Israel’s jousts with Iran grow grim

IRAN Is Not the Problem; Stop War on IRAN

2012 IRAN STRONGER THAN EVER-Uncontained (Documentary)-مستند مهارنشده

THE ZIONIST JEWS SHOULD STOP THIS AMBITION TO RULE THE WORLD BECAUSE THE CONSCIENCE OF THE WORLD HAS BEEN AWOKEN ESPECIALLY AFTER THE INHUMAN ACTS IN GAZA!! http://www.palestinebedrockoftheworld.com/are-the-israelis-human-or-the-devils-at-work-occupation-101/

MINE IS AWOKEN WHAT ABOUT YOURS? I’M JUST AN ORDINARY PERSON LIVING FROM HAND TO MOUTH BUT WHAT HAPPENED IN GAZA, KILLING 1800 PALESTINIANS JUST BECAUSE 1 ISRAELI SOLDIER WAS CAPTURED, MY CONSCIENCE COMPELLED ME TO DEDICATE THIS BLOG TO THE PALESTINIANS’ CAUSE!

http://www.globalresearch.ca/goldstone-commission-gaza-conflict-findings-and-reactions/15317

Final Comments

For over six decades, Israeli state terror continued its tradition of blaming the victim and choosing militarism, violence, intimidation, and naked aggression over peaceful coexistence, respect for human rights, and observance of international laws and norms. Israelization and De-Arabization are fixed policies. So is the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Beirut suburb that the IDF destroyed in the 2006 Lebanon war. It calls civilians a strategic target “at the heart of the enemy’s weak spot,” and for using disproportionate force against them, their property, and infrastructure.

Arabs are thus disenfranchised, denied rights, and deemed inferior as subhumans. Israeli policy is confrontation, conflict, oppression, impoverishment, displacement, slow-motion genocide, and state terror to depopulate historic Palestine for Jews only.

Operation Cast Lead was the latest episode, but Gaza remains isolated under siege. The West Bank is under military occupation. Land seizures, arrests, random killings, torture, checkpoint restrictions, home demolitions, crop destruction, permits, economic strangulation, and incarcerations occur daily, yet the world community is silent. The Goldstone Commission offers the latest evidence of what’s persisted for decades. Holding Israel accountable is essential. It’s high time world bodies and jurists demanded it.

Now after you have read what Stephen Lendman a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization had written do you still believe the Jews are god chosen people?

THE STRAITS TIMES, OCTOBER 15, 2012

By WILLIAM CHOONG SENIOR WRITER

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again had a verbal duel over the state of Israel and Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme.

Addressing the General Assembly, Mr Ahmadinejad spoke about the danger posed by a capitalist system dominated by Zionists and ‘arrogant’ world powers.

Speaking to the same assembly later, Mr Netanyahu held up a cartoonist diagram of an Iranian bomb, arguing that a clear “red line’ needed to be put on preventing Iran from getting nuclear bombs. Iran will likely cross this “red line” come the summer of 2013, he added.

After many months of global hand wringing about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme, the argument against an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities essentially stands on three pillars.

First, a nuclear-armed Iran can be deterred and contained.

Second, the consequences are so devastating that Israel will reconsider an attack. For example, global oil prices are said to spike to US$200 a barrel. Oil-hungry Asia and the rest of the world will feel the impact and a nuclear arms race in the Middle east would result.

Lastly, bombing Iran is probably the faster way for Iran to get the bomb eventually, since it would only stiffen the resolve of the country’s leaders to go nuclear.

All these reasons, however, count for nought if one were to study comments made by Mr Netanyahu and other Israeli analysts recently.

Their reasoning also rests on three legs.

First, Israeli analyists agree that deterrence against Iran will not “work” as it did during the Cold War.

Such a position is the direct opposite of the conventional wisdom about the Cold War. when the United States and Soviet Union were “rational” enough to be deterred from a thermonuclear exchange.

Writing in the August issue of Foreign Affairs, Dr Kenneth Waltz, a respected international relations professor, applied the same logic to Iran.

The country’s mullahs are “perfectly sane” people who want nuclear weapons only for Iran’s defence, he wrote, adding that even Maoist China became cautious after it crossed the nuclear threshold. http://www.palestinebedrockoftheworld.com/why-iran-should-get-the-bomb-kenneth-n-waltz/

But Mr Netanyahu put it differently. He cited Dr Bernard Lewis, a prominent Middle East scholar who said that mutual assured destruction for the Iranians is not a deterrent, but an inducement. “Militant jihadists behave very differently from secular Marxists. There were no Soviet suicide bombers. Yet Iran produces hordes of them,” he said.

Countries like Iran and North Korea cannot be deterred like the former Soviet Union, said Professor Dan Scheuftan of the University of Haifa.

Ask what he thought about professor waltz’s argument, the don who has advised former Israeli premiers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon would only say: “I’d try to be polite. I don’t think it deserves serious consideration because it’s so completely cut off from the reality of different cultures behaving in different ways.” In short, the Israeli position is that even a “rational” Iran does not necessarily lead to reasonable or morally correct behaviour. This draws heavily from Israelis’ understanding of the Holocaust. Writing in his classic. Hitler And The Holocaust, historian Robert Wistrich argues that even Nazi Germany’s rational “desk murderers” were capable of the most heinous crimes.

Second, the Holocaust might prove to convince Israelis that they would need to act against Iran.

Granted, memories of the Holocaust can be overplayed. After all, Israel’s defence budget is double that of Iran’s and its cache of nuclear weapons – estimated at between 75 and 200 – far supersedes that of Iran, which doesn’t have any. http://www.palestinebedrockoftheworld.com/israel-weapons-of-mass-destruction/

But political scientists agree that there are two methods of decision-making – the cool-headed “rational” type, and the ‘affective” or emotionally driven type.

By drawing up images of the holocaust, Mr Netanyahu was appealing to the affective. Speaking in the US in March, he said: “Never again will we not be masters of the fate of our very survival. Never again.

This is understandable, to an extent. After all, the holocaust killed six million Jews. Each and every time after 1948, the year Israel was founded, it has pre-empted emerging threats. In 1967, Israel beat back Arab armies in the Six-Day war. n 1981 and 2007, Israel aircraft destroyed nascent nuclear reactors owned by Iraq and Syria respectively.

“The issue is not whether iran can exterminate six milllion. If they kill a few hundred thousand, this will be a great disaster for a small state such as Israel,” said Professor Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies at Bair-Ilan University.

Finally, the appeal to the affective also underscores the fact the differences between Israel and Iran are no longer merely about rational arguments or calculations.

During the Cold War, it was relatively straightforward to be rational. American nuclear strategists came up with loads of “deterrence curves” estimating how many nukes it would take to destroy a number of Soviet cities. Their Soviet counterparts spoke about the “correlation of forces” between the US and Soviet militaries.

But the ensuing Netanyahu – Ahmadinejad duel shows that their differences are no longer about the correlation of forces or cost-benefit equations. Rather, there are competing apocalyptic visions that fuel emotions on both sides.

Speaking at the General Assembly, Mr Ahmadinejad spent the last four minutes of his 30-minute speech talking about the return of the Mahdi, the Shi’ite messiah who would “bless humanity with a spring that puts an end to our winter of ignorance”.

Then he failed to add the usual tirades about Israel. Two days before however, he had told reporters at a breakfast meeting that Israel had no roots in history, while Iranian civilisation had existed for thousand of years.

Mr Natanyahu was equally defiant in his response, saying that the Jewish state will live forever.

“Three thousand years ago, king David reigned over the Jewish state in our eternal capital, Jerusalem. I say that to all those who proclaim that the Jewish state has no roots in our region and that it will soon disappear, ” he countered.

This is not to say that Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities – most likely, it would

neither will an Israeli attack set back Iran’s nuclear programme significantly. the consensus is that even a successful attack will only delay the programme by three to five years.

Israel has also reaped its own set of problems in the Middle east. It had refused to stop the building of settlements, thus stalling resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

Speaking to The Straits Times recently, Prof Scheuftan said that Israelis were finally coming round to the idea of securing gas masks in preparation for any eventuality.

“If you tell a Singaporean that they should do A, B and C, they will do it. But when you tell an Israeli to do A, B and C, he will say that A is bulls**t and that he will do B when he feels like it. As for C, he’d say that he is lazy today and will do it tomorrow.”

“But this is not as if everyone is rushing for gas masks. It is not assumed that there will be a war tomorrow,” he added.

That might be true. There is speculation that Mr Netanyahu could be delaying a strike to the summer of the next year.

But unless there is some way of unravelling the two competing visions trotted out by Israel and Iran, all indications show that a crippling strike will be coming – and soon.