Category 5 propaganda storm blinding America

Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq which has left some 650,000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early in 2003; for Iran now read Iraq then. And is it not remarkable that North Korea has not been attacked? North Korea has nuclear weapons. That is the message, loud and clear, for the Iranians.
In numerous surveys, such as that conducted this month by BBC World Service, "we," the majority of humanity, have made clear our revulsion for Bush and his vassals. As for Blair, the man is now politically and morally naked for all to see. So who speaks out, apart from Professor Edalal and his colleagues? Privileged journalists, scholars and artists, writers and thespians who sometimes speak about "freedom of speech" are as silent as a dark West End theater. What are they waiting for? The declaration of another thousand year Reich, or a mushroom cloud in the Middle East, or both?

The well-informed http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/300/2">Arab Times in Kuwait says Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov says the US will use nuclear munitions delivered by Cruise missiles launched in the Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilization. It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes. Posing as victims, the Israelis will suffer some tolerable damage and then an outraged US will destabilize Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian hysteria, leaks, disinformation etcetera . . . It remains unclear whether the US Congress is going to authorize the war."

As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, "neocon" fanatics such as Vice President Cheney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest.

Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations – until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear program to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go anywhere and see anything." They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.
Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power with thermonuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets, an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions and the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation, Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.

The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions," just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonizing that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "has done yeoman service in facilitating this"; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals its distortion. According to Juan Cole, American professor of Modern Middle East History, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map." He said, "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." This, says Cole, "does not imply military action or killing anyone at all." Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Jerusalem regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.

A few weeks back, according to UPI's Arnaud De Borchgrave, Netanyahu declared that Israel "must immediately launch an intense, international public relations front first and foremost on the United States – the goal being to encourage President Bush to live up to specific pledges he would not allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons. We must make clear to the (U.S.) government, the Congress and the American public that a nuclear Iran is a threat to the U.S. and the entire world, not only Israel."

Israel's war is to be sold as America's war.

The project is under way. According to Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor of the Guardian, Israeli media are reporting that the assignment to convince the world of the need for tough action on Iran has been given to Meir Dagan, head of Mossad.
Listening to the war talk, Gen. Wesley Clark exploded to Arianna Huffington: "You just have to read what's in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided, but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office-seekers."
The former supreme allied commander in Europe was ordered out of ranks and dressed down by Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. But Matt Yglesias of American Prospect, himself Jewish, says Clark spoke truth: "(I)t's true that major Jewish organizations are pushing this country into war with Iran."

Yet is the hysteria at Herzliya justified? Consider:

Not once since its 1979 revolution has Iran started a war. In any war with America, or Israel with its hundreds of nuclear weapons, Iran would not be annihilating anyone. Iran would be risking annihilation.
Not only has Iran no nukes, the Guardian reported yesterday, "Iran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium ... are in chaos." That centrifuge facility at Natanz is "archaic, prone to breakdown and lacks the materials for industrial-scale production."
There is no need for war. Yet, Israelis, neocons and their agents of influence are trying to whip us into one. Senators who are seeking absolution for having voted to take us into Iraq ought to be confronted and asked just what they are doing to keep us out of a war in Iran.

WASHINGTON - When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared last week that his country could not risk another "existential threat" such as the Nazi Holocaust, he was repeating what has become the dominant theme in Israel's campaign against Tehran - that it cannot tolerate an Iran with the technology that could be used to make nuclear weapons, because Iran is fanatically committed to the physical destruction of Israel.
The internal assessment by the Israeli national-security apparatus of the Iranian threat, however, is more realistic than the government's public rhetoric would indicate. Since Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005, Israel has effectively exploited his image as someone who is particularly fanatical about destroying Israel to develop the theme of Iran's threat of a "second Holocaust" by using nuclear weapons.

But such alarmist statements do not accurately reflect the strategic thinking of Israeli national-security officials. In fact, Israelis began in the early 1990s to use the argument that Iran was irrational about Israel and could not be deterred from a nuclear attack if it ever acquired nuclear weapons, according to an account by independent analyst Trita Parsi on Iranian-Israeli strategic relations to be published in March. Meanwhile, the internal Israeli view of Iran, Parsi said in an interview, "is completely different".

Parsi, who interviewed many Israeli national-security officials for his book, said, "The Israelis know that Iran is a rational regime, and they have acted on that presumption."

His primary evidence of such an Israeli assessment......

Occasionally, Israeli officials do let slip indications that their fears of Iran are less extreme than the "second Holocaust" rhetoric would indicate. In November, Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh explained candidly in an interview with the Jerusalem Post that the fear was not that such weapons would be launched against Israel but that the existence of nuclear capability would interfere with Israel's recruitment of new immigrants and cause more Israelis to emigrate to other countries.
Sneh declared that Ahmadinejad could "kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That's why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs."

Israel's frequent threat to attack Iran's nuclear facilities is also at odds with its internal assessment of the feasibility and desirability of such an attack. It is well understood in Israel that the Iranian situation does not resemble that of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, which Israeli planes bombed in 1981. Unlike Iraq's program, which was focused on a single facility, the Iranian nuclear program is dispersed; the two major facilities, Natanz and Arak, are hundreds of kilometers apart, making it very difficult to hit them simultaneously.
In mid-2005, Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence issues for the daily newspaper Ha'aretz, wrote, "According to military experts in Israel and elsewhere, the Israeli Air Force does not have the strength that is needed to destroy the sites in Iran in a preemptive strike." He added that that the awareness of that reality was "trickling down to the military-political establishment".

Javedanfar, Melman's co-author in a forthcoming book on Iran's nuclear program, agrees. "There is no way the Israelis are going to do it on their own," he said.
That is also the conclusion reached by Francona and other air force analysts. Francona recalls that he and two retired US Air Force generals on the trip to Israel told Israeli Air Force generals they believed Israel did not have the capability to destroy the Iranian nuclear targets, mainly because it would require aerial refueling in hostile airspace. "The Israeli officers recognized they have a shortfall in aerial refueling," Francona said.
In the end, the Israelis know they are dependent on the US to carry out a strike against Iran. And the US is the target of an apocalyptic Israeli portrayal of Iran that diverges from the internal Israeli assessment.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, when the U.S. mission there seemed accomplished or at least accomplishable, Iran came to fear that it would be next in the crosshairs. To stave off that possibility, Iran's leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, began to assemble a negotiating package. Suddenly, everything was on the table—Iran's nuclear program, policy toward Israel, support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and control over al-Qaeda operatives captured since the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan.

This comprehensive proposal, which diplomats took to calling "the grand bargain," was sent to Washington on May 2, 2003, just before a meeting in Geneva between Iran's U.N. ambassador, Javad Zarif, and neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, then a senior director at the National Security Council. (Khalilzad went on to become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and was recently nominated to be America's envoy to the U.N.) According to a report by Gareth Porter in The American Prospect, Iran offered to take "decisive action against any terrorists (above all, al-Qaeda) in Iranian territory." In exchange, Iran wanted the U.S. to pursue "anti-Iranian terrorists"—i.e., the MEK. Specifically, Iran offered to share the names of senior al-Qaeda operatives in its custody in return for the names of MEK cadres captured by the U.S. in Iraq.

Well aware that the U.S. was concerned about its nuclear program, Iran proclaimed its right to "full access to peaceful nuclear technology," but offered to submit to much stricter inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.). On the subject of Israel, Iran offered to join with moderate Arab regimes such as Egypt and Jordan in accepting the 2002 Arab League Beirut declaration calling for peace with Israel in return for Israel's withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. The negotiating package also included proposals to normalize Hezbollah into a mere "political organization within Lebanon," to bring about a "stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.) from Iranian territory," and to apply "pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967."

To be sure, Iran's proposal was only a first step. There were countless unanswered questions, and many reasons not to trust the Islamic Republic. Given the initiative's historic scope, however, it was somewhat surprising when the Bush administration simply declined to respond. There was not even an interagency meeting to discuss it. "The State Department knew it had no chance at the interagency level of arguing the case for it successfully," former N.S.C. staffer Flynt Leverett told The American Prospect. "They weren't going to waste Powell's rapidly diminishing capital on something that unlikely."

Iran had sent the proposal through an intermediary, Tim Guldimann, the Swiss ambassador to the U.S. A few days later, Leverett said, the White House had the State Department send Guldimann a message reprimanding him for exceeding his diplomatic mandate. "We're not interested in any grand bargain," said Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, who went on to become interim ambassador to the U.N. until his resignation last December.

I just got off the phone with Flynt Leverett, a former CIA Mideast analyst and National Security Council staffer during President Bush's first term. Leverett says he finds it "really quite curious" that Secretary Rice is pleading a memory lapse on an Iranian offer shortly after the Iraq war to, among other things, recognize Israel.

Leverett himself says he "saw the actual document" detailing the offer, which arrived at the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs bureau via fax around late April or early May of 2003, when he had left the White House to return to his regular post as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Leverett wasn't around to personally show Rice the document. But, he says, "What I was told from colleagues over at the NSC, people I knew on the NSC staff -- I don't know for a fact that it was put on (Rice's) desk, but it did go to the NSC. And I know for a fact that at State, it went all the way up to Powell."

When the fax arrived at the State Department in 2003, the senior director for the Middle East at the NSC was Elliott Abrams. An NSC spokeswoman told Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, who broke the Iran-overture story last year, that Abrams has no recollection of the fax either.

What's more, Leverett says that he tried to include information on the fax in a New York Times op-ed he wrote in December of 2006 that was heavily redacted at the White House's behest. Even though the information had been reported before -- in Kessler's original Post story, for instance -- the White House held it back, claiming it was "classified."

After promising that the Bush administration would publish a document this week detailing the evidence for its charge that Iranians in Iraq are providing arms and advice to Shiite militias to kill American troops, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack suggested Wednesday that no such document would be forthcoming any time soon. Paul Richter of The Los Angeles Times reported that some officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had resisted the release of the dossier, because they believed the assertions contained in it would have so little credibility that it would backfire politically. As Richter wrote, "They want to avoid repeating the embarrassment that followed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it became clear that information the administration cited to justify the war was incorrect…"

Indeed, the new campaign hyping Iranian meddling, like the 2002-2003 propaganda campaign leading up to the invasion of Iraq, emphasizes a single, highly emotional theme. Instead of the “mushroom cloud” invoked by Condoleezza Rice in September 2002, the administration now conjures up the image of Iranian agents lurking in Iraq for the purpose of killing Americans. And although the White House has decided against the release of any documentation of these allegations for now, the campaign proceeds apace.
As it did in 2002 and 2003 regarding the Iraqi threat, the Bush administration claims to have “intelligence” to support its central theme of Iranian agents fomenting Shiite violence. But a careful investigation of some specific statements that have been made on the alleged Iranian role in sending weapons to Iraqi Shiite militias reveals a gross misrepresentation of the facts.

Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, made the most spectacular claim of Iranian culpability in arming the militias so far when he declared in an interview with USA Today on Wednesday, “We have weapons that we know through serial numbers…that trace back to Iran.” He referred specifically to RPG-29s -- armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades -- and truck-mounted Katyusha rockets captured in Iraq.
That statement represents a serious leap in logic, because the place in which a weapon was manufactured does not tell us who actually supplied them to Iraqi Shiites. (The United States, for example, has been supplying Iraqi forces with Russian-made RPG-7s.) But in making the claim, Odierno made a major stumble: Iran has never been known to manufacture the RPG-29, so the military could not have captured one with an Iranian serial number. ......

Odierno’s statement didn’t mark the first time that the U.S. military has tried to peddle the story of the Iranian origins of the RPG-29s in Iraq. Last September, General John Abizaid admitted that only a single RPG-29 had actually been found in the country, and he said it was “unclear” how it got into the country, according to Agence France-Presse. Abizaid didn’t claim any Iranian serial number, but instead suggested that the mere fact that the weapons had been used by Hezbollah “indicates … an Iranian connection.” In the Bush administration’s world, Hezbollah is a “proxy” of Iran and therefore cannot have any policies independent of Iran. In the real world, however, Hezbollah has long been understood by specialists to have its own priorities and policies that may or may not jibe with those of Tehran. .....

Significantly Odierno did not claim that the anti-armor roadside bombs known as explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), which represent the most lethal armor-piercing technology now being used in Iraq, were manufactured in Iran. Instead, he asserted that the technology itself and “some of the elements to make them are coming out of Iran."
That has been the refrain of the Bush administration and the U.S. command for nearly a year. The Deputy Chief of Staff for intelligence of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, Major General Richard Zahner, gave a press conference last September in which he argued that Iran’s culpability in the appearance of EFP technology is proven by the fact that the C-4 explosive used in EFPs in Iraq has the same Iranian batch number as the C-4 found on the Hezbollah ship carrying arms to Palestinian militants that was intercepted by the Israelis in 2003.

Zahner’s assertion is contradicted, however, by the most in-depth study of the subject so far -- an article by Michael Knights published in Jane’s Intelligence Review late last month. Knights, vice-president and head of analysis for the Olive Group, a private security company based in London, has been following the evolution of EFPs in Iraq for nearly three years.
In the article and in an interview with me, Knights suggested that the evidence does not point to Iran as the primary force behind the use of EFPs in Iraq. “There is no need to see an Iranian policy driving it,” he told me. Knights said it is far more likely that Hezbollah policy drove the phenomenon. He points out that it was Hezbollah, not Iran, that transferred EFP devices and components to Palestinian militants after the second Intifada began in 2000.

The remarkable coincidence of the same batch number of C-4 appearing in the intercepted Hezbollah ship and in southern Iraq indicates that the Shiite militias have been getting supplies not from the Iranians, but from Hezbollah. (If Iran had deliberately shipped the explosive to southern Iraq last year, the batch number would have been different from a batch that was given to Hezbollah years earlier.) .....

U.S. intelligence has made much of the fact that a Hezbollah manual for making EFPs has been captured in Iraq. Knights notes, however, that the manual was actually found in the hands of Sunni insurgents. Knights says the Sunnis “might also have access to EFP expertise through Palestinian groups.” The Sunnis used EFPs on a number of occasions, but most often have relied on the less powerful “shaped charges” that they appear to make themselves.
Regardless of how the technology was initially picked up by Shiite militants, Knights points out that the trend since early 2005 has been toward the emergence of networks of Shiites who make the EFPs themselves, supply them to Shiite militias, and serve as middlemen in importing both devices and components. The network of middlemen, according to Knights, is not aligned with any particular Shiite group and is typified by the one discovered by British forces in Basra in December 2006. It consisted of members of the Basra Police Intelligence Unit, the Internal Affairs Directorate of the police, and the Major Crimes Unit and was drawn from policemen representing every major Shiite faction in Basra.

Knights’ research on EFPs illustrates that the Bush administration campaign to blame Iran for the Shiite use of modern weapons is based not on intelligence but rather, once again, on its own faith-based worldview. The syllogism underlying the anti-Iran campaign is: Hezbollah has been helping Shiites. Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy. Therefore, Iran is arming the Shiites. As Knights cautiously put it in the interview, “It may be that they are taking a data point and blowing it out of proportion.”

Last Friday, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Rupert Murdoch sat on a panel where he lamented what he described as a "loss of power" due to the ascension of the Internet and other new media. The notion that this captain of one of the most dominant media conglomerates in the world is trembling in the shadow of bloggers is simply absurd. Especially when you consider the fact that his company is also a dominant player on the Internet with an aggressive acquisitiveness that includes MySpace, the world's largest online social networking site.

But there was a more shocking exchange that took place that ought to have caused more of a stir amongst professional journalists and all freedom loving people. It was an exchange that revealed something that most conscious beings knew, but which I have never seen explicitly articulated.

Murdoch was asked if News Corp. had managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq. His answer?



Let me repeat this: "We Tried!"

After hearing this confession, how can anyone ever again take seriously Fox News or any of Murdoch's other instruments of bias? How can News Corp. continue to pretend that they are "fair and balanced?" How can any other media company exhibit the slightest expression of respect or patronization?

And speaking of other media companies, where are they now? The Chairman and CEO of a media empire that includes the number one rated cable news network, and numerous newspapers around the world, has just admitted that he tried to use that empire to "shape the agenda" in support of a partisan political goal with consequences of life, death, and global destabilization. Why has the media, who you might think would have some interest in this subject, virtually ignored these remarks? We know they were there because, on the very same day, there was a media tempest over http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/index.php?p=333">remarks by John Kerry on whether Bush had turned the U. S. into an international pariah. That trumped up commotion was led, of course, by Fox News. Even the Hollywood Reporter downplayed the most startling portion of Murdoch's presentation by headlining their story: "Big media has less sway on Internet." They apparently felt that that was a more weighty revelation than the attempted thought-control exposed by Murdoch.

Where is the outrage? Where are the calls to disband this mammoth and unlawful propaganda machine? Murdoch, who was made an American citizen by an act of Congress because, otherwise, he could not own an American television network, should have his citizenship revoked and be deported back to Australia. Think of the precedent this sets for any other wealthy and ambitious ideologue that seeks to manipulate public opinion. There are plenty of wealthy and ambitious ideologues in the Middle East and elsewhere who may view Murdoch as a role model.
At the very least, it needs to be broadcast far and wide that News Corp. and Fox News are nothing but a tool of the neo-con operatives in government. You might say we already knew that, but this is different. We are not merely accusing them of this stance, they have now admitted it. And it can not be tolerated! Not by any standard of journalistic ethics. Not by a nation that values a free press so much that it incorporated that freedom into its Constitution.

Rupert Murdoch, who gives you Bill O'Reilly, Daniel Pipes, and other fantasists of the hard Right by his ownership of a vast media empire admitted at the Davos conference that his companies had "tried" to propagandize for Bush's Iraq War. He said that they were critical of the execution of the war, though. He doesn't watch or read his own media if he thinks that. It is never a discouraging word and 'what were the RNC talking points today?' over there in Foxland.

Murdoch's remarks are a good reason for which the news conglomerates should be broken up so that a wider range of views can be published. While Murdoch complains about competition from the internet, the fact is that far more people watch television than get their news from any blogger.

Murdoch's media have done more to cheapen American values and drive the country toward fascistic ways of thinking than anything since the McCarthy period in the 1950s. The airwaves belong to the public, and this man only licenses them. When will the public take them back and use them for purposes of which Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin would have approved?

Because as active citizens you are serving an essential function: when you advocate, when you lobby, when you speak out on issues that matter to the Jewish community and to Israel you are speaking also on behalf of issues that are important to the larger community of Americans. That’s because the bond shared between the U.S. and Israel is based on shared interests but is rooted in the strength we derive from our shared values. As Americans we are humbled by Israel’s commitment to civic engagement and open debate, free expression and the rule of law, even in the face of grave dangers.

And both Israelis and Americans know so well, a democracy is far more than just holding elections. Democracy has to spring from an active and open citizenry dedicated to tolerance, to respect for differences, to the rule of law, to policies that lift us up not tear us down as fellow human beings, and to the value of human life.

This is a moment of great difficulty for Israel and great peril for Israel, for the U.S. and for free and democratic nations. Israel is confronting many of the toughest challenges in her history, in a neighborhood that is less secure than ever. At this moment of peril, what is vital is that we stand by our friend and our ally and we stand by our own values. Israel is a beacon of what’s right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism. We need only look to one of Israel’s greatest threats: namely, Iran. Make no mistake, Iran poses a threat not only to Israel, but to the entire Middle East and beyond, including the U.S. I don’t need to remind this group that about a month ago the Iranian government hosted a conference in Tehran whose sole purpose was to deny the Holocaust.

Now that conference was beyond the pale of international discourse and acceptable behavior and we must not treat this situation as business as usual. The gathering was hosted by the leader of the member of a United Nations state and by a leader that has raised serious international concerns over his country’s nuclear ambitions and who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Such comments add greater urgency to the necessity to doing everything we can to deny nuclear weapons to Iran. The regime’s pro-terrorist, anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric only underscores the urgency of our response to the threat we face.

U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal. We cannot, we should not, we must not, permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons. And in dealing with this threat as I have said for a very long time, no option can be taken off the table.

But Iran is a threat not only because of the hateful rhetoric spewed by its president, not only because of its nuclear ambitions, but because it uses its influence and its revenues in the region to support terrorist elements that are attacking innocent Israelis; and now we believe attacking American soldiers. Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel this summer using Iranian weapons clearly demonstrate Iran’s malevolent influence even beyond its borders.

In 1999 I raised the problem of anti-Semitism in Palestinian textbooks, now eight years later we continue to hear disturbing reports that these textbooks have not been changed and I will be doing an event in Washington in the Senate, next week, to highlight the anti-Semitic/ anti-Israeli rhetoric that is still part of the Palestinian curriculum.

Some are saying that Eilat was bombed because Israeli’s efforts at self-defense through its security fence have been so successful. But Eilat is a tragic reminder of the threats that Israel faces everyday and underscores the importance of our continued support for Israel’s right to protect and defend her people. The highest priority of any government is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens and that is why, as I have said, I’ve been a strong supporter of Israel’s right to build a security barrier to keep terrorists out. I have spoken out against the International Court of Justice for questioning Israel’s right to build that fence of security.

A perfect example of this is Magen David Adom. I’ve long supported the MDA and for decades it was denied admission to the International Committee of the Red Cross despite the fact it had deployed its volunteers and resources to help victims of disaster worldwide, whether victims of the tsunami in Southeast Asia or victims of Hurricane Katrina right here in our own country. When I learned the MDA was excluded from the ICRC, I was outraged by the injustice. And despite its international, non-political, life-saving work, it was being singled out because it was Israeli. So I joined with many of you in the struggle to try to obtain recognition and we have been in this together for a number of years, some of you for a long, long time. I worked with you to advocate for full inclusion, I sponsored legislation placing limitations on the US contributions to the ICRC until it recognized MDA. And after years of brokering negotiations, and writing letters, and making calls, and passing legislation, after years of urging the Swiss to find a solution to enable the MDA full participation, all of our collective efforts finally paid off when, this summer, the ICRC righted this historic wrong and admitted MDA into the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Discussion of symbol and illustration and historical context here.



And after Senator Hillary Clinton engineered the withholding of this critical funding from the American Red Cross to the international Red Cross body for six years as a form of protest, in the face of hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and tsunamis during that period, here was the result:

There are no easy answers to the complex situation we face today. I have advocated engagement with our enemies and Israel’s enemies because I want to understand better what we can do to defeat those who are aiming their hatred, their extremism, their weapons at us. And I believe we can gain valuable knowledge and leverage from being part of a process again that enables us to get a better idea of how to take on and defeat our adversaries.

This is a worthy debate to have in our country today. There are many, including our President who rejects any kind of process of any sort of engagement with countries like Syria and Iran. I do believe that that is certainly a good, safe position to take, but I am not sure it is the smartest strategy that will take us to the goals that we share.

It is also important that we look at the support of the American people for American leadership including military leadership around the world. The problems that we face in Iraq today have certainly caused many Americans to move away from a belief that the United States has a role in promoting freedom and democracy. If we withdraw from the world, if we turn our back on the dangers we face that I believe will cause problems for us and very big problems for Israel. We need American support first and foremost for American leadership in combating the dangers of extremism and terrorism.

That is why we stand with Israel because it is a beacon of democracy in the region; that is why we stand with Israel because its very existence is a defiant affront to anti-Semitism; that is why we stand with Israel because in defeating terror because Israel’s cause is our cause. And that is why we stand with Israel because of our shared values and our shared belief in the dignity of men and women and the right to live without fear or oppression.