JINSA/PNAC Zionist extremist Richard Perle is continuing to make problems for France which had the right position on the Iraq invasion/occupation:



Perle Warns Germany To
Stop Backing France
11-6-3

BERLIN (AFP) - Senior US defence adviser Richard Perle urged Germany Tuesday to stop following France on the international political stage and said that the Franco-German relationship is harming ties with the United States. "The idea that Germany must submit to French ideas has to be looked at," Perle told about 200 defence experts gathered in Berlin for a two-day security conference. Perle said the depth of the Franco-German partnership was, at times, further damaging the European Union's already strained relations with Washington. "There is such a strong tendency for France and Germany on every occasion to express solidarity, I think in the mistaken belief that somehow that is what is essential to peace in Europe..., that it can obscure the really very difficult issue of Europe and the Atlantic," he said. In a heated exchange, former French chief of staff, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, accused Perle of trying to divide Paris and Berlin and blamed the Pentagon adviser for inciting public ill-feeling in Europe towards Washington.




It is important to also know that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and John Bolton (all mentioned below in the article from the "Forward" which is a respected Jewish publication out of New York) are JINSANs as well.. Perle is also associated with PNAC (which would like to have a confrontation with Russia and China sooner rather than later as you can access the JINSA web site at www.jinsa.org and PNAC's URL via www.newamericancentury.org). Robert Fisk (a respected journalist for the London Independent newspaper as you can read more via www.robert-fisk.com) wrote about JINSA (and Dick Cheney's association to JINSA as he is also associated with PNAC) in the following article:


http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk0910.html

Fisk mentions this article ("Men from JINSA and CSP") from "The Nation" which is a must read as well:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20020902&s=vest


President Bush is following the JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs)/PNAC (Project for the New American Century) agenda in the Iraq invasion/occupation. Please review the "Forward" article included after the following article from the UK Guardian as it conveys that the JINSANS want to install a Hashemite (pro-Israel) King in Iraq (this is hardly "democracy"). JINSAN James Woolsey admitted the same on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" last Sunday (November 2nd, 2003) as you can watch via the link at the following URL (notice the caller in the first 30 minutes of the broadcast who asked the C-SPAN "Washington Journal" host Steve Scully to ask Woolsey about JINSA as the host mentioned that he would, but he lied and didn't when Woolsey appeared near the end of the broadcast):

http://www.c-span.org/homepage.asp?Cat=Series&Code=WJE&ShowVidNum=6&Rot_Cat_CD=WJ&Rot_HT=204&Rot_WD=&ShowVidDays=15&ShowVidDesc=



Subj: Re: New Neocon Player Added to Secret White House Cabal

The following article appeared in the UK Guardian newspaper (via www.guardian.co.uk) and mentioned David Wurmser who is now working with Dick Cheney (as conveyed in the article from the "Forward" which is included after the following):

World dispatch

Selective Memri

Brian Whitaker investigates whether the 'independent' media institute that translates the Arabic newspapers is quite what it seems

Monday August 12, 2002

For some time now, I have been receiving small gifts from a generous institute in the United States. The gifts are high-quality translations of articles from Arabic newspapers which the institute sends to me by email every few days, entirely free-of-charge.
The emails also go to politicians and academics, as well as to lots of other journalists. The stories they contain are usually interesting.
Whenever I get an email from the institute, several of my Guardian colleagues receive one too and regularly forward their copies to me - sometimes with a note suggesting that I might like to check out the story and write about it.
If the note happens to come from a more senior colleague, I'm left feeling that I really ought to write about it. One example last week was a couple of paragraphs translated by the institute, in which a former doctor in the Iraqi army claimed that Saddam Hussein had personally given orders to amputate the ears of military deserters.
The organisation that makes these translations and sends them out is the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), based in Washington but with recently-opened offices in London, Berlin and Jerusalem.
Its work is subsidised by US taxpayers because as an "independent, non-partisan, non-profit" organisation, it has tax-deductible status under American law.
Memri's purpose, according to its website, is to bridge the language gap between the west - where few speak Arabic - and the Middle East, by "providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew media".
Despite these high-minded statements, several things make me uneasy whenever I'm asked to look at a story circulated by Memri. First of all, it's a rather mysterious organisation. Its website does not give the names of any people to contact, not even an office address.
The reason for this secrecy, according to a former employee, is that "they don't want suicide bombers walking through the door on Monday morning" (Washington Times, June 20).
This strikes me as a somewhat over-the-top precaution for an institute that simply wants to break down east-west language barriers.
The second thing that makes me uneasy is that the stories selected by Memri for translation follow a familiar pattern: either they reflect badly on the character of Arabs or they in some way further the political agenda of Israel. I am not alone in this unease.
Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Washington Times: "Memri's intent is to find the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminate them as widely as possible."
Memri might, of course, argue that it is seeking to encourage moderation by highlighting the blatant examples of intolerance and extremism. But if so, one would expect it - for the sake of non-partisanship - t o publicise extremist articles in the Hebrew media too.
Although Memri claims that it does provide translations from Hebrew media, I can't recall receiving any.
Evidence from Memri's website also casts doubt on its non-partisan status. Besides supporting liberal democracy, civil society, and the free market, the institute also emphasises "the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel".
That is what its website used to say, but the words about Zionism have now been deleted. The original page, however, can still be found in internet archives.
The reason for Memri's air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.
Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.
Retrieving another now-deleted page from the archives of Memri's website also throws up a list of its staff. Of the six people named, three - including Col Carmon - are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence.
Among the other three, one served in the Israeli army's Northern Command Ordnance Corps, one has an academic background, and the sixth is a former stand-up comedian.
Col Carmon's co-founder at Memri is Meyrav Wurmser, who is also director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, which bills itself as "America's premier source of applied research on enduring policy challenges".
The ubiquitous Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's defence policy board, recently joined Hudson's board of trustees.
Ms Wurmser is the author of an academic paper entitled Can Israel Survive Post-Zionism? in which she argues that leftwing Israeli intellectuals pose "more than a passing threat" to the state of Israel, undermining its soul and reducing its will for self-defence.
In addition, Ms Wurmser is a highly qualified, internationally recognised, inspiring and knowledgeable speaker on the Middle East whose presence would make any "event, radio or television show a unique one" - according to Benador Associates, a public relations company which touts her services.
Nobody, so far as I know, disputes the general accuracy of Memri's translations but there are other reasons to be concerned about its output.
The email it circulated last week about Saddam Hussein ordering people's ears to be cut off was an extract from a longer article in the pan-Arab newspaper, al-Hayat, by Adil Awadh who claimed to have first-hand knowledge of it.
It was the sort of tale about Iraqi brutality that newspapers would happily reprint without checking, especially in the current atmosphere of war fever. It may well be true, but it needs to be treated with a little circumspection.
Mr Awadh is not exactly an independent figure. He is, or at least was, a member of the Iraqi National Accord, an exiled Iraqi opposition group backed by the US - and neither al-Hayat nor Memri mentioned this.
Also, Mr Awadh's allegation first came to light some four years ago, when he had a strong personal reason for making it. According to a Washington Post report in 1998, the amputation claim formed part of his application for political asylum in the United States.
At the time, he was one of six Iraqis under arrest in the US as suspected terrorists or Iraqi intelligence agents, and he was trying to show that the Americans had made a mistake.
Earlier this year, Memri scored two significant propaganda successes against Saudi Arabia. The first was its translation of an article from al-Riyadh newspaper in which a columnist wrote that Jews use the blood of Christian or Muslim children in pastries for the Purim religious festival.
The writer, a university teacher, was apparently relying on an anti-semitic myth that dates back to the middle ages. What this demonstrated, more than anything, was the ignorance of many Arabs - even those highly educated - about Judaism and Israel, and their readiness to believe such ridiculous stories.
But Memri claimed al-Riyadh was a Saudi "government newspaper" - in fact it's privately owned - implying that the article had some form of official approval.
Al-Riyadh's editor said he had not seen the article before publication because he had been abroad. He apologised without hesitation and sacked his columnist, but by then the damage had been done.
Memri's next success came a month later when Saudi Arabia's ambassador to London wrote a poem entitled The Martyrs - about a young woman suicide bomber - which was published in al-Hayat newspaper.
Memri sent out translated extracts from the poem, which it described as "praising suicide bombers". Whether that was the poem's real message is a matter of interpretation. It could, perhaps more plausibly, be read as condemning the political ineffectiveness of Arab leaders, but Memri's interpretation was reported, almost without question, by the western media.
These incidents involving Saudi Arabia should not be viewed in isolation. They are part of building a case against the kingdom and persuading the United States to treat it as an enemy, rather than an ally.
It's a campaign that the Israeli government and American neo-conservatives have been pushing since early this year - one aspect of which was the bizarre anti-Saudi briefing at the Pentagon, hosted last month by Richard Perle.
To anyone who reads Arabic newspapers regularly, it should be obvious that the items highlighted by Memri are those that suit its agenda and are not representative of the newspapers' content as a whole.
The danger is that many of the senators, congressmen and "opinion formers" who don't read Arabic but receive Memri's emails may get the idea that these extreme examples are not only truly representative but also reflect the policies of Arab governments.
Memri's Col Carmon seems eager to encourage them in that belief. In Washington last April, in testimony to the House committee on international relations, he portrayed the Arab media as part of a wide-scale system of government-sponsored indoctrination.
"The controlled media of the Arab governments conveys hatred of the west, and in particular, of the United States," he said. "Prior to September 11, one could frequently find articles which openly supported, or even called for, terrorist attacks against the United States ...
"The United States is sometimes compared to Nazi Germany, President Bush to Hitler, Guantanamo to Auschwitz," he said.
In the case of the al-Jazeera satellite channel, he added, "the overwhelming majority of guests and callers are typically anti-American and anti-semitic".
Unfortunately, it is on the basis of such sweeping generalisations that much of American foreign policy is built these days.
As far as relations between the west and the Arab world are concerned, language is a barrier that perpetuates ignorance and can easily foster misunderstanding.
All it takes is a small but active group of Israelis to exploit that barrier for their own ends and start changing western perceptions of Arabs for the worse.
It is not difficult to see what Arabs might do to counter that. A group of Arab media companies could get together and publish translations of articles that more accurately reflect the content of their newspapers.
It would certainly not be beyond their means. But, as usual, they may prefer to sit back and grumble about the machinations of Israeli intelligence veterans.
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday August 21 2002
In an article headed Atrocity stories regain currency, page 13, August 8, and in an article headed Selective Memri on the Guardian website, we referred to Dr Adil Awadh, an Iraqi doctor who alleged that Saddam Hussein had ordered doctors to amputate the ears of soldiers who deserted. Dr Awadh has asked us to make it clear that he has no connection with Memri (Middle East Media Research Institute), and that he did not authorise its translation of parts of an article by him. He is no longer a member of the Iraqi National Accord (INA). He is an independent member of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). His reference to orders by Saddam Hussein to cut off the ears of deserters has been supported by evidence from other sources.

Read Memri's response to this article
21.08.2002: Media organisation rebuts accusations of selective journalism

Email
brian.whitaker@guardian.co.uk

Cheney wants to "remodel the entire middle east"--"Shadow Government"

11/03/03

> New Player Added to Secret White House Cabal

> QUOTE:

> "The question is, how does the vice president's [national security staff]
> function in relation to the president's national security staff and how
> important policy decisions are made in the White House. While the vice
> president has a critical role to play, the secrecy surrounding his
> unusually large foreign-policy staff raises many questions which the
> American public needs answered."
>
>
> http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.10.31/news2.wurmser.html
>
>
>
> FORWARD
> OCTOBER 31, 2003
>
> Cheney Taps Syria Hawk As Adviser On Mideast
> By MARC PERELMAN
> FORWARD STAFF
>
> Despite mounting criticism of the administration's Iraq policy, Vice
> President Dick Cheney appears to be ratcheting up his commitment to the
> circle of neoconservative intellectuals who helped spearhead President
> Bush's war policy, adding one of its most controversial proponents to his
> national security staff in a little-noticed move last month.
>
> David Wurmser, a neoconservative scholar known for his close ties to the
> Israeli right, was appointed in mid-September to join the team led by
> Cheney's national security adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. In recent years
> Wurmser, who boasts a complex network of relationships to a variety of
> pro-Likud think tanks and activist groups, has frequently written articles
> arguing for a joint American-Israeli effort to undermine the Syrian
regime.
>
> Wurmser's appointment sheds light on the prominent role played by Cheney
> and his national security staff in shaping foreign policy and coincides
> with the deterioration in the relations between Washington and Damascus.
In
> recent months, Washington has accused Syria of sheltering Iraqi leaders,
> weapons and money and of allowing terrorists into Iraq. The administration
> backed Israel's recent bombing of a suspected terrorist training camp in
> Syria and dropped its objections to a congressional bill that grants the
> president the right to impose sanctions on Damascus.
>
> "The vice president undoubtedly chooses staff whose views are compatible
> with the policies of the administration," wrote Judith Kipper, a Middle
> East scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations, in an e-mail to the
> Forward. "The question is, how does the vice president's [national
security
> staff] function in relation to the president's national security staff and
> how important policy decisions are made in the White House. While the vice
> president has a critical role to play, the secrecy surrounding his
> unusually large foreign-policy staff raises many questions which the
> American public needs answered."
>
> Cathy Martin, a spokeswoman for Cheney, confirmed that Wurmser had
recently
> been hired, adding that he is serving as one of many foreign-policy
> advisers to the vice president. She declined to comment on questions about
> Cheney's or Wurmser's ideological leanings.
>
> Before his appointment, Wurmser had served as a senior adviser to John
> Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international
> security and one of the sharpest critics of Syria within the
> administration. In speeches and testimonies over the past year, Bolton has
> sounded increasingly alarmist far more so than the intelligence
> community about Syria's weapons programs.
>
> Wurmser's appointment was first reported by Inter-Press Service and
> elicited criticism from the Arab American Institute, an advocacy
organization.
>
> Wurmser is the main author of a 1996 policy paper drafted for then-Israeli
> prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu by a task force composed of
> neo-conservative scholars. The white paper, titled "A Clean Break: A New
> Strategy for Securing the Realm," advocated a remodeling of the Middle
East
> that some critics see as a rough blueprint for the policy adopted by the
> Bush administration after the September 11 attacks. The paper advocated a
> strategy of preemptive action to remove Saddam Hussein from power, a
> "rollback" of Syria and the search for alternatives to Yasser Arafat.
>
> "Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically," said
the
> paper, which was commissioned by the Jerusalem-based Institute for
Advanced
> Strategic and Political Studies, where Wurmser was working at the time.
>
> The task force was headed by Richard Perle, now a key Pentagon adviser who
> sits on the Defense Policy Board. Its members included Douglas Feith,
> currently the undersecretary of defense for policy and one of the main
> proponents of the war in Iraq.
>
> Another member of the task force was Wurmser's Israeli-born wife, Meyrav
> Wurmser, who heads the Middle East studies department at the conservative
> Hudson Institute. She is a founder of the Middle East Media Research
> Institute, or Memri, which translates Arabic press reports and which
> critics say highlights negative views of the West.
>
> The policy paper suggested that in order to transform the "balance of
> power" in the Middle East in favor of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey
> and Jordan, Saddam should be removed and replaced by a Hashemite ruler.
>
> The next step would be a "rollback" of Syria by sponsoring proxy attacks
in
> Lebanon and even striking at selected targets in Syria. In the late 1990s,
> Wurmser wrote frequently, arguing for a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to
> undermine the Syrian regime.
>
> On Tuesday, retired Air Force General James Clapper, director of the
> National Imagery and Mapping Agency, told reporters he was not surprised
> that U.S. forces had not discovered any chemical, biological or nuclear
> weapons in Iraq, citing a big increase in the number of vehicles heading
to
> Syria before the war. The administration also has renewed long-standing
> accusations that Damascus is developing chemical and biological weapons
and
> is supporting terrorist groups operating against Israel, despite pledges
to
> crack down on them

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

How US hawks hijacked Mideast policy

By Mark Mazower

FT.com site; Nov 03, 2003

Tony Blair's backing last year for George W. Bush over war with Iraq was based on an American commitment to the "roadmap" for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. In June, after victory in Iraq, the US president publicly identified himself with the schedule the roadmap laid out, and the next month Mr Blair himself, in his triumphant speech to the US Congress, reaffirmed the role of international diplomacy when he stated categorically that terrorism would not be defeated without peace between Israel and Palestine. Yet, within weeks of Mr Blair's visit to Washington, the roadmap had been killed off by a combination of Palestinian suicide bombers and Israeli assassinations. This particular peace process is not likely to revive this side of the presidential elections - which is to say it will not re-emerge at all. However, another kind of peace process is still very much alive. For the hawks around Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, regime change in Iraq is only the first step in the most radical reshaping of the Middle East since the first world war. Barely one week after September 11 2001, they not only urged the president to tackle Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein; they also recommended going after Hizbollah, Syria and Iran. Their assumption was clear: a threat to Israel is a threat to the US. Under the guise of the war on terror, their argument went, America should identify its interests with those of Israel - or, to be more precise, with the way the current leadership in Israel defines those interests. Although a war with Syria has not materialised, the Bush administration is pursuing a more aggressive line against the country. The US's refusal to join international condemnation of the recent Israeli bombing raid on an abandoned camp near Damascus highlighted Syria's new vulnerability. There are now American troops next door and senior US officials have been accusing the Syrian authorities of facilitating attacks across its desert border on American soldiers. Not everyone in the administration sees this anti-Syrian policy as helpful to American interests. Many in the US Army do not. And the CIA - which relies heavily on Syrian intelligence co-operation to monitor Islamic terrorist groups - is dismayed by the belligerent attitude towards Syria. Most people familiar with Syria find it hard to believe that regime change in this majority Sunni country will produce a more co-operative government than the ruling minority Alawi dictatorship. To the hawks, though, such cautionary talk is weak-kneed nonsense. In their highly militarised view of the world, force is the only route to peace and the only language Arabs understand. War on Syria - or even just the threat of it - will allow the Israelis to expand their influence again in Lebanon and put Hizbollah on the back foot. With Syria weakened, the Palestinians will become more pliant, since Palestinian terrorism is not a response to tyranny, injustice and occupation but the work of evil agents of foreign backers. There is, in other words, no place for diplomacy before force has cowed the Palestinians into obedience. Ariel Sharon's government now follows with impunity policies once recommended by Richard Perle, a US hawk, to an earlier Likud government: disengagement from the internationally sponsored peace process, pressure on the US to withdraw funding from the Palestinian Authority and no trade of land for diplomatic concessions. Mr Sharon now mentions the roadmap only to squash even less palatable peace proposals such as the one under discussion in Geneva. His government now enjoys unprecedented scope to combine the militaristic Iron Wall philosophy of Vladimir Jabotinsky - who advocated separation and strength as prerequisites for peace - with the takeover of land and build-up of settlements characteristic of previous Labour governments. As Jewish settlers move in, and the wall goes up, Arabs will be forced either out of the occupied territories or behind the wall into a statelet far removed from the viable state outlined only a few months ago by Mr Bush. This is a far cry from the peace process Mr Blair believed he persuaded Mr Bush to sign up to. Will a future generation of historians be asking their students to explain how a small and un- elected group succeeded so comprehensively in changing the meanings of the US national interest, and of peace itself, while everyone else - from the CIA to Mr Blair and much of the world - looked on in disbelief?

The writer is a professor of history at Birkbeck College London

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

...a Fisk article a "must read" without adding the phrase "for a good laugh" immediately after should not be taken seriously.

Fisk is the one of the best (if not the best) journalists covering the Middle East:

http://www.robert-fisk.com

The following is an outstanding article....pulls no punches...should be mandatory reading for Americans!!

**************************************************************

November 8, 2003

America's Far-Moving Rightwing : The Neocons & Jerusalem Post

By NORMAN MADARASZ

Prior to the attempt made on Paul Wolfowitz's life in Baghdad on October 26, the deputy secretary of defense had already sat far more in the limelight than any of his predecessors. From Vanity Fair to PBS's Charlie Rose, including a passing reference in Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, Wolfowitz has proved his media savvies. Yet caught up in Bush's refrains of how the "world is becoming a safer place", repeated by America's corporate press elite with THE contempt akin to a herd's, few English-speaking readers will have noticed that Paul Wolfowitz was chosen on Rosh Hashanah (October 1) by the Jerusalem Post as Man of the (Jewish) Year.

With his associates in the Bush administration and media circle, Wolfowitz belongs to the 'neoconservative' camp. On the field, he is one of a group of policy hawks who have undermined internationalist diplomacy to serve the unilateral ends of the United States through war, covert action and nationalist/militarist propaganda. The neocons hold the key power positions in the Bush administration. When they don't, as at the State department, they call the shots of what goes on from within the operational offices. Few if any of them have on-the-field military experience. As Rhett Butler would have said, they are the "stay-at-home speakers filling the ears too full with fine words of those who have to fight."

The occupation of Iraq is, unfortunately, providing many of them with their basic military training. The administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, may have emerged from Kissinger's civilian foreign analyst camp; he remains a neoconservative by proxy. As also does, notwithstanding political appearances, the candidate for the Democratic Party, retired General Wesley Clark. In its array of public figures, the neoconservative pedigree proudly represents America's white heterosexual male elite. Yet their devotion to belligerence has garnered them the appellation of the War Party. As Bret Stephens from the Jerusalem Post wrote in celebration of their man of the year: "On September 15, 2001, at a meeting in Camp David, [it was Wolfowitz who] advised President George W. Bush to skip Kabul and train American guns on Baghdad."



THROUGH A LOOKING GLASS

The neoconservative foreign policy agenda has by now been reported enough for most world citizens to understand its major aims and alliances. In the neoconservative press, it is especially easy to testify to the group's frank commitment to Israel's most rightwing expansionist vision. Long before 9/11, magazines such as the National Review, the Weekly Standard, or newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and the Canadian dailies of the Asper chain, were all marching in step to stir up misrepresentation of Arabs. Typically, the information manufacturers seek to demean the nature of a people by roughshod identification with their governments' agendas.

Through a forced equation linking democracy with human goodness, the only worthy country in the Middle East would be Israel. For those who still remain incredulous about an infiltration of the American government by Israel's Likud party, it is easy to blog on to how Richard Perle, the Pentagon strongman and former head of the commercial propaganda war machine known as the Defense Advisory Board, worked on policy analysis for Benjamin Netanyahu's presidential campaign. It is even easier to thumb through the pages of Daniel Pipes' book on "Islamism". Then, turn to the pages of the Jerusalem Post, and notice how both Pipes and Perle are among its closest associates.

Brett Stephen's article is instructive as well for celebrating the "transformative" nature of the foreign policy planning of the current American government. Transformative, that is, of the broader Middle East. As the reader scrolls, it grows very clear how the present concern of the Sharon cabinet is not so much the border and state conflict within the occupied territories it deems its own-to the condemnation of the international community and international law. As Stephens confirms, "Israel has long waited for an administration that understands that the principal problem in the Middle East is not the unsettled status of our borders." Instead, the Israeli government is focusing on "the unsettling nature of Arab regimes - and of the bellicosity, fanaticism, and resentments to which they give rise." Getting the US administration to act on that concern has been one of the leading policy tasks of the neoconservative camp.

Nothing in American law prevents close media and political ties with another State, provided it not be communist. Nor is there anything in American political science banning inference based on observation regarding the geopolitical stakes that may neatly lie tucked away behind international connections. The ties that bind the US and Israel are obviously not recent ones. Moreover, neocons, such as Dick Cheney, his chief of staff "Scooter" Libby and Donald Rumsfeld have all embraced Arab tyrants in older days when the enemy was communism. Although those winds may have changed, bureaucratic commitment to Israel's most fanatical leaders has gone unchanged.

Never has it been as striking as it has now how-at least on the lands of the Middle East and the battleground of North American media-the American government is playing out Israel's game. Once again: no problems to point out in principle. Just that this alliance is being done largely at the expense of world peace and the dignity and patience of the Arab people, to say nothing of the lives of Palestinians who live in a kind of daily horror few of us can fathom.

Some of the milestones of the US/Israeli alliance are replete with nostalgia. Others, such as the bombing of USS Liberty in 1967, fester under cover-ups. Many of the neocons have sung the ditching of the Oslo peace accords in a waltz led by Sharon. In the backrooms, Cheney and his clan have reportedly felt the need to block any attempt by Bush to meet with Chairman Arafat, as if Bush's Christian fundamentalist credentials were more fragile, more on the "Venus" side of the neo-cons' "Mars" rational cynicism.

In Bush's eyes, the world may well appear to be a less dangerous place, but only when put into contrast with the law of the jungle dictating the inner operations of the neocons' world. One might like to question CIA head George Tenet, hardly the dove he is portrayed to be by his neocon foes in this doublespeak world, after the public castration he was made to bear for failing to provide credible information proving Iraq's threat. Recall the irony: behind all the 'son trying to correct harm done to the father' stories, here son stealthily slides a knife into the agency's back that his father once ran. One of the jobs the neocons set out to execute, well documented for that matter in a New Yorker report by Seymour Hersch on May 5 2003, was to establish a more powerful intelligence agency from within the Pentagon itself. The task of setting up the Office of Special Plans, a parallel and counter CIA, was overseen by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Their job: built the tale of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and propel their "man", Ahmed Chalabi, of the Iraqi National Congress, into power in Iraq.

On a broader level, the neoconservative contribution can be succinctly put in the following terms. Maintain the power of the American economy by securing the future of its wealthiest components: oil and weapons manufacturers. Do this by drawing up a new enemy. Attack any form of resistance by brandishing it as terrorist. Step by step, the neocons have taken apart the modern democratic world from within the US structure itself. To the public at home, they present foreign dictatorships as corrupt and evil, but only after having partaken in bending the Middle East to their advantage. Now they have sent in American troops to clean up the mess made by their mentors. It often seems that the democratic world has twisted back into clan or even family warfare, with University of Chicago PhDs providing the mental fodder.

The explicit tie between American foreign policy and Israel/Likud interests will surely not dissuade the gun-ho salivating posse who frame any criticism of Israel into latent or tacit anti-Semitism. "In this year when anti-Semitism is once again a fact of life, the name 'Wolfowitz' has become its lightning rod," is the most convincing line Brett Stephens could muster in an attempt to fend off criticism against Sharon. It remains that the terms of the Jerusalem Post award and what it confirms about neocon/Likud machinations must be subjected to the minutest scrutiny. For as Ran Hacohen recently wrote, "People abusing the taboo [of anti-Semitism] in order to support Israel's racist and genocidal policy towards the Palestinians do nothing less than desecrate the memory of those Jewish victims, whose death, from a humanistic perspective, is meaningful only inasmuch as it serves as an eternal warning to the human kind against all kinds of discrimination, racism, and genocide."



RATIONALIZING THE REAL

Ultimately, the Post article does nothing less that place the policy doctrines of the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservatives' think tank, into layman's words. The AEI has been providing the clearest policy initiatives for the Bush administration, and was doing so well before the Clinton years. Some of their stripes are familiar: a capacity to fight on two different fronts; transforming the nuclear arsenal into conventional war use; the brandishing of rogue states in a move to define a new united enemy, protecting "free" markets, etc. On the domestic front, one stumbles against the clear advantage given to the country's military industrial and oil elite, from Columbine to the Alaskan tar sands.

What the Post homage adds is Israel's specific take on the issue, that is, Likud's take-issues most often downplayed back home in the US, and veiled under spurious accusations of anti-Semitism. Strutting out of the piece into four dimensions is how the Hebrew State is not merely one among many players in the region. Stephens' elegy confirms all suspicions that Israel, far from being the US's main ally, is the main player in and through which American foreign policy has been crafted. It is dubious whether the term "alliance" is appropriate to describe this tandem, the vector of which leaves from Tel Aviv, heads on to Washington prior to returning in computerized metal explosive form to Baghdad, Damascus, and who knows, Riyadh.

It is no longer a rhetorical question to bewildering ask what other response Israelis could have imagined to Sharon's state-sponsored terror strikes but the fiercest wave of equally terrorist suicide bombings in the conflict's history? The grave of Yitzhak Rabin has been desecrated over and over since his assassination by the Israeli far-right eight years ago.
For many outside the US, refutations of the neoconservative conception of democracy are building momentum. Yet no one should be overly optimistic. Having already assumed power through a long thought-out process of filling the Supreme Court with rightwing conservative fanatics, the very same court that overruled the Florida vote recount and, de facto, named Bush president, the unfolding of the 2004 elections remains highly preoccupying. In the next step of a plan that seems to have no end, a further neoconservative bureaucrat was named as Middle East advisor to Vice-President Dick Cheney on October 21.

Said to be a long-time protégé of Richard Perle, and a signatory of the various American Enterprise Institute/Project for a New American Century policy drafts, David Wurmser is also known to have called for a joint US-Israeli attack of Damascus. Perle, who has called Syria "a terroristic (sic) organization," was himself reported to have been in Jerusalem recently to receive an award from the "Jerusalem Summit," an international group of right-wing Jews and Christian Zionists who describe themselves as defenders of "civilization" against "Islamic fundamentalism". Wurmser's appointment has all the looks of increased planning toward implementing the next step in Bush's wars, especially now that his administration will have no choice but to declare extraordinary circumstances in order for him to be re-elected in 2004.

To be sure, no one should consider that Wurmser's marriage to an Israeli policy analyst at the rightwing Hudson Foundation should stir up concerns. After all, it was no less of a credible agency than the US Department of Defense and General Accounting Office that, in April 1996, had issued cases of Israeli espionage within the US as well as illegal technology retransferring. This was at a time when the neocons were not in the executive. So, focusing on the man himself should be enough, for Wurmser is reported to have argued against the US's policy to form alliances with secular-nationalist Arab republics in a bid to fight against terrorism. Just as with the American Enterprise documents, there is little if anything in the papers he has co-signed that indicates vision and constructive partnerships with the diverse players currently residing in the region, let alone with nationalist democrats there.

What stands out in his position is how powerful a tool policy rationalism can be to dilute extremist hatred of things Arab and Muslim. The exception lies when the latter involves non-Arabs and non-Persians, like Turkey and Pakistan especially, two fine flowers from which the neocons love to breathe the scent of democracy. While media back home has put the spotlight on resistance to Turkish 'assistance' in Iraq as coming from the Kurds, not one outlet considered it useful to mention that few Iraqi want to see the return of the Turkish army that dominated their lands for centuries.

With the mounting criticism of the hyper-bellicose actions of two otherwise respected world democracies, the neocons are playing the anti-Semitism card with scant remorse. It can be felt as far as in Brazil, in which there is little if any religious or ethnic tension to speak of. In a special report written for the October 26 Folha de Sao Paulo, Nelson Ascher insisted that European condemnation of Sharon's far-right Zionism is nothing but old-school anti-Semitism in metrosexual new dress. Ascher's job was to stifle any referral to European anger toward Israel as possibly, just possibly, resulting from the demolition of the Palestinian Authority infrastructure. After all, it had largely been funded with European tax payers' money. Nor did Ascher see it fit to refer to the Arab-phobia spreading throughout Europe. This hysteria is far more out of control than any anti-Semitism he terms as "courageously denounced" by new breed State-strong conservative liberal intellectuals, like Bernard Henry Levy and Alan Finkielkraut. These writers, among others, have never hidden their contempt for all 'extremism', save for Israel and America's ­ both apriori cleansed of such human, all too human folly.

Amidst a degree of unheralded violence which threatened to lead to a dictatorship in West Germany in the course of the 1970s, several of that country's internationally-acclaimed cinematographers took to making a collective documentary, Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn). The President of Mercedes Benz, Hanss Martin Schleyer had just been executed in a mock popular tribunal, and the leaders of the Red Army Faction were claimed that have committed suicide while under detention at Stammheim maximum security penitentiary. The film opened on these words: "When violence exceeds all sense, it no longer matters who started; the task is only to stop." The world impatiently awaits such a film from Israeli and Palestinian artists alike.

Norman Madarasz is Canadian and a philosopher. He writes from Rio de Janeiro, welcoming comments at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca.

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