Deception over Lockerbie

By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published by Dissident Voice, September 24th, 2009

By way of deception, shalt thou wage war.

– motto of Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Service

The scenes of flag-waving Libyans welcoming home Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man known as the Lockerbie bomber, further discredited Muslims in the minds of many. For those whose knowledge of the story is derived mainly from TV news, it appeared to be a callous celebration of mass murder, lending credence to the belief that “Islam” and “terrorism” are virtually synonymous. A closer look at the facts surrounding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, however, reveals a pattern of deception by those who have most to gain from making Muslims look bad.

The Crisis Provocateurs: Israel’s Sabotaging of U.S. Negotiations with “Evil” North Korea

By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published by Dissident Voice, September 1st, 2009

You confront evil, you do not negotiate with it.

– Natan Sharansky

While it may be a long way from Tel Aviv to Pyongyang, Israel bears considerable responsibility for North Korea’s increasingly fraught relations with the world. Indeed, through its small but influential support network in the United States, the self-styled Jewish state has played a rarely acknowledged but arguably decisive role in undermining progress towards a peaceful resolution of America’s longest running conflict. Though totally oblivious to this unwarranted intervention by a seemingly distant and irrelevant power, hundreds of millions of Koreans, Chinese and Japanese could have paid, and may yet pay, a terrible price for Israel’s covert meddling in East Asian politics.

The Source of the Economic Crisis: A Chicago State of Mind

By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in Media Monitors Network, June 26, 2009.

Worried about the global economic crisis? It’s all in your head, says a leading financial expert.

And that’s the problem, according to Jeff Gates, author of the
highly-regarded Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street, a sequel to The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism for the 21st Century, which was described by one reviewer as “the best book on economics for a generation,” and praised by Ralph Nader as “a Capitalist Manifesto, a blueprint for spreading the benefits of capitalism more equitably.”

In an interview with Japan’s Kansai Time Out magazine, Gates, a former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance (1980-87), identifies the source of the current economic crisis as a “shared mindset” into which we have been induced to put our faith, to the grave detriment of the majority — but to the immense benefit of a very few.

Two Artistic Responses to Gaza

Closed Zone, a very short animated film by an Academy Award-nominated Israeli filmmaker illustrates through the eyes of a Palestinian boy the inhumane incarceration of the people of Gaza by the Zionist state of Israel.

Inspired by the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, British playwright Carol Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children” is a moving eight minute play which dramatizes the tragedy of Palestine from a Jewish perspective as Jewish adults struggle to explain seven key historical moments to a Jewish girl.

Japan’s Embrace of Phoney War on Terror

By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in Antiwar.com, June 13, 2009.

In Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, Gavan McCormack demonstrates how Japan’s apparent nationalist turn owes much to the need to conceal the country’s increasing subordination to American imperial designs. However, a closer examination of the driving forces behind the US Empire in the 21st century suggests that both countries may be serving a quite different agenda.

Did Bibi Box Obama In?

Pat Buchanan, a genuine American conservative as opposed to the Likudnik neoconservatives, warns Barack Obama in a recent article that Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel is no friend of America and is not to be trusted on Iran. Buchanan reminds readers of Bibi’s role in persuading America to go to war against Saddam Hussein. In September 2002, The War Street Journal gave a platform to the Israeli hawk to push for war against Saddam Hussein. Netanyahu exhorted American readers:

“[I]f action is not taken now, we will all be threatened by a much greater peril … (for) no gas mask and no vaccine can protect against nuclear weapons.”

Is Netanyahu Waging War By Way of Deception?

Jeff Gates, the author of Guilt By Association: How Deceit and Self-Deception Took America to War, warns in his latest article that another 9/11 style terrorist attack may be in the offing. But the perpetrators of such an attack may not be “the usual suspects,” Islamic terrorists. Gates writes:

“Israeli behavior suggests that the pre-staging for a terrorist attack may be underway to advance indirectly what Tel Aviv cannot achieve directly.”

Regarding the recent meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who coined the phrase “war on terrorism,” and Barack Obama, whom James Petras described as “America’s First Jewish President,” Gates says,

“If President Obama in any way links the two-state solution to concessions on Iran, he is inviting a terrorist attack. If history is any guide, that attack will be accompanied by an orgy of evidence implicating Hezbollah, with Iran the plausible Evil Doer.”

Confronting Zionism Is The Moral Issue of Our Time

So says Prof. James Petras, the author of three great books on Zionist power in the United States, in this interview by George Kenney at Electric Politics. Here’s Kenney’s introduction:

“In the UK press one frequently finds tough criticism of Israel. See, for example, this recent essay by Mark Steel in the Independent, a thoroughly mainstream UK paper. One cannot imagine a similar essay appearing in the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, or indeed any other major American newspaper. Why not? Perhaps more taboo than mentioning the ‘Israel Lobby,’ is asking what’s behind it, what makes it different than the tobacco lobby, the NRA, or the AARP? To get at this vexing issue I turned to an extraordinarily distinguished leftist academic, Dr. James Petras. Jim is one of the very, very few people that I know of who reasons sensibly about the problem of Zionist influence and who isn’t afraid to speak out.”