11:23am

Concern about the appointment of Chas W Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council has now reached such a pitch that Congress has launched an investigation into his foreign financial links. As I reported here and here Freeman, whose designated role will give him access to and make him gate-keeper over intelligence about countries posing a threat to America such as Saudi Arabia, China and Iran, has financial ties to Saudi Arabia, China and Iran. He has also reportedly voiced support for China over the Tiananmen Square massacre, and even appeared to justify the 9/11 attacks:
One lesson of September 11th that we need to recall more than any other is that if we attack someone else's homeland in this day and age, we can expect that our
own homeland will be attacked.
In the Washington Times Eli Lake reports that Director of National Intelligence's inspector general, Edward McGuire, is to investigate Freeman's potential conflicts of interest. Topping the list of concerns is Freeman’s position on the international advisory board of the China National Offshore Oil Corp. The Chinese government and other state-owned companies own a majority stake in CNOOC -- which has invested in Sudan and Iran. Then there is Freeman’s chairmanship of the Middle East Policy Council which is funded by the Saudis.
It is astounding that such a man is to be entrusted with the most sensitive intelligence regarding America’s security. But then there’s this:
Mr. Freeman has not submitted the financial disclosure forms required of all candidates for senior public positions, according to the general counsel's office of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Now the White House is saying the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, did not get Obama’s approval before he announced Freeman’s appointment. Is this really likely? And if it is so, then one has to wonder at Obama’s pick of Dennis Blair who can make such an appalling appointment as Chas W Freeman and without even doing due diligence on his choice.
Buried in Lake’s story, however, is also this telling and dismal little observation:
Buck Revell, the FBI’s associate deputy director responsible for investigations and intelligence from 1980 to 1991, said the receipt of Saudi money alone is not a reason to disqualify Mr. Freeman. ‘Saudi money is everywhere. It is in the George Bush library, it is in the Clinton library, it's everywhere.’
This is the deeper and underlying problem which has tied America up in knots and has paralysed it in its attempts to defend itself against the Islamist threat: from the time of ‘Bush the Father’ and right through Clinton and Dubya, Washington has been in the pocket of Saudi Arabia, the Sunni arm of the Islamist war against America and the free world.
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (33)
5:36pm

It’s Science Pogrom Week.
Yesterday, the Independent cranked up a front-page splash claiming that 400 academics were calling upon the Science Museum to cancel workshops being held this week promoting Israeli scientific achievements to schoolchildren. This was a reference to the 400 or so individuals who signed a letter to the Guardian last month screeching about
the indiscriminate slaughter and attempted annihilation of all the infrastructure of organised society in Gaza
and that the museum was thus promoting scientists and universities who were
complicit in the Israeli occupation and in the policies and weaponry recently deployed to such disastrous effect in Gaza.
Such venom is particularly egregious considering Israel’s hugely disproportionate contribution to science for the benefit of all mankind – even that of the 400 signatories. And then of course there were the ritual lies. There was no ‘indiscriminate slaughter ‘; most of those killed were terrorists. The weaponry used in Gaza was used to try to stop the murder of innocents; it was legal and proportionate; the Israelis went to huge lengths to avoid hitting civilians. All this is demonstrably so.
What the signatories are of course really saying is that Israel should not defend itself -- and therefore that it should be destroyed. An excellent leader in the Times this morning got the point that the real agenda here was not concern for the Palestinians but hostility to Israel's existence.These are actually scientists for extermination. They want Israel obliterated.
In any event, are they all scientists? The organisers seem to be largely retreads from the stymied attempt to impose an academic boycott of Israel. The signatories include such non-scientists as novelist Ahdaf Soueif, architect Walter Hain, Nobel ‘Peace’ Laureate Mairead Maguire, singer Reem Kelani and writer and TV producer Karl Sabbagh. To turn what they say about the Science Museum’s workshops back on them, their stunt clearly has nothing to do with science and everything to do with Israel.
Of course, it is pure coincidence that the Independent published this month-old non-story on its front page in ‘Israel apartheid week’, part of the orchestrated campaign of lies about Israel designed to soften up the high-minded for genocide.
This verbal pogrom has been making particular inroads, for some reason, into the medical profession. As I reported here, the British Medical Journal ran five pieces in last week’s issue accusing pro-Israel lobby groups, and Honest Reporting in particular, of organising a mass campaign of hostile and often abusive emails in response to the BMJ’s comments about Israel.
These comments happened to be the usual farrago of lies and distortions about Israel that have done so much to create the current frenzy of hate. No matter: prejudice is permitted, apparently, but protests against it are not. The claim that such protests are an assault on free speech is visibly disproved by the fact that not only did the comments appear but are now being revisited all over again. So much for the alleged pressure to shut down the debate.
In any event, as I said before, the key point is that Israel’s military action against the Palestinians is not an appropriate topic for a medical journal -- and that this onslaught is being directed by the medical journals (the Lancet is just as bad) against no other country than Israel.
In last week’s BMJ hate-fest Karl Sabbagh (again) complained that hostile responses to hostility to Israel in the medical periodicals
all go far beyond the average heated but civilised debate one expects to find in a scientific or medical journal.
But Honest Reporting has established that the BMJ’s obsession with Israel goes far beyond its coverage of any other conflict. In a search of the medical literature for citations relating to victims of international conflicts, including Palestinians, it discovered the following:
- When Europeans kill Europeans (Bosnia), the BMJ allocates one citation for every 2000 deaths.
- When Africans kill Africans (Rwanda), the BMJ allocates one citation for every 4000 deaths.
- When Muslim Arabs kill Christian Africans (Darfur), the BMJ allocates one citation for every (minimum) 7000 Christians who are killed.
- When Israelis, in the process of combating terrorists, kill Palestinians, the BMJ allocates one citation for every 13 Palestinians killed (including terrorist combatants).
- When Arab Muslims kill Kurds, the BMJ fails to give this any attention whatsoever.
The evidence clearly shows that the BMJ has a disproportionate interest in Palestinian deaths over those from other conflict areas where the impact on public health is certainly as great and potentially greater than that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Nor is it alone. The verbal pogrom has swept through the hallowed halls of the Royal College of Physicians. The February issue of its Commentary bulletin carried a ‘Special Feature’ article by Dr Chris Burns-Cox on ‘Physicians in Palestine’. This is a boiler-plate one-sided account of the (undoubted) privations of health care in Gaza with shortages of drugs and fuel for hospital generators, patients dying while waiting for permits to leave (for Israeli hospitals!!) and ‘severe
limitations on postgraduate training’ through ‘restrictions on movement and checkpoints ‘. But no mention of the fact that the reason for these shortages is that the government which Gaza voted in is waging a war of extermination against Israel; nor of the fact that the checkpoints are only there because Gazans never stop trying to blow up Israeli citizens.
Worst of all was an editorial insert into the article labelled ‘News update on Gaza’, which
referred to ‘the massacres on 27th December 2008’, telling readers ‘we are tested to see if we “pass by on the other side”’.
There were, of course, no massacres.
This article so badly incensed one non-Jewish and non-Israeli reader, consultant in emergency medicine Samuel McBride, that he wrote to the magazine as follows:
One is faced often these days by a double standard of moralising against Israel’s right to protect its citizens from the murderous attacks of (inter alia) Hamas terrorists. This usually involves assuming a moral equivalence between the Jew-hating murderers and the Israeli Defence Forces response to the missile bases (deliberately based in civilian areas contrary to International Law). Such moral equivalence is specially reserved for treatment of Israel, not of Britain when it bombed civilian targets in Serbia a few years ago, nor Obama’s USA in Western Pakistan & Afghanistan to name but two examples.
I perceived the tone of your Dr Burns-Cox’ article and the editorial comment as worse than the usual moral equivalence. The term ‘massacres’ is editorially unjustified and should be corrected in the next issue with an apology to all those who have been hurt and offended thereby. It is a pejorative term smuggled in deliberately to delegitimise the right of the State of Israel to defend itself. I hope sir that you can rise above the tide of anti-semitism (better called Jew-hatred) currently sweeping the UK which often hides behind imbalanced anti-Israel verbiage.
The President of the RCP has now issued an apology:
The College deeply regrets the offence that has been caused by the use of the word massacre in the update box accompanying the article ‘Physicians in Palestine’ in the February 2009 edition of the College Commentary. The article was drawing attention to the need to support medical schools there, and we sought a brief update shortly before going to print. The term ‘massacre’, not a medical one and with political overtones, would normally have been removed on editorial review. This did not happen because of a tight publication deadline and for this we unreservedly apologise.
But the point is not that the word ‘massacre’ is political, not medical. It is that as used in this context it was a lie.
Still, apologies seem to be breaking out amongst the medical pogromistas like an infectious rash. It appears that the Lancet published a blog post entitled ‘The wounds of Gaza’. It is not possible to see what it said as the Lancet has now taken it down and issued an apology:
2 March 09: We have taken down the blog post The wounds of Gaza because of factual inaccuracies. We would like to point out that our editorial decision process to post blog entries (and their comments) on The Lancet Global Health Network is very different from our rigorous peer review process in The Lancet and TheLancet.com.
Well I’m sure we’re all deeply relieved to hear that. But we can glean what it said from a letter in protest that the Lancet has now published from a Nobel Prize winner and three other prominent Israeli doctors -- which makes it clear that the Lancet published a blood libel:
The article begins by asserting that Israel executed 35,000 prisoners of war in 1967. The claim of murdered POWs was sparked recently by the release of an Israeli documentary film, covered by the Egyptian press who then reported that Israel killed 250 Egyptian POWs. However, the film’s producer contends that the Egyptian media distorted the facts presented and that the incident in 1967 did not involve unarmed prisoners of war, but rather Palestinian militants killed during battle. Furthermore, two UN peacekeepers who witnessed the 1967 war have gone on record as stating that if an Israeli unit had killed some 250 POWs near El-Arish, they would have known about it. (2) We have no idea where the number 35,000 came from, other than the imagination of those seeking to incite a modern day blood libel.
The article goes on to discuss the use of unconventional weapons by Israel. Some of these claims, such as the use of silent bombs in which ‘all objects and living things are vaporized without a trace’, sound like the stuff of science fiction films. Of course, no facts are brought to remotely support such an absurd accusation, other than ‘unnamed people in Gaza’ who supposedly witnessed such an event. The same goes for purported executions of innocent children, old people and women who were supposedly killed in cold blood. No such thing occurred. What did occur, according to an orthopedic rehabilitative surgeon in one of Israel’s leading hospitals, is that Hamas made PLO policemen and others stand against a wall while they shot their legs with a machine gun and then stabbed their legs to finish the job. Most of these Palestinians were treated in Israeli hospitals such as Ichilov, Sheba and Barzilai Medical Centers to save their lives and treat their fractures, amputations and neurological damage.
The authors then go on to state that Israel targeted ambulances in the recent fighting. I refer you to a recent article in the Australian press in which a Palestinian ambulance driver admits that the Hamas hijacked Red Crescent ambulances and lured them into the heart of battle to transport fighters to safety.(3)
Similarly incomprehensible is the authors’ claim that the Gaza tunnels are not being used to smuggle weapons. This incontrovertible fact has been reported by the British press, in addition to every reputable news agency. (4)
... As physicians, we find it inconceivable that a respected publication like the Lancet would print such an imaginary, unproven, uncorroborated diatribe. This is wholly apart from whether the Lancet, as a scientific publication, should be dabbling in politics at all. Before accepting a medical article for publication, you rightfully insist on proven facts and evidence. You would not think of printing something based on the flight of fancy of an unknown physician. Why is this case different?
In the thread below the apology, another reader added of the 35,000 claim:
...this is a staggering historical invention. Have a browse on reliable, international sources on the net. Egyptian sources list 10,000 TOTAL war casualties in 1967. Not POWs, total Egyptian casualties… so what does the statement above mean? And how about the ‘civil disobedience’ of the people of Gaza? Again, take a look around the net, to see that the people of Gaza have been busy with quite a bit more than civil disobedience. Say, suicide bombings?
But there are also readers who have been incited to hatred of Israel by this disgusting blog post:
It is shocking to hear details of the weapons that were used and alarming to hear the extent of the injuries upon the palestinian civilian population... Many people were dreading to read a report such as this, knowing full well what horrific actions has been carried out by Israel over the years... I have no words appropriate to describe my horror and revulsion. It is almost unbelievable that the people of Israel, many of whom are descended from Jews who died in the Nazi holocaust, should have a government practising today’s holocaust.
Tomorrow, in another amazing coincidence with ‘Israel Apartheid Week’, the Lancet unleashes a further onslaught by publishing a special supplement on ‘health care in the occupied Palestinian territory’, prefaced by a symposium today at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. (Maybe someone can tell them Gaza is no longer occupied).
I think it’s a fair bet that this series of papers will not feature one of the most remarkable things about health care in Gaza -- unknown in any other theatre of war on the planet -- where patients from the side waging war are regularly treated in the hospitals of those against whom they continue to fire rockets and missiles aimed at killing their civilians. Israel regularly treats patients from Gaza – and yet the only reference ever made to this is the complaint that Gazan patients are often delayed in getting to those Israeli hospitals. And of course no mention that the reason for those delays is the war that Gaza is waging – or the fact that Hamas actually prevent Gazans from crossing into Israel to be treated.
The Lancet is unlikely to tell us any of that. Nor is it likely to tell us that the current undoubtedly parlous health indicators amongst Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, are solely the result of the war they continue to wage – as demonstrated by the following statistics of Palestinian health indicators reported by Professor Efraim Karsh of Kings College London:
From June 1967 until Israel passed control to the PA in the mid-1990s, life expectancy had risen from 48 to 72 years (compared to 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Mortality rates fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22).
To their eternal shame, and as proof that scientific reason confers upon those who lay claim to it no immunity against gross prejudice and the abuse of power, scientists played a key role in fascism and communism. Now some British scientists are once again colluding in just such an evil perversion of their calling.
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (105)
4:29pm

There has never been a situation like this. ‘Surreal’, as Daniel Pipes expostulates, just doesn’t begin to describe what America, Britain and Europe are doing in Gaza. America has pledged $900 million for the ‘rebuilding’ of Gaza; at the ‘donors’ conference at Sharm el Sheikh yesterday, pledges from more than 70 states including Europe and Britain swelled that total to more than $4.4 billion. The beleaguered British taxpayer may be rather surprised to know that bankrupt Britain is throwing £30 million at the place.
These governments all piously intone that the money will not end up in the hands of Hamas. This is utterly absurd. Hamas run Gaza. They control it. Nothing happens there without their say-so. UNRWA, which is apparently supposed to distribute the humanitarian aid, is riddled with Hamas operatives amongst its staff; Hamas won more than 80 percent of the vote in the last election for the UNRWA workers association and the UNRWA teachers association.
To avoid the money going to Hamas, we are told with a straight face, aid is to be funnelled through the Palestinian Authority. But the PA are in the West Bank. They are not in Gaza. Hamas run Gaza. The PA have no more power to stop that money from ending up in the pockets of Hamas than they have of flying to the moon.
Who can doubt that the $4.4 billion will go straight to Hamas so that it can buy yet more rockets and missiles and construct yet more death-dealing factories to enable them to bombard Israel and kill the innocent?
In no other global conflict do the nations of the world throw money at an area waging aggressive war, even while it is still lobbing missiles at its victims. According to Israel’s ambassador to the UN, there have been nearly 100 rocket and mortar attacks from the Gaza Strip since the ’ceasefire’ on January 18. These have been increasing in number, with 12 rockets fired at Sderot on March 1 alone. On Saturday morning, two new and improved Grad rockets, capable of yet greater destruction than before, hit Ashkelon; one hit a school.
And for this Gaza is to be rewarded to the tune of $4.4 billion.
Even the Saudis seem to think this is mad:
Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal told al Arabiya TV that rebuilding Gaza would be ‘difficult and fool-hardy, so long as peace and security do not prevail’ in the territory.
But of course; Saudi knows full well that what America, Europe, Britain and the rest have just done is hand $4.4 billion to the Iranian war machine against not just Israel but the Sunni Arab world. Now look by contrast at what Douglas Alexander, Britain’s International Development Secretary, has said:
‘There is a desperate need for tough restrictions on the supply of goods to be relaxed,’ he said. ‘Gaza needs money, fuel and construction materials, and whilst these goods are turned away at the borders, repairs to homes, water systems and the electricity network will remain impossible. Israel must do the right thing and allow much-needed goods to get through to those men, women and children who continue to suffer.’
No mention of the materials getting through to be appropriated by Hamas in order to kill more Israelis. Alexander’s remarks reflect the collective derangement of Britain’s political class, which frames a genocidal war against Israel as a humanitarian catastrophe for the perpetrators who are said to be starving, even while they fire bigger and better weapons to kill Israelis.
As a result, Douglas Alexander, Hillary Clinton and the rest of them are effectively giving Hamas $4.4 billion to do just that. Clinton’s own remarks were just pure newspeak.
‘Our response to today's crisis in Gaza cannot be separated from our broader efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace,’ she said. ‘Only by acting now can we turn this crisis into an opportunity that moves us closer to our shared goals.’ She added that ‘by providing humanitarian aid to Gaza, we also aim to foster conditions in which a Palestinian state can be fully realized, a state that is a responsible partner, is at peace with Israel and its Arab neighbors and is accountable to its people.’
Her remarks reflect the lethal liberal delusion that the establishment of a Palestinian state would bring peace to the region, and that humanitarian aid is necessary to make that state more possible. No recognition that the Palestinians have received more aid than any other people on earth – and have used it to wage genocidal war, because their grievance is not the absence of a state but the existence of Israel.
Clinton’s delusion is the distillation of the key liberal fallacy that the perfection of the world lies in the application of reason; that people are all innately reasonable, and will always act in furtherance of their own rational self-interest. Seen through this prism, Israel’s destruction of Palestinian infrastructure – indeed, any action it takes to prevent Gazans from murdering Israeli citizens – is frightfully inconsiderate because it mucks up the only real agenda in the Middle East which is to set up a Palestinian state -- not the fact that Israel is under permanent siege from a real agenda of genocide. So Gaza’s donors told themselves this:
A new drive to revive the Middle East peace process is needed because violence could easily erupt again in Gaza, wrecking aid efforts, international donors were told at an aid conference today... ‘We are confronted with a serious dilemma,’ Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told the final news conference. ‘Will we once again reconstruct something we built a few years ago and now has been hammered and flattened?’
Note – the dilemma is not whether the donors’ money will be used to hammer and flatten Israel; it is only whether Israel will give the donors a poor return for their investment in Gaza, by having the gall to seek to protect its citizens against the violence that the donors’ money will fund.
As Tony Blair said after a visit to Gaza and Sderot:
‘I wanted to come to hear for myself first-hand from people in Gaza, whose lives have been so badly impacted by the recent conflict. These are the people who need to be the focus of all our efforts for peace and progress from now on.’
Note -- the people of southern Israel, who have been living in shelters almost continuously, aren’t the real victims of this conflict. That honour goes to those who have been trying to kill them. It is those people who will now be ‘the focus of all our efforts for peace and progress’. And Blair poses as a friend of Israel.
Did I say liberals were rational?
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (95)
11:27pm

On Friday afternoon, the Obama administration let it be known that it was now withdrawing from the planning process for the ‘Durban 2’ anti-Israel and anti-Jew hate-fest taking place under the aegis of the satirically-named UN Human Rights Council in Geneva next month, and wouldn’t take part in the conference itself. As I reported here and here, Obama had sent a delegation to Geneva to try to sanitise the draft Declaration being planned for the meeting, saying that if it failed it would withdraw. On Friday, after the draft text had got worse rather than better, it appeared that the US had indeed withdrawn from the planning process and was now boycotting the whole thing; certainly, Ha’aretz thought it had done so, various Jewish groups threw their hats in the air and Obamaphiles breathed a sigh of relief and replaced the halo above their hero’s head.
They should have waited. Indeed, they should have read the warning signs in the story. For the Americans chose their words carefully:
‘The document being negotiated has gone from bad to worse, and the current text of the draft outcome document is not salvageable,’ State Department spokesperson Robert Wood said. ‘As a result, the United States will not engage in further negotiations on this text, nor will we participate in a conference based on this text. A conference based on this text would be a missed opportunity to speak clearly about the persistent problem of racism. The United States remains open to a positive result in Geneva based on a document that takes a constructive approach to tackling the challenges of racism and discrimination’, Wood said.
It was obvious from this that the Americans were not now doing what they should have done from the start -- saying that the whole Durban process was a sick farce and that they would have nothing to do with it. Instead, they were still leaving the door ajar for some kind of fudged form of words in the Declaration. An early version of the Jerusalem Post story deepened the ambiguity. Anonymous US officials told the paper:
The Obama administration would reconsider its position if the document improves in a number of areas including dropping references to any specific country, references to defamation of religion which the US views as a free speech issue, and language on reparations for slavery. It also wants a shorter text and does not want the final document for Durban II to reaffirm the final document from the 2001 Durban conference, the US official said.
By Friday evening, when the US published its official statement on the matter, the fog had deepened further still. As Anne Bayefsky – the UN watcher whose single-handed efforts in blowing the whistle on Durban 2 and America’s manoeuvrings must take much of the credit for the pressure applied to the US over its participation – has now pointed out in an article for Forbes, the statement said:
...‘the United States will not ... participate in a conference based on this text,’ but we will ‘re-engage if a document that meets [our] criteria becomes the basis for deliberations.’ A new version must be: ‘shorter,’ ‘not reaffirm in toto the flawed 2001 Durban Declaration,’ ‘not single out any one country or conflict,’ and not embrace the troubling concept of ‘defamation of religion.’ And by the way, it continued, the U.S. will ‘participate’ for the first time in the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Those two words ’in toto’ leave the door ajar for the Israel-bashers to find a way round the US insistence that there can be no singling out of any one country, while fulfilling the remit of 'Durban 2' to ‘reaffirm’ the 2001 Durban Declaration which singled out Israel for defamation as a racist state. Bayefsky reports that, after US officials told Jewish groups US participation was over while assuring the Israel-bashers it was looking for ways to 're-engage', the bashers are furious; tellingly,
Peggy Hicks from HRW [Human Rights Watch] complained that insisting on ‘no reference to a single country or conflict is very problematic and destructive to the Durban Review process.’
Whoops, what a giveaway. To Human Rights Watch, the Durban Review process is all about singling out one particular country. No prizes for guessing which one, eh, Peggy?
So to keep the Israel-destroyers sweet, Obama has thrown them a bone. A big fat juicy one. The US may not be going back into the 'Durban 2 'process, but it will go one better – it will re-enter the Human Rights Council itself as an observer and will stand for election to it. Until now it was boycotting the council precisely because the connection with ‘human rights’ of a body whose members are overwhelmingly not democracies and which include China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba is a sick joke – and because its overwhelming purpose is to delegitimise Israel and engineer its destruction. Accordingly, it singles out Israel for (unwarranted) vilification while ignoring real human rights abuses elsewhere. As Bayefsky observes:
The Council -- controlled by the Organization of the Islamic Conference -- has adopted more condemnations of Israel than all other 191 U.N. states combined, while terminating human rights investigations on the likes of Iran, Cuba and Belarus. Obama’s move denies the opportunity to leverage the prospect of American membership to insist on reform.
Even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned the UNHRC:
‘The Secretary-General is disappointed at the council's decision to single out only one specific regional item given the range and scope of allegations of human rights violations throughout the world.’
So the Obama administration has decided as a matter of principle to withdraw from 'Durban 2' (pro tem) because it ‘singles out’ Israel for vilification, and instead will take part in and thus legitimise the UNHRC -- which singles out Israel for vilification. This is what the State Department calls
advancing the cause of human rights in the multilateral arena.
Doubtless it will carry out its intention to
ensure the Human Rights Council focuses on the pressing human rights concerns of our time
by tackling the HRC's singling out of Israel for vilification through telling it precisely what it told the ‘Durban 2’ planning meeting in order to tackle its singling out of Israel for vilification.
Nothing.
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (41)