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Published on Tuesday, June 1, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Obama's Timidity and Deaths at Sea
A chief lesson to learn from President Barack Obama’s recent unwillingness to stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Lobby is that such timidity can get people killed.
Casualty figures are still arriving in the wake of
Seldom has an act of aggression been so well advertised in advance. Israel had made clear that it would use force to prevent the ships from reaching Gaza and heard no stern protest from President Obama, who apparently could not overcome his fear of Israel’s legendary political clout.
Earlier this year, Obama did criticize
Then, Netanyahu could expect that America’s Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) – with leading figures like Wolf Blitzer who built his journalistic career by working for the Jerusalem Post – would finesse the murderous assault into something reasonable and possibly even tilted sympathetically toward the Israeli troops.
Early on, CNN began repeating the Israeli “explanation” for its attack on the high seas, parroting the Jerusalem Post which reported that “militants were killed” after they set upon Israeli naval commandos who boarded one of the six ships Monday morning at two o’clock.
The commandos “were met with strong resistance from men armed with bladed weapons and the situation degenerated into a massacre when one of them grabbed the weapon of a soldier and opened fire,” said the
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that the relief convoy organizers had a “radical Islamic anti-Western orientation,” and that Israeli “naval forces were attacked with metal clubs and knives, as well as live fire,” though there were no reports of Israeli deaths. The IDF statement continued:
“The demonstrators had clearly prepared their weapons in advance for this specific purpose,” adding that the Navy then used riot dispersal methods, which include live fire, according to JTA, the global news service of the Jewish people.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak blamed the organizers of the convoy for the violent outcome, and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told a news conference why that was so: “The organizers’ intent was violent, their method was violent, and unfortunately, the results were violent.”
So, you see, the Israeli military resorted to violence only in self-defense. Right.
Quiet Conversation
On Monday, President Obama spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone about the incident. Afterwards, the White House said Obama had expressed “deep regret” over the deaths, but declined further comment, citing “the importance of learning all the facts and circumstances” as quickly as possible.
Don’t hold your breath, though, waiting for the timid Obama or his Likud-leaning advisers — much less the FCM — to question the Israeli version.
We are likely to get an “explanation” worthy of the late Alexander Haig as to why the slaughter may well have been “justified.” Haig’s death in February brought to mind comments he made about a brutal incident on the night of Dec. 2, 1980, shortly after Ronald Reagan’s election victory.
In rightist-ruled
After becoming Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Haig told Congress that “the nuns may have run through a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire.”
In just a few weeks, the American women had gone from being innocent victims to “political activists” to armed insurgents – although knowledgeable
Watch for something similar to happen with respect to the “militants” or “activists” who were killed or wounded in the incident off
Uncle Remus’s Wisdom
“He Don’t Say Nothin’,” as Uncle Remus put it, with improper grammar but with an accurate understanding that by not saying anything you can often convey a powerful or dangerous message.
As a presidential candidate, Obama was careful to say nothing about the brutal Israeli blockade against the 1.5 million people in
As President, he has backed down at every significant moment when Netanyahu thumbed his nose at Obama or at Vice President Joe Biden.
Obama knew about the “Freedom Flotilla” and its plan to bring supplies to
Quite the contrary, Obama’s pro-Zionist White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who recently vacationed in
On Monday morning, Netanyahu canceled out of a gala dinner to be held in his honor in
Getting Away With Murder
The fatal incident off the
The war started on June 5, 1967, when
“In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President]
Three days into the war, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats turned their firepower on the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty in international waters after the Israelis had identified it as a U.S. Navy ship.
The Israelis later insisted that the strafing and torpedo attacks were accidents in the fog of war. However,
Israeli commandos clad in black were about to land from helicopters and finish off what remained of the
Israeli forces intercepted the SOS and quickly broke off the attack. But 34 of the Liberty crew were killed [1] and over 170 wounded.
To avoid exacerbating relations with
One of the surviving crew of the USS Liberty, decorated Navy veteran Joe Meadors, was with the “Freedom Flotilla” when it was attacked on Sunday night. Meadors is past president of the USS
Rachel Corrie
Another American was murdered in cold blood on March 16, 2003. Twenty-three year-old Rachel Corrie, a volunteer serving in
The message the Israelis wanted to convey in killing Rachel Corrie was that international volunteers would no longer be exempt from the brutal treatment accorded young Israeli volunteers who tried to stand up, as Rachel did, for decent treatment of Palestinians in
The FCM’s excitement over President George W. Bush’s eagerly anticipated “shock-and-awe” bombing of
These P.R. tactics may work with the American FCM and neocons in
Some Care About the Scandal of
Much of the world’s impatience has to do with
Regardless of how one feels about
Has Netanyahu Gone Too Far?
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has reacted strongly to the Israeli attack on the relief ships, the largest of which sailed from
Erdogan has had it with Israeli mistreatment of Muslims in his eastern Mediterranean neighborhood. On Jan. 29, 2009, at the economic summit in Davos, he leveled harsh criticism to Israeli President Shimon Peres’s face, labeling
Erdogan angrily cited “the sixth commandment — Thou Shalt Not Kill,” adding, “We are talking about killing” in
Five days before Erdogan’s outburst, the Brazilian government also condemned
It seems to have been the atrocity in Gaza—plus a common determination to prevent war from spreading to Iran—that galvanized the successful joint effort by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to defy Israel. They persuaded
Defy
Truth be told,
And this twin wish is shared by American neocons who remain influential in the Obama administration and in the FCM.
The pro-Israeli hardliners are the ones running
Small wonder, then, that the leaders of
And the President? Did he step up and acknowledge that he had encouraged
Israeli Influence
While Americans continue to be starved of real information from the FCM, better informed people around the world have come to view with disdain the degree to which Washington dogs are wagged by Israeli tails.
When I suggested five years ago before a Capitol Hill hearing chaired by Rep. John Conyers that
An inadvertent remark by a major player on
In early February 2010, the British press revealed that Blair, testifying to the Iraq war commission in the U.K., offered the following account of his discussions with Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. (That’s when Bush said war was the only way to deal with Saddam Hussein, and Blair acquiesced.) But Blair’s remarks revealed that Israeli concerns were a major part of the equation and that Israeli officials were involved in the discussions. Thus, Blair:
“As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this."
It is a safe bet that Hillary Clinton’s Likud-friendly lieutenants and their new junior partners in
How does one make into a bad thing Iran’s agreement to ship half its uranium out of the country, even if additional steps might still be needed to assure the world that Iran is telling the truth when it says it isn’t building a nuclear bomb?
More and more people around the globe are seeing Obama as subservient to the Likud Lobby, perhaps not as enthusiastically as Bush was, but still unwilling to put action behind his occasional words of dissatisfaction. Important players in the Middle East, as well as increasingly assertive countries like
And then there is the $3 billion or so that the
Hard Lessons
The likely results are three-fold:
1)--On Memorial Day next year, there may well be hundreds more “fallen heroes” to honor, killed by Muslim and other “militants” who make no distinction between what the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan and what Israel does in Gaza and the occupied West Bank — and add Lebanon and Syria, for good measure.
As Gen. David Petraeus pointed out earlier this year, the unresolved Arab-Israeli “conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of
“Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of
2)--The linking of
While it is difficult to find a measure of objectivity in official
“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
You will not be surprised to find out that the board’s report was generally suppressed in the FCM, as were the following, more specific, examples:
“By his own account, KSM’s [9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s] animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” [9/11 Commission Report, July 22, 2004, page 147]
And what motivated Dr. Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian physician of Palestinian origin, who on Dec. 30, 2009, detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA site in eastern
When al-Balawi volunteered to treat injured Palestinians in
Christmas underpants bomber Abdulmuttallab, also is reported to have been particularly outraged by
That Israeli actions in Gaza acted as catalysts to al-Balawi’s and Abdulmuttallab’s determination to exact revenge on the U.S. is hardly surprising — the more so in view of Washington’s efforts to suppress the findings of the UN-commissioned Gaza investigation by Justice Richard Goldstone. His report concluded that:
“The blockade policies implemented by Israel against the Gaza Strip, in particular the closure of or restrictions imposed on border crossings in the immediate period before the military operations, subjected the local population to extreme hardship and deprivations that amounted to a violation of Israel’s obligations as an Occupying Power under the Fourth Geneva Convention. …
“Israel has essentially violated its obligation to allow free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital objects, food, and clothing that were needed to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the civilian population …
“The Mission concludes that the conditions resulting from deliberate actions of the Israeli forces and the declared policies of the Government with regard to the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the military operation cumulatively indicate the intention to inflict collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip.
“The
3)--Attacking
It is no secret that this goal enjoys high priority on Netanyahu’s agenda. It could be stopped in its tracks by a public warning from President Obama. But all signs point to his bending to neocon advice to shy away from a showdown and, rather, leave everything, including another war of aggression, “on the table.”
The fact that world leaders consider Netanyahu a clear and present danger to peace in the region is shown by the way the leaders of Turkey and Brazil moved at an accelerated pace to bend the Iranians to the kind of deal that Obama personally had advocated, before being overruled by Hillary Clinton and others in his misguided Team of Rivals.
The urgency of the Turkey-Brazil initiative came through in the words of Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who could hardly have been more explicit:
“We can't allow to happen in
Green Light?
Netanyahu listens only to Washington, when he listens at all. Following the bloody attack on the Freedom Flotilla, I imagine he will now get at most a mealy-mouthed “please-don’t-do-this-again” from the White House, together with acquiescence in an Al-Haig-type made-up excuse about an “exchange” of fire.
If that proves to be the case, Netanyahu is altogether likely to consider that
Non-ally ally? Sorry, despite what you hear from Obama, Congress and the whole
There is no mutual defense treaty between the
NATO member Turkey, on the other hand, is a
Craig Murray, a former British ambassador and Foreign Office specialist on maritime law (and VIPS member), has just weighed in with a helpful description of two clear legal possibilities, which take into account both international law and the Law of the Sea:
Possibility one is that the Israeli commandos were acting on behalf of the government of
In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory. So in this case
Possibility two is that, if the killings were not military actions authorized by
Stay tuned.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city
This article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com.
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/01-6
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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