By: Israel Shamir, August 17, 2010
1. Crying Wolf
Information Clearing House" -- So many people have circulated so many warnings of the forthcoming US-Israeli attack on Iran that it is hard to ignore them. A piece written by a few ex-spooks warning of a new round of war is one of these messages. In our view, spooks, ex or not, are not the most reliable people, and the CIA is not the best reference. However, this item fits with the dire predictions of Fidel Castro. It fits with the recent heating up of the Gaza and Lebanon borders. It fits with the relocation of some American warships and accompanying Israeli U-boats to the shores of Iran. Rumours of Israeli advance forces being placed in Azerbaijan and even Saudi Arabia are used as supportive evidence. The Lobby's agents relentlessly call for war. They blackmail America, saying: if Obama will not attack, Netanyahu will, and the US will anyway be forced to fight. This is the bottom line of Jeffrey Goldberg’s long piece in the Atlantic magazine.

On the other hand, we have heard the cry "wolf" so many times from so many people that now we are perfectly blasé. For quite a few years now, hardly a month has gone by without a serious warning of an impending attack on Iran.

Though these warnings are usually sounded by friends, they do serve the enemy as well.

They amount to psychological pressure on Iran. For this reason alone I am ready to bet: there will be no attack on Iran. Israel has never gone to war without its centre-left parties in the government. So as long as Israeli government includes only right and far-right parties, no war is foreseeable. It would be like driving without insurance. ( Barak’s Labour Party is too weak to count. If Livni should join the government – run for cover, but not until then.)

I am amazed by the strong nerves of President Ahmadinejad: a weaker person in his place might flinch and pre-empt the imminent attack. He does not – apparently he thinks that the jaw-jaw is not likely to become war-war. This is also the view of the well-informed Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram: The current escalation of US and Israeli sabre-rattling against Iran is probably no more than that, writes Amani Maged.

The main reason: there is no love lost between Obama and Netanyahu. They do
not trust one other. In Israel there is a hidden fear that should Netanyahu follow Goldberg’s advice, the US president will not rush in to save and defend it. Obama certainly did not promise he would help in case of Israeli aggression; and he has no knee-jerk instinct to defend Tel Aviv come what may. 90% of Israeli Jews dislike him; he is hated by right-wing American Jews – “friends of Israel.” A year ago, after his Cairo speech, there was a universal feeling that Obama’s administration will not chop wood and draw water for Israel.

Now this illusion of America’s independence is gone. Israelis are notorious for their “kiss and tell” indiscretion (“larutz lesaper lehevre”, in Hebrew). A confidante of Netanyahu, Ari Shavit, has told us that “the Israeli leader applied hidden pressure to the American leader,” which made him fall to his knees and beg for mercy. The name of the “hidden pressure” could be a Jewish billionaire from Chicago, one Lester Crown, who “made Obama” and supposedly retains full control over his creature, or alternatively , another Jewish Chicagoan named Marty Nesbitt. However, even if the US President was forced by his Jewish benefactors to do a volte-face, he certainly bears a grudge for this humiliating turn.

The worst-case scenario as seen from Israel unrolls as follows: Netanyahu
mistakes the vague remarks of Obama for an iron-clad promise, and launches an attack. Then Obama sits tight while Israel bleeds under the Iranian response. Israelis remember that this was the US tactic for dealing with Saddam Hussein: this best friend of America and recipient of US military aid was led to believe that Washington would permit the takeover of Kuwait.

The most likely interpretation for all the sabre-rattling is that Israelis plan yet another invasion of Lebanon, while hoping that Iran will be scared into immobility by the threat of an all-out war. Like all previous invasions of Lebanon, this would be a great crime and a huge mistake, but hardly an apocalyptic event.

Indeed, to all appearances it is a re-run of 2006, when predictions of an
American attack on Iran were also running high, but eventually Bush got cold feet and the Israeli army was roundly defeated in the mountain valleys of South Lebanon.

2. If It Comes
However, if this optimistic prognosis goes the way of some weather broadcasts,
and instead of a sunny day with rainy spells we get a full-blown storm, the whole fabric of the Middle East will unravel. This juggernaut will be unstoppable. After Iran, Syria will fall. After Syria, Saudi Arabia. It will be the classic domino game: Iran rejoiced when Iraq fell.
Saudis wish Iran to fall. Israel wants to break Saudi Arabia to pieces, and then the rest of the Middle East. This is inscribed in their Clean Break paper and its source, OdedYinon’s paper , which they follow religiously.

If Saudis have too poor a memory, let us remind them: A few months after 9/11, Rand Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec briefed Richard Perle’s Defence Policy Board, calling upon the US to break up Saudi Arabia. Its oil fields should be targeted and its financial assets seized, advised this neocon.

I wrote back then, in an essay appropriately called Take your Money and Run:
“The riches of the Arabian Peninsula hoodwink the Jews, being tantalisingly within the reach of IDF Merkaba tanks. They have too many good reasons to undo Saudi Arabia.

- Saudis have too much money, too much oil and too few friends.
Elimination of all Saudi financial assets will invigorate the flabby Dow Jones average and strengthen the weakened dollar. This prosperous and well-armed country must be reduced before Israel takes its most important step, the seizure and destruction of the beautiful Umayyad Mosques in Jerusalem.”

With the destruction of Iran, the countdown for the takeover of Saudi Arabia would begin. In the words of a neocon: “Everyone wants to take out Tehran. But a real mensch wants to take out ar-Riyadh”. Provided that no attack on Iran is possible without Saudi connivance, the “irony of history” will be complete. The enemies of Israel will be taken out one after another, each with help of the next still
unsuspecting victim.

3. The Second Shoe

But an attack on Lebanon is not a sure thing, and that will not be the end of the story, predicts one of the best experts, David Hirst, an old Eastern hand and a brilliant British journalist, the like of Robert Fisk and Patrick Seale. He had written arguably the best book ever about Palestine/Israel called The Gun and the Olive Branch years ago, and ever since then I have been waiting for this second book as one waits for the second shoe to drop. Now he has delivered it and unravelled all the mysteries of this extremely confusing country where alliances do not last, and expectations come to nought.

If you read one book a year, this year read Beware of Small States by David Hirst, and you’ll understand why Israeli invasions of Lebanon always have been and always will be an unmitigated disaster for all parties involved. Lebanon is small, but the advice of Bismarck, “Do not ever invade it” (he meant Russia), is perfectly applicable to it as well.

Hirst predicts that the next, the Seventh Arab-Israeli War, will begin like a second round of 2006 (by an Israeli attack on Lebanon), but that this war will spread to Syria and Gaza. It will be a missile war, like 2006 written large. Afterwards, it will
likely spread over all of the Middle East, until the Zionist aggression
is repulsed. Hirst predicts: “…a seemingly interminable [Israeli – Arab] conflict which began with the sword the sword will end, but it may have to administer
many a bloody and painful, yet inconclusive blow before it finally does
so”.

4. Give them war
However small the chances for all-out war, we should not sit by, wail and wait
for the enemy to act. But fear of war is not the best adviser. If they want war, give them war. Attack the chief warmonger, and we know who that is. Name him ‘the Lobby’ with Mearsheimer, or the ‘Zionist Power Configuration’ with Petras, or ‘Masters of Discourse’ as this writer or whatever. They are calling the shots, let them foot the bill. For years there was a discussion whether the Dog (American imperialism) wags the tail (Israel Lobby) or other way around. Now the debate is over. “This is not a case of the Tail wagging the Dog,” quipped Anatole Lieven, “but of the Tail wagging the unfortunate Dog around the room and banging its head against the ceiling”.

What is the secret of its success? It is alchemy, of sorts. Not in vain did the Jews stand at the cradle of alchemy. However, the alchemists of old tried to transmute base metals into gold. The modern alchemists of the Lobby transmute the real gold of your labour into Fools Gold and pay others with it. Instead of bubbling retorts and overflowing alembics, they use shares, bonds, loans, mortgages, derivatives and other instruments by which Goldman-Sachs and Madoff and hundreds of other banksters rob you of your livelihood. This alchemy is nothing more than
counterfeiting. They borrow a hundred dollars from you, turn it into a
hundred thousand dollars debt and force the Treasury (staffed by their
own guys) to repay the debt in full at your expense.

Deal with them, and you will save yourselves. As a bonus, you’ll save the world, too. It is them, not the Iranians or Iraqis, you Americans should fight. The great American, Eugene Debs has said: “If you are given weapons, do not use them against far-away strangers. Turn them against your true enemy at home. Expropriate the expropriators, rob the robbers.”

5. Alchemical Wedding

The Alchemist’s exploits do not end with transmuting your labour into Fools Gold for others and real gold for himself. Miraculously the Alchemist weds the most reactionary forces to the most enlightened liberals in a mock-alchemical marriage. The real thing is a mystical union of King and Queen, of Logos and Soul, of Masculine and Feminine. The Lobby's version is a Fools wedding.

Their King is the Lobby’s new ally : the Tea-Party mob of pseudo-right Republicans with an admixture of European fascists like Wilders. These men and women, united by their hatred of Islam, of communists, of China and Russia, have recently sworn obedience to Israel and supported an attack on Iran. This is a new Far Right that chooses to make friends with Jews, just like Mussolini and Franco did.

For the feminine soulful element, the wonderful alchemists of the Lobby chose gender activists. Not the Queen, but a Drag Queen. They are as destructive as fascists. Remember, the attack on Afghanistan was preceded by a verbal barrage from the gender activists, as I wrote at the time. They justified the forthcoming slaughter and occupation by saying that “Afghani men mistreat their women and gays”. The horrors of burka were enlarged upon endlessly.

It is repeated now. Here are three most recent headlines on Iran from the Guardian, the best paper of the moderate Left: - Iranian facing stoning speaks: 'It's because I'm a woman' ; - When adultery means death, - Iran set to execute 18-year-old on false charge of sodomy It is a replay of the treatment they gave to the Soviet communism. On the right, President Reagan wished to bomb Moscow; the pseudo-left prepared the ground by condemning the Soviets for their lack of democracy and treatment of dissidents and Jews. What a wonderful division of labour: the pseudo Right calls to kill the Bolshies or the gooks, the false Left (now gender activists) justifies the killing.

Gender activists are not men and women with certain sexual preferences. We do not care about people’s private lives. Let it remain private. Gender
activists use gender as their key factor. It is not woman but feminists. It is not practitioners of same-sex relations but gay-activists, or Gay International of Joseph Massad.

Why gender activism became so important in the war against Islam (and with
the Church)? Why this media-promoted obsession with gender activism?
This is not due to compassion. They are chosen and protected because, by
the brazenness of their actions, they mock the sanctity of marriage in
general, and ultimately that of archetypical sacred marriage, of the
union of Heaven and Earth in order to undermine the sacral fabric of the
world. They help to profane the world, to remove the last vestiges of
holiness, and that is the true ultimate goal of the Masters of
Discourse.

In the name of profanation the Judeo-Americans go to fight the pious puritans of Persia and the warrior monks of Lebanon. For them, Israel should remain the only island of holiness upon the profaned earth. The Masters could overlook Iranian nuclear reactors, like they overlooked the Pakistani bomb. It is the Iranian faith-based society, Iranians’ belief in God they can’t tolerate. For such a society is impervious to the rot they spread.

Israel Shamir, A native of Novosibirsk , Siberia, he moved to Israel in 1969, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war. After the war, he turned to journalism and writing. In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and
moved to London . In 1977-79 he lived in Japan . After returning to
Israel in 1980, Shamir wrote for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, and was the Knesset spokesman for the Israel Socialist Party. Shamir,is a leading Russian Israeli writer, is a champion of the "One Man, One Vote, One State" solution seeking to unite Palestine & Israel in one democratic state. Shamir's work and that of his contributors speaks to the aspirations of both the Israelis and the Palestinians seeking an end to the bloodshed, true democracy and lasting peace. www.israelshamir.net