestine, "including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure." The post, alleged written years ago by now-deceased settler leader Uri Elitzur, added that Palestinian mothers should be executed for giving birth to "little snakes," that is, Palestinian children. Less than a year later, Netanyahu appointed Shaked to be Israel's Minister of Justice.

In mid-2015, Netanyahu appointed as new Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan, a rabidly racist rabbi who also belongs to the Jewish Home party in the Knesset. A couple years earlier, on August 1, 2013, Ben-Dahan said in a radio interview, "To me, they [Palestinians] are like beasts, they are not human." Later that same year, Ben-Dahan insisted that "a Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual." As Deputy Defense Minister, Ben-Dahan is now responsible for the "Civil Administration" of Israel's martial law in the West Bank. "The Civil Administration," a blogger for the Israeli media site 972+ has pointed out, "is responsible for all aspects the occupation that don’t involve boots-on-the-ground security operations — it administers planning, building, and infrastructure for both Jews and Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank. It also administers the Palestinian population database and is responsible for granting and revoking entry and travel permits for Palestinians, controlling every aspect of their movement."

"In other words, the man slated to take charge of an organization entrusted with supervising the theft of Palestinian land and supervising Palestinians' lives, is a racist who said he does not see them as human, but rather as animals."

Netanyahu, too, has a penchant for animal allusions when speaking about those he despises most, be they Palestinians, Iranians, or Muslims, in general.

Insatiable Crocodile

While a possibly apocryphal quote has then-Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak saying in August 2000, "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more," Netanyahu brought the reptilian analogy up to date when, during a typically verbose and combative speech before the UN General Assembly in September 2011, he said:

[Israel's] critics continue to press Israel to make far-reaching concessions without first assuring Israel's security. They praise those who unwittingly feed the insatiable crocodile of militant Islam as bold statesmen. They cast as enemies of peace those of us who insist that we must first erect a sturdy barrier to keep the crocodile out, or at the very least jam an iron bar between its gaping jaws.

Netanyahu probably didn't realize he was channeling his fellow apartheid champion, P.W. Botha, who led South Africa from 1978 to 1989, and is credited with complaining that "the free world wants to feed South Africa to the red crocodile [Communism], to appease its hunger." Botha, incidentally, was widely known by the Afrikaans nickname Die Groot Krokodil, or "The Big Crocodile."

Nuclear Duck

The following March, in one of his most tedious diatribes about the non-existent threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, Netanyahu told attendees at AIPAC's annual conference that Iran's fully safeguarded uranium enrichment facilities and medical research reactor were actually a cover for a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

Ladies and Gentlemen, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then what is it? That's right, it's a duck – but this duck is a nuclear duck. And it's time the world started calling a duck a duck.

Quack.

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

Appearing on Face The Nation on July 14, 2013, Netanyahu decried Iranian president-elect Hassan Rouhani as a "wolf in sheep's clothing," whose devious Persian strategy is to "smile and build a bomb." He repeated this description to a group of U.S. lawmakers the following month.

On October 1, 2013, Netanyahu returned to the UN General Assembly and accused Rouhani of being a "wolf in sheep's clothing."

"Rouhani doesn't sound like Ahmadinejad," Netanyahu wailed. "But when it comes to Iran's nuclear weapons program, the only difference between them is this: Ahmadinejad was a wolf in wolf's clothing. Rouhani is a wolf in sheep's clothing, a wolf who thinks he can pull the eyes -- the wool over the eyes of the international community."

Fittingly, Netanyahu's faithful lapdog, Yuval Steinitz, also took to the media in July and September that year to describe Rouhani the same way.

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Updated 02.11.16 to include references to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as a "wolf in sheep's clothing," which I inexplicably omitted in my original post. Thanks to @PersianSteel for bringing this to my attention.

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UPDATE:

February 16, 2016 - Israel-based journalist David Sheen, who has cataloged and reported extensively on Israel's treatment of African immigrants and refugees, posted this on Twitter yesterday:

College engineering exam question posits non-Jewish African refugees in Israel as rats to be rounded up for torture pic.twitter.com/c56u2lihjR

— David Sheen (@davidsheen) February 15, 2016

The image was obtained by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev student Moran Mekamel.

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UPDATE II:

September 20, 2017 - Well, it's that time of year again. In his latest performance of propagandistic pabulum before the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unloaded all of his usual, tired talking points about Iran.

As he always does, he likened those he maligns to beasts. Predictably railing against the Iran nuclear deal, Netanyahu said:

I warned that when the sanctions on Iran would be removed, Iran would behave like a hungry tiger unleashed, not joining the community of nations, but devouring nations, one after the other. And that’s precisely what Iran is doing today.

So, now Iran is a "hungry tiger." Got it.

Not one to quit while he's already behind, Netanyahu had one more animal allusion teed up to make his sycophants in the balcony swoon and bore the rest of the dwindling delegations that stayed for his speech.

Boasting about his recent world travels, Netanyahu lied that, "[a]fter 70 years, the world is embracing Israel, and Israel is embracing the world. One year. Six continents." He continued:

Now, it’s true. I haven’t yet visited Antarctica, but one day I want to go there too because I’ve heard that penguins are also enthusiastic supporters of Israel. You laugh, but penguins have no difficulty recognizing that some things are black and white, are right and wrong."

What the transcript of this pathetic routine fails to capture, however, is that no one watching the speech actually laughed. The joke, indeed, is Netanyahu himself.

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UPDATE III:

February 18, 2018 - In order to distract attention from his mounting corruption scandals, Benjamin Netanyahu is again raising the specter of a ferocious Persian kitty, lurking in the dark underbrush and waiting to pounce upon poor, unsuspecting Israel.

And so, back are tired appeasement comparisons along with the good ol' "tiger" metaphor, as Netanyahu claimed in a speech today that the 2015 Iran deal he and his lobbyists in Washington are desperate to destroy has "unleashed a dangerous Iranian tiger."

As tiresome propaganda goes, this one's purrrrrfect.

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UPDATE IV:

March 22, 2018 - Well, this isn't a hard one.

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Andrea Mitchell Said British Sailors Were Held by Iran in 2007 for 'Months and Months.' That's Not True.

Appearing tonight on MSNBC in advance of Barack Obama's final State of the Union address, foreign correspondent Andrea Mitchell spoke to Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews about Iran's seizure of two U.S. Navy riverine gunboats (and 10 crew members) that had entered Iranian territorial waters on their way from Bahrain to Kuwait - perhaps accidentally, perhaps due to a mechanical malfunction or engine failure, perhaps not.

The timing of this event "could not be worse," Mitchell explained, noting that Obama was poised to laud the success of the multilateral nuclear deal negotiated and signed last year by Iran, the United States and five other world powers. Important terms of the deal - such as the lifting of international sanctions on Iran - are set to go into effect just a few days from now. As it turned out, Obama's speech was not rewritten to specifically address the naval issue.

Beyond discussing the political implications of this situation for Obama, and his Republican critics, Mitchell provided a little context for MSNBC viewers about a previous scenario involving foreign troops held by Iran for violating its borders:

"The backdrop here is that years ago, 2007, British sailors were taken, they were not released for months and months."

While the term "taken" is a highly suggestive one considering Iranian allegations that British navy vessels had entered Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf, Mitchell was referring to the March 23, 2007 incident when 15 members of the Royal Navy - eight sailors, seven marines - were taken in Iranian custody and subsequently transferred to a detention center in Tehran.

'Months and months'

Yes, similarities between the 2007 incident and today's are obvious. Immediate and incessant were the claims that Iran was engaged in outrageous, aggressive behavior, with the British sailors and marines, dubbed "hostages," said to have been "kidnapped" and "abducted." Such outrage, regardless of knowing the full facts of the situation, has once again been on display after news broke about today's incident (as if an Iranian patrol boat entering American territorial waters wouldn't be instantly either detained or attacked by the U.S. Coast Guard).

But it is not true that the British personnel, as Mitchell said, "were not released for months and months."

In fact, harrowing as their ordeal may have been, they were held in Iran for less than two weeks: from March 23 to April 4, 2007. That's a far cry from "months and months," yet nobody felt the need to fact-check the veteran reporter.

'A bit like a camping trip'

In another incident from late 2009, five British nationals were traversing the Persian Gulf from Bahrain to Dubai in a 60-foot yacht in order to take part in an international boat race to Muscat when their propeller broke and they drifted into Iranian territory. They were picked up by an Iranian Navy patrol and held at a naval base on Sirri island for about a week before being released.

At a press conference in Dubai afterwards, one of the sailors said their Iranian guards had been "excellent hosts" and that "the crew passed the time playing chess and darts and trying to keep each other's spirits up."

"For the first few days the door was locked all the time, then gradually it was left open more often, till one evening one of the guards asked if we wanted to sit out on the patio and watch a football match on TV," he said said. "We were brought three meals a day, crisps and snacks. We always had a bowl of fresh fruit. If anything, we may be a bit overweight because they were feeding us so much. They discovered one of us liked Iran tea, so it arrived by the flask."

"It was a bit like a camping trip, actually. It wasn't bad at all," he added.

'Our sailors are safe'

Reuters is reporting that both American and Iranian officials have affirmed the detained U.S. sailors are "safe and well-treated." White House spokesman Josh Earnest told the press, "We have received assurances from the Iranians that our sailors are safe and that they will be allowed to continue their journey promptly."

Hopefully the current incident will be resolved quickly, especially due to the recently renewed direct channels of communication between senior diplomats of both nations.

In the meantime, however, getting the facts straight and keeping hysteria at bay is important. Chances are this will all be over soon.

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You can watch the segment here:


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UPDATE:

January 13, 2016 - The American sailors have already been released. Yet hysteria about Iranian aggression and lazy, knee-jerk comparisons to hostage-taking are already ubiquitous.

Iran detains US sailors. Released promptly or not, a hostile act by a regime that acts w/o US cost/consequence https://t.co/0MNy0FnsjI

— Aaron David Miller (@aarondmiller2) January 12, 2016

So while knowing zero facts about this situation, you decided it's a "hostile act"? Your hysteria is tedious, Aaron. https://t.co/u4fZ6J1aHl

— Nima Shirazi (@WideAsleepNima) January 12, 2016

This morning, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept points out how "the U.S. media instantly converted the invasion of Iranian waters by U.S. ships into an act of aggression by Iran" because of "the permanent narrative that any countries adverse to the U.S. are inherently evil and aggressive."

He concludes:

But the media reaction last night is also explained by the fact that their self-assigned role in life is to instantly defend their government and demonize any governments that defy it. Even when the White House was saying it did not yet regard the Iranian conduct as an act of aggression, American journalists were insisting that it was. The U.S. does not officially have state TV; it has something much better and more effective: journalists who are nominally independent, legally free to say what they want, and voluntarily even more nationalistic and jingoistic and government-defending than U.S. government spokespeople themselves.

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UPDATE II:

January 15, 2016 - It turns out the Navy boats didn't suffer mechanical problems, but rather - the U.S. government tells us - "made a navigational error that mistakenly took them into Iranian territorial waters." Reasons why this may have happened are apparently being spit-balled: "A sailor may have punched the wrong coordinates into the GPS and they wound up off course. Or the crew members may have taken a shortcut into Iranian waters as they headed for the refueling ship, officials said," according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.

Glenn Greenwald, who previously noted the media's uncritical parroting of official claims when news of this incident first broke on Tuesday, reminds us that "no matter how many times the U.S. government issues patently false statements about its military actions, those statements are entitled to unquestioning, uncritical treatment as Truth the next time a similar incident occurs."

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