[A-List] Fwd: U.S.: Israel's Defenders Mobilise, Threaten

[Suzanne de Kuyper]

There could be no more clear proof of Israel's assumption that the
United States has no choice but to support it forever as it
exterminates the Palestinians.    It is a relief that the total
arrogance of the small enraged state is in full view world-wide.
Would that our President and dear Hilary were real statesmen and took
back American sovereignity from the criminal state that Israel has
become.   Suzanne


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sid Shniad <shniad at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 10:16 PM
Subject: U.S.: Israel's Defenders Mobilise, Threaten
To:


http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51698

U.S.

Israel's Defenders Mobilise, Threaten

Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Jun 2 (IPS) - Faced with what the Wall Street Journal
calls "one of Israel's worst international relations disasters in
years", the right- wing leadership of the so-called "Israel Lobby" has
been pulling out all the stops to defend the Jewish state against
global outrage over its deadly seizure of a Gaza-bound vessel in
international waters carrying humanitarian supplies early Monday
morning.

Its biggest concern for now is to prevent the administration of
President Barack Obama from distancing itself in any way - let alone
joining in the almost universal condemnation - from the military
operation in which at least nine civilian passengers of
Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara were killed by Israeli commandos.

"As the international community is engaged in a biased rush to
judgment against Israel and a diplomatic lynching, now is the time for
the United States to firmly stand with the Jewish state and its
people," said Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL), Wednesday.

"The U.S. must show the world that it not only supports Israel's right
to defend its borders and citizens against terrorism, but that it
supports Israel's right to protect itself from people who pretend to
be 'peace activists,' and parade under the guise of humanitarians
while supporting Hamas and violently attacking Israeli military
personnel," he added.

Indeed, even after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's
spokesman publicly thanked Washington for its efforts to "water down"
a statement by the president of the U.N. Security Council issued early
Tuesday morning, hard- line neo-conservatives complained bitterly that
Obama had betrayed its closest ally by not vetoing it.

"So why did we agree to the presidential statement?" asked Elliott
Abrams, former President George W. Bush's top Middle Eastern aide, in
an article entitled "Joining the Jackals".

"The White House did not wish to stand with Israel against this mob
[of Security Council members who condemned the Israeli attack] because
it does not have a policy of solidarity with Israel," Abrams, who is
now based at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), wrote for the
neo- conservative 'weeklystandard.com'. "…[I]t would have been simple
to stop the mob had the White House wanted to." [Emphasis in the
original.]

Some neo-conservatives, whose worldview is closely aligned to that of
Netanyahu's Likud Party, even suggested that Obama's failure to
unconditionally defend Israel in its hour of need could well make the
Jewish state take even more aggressive action in the future.

"If Obama decides it is in America's interest to make an example of
Israel after the Gaza flotilla incident in order to win goodwill in
Cairo, Beirut, Tehran, and Ankara," warned Michael Rubin of the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), "then he must also recognise that
the leadership in Jerusalem is going to conclude that it cannot trust
the United States to safeguard its security, and that therefore it
must take matters into its own hands on any number of issues, not the
least of which is Iran’s nuclear programme."

In effect, if the White House decides to come down hard on Israel
now," he added in National Review Online, "it is the same as giving a
green light for Israel to strike Iran."

That threat was echoed in a remarkable column published by the
neo-conservative Wall Street Journal Tuesday in which the author,
Ronen Bergman of Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, argued that the
operation itself was "irresponsible" and evidence that a "siege
mentality" - based on the belief that world opinion is irreversibly
hostile to the Jewish state - had taken hold of the country and its
governing elite.

Citing Iran's nuclear programme, Bergman argued that such an
"unhealthy" mindset "is profoundly disturbing when the fatigued and
isolated country itself has the means to strike pre-emptively and
punishingly at its enemies, including in ways from which,
realistically, there may be no return."

While neo-conservatives were warning darkly about the geo- political
consequences for the administration of any distancing from Israel's
position, the Lobby's leaders and their friends in Congress focused
more on defending Israel's version of the pre-dawn incident that took
place Monday some 100 kms off Gaza's coast.

They insisted, among other things, that the Israeli commandos who
carried out the operation, armed only with paintball rifles and
handguns, acted in self-defence after coming under attack from
passengers brandishing iron bars, knives, and other crude weapons.

"Israeli soldiers had every right to defend their lives against a
lynch mob attacking them with knives and clubs," said Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs
Committee.

Based primarily on a short video distributed by the Israel Defence
Forces (IDF), this version of events, including the weapons involved
on both sides, has been called into question by the testimony of many
of the 600 some passengers. After being towed to Israel and held
incommunicado for some 24 hours, they were deported Wednesday.

It also failed to take into account the right of self- defence of
those aboard a vessel that came under attack in international waters.
"This is like a carjacker complaining to the police that the driver
bashed him with a crowbar that was under the seat," noted M.J.
Rosenberg, a Middle East analyst at Media Matters.

Israel's defenders have also tried to focus media and public attention
on what they have called the "terrorist-linked, radical Islamic" group
that reportedly bought the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish-based Insani
Yardim Vakfi, or IHH, and helped sponsor the flotilla of eight vessels
that set out to breach Israel's three-year-old blockade of Gaza.

According to a release put out Monday by the powerful American Israeli
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a declassified report by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) after 9/11 named the IHH "as part of 15
organisations that employed members or otherwise the facilitate the
activities of terrorist groups - INCLUDING AL Qaeda."

Another AIPAC release cited testimony by a "famed French
counter-terrorism investigator" that the IHH had played "[a]n
important role" in the Al-Qaida Millenium [sic] bomb plot" that
targeted Los Angeles International Airport.

But, while the IHH appears to have played a role in recruiting
fighters in the Bosnia and Chechnya conflicts in the mid-1990s when
the CIA report was written, it currently carries out relief operations
in more than 100 countries, including Haiti and a number of African
countries, as well as in Gaza, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
And, aside from an assortment of sticks and kitchen knives, no weapons
were found aboard any of the ships seized by Israel.

Similar talking points, however, were deployed by The Israel Project
(TIP), another right-wing Zionist group that mobilised its members to
write emails to lawmakers and media outlets in their area calling on
them to stand by Israel. In the space of two hours Tuesday afternoon,
the Washington bureau of IPS received nearly 20 emails from TIP
members in support of Israel's version of the incident.

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at
http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

(END/2010)