Princes of Darkness / 1

Jihad Khazen Al-Hayat 19/11/05/

Over the course of three days I intend to educate and entertain the reader by destroying the reputation of Laurent Murawiec as a researcher and alleged expert on Saudi Arabia. I will use the same method I employed against Gerald Posner in the summer, simply detailing the mistakes in information, large, small and stupid to argue that any analysis based on such ignorance can only be misinformed and misleading. Posner wrote "Why America Slept" in 2003 and I thought then that there could not be a worse example of ignorance. But he outdid himself this year by coming out with the book "Secrets of the Kingdom." I wrote three columns about his second book in June and I am going to write three columns, starting today about Murawiec's "Princes of Darkness" hoping to consign him to the dustbin of academia and serious scholarship.It takes effort to be more ignorant of Saudi Arabia than Posner, but Murawiec beats him hands down with mistakes, half truths and out of context statements. The book is an outgrowth of a briefing by Murawiec on June 10, 2002, to the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board under the title "Taking Saudi Out of Arabia" which is self-explanatory.First things first. There is a refrain every time I write about Saudi Arabia. I do not defend the government or people. I do not say that Saudi Arabia is democratic. I do not claim that women have full rights or that the rule of law is paramount. There are many drawbacks and I support basic freedoms for all Saudi citizens, the right of assembly and expression, and every other right. When I write about Saudi Arabia my intention is solely to uncover the bias, prejudice and enmity of the other side. It is usually a position against all Arabs and Muslims and not just the Saudis, Syrians, Palestinians or any particular Arab people. I hold such enemies in the U.S. administration and in the right wing think tanks and the media around it responsible for the death of over a hundred thousand Iraqis and two thousand Americans so far.Laurent Murawiec expanded his lecture into a book "Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West." The title is as phoney as the author. Prince of Darkness is the other name of Richard Pearle, then head of the Defence Policy Board, and Murawiec's benefactor. The assault is by the neocons against Saudi Arabia and all Arabs and Muslims to control our oil and leave Israel as the dominant power in the Middle East.It is only to be expected after such a title that the author ends his book by quoting none other than Fuad Ajami, the neocon Uncle Tom. In between a reader would find a comedy of errors of Shakespearean proportions.He starts his Introduction by quoting from his Defence Policy Board briefing, i.e. quoting himself. He claims that "the Saudi are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadres to foot soldiers, from ideologist to cheerleader." I will not defend Saudi Arabia but will say that Murawiec is using a time (dis)honoured method the neocons by blaming the "other" to divert attention from the crimes of a criminal Nazi-like Israeli government that practices terror every day and kills schoolchildren.Mistakes begin with the first paragraph as the author refers to taking Saudi out of Arabia. Arabia is not Saudi Arabia but what is known as the Arabian Peninsula. We also call it the Arabs island, because the sand in the north represents another sea. Arabia as referred to in the book includes six countries other than Saudi Arabia and mean spirited as he is Murawiec is not asking to take "Saudi" out of countries they are not in.I must hurry a little bit as I am still discussing the title and first paragraph of the Introduction. Murawiec says that a few days after the briefing The Washington Post printed a story about it and a "thunderbolt struck." He is bemused for becoming a target of public condemnation: A foreign resident; a French-Jewish-Polish strategist; an unrepentant extremist; an ignorant pontificator; an obscure figure; Dr. Strangelove.Of course, all the above and more is true. He is an immigrant from Poland to France then the U.S. where he was adopted by like minded extremists. As to the ignorance in every page, and we are still in the Introduction, on page XV he refers to Prince Saud Al Feisal as the "former" Saudi Foreign Minister, and on page XVII he refers to Prince Khaled Ben Sultan as the owner of Asharq Al Awsat.This is the man who presents himself as a knowledgeable expert on Saudi Arabia. I will state my case very simply: arguments that are based on the wrong information can only be wrong and recommendations made are not just useless but harmful, if they are taken seriously. Murawiec, Perle and others like them want to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Based on what they know they can only be wrong and must be exposed as apologists for the Israeli Nazi-like government.
I went to the Index at the end of the book to see if Murawiec restores Prince Saud as Foreign Minister. I found a reference to Al-Saud, family, starting on pages 11-14. I did not find the foreign minister but instead found on page 13 this strange phrase written in Arabic characters Al shaykuh abkhas. What does it mean? He translates it as "the royal family knows (better)." I suppose he means Al Shuyukh Akhbar, or the sheikhs know better, which applies to sheikhs, not princes. Prince Saud is finally restored as foreign minister on page 104, but true to form Murawiec then describes Prince Saud as a brother of Prince Nayef instead of a nephew.The Index guided me to a page where Prince Khaled Ben Sultan is restored as owner of Al-Hayat daily, but then on Page 123 Prince Khaled is reported as having contributed to an organisation having Aramco roots, Americans for Understanding in the Middle East, in 1969. Prince Khaled then had just left his teens behind, a lieutenant on a training mission in El Paso, Texas, and his finances were worse than mine today.The index led me to page 232 where Murawiec says that Prince (now King) Abdullah has no half-brothers, then continues to say on the same page that he is unlike his half-brothers.At times the mistakes are funny but the book is no laughing matter. The author is taken seriously and not as the intellectual charlatan that he is with the result that the Arabs and Muslims everywhere pay the price along with real Americans, not Likudniks, imported from Israel and Poland via France.

Princes of Darkness / 2

Jihad Khazen Al-Hayat 21/11/05/

When I reviewed Gerald Posner's book "Secrets of the Kingdom" in June I stopped at the third chapter when I found him claiming that Sayyid Qutb set "The guidelines for modern Wahhabi adherence." Most Wahhabis consider Qutb an apostate. With Laurent Murawiec I could not go past the second chapter. There were so many glaring errors that would eliminate any intellectual, academic or research claim.The first paragraph of the first chapter alleges that Saudi Arabia was an empire forged recently in "rivers of blood". How recent is recent? Saudi Arabia is over seventy years old and a founding member of the U.N. And what about those rivers of blood? It doesn't even have brooks with saline water. Arabia was sparsely populated then and blood trickles and does not flow. The egregious exaggeration reminds me of Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech which ended his carrier as a serious British politician.Murawiec is a no danger of losing a reputation that is non-existent except among fellow travellers and Israeli apologists who lied their way into a war against Iraq which increased terrorism instead of defeating it.Exaggeration continues as when he describes Saudi arms deals, and differential diplomats or arms dealers thinking of their profits. Now this man writes from a country whose annual military budget is over 400 billion dollars, more than the rest of the world but together. Saudi arms purchases are the proverbial drop in the ocean by comparison.When Murawiec is not exaggerating he is openly envious. He notes that Saudi Arabia orchestrated soaring oil prices in the seventies and raked "the almost unimaginable sum of two trillion dollars." Why can't Murawiec imagine two trillion dollars? All he needs to do is look at the accumulated budget deficits of George Bush's years in office and two trillion becomes easily imaginable.Oil prices reflect supply and demand in a free market. I would like Saudi Arabia to cut down on production until oil sells at one hundred dollars a barrel. Those who don't like the price can shop elsewhere or walk.Murawiec talks about corruption. There is corruption and as I promised the reader I will not deny it or defend Saudi Arabia. I would only say that Saudi corruption pales before the corruption of the American occupation of Iraq. U.S. government auditors and Congress investigators have written reports about the disappearance of billion of dollars of Iraqi funds disposed by the pro-consul Paul Bremmer. There wasn't a single receipt for any of 8.8 billion dollars given to Iraqi ministries under his control, according to American auditors.An equally outrageous claim involves the influence of the Saudi lobby in Washington. There is a Saudi lobby but it takes tons of chutzpah to ignore the fact that the most influential lobby, the tail that wags the dogs, is the Israeli lobby. Anyway, the Saudi lobby does not spy on the US as Larry Franklin did with officials from AIPAC who are all facing trial now.I promised the reader that I will educate and entertain him. I start with education.Murawiec claims that King Fahd, King Abdullah and Princes Sultan, Nayef and Salman are "illiterate". He lies. He talks about men from the late sixties to eighty in age. Their education started over sixty years ago. In the case of King Fahd before the creation of Saudi Arabia itself. The education of the five brothers was local and traditional. They don't speak French or Polish but they are definitely cultured. I know them very well. I watched King Fahd, then Crown Prince, prepare a speech about a five year plan. He stopped at the figure of one thousand million or one trillion riyals, at two hundred billion a year. He wanted a phrase that does not provoke envy, anticipating the likes of Murawiec and changed the relevant paragraph several times. Then Planning Minister Hisham Nazer is my witness. In 1976 or 1977 he wrote a front page article for Al Madina newspaper in Jeddah. I saw him a week later and jokingly complained that he was taking our job as journalists. He said: Do your job well and I won't compete with you. I sat in Crown Prince, now King Abdullah's office several times and saw him write instructions on memos presented to him, or dictate memos and correct them longhand as we all do in Arabic. Crown Prince Sultan always surprises me with his extensive knowledge of Arabic classical culture. My speciality is Arabic literature. Still I would come out of Prince Sultan's office with notes about stories, lines of verse or proverbs that I had not heard before. To annoy Murawiec I claim here that I know more about Al Khubar terrorist attack than Louis Freeh of the FBI. Prince Nayef went over details of the investigation with me in his office. I sat with him many times with our meetings starting about midnight and ending in time for his morning prayers. I always write notes on the official paper of the Interior minister's office.I don't need to talk about Prince Salman to Arab readers, but this column is translated into English and read by non-Arabs, so I would say that had Salman bin Abdul Aziz not been born prince he would have been a journalist. He's got enough news agency tickers in his office and yacht, Shaf, to produce a newspaper. Last week he phoned me and gave me a critique of my book on the neocons and made suggestions on how to improve the copy.Now to the entertainment. Murawiec speaks about five sons of "King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud" who went to university. There is no such king in Saudi Arabia. The names gave me the impression that Murawiec was talking about sons of King Feisal. If so he should have said that they all speak fluent French, and he might have added that the king's daughters went to finishing school in Geneva. Incidentally, Prince Turki Al Feisal, who is now ambassador in Washington, did not go to the University of London as stated in the book, but left Georgetown University in 1967 and went to Cambridge.Views based on such unmitigated ignorance are the proverbial house built on the sand which is blown away by the wind of truth. They are dangerous still because the U.S. administration listens to such views and pays the price with us.

Princes of Darkness / 3

Jihad Khazen Al-Hayat 22/11/05/

Another day with Laurent Murawiec and his book "Princes of Darkness". He targets Saudi Arabia, but it is not really one country. The neocons, the likudniks and other Israeli apologists in the U.S. have in their sights all the Arabs and Muslims, seeking a "creative destruction" of the Middle East to steal its oil and protect Israel.Dick Cheney asked the Project for a New American Century in 2000 to prepare a study on the region. It was written and presented before 9/11, even before George Bush won the presidency. It called for a sizeable U.S. military presence in the Gulf to guarantee oil supplies. The writers of the study and other neocons wrote letters to Bill Clinton and George Bush calling for an invasion of Iraq. Again, this preceded 9/11. Extreme right wing American politicians, led by Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld form common grounds with Likudniks like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Douglas Feith, Lewis Libby, Kenneth Adelman and David Wurmser in government, and William Kristol, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer Stephen Schwartz and Murawiec himself on the outside. They are all Jews, but it is not a Jewish conspiracy. It is a neocon-Likud conspiracy. James Wolfenson is Jewish and he has more humility and humanity in his little toe than the whole cabal put together. Ditto Noam Chomsky.Murawiec does not fail to remind us in his book that 15 of the 19 terrorists on 9/11 were Saudi. Of course, this is true and for an obvious reason. Al Qaeda tried to drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia which is exactly the goal of Murawiec and other neocons.There is a unity of purpose, sources and resources among American and émigré Likudniks. As I was reading Murawiec's book I came across an article by Gaffney under the title "Our Saudi Foes" with the same points as the book on oil prices, terrorism, religious freedom or lack of it and such Israeli points. When Gaffney, like Murawiec, talks about "our" foes he really means foes of Israel. Gaffney complains that oil prices are high. I say they are not high enough and if he does not like Saudi prices he can shop elsewhere, which was my advice to Murawiec as well.Gaffney was unhappy that the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed (it was held Nov.8) a hearing on Saudi Arabia. He tells us that Yigal Carmon and James Woolsey would have testified.Carmon is a former Israeli intelligence officer sent by Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington to establish the translation company MEMRI, which concentrates on obscure Imams of mosques in the Empty Quarter but not the racist diatribes of settler rabbis in Palestinian lands. He is an enemy of Arabs and Muslims who is a party to the conflict and not an independent witness.Woolsey is a former head of the CIA and current ass. No one will take him after leaving office except the neocons and he chose to vie with them in extremist policies. His would be testimony before the judiciary committee was released and it describes Wahhabism as a totalitarian movement which he compares to Nazism or communism. So much for the ass, or asshole.While Gaffney quotes extremist of his elk Murawiec quotes the disgraced journalist Judith Miller. Readers may recall her quoting Ahmed Chalabi about Iraq's WMDs which have since been confirmed as deliberate lies. She has now left the New York Times after a rebellion by colleagues who did not want to work with her anymore.Still Miller is not as bad as the Israeli Carmon.As already stated I stopped reading after the second chapter but went through the Index and found credible sources and not only Miller or Carmon. The anti-Arab anti-Iranian Daniel Pipes was also there and he's been working overtime against Iran since President Ahmedinejad called for wiping Israel off the map. The neocons are trying to get the U.S. to do Israel's dirty work against Iran. But the U.S. cannot handle the Sunni minority in Iraq and a confrontation with Shiites in Iran, Iraq and elsewhere in the region would destroy American interests. Simply put, Iran is stronger than the U.S. in the Middle East.The back cover of Princes of Darkness is a joke. The book is praised by Pipes, Woolsey and Pearle. David Pryce-Jones also wrote in support. He is a quasi-historian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim since a beggar in Casablanca spit in his face.A serious note to end this column. Neocons and Likudniks are past masters at passing on their faults to others; I have done Psychology 201. Pearle is known as Prince of Darkness, so Murawiec uses this to describe Saudi princes. Taliban were first sponsored by the Pakistani Military Intelligence then the U.S. before reaching Saudi Arabia but the Saudis are blamed alone for financing them on terror. Israel kills schoolchildren so they speak about Palestinian terror and gloss over the fact that five times as many Palestinian civilians were killed in the last five years as Israeli civilians. And then there is the envy about oil prices and the Saudis buying Rolex watches, when many companies in the U.S., or a handful of individuals, have more money than the whole country of Saudi Arabia.Throughout this review I detailed mistakes in the book. Here is another one for good measure. On page 13 Murawiec tells us that Al-Dawla is the government and that Al-Hukuma represents "the chiefs". Of course, Al-Dawla is the State and Al-Hukuma is the Government with ministers not chiefs. I advise Murawiec to immigrate again… to Israel. Otherwise I'll start writing about Poland.

A Conspiracy to Kill -2-

Jihad Khazen Al-Hayat 10/11/05

The criminal conspiracy pursued by the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was a premeditated attempt at murder and destruction. It is not logical that Dr. Mohammed El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency, could take one look at the Niger documents and decide that they are a forgery while the Bush administration failed to see the forgery with all the intelligence agencies available to it.As I explained yesterday, the criminal cabal found a way of circumventing the CIA, but the betrayal of American national interests in the service of Israel does not stop there. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of December 2001 said that Iraq did not have a nuclear program. The U.N. inspectors had left Iraq in 1998 and the estimate remained unchanged for three years. The NIE is by far the most important document of its kind. It is prepared under the CIA direction and includes information from all the intelligence branches. Disagreement or dissent is listed in the document but the 2001 estimate was unanimousStill President Bush in his State of the Union address the next month referred to Iraq as a "grave and growing danger" While Dick Cheney claimed time after time that Iraq had connections with Al Qaeda, was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons and was close to producing a nuclear bomb.Members of the cabal must have known that they were promoting lies. As the State Department and CIA contested the information, Wolfowitz and Feith established the Office of Special Plans in the Defence Department to produce false information provided by Ahmed Chalabi and other professional conmen. They also established the so-called Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG) to "evaluate" intelligence information about Iraq in a way that suited their purposes.Dick Cheney was on television three times in one day, March 24, 2002, insisting that Iraq was actively working on a nuclear bomb. All members of the cabal joined in a huge public relations campaign to convince ordinary Americans of the impending danger from Iraq. They were helped by others like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and General Richard Myers. They claimed that Iraq also sought to buy aluminium tubes suitable for centrifuges in uranium enrichment. But they could not have been oblivious to the fact that a year earlier both the CIA and the Energy Department had concluded that the aluminium tubes were not suitable for centrifuges and were probably for use in military rockets.Lewis Libby and his boss Cheney were at the heart of this conspiracy. They both visited CIA headquarters in Langley to pressure its experts to come up with the necessary information. When the experts failed they established what the magazine Mother Jones called the Lie Factory.Again, the journalist Judith Miller must have known that she was being fed lies by the likes of Chalabi. Her role is still to be revealed in full. She went to prison for 85 days claiming that she did not want to betray her source and almost had people believe that she was a martyr of the freedom of the press. Far from it, she was promoting the purposes of the neocons under a thin veneer of liberalism. It turned out that the waiver to her by Libby was given a long time ago. She did not use it until her lawyer secured from the private prosecutor a promise that his client will be questioned about Libby only. She is protecting other names and not in the interest of the freedom of the press.In all this Dick Cheney comes out as vile and insensitive. When his right hand man resigned he did not seek a compromise but instead appointed to replace him David Addington, a man whose name is connected with a famous paper justifying the torture of prisoners, and John Hannah as national security adviser.Addington's study flew in the face the American constitution, laws passed by Congress and international treaties which the U.S. has ratified.Hannah is also a major player. UPI quoted sources of the investigation that he faced the possibility of doing jail time. It was a way of pressuring him to name his superiors. In the 1990s Hannah worked for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a once centrist think tank that later moved into the Likud camp and cooperated closely with the official lobby AIPAC. He played an important role in the manipulation of intelligence information to justify the war on Iraq.It will be travesty of justice if Libby and others face only charges of perjury or obstruction of justice. They conspired to kill Iraqis and Americans and destroy Iraq. My hope is that they start telling on each other to save their skin. We already have the case of the former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin who has pleaded guilty to spying for Israel in return for a shorter prison term. He has testified that he passed secret documents to Steven Rosen, AIPAC's long serving foreign policy director, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC's senior Iran specialist.The plot thickens, or sickens, as we find out that Franklin went to Rome where the most brazen forgery of the Lie Factory was hatched.We demand justice for the scores of thousands of Iraqis and Americans sacrificed in Iraq by a cabal of anti-peace Likudniks serving the interests of Israel instead of their own country.

A Conspiracy to Kill

Jihad Khazen Al-Hayat 09/11/05/

Justice, Saddam Hussein style, was to hang the accused then try him. Those found innocent would then be declared "martyrs of wrath" and their families would be compensated.Justice, American style, is for a Likud cabal within the Bush administration to prepare a war on the basis of completely false accusations in which over a hundred thousand Iraqis and two thousand Americans are killed, and when a co-conspirator is referred to trial he is not accused of taking part in the murder of tens of thousands of innocent people but of perjury.Traditional American justice is great and American human rights are an example for the world to follow, but I am talking here about justice under the Bush administration, since Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, began his effort about 18 months ago to find out who leaked the name of an intelligence operative, Valerie Plame, as an act of revenge against her husband, Joseph Wilson. Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, was sent to Niger and returned to confirm that information about Iraq's attempt to buy uranium, known as yellow cake, from that country was bogus, thus destroying a main premise for launching the war against Iraq.President Bush is not directly responsible; he just does not know because he prefers to exercise in the White House gym or ride his mountain bike. Responsibility rest with the cabal led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who hijacked U.S. foreign policy and launched an unjustified war that killed thousands of Americans and Iraqis and destroyed a country while claiming to rebuild it.Lewis Libby, chief of staff of Vice President Cheney's office, has claimed innocence of leaking Wilson's name in his short court appearance. Yeah, he is innocent as much as I am of ever breaking traffic laws in forty years of driving in three continents.They are all guilty. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Douglas Feith, Libby and others, with the help of Likudniks on the outside like William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Frank Gafney, David Frum, Michael Ledeen and many others who are part of the conspiracy. I can call it such because Fitzgerald himself spoke of a "criminal conspiracy". And while he started with chasing a leak, the investigation must end in murder charges.In criminal law a conspiracy is an agreement between "two or more persons" to follow a course of conduct that, if completed, constitutes a crime. The Supreme Court defined a conspiracy to defraud the United States as "to interfere with, impede or obstruct a lawful government function by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least my means that are dishonest."The conspiracy was hatched long before 9/11. I will not delve into the history of the neo-cons but rather go back only to the year 2000 when Dick Cheney asked the Project for a New American Century, a hub of anti-peace Likudniks, for a strategic study that was presented in September that year stressing that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." But the hawks admitted that the American public would not support a war against Iraq unless there was a "catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."And so it was and the 9/11 attacks gave the hawks the excuse they needed. Iraq was not officially linked to the atrocity but every official statement also made mention of Iraq to establish a subconscious link in the mind of the American public.The Niger uranium remains one of the most outrageous lies of the whole affair. It started with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi visiting Washington on October 15, 2001 with Nicolo Pollari, the new head of Italian intelligence (SISMI). Keen to please, they offered documents claiming that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. The CIA studied the documents and decided they ere unreliable. Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger and confirmed the agency's suspicion.Of course they were forged. The Niger Embassy in Rome was burgled in 2000 and only official paper, letter heads and the like went missing. A former SISMI operative, Rocco Martino, tried to peddle the forged documents to news outlets in Italy for $10,000. Still in September 2002 Michael Ledeen set up a meeting between Pollari and Stephen Hadley, then deputy head of the National Security Council. Ledeen was connected with the Office of Special Plans established at the Defence Department by Wolfowitz and Feith to bypass the intelligence agencies and produce fake intelligence justifying the war on Iraq.As a result of all this conspiracy President Bush included in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003 the famous 16 words "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."The lie was also included in the British dossier about Iraq and I hope that the British officials responsible also face trial, like the Americans, in connection with a conspiracy that killed over a hundred thousand Iraqis and two thousand Americans and not just perjury or obstruction of justice. More tomorrow.

Words That Went Unpunished

Jihad Khazen Al-Hayatt 06/11/05

As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.

As we all know now, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini as he spoke to students who gathered in Tehran for a conference called “The World Without Zionism.”

All hell broke loose after the speech and Iran was threatened by the same countries which apologize for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
I said yesterday words don’t kill, bullets do. But since the West show more interest in words than deeds, I have the following:
-- "If only it would sink into the sea". Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin referring to Gaza, just before signing the Oslo Accords."I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child's existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian women is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do." Ariel Sharon, current Prime Minister, in an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. Also Israel Koenig “The Koenig memorandum.”
"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." Benjamin Netanyahu: Speech at Bar-Ilan University, 1989"We must expel Arabs and take their places." David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv , October 1983. "[I advocate] using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [and] against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment. [I do not understand] the squeamishness about the use of gas [...] We cannot in any circumstamstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier." Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State at the British War Office, authorising RAF Middle East Command to attack rebelling Iraqis with chemical weapons, 1919"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000 "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." Israeli Prime Minister Menahim Begin in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

They are all Menahim Begin. But bad as they are they are no worse than their apologists who provide them with cover, and always come up with excuses to justify their crimes.

The Israeli translation company Memri would translate a sermeon of an Imam in a desert outpost that no Muslims outside the outpost itself had heard of. But it does not translate the venom of the settlers’ rabbis. Four Palestinian civilians have been killed by settlers since the withdrawal from Gaza and about one hundred other civilians by military strikes since the hudna of February. This is terrorism, not words that mean nothing in practical terms.

Iran in Driver’s Seat

Jihad Khazen Al-Hayatt 05/11/05

Words don’t kill. Bullets kill.
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke about wiping Israel off the map, and his words did not kill anyone. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon does not talk about wiping Iran or any other country off the map, but he kills children almost every day.

I would have accepted the condemnation of Ahmadinejad’s words if it had been preceded by a condemnation of Sharon’s deeds. And I insist that the words were an expression of sentiment rather than policy.

I write as both an Arab and a British citizen, and I note that in commenting on the words of the Iranian president, Prime Minister Tony Blair found them “totally unacceptable” when he never describes the killing by Israeli soldiers of Palestinian schoolgirls as “totally unacceptable” . I also don’t recall that he felt “revulsion” at the killing of the schoolgirls as he felt on hearing the words of Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Blair claimed that Western public opinion (which he certainly does not represent) would demand action over Iranian remarks, but did not specify what action, although press reports speculated that he sought U.N. sanctions. Every British and American official comment, however, spoke about added resolve to deny Iran nuclear weapons because a country that wants to wipe another off the map cannot be trusted with such weapons.
The American and European concern over Iran is a fraction of my concern over Israel and its nuclear arsenal in the hands of an extremist and racist government. If the US and the European Union seek to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone they would have my full support. But if Iran is singled out, and Israel is left with its arsenal, then all Muslims would side with Iran.

President Ahmadinejad did not say he wanted to wipe Israel off the map. His exact words were “as the Imam (Khomeini) said, Israel must be wiped off the map.” As such he was reiterating an established position of the Islamic Republic, and not forging new policy. And he did not go back on his and Khomeini’s words when he joined large demonstration in Tehran calling for the death of America and Israel.

What can the US and its British poodle do about Iran?

Nothing. Nothing at all. George Bush lost the war in Iraq as much as Saddam Hussein lost it, but he still has to recognize the loss and admit it. His administration is as much in the dock before the American grand jury, as Saddam Hussein is in the dock in Baghdad before his Iraqi people and the whole world.

War usually ends with a victor and a vanquished. Not in Iraq, where both sides to the war lost, and a third side, i.e. Iran, won from the outside.

The American helped Saddam in the eighties to thwart Iran’s effort to export the revolution. Then they fought and defeated him two years ago, and offered Iraq as a gift to Iran.

Donald Rumsfeld was wrong to visit Saddam and help build the beast who invaded Kuwait and threatened all his neighbors, and was wrong again in fighting him after he was neutered and represented no danger to anyone, near or far.

For years after the Iran revolution the US kept hoping that Iran would return to the fold. The US’s friendship of some Arabs and enmity for Iran are both against its desire. It took years and years before it dawned on the US and Israel that they lost Iran forever. (Israel’s role in the Iran-contra Scandal is a testimony to its lingering hopes for Iran).

Now I hear talk, or rubbish, about the differences between Presidents Ahmadinejad, Mohammed Khatemi, his predecessor, and Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, who lost to him in the recent elections. They are different, but a common point among the three is the determination that Iran acquire a “peaceful” nuclear capacity. The present nuclear program is not the work of Ahmadinejad who’s been in power for a few weeks, but of his predecessors.

At the UN the Iranian President referred to Israel as the “Zionist entity” when Arab leaders were referring to it as Israel. He rejects its very existence and as he is democratically elected and much stronger in his country than Arab leaders in theirs, he is immune to pressure and will not mince his words.

Objectively and reservedly, I say that the US has made Iran the most powerful country in the Middle East, even stronger than the US itself in the region. The US cannot quell the minority Sunni insurgency in Iraq, and one can only imagine how it will fair against a Shite uprising at the instigation of Iran, not only in Iraq but in the whole region, and with Hizbullah at the doors Israel with 20,000 would be “martyrs” and 20,000 rockets, not one of which is the primitive Al Qassam.

And with oil prices at record high, Iran has economic elbow too. It is in a position to threaten, and not to be threatened.

Will Israel attack the Iranian nuclear facilities to drag the US into a military confrontation with Iran? Rather than answer a hypothetical question I offer a few facts.

- Words don’t kill. Bullets kill.
- Iran is stronger in its region than the powers threatening it, and the position of its president against Israel is supported by an overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world.
- If one country deserves to be kicked out of the UN it is Israel which voted into office a war criminal who kills schoolchildren.
- The US will not solve its problem with 1.2 billion Muslims around the world until it distances itself from Israel. All other talk is as false as Sharon’s Biblical assertions at the UN to Palestinian lands.