- Introduction
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- Because of the unconditional support of the entire political
class in the US, from the White House to Congress, including both Parties,
incoming and outgoing elected officials and all the principle print and
electronic mass media, the Israeli Government feels no compunction
in publicly proclaiming a detailed and graphic account of its policy of mass
extermination of the population of Gaza.
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- Israel's sustained and comprehensive bombing campaign
of every aspect of governance, civic institutions and society is directed
toward destroying civilized life in Gaza. Israel's totalitarian vision
is driven by the practice of a permanent purge of Arab Palestine informed
by Zionism, an ethno-racist ideology, promulgated by the Jewish state and
justified, enforced and pursued by its organized backers in the United
States.
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- The facts of Israeli extermination have become known: In
the first six days of round the clock terror bombing of major and
minor populations centers, the Jewish State has murdered and seriously
maimed over 2,500 people, mostly dismembered and burned in the open ovens
of missile fire. Scores of children and women have been slaughtered as
well as defenseless civilians and officials.
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- They have sealed off all access to Gaza and declared
it a military, free fire zone, while expanding their target to include
the entire population of 1.5 millions semi-starved prisoners. According
to the Boston Globe (December 30, 2008): Israeli military
officials said their target lists have expanded to include the vast
support network on which the Islamist movement relies to stay in power
"we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything
is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel (my
emphasis)". A top Israeli in its secret police apparatus is quoted
saying, "Hamas' civilian infrastructure is a very sensitive
target" (ibid). What the Israeli Jewish politicians and military
planners designate as "Hamas" is the entire social service network,
the entire government and the vast majority of economic activity, embracing
almost the entire 1.5 million imprisoned residents of Gaza.
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- Israel's 'target' list thus involves the 'total population',
using the totality of its non-nuclear weaponry and for an unlimited time
period (until the 'bitter end' according to the Israeli Prime Minister).
Israel's defense ministry spokesman has emphatically reiterated the Jewish's
state's totalitarian war concept emphasizing the targeting of civilians: "Hamas
has used ostensibly civilian operations as a cover for military activities.
Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target."
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- Like all totalitarians in the past, the Jewish state
boasts of having systematically pre-planned the extermination campaign
months in advance up to and including the precise hour and
day of the bombing to coincide with inflicting the maximum murder of
civilians: The rockets and bombs fell as children were leaving school,
as graduating police cadets were receiving their diplomas and as frantic
mothers ran out from their homes to find their sons and daughters.
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- The mass military extermination campaign was a follow
up of its non-stop total economic embargo and unremitting selective assassination
campaign of the previous two years: Both were designed to purge Palestine
of its Arab population, first via mass hunger, disease, humiliation and
violent intimidation and the proxy power grab by the PLO Quislings under
Zionist puppet Abbas. When they discovered that mass hunger and selective
Israeli murder only strengthened the population's links to its democratically
elected government and the resolve of the Hamas government to resist Israel,
the Israeli regimes unleashed its entire arsenal of weapons, including
its new 'American gifts' up-to-date 1000 pound 'bunker buster' bombs and
high tech missiles to incinerate large numbers of human beings within their
deadly radius and to obliterate Palestinian civilization.
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- Moving directly from its totalitarian vision to its military
blueprint to the savaging of Palestinian population centers, the Jewish
state destroyed the principle university with over 18,000 students (mostly
women), mosques, pharmacies, electrical and water lines, power stations,
fishing villages, fishing boats and the little fishing port that provided
a meager supply of fish for the starving population. They destroyed roads,
transport facilities, food warehouses, science buildings, small factories,
shops and apartments. They destroyed a women's dormitory at the university.
In the words of the Israel leader: "because everything is connected
to everything" it is necessary to destroy each and every facet
of life, which allows humans to exist with some dignity and independence.
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- The Israeli totalitarian leaders knew with confidence
that they could act and they could kill with impunity, locally and
before the entire world, because of the influence of the USZionist Power Configuration
in and over the US White House and Congress. They knew they had the full
backing of all the major Israeli political parties (Right, Left and Center),
trade unions, mass media and especially public opinion. Israeli state terror
is backed by 81% of Jewish Israelis according to a poll taken by Israel's
Channel 10 (Financial Times December 30, 2008). Israeli totalitarian
violence and extermination of Palestinians is extremely popular among the
Jewish electorate, especially in raising support for the Labor Party candidate
MinisterEhud Barak. They knew they would 'succeed' with virtually no casualties
because they bombed, burned and dismembered a defenseless population totally
lacking the minimum means to defend themselves from F16 bombers, helicopter
gun ships and missile assaults. The vile depravity of the assault on the
defenseless population is matched by the utter cowardice of the Israeli
military command and its cheering bloodthirsty public ensconced behind
their aerial monopoly. They suffered no threats of aerial retaliation,
no wounded or dead pilots, helicopter gunners, as wave after wave swept
in and over a defenseless imprisoned population in a crowded and besieged
ghetto.
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- Hundreds of tanks and armored carriers are prepared to
invade once the cities and towns have been leveled, once the population
is too weakened by starvation to resist, once the leaders and fighters
have been murdered and the normal Palestinian institutions of law and order
have been pulverized, making way for the corrupt thuggish collaborators
of the so-called Palestinian Authoritythen and only then, will the Israeli
General staff risk the skin of a precious Jewish 'soldier' and risk the
anxiety and worry of their kin in Israel and the US.
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- Overseas Allies: The Presidents of the Major American
Jewish Organizations (PMAJO)
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- From the moment that the Israeli Government decided it
would destroy the newly elected Hamas government and punish the democratic
electorate of Gaza with starvation and murder, the entire Zionist Power Configuration
(ZPC) in the US, including the PMAJO, pulled all stops in implementing
the Israeli policy. The PMAJO encompasses the fifty-two Jewish organizations
with the largest membership, with the greatest financial clout and the
most influential backers. The most prominent lobbyist within the PMAJO
is AIPAC, which has over 100,000 members and 150 full-time operatives in
Washington actively pressuring the US Congress, the White House and all
administrative agencies whose policies may relate to the interests of the
State of Israel. However Israeli political extends far beyond its non-governmental
agencies. Over two score legislators in the Congress and over a dozen senators
are committed Zionists who automatically back Israel's policies and push
for US funding and armaments for its military machine. Top officials in
key administrative positions, in Treasury, Commerce and the National Security
Council, senior functionaries in the Pentagon and top advisers on Middle
East affairs are also life-long, fanatically committed Zionists, who consistently
and unreservedly back the policies of the State of Israel.
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- Equally important, the majority of the largest film,
print and electronic media are owned or deeply influenced by Jewish-Zionist
media moguls who are committed to slanting the 'news' in favor of Israel.
The composition and influence of the ZPC is central to understanding
three main characteristics of Israel's power: (1) Israel can commit what
leading United Nations and international human rights experts have defined
as 'crimes against humanity' with total impunity; (2) Israel can secure
an unlimited supply of the most technologically advanced and destructive
weapons and use them without limit on a civilian population in violation
of even US Congressional restrictions and (3) scores of almost unanimous
United Nations condemnations of the construction of genocidal apartheid
barriers against a native population, starvation embargoes and the current
extermination campaign in Gaza are always vetoed by the US representative.
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- Many critics of Israel's genocide in Gaza also condemn
what they call 'the complicity' of Washington or 'the United States' without clearly
identifying the actual socio-political forces influencing policy-makers
or the 'dual' political loyalties and identities of the 'American' politicians
who have long-standing and deep allegiances to Israel. As a consequence,
most critics fail to counter, protest or even identify the ideology and
politics of the organized power configurations which define US complicity
with Israel, who intimidate potential critics, who write and mouth the
pro-Israel editorials in the mass media and who filter out any criticism,
any trutheven when Israel engages in sustained bloody extermination campaigns.
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- The ZPC and the Israeli War of Extermination in Gaza
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- The ZPC played a major role in all stages of Israel's
extermination campaign against Gaza including a sustained propaganda effort.
The ZPC orchestrated a massive successful campaign through the extensive
network of American mass media, which it controls and influences. It fabricated
an image of the Hamas administration in Gaza as a terrorist organization,
which allegedly seized power through violence totally denying its
rise to power through internationally supervised, democratic elections
and its defense of its electoral mandate against a US-Israeli backed PLO
military takeover. The entire Zionist Jewish leadership backed Israel's
land grabs, its ghetto wall around Palestinians, the hundreds of road blocks,
the Jewish settlers violently taking over Palestinian homes in the West
Bank and East Jerusalem and the criminal, genocidal Israeli economic embargo
on Gaza designed to systematically starve the Palestinians into submission.
Throughout the two years of this Israeli extermination campaign, American
Zionists played a major role in leading the servile US government at home
and abroad in backing each totalitarian measure: The vast majority of local
synagogues became bully-pulpits defending the starvation and degradation
of 1.5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza caged on all sides by deadly
force and the 'walling off' into economically and socially devastating
cantons of the 4.5 million West Bank Palestinian population under foreign
occupation.
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-
- The US Congress shamelessly followed the Zionist lead,
backing every single criminal measure taken by the State of Israel and
approving dozens of resolutions, which in most cases were entirely written
by AIPAC lobbyists acting as unregistered agents of the Israeli
government (contrary to US federal statute, which requires foreign agents
and lobbyists to be registered as such). Israel's demands for the most
up-to-date US warplanes, including F-16s, Apache helicopter gun ships,
and 1,000 pound bombs were secured by dint of effort of the AIPAC lobbyists
and their clients in the US Congress. In other words, the American ZPC created
the ideological cover and military instruments for
Israel's 'total war' against the defenseless Palestinian population. Equally
important, prominent Zionist leaders in the US Congress and members of
the foreign policy establishment blocked or vetoed any international criticism
of Israel securing its impunity and immunity from any of the Congressional
sanctions usually enacted against criminal states. In other words, Israeli
policy makers operated with the knowledge that there would be no negative
economic, diplomatic and military repercussions to their launching the
planned Gaza extermination campaign because they knew, in advance, that
'their people' were in total control of US Middle East policy to the extent
of actually repeating verbatim each and every propaganda lie in defense
of Israel's total war against the entire population of Gaza.
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- In Defense of Israel's War of Extermination
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- The Zionist-controlled US print media, in particular
the New York Times and the Washington Post, systematically
fabricated an account that fit perfectly with Israel's official line defending
its massive assault on Gaza: Omitting any historical account of the hundreds
of Israeli armed incursions and 'targeted' assassinations of Palestinian
leaders and officials (even in their own homes) which repeatedly violated
the 'cease fire' agreed by Hamas and provoked its retaliation
in self-defense of its people; omitting the years of an Israeli enforced
starvation embargo of food and essentials that threatened the lives of
1.5 million Palestinians and led to the desperate efforts of the elected
Hamas leadership to secure supplies for the people's survival via tunnels
across the Egyptian border and through missile attacks against Israel to
pressure the Jewish state to negotiate an end of the criminal blockade.
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- The Conference of Presidents of the Major American Jewish
Organizations, and the vast majority of Jewish communal groups and congregations,
gave enthusiastic and unanimous support to Israel's total war, its extermination
campaign against the captive Palestinian population of Gaza. Even as images
and reports of the massive destruction, killing and wounding of over 2,500
defenseless Palestinians filtered in the mass media, not a single major Jewish
organization broke ranks; only individuals and small groups protested.
All the 'Majors' persisted in the politics of the Big Lie: the destruction
of hospitals, mosques, universities, roads, apartments, pharmacies and
fishing ports were all labeled 'Hamas targets'. The systematic all-out
assault by uncontested helicopter gunships against 1.5 millions civilians
was erased by tendentious accounts of Hamas' homemade missiles falling
ineffectively near Israeli towns.
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- A close reading of the most important propaganda organ
of the PMAJO, The Daily Alert (TDA), during the first 5 days of Israel's
assault, reveals the propaganda tack taken by the leadership of the pro-Israel
power configuration. TDA systematically worked to achieve the
following:
-
- 1.
- Exaggerate the threats to Israel by the Palestinian missiles
from Gaza, citing 4 Israeli deaths, while omitting any mention of the 2,500
Palestinian dead and wounded and the total destruction of their economy
and living conditions (without safe water, electricity, food, cooking fuel,
medicine and heat in the winter)
-
- 2.
- Promote Israel's military assault as 'defensive', directed
at eliminating Hamas rocket attacks while omitting mention of Israel's
clearly stated purpose of destroying all civil organizations, social welfare
agencies, educational facilities, medical clinics and public security institutions
connected in any way with the elected Hamas government and any auxiliary
agencies.
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- 3.
- Cite select statement from Israel's allies and clients
(Washington, the US media, Germany and the UK) blaming Hamas for the conflict without
mentioning the vast majority of countries in the United Nations General
Assembly condemning Israel's brutality.
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- 4.
- Reproduce Israeli slanders against any and all international
human rights leaders and organizations that condemn the Jewish state's
policy of genocide against the native Palestinians. In this regard, TDA is
the foremost 'genocide denier' in the United States and, perhaps outside
of Israel, in the world.
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- 5.
- Repeatedly cite Israeli political and military leaders'
claims of acting 'with restraint', 'safeguarding civilians', and 'targeting
military objectives', even in the face of reports and images of mass civilian
destruction and loss of life documented in the vast majority of (non-US)
Western media.
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- 6.
- Defend every Israeli bombing mission, every day, every
hour, of every building, every home, and every economic, religious and
educational institution in Gaza as 'defensive' or a 'reprisal', all the
while quoting some of the most notorious, unconditional, perennial apologists
of Israeli violence as if they were unbiased intellectuals, including Benny
'Nuke Tehran' Morris, Marty Peretz and Amos Oz
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- 7.
- The Daily Alert quotes US writers, journalists and
editors who praise and defend Israel's 'total war' without identifying
their long-standing affiliation and identification with Zionist organizations,
giving the false image of a wide spectrum of opinion behind the assault.
Never has even the most moderate Jewish or Gentile critic of Israel's massive
extermination campaign appeared in any issues of The Daily Alert.
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- The principle American Jewish organizations have bombarded
the US Congress, influencing, intimidating and purchasing the craven so-called
'representatives' of the American people, the media and public notables
with lies in defense of Israel's total war to exterminate a people. Their
public, brazen, open complicity in genocide can be considered
crime against humanity: The willful promotion of acts of a state designed to
destroy an entire people.
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- And yet these willing accomplices, these 'willing executioners'
of state mass murder go uncontested within the US political class. One
of their leading mouthpieces in the incoming Obama Administration, Chief
Presidential Adviser David Axelrod, even cites an Obama campaign speech
defending Israeli assaults on the people of Gaza.
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- Israel arrogantly repudiates all calls to end this mass
murder, because Israel knows that 'its people' are still in control of
US policy toward the Middle East and will use their power in the new president's
administration to block any condemnation of this crime.
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- To date the entire human rights and anti-war movements
have failed to even mention, let along challenge, the most powerful propaganda
and political organizations, which influence US policy and manipulate the
mass media in favor of Israel's extermination campaign. They will play
no restraining role on Israel's totalitarian policies as long as its principle
US backers are free to lie, manipulate and defend each and every crime.
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- There is little hope for an independent US Congressional
policy as long as Israel's war of extermination in Gaza can be defended
by the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (and Zionist zealot)
Congressman Howard Berman in the following terms: "Israel
has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds
of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week. No government
in world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected to this kind
of indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a terribly
tragedy and the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas." Thus
Congressman Berman cynically omits the 2 years of Israel's embargo, the
daily 'targeted' assassinations of Palestinians, the 'targeted' missile
attacks against civilians, the land, sea and air blockades and the blatant
'targeted' destruction of the infrastructure of Gaza. No government, indeed
a democratically elected Islamist government, can stand by while its people
are starved and murdered into submission. But according to the respected
Congressmen Bermans of the world,only the lives of Jews matter, not the
growing thousands of murdered, dismembered and mutilated citizens of Gaza
they do not count as people!
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- What is to be Done
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- Israel's crimes against humanity demand a public response:
social action, which will force it to cease and desist from its campaign
to exterminate the people of Gaza. Because the Jewish state has assaulted
a vast array of Palestinian social institutions, which resonate with those
in our own society, we can and should mobilize them to condemn and boycott
their counterparts in Israel:
-
- 1.
- We should urge the entire academic community to
denounce Israel's bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza and the
total destruction of all of its science facilities. An organized boycott
of Israeli universities and all academic exchanges, especially scientific,
should become university policy throughout the country. Special attention
should be paid to the 450 US university presidents, who in the recent past,
denounced a call by British academics for a boycott and who remain silent
and complicit in the face of Israel's total physical annihilation of all
ten faculties for 20,000 Palestinian university students
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- 2.
- All American health workers, doctors, nurses, technicians,
should organize and denounce Israel's medical embargo against the 1.5 million
Palestinians crowded into the Gaza Strip. They must condemn Israel's bombardment
of Gaza's Children's Hospital, the neighborhood pharmacies and the attacks
on any transport of those critically wounded Palestinian victims of its
aerial and missile attacks. Medical personnel should raise the fundamental
ethical issues regarding the collaboration of US medical personnel and
programs with the Jewish State's 'total war' policies of extermination.
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- 3.
- All citizens should demand the end of all US military
aid to Israel, especially F-16 fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters,
missiles, 1000 pound 'bunker buster' bombs used by the Israeli armed forces
on the civilian infrastructure of Gaza and the murder and maiming of over
2,500 Palestinians, civilians, civil servants, police and national militia.
In pursuit of a cutoff of US military aid to Israel, every effort should
be made to target and denounce the most forceful, aggressive and successful
Zionist advocates and lobbyists who influence the elected members of the
US Congress and White House on foreign military aid budgets. No progress
in ending US military aid for Israel's ethnic cleansing will succeed unless
the peace movement and others appalled by Israel's mass murder tackles
the Zionist lobby head on. This includes boycotts, rebuttals and demonstrations
against the AIPAC, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and the other 50 leading
American Jewish organizations, which initiate and secure US governmental
endorsement of Israel's extermination policies.
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- 4.
- US religious institutions should forcefully denounce
Israel's crimes against humanity, including its demolition of 5 mosques,
uniting all faiths (Christian, Moslem, Buddhist) and especially reaching
out to the tiny minority of rabbis and observant Jews willing to forthrightly
denounce the totalitarian practices of the Israeli state.
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- 5.
- Port and long shore workers, sailors and other maritime
workers and officials should boycott the handling of all trade with
Israel and denounce its Navy's violent illegal assault, in international
waters, of civilian fishing boats and vessels carrying humanitarian aid
to Gaza. No ships carrying Israeli products should be loaded or unloaded
as long as Israel maintains its criminal military blockade of the port
facilities of Gaza.
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- 6.
- Tens of millions of US citizens subject to the one-sided
pro-Israel bias of the electronic and print media, the lop-sided presentations
of Zionist 'op-ed' writers, 'news' reports and the self-styled Middle East
experts, should demand equal time, coverage and reportage for non-Zionist
specialists, analysts and commentators. We should demand the end of euphemisms
and fabrications, which convert victims into aggressors and exterminators
into victims.
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- 7.
- We should wage a battle of ideas everywhere (in
every public forum) against the efforts by the Zionist Power Configuration
to monopolize discussion over the Israeli policy of genocide, to censor,
intimidate and slander critics of Israeli apartheid as UN General
Assembly President Manuel d'Escoto so aptly calls Israel's Ghetto Wall
surrounding Palestinian villages. The outpouring of public protest over
Israel's war of extermination is an enormous step forward in countering the
Zionist monopoly of the mass media and encouraging the tens of millions
of Americans who clearly recognize and privately despise Israel's crimes
against humanity and resent the local Zionist elite's thuggery against
those who speak out. Mass pressure on elected representative may sway some
to reconsider their abject servility to their Zionist 'contributors' and
their 'Israel First' Congressional colleagues.
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- 8.
- A patriotic nationwide campaign should demand that
the Israel lobby, especially AIPAC, come clean and register as a foreign
agent of the State of Israel. This might undermine the Lobby's appeal to
American Jews, reduce its influence over Congress and open up judicial
processes and investigations over its abuse of tax-exemptions, money-laundering
and lead to revelations over its treasonous procurement of confidential
US state documents for a foreign power. There is a powerful political and
legal basis for such a denial of the 'Lobby's' tax-exempt status and legality,
apart from the transparent and overwhelming evidence that all Zionist organizations
act as transmission belts for Israeli state policies: In the early 1950's up
to 1963, the forerunner of AIPAC was obligated to register as a foreign
agent of the State of Israel. More recently, an Israeli prosecutor presented
evidence that the Israeli-Jewish Agency and its US counterparts were laundering
billions of dollars especially for the funding of Israeli colonial settlements
on occupied Palestinian land, condemned as illegal under international
law. Congressional hearings, law suits and further published research would
reveal the role of the Lobby as a Fifth Column for the State of Israel
against the interest of the people of the United States.
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- Until we neutralize the pervasive power of the Zionist
Power Configuration in all of its manifestations in American public
and civic life and its deep penetration of American legislative and
executive offices, we will fall short of preventing Israel from receiving
the arms, funding and political backing to sustain its wars of ethnic extermination.
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- When told that the great majority of the world's people
are sickened and incensed by Israel's mass murder of the citizens of Gaza,
we can easily imagine the contemptuous dismissal by Israel's top leaders,
paraphrasing Joseph Stalin: How many bombers, missiles, fighter planes
and powerful lobbies do they (the outraged people of the world) have?
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- James Petras is the author of Zionism, Militarism
and the Decline of US Power, Clarity Press 2008.
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