Iran Affairs

Iran gays executed?

Is the "Gay Executions in Iran" story being ginned up for political purposes?

There's been a lot of talk about Ahmadinejad's statement about how Iran supposedly "doesn't have gays like you do" - which of course is ridiculous but which also totally distracts from the substance of his speech in which he proclaimed that Iran was not going to attack anyone including Israel, and that he didn't deny the holocaust as often claimed but only questioned why the Palestinians had to suffer for it.

And the talk about gays in Iran inevitably returns to the old chestnut about how "two youths were executied in Iran for being gay."

But regarding the allegation of the "gay executions" in Iran, I recommend some reading since there is a lot more to it:

The Washington Blade's report:

It appears that reports claiming the boys were executed for being gay originated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran...“It was not a gay case,” said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, taking issue with the Human Rights Campaign’s statement that was quick to condemn the execution as anti-gay.

Richard Kim's investigation into the origin and distribution of the allegation about gays being executed in Iran, as published in the Nation magazine entitled Witness to an Execution:

But was the story accurate? And what steps did organizations take either to confirm its veracity or to gauge what effects their campaign might have in Iran? It appears that the answer to the second question is very little. . .As for the accuracy of the story itself, the Outrage! press release that incited this storm claims that neither the original ISNA story nor the first NCRI report on the incident mentions sexual assault. But it appears that Outrage! was working from a faulty translation.

Also, Rostam Pourzal's recent article "Let's Not Trivialize Discrimination in Iran" published by Monthly Review.

And finally, as reported by the Gay City News (.pdf):

For eight months, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has researched a report on abuses based on sexual orientation and gender identity in Iran, interviewing dozens in Iran and the diaspora, trying to separate fact from rhetoric and rumor. As a prominent Iranian dissident said last week, 'We need cases!' documentation, not speculation. When pictures of two young men hanged in the Iranian city of Mashhad circulated in July 2005, revulsion rode with them around the world. Doug Ireland began a campaign in Gay City News to prove that the Mashhad case was one of consensual homosexual sex, and that the Ahmadinejad regime was carrying out a 'massive pogrom,' an 'intensifying crackdown.' His reporting was deeply irresponsible. His claims about Mashhad relied entirely on second-hand sources. Ireland never confirmed those reports. No one has. His main source hasn’t shared information directly, even with the Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization. Ireland proclaimed the rape charges 'refuted.' If we want to challenge Iran’s government, we need facts. There is enough proof of torture and repression that we can do without claims of 'pogroms.' If we want to act, we need a goal. That means listening to Iranian dissidents, straight and gay.

(SOURCE: Title: Debating Iran (.pdf), by HRW analyst Scott Long. Impressum Gay City News, 5 (2006) 30 July 27-Aug. 2 )

A follow-up from Human Rights Watch:

The preponderance of evidence suggested that the youth were tried on allegations of rape, with the suggestion that they were tried for consensual homosexual conduct seemingly based almost entirely on mistranslations and on cursory news reporting magnified by the Western press.

Incidentally, as an interesting sidenote: as I understand it, the crime of sodomy in Iran can only be proven by the admission of the perpetrator himself, or the testimony of four other men. Figure that one out!

Stampeding Us to War: False Choices on Iran's Nuclear Program

The range of options in dealing with Iran's nuclear program is being deliberately limited in order to justify a war with Iran or the imposition of sanctions. Left out are any acknowledgments of Iran's offers of nuclear compromise that would address any legitimate concerns about nuclear proliferation, while at the same time respecting Iran's right to operate a civilian nuclear energy program.

I was struck by a recent press release issued by the New America Foundation about an up-coming speech by Gary Samore on the subject of "Countering a Nuclear-Armed Iran", which states:

"Unless significantly greater sanctions are applied...we will eventually face a choice between acquiescing to Iran obtaining a nuclear weapons break out option or using military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities."

Leaving aside deliberate ambiguities and hype here (a "nuclear armed" Iran is equated with possesion of a nuclear breakout "option" - whatever that means) this formulation of the range of options presented by Samore in dealing with Iran (and oft repeated in the media and by other pundits) presents the usual false choice.

Conveniently left out are the 8 or so Iranian offers that would address any real concern of nuclear proliferation, and which have included offers to renounce plutonium reprocessing (thus making it impossible to use the Arak nuclear facility to manufacture bombs, for example.) It appears that even acknowledgment of these offers is to be simply left off the agenda.

Amb Javad Zarif listed some of the terms of these offers in an op-ed piece which was published in the NY Times and International Herald Tribune in April 2006

For the sake of at least historical accuracy, it is important to note the details of the offer listed by Zarif:

"Over the course of negotiations, Iran volunteered to do the following within a balanced package:

1- Present the new atomic agency protocol on intrusive inspections to the Parliament for ratification, and to continue to put it in place pending ratification;

2- Permit the continuous on-site presence of IAEA inspectors at conversion and enrichment facilities;

3- Introduce legislation to permanently ban the development, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons;

4- Cooperate on export controls to prevent unauthorized access to nuclear material;

5- Refrain from reprocessing or producing plutonium;

6- Limit the enrichment of nuclear materials so that they are suitable for energy production but not for weaponry;

7- Immediately convert all enriched uranium to fuel rods, thereby precluding the possibility of further enrichment;

8- Limit the enrichment program to meet the contingency fuel requirements of Iran's power reactors
and future light-water reactors;

9- Begin putting in place the least contentious aspects of the enrichment program, like research and development, in order to assure the world of our intentions;

10- Accept foreign partners, both public and private, in our uranium enrichment program.

11- Iran has recently suggested the establishment of regional consortiums on fuel-cycle development that would be jointly owned and operated by countries possessing the technology and placed under atomic agency safeguards."

This false choice formulation has become a standard talking point which is repeated in pretty much all of the coverage of Iran's nuclear program. With all the recent speculation about an impending US attack on Iran, there are lots of articles discussing the same limited range of options (usually accompanied by pretty graphics showing the potential routes for Israeli planes to bomb Iran) - yet I have yet to see a single, solitary news report which even acknowledges Iran's compromise offers.

Ahmadinejad, Columbia and Bollinger

Ahmadinejad's visit to NYC has caused the usual rukus - and ironically, the vehemence of the people opposed to him has actually made him look good in comparison. Local tabloids like the Daily News and the Murdoch-owned New York Post have screaming headlines about how Hitler is visiting Columbia University, etc.

Lee Bollinger, the head of Columbia University, took the cake for attacking Ahmadinejad - resulting in people expressing sympathy for AN and dismay at Bollinger.

Whats interesting is that Bollinger accused Ahmadinejad of being a dictator. On the other hand, this is how Bollinger welcomed Pakistan's President Musharraf on his visit to Columbia on Sept. 16, 2005:

"President Musharraf is a leader of global importance and his contribution to Pakistan's economic turnaround and the international fight against terror remain remarkable - it is rare that we have a leader of his stature at campus"

The irony, of course, is that Mussharaf is in fact a military dictator who took power through a coup d'etat, while Ahmadinejad was elected to office by a clear majority of Iranian voters, no matter the faults of the election processes in Iran.

Rice tells El Baradei to butt out

Rice has told El Baradei to butt out of diplomacy since the IAEA is "just a technical body" and has no business discussing the Iran nuclear issue.

Funny thing is, that when El Baradei demanded that Iran only import nuclear fuel from multinational enrichment facilities located in Russia - a demand which is not only totally outside of the competence of the IAEA but in violation of the explicit text of the NonProliferation Treaty - Madame Rice didn't seem to have any problems with El Baradei acting as a diplomat then.

Iran's referral to the UN Security Council and "undeclared" nuclear activities

The US media tries to scare you by repeating how "the International Atomic Energy Agency cannot verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities in Iran" - here are the actual facts...

The International Atomic Energy Agency has stated that previously undisclosed Iranian nuclear activities had no relation to a weapons program, and furthermore that all declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for & none has been diverted to a nuclear weapons program. However, the IAEA has also said that it cannot verify the absence of undeclared nuclear materials and activities in Iran. This last issue has been presented by the media and the US government as proof of Iranian perfidy, and a reason why Iran "can't be trusted". However, a careful examination of the facts easily refute this allegation.

THe US was quite upset at the IAEA for stating that the declared nuclear material was accounted for, and tried to remove IAEA Director ElBaradei from his office as a result. Why? People who are not familiar with the law of the Non-Proliferation Treaty may not realize the reason and the significance of the IAEA's statement on that point: It meant that Iran was in compliance with its safeguards agreement and there was no legal basis for a referral to the UN Security Council, contrary to the Bush administration's game-plan. As a result, Bush had to create another pretext to find a way to refer Iran to the UNSC - this time by claiming that Iran's refusal to suspend enrichment was a violation of its "international obligations" (when in fact Iran is not so obligated, and never was) and that Iran's past failures to declare some nuclear activites amounted to a violation of its safeguards agreement.

This was a case of creative legal spin-doctoring by the US. For one thing, Iran was never obligated to suspend or give up uranium enrichment, and any such demand on Iran would have been illegal. Second, to the extent that Iran "failed" to disclose any nuclear activities in the past, the IAEA had already certified that those activities had no relationship to a nuclear weapons program and involved no diversion of nuclear material to military use - and so there was no violation of Article 19 of Iran's safeguards agreement which set the standard for a referral of Iran's file to the UNSC. Nor is Iran the only country to have failed to disclose such activity - both Egypt and S. Korea, for example, had failed to declare some of their nuclear activities for decades. In fact, Iran wasn't even obligated to inform the IAEA of the existence of Natanz or Arak nuclear facilities (since they were still under construction) though Iran's plans for nuclear enrichment were never a secret anyway (Iran had invited the IAEA to visit its uranium mines years before, had sought IAEA technical assistance in building its enrichment program until the US thwarted the aid, and the discovery of uranium sources had been openly announced on Iranian radio in an interview with the head of Iran's atomic energy program.)

As Siddharth Varadarajan has written:

Though there has been a surfeit of motivated and ill-informed commentary about how Iran "concealed" its uranium enrichment programme from the IAEA "in violation of the NPT" until it was "caught cheating" in 2002, the fact is that Iran was not obliged to inform the Agency about those facilities at the time. David Albright and Corey Hinderstein — who first provided the international media with satellite imagery and analysis of the unfinished fuel fabrication facility at Natanz and heavy water research reactor at Arak on December 12, 2002 — themselves noted that under the safeguards agreement in force at the time, "Iran is not required to allow IAEA inspections of a new nuclear facility until six months before nuclear material is introduced into it." In fact, it was not even required to inform the IAEA of their existence until then, a point conceded by Britain and the European Union at the March 2003 Board of Governors meeting... This `six months' clause was a standard part of all IAEA safeguards agreements signed in the 1970s and 1980s.

The US had to do quite a bit of arm-twisting and bribing to get the members of the IAEA Board of Governors to agree to this sophistry and report Iran to the UNSC - for example, by promising to share nuclear technology with India even though that would itself be a violation by the US of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In short, the "reporting" of Iran's file to the UNSC was illegal and ultra vires all along (and furthermore, the resultant UNSC resolutions which demand that Iran give up enrichment are ultra vires and non-binding too beause they violate the principle of jus cogens.)

As Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Committee on Nuclear Policy has explained:

The conclusion that no diversion has occurred certifies that the state in question is in compliance with its undertaking, under its safeguards agreement and Article III of the NPT, to not divert material to non-peaceful purposes. In the case of Iran, the IAEA was able to conclude in its November 2004 report that that all declared nuclear materials had been accounted for and therefore none had been diverted to military purposes. The IAEA reached this same conclusion in September 2005.

Of course the IAEA also said that it has not been able to verify "the absence of undeclared material or activities" and the media are trying to spin that for all it is worth to scare people - but that is actually not a valid basis for suspicion that Iran has a hidden nuclear weapons program. Rather, the IAEA simply does not formally verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities in countries until they have ratified the Additional Protocol, and have permitted the required inspection process (which can take several years to complete.) As Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Comittee for Nuclear Policy has explained:

For some it is tempting to declare, based on the inability of the IAEA to presently draw a conclusion on the absence of nuclear activities, that Iran continues to operate concealed facilities and that any such facilities must be for a military program. But the IAEA has cautioned that the lack of a conclusion does not imply suspicion of undeclared nuclear materials and activities, as the matter is frequently spun in the media and by some governments.

According to the IAEA's own Annual Safeguards Implementation Report of 2004, of the 61 states where both the NPT safeguards and the Additional protocol are implemented, the IAEA has certified the absence of undeclared nuclear activity for only 21 countries, leaving Iran in the same category as 40 other countries including Canada, the Czech Republic, and South Africa. Note especially the last sentence:

"With regard to 21 States with both CSAs and AP in force or otherwise applied, the Agency concluded that all nuclear material in those States remained in peaceful nuclear activities. For 40 other such States, the Agency had not yet completed the necessary evaluations, and could therefore only draw the conclusion that the nuclear material placed under safeguards remained in peaceful nuclear activities."

Nevertheless, even though Iran has not yet ratified the Additional Protocol, it has stated repeatedly that it is willing to do so as long as its nuclear rights are recognized, and Iran voluntarily acted as if it was bound by Additional Protocol anyway during the course of the Paris Agreement, by permitting the additional inspections at sites such as the Parchin military complex - and no evidence of a secret nuclear program was found then either. (A string of similar "tips" about "secret Iranian nuclear sites" which turned out to be duds ultimately led IAEA officials to publicly complain about the quality of US intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.)

So the next time the US media tries to scare you about how "according to the IAEA, Iran may have undeclared nuclear activities" - now you know the facts behind this claim.

Bush blames Iran of his failures in Iraq an Afghanistan

So Robin Wright is quoting the usual "anonymous sources" who claim that Iran is arming the Taliban, and the Washington Post claims that Iran is behind the US failures in Iraq, but the Iraqis told the Bush administration to stop trying to shift the blame:

"The Americans always try to pretend the responsibility for cleaning up this mess isn't theirs and tend to shift blame onto Iraq, Iran and Syria for everything that goes wrong," said veteran Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman.

"But they should stop this nonsense and admit that most of the accountability rests on their shoulders," he told Reuters.

Iran nuclear goalposts moving again; Another "Paris Agreement" fiasco?

Iran's recent agreement with the IAEA to resolve outstanding issues over its nuclear program is following a predictable pattern as the US and EU deliberately try to undermine it. Everytime Iran makes concessions over the nuclear issue by showing some flexibility and making compromise offers which would address any real concerns about weapons proliferation, the US and EU-3 simply move the goalposts by demanding yet more concessions and imposing additional preconditions on Iran. This consistent pattern only proves that the claims about any Iranian nuclear "threat" are just pretextual.

Iran recently reached an agreement with the IAEA that resolved some outstanding issues and which is intended to address all the remaining issues regarding Iran's nuclear program. The US initially criticized the agreement and accused IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei of "overstepping" his authority. Then the US demanded that Iran comply with the agreement but at the same time asserted that even Iran's full compliance with the agreement, won't be enough anyway. The EU-3 have joined in criticism of the IAEA Director General, causing him to simply walk out of a meeting with the EU representatives.

It appears that what we're seeing is essentially a repeat of a previously-established pattern where Iran makes concessions and shows flexibility, only to be met with increased demands...(more)

Israel and Iraq invasion

Despite second-hand, anecdotal reports about how Sharon supposedly warned Bush not to invade Iraq, the public record shows quite clearly that Israel not only pushed hard for the invasion to happen and funnelled falsified "intelligence" about non-existent Iraqi WMDs to help ensure that the invasion did happen, but that they expected the US to go to war against Iran next too.

Israel To U.S.: Don't Delay Iraq Attack Sharon Government Urges Prompt Action Against Saddam

JERUSALEM — Israel is urging U.S. officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday.

Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, said Sharon aide Ranaan Gissin.

"Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose," Gissin said. "It will only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction."

And...

Israel Says War on Iraq Would Benefit the Region by James Bennet New York Times February 27, 2003

"Israelis have also suggested that that an Iraq war may salvage their economy and even prompt the opposition Labor Party to join Mr. Sharon's coalition in a new government of national unity.

Expressed in its broadest, vaguest terms, that theory has come in for the sort of mockery that the idealistic vision of Oslo's effects suffered from the right. The accusation is the same: fuzzy, wishful thinking..."

AND...

Attack Iran the Day Iraq War Ends, Demands Israel by Stephen Farrell, Robert Thomson and Danielle Haas The Times Tuesday, November 5, 2002

ISRAEL’S Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has called on the international community to target Iran as soon as the imminent conflict with Iraq is complete...

ElBaradei the "Rogue Regulator" redux?

So the Washington Post's editorial board has decided to smear IAEA Director Mohammad El-Baradei (ElBaradei? El Baradei?) by calling him a "Rogue Regulator" because - oh my goodness gracious! - the IAEA is doing precisely what it was supposed to do by monitoring Iran's nuclear facilities and resolving outstanding issues.

Of course, this should hardly come as a surprise because it was always known that the US considers the IAEA and international law only relevant when it serves their purposes. The Bush administration never really gave a damn whether there were any WMDs in Iraq or not, and always ignored the IAEA inspectors anyway.

Glen Greenwald notes (among other interesting points) that this critical editorial about El-Baradei over the Iran issue is eerily similar to a previous Washington Post editorial which was also critical of ElBaradei over the Iraq issue - which turned out to be totally unjustified. A reader conveniently provides the full text of that editorial for your reading pleasure.

I would point out that the criticism of ElBaradei is also very similar to the beating that Hans Blix, the previous IAEA head, took at the hands of the warmongers in Washington, due to his "failure" (LOL!) to find the non-existent WMDs in Iraq. I wrote about this sort of thing previously:

And regrettably, some of the same pundits and think tanks that helped peddle the "Iraqi WMD" threat are now active in promoting the idea that an Iranian nuclear weapons programme exists. For example, during the build-up to the Iraq invasion, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control repeatedly claimed that Iraq had "an active programme for building weapons of mass destruction", though in fact the IAEA inspectors had concluded otherwise. In editorials published in the Wall Street Journal he even went so far as to repeatedly accuse Hans Blix, then-Director General of the IAEA, of being "timid"-and "irrelevant" because of the IAEA's "failure" to find the non-existent WMD in Iraq. The editorials are still conveniently posted at IragWatch.org, a special website created by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control dedicated to "accounts of Iraq's efforts to build weapons of mass destruction". There were no attempts to withdraw these statements after the IAEA was vindicated and no WMD were found in Iraq. Instead, without missing a beat, the same organisation has simply shifted its attention to Iran: it has a started a new website called IranWatch.org, which urges policies to "stop the Iranian bomb". The fact that there is no actual evidence of any "Iranian bomb" appears to be as irrelevant to these pundits today as the non-existence of Iraqi WMD was in 2003.

Of course, we all remember how Washington had tried to oust El-Baradei from his job at the IAEA after the IAEA reported in November 2003 that there was no evidence that Iranian nuclear activities had any relation to a weapons program, and later in Nov 2004 that all nuclear material in Iran had been accounted for and none had been diverted to military use (and so there was no legal basis to refer Iran's file to the UNSC under the terms of Iran's safeguards agreement.)

As Joseph Cirincione wrote in more detail in Foreign Policy, ElBaradei first upset the Bush administration over the Iraq WMD issue:

By January 2003, as the full court press for war in Iraq was reaching an apex, ElBaradei reported that his team could not find any evidence to support the U.S. claim that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. And his March 2003 findings, sent to the U.N. Security Council, refuted all of the purported evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program, including the infamous aluminum tubes, uranium from Niger, and reactivated nuclear production plants.

The Bush administration was furious. Vice President Dick Cheney heaped scorn upon ElBaradei and his inspectors. Of course, ElBaradei’s intelligence ultimately proved to be much more accurate than the Bush administration’s. Everyone now agrees that ElBaradei was correct.

And if that wasn't bad enough, then came the Iran issue:

ElBaradei annoyed the Bush administration anew in September 2004 with a report on Iran. Administration hard-liners, including Bolton and Cheney, believed that they had solid evidence of an Iranian weapons program that could be used to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council—or to provide justification for military strikes against the Islamic Republic. But the IAEA report found that the traces of highly enriched uranium that U.S. officials touted as proof of Iran’s weapon activity could be plausibly traced back to Pakistan, a U.S. ally and the source of Tehran’s nuclear equipment. Inspectors from the IAEA did not find any definitive evidence of weapons-specific work in Iran

After failing to get support for the ouster of El Baradei, the US only lifted opposition to him - but only conditionally, if he promised to "get tough on Iran."

Anyway, all this is quite similar to Bush administration's (successful) effort in 2002 to oust José Maurício Bustani, the head of Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), three years prior to the end of this term. The only paper to fully & directly deal with this at the time was the Guardian, in an article by George Monbiot - though the AP reported on it much later.

This was the first time that a head of an international organization was removed from office
before the conclusion of his term. Bustani had fallen out of favor with the Bush administration (and John
Bolton) for a number of reasons, but chiefly because he had insisted that the US be subject to the same
chemical weapons inspections as other signatories, refused to play along with the accusations of an
Iranian chemical weapons program, and more significantly, because he had nearly convinced the
Iraqis to sign on to the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - which would have meant that OPCW inspectors could then get into Iraq and disprove the Bush administration's repeated allegations about the alleged "vat-loads" of
anthrax and other weapons that the Bush administration already knew didn't exist. Goes to show - again - that the existence of WMDs in Iraq was only a pretext all along.

Anyway, Bustani filed suit against the OPCW before the International Labour Organization - and won. The ILO Tribunal ruled that the dismissal occurred under US pressure for political reasons and was subject to procedural irregularities (though it didn't detail the nature/motivations of the political pressure.)

This event followed the removal of a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the
campaign against the appointment of Mary Robertson as the High Commissioner for Human Rights; it predated efforts to remove El-Baradei in 2003-2004, which seemed to have ended after El-Baradei was invited to a certain meeting with US Sec. of State Condaleeza Rice, after which Rice expressed her support for ElBaradei and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Well, I guess ElBaradei is back in the hot water again. Maybe the Washington Post will let him keep his job if he promises to get even "tougher" on Iran?

Who is pushing the Apocalypse?

The "official narrative" is that Iran - and the person of Ahmadinejad - are insane and have threatened to drop nukes on the US and Israel in order to bring about the Apocalypse. You've probably heard this line enough to be thoroughly familiar with it, and the US media will keep repeating it.

But in fact, the exact opposite it true. It is the US and Israeli policy which has fallen under the influence of apocalyptic religious zealots, and it is Iran which has been threatened with a nuclear holocaust.

First, lets remember who has threatened whom with nuclear weapons and bombings. Iran has explicitly stated that it does not want nuclear bombs. The US, on the other hand, has explicitly threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran and thus murder 1 million civilians. Who is threatening to whom here?

Second, senior religious leaders in Israel are predicting a "miraculous war" on Iran. Sure, you can say that these nuts don't represent officials in power - but they're not the only ones who are pushing this nonsense. Good old Reverend Hagee, a Christian pro-Zionist evangelist who has made a career out of calling for an apocalyptic war against Iran, has been warmly embraced by AIPAC-where he shared a podium with current and former US government officials, as well as US presidential candidates (the cynicism and moral bankruptcy of the pro-Israeli Lobby's embrace of Hagee is shown in the fact in the evangelical version of the Apocalypse, the Jews don't go to heaven either.) So, who is really the apocalyptic zealot here?

Note that Hagee isn't some kook in the wildnerness - he has been quite warmly received by the Bush administration and regularly visits the White House. His crazy millennialist "Christians United for Israel" group has been endorsed by Bush himself.

And yet, despite these facts, the pro-Israeli lobby and the complicit US media still have the audacity of accusing Iran of being a nuclear danger influenced by apocalyptic zealotry! LOL!

BUY THIS BOOK: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

BUY THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policyby John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

The Israelis and the pro-Israeli lobby in the US would prefer to simply ignore this book and pretend it doesn't exist so as to minimize publicity for the book.

Don't let them get away with it.

Its a great book btw. Very detailed. I knew most of the incidents mentioned here but its good to have them all in one place, with footnotes and reference. My only complaint is that they didn't really go into the nuclear facts about Iran in sufficient technical detail - simply saying that Iran "could" build a bomb "if it so chooses" and while they do mention the Iran has made several compromise offers to the US over the nuclear issue, they don't provide the details - for example, that Iran has offered to renounce plutonium processing and to place strict, verifiable limits on its uranium enrichment and open Iran's program up to foreign participation (so in fact, Iran would not even theoretically be capable of building nukes.) But I guess what they wrote is good enough.

Incidentally, it also appears that the warmongering pro-Israelis in the US are trying to push for war on Iran on one hand, and avoid the public appearance of pushing for war on the other hand.

The funny thing is, a few years ago when anyone even spoke of AIPAC's influence and role in shaping US foreign policy, they were looked upon as kooks and conspiracy theorists. Talking about the pro-Israeli lobby was a big taboo, and you risked being labelled as an "anti-Semite" for doing so. Now, there are books being published with these sorts of titles, by authors who are the cream of academia in the US. A couple of years ago even, a major US mainstream foreign policy journal had a cover which said "Does the Israeli lobby have too much power" - amazing when you consider that US Congressman Paul Findley's book They Dare Speak Out on the power of the Israeli lobby was treated so poorly when it was published many years before. Criticism and analysis of the Pro-Israeli lobby is no longer a taboo!

For the longest time, the pro-Israeli lobby liked to pretend that it didn't exist and complained that people who spoke of the influence of a pro-Israeli lobby were repeating anti-Semitic claims about exaggerated "Jewish influence" - and yet on the other hand, the same pro-Israeli lobbyists couldn't help but show off how influential they were, by boasting that they could get 50 US senators to sign a dinner napkin. Well, that's all over.

And the biggest irony is that AIPAC and Bush's own miserable failures in causing the mess in Iraq have caused this taboo on the discussion of the pro-Israeli lobby to be removed. Even other American Jews are speaking up against The Lobby's influence now (and yes, Jews like non-Jews have a variety of views on a variety of issues and not all of them agree with the Israeli agenda.) Now, all the pro-Israeli lobby can do is engage in damage control and try to prevent academics like Norman Finkelstein from getting tenure, thus further proving their illiberal proto-fascist tendencies.

When I checked a couple of years ago, I was only able to find one PhD thesis done in the US on the topic of the pro-Israeli lobby specifically. Hopefully, there will be more coming out now.