"WHAT A BLACK DAY, THEY KILLED MY FAMILY."

It never ceases to amaze (or disgust) me how Western journalists can continue to refer to a ‘peace process’ in the Middle East, while the Israelis simultaneously continue to butcher Palestinians in their hundreds. According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, the Palestinian death toll this year is worse, so far, than the previous three bloody years of the conflict. It said 312 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in 2008, including 197 unarmed civilians of whom 44 were children and another 14 were women.

Tragically, the latest killing includes both a woman and several children – shortly after 8am yesterday, a Palestinian mother and her four children were killed by an Israeli military attack as they sat around their breakfast table in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. Two other children and 10 others who were nearby were also injured.

Here is the peerless Donald Macintyre reporting on this brutal incident in the Independent:

“The Israeli military said it had been targeting nearby gunmen and suggested the deaths had been caused when explosives it said were being carried by two militants blew up. The children were about to eat breakfast when they were killed.

“The deaths of the children, and the wounding of two older siblings, overshadowed efforts by Egypt to broker a ceasefire between Israel and the armed factions in Gaza. At least one militant and another unidentified man were killed by Israeli forces during the incursion.

“Palestinian medics identified the dead children as sisters Rudina and Hana Abu Meatak, aged six and three; and their brothers, Saleh, four, and Mousad, 15 months. Their mother, Miyasar, who was in her late 30s, died later of wounds she sustained. Seven rockets were later fired into Israel, three claimed by Hamas in response to the deaths of the family.

“The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said that, according to its preliminary investigation, around 20 armoured vehicles moved over a kilometre into northern Gaza at around 6am, and that at around 8.15am Israeli aircraft had fired a missile at a group of militants. The missile landed 10 metres away from the Meatak home, seriously injuring a militant, it said.

“Less than a minute later, the PCHR said, two further missiles were launched at the same area, landing at the door of the same house and killing another militant. The centre said that shrapnel from the missiles destroyed the door and sprayed around the house, killing the children outright.

“…The children's father, Ahmad Abu Meatak, told Associated Press that he was on his way to a nearby market when his home was hit. "What a black day. They killed my family," he said, sobbing outside the local hospital where the bodies were taken.”

Donald Macintyre, incidentally, is a (British) Middle East correspondent who deserves praise and support for his rigorously honest and compassionate (not to mention brave and courageous) reporting from the Occupied Territories. In recent weeks, he has interviewed Israeli soldiers who have confessed to him the torture, beatings and abductions that they have inflicted on the residents of the occupied Palestinian town of Hebron in recent years (a story which remarkably appeared on the front page of the Independent, entitled 'Our reign of terror, by the Israeli army').

In fact, Macintyre – a former political commentator and domestic journalist who has transformed into an insightful Middle East reporter and foreign correspondent par excellence – has form in this area: it was nearly three years ago that he first reported on the former Israeli soldiers who have admitted to joining the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) simply out of a desire “to kill Arabs”. When I read such accounts, such confessions of brutality and abuse, my mind often harks back to a former (Jewish) colleague of mine who, despite being liberal and left-wing and ‘pro-peace’, used to be in continual denial about the IDF’s long history of killing, maiming and torturing Palestinian civilians. He once proclaimed to me: “I refuse to believe that a single Israeli soldier has ever deliberately killed or harmed a Palestinian civilian.” It’s both ironic and depressing that, thanks to the journalism of Donald Macintyre and others, we now know that Israeli soldiers themselves disagree with such a naïve and partisan statement.

By the way, on a related issue, the Guardian reports that warmonger-turned-peace-envoy Tony Blair yesterday presented to the Israeli government a list of checkpoints that he wanted lifted in the West Bank. There are currently 500 Israeli barriers in the West Bank, stifling trade, chocking the Palestinian economy, preventing mothers in labour from reaching hospital, blocking kids from getting to school, etc. Guess how many the Israelis decided to move after their meeting with the all-powerful Blair?

One.

9-11, NETANYAHU AND AHMADINEJAD

With apologists for the United States having spent several years now accusing Muslims, Arabs, doves, liberals and lefties of either (a) having been indifferent to the suffering perpetrated by terrorists on September 11th 2001 or (b) cynically using it to advance their anti-war or anti-American political agendas, may I point readers of this blog in the direction of the pro-war, pro-American Israeli politician (and former prime minister) Benjamin Netanyahu's rather tactless yet revealing remarks at Bar Ilan University this week?

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

Israel is benefiting from 9-11? Imagine if you or I had said such a thing. There would be instant accusations of anti-Semitism. Imagine if another world leader had spoken about the ‘benefits’ of 9-11. There would be nothing but uproar in Washington DC and on Fox News and talk radio. But, as I have repeatedly pointed out in previous posts, there is one rule for the Israelis and one rule for everybody else.

Nevertheless, cynical and callous Benjamin’s remarks may have been, but the fact is that the chairman of the Likud party happens to be 100 per cent correct in his analysis: the 9-11 attacks – and the subsequent so-called ‘War on Terror’ – have indeed benefited Israel strategically and tactically, while strengthening pro-Israeli, anti-Arab sentiments amongst the American public at large.

However, on the other hand, the comments regarding 9-11 made this week by Netanyahu’s Persian bete noire, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, have been anything but accurate or correct.

Now, I have no time for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yes, alright, he was indeed mistranslated regarding his views on the existence and/or destruction of the State of Israel. But his views on the Holocaust are well-documented not to mention odious and ahistorical, and his decision to host a conference of Holocaust deniers in Tehran was both offensive and embarrassing. I consider him to be a bumbling ‘village idiot’, out of his depth, who has taken the art of ‘misspeaking’ to a new level. I mean, which sane and sensible leader stands in the front of the world’s media and denies there are homosexuals in their country, when images of the execution of homosexuals in that same country are publicly, widely and openly available? (I also can’t stand the fact that Mahmoud, like his self-centred and sanctimonious White House counterpart, wrongly and arrogantly assumes God is personally intervening to protect and guide him.)

Now, in his latest mis-pronouncement, the Iranian president has declared his support for the 'truthers' – the wide array of misguided, close-minded, obsessive 9-11 conspiracy theorists (who tragically tend to draw so much support and sympathy from the world’s conspiracy-obsessed Muslims). Speaking in the holy city of Qom, Ahmadinejad declared:

"Four or five years ago, a suspicious event occurred in New York. A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed but never published their names.

"Under this pretext, they [the U.S.] attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then, a million people have been killed only in Iraq."

Yes, the United States did use 9-11 as a ‘pretext’ to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. And, yes, as I have blogged here before, studies suggest up to a million people may indeed have been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. But for Mahmoud to claim that a building (i.e. the World Trade Centre) simply ‘collapsed’ is an utterly false and misleading statement. The Twin Towers did not ‘collapse’, as a result of a natural disaster, or a bomb, or a controlled explosion or demolition. All of these ridiculous conspiracy theories have been repeatedly debunked and disproved by credible, independent experts from scientific and engineering backgrounds.

As for the names of the 9-11 victims not having been published, I am sorry to say that the Iranian prez is both a liar and a fool. A liar because here, here and here is the full list of all the dead and a fool because – a la his ‘homosexuals don’t exist in Iran’ comments – he must have known that his ludicrous claim could be instantly and demonstrably disproved as soon he made it. So why did he make it? I despair!

It is time, I believe, for supporters of Iran to disassociate from the 9-11 conspiracy theories promulgated by the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and it is time for supporters of Israel to disassociate themselves from the 9-11 cynicism and opportunism articulated by the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s that simple.

THE ARROGANCE OF ISRAEL

So, let me get this right: the United States of America funds Israel to the tune of $7 million a day, or around $500 per Israeli per year. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America's entire foreign aid budget. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion. (See this Congressional report for all of the astonishing details of unparalleled US financial largesse towards the Jewish state.)

Yet, this week, when a former President of the United States – who happens to be the man who negotiated Israel’s peace deal with its largest Arab neighbour, and who also happens to be a Nobel Peace Laureate to boot – visits the State of Israel at the start of a Middle East tour, he is denied a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, as well as the country’s foreign and defence ministers, and the Israeli security services even have the temerity to decline the requests for help and assistance from the US Secret Service agents guarding him. (Has anyone actually reminded the Shin Bet that everything they possess – from their guns and grenades, to their suits and sunglasses – is paid for, in full, by the United States?)

Is this the height of arrogance?

Yes.

But why the snub? Why the rudeness and arrogance expressed towards a former occupant of the traditionally pro-Israeli Oval Office – behaviour described by one American source as ‘unprecedented’? Because this former president happens to be none other than Jimmy Carter, author of the 2006 best-selling book, ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’, in which he describes,

“…the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine, to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what black people lived under in South Africa during apartheid.”

Judging by the official Israeli reaction to his visit now, two years on, I guess what they say is true. The truth hurts...

DO PALESTINIANS DESERVE LESS THAN TIBETANS?

Following on from yesterday, Haaretz also has a piece by its senior writer, and noted anti-occupation columnist, Gideon Levy, in which he makes a rather obvious yet under-reported point: why is it that the Tibetans are feted as freedom fighters by the West, lionised and eulogised, and China is condemned for its barbaric, repressive and colonial activities in Tibet, when the Palestinians are offered no such support or solidarity and Israel’s own China-like crimes of repression and occupation are ignored and overlooked?

The usual (depressing) two words: double standards.

From the Haaretz article:

“Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet….No small number of…good Israelis have recently joined the wave of global protest that broke out over the Olympics, set to take place in Beijing this summer. It is easy; it engenders no controversy - who would not be in favor of liberating Tibet? But that is not the fight that Israeli human rights supporters should be waging.

“To fight for Tibet, Israel needs no courage, because there is no price to pay. On the contrary, this is part of a fashionable global trend, almost as much as the fight against global warming or the poaching of sea lions.

“These fights are just, and must be undertaken. But in Israel they are deluxe fights, which are unthinkable. When one comes to the fight with hands that are collectively, and sometimes individually, so unclean, it is impossible to protest a Chinese occupation.

“Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. Citizens of a country that is entirely tainted by the occupation - a national, ongoing project that involves all sectors of the population to some extent, directly or indirectly - cannot wash their hands and fight another occupation, when a half-hour from their homes, horrors no less terrible are taking place for which they have much greater responsibility.

“The world has fallen in love with Tibet. How easy it is to do so….

“The Palestinians are not as nice as the Tibetans in the eyes of the world. But the Palestinian people deserve exactly the same rights as the occupied Tibetan people, even if their leaders are less enchanting, they have no scarlet robes and their fight is more violent. There is absolutely no connection between rights and the means of protest, and from that perspective, there is no difference between a Tibetan and a Palestinian - they both deserve the exact same freedom."

Hear, hear!

USE A PALESTINIAN CAR MECHANIC, GO TO PRISON

As reported a few days ago by the liberal Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, the Israeli Knesset has passed a law imposing a penalty of three years imprisonment on Israeli car-owners who take their vehicles to mechanics in the West Bank.

Does anyone detect the unmistakeable whiff of state-sponsored racism?

After all, the Israeli defence establishment – and its hardline apologists here in the West – justify each of the Jewish state’s ongoing crimes against freedom, democracy and the rule of law on the grounds of ‘national security’ – but what on earth is the security argument for banning the use of Palestinian mechanics by Israeli car-owners? Do Israeli cars have a track record of spontaneously combusting upon being touched by an Arab?

IS ISRAEL THE WORLD’S MOST HYPOCRITICAL NATION? YOU DECIDE….

Which country is the most hypocritical on earth?

I am often torn when considering the answer to this question. Is it the United States, which blusters on and on about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ abroad while continuing to defend and even justify Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, rendition, the Patriot Act and warrantless phone tapping? Or which condemns elections in Palestine and Iran while simultaneously cosying up to dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

Or is it Saudi Arabia, which spends millions and millions of petro-dollars funding the spread of radical Islam across the world – building mosques and madressas and distributing books and pamphlets, from Bangladesh to Birmingham – yet forbids its residents from publicly practising any other religion apart from Islam and which remains the only country in the Arabian peninsula without a single church, synagogue or temple?

Is China the world’s most hypocritical country, with a totalitarian and dictatorial political system controlled by self-proclaimed communists on the one hand, but with those same communist rulers depending on a free-market, capitalist economic system to generate wealth and prosperity on the other?

Or it is my own home country, Britain, where the Archbishop of Canterbury was roundly condemned by all sections and segments of society, only a few weeks ago, for daring to even suggest that Britain’s Muslims be allowed to use religious courts to settle (some of) their legal disputes, despite the fact that Britain’s Jews have been allowed to do exactly the same for several decades now?

I happen to believe that the world’s most hypocritical nation is Israel. Why? Because for several years, the Israelis have been accusing Iran of being an ‘existential’ threat to the Jewish state, of developing a secret nuclear weapons programme and of disrupting the so-called ‘peace process’ by funding terrorist groups. The hawks in Tel Aviv have long harboured ambitions of launching a bombing campaign against Tehran and Israel’s neoconservative supporters in Washington D.C. are at the forefront of the anti-Iranian propaganda campaign inside the United States. Yet, only a week ago, the Swiss newspaper Sonntag revealed that Israel, supposedly observing a complete and utter boycott of all things Persian, has been buying Iranian oil for decades.

According to the Swiss report,

"Israel imports Iranian oil on a large scale even though contacts with Iran and purchasing of its products are officially boycotted by Israel. Israel gets around the boycott by having the oil delivered via Europe. A reliable Israeli energy newsletter, EnergiaNews…

"EnergiaNews got the information about the Iran trade from sources with ties to the management of Israeli Oil Refineries Ltd ... According to EnergiaNews the Iranian oil is liked in Israel because its quality is better than other crude oils.”

Can any country act any more hypocritically than this? You claim to hate a particular nation in your neighbourhood, you accuse it of being a state sponsor of terrorism and an existential threat to your own nation and people, you compare its president to Adolf Hitler and urge your allies in the West to sanction and even perhaps bomb it and – yet – all the while you continue to (secretly) buy oil from that country (!!) Is there any better definition of hypocrisy? I think not.

So, dear readers, that’s my view. What’s yours? Which do you think is the world’s most hypocritical nation, and why?

COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

As the world's media convulses over the latest Arab-inflicted massacre against the poor, innocent people of Israel, spare a thought for poor Amira Abu Aser, buried in Gaza on Wednesday after being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house she and her family had been visiting. She spent only twenty days on this earth.


Was she firing rockets into Israel? Did she deserve to die? Is her death not an act of 'terrorism'?

WHO CARES ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS?

The bloodshed in the so-called 'Holy Land' continues, with the typical Middle East 'cycle of violence' spiralling further and further out of control. Earlier today, after hundreds of Palestinian deaths at the hands of the occupying Israeli machine, the predictable 'terrorist' response arrived - in Jerusalem, an Arab gunman infiltrated a Jewish seminary school in Jerusalem and shot dead eight people, wounding at least nine others.

The attack has dominated news headlines - of course, the deaths of Israeli civilians (like the deaths of American and British civilians) always trumps over the deaths of dark-skinned Arab Muslims. So, here is a small reminder of the suffering on the 'other', often ignored, side of the Mid East ledger of pain and suffering, from Monday's Guardian front page:

"First came an explosion in the street outside. Then the sound of a single rifle bullet slicing through the sky in a sharp crack and into the apartment directly above the home of Raed Abu Saif, the same apartment into which his young daughter Safa had just gone. It was Saturday afternoon, about 4pm.

Abu Saif hurried upstairs and found, lying on the floor of the front room, Safa, aged 12.

There was a hole in her chest where the bullet had entered and a hole in her back where it had exited. It took her three hours to die.

Outside in the district of Zimmo Square, at the eastern edge of Jabalia in the Gaza Strip, there was by now a heavy Israeli military presence, with tanks and troops and the sound of fighting raging. It was too dangerous for ambulances to reach the apartment and too dangerous for Abu Saif to head out on foot with his daughter.

Instead, he fetched bandages, closed the wounds as best he could and held her in his arms as she bled.

"She said she was in pain, that she couldn't breathe," he said. "A few minutes before she died she told me to stop squeezing the wound,
she couldn't breathe. I was just touching her hair. Then I saw her eyes roll up. I felt her heart. It was not beating."

Read the full, heart-breaking piece from Rory McCarthy here.

And check out Donald Macintyre's excellent and deeply sensitive coverage in the Independent here.

And if your heart can bear the overwhelming sorrow and grief, read here about the latest report from Amnesty International on how the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip has actually now reached its lowest point in forty years, i.e. since Israel first occupied the Palestinian territories in 1967.

God save the Palestinians - after all, no one else will.

RADICAL OPINIONS AFTER A WEEK AWAY…

After a regrettable and difficult week away from world affairs and away from this blog of mine, I am now officially back and back with a vengeance. (Incidentally, my thanks to the blogger Legal Alien who, in the meantime, left an insightful and passionate comment in response to my earlier posting on Barack Obama).

So, what has been going on in this dark, dank and dismal world we all so passively and effortlessly inhabit over the past few days? Here are the radical opinions – on the major geopolitical events to have rocked the globe over the past week – that the mainstream media have been denying you, but which this particular blog was set up to provide and purvey:

1) Prince Harry’s war in Afghanistan

Thanks to Matt Drudge, we discovered that the third in line to the British throne, Harry Windsor, second son of Diana, has been fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban over the past two months. Some say he is a war hero, while our Prime Minister says we owe him a debt of gratitude – but why? Is a spoiled, ex-Etonian, rich, royal brat who volunteers to fly half way around the world in order to help sustain the invasion and occupation of a poor, defenceless country, populated by brown-skinned Muslim inhabitants (none of whom, by the way, had anything whatsoever to do with the 9-11 attacks!), and to continue fighting a pointless and seemingly endless counter-insurgency war against history’s most stubborn and determined insurgents, really deserving of hero status and deserving of our gratitude?

The media have shown us the usual grainy, black-and-white cockpit videos of ‘coalition’ bombs – ordered and directed by Prince Harry – destroying their ‘terrorist’ targets? But what about the collateral damage? How much innocent Afghan blood does our young prince have on his royal hands? The fact is that US-led and NATO-led ‘coalition’ forces in Afghanistan, including ‘our boys’ from Britain (and including Harry!), have actually killed more civilians there than Taliban insurgents or Al Qaeda terrorists – and continue to do so. Yet our media remain silent on this key point and prefer instead to uncritically idolize Harry and his warmongering ilk.

2) Ongoing violence in Iraq

Despite claims from hawks in the United States that the ‘surge’ in the number of American troops occupying Iraq has led to a verifiable and indisputable decline in the number of civilian casualties in Baghdad and the country’s various other hot spots, the number of Iraqis killed actually rose (!) by 33 percent from January to February, according to official figures released on Saturday. The combined figures obtained by AFP from the interior, defence and health ministries showed that the total number of Iraqis killed in February was 721, including 636 civilians, compared with 541 dead in January. How many of our newspapers chose to report this horrific yet significant statistic on their front pages? Or with banner headlines on the inside pages? Typically, and depressingly, none at all. Zero.

3) Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians

The cat is now out of the bag: Israel’s deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai admitted on Friday what those of us on the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian left have long believed, i.e. that the Jewish state is bent upon destroying the Palestinian people and is engaged in a genocidal occupation. Vilnai told Israeli army radio,

“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

“Shoah” is of course the Hebrew word normally reserved by Israelis for referring only to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews during World War II.

Of course, Israel is not gassing the Palestinians en masse, nor is it massacring the residents of Gaza (or the West Bank) on Nazi-like levels. Yet, according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the definition of genocide includes acts,

“….committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Is there any better or more apt description for an occupying state which chooses to respond to the deaths of two or three of its citizens in rocket attacks over the space of a few months by killing over a hundred of its enemies in the space of a few days, including a six-month-old baby and four boys playing football? Is this a proportionate act of self-defence or a genocidal act of aggression? I have no doubt that it is the latter.

So, the question is: who can reverse – or at least stem – these negative, depressing and bloody geopolitical trends? Will it perhaps be the next President of the United States of America? Tomorrow, I’ll be blogging on the US presidential elections and the Texas and Ohio primaries which conventional wisdom suggests Senator Hillary Clinton must win in order to stay in the race….

Your comments are welcome (in fact, requested! demanded!) on any and all of the above issues. And, please, please, keep checking back to this blog for the latest radical opinions on the latest world events.

ISRAELI PROPAGANDA

The arch-Zionist and Israel apologist, Melanie Phillips – known affectionately as ‘Mad Mel’ to her critics – devoted two or her blogs this week to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Both were filled with a farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and racial stereotypes.

For example, in defending Israel’s illegal and bloody raid into the Gaza Strip this week, Mad Mel claims: “Today it [Israel] killed at least 18 people in Gaza, almost all of them Hamas terrorists.”

“Almost all”? Note the use of her weasel words. “Almost all” simply and bluntly means not all. It means some of those who were killed were not terrorists. They were innocents. And for them, Melanie Phillips has no words, no sympathy, no care, no compassion. They are, to quote historian Mark Curtis, “unpeople”.

It pains me to say this, and not simply about Zionist propagandists like Phillips but about pretty much most of my fellow citizens here in the West, but there does seem to be an unconscious racism which perhaps subconsciously masks our entire approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israelis – blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, often Western-educated if not Western-born – look like us, talk like us, live in towns like ours, shop in stores like ours, and so we readily and understandably identify with their pain and suffering. But the Palestinians? What would endear to us a people who combine dark skins, headscarves, tribal backgrounds and the Islamic faith? Why should we care about their lives, their futures, their children?

Why? Because they feel pain like we do. They are human beings like us. They deserve to live their lives in safety and security, as we do.

Take Asad Taafish, a retired, 65-year-old businessman, who was killed this week by a bullet from an Israeli sniper as he walked through the family's farmland close to the boundary with the Jewish state.

Take Abd Salam, an 18-year-old student who was killed this week by Israeli fire as he was leaving his school after taking one of his final-year exams.

Do their deaths not feature on the Melanie Phillips moral radar? Will she shed any tears for them? Of course not. For her, all that matters is that “almost all” of the dead are “Hamas terrorists."

Phillips is part of a group of ultra-right-wing, pro-Israeli, Zionist hawks who believe the Jewish state can do no wrong and the only deaths that matter are Jewish deaths.

She writes, perhaps ironically, in one of her postings that "the aggressor is still continuing to murder its victims and to incite others to do so.” I could not pen a better description for the Israelis if I tried.

Oh, and for those of you want to see with your own eyes the blatant and callous violence that the Israeli occupying forces choose to inflict on all those who stand up to them, including pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters and fellow Israeli citizens, check out this video:

ISRAEL: 'MILITARY CONFRONTATION WITH IRAN IS INEVITABLE'

One final point worth considering on Iran and the prospects for war: the Israel factor. Since the US government's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iranian nuclear ambitions (or lack of) was published on Monday, Israel - also known as America's 51st state - has been at the forefront of the campaign to discredit the NIE's seemingly dove-ish conclusions.

Speaking shortly after the NIE came out, Israeli defence minister (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak said he believed US intelligence had got it wrong and that his intelligence reports suggested Tehran is still trying to develop a nuclear weapon:

"It's apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a time. But in our opinion, since then it has apparently continued that program. There are differences in the assessments of different organizations in the world about this, and only time will tell who is right....We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth, even if it is from our greatest friend.''

The new Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, went further than Barak in an interview on Thursday with the Daily Telegraph's uber-hawk Con Coughlin: "It should be made clear that if Iran does not co-operate then military confrontation is inevitable. It is either co-operation or confrontation."

And Friday's Guardian has this report: "Israel considering strike on Iran despite US intelligence report."

(Plus, Iran expert Trita Parsi, writing for antiwar.com, claims: "Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh referred to the report as a lie at a recent breakfast in New York, and Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer reportedly "doesn't buy" its findings.")

The Israelis have always refused to believe the Iranian civil nuclear programme is anything other than a covert military programme that poses a so-called 'existential threat' to the Jewish state. They have spent years issuing dire and bellicose warnings, claiming again and again that Iran is just a few years away from the bomb - yet, as Israel's own former deputy national security adviser Shlomo Brom once noted, rather sarcastically: "Remember, the Iranians are always five to seven years from the bomb. Time passes, but they're always five to seven years from the bomb."

The reality is that the Israeli defence establishment has long harboured a desire to carry out a re-run - against Iran - of the country's unilateral (and infamous) air strikes on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. And as the Guardian report points out, "they may have been been heartened by the lack of international censure over its bombing raid in northern Syria in September, which may or may not have targeted a Syrian nuclear installation." (It never ceases to amaze me how the Middle East's only nuclear weapons state - Israel - can arrogate to itself the right to attack those of its neighbours who have no nuclear weapons on the pretext that it is protecting the region from nuclear weapons. We truly inhabit an upside-down, back-to-front, black-is-white-and-white-is-black gepolitical universe - one in which double standards seem to be the only standards.)

It is not only hawks in Israel who long for Osirak the Sequel. The neoconservative hawks within the Bush administration in Washington are equally keen for Israel to flex its muscles against Iran, to strike the first blow and to provoke a military conflict in the region which the American can then join (or claim to be 'dragged into'). In September, Washington insider Steve Clemons reported the following development:

"One member of Cheney's national security staff, David Wurmser, worried out loud that Cheney felt that his wing was "losing the policy argument on Iran" inside the administration -- and that they might need to "end run" the president with scenarios that may narrow his choices. The option that Wurmser allegedly discussed was nudging Israel to launch a low-yield cruise missile strike against the Natanz nuclear reactor in Iran, thus "hopefully" prompting a military reaction by Tehran against U.S. forces in Iraq and the Gulf."

"Hopefully"? It never ceases to amaze me how supposedly educated, intelligent, worldly and rational strategic thinkers, at the highest levels of their governments, in self-proclaimed democracies like Israel and the United States, can continue to agitate for an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, which will undoubtedly make Iraq look "like a leisurely stroll in the park on a balmy Sunday afternoon."