http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-07260651404.htm

Jonathan Cook: Five Primetime Lies from the American Media 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


This week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura
Ingraham show, pitted against David Horowitz, a "Semite supremacist" who
most recently made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading
McCarthyite witch-hunts against American professors who have the
impertinence to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Arabs have minds and
feelings like the rest of us. 

It was a revealing experience, at least for a British journalist rarely
exposed to the depths of ignorance and prejudice in the United States on
Middle East matters -- well, apart from the regular whackos who fill my
email in-tray. But five minutes of listening to Horowitz speak, and the
sympathy with which his arguments were greeted by Laura ("The Professors
-- your book's a great read, David"), left me a lot more frightened
about the world's future. 

Horowitz's response to every question, every development in the Middle
East, whether it concerns Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria or Iran, is
the same: "They want to drive the Jews into the sea". It's as simple as
that. Not even a superficial attempt at analysis; just the message that
the Arab world is trying to finish off the genocide started by Europe.
And if Laura is any yardstick, a lot of Americans buy that stuff. 

Horowitz is keen to bang the square peg of the Lebanon story into the
round hole of his claims that the "Jews" are facing an imminent genocide
in the Middle East. And to help him, he and the massed ranks of US
apologists for Israel -- regulars, I suspect, of shows like Laura's --
are promoting at least four myths regarding Hizbollah's current rockets
strikes on Israel. Unless they are challenged at every turn, the danger
is that they will win the ground war against common sense in the US. The
first myth is that Israel was forced to pound Lebanon with its military
hardware because Hizbollah began "raining down" rockets on the Galilee.
Anyone with a short memory can probably recall that was not the first
justification we were offered: that had to do with the two soldiers
captured by Hizbollah on a border post on July 12. 

But presumably Horowitz and his friends realized that 400 Lebanese dead
and counting in little more than a week was hard to sell as a
"proportionate" response. In any case, Hizbollah kept telling the world
how keen it was to return the soldiers in a prisoner swap. Hundreds of
dead in Lebanon, at least 1,000 severely injured and more than half a
million refugees -- all because Israel is not ready to sit down at the
negotiating table. Even Horowitz could not "advocate for Israel" on that
one. 

So the chronology of war has been reorganized: now we are being told
that Israel was forced to attack Lebanon to defend itself from the
barrage of Hizbollah rockets falling on Israeli civilians. The
international community is buying the argument hook, line and sinker.
"Israel has the right to defend itself", says every politician who can
find a microphone to talk into. But, if we cast our minds back, that is
not how the "Middle East crisis", as TV channels now describe it,
started. It is worth recapping on those early events (and I won't
document the long history of Lebanese suffering at Israel's hands that
preceded it) before they become entirely shrouded in the mythology being
peddled by Horowitz and others. 

Early on July 12 Hizbollah launched a raid against an army border post,
in what was in the best interpretation a foolhardy violation of Israeli
sovereignty. In the fighting, the Shiite militia killed three soldiers
and captured two others, while Hizbollah fired a few mortars at border
areas in what the Israeli army described at the time as "diversionary
tactics". As a result of the shelling, five Israelis were "lightly
injured", with most needing treatment for shock, according to the
Haaretz newspaper. 

Israel's immediate response was to send a tank into Lebanon in pursuit
of the Hizbollah fighters (its own foolhardy violation of Lebanese
sovereignty). The tank ran over a landmine, which exploded killing four
soldiers inside. Another soldier died in further clashes inside Lebanon
as his unit tried to retrieve the bodies. Rather than open diplomatic
channels to calm the violence down and start the process of getting its
soldiers back, Israel launched bombing raids deep into Lebanese
territory the same day. Given Israel's world view that it alone has a
right to project power and fear, that might have been expected. 

But the next day Israel continued its rampage across the south and into
Beirut, where the airport, roads, bridges, and power stations were
pummeled. We now know from reports in the US media that the Israeli army
had been planning such a strike against Lebanon for at least a year. 

In contrast to the image of Hizbollah frothing at the mouth to destroy
Israel, its leader Hassan Nasrallah held off from serious retaliation.
For the first day and a half, he limited his strikes to the northern
borders areas, which have faced Hizbollah attacks in the past and are
well protected. 

He waited till late on June 13 before turning his guns on Haifa, even
though we now know he could have targeted Israel's third largest city
from the outset. A small volley of rockets directed at Haifa caused no
injuries and looked more like a warning than an escalation. 

It was another three days -- days of constant Israeli bombardment of
Lebanon, destroying the country and injuring countless civilians --
before Nasrallah hit Haifa again, including a shell that killed eight
workers in a railway depot. 

No one should have been surprised. Nasrallah was doing exactly what he
had threatened to do if Israel refused to negotiate and chose the path
of war instead. Although the international media quoted his ominous
televised message that "Haifa is just the beginning", Nasrallah in fact
made his threat conditional on Israel's continuing strikes against
Lebanon. In the same speech he warned: "As long as the enemy pursues its
aggression without limits and red lines, we will pursue the
confrontation without limits and red lines." Well, Israel did, and so
now has Nasrallah. The second myth is that Hizbollah's stockpile of
12,000 rockets -- the Israeli army's estimate -- poses an existential
threat to Israel. According to Horowitz and others, Hizbollah collected
its armory with the sole intent of destroying the Jewish state. 

If this really was Hizbollah's intention in amassing the weapons, it has
a very deluded view of what is required to wipe Israel off the map. More
likely, it collected the armory in the hope that it might prove a
deterrence -- even if a very inadequate one, as Lebanon is now
discovering -- against a repeat of Israel's invasions of 1978 and 1982,
and the occupation that lasted nearly two decades afterwards. 

In fact, according to other figures supplied by the Israeli army, at
least 2,000 Hizbollah rockets have already been fired into Israel while
the army's bombardments have so far destroyed a further 2,000 rockets.
In other words, northern Israel has already received a fifth of
Hizbollah's arsenal. As someone living in the north, and within range of
the rockets, I have to say Israel does not look close to being expunged.
The Galilee may be emptier, as up to third of Israeli Jews seek
temporary refuge in the south, but Israel's existence is in no doubt at
all. 

The third myth is that, while Israel is trying to fight a clean war by
targeting only terrorists, Hizbollah prefers to bring death and
destruction on innocents by firing rockets at Israeli civilians. 

It is amazing that this myth even needs exploding, but after the efforts
of Horowitz and company, it most certainly does. As the civilian death toll in
Lebanon has skyrocketed, international criticism of Israel has remained at
the mealy-mouthed level of diplomatic requests for "restraint" and
"proportionate responses". One need only cast a quick eye over the
casualty figures from this conflict to see that if Israel is targeting
only Hizbollah fighters it has been making disastrous miscalculations.
So far some 400 Lebanese civilians are reported dead -- unfortunately
for Horowitz's story at least a third of them children. From the images
coming out of Lebanon's hospitals, many more children have survived but
with terrible burns or disabling injuries. 

The best estimates, though no one knows for sure, are that Hizbollah
deaths are not yet close to the three-figures range. 

In the latest emerging news from Lebanon, human rights groups are
accusing Israel of violating international law and using cluster
grenades, which kill indiscriminately. There are reports too, so far
unconfirmed, that Israel has been firing illegal phosphorus incendiary
bombs. 

Conversely, the breakdown of the smaller number of deaths of Israelis at
the hands of Hizbollah -- 42 at the time of writing -- show that more
soldiers have been killed than civilians. 

In fact, although no one is making the point, Hizbollah's rockets have
been targeted overwhelming at strategic locations: the northern economic
hub of Haifa, its satellite towns and the array of military sites across
the Galilee. 

Nasrallah seems fully aware that Israel has an impressive civil defense
program of shelters that keep most civilians out of harm's way. Unlike
Horowitz, I won't presume to read Nasrallah's mind: whether he wants to
kill large numbers of Israeli civilians or not, cannot be known -- given
his inability to do so. 

But we can see from the choice of the sites he is striking that his
primary goal is to give Israelis a small taste of the disruption of
normal life that is being endured by the Lebanese. He has effectively
closed Haifa for more than a week, shutting its port and financial
centers. Israeli TV is speaking increasingly of the damage being
inflicted on the country's economy. Because of Israel's press censorship
laws, it is impossible to discuss the locations of Israel's military
installations. But Hizbollah's rockets are accurate enough to show that
many are intended for the army's sites in the Galilee, even if they are
rarely precise enough to hit them. 

It is obvious to everyone in Nazareth, for example, that the rockets
landing close by, and once on, the city over the past week are searching
out, and some have fallen extremely close to, the weapons factory sited
near us. 

Hizbollah seems to have as little concern for the collateral damage of
civilian deaths as Israel -- each wants the balance of terror in its
favor -- but it is nonsense to suggest that Hizbollah's goals are any
more ignoble than Israel's. It is trying to dent the economy of northern
Israel in retaliation for Israel's total destruction of the Lebanese
economy. Equally, it is trying to show Israel that it knows where its
military installations are to be found. Both strategies appear to be
having an impact, even if a minor one, on weakening Israeli resolve. 

The fourth myth is a continuation of the third: Hizbullah has been
endangering the lives of ordinary Lebanese by hiding among
non-combatants. 

We have seen this kind of dissembling by Israel and Horowitz before,
though not repeated so enthusiastically by Western officials. The UN
head of humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, who is in the region, accused
Hizbollah of "cowardly blending" among the civilian population, and a
similar accusation was leveled by the British foreign minister Kim
Howells when he arrived in Israel. 

In 2002 Israel made the same charge: that Palestinians resisting its
army's rampage through the refugee camps of the West Bank were hiding
among civilians. The claim grew louder as more Palestinian civilians
showed the irritating habit of getting in the way of Israeli strikes
against population centers. The complaints reached a crescendo when at
least two dozen civilians were killed in Jenin as Israel razed the camp
with Apache helicopters and Caterpillar bulldozers. 

The implication of Egeland's cowardly statement seems to be that any
Lebanese fighter, or Palestinian one, resisting Israel and its powerful
military should stand in an open field, his rifle raised to the sky,
waiting to see who fares worse in a shoot-out with an Apache helicopter
or F-16 fighter jet. Hizbollah's reluctance to conduct the war in this
manner, we are supposed to infer, is proof that they are terrorists. 

Egeland and Howells need reminding that Hizbollah's fighters are not
aliens recently arrived from training camps in Iran, whatever Horowitz
claims. They belong to and are strongly supported by the Shiite
community, nearly half the country's population, and many other
Lebanese. They have families, friends and neighbors living alongside
them in the country's south and the neighborhoods of Beirut who believe
Hizbollah is the best hope of defending their country from Israel's
regular onslaughts. 

Given the indigenous nature of Hizbollah's resistance, we should not be
surprised at the lengths the Shiite militia is going to ensure their
loved ones, and the Lebanese people more generally, are not put directly
in danger by their combat. 

If only the same could be said of the Israeli army and air force. One
need only look at the images of the victims of its strikes against
residential neighborhoods, car, ambulances and factories to see why most
of the dead being extracted from the rubble are civilians. And finally,
there is a fifth myth I almost forgot to mention. That people like David
Horowitz only want to tell us the truth. 

--------------------------------------------------------
-Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
book "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic
State" is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net 
--------------------------------------------------------

Hi All 

This is a tough book to put down but it is also tough to read. 

Blood and Religion: The unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State 

The further you get in to it, the more you feel like you're in a time
warp. The arguments, the tactics, the government incentives to have
'Jewish babies' and discourage 'Arab babies', the proposals by Sharon,
Barak and others justifying ethnic cleansing as normal. The racial
supremacy...no, you're not reading Himmler, Hitler or something by the
Thule society embracing Galton's Eugenics and racial hygiene. This isn't
1936 Germany but 2006 Israel and it is disgusting beyond what we knew.
Kudos to Cook for having the courage to write this book. It really does
need to be read and the arguments and examples we need when debating
this issue about how the majority in Israel do not want a true
democratic state, only a Jewish state. As has often been proven, it is
easier to get the masses to follow immorality if it is packaged right.
But, For the minority in Israel and abroad fighting for equal rights and
justice, this book gives you the examples in detail. Times, dates, court
cases, articles...they're all here. This is an amazing tool. 

Did a book review because it also alarmed me based upon events in the US
and our own direction. Get a hold of this book. It is a must read for
anyone involved in human rights, the Middle East and even American
politics. Don't let this pass unnoticed. It is too important. 

Oh...and the holocaust programming is full force on American TV and
radio this week...to minimize what Israel is doing in Lebanon and Gaza.
I counted 4 different holocaust stories on NPR (National Public Radio)
today within 3 hours. 

Have a great weekend 

Laura 

http://www.couplescompany.com/Features/Politics/2006/BloodandReligion.
htm 

Blood and Religion: 

The Most Important Book You’ll Read This Year 

By Laura Dawn Lewis 

Microcosms of what can be, or shall be often present themselves in
unusual places. Like most Americans the events over the past five years
increasingly alarm me. We’re told we must invade other nations to
protect our freedom. Yet I’ve watched my freedoms disappear. We’re told
we are a united nation, yet I watch the pettiness of politics split us
into camps where one is defined as red or blue, conservative or liberal.
Upon examination little difference rises to the surface. 

Blood and Religion enables Americans to dispel many myths about Israel
and it provides the missing pieces as to why the conflict in that
region, the root cause of unrest in the Middle East continues. But more
importantly, the eerie similarities to the increased militarization of
our own society are exposed. 

The United States continues to evolve as a nation frozen in fear. This
fear is being used to strip us of our rights and ability to fight for
our rights. Though our government was never meant to ‘protect us’, it
now boasts this obligation. But its protection is an illusion. The ‘us’
it claims to protect is them. The laws, veils of secrecy used to quell
or stall investigation, legislation and propaganda increasing serve to
protect them from us, the people they are elected to serve. Somewhere in
the last fifty years our government went from a nation of the people and
by the people to one that must control the people so it is served by the
people. 

This sets a dangerous precedent, one evident in fringes. And there is a
model, one we follow, thou at a distance. That model is Israel. 

British journalist Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth’s latest book, Blood
and Religion: The unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State focuses
on Israel’s two faced legal system and the implications of a society
that bases its existence on racism, fear and entitlement to the
detriment of 4.5 million people. Reading it, I was struck by the
similarity to 1930’s segregated South. How unarmed Arab protests against
Israel’s unfair laws and state sanctioned racism are met with bullets,
live and rubber coated, while Jewish protests are handled with kid
gloves, (as all non-violent protesters regardless of faith should be). 

Israel is a state where murdering Arabs receives a high five and
murdering Jews receives prison and often a death sentence. Jews may own
guns. Arabs, in most cases, may not. Jews may participate fully in
society. Arabs may only participate nominally and are blocked from 93%
of the country. This is the definition of segregation. It is also the
definition of apartheid. 

Creating Fear and Controlling People 

What really struck me reading this book is how the seed of distrust and
hate, bolstered by fear is planted in the mindset of the Israeli Jewish
community by its leaders, media and police. I’ve seen this before, both
in twentieth century Europe and today in the United States. 

The Israeli Arabs are described as a fifth column by Israel's leaders,
media and courts, the enemy within, there to destroy the nation
demographically by breeding and literally by plotting against the Jewish
people. If the ideas sound familiar, they are the same racist
stereotypes used by the Nazis to describe Europe’s Jewish population and
later expel and intern them. Germans, convinced through propaganda
became afraid of Jews over taking their mythical pure blood and
demographically destroying their nation. Today, Israel cites the
demographic time bomb of Arabs conspiring to topple their state. Of
course no evidence exists to support this in either Nazi Germany or
current Israel, but politically fostering fears of an enemy within
allows for the increased surveillance, detention, confiscation of
property and the imposition of police state tactics. It also prevents
fair minded citizens, blinded by false fears, from objecting. After all,
it's not 'me' being persecuted...yet. 

From Free State to Police State 

Israel’s military is used to kill its own citizens, Arab citizens within
the state of Israel. My mind returns to Katrina and New Orleans where
our own military was used to kill US citizens within the US. Like in
Israel, these were minorities. Like in Israel, their communities receive
less funding and support though not to the disparity of that nation
where just 2% goes to 20% of the population and 98% to 80%. 

Again with Katrina I’m reminded of the private militias hired by the
wealthy. Most of these came from Israeli based companies with training
in squashing unarmed or lightly armed people with complete military
force, often deadly. I see these same tactics being implemented into our
own police forces, again training by Israel who is lauded as the
‘expert’ in fighting terrorism. We also bypass laws designed to protect
American's privacy. Intelligence prohibited by our constitution
frequently originates with the Anti-defamation League, an Israeli
operation, a key component of the Israel Lobby tightly associated with
US civil police agencies and often considered Israel's intelligence arm
in the United States. This means a disproportionate level of scrutiny is
applied to US citizens deemed enemies of Israel: Arabs, non-Zionists
Christians and non-Zionist Jews. 

Military Society 

Reality shows creating reasons for terrorism, rather than fighting it is
the expertise. Israeli techniques of surveillance, intimidation and even
torture increasingly find their way into our military and police forces,
further blurring the line between civilian and military. This is
intended. 

Israel is a military-centric society. Increasingly the US is becoming
such. Nations focused upon military objectives, colonization and
conquest must continually create threats to justify their existence and
expenditures. This places the civilian population within a bubble of
fear and that fear is used to strip rights and control. This stripping
always starts with the most vulnerable. Eventually it gets to all.
Through fear and government encroachment, reason and morality lay
discarded as the people, convinced through falsehoods line up behind
their leaders like children clinging to mother’s skirts. 

Finally I see the assault on illegal immigration and the tactics used by
Israel to confiscate land and further intern those not Jewish. We speak
of building walls, like Israel is doing. We label illegal immigration as
an enemy and infer those of Hispanic heritage or of color have alternate
objectives in this country, that they are destroying us from within. We
violate the rights or our Arab citizens disproportionately under the
guise of ‘terrorism’ and we hide the results under ‘national
security’…just like Israel. 

America's slide 

This book exposes the ugly side of Zionism and Israel, the racism and
disregard for non-Jewish human life those of us who write on this issue
have known about and often get labeled anti-Semitic for exposing. But
far more chilling is the similarities to how America now operates. 

The similarities to Homeland Security, the NSA and even our own police
forces being used to spy upon our own citizens frighteningly obvious in
this statement by Haifa University professor Ilan Pappe, found on page
79: 

  “My fear even before the outbreak of the intifada was that the Shin Bet,
  (CIA in Israel) was under-employed in the occupied territories because
  of the withdrawals agreed under the Oslo Accords. The security apparatus
  (in Israel) is huge, and a lot of people work for it—50 percent of
  academics for example, are employed in some capacity as advisers or
  counselors—so there’s a lot of interest in keeping it going. 
  
  Because the service still had the same manpower and the same means at
  its disposal, it needed to change target—and to justify this change of
  target it had to come up with a new story; that there had been a
  fundamental change in the way the Palestinians inside Israel were
  behaving. The Shin Bet argument was that Israel needed to increase the
  involvement of the secret services inside Israel, that the police could
  not operate alone. They had to prove there was a sinister side to the
  activity of the Palestinian minority that could only be deciphered by
  the secret service and could only be confronted by the secret service.”

This 'sinister action' that Israeli Arabs were undertaking?

Protesting for equal rights -- the same rights to property, employment,
education, housing, opportunity, civil services and safety enjoyed by
the Jewish citizens of the state. In short, using the tactics made
famous by Martin Luther King and Gandhi, they lobbied through peaceful
demonstrations for a state that recognized all its citizens, not just
those of the Jewish faith. For doing so, often Israel's Arab citizens
are maimed, beaten and killed. 

To prevent peaceful demonstrations and the achievement of equal rights
by a minority, the state of Israel turned on its own citizens and made
them the enemy within. Now imagine what happens in the United States
when Americans begin to realize our constitutional rights have been
completely discarded and we begin to peacefully organize to get them
back. Now we, those of us wanting rights become the enemy within because
we become a threat to the status quo and state. 

Blood and Religion enables Americans to dispel many myths about Israel
and it provides the missing pieces as to why the conflict in that
region, the root cause of unrest in the Middle East continues. But more
importantly, the eerie similarities to the increased militarization of
our own society and scapegoating of ‘others’ whether liberal or
conservative, legal or illegal, Arab or Jew, Hispanic or Black make this
a must read for any American who cares about our republic, our rights
and our morality. If we’re not careful, we could become Israel and this
is not in the best interests of our nation, people or the world. Let us
learn from the mistakes and hatred of others thus saving ourselves from
becoming as they.