To abdallah, shut the hell up... Nothing in the article has anything to do with Israel, you retard... No one wants to hear your filth...

On another note, glad to see the international community is acting on the Iran issue without first going down the war path... I just hope when it comes to war, (Hopefully it doesnt) that they would man up to the challenge as well & not let Israel or the US go it alone like they always do...

Hello Jonathan, you have no right to tell anybody to shut up, remember our first amendment rights? Anyone using half their brain pan knows that Israel is who is driving their puppet countries to foment war against Iran. The good Jewish people in Israel are overwhelmingly against a war with Iran. They are having a tough enough time keeping the zionist puppet Netsayahoo in line. His policies are not winning over hearts and minds of anybody.

Netsayahoo should leave Iran alone as guess who has caused more strife in the Middle East, Israel and their puppets U.S. and Europe.

USS Liberty was attacked in international waters by Israeli forces on June 8, 1967, killing 34 Americans and wounding another 174. When Israel can't get the U.S. to do its bidding in attacking the countries they want attacked they perpetrate covert military attacks against the U.S.

General Dempsey, Chairman of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the man who flew to Tel Aviv and informed Netanyahu that America wanted no part of his scheming against Iran was the subject of an assassination attempt in Afghanistan.This wasn’t an act of terrorism or Taliban militants. It was a mob hit by Israel’s Mosaad against someone who failed to kiss the feet of Netanyahu. His response was to unleash killers, not a fact for the public but a fact just the same, one the American military knows very well. Netsayahoo is pathologically insane.

What about the land Israel has stolen from the Palestinians much less the thousands murdered and millions displaced. Remember the 1947 UN Partition accord and the land ceded to Israel. That wasn’t enough so Israel encroached on more Palestinian land the land lines were redrawn in 1967 and Israel keeps redrawing them to this day Recently Israel’s Defense Ministry has ordered eight Palestinian villages in the West Bank to be razed, claiming the land is needed for military training.. Hundreds of Palestinians are to be displaced despite evidence that the villages have existed since 1830. In their magnanimity they let the farmers have back their own land on the weekends to eke out a living. Israel continues to displace innocent men, women and children and wonders why they are targets of terrorism. What would you do if someone took over your home?

And why are the sanctions going on? For Middle Eastern hegemony!

I accidentally voted for your comment instead of hitting the reply button, oops!

Would you both PLEASE stop tossing the "r" word around?

The R WORD?

What ever.

Please go. Obama

TrustVerify: "That wasn’t enough so Israel encroached on more Palestinian land the land lines were redrawn in 1967 and Israel keeps redrawing them to this day." And that is why no doubt they returned the Sinai to the Egyptians and Gaza to the Palestinians.

Corrupt Language Breeds Bad History and Bad Policy
Bruce Thornton - Advancingafreesociety.org - May 22, 2011

"...the false history and its false vocabulary are now taken for reality and made the basis of policy."

As the history of communism and fascism both illustrate, modern political tyranny has relied on fabricated history to legitimize its claims and actions, and such history in turn relies on the debasement of language. Nowhere is this axiom more evident than in the conflict between Israel and the Arabs––so much so that, as Obama’s recent remarks about Israel show, the false history and its false vocabulary are now taken for reality and made the basis of policy.

Start with the use of “borders” to describe what is in fact the armistice line marking the farthest advance of the five Arab armies that invaded Israel in 1948. That line is not an international “border” in the strict sense of a line dividing one sovereign state from another. The territory in question was never a state. Once a state is established, then the international border will be settled by negotiations. As Israeli ambassador Dore Gold points out, U.N. resolution 242, as well as later agreements such as the 1993 Oslo Accords, preserves this “flexibility for creating new borders.”

Then there’s “occupation,” used to describe the Israeli presence in the West Bank, itself a misleading term that obscures the historical fact that this region is Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish state. Aside from that, using “occupation” to describe Israel’s control over a disputed territory whose final status will be determined by negotiation evokes misleading analogies with historical events like the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, or the Soviet occupation of the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. But that analogy is false: Germany and Russia invaded and then occupied sovereign nations defined by international borders. Israel ended up in the West Bank territories as the result of a defensive war against aggressors. Israel’s continuing control is a defensive necessity, just as after World War I the traditional launching pad for German aggression against France, the Rhineland, was demilitarized and subject to Allied military control. Indeed, the Allied decision to evacuate their forces from the Rhineland was one of many mistakes that led to World War II. Given that central Israel is only 9 miles wide from the Mediterranean to the West Bank, it is understandable that it is cautious about losing control over the traditional Arab launching pad for invasion.

“Palestinian homeland” is another particularly loaded and historically false phrase. “Palestine” was the name of a multi-ethnic Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman province, not a people. The name itself reflects Rome’s attempt to alter historical reality with language. After the destruction of Israel as a political entity and the scattering of its people in the 2nd Century A.D., the Romans renamed the territory “Palestine” after the Philistines, a people that once lived in the region but had been absorbed into other groups for centuries. Thus the Romans subjected the Jews to a collective damnatio memoriae, the practice of erasing all public mention or record of an enemy to the Roman state––exactly what the Arabs have been trying to do to Israel for the last 60 years by denying its historical ties to the land.

Likewise, just as the Romans named the land after a people that no longer existed, so too calling the current Arab inhabitants “Palestinians” perpetuates a similar historical fraud. What constitute a people are a shared language, culture, customs, traditions, and history distinct enough to set them apart from others. By these criteria, there is no such thing as “Palestinians.” The average Arab living in Israel or the West Bank is no more significantly distinct from one living in Syria, Jordan, or Egypt than a resident from California is significantly distinct from a resident of Arizona or Nevada. Whatever differences that do exist do not trump the more important similarities, and reflect rather the refusal of surrounding Arab nations to integrate their Arab brothers into their own countries, instead constructing a Palestinian identity based on victimhood, humiliation, and failure.

That’s why before 1967, no one talked about “Palestinians” as a distinct people deserving a homeland, and the Jordanians did not create a Palestinian state when they controlled the West Bank. That notion of a “Palestinian state” arose after the Arab defeats in the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Once those debacles made it clear the Arabs could not destroy Israel by force, the tactic shifted to making the issue one of national self-determination as a way of chipping away at Israel’s territorial integrity and international support.

Finally, the claim that the territory inhabited by Israel is the traditional “homeland” of those whom we call Palestinians is false. The majority of Arabs who have lived or are living in Israel and the West Bank are there as the descendants of conquerors, colonizers, and immigrants. Many of them came after Zionists began in the 19th Century to develop a mostly desolate, neglected land and to create economic opportunities. History and archaeology tell us that the territory comprising Israel and the West Bank is the traditional homeland of the Jewish people, not a mythical Palestinian people.

The misleading and false language used to describe the conflict between Israel and the countries that have tried to destroy it obscures the actual causes of Arab hatred of Israel, which in turn creates bad policies pursuing false solutions. A Palestinian state will not bring peace to the region, for the simple reason that a critical mass of Arabs does not want Israel to exist.

TrustVerify: "What would you do if someone took over your home?"

Resolution 194, adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 11, 1948, addressed a host of issues, but only one paragraph out of 15 dealt with refugees created by the conflict. Resolution 194 attempted to create the tools required to reach a truce in the region. It established a conciliation commission with representatives from the United States, France and Turkey to replace the UN mediator. The commission was charged with achieving "a final settlement of all questions between ∑ governments and authorities concerned." The Resolution‚s "refugee clause" is not a standalone item, as the Arabs would have us think, nor does it pertain specifically to Palestinian Arab refugees.

Of the 15 paragraphs, the first six sections addressed ways to achieve a truce; the next four paragraphs addressed the ways that Jerusalem and surrounding villages and towns should be demilitarized, and how an international zone or jurisdiction would be created in and around Jerusalem. The resolution also called on all parties to protect and allow free access to holy places, including religious buildings.

One paragraph has drawn the most attention: Paragraph 11, which alone addressed the issue of refugees and compensation for those whose property was lost or damaged. Contrary to Arab claims, it did not guarantee a Right of Return and certainly did not guarantee an unconditional Right of Return ˆ that is the right of Palestinian Arab refugees to return to Israel. Nor did it specifically mention Arab refugees, thereby indicating that the resolution was aimed at all refugees, both Jewish and Arab. Instead, Resolution 194 recommended that refugees be allowed to return to their homeland if they met two important conditions:

1. That they be willing to live in peace with their neighbors.

2. That the return takes place "at the earliest practicable date."

The resolution also recommended that for those who did not wish to return, "Compensation should be paid for the property ∑ and for loss of or damage to property" by the "governments or authorities responsible."

Although Arab leaders point to Resolution 194 as proof that Arab refugees have a right of return or be compensated, it is important to note that the Arab States: Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen voted against Resolution 194. Israel is not even mentioned in the resolution. The fact that plural wording also is used ˆ "governments or authorities" ˆ suggests that, contrary to Arab claims, the burden of compensation does not fall solely upon one side of the conflict. Because seven Arab armies invaded Israel, Israel was not responsible for creating the refugee problem. When hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews, under threat of death, attack and other forms of persecution, were forced to flee Arab communities, the State of Israel absorbed the overwhelming majority of them into the then-fledgling nation.

The Forgotten Jewish Refugees

For a host of reasons ˆ practical to parochial ˆ Israel has failed to raise the issue of the mammoth injustice done to almost a million Jews from Arab countries. The scale and premeditated state-sponsored nature of persecution that prompted the 1948 flight of close to 900,000 Jews from their homes has only recently begun to emerge. Arab publicists have sought to detach entirely the flight of Jews from Arab lands from the Arab-Israeli conflict, claiming they are two separate phenomena, and that Israelis should take up the issue with each respective Arab state that was involved, not with the Palestinian Arabs.

Clearly this is an attempt to rewrite history. One only needs to reexamine the almost prophetic article in The New York Times two days after Israel declared independence ("Jews in Grave Danger in all Moslem Lands") to confirm the tie. The New York Times reported on May 16, 1948:

"For nearly four months, the United Nations has had before it, an appeal for Œimmediate and urgent‚ consideration of the case of the Jewish populations in Arab and Moslem countries stretching from Morocco to India."

The New York Times country-by-country table estimated the Jewish population-at-risk as 899,000 people. The article cited the dismissal of Jews in the civil service in Syria, per capita ransom payment of $20,000 by Iraqi Jews seeking to leave Iraq, a forced levy on the Lebanese Jewish community to support the Arab war effort parallel to incitement and physical attacks on Jews, and Jews fleeing to India from Afghanistan. It quoted the UN Economic and Social Council report as saying:

"The very survival of the Jewish communities in certain Arab and Moslem countries is in serious danger, unless preventive action is taken without delay."

Hostility and oppression only grew, ultimately leading to the exodus of almost all Jews from all Arab and Moslem countries from Casablanca to Karachi.

How and Why Did Palestinian Arabs Leave, and Who Was Responsible?

It is important to set the historical record straight: The overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arab refugees left what was then the newly-established State of Israel on their own accord due to structural weaknesses within Palestinian Arab society and their leadership.

The pressure of wartime conditions triggered the collapse of what was already a fragile Palestinian Arab society, particularly when Palestinian Arab leaders chose to oppose the Jewish state by a show of arms rather than by accepting a UN plan for their own state. Those events set the stage for the forceful expulsion of countless other Palestinian Arabs from Jewish-held areas. That military necessity resulted after seven Arab armies invaded western Palestine with the goal of exterminating the newly born State of Israel.

On their own accord, an estimated 600,000 Palestinian Arabs fled a war zone, which their leaders had created. An estimated 250,000 to 300,000 of those refugees in 1948 left even before their homes became part of a war zone.

The human tragedy of being uprooted notwithstanding, Arab refugees were neither hapless targets nor innocent bystanders. The first stage of the 1948 war was a fierce interethnic or anti-Zionist civil war in which Palestinian Arabs were the aggressors and the initiators; the second half was an all-out war involving regular Arab armies, whose participation the Palestinian Arabs engineered.

The violent path that Palestinian Arabs chose ˆ and the ensuing fear, disorientation, and economic deprivation of war ˆ led to their own collective undoing.

The Collapse of Palestinian Society and Mass Flight

What caused the collapse of Palestinian Arab society? In part, it was the absence of an alternative Arab infrastructure after the British pulled out from Palestine. In addition, serious cleavages dating to Ottoman times existed in local Arab society. Because Palestinian Arab society had been so dependent on British civil administration and social services, Britain‚s departure left Arab civil servants jobless. As a result, most social services and civil administration ceased to function in the Arab sector, disrupting the flow of essential commodities such as food and fuel, which added to the hardships, the uncertainty, and the dangers.

In contrast, Jewish society in Palestine, or the Yishuv as it was called in Hebrew, had established its own civil society over the span of three decades under the Mandate. The Yishuv created its own representative political bodies and social and economic institutions, including health and welfare services, a public transport network, and a thriving sophisticated marketing system for manufactured goods and food ˆ in short, a state-in-the-making. It was best described by the 1934 British report to the League of Nations:

"During the last two or three generations the Jews have recreated in Palestine a community, now numbering 80,000, of whom about one-fourth are farmers or workers upon the land. This community has its own political organs, an elected assembly for the direction of its domestic concerns, elected councils in the towns, and an organisation for the control of its schools. It has its elected Chief Rabbinate and Rabbinical Council for the direction of its religious affairs. Its business is conducted in Hebrew as a vernacular language, and a Hebrew press serves its needs. It has its distinctive intellectual life and displays considerable economic activity. This community, then, with its town and country population, its political, religious and social organisations, its own language, its own customs, its own life, has in fact Œnational‚ characteristics."

And as time passed:

"Those characteristics have been strengthened and magnified in the course of the following twelve years. To-day there are in Palestine almost 300,000 Jews. There is a constantly flowing stream of men and money, new industries are being established, citriculture is expanding, new settlements are springing up, towns are being enlarged by suburb after suburb."

During that same period, the Arabs in Palestine, however, had invested all of their energies into fighting any form of Jewish polity-in-the-making. Although the British encouraged creation of an Arab Agency parallel to the Jewish Agency that had orchestrated and financed development of the Jewish sector, a similar Arab organization failed to develop.

So it was no surprise that when the British departed, the Palestinian Arabs remained unorganized and ill-prepared not only for statehood (which they rejected in any case), but also for sustained conflict with their Jewish adversaries. In the end, the war caused horrific casualties for the Jews and left thousands of Palestinian Arabs without their homes.

TrustVerify: Arabs lost their homes in Palestine because six Arab armies invaded Israel.

UN Resolution 194:

A/RES/194 (III) of 11 December 1948

"Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;

"Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations."

TrustVerify: There is a hateful, bigoted, inaccurate, and divisive interpretation of history and a moral, factual interpretation of history. Obviously you and others who voted in favor of your post opted for the former. Pray tell, what did the Jews and Israel ever do to you personally?

Hello Basil, if Israel wants to start a war with another country that is their call but they can do it on their own. Israel's hypocrisy knows no bounds in terms of how they treat their neighbors.

Despite the widely publicized claims by the US, Israel and some of their European allies that Iran’s nuclear program may include a military aspect, Iran insists on its civilian nature, arguing that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful objectives.

The IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence indicating that Tehran’s civilian nuclear program has been diverted towards nuclear weapons production.

This is while the Israeli regime is widely known to possess between 200 and 400 nuclear warheads which they deny. Furthermore, Tel Aviv refuses to allow its nuclear facilities to come under international regulatory inspections and rejects any international nuclear regulatory agreements and is will not sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander! If I was another country who was under Israel’s scrutiny for nuclear weapon investigation, I would ask that the same review processes be applied and agreed to by both countries before I would capitulate to inspections.

Basil - Thank you. Trust Verify - follow your own name. While I agree with you that Israel will almost always put their own agenda first, it must be recognized that they live cheek and jowl with sworn enemies. The U.S. does not always act in Israel's interest, but tries to balance relations with every body in the region to what we perceive is in OUR best interests. If you wish to deny Iran's claim of no intent on a nuclear weapon, then why have they constantly refused offers of aid in establishing non-weapon capable facilities and instead cling to a program that has taken their economy to the brink of collapse? You want to tie Israel's history into this equation without recognizing both sides of event. You also fail to recognize that the Arab/Muslim world's first reaction to any slight has most usually been of self-righteous and MURDEROUS rage. When the Taliban kills Christians in Afghanistan and burns Bibles, that is perceived by them as justifiable, but let one vocal self-righteous Christian minister in the U.S. announce that he will burn a koran in protest and they go berserk. They announce death sentences and try to kill people over it. This narrow and hypocritical view is prevalent across much of the Arab world. They consistently will consider only wrongs done to them and ignore wrongs they commit. Is this religious or cultural? I don't know, but if you fail to recognize this and Iran's lies, then you have your head in the sand. Just examine how they have treated their own people, and the last sets of "fair and honest " elections - a presidential election rife with fraud, and parliamentary elections with popular candidates being banned. How to you think the Iranian regime handles its relations with the world when they are not even honest at home?

Hello ULdog and Basil Romeo, it's a bit ironic that when historical facts that shed light on the zionizt atrocities Israel has perpetrated on the world, heretofore bloggers who haven't shown up are now revealed, just saying.

I want to make a point perfectly clear, there are two distinct factions in Israel, the zionists and the good innocent people of Israel. While the zionists are part of the Rothschilds faction who are trying to institute their globalization and New World Order agenda the good Jewish people of Israel are innocent pawns to the corrupt leaders causing chaos and mayhem for their masters.

While the zionists are trying to start WW III, the good Jewish people are trying to stop it. Israel has the right to exist as a law abiding peaceful nation as does Palestine. If both countries could eliminate their fundamentalist entities I think peace and harmony can exist.

zionist propaganda and anti semitic castigation of those who dare speak of Israel’s short comings no longer works my friend. The truth is the truth and the light has been cast on our planet for the purpose of exposing the lies and deception.

Talk about not being honest at home, Israel since 1992 has been claiming Iran is months away from a nuclear bomb, it has been 20 years. Israel claims they don't have nuclear weapons, anyone using half their brain pan knows that Israel has hundreds of Nuclear weapons from their Dimona nuclear facility.

The zionists in Israel are trying to become the corporation that services Europe with their relatively new found natural gas reserves in the Levantine Basin and are in competition with Western Asia’s (Syria, Iraq, Iran) Nabucco and South Stream pipelines.

This is not about Israel’s right to exist or Iran’s nuclear weapon capability or about religion, it’s a pretext to enrich the money changers/elite and control of natural gas markets!

Syria, Turkey, Israel and a Greater Middle East Energy War – by F. William Engdahl

Source: Veterans Today
October 11, 2012

Pipeline Roulette

On October 3, 2012 the Turkish military launched repeated mortar shellings inside Syrian territory.

The military action, which was used by the Turkish military, conveniently, to establish a ten-kilometer wide no-man’s land “buffer zone” inside Syria, was in response to the alleged killing by Syrian armed forces of several Turkish civilians along the border.

There is widespread speculation that the one Syrian mortar that killed five Turkish civilians well might have been fired by Turkish-backed opposition forces intent on giving Turkey a pretext to move militarily, in military intelligence jargon, a ‘false flag’ operation.[i]

Turkey’s Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Foreign Minister, the inscrutable Ahmet Davutoglu, is the government’s main architect of Turkey’s self-defeating strategy of toppling its former ally Bashar Al-Assad in Syria.[ii]

According to one report since 2006 under the government of Islamist Sunni Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his pro-Brotherhood AKP party, Turkey has become a new center for the Global Muslim Brotherhood.[iii] A well-informed Istanbul source relates the report that before the last Turkish elections, Erdogan’s AKP received a “donation” of $10 billion from the Saudi monarchy, the heart of world jihadist Salafism under the strict fundamentalist cloak of Wahabism. [iv]

Since the 1950’s when the CIA brought leading members in exile of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia there has been a fusion between the Saudi brand of Wahabism and the aggressive jihadist fundamentalism of the Brotherhood.[v]

The Turkish response to the single Syrian mortar shell, which was met with an immediate Syrian apology for the incident, borders on a full-scale war between two nations which until last year were historically, culturally, economically and even in religious terms, closest of allies.

That war danger is ever more serious. Turkey is a full member of NATO whose charter explicitly states, an attack against one NATO state is an attack against all. The fact that nuclear-armed Russia and China both have made defense of the Syrian Bashar al-Assad regime a strategic priority puts the specter of a World War closer than most of us would like to imagine.

In a December 2011 analysis of the competing forces in the region, former CIA analyst Philip Giraldimade the following prescient observation:

NATO – Has it become a geopolitical energy army now?

NATO is already clandestinely engaged in the Syrian conflict, with Turkey taking the lead as U.S. proxy. Ankara’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has openly admitted that his country is prepared to invade as soon as there is agreement among the Western allies to do so.

The intervention would be based on humanitarian principles, to defend the civilian population based on the “responsibility to protect” doctrine that was invoked to justify Libya. Turkish sources suggest that intervention would start with creation of a buffer zone along the Turkish-Syrian border and then be expanded. Aleppo, Syria’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, would be the crown jewel targeted by liberation forces.

Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons from the late Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional National Council who are experienced in pitting local volunteers against trained soldiers, a skill they acquired confronting Gaddafi’s army.

Iskenderum is also the seat of the Free Syrian Army, the armed wing of the Syrian National Council. French and British special forces trainers are on the ground, assisting the Syrian rebels while the CIA and U.S. Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and intelligence to assist the rebel cause, enabling the fighters to avoid concentrations of Syrian soldiers. [vi]

____________________________________

Israel mobile artillery on the move during exercise

Little noted was the fact that at the same day as Turkey launched her over-proportional response in the form of a military attack on Syrian territory, one which was still ongoing as of this writing, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) undertook what was apparently an action to divert Syria’s attention from Turkey and to create the horror scenario of a two-front war just as Germany faced in two world wars.

The IDF made a significant troop buildup on the strategic Golan Heights bordering the two countries, which, since Israel took it in the 1967 war, has been an area of no tension.[vii]

The unfolding new phase of direct foreign military intervention by Turkey, supported de facto by Israel’s right-wing Netanyahu regime, curiously enough follows to the letter a scenario outlined by a prominent Washington neo-conservative think tank, the Brookings Institution.

In their March 2012 strategy white paper, Saving Syria: Assessing Options for Regime Change, Brookings geo-political strategists laid forth a plan to misuse so-called humanitarian concern over civilian deaths, as in Libya in 2011, to justify an aggressive military intervention into Syria, something not done before this.[viii]

The Brookings report states the following scenario:

Israel could posture forces on or near the Golan Heights and, in so doing, might divert regime forces from suppressing the opposition. This posture may conjure fears in the Assad regime of a multi-front war, particularly if Turkey is willing to do the same on its border and if the Syrian opposition is being fed a steady diet of arms and training.[ix]

This seems to be precisely what is unfolding in the early days of October 2012. The authors of the Brookings report are tied to some of the more prominent neo-conservative warhawks behind the Bush-Cheney war on Iraq.

Their sponsor, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, includes current foreign policy advisers to Republican right-wing candidate Mitt Romney, the open favorite candidate of Israel’s Netanyahu.

Haim Saban – A lot to smile about

The Brookings Saban Center for Middle East Policy which issued the report, is the creation of a major donation from Haim Saban, an Israeli-American media billionaire who also owns the huge German Pro7 media giant.

Haim Saban is open about his aim to promote specific Israeli interests with his philanthropy. The New York Timesonce called Saban, “a tireless cheerleader for Israel.”

Saban told the same newspaper in an interview in 2004, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” [x] The scholars at Saban as well as its board have a clear neo-conservative and Likud party bias.

They include, past or present, Shlomo Yanai, former head of military planning, Israel Defense Forces; Martin Indyk, former US Ambassador to Israel and founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a major Likud policy lobby in Washington.

Visiting fellows have included Avi Dicter, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet; Yosef Kupperwasser, former Head, Research Department, Israeli Defense Force’s Directorate of Military Intelligence.

Resident scholars also include Bruce Riedel, a 30 year CIA Middle East expert and Obama Afghan adviser; [xi] Kenneth Pollack, another former CIA Middle East expert who was indicted in an Israel espionage scandal when he was a national security official with the Bush Administration. [xii]

Why would Israel want to get rid of the “enemy she knows,” Bashar al-Assad, for a regime controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood? Then Israel’s security would seemingly be threatened by the emergence of hard-line Muslim Brotherhood regimes in Egypt to her south and Syria to her North, perhaps soon also in Jordan.

The geopolitical dimension

Will the little people fight and die over oil for the big people?

The significant question to be asked at this point is what could bind Israel, Turkey, Qatar in a form of unholy alliance on the one side, and Assad’s Syria, Iran, Russia and China on the other side, in such deadly confrontation over the political future of Syria? One answer is energy geopolitics.

What has yet to be fully appreciated in geopolitical assessments of the Middle East is the dramatically rising importance of the control of natural gas to the future of not only Middle East gas producing countries, but also of the EU and Eurasia including Russia as producer and China as consumer.

Natural gas is rapidly becoming the “clean energy” of choice to replace coal and nuclear electric generation across the European Union, most especially since Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear after the Fukushima disaster. Gas is regarded as far more “environmentally friendly” in terms of its so-called “carbon footprint.”

The only realistic way EU governments, from Germany to France to Italy to Spain, will be able to meet EU mandated CO2 reduction targets by 2020 is a major shift to burning gas instead of coal. Gas reduces CO2 emissions by 50-60% over coal.[xiii]

Given that the economic cost of using gas instead of wind or other alternative energy forms is dramatically lower, gas is rapidly becoming the energy of demand for the EU, the biggest emerging gas market in the world.

Huge gas resource discoveries in Israel, in Qatar and in Syria combined with the emergence of the EU as the world’s potentially largest natural gas consumer, combine to create the seeds of the present geopolitical clash over the Assad regime.

_______________________

Syria-Iran-Iraq Gas pipeline

Is our navy fighting for oil interests?

In July 2011, as the NATO and Gulf states’ destabilization operations against Assad in Syria were in full swing, the governments of Syria, Iran and Iraq signed an historic gas pipeline energy agreement which went largely unnoticed amid CNN reports of the Syrian unrest.

The pipeline, envisioned to cost $10 billion and take three years to complete, would run from the Iranian Port Assalouyeh near the South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf, to Damascus in Syria via Iraq territory. Iran ultimately plans then to extend the pipeline from Damascus to Lebanon’s Mediterranean port where it would be delivered to EU markets. Syria would buy Iranian gas along with a current Iraqi agreement to buy Iranian gas from Iran’s part of South Pars field.

South Pars, whose gas reserves lie in a huge field that is divided between Qatar and Iran in the Gulf, is believed to be the world’s largest single gas field. [xiv] De facto it would be a Shi’ite gas pipeline from Shi’ite Iran via Shi’ite-majority Iraq onto Shi’ite-friendly Alawite Al-Assad’s Syria.

Iran and Qatar – head to head – but with Qatar having big brother

Adding to the geopolitical drama is the fact that the South Pars gas find lies smack in the middle of the territorial divide in the Persian Gulf between Shi’ite Iran and the Sunni Salafist Qatar.

Qatar also just happens to be a command hub for the Pentagon’s US Central Command, headquarters of United States Air Forces Central, No. 83 Expeditionary Air Group RAF, and the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing of the USAF.

In brief Qatar, in addition to owning and hosting the anti-Al-Assad TV station Al-Jazeera, which beams anti-Syria propaganda across the Arab world, Qatar is tightly linked to the US and NATO military presence in the Gulf.

Qatar apparently has other plans with their share of the South Pars field than joining up with Iran, Syria and Iraq to pool efforts.

Qatar has no interest in the success of the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline, which would be entirely independent of Qatar or Turkey transit routes to the opening EU markets.

In fact it is doing everything possible to sabotage it, up to and including arming Syria’s rag-tag “opposition” fighters, many of them Jihadists sent in from other countries including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Libya.

Further adding to Qatar’s determination to destroy the Syria-Iran-Iraq gas cooperation is the discovery in August 2011 by Syrian exploration companies of a huge new gas field in Qara near the border with Lebanon and near to the Russian-leased Naval port of Tarsus on the Syrian Mediterranean.[xv]

Pepe Escobar

Any export of Syrian or Iranian gas to the EU would go through the Russian-tied port of Tarsus. According to informed Algerian sources, the new Syrian gas discoveries, though the Damascus government is downplaying it, are believed to equal or exceed those of Qatar.

As Asia Times’ knowledgeable analyst Pepe Escobar pointed out in a recent piece, Qatar’s scheme calls for export of its huge gas reserves via Jordan’s Gulf of Aqaba, a country where a Muslim Brotherhood threat to the dictatorship of the King is also threatening.

The Emir of Qatar has apparently cut a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood in which he backs their international expansion in return for a pact of peace at home in Qatar.

A Muslim Brotherhood regime in Jordan and also in Syria, backed by Qatar, would change the entire geopolitics of the world gas market suddenly and decisively in Qatar’s favor and to the disadvantage of Russia, Syria, Iran and Iraq. [xvi] That would also be a staggering negative blow to China.

As Escobar points out,

“it’s clear what Qatar is aiming at: to kill the US$10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline, a deal that was clinched even as the Syria uprising was already underway. Here we see Qatar in direct competition with both Iran (as a producer) and Syria (as a destination), and to a lesser extent, Iraq (as a transit country). It’s useful to remember that Tehran and Baghdad are adamantly against regime change in Damascus.”

He adds, “if there’s regime change in Syria – helped by the Qatari-proposed invasion – things get much easier in Pipelineistan terms. A more than probable Muslim Brotherhood (MB) post-Assad regime would more than welcome a Qatari pipeline. And that would make an extension to Turkey much easier.” [xvii]

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The Israeli Gas dilemma

Was the peak oil hype nothing more than a price rigging psy ops?

Further complicating the entire picture is the recent discovery of huge offshore Israeli natural gas resources.

The Tamar natural gas field off the coast of northern Israel is expected to begin yielding gas for Israel’s use in late 2012. The game-changer was a dramatic discovery in late 2010 of an enormous natural gas field offshore of Israel in what geologists call the Levant or Levantine Basin.

In October 2010 Israel discovered a massive “super-giant” gas field offshore in what it declares is its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). [xviii]

The find is some 84 miles west of the Haifa port and three miles deep. They named it Leviathan after the Biblical sea monster.

Three Israeli energy companies in cooperation with the Houston Texas Noble Energy announced initial estimates that the field contained 16 trillion cubic feet of gas—making it the world’s biggest deep-water gas find in a decade, adding more discredit to “peak oil” theories that the planet is about to see dramatic and permanent shortages of oil, gas and coal.

To put the number in perspective, that one gas field, Leviathan, would hold enough reserves to supply Israel’s gas needs for 100 years.[xix]

Energy self-sufficiency had eluded the state of Israel since its founding in 1948. Abundant oil and gas exploration had repeatedly been undertaken with meager result. Unlike its energy-rich Arab neighbors, Israel seemed out of luck.

Then in 2009 Israel’s Texas exploration partner, Noble Energy, discovered the Tamar field in the Levantine Basin some 50 miles west of Israel’s port of Haifa with an estimated 8.3 tcf (trillion cubic feet) of highest quality natural gas. Tamar was the world’s largest gas discovery in 2009.

Israel discovered huge gas in Levantine Basin with Noble Energy. Source: Noble Energy map

At the time, total Israeli gas reserves were estimated at only 1.5 tcf. Government estimates were that Israel’s sole operating field, Yam Tethys, which supplies about 70 percent of the country’s natural gas, would be depleted within three years.

With Tamar, prospects began to look considerably better. Then, just a year after Tamar, the same consortium led by Noble Energy struck the largest gas find in its decades-long history at Leviathan in the same Levantine geological basin. Present estimates are that the Leviathan field holds at least 17 tcf of gas. Israel went from a gas famine to feast in a matter of months.[xx]

Now Israel faces a strategic and very dangerous dilemma. Naturally Israel is none too excited to see al-Assad’s Syria, linked to Israel’s arch foe Iran and Iraq and Lebanon, out-compete an Israeli gas export to the EU markets. This could explain why Israel’s Netanyahu government has been messing inside Syria in the anti-al-Assad forces.

However, a Muslim Brotherhood rule in Syria led by the organization around Mohammad Shaqfah would confront Israel with far more hostile neighbors now that the Muslim Brotherhood coup by Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi has put a hostile regime on Israel’s southern border.

Dalia Mogahed

It is no secret that there is enmity bordering on hate between Netanyahu and the Obama Administration. The Obama White House and US State Department openly back the Muslim Brotherhood regime changes in the Middle East.

Hillary Clinton’s meeting with Turkey’s Davutoglu in August this year was reportedly aimed at pushing Turkey to escalate its military intervention into Syria, but without direct US support owing to US election politics of wanting to avoid involvement in a new Middle East debacle.[xxi]

State Department Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin has been accused by several Republican Congress Representatives of ties to organizations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Dalia Mogahed, Obama’s appointee to the Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, also a member of the US advisory council of the Department of Homeland Security, is openly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and an open foe of Israel as well as calling for the toppling of Syria’s al-Assad. [xxii]

Obama’s Washington definitely seems to be backing the Muslim Brotherhood horse in the race for control of the gas flows of the Middle East.

__________________________________

And the Russian role

Washington is walking a temporary tightrope hoping to weaken al-Assad fatally while not appearing directly involved. Russia for its part is playing a life and death game for the future of its most effective geopolitical lever—its role as the leading natural gas supplier to the EU.

This year Russia’s state-owned Gazprom began delivery of Russian gas to northern Germany via Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea from a port near St. Petersburg.

Strategically vital now for the future role of Russia as an EU gas supplier, is its ability to play a strategic role in exploiting the new-found gas reserves of its former Cold war client state, Syria. Moscow has long been engaged in promoting its South Stream gas pipeline into Europe as an alternative to the Washington Nabucco pipeline which was designed to leave Moscow out in the cold. [xxiii]

Already Gazprom is the largest natural gas supplier to the EU. Gazprom with Nord Stream and other lines plans to increase its gas supply to Europe this year by 12% to 155 billion cubic meters. It now controls 25% of the total European gas market and aims to reach 30% with completion of South Stream and other projects.

Rainer Seele, chairman of Germany’s Wintershall, the Gazprom partner in Nord Stream, suggested the geopolitical thinking behind the decision to join South Stream:

“In the global race against Asian countries for raw materials, South Stream, like Nord Stream, will ensure access to energy resources which are vital to our economy.” But rather than Asia, the real focus of South Stream lies to the West.

The ongoing battle between Russia’s South Stream and the Washington-backed Nabucco is intensely geopolitical. The winner will hold a major advantage in the future political terrain of Europe”.[xxiv]

Erdogan – Knows Turkey is at the cross roads of history

Now a major new option of Syria as a major source for Russian-managed gas flows to the EU has emerged. If al-Assad survives, Russia will be in the position as savior to play a decisive role in developing and exploiting the Syrian gas.

Israel, where Russia also has major cards to play, could theoretically shift to back a Russian-Syrian-Iraqi-Iran gas consortium were Israel and Iran to reach some modus vivendi on the nuclear and other issues, not impossible were the political constellation in Israel to change after the coming elections.

Turkey, which is presently in a deep internal battle between Davutoglu and President Gül on the one side and Erdogan on the other, is dependent on Russia’s Gazprom for some 40% of gas to its industry.

Were Davutoglu and his faction to lose, Turkey could play a far more constructive role in the region as transit country for Syrian and Iranian gas.

The battle for the future control of Syria is at the heart of this enormous geopolitical war and tug of war. Its resolution will have enormous consequences for either world peace or endless war and conflict and slaughter.

NATO member Turkey is playing with fire as is Qatar’s Emir, along with Israel’s Netanyahu and NATO members France and USA. Natural gas is the flammable ingredient that is fueling this insane scramble for energy in the region.

Either you and Basil Romeo are government trolls or ill informed, but nice try anyway!