Israel Wants to Tear Down Alaqsa Mosque To Rebuild 3rd Zionist Temple, Temple of Solomon

Zionists plan to build 3rd temple, where Alaqsa Mosque currently stands.

The Temple of Solomon is also known as the, First Temple. It was the Temple in Jerusalem, located on the Temple Mount, or Mount Zion as it is also known, which was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II after the Siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC. The site where the Temple once stood is now occupied by Alaqsa Mosque. Israel, in their attempt to rebuild the Temple, has been trying endlessly to find ways of removing Alaqsa Mosque from the site. They've been trying to tunnel under it, hoping it will become unstable, weak and collapse.

Free Palestine

 (Translated from Arabic via Google)

Urgent: Palestinian Information Center: development of a scale model of the structure of the alleged at the top of the door pillar on the wall of Jerusalem, Sheikh Kamal Khatib, calling the nation to move soon and the restoration of the Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem

_________________________________________________________________
I picked up lens photojournalist Afif Hanna Amira Thursday (2-6) image of an embodiment of a temple, a newly developed at the gate of Damascus, known as "Damascus Gate" A main doors of the Old City in Jerusalem.

The deployment of the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights of the stereo image, and said that the subject manner that does not appear visible at this stage, because of the ongoing restoration work, and hidden by the crew of Zionism.

It is noteworthy that the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem, the Antiquities Authority Zionism you several months ago what it calls "the work of restoration and maintenance" of the ancient city wall of Jerusalem.

Seen Jerusalemites suspicion significant of those acts, which are interspersed in the last period changes are not visible on the stone wall, including the removal of stones from it and replace it with another, and the development of forms and figurative-style temple, as was the case in a section of fence near Herod's Gate

Rachel Maddow Defends Western Warmongering in Libya

Rachel Maddow, defender of "friendly" western aggression

By David Walsh

On March 21, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow offered a defense of the Obama administration and its role in launching a military assault on Libya. With tortured logic, Maddow attempted to show that the means by which President Barack Obama made public this new act of Great Power aggression revealed the chasm that separates his administration from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

The arguments offered by the MSNBC news program host, a principal voice of the American liberal-left in the mainstream media, are absurd and unworthy, but it is unlikely anyone in and around her circle will object. This social layer is fully committed to the Obama administration and, moreover, to the defense of American imperial interests, with which it identifies, in the final analysis, its own material comfort and peace of mind. This helps explain the collapse of the official anti-war movement in the US since the 2008 election.

Maddow began her program Monday in a typically flippant manner. “In the United States of America, we are used to thinking of ourselves as a superpower, as a world leader, as a country capable of throwing our weight around when we feel the need to. … We go to war all the time—big wars, little wars, medium-sized wars, weird wars, normal wars, wars. America as a country fights a lot of wars.”

Maddow’s cynical tone hints at criticism and a vaguely anti-establishment, even anti-war stance, while actually committing her to no position or analysis whatsoever. Why does the US government go to war so frequently? What has been the character of those wars? What is her attitude toward those conflicts? About that, nothing …

After showing clips of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and the most recent Bush announcing military actions from the White House (against Grenada, Libya, Iraq, Serbia, and Iraq once more), Maddow told her viewers, “Now that the United States has embarked on its latest new military intervention in Libya, I would love to be able to show you the current president’s Oval Office address on the subject, but there isn’t one.”

Maddow noted that Obama made his public statement about the latest US military action while in Brazil. She continued, “President Obama announced his own military intervention, but he pointedly declined the opportunity to do it in a way that US presidents usually do.” The current administration’s decision, the news program host explained, “to forego the chest-thumping commander-in-chief theater that goes with military intervention of any kind, that in itself is a fascinating and rather blunt demonstration of just how much this presidency is not like that of George W. Bush.”

In other words, Maddow treats Obama’s anti-democratic and unconstitutional act of declaring war behind the backs of Congress and the American people as a positive good.

From there, Maddow presented clips of past presidents, while running for office, posturing as humble, ‘peace’ candidates. She went on, “A candidate named Barack Obama promised that. The difference with Mr. Obama as president is that he appears to be walking more of that walk as well as talking that talk.”

But Obama has launched a military assault against a virtually defenseless country (and, of course, escalated the war in Afghanistan to unprecedented levels, while maintaining 50,000 US troops in Iraq). How is that different from Bush, who also launched such attacks?

Because Obama has gone about it differently, making no Oval Office address, “repeatedly stressing the limited nature of US involvement, promising there will be no ground troops, no matter what” (Maddow), bringing in European allies and various Arab regimes, etc. Obama’s empty phrase that the bulk of US involvement in the Libyan operation would last “A Matter of Days, Not a Matter of Weeks” appeared on the screen throughout the first portion of her program.

Maddow’s defense of Obama’s new war in Libya, which will result in the deaths of thousands and risks unleashing far wider and bloodier conflagrations, sheds light on her and the American liberal-left more generally. There is nothing remotely “progressive” about these people.

Israel None Too Happy About Egypt

Israel loses its Egyptian ally

LRB

The challenge to Israel of the revolutionary changes now underway may well be existential, depending on how it responds to these events. With Mubarak gone, Israel may once again be a pariah nation in the region.

Netanyahu’s government has already proved that even if Zionism is not racism, Zionists can be racists.

By denying Palestinians a state of their own and bringing about an apartheid state, it may yet succeed in persuading the world that Zionism as practised by Israel is indeed no different from the settler colonialism that existed in South Africa.

Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt is what ruled out a successful military challenge by the other countries in the region. Egypt has by far the most effective military force in the Arab Middle East, and no Arab military challenge to Israel would have been dared without Egypt’s participation.

A change of government in Egypt that brings to an end Mubarak’s policy of supporting America’s coddling of Israel will seriously undermine Israel’s strategic situation.

Moreover, Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel is unlikely to survive if Egypt’s treaty is abrogated – Jordan wouldn’t want to risk being the only Arab country to maintain normal relations with Israel.

No matter what further changes there may be in the region, developments in Tunisia and Egypt have already drastically curtailed the ability of surviving Arab regimes to move towards a rapprochement with Israel.

It is unlikely that the Arab Peace Initiative, disdained by Israel for nearly a decade, will remain on the table. No surviving Arab regime will dare challenge the popular rage against Israel for the humiliations it inflicts on the Palestinians.

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the prime cause of the current upheavals, the failure of Arab regimes to halt Palestinian dispossession is not far from the top of the list of popular grievances.

HAPPY MUBARAK RESIGNATION DAY!

Today, should be a Holiday

This a day to rejoice, not only for the people of Egypt

But of Gaza and the whole middle east

By Bill Van Auken

With his speech on Thursday night, Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak threw down the gauntlet to the mass protests and growing strike wave that have rocked his regime for nearly three weeks.

After widespread media reports that Mubarak would announce his resignation—and rumors that he had already fled the country—the Egyptian president appeared on national television to declare that he would “remain adamant to shoulder my responsibility, protecting the constitution and safeguarding the interests of Egyptians” until elections are held and his term expires next September.

His remarks, which included vague promises to pursue “national dialogue” and to repeal police state measures in the country’s constitution once “stability allows”, included an announcement that he was delegating some of his presidential duties to his hand-picked vice president, the longtime chief of the regime’s secret police, Omar Suleiman.

Suleiman, a key ally of the US Central Intelligence Agency, then delivered an even more ominous speech. He demanded that Egypt’s millions of demonstrators and strikers “go back home” and “go back to work.” He warned them to “join hands” with the regime, rather than risk “chaos.” And he urged them not to listen to those promoting “sedition.”

The reaction of the millions of demonstrators assembled in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, central Alexandria and in towns and cities across the country was one of stunned disbelief followed by uncontrollable rage. Crowds that had been singing and dancing in celebration of Mubarak’s anticipated downfall began waving their shoes in the air in a sign of hatred and contempt for the US-backed dictator. Thousands were reported to be marching from Tahrir Square to the national state television headquarters and the presidential palace, both ringed by barbed wire and heavy troop deployments. In Alexandria, the majority of demonstrators reportedly left the center of the city to march on the local army base.

With even more millions expected to take to the streets on Friday, the likelihood of a bloody confrontation between the Egyptian military and the masses in revolt is growing. If murderous repression is unleashed, the political and moral responsibility for the dead and wounded will lie squarely with the Obama administration in Washington.

The decision of Hosni Mubarak to hold on to the Egyptian presidency was not, as the shallow and duplicitous reporting of the American media would have it, a matter of one man’s obstinacy or “military pride.”

Rather, it was the outcome of intense discussions within both Egypt’s own ruling establishment of corrupt capitalists and military commanders and within the corridors of power in Washington and other imperialist capitals.

Involved is the classic debate that besets every reactionary regime confronted with a revolutionary challenge from below. Some insist that at least nominal concessions must be made to defuse the revolutionary threat. And others counter that to make such concessions will only strengthen the revolution and hasten the downfall of the regime.

There are reports from Cairo that the military command, which Thursday convened its “supreme council”—a body that had met previously only during the wars with Israel in 1967 and 1973—was beset by just such divisions. It was Mubarak’s absence from the meeting that convinced many that his departure was already secured.

In his speech, Mubarak made an absurd attempt to appeal to nationalist sentiments by vowing not to bow to “foreign diktats”, by which he meant orders from Washington. However, the reality is that the Obama administration had in the previous days made it clear that it had accepted the Egyptian president remaining in office, while placing its full support behind the country’s chief torturer, Suleiman, as the organizer of an “orderly democratic transition.” It stressed that it was focusing on “process” rather than “personalities.” In other words, what Mubarak and Suleiman announced on Thursday was precisely what the Obama White House had promoted.

Whatever differences exist between the Obama administration and the dictatorship in Cairo are of an entirely tactical character. Within the US administration—as within the Egyptian regime itself—there are no doubt divisions as to whether salvaging the regime can best be accomplished with or without Mubarak, through a direct assumption of power by the military or by some intermediate means.

Israel, Washington’s principal client state, was even more categorical. Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom announced that any democratic opening was impermissible, because it would strengthen “radical elements.”

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama held private discussions with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi and other Persian Gulf potentates, all of whom urged the US to back Mubarak against the Egyptian masses. The fear, both from the semi-feudal monarchs and Washington itself, is that if an uprising succeeds in overthrowing the Egyptian dictator, these other US-backed regimes may fall as well.

Speaking hours before Mubarak’s speech, Obama declared in relation to Egypt, “What is absolutely clear is that we are witnessing history unfold.” He added, “Going forward, we want ... all Egyptians to know that America will continue to do everything that we can to support an orderly and genuine transition to democracy.”

Palestinian Refugees Speak

Occupation 101 - Voices of the Silenced Majority (Documentary) (2007)

Lebanon, in Israel's Sights?

Spy Trade: How Israel's Lobby Undermines America's Economy


Analyst says Israel, more likely to initiate hostilities

By Jim Lobe

While speculation over a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities intensifies, at least one influential analyst is calling on Washington to focus more on the likelihood of a new war breaking out between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and how to prevent or contain it.

In his eight-page “Contingency Planning Memorandum” released last week by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), retired U.S. ambassador Daniel Kurtzer argued that Israel was more likely than Hezbollah to initiative hostilities and that it could “also use a conflict with Hezbollah as the catalyst and cover for an attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

He also warned that, as in the 2006 war that was touched off by Hezbollah’s attack on an Israeli border patrol, “even small-scale military engagements with limited objectives can escalate into a major conflict” involving outside powers – notably Syria – with “significant implications for U.S. policy and interests in the region.”


“If the next Israeli-Hezbollah confrontation were to result in a sharp decline in Hezbollah’s military capabilities and was not accompanied by substantial civilian casualties or destruction of Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure, the result would be beneficial for U.S. interests,” he wrote. “However, such an outcome is slim.”


“The more likely unfolding of an Israeli-Hezbollah war would hold almost no positive consequences for the United States, which is focused on three Middle East priorities: trying to slow or stop Iran’s nuclear program, withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, and helping Middle East peace talks succeed,” according to his report, titled “A Third Lebanon War.”


In an e-mail exchange with IPS, the author, Kurtzer, who served as ambassador to both Israel and Egypt and specialized in the Middle East during a distinguished foreign-service career spanning three decades, stressed that he did not believe war was imminent, despite an escalation of rhetoric in recent months on both sides of the border.


“My time frame for the crisis to erupt was 12-18 months,” he wrote. “I don’t think the immediate term poses risks, but the situation could change or deteriorate rapidly and without much advance warning.”


Speculation about an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program has grown in recent weeks, as both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his neoconservative allies have argued that recently adopted U.S. and international economic sanctions are unlikely to persuade Tehran to curb its nuclear program before it accumulates enough highly enriched uranium to manufacture a bomb.


In just the past week, since Netanyahu returned home from a summit with President Barack Obama, neoconservatives, who have been close to Netanyahu’s Likud Party since the early 1980s, have stepped up calls for Washington to provide support for Israel should it decide to carry out an eventual attack, or, better yet, for Washington to carry out its own.


Indeed, the cover story of this week’s Weekly Standard, a hard-line neoconservative publication headed by William Kristol, is titled “Should Israel Bomb Iran?” The story, by Reuel Marc Gerecht, who worked previously at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and is currently employed by another Likudist group, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is subtitled “Better Safe Than Sorry.”


While Kurtzer’s study does not address the likelihood of such an attack, it argues that Hezbollah’s increasingly potent missile arsenal – much of it believed to be supplied by Iran, as well as Syria – and the security threat it poses to Israel may move policymakers in the Jewish state to “take preemptive military action.”


While it does not exclude the possibility that Hezbollah could launch an attack, possibly to unify its supporters, particularly after the passing of Shia cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah or at the urging of an Iranian leadership eager to deflect international pressure on its nuclear program, the more likely scenario is for Israel to either initiate hostilities or “lure [Hezbollah] into a war to destroy capabilities that threaten Israel’s security,” according to Kurtzer, who also served as a key Middle East adviser to the Obama during his presidential campaign.


“The combination of … the size and quality of Hezbollah’s missile inventory; the possible acquisition of long-range, accurate missiles; and the possible upgrading of Hezbollah’s surface-to-air missile capability changes the equilibrium on the ground to an extent that Israel views as threatening,” according to the report. The report argues that Israel would likely exploit an “operational opportunity,” such as an attack against a convoy carrying long-range weapons or a storage facility in Lebanon or even in Syria that it claims Hezbollah is using.


The study noted that indicators and other warning signs of war are “already evident” and include an increase in anti-Israeli rhetoric on Hezbollah’s part and in official statements on Hezbollah from Israel – specifically, recent allegations that the group had acquired Scud missiles from Syria and that its fighters are being trained there in their use. It also pointed to heightened levels of Israeli military and civil-defense preparedness on the northern front.


If war breaks out, according to Kurtzer, Washington could suffer serious setbacks to its regional priorities, including a resumption of Syrian support for Iraqi insurgents in Iraq and the likelihood that U.S.-encouraged Arab-Israeli peace efforts would “enter another deep freeze.”


Washington’s capacity to prevent a war, according to the study, is “limited” given both Israel’s perception of the threat and the fact that Washington has no relations with Hezbollah or Iran and that Obama’s initial efforts to upgrade ties with Syria have largely stalled as a result of opposition by Republicans and the right-wing leadership of the so-called Israel Lobby.


Nonetheless, Kurtzer calls for Washington to upgrade U.S.-Israeli intelligence exchanges; reiterate U.S. support for Israel’s right of self-defense and concerns about Hezbollah’s rearmament; increase pressure on Syria to halt arms shipments to Hezbollah; support international monitoring efforts; and prepare both for the likelihood of war and its aftermath, including the possibility of launching a post-conflict diplomatic initiative to promote a broader Arab-Israeli peace process.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein

Which side of the debate are you on?

 

Analyzing The Situation With Iran

 Iran, a threat?

By Noam Chomsky

 

The Iranian threat is not military aggression but that doesn't mean it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is considered an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with U.S. global designs. Specifically, it threatens U.S. control of Middle East energy resources.

The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration.

General Petraeus informed the Senate Committee on Armed Services in March 2010 that "the Iranian regime is the primary state-level threat to stability" in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, the Middle East and Central Asia, the primary region of U.S. global concerns.

The term "stability" here has its usual technical meaning: firmly under U.S. control. In June 2010 Congress strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies.

The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding U.S. offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the U.S. could build the massive base it uses for attacks in the Central Command area.

The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group.

According to a U.S. Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 "bunker busters" used for blasting hardened underground structures.

Planning for these "massive ordnance penetrators," the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished.

On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.

"They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran," according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London.

"US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours," he said. "The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003," accelerating under Obama.

The Arab press reports that an American fleet (with an Israeli vessel) passed through the Suez Canal on the way to the Persian Gulf, where its task is "to implement the sanctions against Iran and supervise the ships going to and from Iran."

British and Israeli media report that Saudi Arabia is providing a corridor for Israeli bombing of Iran (denied by Saudi Arabia).

On his return from Afghanistan to reassure NATO allies that the U.S. will stay the course Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited Israel to meet IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and senior military staff.

He also had meetings with intelligence and planning units, continuing the annual strategic dialogue between Israel and the U.S.

The meetings focused "on the preparation by both Israel and the U.S. for the possibility of a nuclear capable Iran," according to Haaretz, which reports further that Mullen emphasized that, "I always try to see challenges from Israeli perspective." Mullen and Ashkenazi are in regular contact on a secure line.

The increasing threats of military action against Iran are, of course, in violation of the UN Charter and in specific violation of Security Council resolution 1887 of September 2009 which reaffirmed the call to all states to resolve disputes related to nuclear issues peacefully, in accordance with the Charter, which bans the use or threat of force.

Some analysts, who seem to be taken seriously, describe the Iranian threat in apocalyptic terms. Amitai Etzioni warns that, "The U.S. will have to confront Iran or give up the Middle East," no less.

If Iran's nuclear program proceeds, he asserts, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other states will "move toward" the new Iranian "superpower."

To rephrase in less fevered rhetoric, a regional alliance might take shape independent of the U.S. In the U.S. army journal Military Review, Etzioni urges a U.S. attack that targets not only Iran's nuclear facilities, but also its non-nuclear military assets, including infrastructure—meaning, the civilian society.

This kind of military action is akin to sanctions—causing 'pain' in order to change behaviour, albeit by much more powerful means."

What is the Threat, Exactly?


Such inflammatory pronouncements aside, what exactly is the Iranian threat? The military and intelligence assessments are concerned with the threat Iran poses to the region and the world.

The reports make it clear that the Iranian threat is not military. Iran's military spending is "relatively low compared to the rest of the region," and minuscule as compared to the U.S. Iranian military doctrine is strictly "defensive - designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities."

Iran has only "a limited capability to project force beyond its borders." With regard to the nuclear option, "Iran's nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy."

Though the Iranian threat is not military aggression, that does not mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is considered an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with U.S. global designs.

Specifically, it threatens U.S. control of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since World War II. As one influential figure advised, expressing a common understanding, control of these resources yields "substantial control of the world".

But Iran's threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence.

Iran's "current five-year plan seeks to expand bilateral, regional, and international relations, strengthen Iran's ties with friendly states, and enhance its defense and deterrent capabilities.

Commensurate with that plan, Iran is seeking to increase its stature by countering U.S. influence and expanding ties with regional actors while advocating Islamic solidarity."

In short, Iran is seeking to "destabilize" the region, in the technical sense of the term used by General Petraeus. U.S. invasion and military occupation of Iran's neighbors is "stabilization."

Iran's efforts to extend its influence in neighboring countries is "destabilization," hence plainly illegitimate. It should be noted that such revealing usage is routine.

Thus, the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace, former editor of the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, was properly using the term "stability" in its technical sense when he explained that in order to achieve "stability" in Chile it was necessary to "destabilize" the country (by overthrowing the elected Allende government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship).

Beyond these crimes, Iran is also carrying out and supporting terrorism, the reports continue.

Its Revolutionary Guards "are behind some of the deadliest terrorist attacks of the past three decades,"including attacks on U.S. military facilities in the region and "many of the insurgent attacks on Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces in Iraq since 2003."

Furthermore, Iran backs Hezbollah and Hamas, the major political forces in Lebanon and in Palestine—if elections matter.

The Hezbollah-based coalition handily won the popular vote in Lebanon's latest (2009) election.

Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election, compelling the U.S. and Israel to institute the harsh and brutal siege of Gaza to punish the miscreants for voting the wrong way in a free election.

These have been the only relatively free elections in the Arab world. It is normal for elite opinion to fear the threat of democracy and to act to deter it, but this is a rather striking case.

Particularly, alongside of strong U.S. support for the regional dictatorships, emphasized by Obama with his strong praise for the brutal Egyptian dictator Mubarak on the way to his famous address to the Muslim world in Cairo.

Women of Afghanistan Imprisoned for being raped

7 Years After Operation Enduring Freedom was launched, women in Afghanistan still imprisoned for rape.

The Story of 9/11

Hint: It's not the story Bush W gave or that Obama is upholding

 

It isn't right at all that Americans should have to die for shit that they didn't even know their government was doing. And yet considering just what our own government has been up to perhaps that is what makes our own mixture of innocents and ignorance so infuriating.

By RAY McGOVERN

"I think that we’re going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don’t want to look at” is how American Civil Liberties Union attorney Denney LeBoeuf put it, according to The New York Times on Saturday.

No problem, says Attorney General Eric Holder, who claims to have “great confidence” that other evidence – apart from what may have been gleaned from the 183 times Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, for example – will suffice to convict him.

Maybe so, But what the Fawning Corporate Media (or FCM) have so far neglected is the likelihood that the testimony will be so public that they will have to break their studied silence about why Sheikh Mohammed and his associates say they orchestrated the attacks of 9/11.

For reasons that are painfully obvious, the FCM have done their best to ignore or bury the role that Israel’s repression of the Palestinians has played in motivating the 9/11 attacks and other anti-Western terrorism.

It is not like there is no evidence on this key issue. Rather, it appears that the Israel-Palestine connection is pretty much kept off limits for discussion.

Yet, as Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators go to trial, the FCM's tacit but tight embargo will be under great strain.

Eyes will have to be averted from the sensitive Israeli-Palestinian motive even more than from torture, which most Americans know about (and, God help us, are willing to explain away).

The Bromides

To refresh our memories, let’s recall the bromides we were fed by the likes of President George W. Bush about why the terrorists attacked on 9/11.

Rather than mentioning long-held grievances expressed by many Arabs – such as Western intrusion into their region, Washington’s propping up of autocrats who enrich themselves in deals with multinational oil companies, and Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory – Bush told the American people that “the terrorists hate our freedoms.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney reprised that feel-good theme in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on May 21. Cheney said the terrorists hate “all the things that make us a force for good in the world — for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences.”

Some observers might have found those qualities strange for Cheney to cite given his role in violating constitutional rights, torturing captives and spreading falsehoods to justify an aggressive war against Iraq.

But Cheney also slipped up in the speech, presumably because he had lost his best speechwriters upon leaving office. He inadvertently acknowledged the Israeli albatross hanging around the neck of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

“They [terrorists] have never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief in freedom of speech and religion … our belief in equal rights for women … our support for Israel… — these are the true sources of resentment,” Cheney said.

Yet “our support for Israel” is hardly ever included in these formulations, but Cheney at least got that part right.

Rarely in the FCM – and not even often on the Web – does one find Sheikh Mohammed’s explanation for what motivated him to “mastermind” 9/11. Apparently, few pundits have made it as far as page 147 of the 9/11 Commission Report.

The drafters were at work on the report when they learned that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been captured.

They knew that he earned a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro in 1986, before going to Afghanistan to fight the Russian occupier.

And it seems their first assumption was that he suffered some major indignity at the hands of Americans in Greensboro. Thus the strange wording of one major finding on page 147 of the 9/11 Commission Report:

“By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”

Moreover, the footnote section reveals that KSM was not the only “mastermind” terrorist motivated by “U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel,” although in the footnote the Commission dances around a specific reference to Israel, leaving it to the reader to infer that point from the context. Note the missing words in the footnote on page 488:

“On KSM’s rationale for attacking the United States, see Intelligence report, interrogation of KSM, Sept. 5, 2003 (in this regard, KSM’s statements echo those of Yousef, who delivered an extensive polemic against U.S. foreign policy at his January 1998 sentencing),” the footnote said.

Was Yousef, who happens to be Mohammed's nephew, perhaps upset about U.S. foreign policy favoring NATO expansion, or maybe toward Guam? Obviously, the unstated inference in the footnote was about Israel.

The First Attack

The family connection between Yousef and Mohammed was not incidental, either. “Yousef’s instant notoriety as the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing inspired KSM to become involved in planning attacks against the United States,” the 9/11 Commission Report noted on page 147.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing occurred on Feb. 26, 1993, when a car bomb was detonated below Tower One. The 1,500-pound urea nitrate-hydrogen gas-enhanced device was intended to knock the North Tower (Tower One) into the South Tower, bringing both towers down and killing thousands of people.

It failed to accomplish that, but the bombing did kill six people and injured 1,042.

Motive? Ramzi Yousef spelled out his motive in a letter to The New York Times after the bombing:

"We declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel, the state of terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region."

Yousef was captured in Pakistan in 1995, imprisoned in New York City, and held there until his trial. On Nov. 12, 1997, he was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” and was sentenced the following January to life without parole. He is held at the high-security Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

Regarding the touchy Israel connection, the 9/11 Commission stepped up to the plate in the “Recommendations” section of its final report, which was issued on July 22, 2004, but then bunted:

“America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world. … Neither Israel nor the new Iraq will be safer if worldwide Islamist terrorism grows stronger.”

A more convincing swing at this issue was taken in an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004, just two months later. The board stated:

“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights.

Also, the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.

“Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”

The report directly contradicted what Bush had been saying about “why they hate us,” letting the elephant out of the bag and into the room, so to speak.

But, you say, you didn’t hear much about that report either, despite 24-hour cable “news” networks and the “change-everything” importance of 9/11 in justifying U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?

Creative Editing

If you’ve read down this far, you will not be surprised that the FCM ignored the Defense Science Board findings for two months.

On Nov. 24, 2004, The New York Times, erstwhile “newspaper of record,” finally published a story on the report — but only after some highly instructive surgery.

Thom Shanker of the Times quoted the paragraph beginning with "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom'" (see above), but he or his editors deliberately cut out the following sentence about what Muslims do object to, i.e., "what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights" and support for tyrannical regimes.

The Times did include the sentence that immediately followed the omitted one. In other words, it was not simply a matter of shortening the paragraph. Rather, the offending middle sentence fell victim to the “delete” key.

Similarly creative editing showed through the Times' reporting in late October 2004 on a videotaped speech by Osama bin Laden.

Almost six paragraphs of the story made it onto page one, but the Times saw to it that the key point bin Laden made at the beginning of his speech was relegated to paragraphs 23 to 25 at the very bottom of page nine.

Buried there was bin Laden's assertion that the idea for 9/11 first germinated after "we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon."

There is other evidence regarding the Israeli-Palestinian motive behind 9/11.

Though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not allowed to talk to the attorneys in the 2006 trial of 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, the judge did allow into the official record a statement by Mohammed on the “Purpose of the 9/11 Attacks,” which was drawn from “numerous written summaries of Sheikh Mohammed’s oral statements in response to extensive questioning.”

The following statement from Sheikh Mohammed appears on page 11 of Defense Trial Exhibit 941 from “United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Criminal No. 01-455-A”:

“Sheikh Mohammed said that the purpose of the attack on the Twin Towers was to ‘wake the American people up.’

Sheikh Mohammed said that if the target would have been strictly military or government, the American people would not focus on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people.

And America’s self-serving foreign policy that corrupts Arab governments and leads to further exploitation of the Arab/Muslim peoples.”

Some recent articles about Mohammed’s upcoming trial also have mentioned the Israel-Palestine motive behind 9/11, though usually in passing and deep inside the stories.

For instance, Sunday’s New York Times carries a front-page article giving a “portrait of 9/11 ‘Jackal,’” Mohammed.

But one has to read deep into the jump on page 26 to learn that the original plan for the 9/11 attacks envisioned Mohammed flying on one of 10 planes that were to be hijacked and that “he would be on the one plane not to crash, and after the plane landed would emerge and deliver a speech condemning American policy on Israel.”

Revisionist View

Yet, the Fawning Corporate Media won’t stop performing its creative editing – or creative composition – to obscure this motive.

Never mind what the 9/11 Commission Report said about Mohammed not being driven by resentments from his college days in North Carolina, the Washington Post offered a revisionist view on that point on Aug. 30:

“KSM’s limited and negative experience in the United States — which included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills — almost certainly helped propel him on his path to becoming a terrorist,” according to an intelligence summary, the Post reported.

“He stated that his contact with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country.”

A telling revision perhaps extracted from one of Mohammed’s 183 waterboarding sessions – and certainly politically more convenient in that it obscured Mohammed’s other explanation implicating “U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”

But let’s look for a moment at the “debauched and racist” part. Could Mohammed be speaking some truth here – and not just about his college days of the 1980s?

Would the Washington Post’s editors be so supportive of the “war on terror” if captives from a more favored ethnic or religious group were stripped naked before members of the opposite sex, put in diapers, immobilized with shackles in stress positions for long periods, denied sleep and made to soil themselves?

In my view, racism comes very much into play here. If Mohammed and other detainees looked more like us, would it be so easy to demonize and waterboard them?

Unguarded Moments

At rare moments, however, hard truths about the 9/11 motivations slip out – although not in high-profile presidential speeches nor in Washington Post op-eds.

For instance, at a public hearing in June 2004, 9/11 Commissioner Lee Hamilton asked a panel of government experts, “What motivated them [the hijackers] to do it?”

The CIA analyst in the group is seen in some panic, directing his eyes toward the other panelists in the all-too-obvious hope that someone else will answer the politically loaded question. FBI Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald rose to the occasion, saying:

“I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem; they identify with people who oppose oppressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”

For Hamilton and his colleagues that proved to be a politically incorrect answer. Ergo, you will not find that testimony in the 9/11 Commission Report.

And notably absent from the report’s recommendations is any suggestion as to how one might address the question of Israeli treatment of Palestinians and U.S. support for it.

In their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, Chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton are unusually candid in admitting that this issue was so sensitive and contentious that they chose the course of least resistance.

Despite the findings of the Commission staff – and FBI Agent Fitzgerald – that the hijackers were not motivated by religious ideology, many of the Commissioners much preferred attributing the attacks to Islam than to U.S. policy toward Israel.

Kean and Hamilton explain that those commissioners were dead set against identifying Israel as a major factor motivating the terrorists, because someone might get the idea that Washington should reassess its policy.

But it’s a legitimate and urgent question: Would a more determined commitment by the U.S. government to secure an independent state for the Palestinians and to alleviate their suffering undercut the appeal of al-Qaeda and other extremist groups to young people in the Muslim world?

Or put differently, why should ardent supporters of Israel in the U.S. Congress behave in such a way as to make the Muslim world view the United States as disinterested in the plight of the Palestinians and thus increase the danger of future attacks against the United States, as well as against Israel?

The Goldstone Report

The rest of the world and most Americans opposed the Israeli strikes on Gaza last December and January that resulted in the killing of 1,400 Palestinians, with 13 Israelis also killed. And there was wide criticism of the silence not only of the Bush/Cheney administration, but also of President-elect Barack Obama.

The UN-authorized investigation by the widely respected South African jurist, Richard Goldstone, himself a Jew, pointed to war crimes by both Israel and Hamas, although the inquiry’s harshest criticism landed on Israel for the staggering civilian death toll.

This finding led Israel’s Likud government to activate its powerful U.S. lobby, which pressed the House of Representatives to denounce the Goldstone report, which the House did on a 344-36 vote.

In a wondrous display of pot-and-kettle, House members branded the Goldstone report “irredeemably biased.” Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called the report “unbalanced and unfair and inaccurate.”

These so-called “friends of Israel” either don’t know or don’t care that this sort of resolution only makes matters worse regarding American attempts to defuse the explosive anger building across the Middle East. It is a gift to al-Qaeda.

This U.S. pandering to the Likud Lobby – and the implicit suggestion that the lives of 1,400 Palestinians don’t much matter – also is bad for the people of Israel.

Indeed, it may prove suicidal, by delaying the geopolitical imperative for Israel to make peace with its Arab neighbors and thus avert some future catastrophe.

Closer to home, by further identifying itself with – and justifying – Israeli repression of the Palestinians, the United States helps breed more Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds and Ramzi Yousefs, more young terrorists determined to make Washington and the American people pay a price.

It requires no logical leap to conclude that Likud-friendly lawmakers — the Steny Hoyers, the Howard Bermans, the Ileana Ros-Lehtinens of this world — could scarcely think up a better way to raise the threat level from terrorists who feed on festering sores like the calamity in Gaza.