America and Israel: The embedding of fear, and the conquest of hope.


(Oct 2 2004 ©pkj.ca 2004)




“We are all Israeli’s now.”

This phrase surfaced immediately after 911. Google it and find over a dozen pages of the sentence used in different forms from 911 to April 2004.

Why is there a conflating of America with Israel? And why does the leadership caste of both nations see themselves as innocent victims rather than as criminals getting some payback from those they have abused?

In the three years since 911 I have watched the United States unravel with fear. Terror alerts, colour codes, no-fly watch lists, and the threat of new attacks.

In reality the threat of new attacks comes from one place: The White House.

Audio or video tapes that come out from Ayman al Zawahiri and, even rarer these days, Osama bin Laden mean what exactly? Shouldn’t they have all the impact of a crank caller?

Three years ago Osama was blamed for 911 and since then Osama has done what, exactly? Made some threatening phone calls? Hardly a menace which would warrant James Bond being forced to gulp down his martini and leap into action.

The terror that has caught the United States by the throat comes directly from the White House.
Day after day of unremitting terror spews forth from the twisted mouths of Ashcroft, Ridge, Bush and Cheney.

John Kerry has caught the buzz too and now speaks of the terror lurking underground in America’s subways. That’s a whole new angle. Maybe he sees a hijacked L-Train slamming into the Sears Tower in Chicago? Kerry recently said that American police have to start becoming more like Israeli police; on the hunt for the terrorists.

Face it: Heart disease and strokes kill Americans every single day on a scale equal to about one 911 a week. Stop eating junk food, get off the couch, and you may actually save your life.

The fear factor, though, is a handy tool for controlling the population.

This isn’t the same America that fought at Lexington and Concord; on American soil against a foreign occupier. Those Americans could absorb the blows the British dished out. The British set whole towns on fire with flaming canon balls, but the Continental Army didn’t give up. The Minute Men didn’t rush home with duct tape and bottled water. They were too busy fighting the British to be waving flags and calling into AM talk radio stations. Paul Revere got on his horse to warn that the British were coming; he didn’t sit on his couch and wait for CNN to tell him that the terror threat level had gone up to orange.

However, this is the new America, and is similar to the strangle hold of fear which the far-right leadership in Israel uses to control that population.

911 was a godsend to the Likudniks and far-right religious parties in Israel. It was the perfect twinning of American and Israeli paranoia of Islam and the excuse needed to unleash the last three years of unremitting international horror, murder, torture, rape, and bloodshed; all in the name of “peace” and “democracy.”

Under the guise of the “War on Terror” Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is now free to drive hundreds of tanks into the poorest of the Palestinian refugee camps; with impunity his soldiers can flatten entire streets of houses, set ablaze olive orchards, smash aquifers and wells, and build a wall around entire Palestinian towns. IDF soldiers can shoot dead children sitting in their class rooms, and Jewish colonists can kill Palestinians with impunity.

In what could be seen in terms of a Grimms Fairy tale because it is so frightening, Israel has launched a massive armoured and aerial assault into Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza strip. The United States has “urged Israel to show restraint” in Gaza. This while just a few hundred miles away in Iraq, American warplanes and attack helicopters are savaging the towns of Fallujah, Samarra, and Sadr City. One can picture two giant ogres standing over helpless and broken cities. With blood dripping from their claws and from their teeth, one monster yells over to the other, “Smaller bites, smaller bites…” It’s fantastically disturbing.


The death cults of the far-right Christian Fundamentalists play directly into this paradigm of fear and paranoia. The Born Agains believe not only in the End Times, but also in their spiritual superiority. Unfortunately, it is also symptomatic of an inferiority complex. These death-culters are rubbing their palms in terrified glee to think that the Apocalypse is finally coming. And their support for Israel is linked directly to their twisted and ignorant End Times prophecies. They want Israel to grow. They want Israel to build the new temple where the Al Aqsa mosque currently stands. They want Armageddon to come.

This isn’t secret information, this is broadcast 24/7.

Not only is this kind of thinking extremely terrifying, it is just plain wrong. It is deliberate and wilful manipulation of biblical scripture.

How can a death-cult see any positive solution for the world’s current events? It can’t. In fact, it seeks to make them worse. Don’t forget that.

Fundamentalist Christianity is a doomsday death-cult which seeks the total destruction of the world.

Much like Hitler wrote of Gotterdammerung in his auto-biography Mein Kampf, the destruction of the world is at the centre of the Fundamentalist Christian’s belief.

So while the Born Agains smile and praise and thank god and “offer up prayers”, whether it be from the White House or on CNN from a hurricane ravaged trailer park, the bottom line is that these people want the total destruction of the world, along with every man, woman, and child in it who isn’t “saved.”

To conflate Israel with the United States is to drag the United States into both the Israeli justification game and the Christian Fundamentalists Armageddon game.

The Neo-conservatives led the United States into Iraq. In the run up to the war the State Department had prepared detailed plans for a transfer of power to immediately follow the collapse of the Saddam regime, but the Neo-Cons tossed those plans aside. Why?

Seymour Hersh says that the Neo Cons really believed that democracy would spring up over night in Iraq. Hersh says that the Neo Cons honestly thought that American soldiers would be welcomed with roses and kisses.

And oh, have things turned out somewhat differently.

Hersh’s view is one interpretation of the Neo-con’s agenda. Hersh contends that the Neo-cons were simply bright eyed ideologues who made a mistake. That belies the truth of who these characters are, and what their history tells us. We know that the neo-cons have been urging for the invasion of Iraq since 1998. In 1996 Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser all staunch Zionists, wrote the Clean Break document for Likudnik Benyamin Netanyahu. That paper paved the way for the Neo-Con agenda. Perle, Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz have all been under the spotlight recently as part of an FBI operation to uncover Israeli spies in the Pentagon. And all three men have previously been investigated for possible espionage ties to Israel. So, although Hersh’s hypothesis may be sound, it fails to add in the Straussian equation. Which means that plots go very deep, and nothing is as it seems on the surface. Therefore, I add my own theory for why the Neo-cons appeared to “bungle” the Iraq invasion: Any school child looking at the history of Iraq, which as “Iraq” only goes back to 1917, knows that the country has been a seething cauldron of anti-Imperialist hate since the British started bombing Fallujah and Najaf in the 1920s.

If the State Department plans for a transfer of civil authority had been implemented there was the possibility that the hand-over of power may have happened with hardly a bump. If General Shinseki’s estimate of two hundred thousand troops had been honoured there may have been enough ground power to establish that authority. However these two key ingredients to a possible swift and safe handover of power were quashed by the Neo-Cons.

As we know, the Americans rolled into Baghdad, chaos ensued, and has worsened ever since.

We also know that the Americans are building 14 permanent bases in Iraq. Permanent.

Kerry acknowledged that in the first Presidential debate.

And even though Kerry talks of “getting out of Iraq” it’s not going to happen. Because both Bush and Kerry said during that first debate that Israel has to be protected. That was the first time that I have heard either man refer directly to Israel as a reason for “staying the course” in Iraq. In the past I know they have referred obliquely to their “friends and allies in the region,” never have I heard them come out and say that America is in Iraq for Israel’s benefit.

Was this then the underlying motive of the neo-cons?

The enmiring of the United States in Iraq has a multitude of spin-off positives. Everyone, from ammunition makers to Halliburton, is making lots of money off the occupation; that’s a given.

But from a geo-political view point where is the sense in having a festering pot of hate where American soldiers get attacked over 80 times every day?

If the United States was to do the sensible thing they would at once retreat to the borders of Iraq, seal them tight and wait for rain. Leave the mess in the middle to burn itself out. Just make sure that no weapons or fighters can get into the country.

Is America going to do that? No. Is America going to pack up and go home? And leave Iraq blazing with hatred for America and Israel? No.

So, it’s a win-win for Israel isn’t it?

Ehud Barak recently said that the Iraq mess is unwinnable, and so it should be. For that would appear to have been the plan since day one.

America will never leave Iraq. It can’t. America can never leave.

Will America be able to take on Syria and Iran? Wait until next year. The Neo cons had long planned to strike at Syria and Iran, but Iran is huge, and if the Americans can’t contain Iraq, they will never contain Iran.

Syria is extremely doable. Syria is weak, and borders the Mediterranean. Squashing Syria allows Israel to breathe freely, and allows for constructing new pipelines directly to the coast.

What are the solutions? Israel is a failed state. What would happen to Israel if the United States pulled the plug on the billions of dollars in annual funding? Will it happen? Not while Israel has powerful lobby groups in the United States like AIPAC and JINSA. As well as 200 nuclear weapons, five submarines, and long range missiles. A couple of well placed nukes would irradiate the oil fields of Saudi-Arabia, Iraq, and the Gulf States for years. Long enough to destroy America. Israel has America by the short hairs.

What to do, what to do?

There is still hope. In Israel, as in the United States and around the world there are more and more people who aren’t buying into the fear-machine. Every day there are new voices being added to the growing chorus saying that they are no longer satisfied with, “More of the same.”

A point will come when our voices of reason will overcome the voices of hate, and then change will happen.

Any voice that says, “More of the same,” is simply wrong. More of the same has not been working. So, let’s try something new. Imagine.