The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
Syria's Destruction By Vicious Western Media
By
Peter Koenig
October 06, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "
“Five
million Syrian people have already been
forced to leave their country. Now they are
being scattered all over the Middle East:
throughout Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and
Turkey. Some have even gone as far as
Europe, Canada and Chile.
How
much more can one country endure?
And
how can the rest of the world just stand by
and watch as it is put through hell?
The
answer is obvious: the rest of the world
does not know; it does not understand! The
propaganda coming out of the Western mass
media outlets and indoctrination-spreading
institutions is so thorough, so
professional, that to most of people all
over the world everything related to Syria
appears to be blurry, murky, and incredibly
complex. President al-Assad is demonized on
a daily basis. Heroic resistance is called
the “regime’s brutal actions”, pro-western
terror groups are described as “moderate
opposition.”
This is what my good friend, Andre Vltchek,
wrote in his recent piece about “Syria’s
Heroic Fight Against Western Imperialism”.
It is almost an understatement. Living in
Europe, being exposed to the daily, hourly,
horrifying barrage of abject lies,
day-in-day-out, for weeks no end, is
unbearable.
Europe, alias the West, has become infested
with falsehoods, with thirst for profit and
more gains and personal comfort, a hearth of
egocentricity and disrespect for her
brothers and sisters, let alone for the rest
of the world – there is no equal on earth,
other than the US of A, the Master of all
Masters of crime and horror. Europe with its
hundreds of years of colonization always was
the chieftain of these ignoble attributes,
but now, all scruples are gone; the veils
are lifted. There is not even an iota of
shame left.
Let’s face it, the six Anglo-American media
giants that dominate the western world, can
spend billions on propaganda. Money doesn’t
matter. Money is made of thin air. Money for
wars doesn’t matter either – it’s also made
of thin air. It’s made by the dollar
manufacturing machine, meaning the US
private banking system. Today, 97% of
all the money produced in the US is made by
private banks in the form of debt, mostly by
Wall Street. And the epitome of financial
fraud throughout the globe is Goldman Sachs,
the same GS that makes EU financial and
monetary policy, through the European
Central Bank which is headed by a former GS
executive.
So
the rest of the world, which is buying US
debt as treasury bonds in their reserve
coffers, is actually financing all the wars
and the slandering of unbending nations,
like Syria, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela –
and the list is growing every day, as people
are resisting. Most of the propaganda is
directed against the very nations that are
held hostage by the western dollar-based
casino scheme. To add a little caveat: It is
all controlled by the Rothschild gang, in
connivance with the Rockefellers and
consortia of this world, as is the FED
itself.
Syria’s fight is indeed heroic. She stands
up tall and bold, while burying her hundreds
of thousands of death, many of them women
and children – the children who would be the
future of Syria to rebuild their country.
Now they are gone. They died miserable
torturous deaths, by cluster bombs,
phosphorous-laden missiles and poisonous
sarin killer gas, provided to the terrorists
by NATO, CIA and Mid-Eastern vassal allies.
Others had to flee their homes, their
country under the most horrible conditions
of famine, disease, discrimination and
violence. But the western MSM have
brainwashed their public to believe it is
the work of Bashar al-Assad, the legitimate
President of Syria, who still enjoys close
to 80% support of the Syrian population,
with the help of Russia and, of course, as
always, President Putin. It’s been said
before but must be said again – we are in
the midst of WWIII, but thanks to the number
one diplomatic chess strategist, Vladimir
Putin, we have so far been spared from a
nuclear war.
Syria is not only fighting the most
abhorrent weaponry the west invented to not
just kill, but to cause tremendous suffering
before death – and to cause for those who
survive, generations of malformations and
birth defects; generations of people who
could not live normal lives, even if peace
one day would return. Falluja in Iraq is
just an example. Aleppo may become another
such horrifying legacy, if not liberated
soon by Syria’s and Russia’s armies.
When one sees the pictures of the war
victims, or reality itself, the barbarism
being committed in Syria and the Middle
East, accompanied by the constant rumble of
western lie-propaganda, day by day, there is
no other option than to conclude that the
west has ceased to be human. That process
has started hundreds of years ago, by
colonial exploitation, mass-murders,
esclavisation, torture of literally the
entire world by the West and its monotheist
Judo-Christian religions. Just think of
water-boarding and other diabolical forms of
torturing, invented under the Catholic Kings
of France and Spain, the infamous
Inquisition that began in the 12th
Century and lasted for almost 800 years. Its
revolting torture methods were promptly
taken over by our modern western special
forces and secret services, like CIA, MI6,
Mossad and all those who serve the empire –
which itself is nothing more and nothing
less than the descendant of inhuman European
stock.
Syria is confronting an entire western
culture (sic), dying indeed, but kept alive
with an artificial heart, the nefarious
dollar-making-machine, as long as feasible
with the western pyramid or Ponzi monetary
scheme. We, who see through this horror,
have to stand up and scream it out to the
people, to awaken them from their
brainwashed state of zombie; to ignite in
them the tiny spark of conscience that we
were all born with. Will we succeed?
Make no mistake, Washington
will never let go
– not by itself, never. Their target is
world hegemony – the goal of their
self-indulging PNAC – Plan for a New
American Century. And to attain this goal,
the fall of Syria had been planned long in
advance, in the early 1990’s. “Regime
Change” is relentlessly being pursued – see
Wesley Clark at the Commonwealth Club of
California, October 3, 2007 –
‘7 countries have to fall in
five years’
In
addition to the balkanization of Syria,
along with the spreading eternal chaos
throughout the Middle East and North Africa,
one of the key reasons why Mr. Assad has to
go – is the infamous Qatari gas pipeline
which the US oil giants want to pass through
Syria and Turkey – and to which Mr. Assad
said NO. He said ‘no’ in 2000; and a
definite ‘no’ in 2007. That’s when the CIA
started recruiting and training terror
groups that would eventually erupt into
another ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 in Syria, to
become what’s now euphemistically called a
civil war – which is another outrageous lie.
It’s a full-out war, driven by Washington
with NATO and its European and Mid-Eastern
vassal allies – and their foot soldiers and
well-paid mercenaries, the western recruited
and groomed terror armies. (See
F. William Engdahl, Global Research,
March 16, 2016
This pipeline is meantto
disrupt the Russian European gas market –
and, most important – to keep the hegemony
of the dollar. It would again justify
printing trillions of new debt dollars, just
to extend the reign of the dollar a bit
longer. The alternative pipeline,
Iran-Iraq-Syria to Europe would be
complementary. It is favored by Iran, Russia
and Syria; and covertly also by most future
European clients, as they would be free from
the yoke of the western dollar system.
Russia, China and the SCO (Shanghai
Cooperation Organization) alliance have
freed themselves years ago from the rule of
the dollar, using their own currencies for
trade, including for trading hydrocarbons.
The
only way to defeat the monster, is by
pulling the rug from under its bloody boots
– the monetary rug, that is. This is already
gradually happening and may be happening
much faster than we think. The ‘crisis’
artificially started by Washington in 2007 /
2008 – under orders of the cream of crop of
the occult elite that pulls the strings on
Obama, Merkel, May and Co., towards the One
World Order – is never ending, as it is
meant to prolong the supremacy of the dollar
and its by-product, the euro, to the very
Armageddon. But, We, The People, can stop it
from reaching that horrifying end.
As
long as the world is blind to this fact and
pundits keep arguing about details of the
‘crisis’ and who is to blame for it (when
the willing culprits are clearly those
‘invisible elitists’ who control the
monetary system), or as long as politicians
are afraid of the consequences of seeing the
light, so long the hegemon will advance and
encircle the world, like an octopus,
gradually but steadily sucking up all its
internal and external juices. It’s already
happening.
Look at NATO aggressions at Moscow’s
doorstep, the absurd and highly propagated
US threats on Chinese sovereignty in the
South China Sea, are clear signals, that
there is no way in heaven that Washington
will seriously negotiate for anything; not
for a cease fire in Syria, not for reducing
weapon-grade plutonium, not for a halt to
fighting in the Ukraine Donbass – not for
anything. Every attempt at diplomacy is an
abject failure, as it is countered with
verbal insults at the UN, with lies,
accusations and denigrations in all western
media. Syria is considered but a stepping
stone towards Washington’s Full Spectrum
World Dominance – the goal clearly spelled
out in the PNAC.
But
Syria is no stone, let alone a stepping
stone. Syria is a solid rock. Syria has the
world’s strongest alliance it could dream of
– Russia, Iran and China. This Alliance of
Peace will eventually triumph over the
diabolical US-NATO-Brussels terror-alliance
of destruction and killing.
Peter Koenig is
an economist, and water resources and
environmental specialist. He has worked for
over 30 years with the World Bank, the World
Health Organization, and the Swiss
Development Cooperation, in Africa, Middle
East, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, East
and South East Asia and Latin America. Peter
is also a geopolitical analyst for Global
Research, Information Clearing House, RT,
PressTV, Sputnik, TeleSUR and The 4th Media,
China. He is the author of Implosion
– An Economic Thriller about War,
Environmental Destruction and Corporate
Greed – fiction based on 30
years of World Bank experience around the
globe. He is a co-author of The
World Order and Revolution! – Essays from
the Resistance.
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