Opinion Editorials, February 2012

At the Crossroads of Israeli-US War on Iran:

Do NOT Say You Were NOT Warned

By Eileen Fleming

Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, February 6, 2012

Last week The New York Times published an opine by Ronen Bergman, who answered his own question in “Will Israel Attack Iran?”

“After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012. Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all, but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear — rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive — and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.” [1]

And only Israel can save itself or destroy itself, for as a Hebrew prophet once warned that those who live by the sword will die by it too.

Bergman began his oped with the missed opportunity to educate the reader with the failure to respond with facts to Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak after he said, “The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.”

In 1948, Israel began to wipe Palestine off the map by ethnically cleansing over 500 Palestinian villages and towns.

In 2006, Virginia Tilley, Professor of political science explained:

"In his October 2005 speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad never used the word 'map' or the term 'wiped off.' According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole and even right-wing services like MEMRI, what he actually said was 'this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.'

"In this speech to an annual anti-Zionist conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad was being prophetic, not threatening. He was citing Imam Khomeini, who said this line in the 1980s-a period when Israel was actually selling arms to Iran, so apparently it was not viewed as so ghastly then.

"Mr. Ahmadinejad had just reminded his audience that the Shah's regime, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein had all seemed enormously powerful and immovable, yet the first two had vanished almost beyond recall and the third now languished in prison.

"So, too, the 'occupying regime' in Jerusalem would someday be gone. His message was, in essence: 'This too shall pass.'"

Bergman instead mentions “to Barak the opinion voiced by the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and the former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi — that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Netanyahu have suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic (and that they, Barak and Netanyahu, were cynically looking to score populist points at the expense of national security), Barak reacted with uncharacteristic anger. He and Netanyahu, he said, are responsible 'in a very direct and concrete way for the existence of the State of Israel — indeed, for the future of the Jewish people.'”

In 1986, Israel’s Nuclear Whistle Blower, Mordechai Vanunu, acted on conscience to alert the world about Israel’s clandestine seven-story underground weapons of mass destruction facility in the Negev Valley so as to avert a nuclear holocaust and ‘for the future of the Jewish people’ as he wrote in his first of 18 years in prison for telling the truth:

I Am Your Spy

I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, and the driver.
They said, Do this, do that, don't look left or right,
don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You
are only responsible for this one bolt. For this one rubber-stamp.
This is your only concern. Don't bother with what is above you.
Don't try to think for us. Go on, drive. Keep going. On, on.

So they thought, the big ones, the smart ones, the futurologists.
There is nothing to fear. Not to worry.
Everything's ticking just fine.
Our little clerk is a diligent worker. He's a simple mechanic.
He's a little man.
Little men's ears don't hear, their eyes don't see.
We have heads, they don't.

Answer them, said he to himself, said the little man,
the man with a head of his own. Who is in charge? Who knows
where this train is going?
Where is their head? I too have a head.
Why do I see the whole engine,
Why do I see the precipice--
is there a driver on this train?

The clerk driver technician mechanic looked up.
He stepped back and saw -- what a monster.
Can't believe it. Rubbed his eyes and -- yes,
it's there all right. I'm all right. I do see
the monster. I'm part of the system.
I signed this form. Only now I am reading the rest of it.

This bolt is part of a bomb. This bolt is me. How
did I fail to see, and how do the others go on
fitting bolts. Who else knows?
Who has seen? Who has heard? -- The emperor really is naked.
I see him. Why me? It's not for me. It's too big.

Rise and cry out. Rise and tell the people. You can.
I, the bolt, the technician, mechanic? -- Yes, you.
You are the secret agent of the people. You are the eyes of the nation.
Agent-spy, tell us what you've seen. Tell us what the insiders, the clever ones, have hidden from us.
Without you, there is only the precipice. Only catastrophe.

I have no choice. I'm a little man, a citizen, one of the people,
but I'll do what I have to. I've heard the voice of my conscience
and there's nowhere to hide.
The world is small, small for Big Brother.
I'm on your mission. I'm doing my duty. Take it from me.

Come and see for yourselves. Lighten my burden. Stop the train.
Get off the train. The next stop -- nuclear disaster. The next book,
the next machine. No. There is no such thing. -1987, Ashkelon Prison

The New York Times gave print to Barak’s alarm and also provided an opportunity I seize!

Barak said if the world waits to act on Iran, “It will not be possible to use any surgical means to bring about a significant delay. Not for us, not for Europe and not for the United States. After that, the question will remain very important, but it will become purely theoretical and pass out of our hands — the statesmen and decision-makers — and into yours— the journalists and historians.”

And well war should be in the hands of historians and journalists who act in the interests to avoid it for the sake of ALL people and Mother Earth.

"I would never have become an historian if I thought that it would become my professional duty to go into the past and never emerge, to study long-gone events and remember them only for their uniqueness, not connecting them to events going on in my time."-Howard Zinn

A little history of US-Israel nuclear insanity as understood by Lewis Mumford:

“You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased to obey the laws of life.”-1946

This August 6th and 9th will mark the 67th anniversary of the most brutal acts of terrorism upon innocent people; America's atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On Armistice Day, 1948 General Omar Nelson Bradley warned, "We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living."

In 1995 and still in Ashkelon Prison, Vanunu noted: "A radioactive cloud consumed rubbed out Hiroshima...A live nuclear test sentenced you. A nuclear laboratory…children women trees animals in and under a nuclear mushroom…burning… burned…flattened to ground radioactive ash-Hiroshima...Nuclear weapons gamblers win against you…Hollywood doesn't know you - you are not a Jewish Holocaust."[2]

Barak went on: “The moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same. The Saudi Arabians have told the Americans as much, and one can think of both Turkey and Egypt in this context, not to mention the danger that weapons-grade materials will leak out to terror groups…And if a nuclear Iran covets and occupies some gulf state, who will liberate it? The bottom line is that we must deal with the problem now.”

Israel is a nuclear state that covets and also occupies other gulf states properties so, why NOT deal with THAT problem which is the root cause of WHY Israel feels so insecure.

And as Vanunu explained, “Many journalists come here to the American Colony, from CNN and NY Times. They all want to cover my story, but their EDITORS say no...CNN wants to interview me; but they say they can't do it because they don't want problems with the Israeli censor. BBC is doing the same thing.

"Sixty Minutes from the United States from the beginning they wanted to do a program, but because of the censor situation they decide not to do it. Also big media from Germany, France, Italy, Japan. None of them wants problems with the Israelis."



Bergman also wrote, “Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed this explicitly when he said that Iran would be able to reach nuclear-weapons capabilities within a year.”

Speaking on “60 Minutes” on January 29, Panetta said it would probably take Iran another two to three years to produce a missile or other vehicle that could deliver the weapon to a target.

Iran's leadership denies any effort to make a nuclear weapon and Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said that international inspectors will be allowed to visit any site in Iran that they wished.

Currently there is a team of inspectors from the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Iran and on Sunday, Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani said the IAEA's visit is a "test" for the agency, adding that Iran would cooperate if the IAEA acted "professionally" and not as "a tool of the West."

In his State of the Union Address last week, President Barack Obama warned Tehran, "Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal” and he reiterated America’s commitment to Israel’s security.

The only option conscience can allow is to demand of Israel what is demanded of Iran and to work for the establishment of a Nuclear Free Middle East and World.

Notes:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/will-israel-attack-iran.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

2. http://vanunu.com/poems/mvpoemhiroshima.html

3. The "Big Get" Don Hewitt and "60 Minutes" Didn't Get

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editor@aljazeerah.info & editor@ccun.org