Tainted Saints

…The order from Binyamin Netanyahu follows a special cabinet meeting on Tuesday to discuss Israel’s response to the UN’s Goldstone report, which condemned Israel’s actions during the 22-day war on Gaza earlier this year.

The meeting also called for the formation of a special committee to deal with the international legal consequences of the report and the prospect Israeli officials could face war crimes trials abroad.

The Israeli government contends international law needs to be amended in order to fight global terrorism…

[So they were “fighting global terrorism” when they slaughtered those women and children in Gaza. Just like we’ve been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last 8 years. Netanyahu is putting Obama in a very uncomfortable position, which I suspect is intentional…

The terrible irony here is that Richard Goldstone, in addition to being a highly respected jurist, is also a Zionist Jew, whose view of war crimes was shaped by the Holocaust. – Ed.]

Some [Arabs] have told me that the US talks a good game about international law and human rights, but when a report emerges chaired by one of the world’s most respected, leading human rights and war crimes jurists, America goes the realpolitik course and embraces Israel no matter its behavior.

Read entire article…

This year has seen a dramatic shift in American Jews’ attitudes toward Israel. In January many liberal Jews were shocked by the Gaza war, in which Israel used overwhelming force against a mostly defenseless civilian population unable to flee. Then came the rise to power of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose explicitly anti-Arab platform was at odds with an American Jewish electorate that had just voted 4 to 1 for a minority president. Throw in angry Israelis writing about the “rot in the Diaspora,” and it’s little wonder young American Jews feel increasingly indifferent about a country that has been at the center of Jewish identity for four decades.

Read entire article here…

After weeks of attempted suppression of the U.N.’s Goldstone report by the U.S., Israel, and Western Europe, the Human Rights council finally agreed to refer the findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague if Israel and Hamas don’t conduce credible investigations in 6 months. Such a referral could result in individual members of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) being charged with war crimes.

Given the horrors committed against the Jewish people in the name of “racial purity”, anti-miscegenation and Israel shouldn’t even be uttered in the same sentence. Unless it’s in condemnation…

“Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, reopened today after a long break for the summer and the Jewish holidays. In line with protocol, Israel’s president opened the winter session and Shimon Peres had this to say on the linkage between reaching peace with the Palestinians and addressing the Iran issue:

In my opinion, if we move forwards with peace and make peace with the Palestinians, and if we start negotiations with Syria and Lebanon, we will remove the main pretext for the Iranian madness – against us and against the other residents of this region. (President Peres, October 12th in the Israeli Knesset).

Now Mr. Peres is in reality not exactly the dove he is portrayed to be (he authorized many of the settlements, he supported Israel’s recent wars with Lebanon and Gaza, and he never really earned his own Nobel peace prize), but this was nonetheless an interesting acknowledgment of the linkage from Israel’s head of state – and it seems to directly contradict the messaging coming from Israel’s ambassador to Washington D.C., Michael Oren…”

Juan Cole proposes something called “nuclear latency,” which “would allow the production of an atomic bomb on short notice if an extreme danger to national autonomy reared its ugly head.” And the reason for the new facility at Qom is because the existing facility at Natanz is “too easily bombed or struck with missiles.”

Are we seeing the terrible irony here? The U.S. and Israel have been rattling sabres at Iran for several years now — recall that during the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran if they attacked Israel. Because of this near-constant barrage of threats, Iran rightly fears that their nuclear facility may be bombed, so they rushed to build a new one in a more remote area of the country. They also know that both the U.S. and Israel have nuclear weapons, and have been openly stating that they would be willing to use them on Iran.

Since Iran’s Supreme Leader has been clear that “no Islamic state may possess or use atomic weapons because they willy nilly kill masses of innocent civilians when used, which is contrary to the Islamic law of war (which forbids killing innocent non-combatants)”, why are we really so obsessed with Iran? Richard Heinberg spelled out the reasons quite nicely in his excellent 2005 piece in Energy Bulletin entitled Onward to Iran. We have no control over them, whatsoever, since we have no bases there, and Iran is the second-largest exporter of oil in the world. You do the math…

So in 1969, Richard Nixon and Golda Meir made an agreement to not acknowledge Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. Ever since, we have upheld the myth that Israel is utterly defenseless, surrounded on all land-locked sides by big, bad Arabs. Except the reality is, Israel has nuclear weapons, and none of their neighbors do. Ya think that might cause a little tension between Israel and Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and…Iran (who is not technically a neighbor, but is definitely within missile range)?

I like this quote from Netanyahu the best:

“Netanyahu spoke of his confidence that  Obama’s recent remarks on a world free of nuclear weapons would not apply to Israel.

“It was utterly clear from the context of the speech that he was speaking about North Korea and Iran,” the Israeli leader said.”

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others…

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/10/2009103125440407949.html#

Take special note of the quote from The Washington Times  about Obama’s renewal of the 40-year agreement that “has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections…”

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/02/iran/index.html

Including:

• Iran has not launched an aggressive war in modern history;
• Iran’s annual military budget is less than Sweden, Greece, and Singapore’s;
• Ahmadinejad did not threaten to “wipe Israel off the map”.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/10/01/cole/