Nonchalantly, NYT Details Israeli Ethnic Cleansing

Today is my day off; I wasn’t even planning on looking at the news, but it’s on my Google page and when I opened my browser, there it was: “Israeli Riddle: Love Jerusalem, Hate Living There”. I’ll be brief, as the article speaks for itself. The article starts out right away matter-of-factly stating that Israel has tried to cram more Jews into Jerusalem while trying to squeeze out the natives.

For four decades, Israel has pushed to build and expand Jewish neighborhoods, while trying to restrict the growth in Arab parts of the city.

I can’t imagine the vitriol that would be packaged as journalism if some southern US state were to, say, subsidize the construction of white neighborhoods and yet refuse permits for private building in overcrowded black neighborhoods. In 2007. It would be the only news for weeks. But it’s Israel, so the New York Times shrugs.

The article goes on to document the rising air of religious fanaticism convincing secular Israels to flee to more modern, cosmopolitan cities like Tel Aviv, mainly because of the astounding birth rate of Jewish religious extremists.

Ms. Angel [who left Jerusalem after 30 years] said she was increasingly turned off by religious and political intolerance. She recalled being casually but modestly dressed one day when an ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman began yelling at her that she was not properly clothed.

Also, because the ultra-Orthodox hardly participate in wealth-generating enterprises, in addition to the conscious economic crushing of the Palestinians in their ghettoes, Jerusalem has become service-poor and opportunities have bled away to other, more liberal parts of Israel. Enlightened, upwardly-mobile Israelis simply don’t want to live there. And yet, while

More than 60 percent of Israelis said they would not want to give up Israeli control of the city’s holy sites, even as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians…78 percent of Israelis said they would not consider living in Jerusalem or would prefer to live elsewhere in Israel.

They don’t want to live there, but they want their government to continue the ethnic cleansing of the native population of the Old City. And the New York Times just finds that yawnable.

When War Just Can’t Wait

Prominent in the international press this past month has been Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s latest push to have the nation’s constitution amended to support a more belligerent foreign policy. The Japanese people, to their credit, have organized massive protests in opposition to the government’s rising militarism.

While revision of the constitution has been and remains a top priority for Abe’s administration, former envoy Shunji Yanai feels that the matter is simply too pressing to be allowed to continue through the appropriate legal channels. Revising a constitution can take years, after all, and in the meantime, the prohibitions against starting wars or getting involved in other peoples’ wars would remain in place. That is why Mr. Yanai has been appointed as the head of a committee to seek legal loopholes that would allow the government to further erode the interpretation of this portion of the constitution.

The “growing threat” of North Korea may be the present justification for this policy, but getting Japan to ditch its pacifist constitution so that they can “do their part” in assisting in America’s various international adventures has been a goal of American foreign policy for many years. In 2000, a bipartisan study group featuring such well-placed neocons as Richard Armitage and Paul Wolfowitz issued a report that called the Japanese policy a ‘constraint’ on their alliance and urged a model similar to US-Britain alliance for broadening Japanese involvement in global military operations.

Yohei Kono, the Speaker of the Japanese Parliament says he takes pride in the fact that the Japanese troops haven’t killed a single person in the 60 years since this constitution has been in place. Between that and turning a country devastated by war into the second largest economy on the planet, one can’t help but wonder why there is such haste amongst policymakers, and indeed, why there would be any support at all from the population at large for such a major change. Hasn’t peace served Japan well enough since then? Hasn’t war after war proven enough of a disaster for the nations that have gone down that road since then?

Nir Rosen

Millions of Refugees: Iraq no longer exists

Nir Rosen discuss his article “The Flight from Iraq,” about how that country doesn’t really exist anymore, Iraq’s refugee crisis, how many million they are, Riverbend’s exile, the complete destruction of Iraq’s middle and professional classes, the sad state of the refugees in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran and beyond, how the U.S. invasion and collaboration with the Iran parties is responsible for the new sectarian hatred between Sunnis and Shia Arabs in Iraq, the ethnic cleansing among those who remain, the growth of sectarianism and the civil war, John Bolton’s crass dismissal of his own responsibility, the massive new American “Embassy” in the green zone.

MP3 here. (18:02)

Nir Rosen is a journalist who has written extensively on American policy toward Afghanistan and Iraq. He spent more than two years in Iraq reporting on the American occupation, the relationship between Americans and Iraqis, the development of postwar Iraqi religious and political movements, interethnic and sectarian relations, and the Iraqi civil war. His reporting and research also focused on the origins and development of Islamist resistance, insurgency, and terrorist organizations. Mr. Rosen covered the elections in Afghanistan and the differences between the American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has also reported from Somalia, where he investigated Islamist movements; Jordan, where he investigated the origins and future of the Zarqawi movement; and Pakistan, where he investigated the madrassas and pro-Taliban movements. Mr. Rosen’s book on postwar Iraq, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, was published by Free Press in 2006. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, Boston Review, Time, Mother Jones, and World Policy Journal.

As a Fellow at the New America Foundation, Mr. Rosen is working on a book about his travels in the post-9/11 Muslim world during the global war on terror. Mr. Rosen’s personal Website can be accessed at: NirRosen.com.

Ellen Barfield

The Real Meaning of Mother’s Day: Your security lies in mutual respect, not militarism

Ellen Barfield, of Veterans for Peace and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Julia Ward Howe abolitionist mothers’ day calling for women to rise up to abolish war in the 1870, how Howe evolved from the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to antiwar leader, Barfield’s upcoming court appearance for harassing John McCain’s office in February and the upcoming “10,000 Mom March” against the war.

MP3 here. (15:13)

Ellen Barfield is the National Vice President of Veterans for Peace and a full-time peace and justice activist. She served in the U.S. Army from 1977-1981. She is also a member of the national boards of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the War Resister’s League, and the School of the Americas Watch.

Tenet v. Perle II

In his latest blast at George Tenet published in Friday’s Washington Post, “How the CIA Failed America,” Richard Perle demonstrates once again why much of what he says or writes should be tested not only against a fact-based (as opposed to, perhaps, a Feith-based) reality that may sometimes approximate truth, but also against his own previous statements and writings.

You will recall that the latest argument began when Perle’s protégé, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol reported April 29 that Tenet had made a “stunning error” in the very first pages of his new book, At the Center of the Storm, by citing an alleged September 12 encounter with Perle at the White House in which Perle told him, “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.”

The problem with that account, wrote Kristol with barely disguised glee, was that Perle was in France on September 12 and didn’t return until the 15th. “Perle in any case categorically denies to The Weekly Standard ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else,’’ he added.

Tenet has since conceded that the encounter may have taken place later that week. “…I may have gotten the days wrong, but I know I got the substance of that conversation correct,” he said on NBC’s Today show April 30.

Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last Friday, however, Perle against insisted that he “never said the things that [Tenet] attributes to me.” Asked specifically about whether he may have said, “Iraq has to pay the price for what happened yesterday,” however, Perle, after repeating his denial, qualified it by noting that he ‘’would not have said ‘yesterday’” – an obvious point since Tenet had already admitted that the encounter may indeed not have taken place on Sep 12.

At that point in the interview, Blitzer played a video clip from the September 16, 2001, “Crossfire” in which Perle called for action against Iraq and asserted, “We do know …that Saddam Hussein has ties to Osama bin Laden.”

As this blog tried to show in the first “Tenet v. Perle,” his “Crossfire” appearance was one of a number of similar public exhortations by Perle in the days that followed 9/11, culminating in his signature on the September 20 open letter from Kristol’s Project for the New American Century that called for “a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power… even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the (9/11) attack…”

Faced with the published record, Perle now appears to have retreated from his initial blanket denials of what Tenet quoted him as saying. In his op-ed in the Post Friday, he carefully distinguishes between the two sentences that Tenet originally quoted him as saying. ‘’(The) two statements,” he writes, “are not at all the same: that Iraq was responsible for Sept 11 – which I never said – and that removing Saddam Hussein before he could share chemical, biological or nuclear weapons with terrorists had become an urgent matter, which I did say.”

So, having admitted that he may indeed have declared Iraq should be a target (Perle also insisted to Wolf Blitzer that he never had any conversation with Tenet outside the White House, but, for the first time, he failed to explicitly rule out such an encounter in Friday’s op-ed), Perle now takes issue only with the three words in the second sentence. “I did not tell Tenet that Iraq was responsible for the Sept 11 attacks, not then [Sept 12], not ever,” he wrote Friday.

A review of the record reveals that, on this point, Perle may be literally correct. I know of no declarative statement by Perle that Iraq was indeed responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

But Perle’s serial use of innuendo – particularly in repeatedly pushing the story that 9/11’s operational mastermind, Mohamed Atta, met a senior Iraqi intelligence official, Ahmad Samir al-Ani, at a Prague café in April, 2001 — to suggest Iraqi responsibility for the attacks was a major feature of his statements and writings within weeks of 9/11 itself.

(Of course, his friend and fellow-member of the Defense Policy Board, James Woolsey, was even more outspoken about both the alleged Prague meeting and Iraqi responsibility for 9/11. See “And Then There Was Woolsey.” Indeed, Woolsey’s constant public assertions of Iraq’s alleged links for 9/11 – presumably made in DPB meetings chaired by Perle, as well as in the media – give the lie to Perle’s video-taped declaration in response to an anti-war activist on his own “The Case for War” production that aired last month on PBS: “I didn’t hear statements to the effect that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.”)

He first raised the Prague meeting in an interview published by the Chicago Sun-Times on October 21, 2001, when he was asked by Linda Frum (the sister of Perle’s American Enterprise Institute (AEI) colleague and co-author, David Frum) what Washington should do if alleged state sponsors of terrorism could not be persuaded to change their ways.

“It may be necessary to destroy two of these regimes before the others understand that we’re serious,” he replied. “I have my own candidate for who’s next [after Afghanistan]. Iraq is working assiduously on weapons of mass destruction, and we know, for example, that Iraqi intelligence officers met with Mohamed Atta in Prague.”

In a November 21, 2001, article run by the Gannett New Service, he and Woolsey were identified as “among those in the federal intelligentsia who suspect Saddam had something to do with Sept. 11 and perhaps the anthrax postal assault that followed.

“Perle noted that ‘enough of a linkage has been established’ between Iraq and al-Qaida, bin Laden’s base group,” Gannett reported. “He pointed to recent statements by Czech leaders that a high-ranking Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, was expelled from Prague following an April meeting with Mohamed Atta – the suicide pilot the FBI has tagged as the field captain of the Sept. 11 hijackings.

“…Woolsey also noted the meeting. “Maybe Iraqi intelligence and the chief bomber of Sept. 11 like Prague’s beautiful architecture,” he said sarcastically. “But at some point, it seems to me, we begin to get to at least a strong likelihood Iraq has been involved in some way.”

In an op-ed published by the New York Times December 28, 2001, Perle argued that Saddam Hussein “…operates a terrorist training facility at Salman Pak complete with a passenger aircraft cabin for training in hijacking.

“His collaboration with terrorists is well documented. Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the Sept. 11 ringleader, is convincing.”

(Perle, incidentally, also charged Saddam with running a vast, secret nuclear programme in this op-ed, a charge Vice President Dick Cheney would echo for the first time three months later, in March, not, as is commonly believed, in August, 2002.

On May 1, 2002, Perle appeared on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” program in which he challenged at length Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff recent report that the Atta-in-Prague story had been thoroughly debunked by the intelligence community.

“… I think Mike Isikoff’s information on this is wrong. I’m quite confident the meeting took place. We know a great deal about the circumstances of the meeting, although we don’t know what was said in the meeting. There was a pretty positive identification made of Mr. Atta after his pictures appeared in the press following 9/11. I don’t know why there are people discouraging the view…”

“…[T]hat meeting was observed by the Czech intelligence agent who was following the Iraqi intelligence agent. Subsequent to September 11, when Mohamed Atta’s photograph appeared around the world, that Czech intelligence agent said: “The man that I couldn’t identify at the time was Mohamed Atta.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

Having planted the suggestion of an Iraqi relationship with Atta, however, Perle was careful to deny that he was saying Iraq was involved in 9/11: “I did not say tha the decision to go after Saddam Hussein turns on whether Saddam was involved in September 11. I don’t believe that. I’ve never said that.”

On May 10, 2002, however, he again stressed his certainty that the meeting took place, telling the Chicago Tribune on that date, “The evidence – for the meeting – is overwhelming, as convincing now as it was then,” Perle is quoted as saying. “People who are raising questions now are just slinking about, not doing so openly. Why? They have their own policy agenda, which is to limit the president’s options.”

On October 7, 2002, just as Congress was debating the pending war resolution, Perle went beyond his previous assertions on CNN’s “Crossfire,” asserting not only that the intelligence community was “wrong” about their conclusion that the Prague meeting did not take place, but also that,

“…[T]there are other indications of other meetings with other members of al Qaeda including hijackers and intelligence officials from Iraq.

“…What I said is that there is evidence that I find compelling that there were meetings between Czech intelligence, Mohammed Atta, and other hijackers. Now whether that constitutes a role in 9/11, that’s a matter of judgment.

“And I can’t tell you it is because I don’t know. But how would we know if he did?”

Perle was still at it the following July, after U.S. forces captured al-Ani, the Iraqi official who allegedly met with Atta in Prague. The July 9, 2003, edition of the Washington Post descirbes Perle as “hopeful al-Ani’s capture will lead to a corroboration of his stance.”

“If he chose to, he could confirm the meeting with Atta,” Perle said. “It would be nice to see that laid to rest. There’s a lot he could tell us.”

“Of course, a lot depends on who is doing the interrogating,” said Perle, adding he fears that if it were the CIA, it could skew the interrogation so as to play down the evidence that the alleged meeting with Atta occurred.”

Apparently, that was precisely what happened.

Jim Lobe wrote this for Inter Press Service’s new blog.

Illegals, not refugees

After two days of misleading the public about the identity of four Albanians arrested on charges of plotting an attack on Ft. Dix, the mainstream media finally found their roots – but only to try and pull another Sulejman-Talovic-style turnabout and make the Duka brothers “poor victims” of… well, something. Maybe evil Serbs again, even though the Dukas had no contact with Serbia whatsoever. Then again, neither had Talovic.

It turns out the Dukas came from Debar, a small town in western Macedonia, and are actually not Kosovo Albanians. AP reporter Garentina Kraja – who got her start covering (for) the KLA – pulled together statements from Kosovo “prime minister” Agim Ceku and Dukas’ relatives to make sure the point gets across: Albanians worship America, therefore they could not have possibly been involved in a plot to mean it harm.

Whether they worshiped America or not, the Duka brothers were not Kosovo Albanian refugees, had not been involved with the KLA (except perhaps to give mandatory “donations” to its financiers in the 1990s), and had not passed through Ft. Dix in 1999. Agron Abdullahu has – which means that there are plenty of valid questions about the man who made jokes about his “Uncle Benny” despite Uncle Sam’s support for his cause in the Balkans.

Much like Florin Krasniqi, another famous Albanian “roofer” (as well as weapons smuggler and fundraiser), the Dukas came to the U.S. illegally in “1986 or 1987,” according to their relatives. How is it possible that they have managed to live and work in New Jersey for twenty years without being caught?

No doubt, many who come into this country on the sly wish only to live a life even slightly better than the crushing poverty of their homelands; that doesn’t somehow excuse them from having to obey the law. But how many of those who sneak into the United States under the cover of darkness mean this country ill?

According to their relatives, the Duka brothers “had grown long beards and had become more devoted to Islam.” And these are ethnic Albanians, mind you, who are supposed to be the most pro-American people in the Balkans. If that is not a terrifying thought, I don’t know what is.