donderdag 21 september 2017

If Donald Trump is going to use WW2 to justify his UN speech, it would be good if he got his facts right

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor the independent

If Donald Trump is going to use WW2 to justify his UN speech, it would be good if he got his facts right

I do recall another man who used the ‘Free French’ resistance parallel from the Second World War. He was trying to prove that Muslims had the right to resist the United States. His name was Osama bin Laden

d.d. 20-09-2017

Robert Fisk

The US President’s speech at the UN has been branded ’delusional’ Getty

When, oh when, will our politicians/statesmen/dictators – mad or moderately sane – stop using the Second World War as a yardstick for their hatred and pride? Trump turned his hand to it in his UN speech – in a passage clearly written by others, but woefully out of context – when he uttered the following historical perspective:

“From the beaches of Europe to the deserts of the Middle East to the jungles of Asia, it is an eternal credit to the American character that even after we and our allies emerged victorious from the bloodiest war in history, we did not seek territorial expansion or attempt to oppose and impose our way of life on others.”

Phew. Well, let’s kick off with the one country Trump left alone in the UN: Russia. It was Russia which bore the brunt of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, it was Russia’s destruction of Hitler’s military power that broke the Nazis, and it was Russia which – with the approval of both Churchill and Roosevelt (and later Truman, whom Trump quotes at some length) – dominated eastern Europe with a series of vicious “socialist” dictatorships for decades after the war was over. When Trump referred to “our allies” in the Second World War, he surely – though I’m not certain of this – knew that the most powerful of them in Europe was the Soviet Union.

There’s no problem with D-Day (“the beaches of Europe”), and the landings in Italy and southern France, although they came a bit late for Stalin who’d been pleading for a Second Front for two years. Besides, the Western Allies feared that if they didn’t launch D-Day soon, then the advancing Russian army would be sunbathing on the beaches of Spain.

But the reference to the “deserts of the Middle East” went way beyond reality. US Middle East policy after the Second World War was based on oil resources – and the propping up of dictators and kings who would ensure the flow of oil in the future – and total and uncritical support for Israel, whose occupation and theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank would have produced a froth of economic sanctions from the Trumps of this world had it been any other country.

The “jungles of Asia” was also way over the top. The Communists of French Indo-China fought their Japanese occupiers, then the French when they returned to “their” colonies, and then the Americans when they fought in Vietnam to prop up their own dictatorship in Saigon. The Japanese themselves got off so lightly under Douglas MacArthur that many of their war criminals were never put before a war crimes court, and the Emperor remained on his throne. But – the Department of Home Truths (DHT) beckons here – yes, the Americans did help to give birth to a flourishing democracy in Japan. And – the DHT again – the US did help West Germany to develop as a democracy, albeit with quite a lot of ex-Nazis still in positions of power, and kept the West Berliners alive with the Allied airlift. Pity about eastern Germany.

And Czechoslovakia. And Bulgaria. And Hungary. And Rumania. And Lithuania. And Latvia. And Estonia. And Poland. Ah yes, poor old Poland. “Patriotism led the Poles to die to save Poland,” Trump quoth at the UN. Oh yes, the poor old Poles did indeed die to “save” Poland. Firstly, they died in their tens of thousands when the Nazis invaded them in 1939 (after a secret pact with Stalin). Britain and France drew the sword on their behalf but did not even attack Hitler’s Germany in the West. And when the Poles rose up against the Nazis in 1944, the Western Allies dropped a few weapons and watched impotently as Stalin – our greatest ally – did nothing, allowed the Nazis to erase the Polish patriots and then gobbled up Poland himself. The Poles had died, literally, in their millions, for this gross betrayal.

And there’s one more thing we might mention in this load of old Trumpery: that when Hitler marched into Poland and Denmark and Norway and Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg and then France and threatened to invade Britain, the United States enjoyed a very profitable period of neutrality – as it had done for most of the First World War – until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in December 1941, more than two years after the start of the Second World War. It was, we might remember, Hitler who then declared war on the United States, not the other way round. And French “patriotism” and “free France”, which Trump also mentioned, took something of a back seat during the four-year disgrace of the Vichy collaboration.

As for the Brits, strong we were, though it would have been good to have US troops fighting for us on the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940 as well as on the beaches of Normandy four years later. Pity they couldn’t make it.

And – hem, hem – I do recall another man who used the “Free French” resistance parallel from World War Two. He was trying to prove that Muslims had the right to resist the United States. He said it to me. In Afghanistan. His name was Osama bin Laden. But there you go. I guess Trump’s World War Two efforts get about two out of ten. Not bad for a guy who’s crackers.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-un-speech-ww2-facts-poland-free-french-middle-east-world-war-two-second-world-war-a7956991.html

dinsdag 19 september 2017

Trump and Netanyahu ready united assault against Iran nuclear deal

The two are bound by their mutual loathing of Obama’s foreign policy deal, even as it sets them apart from other world leaders at the UN general assembly

Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump in Tel Aviv. Both are expected to use their speeches at the UN to highlight the threat posed by Tehran. Photograph: GPO/Getty Images

Julian Borger in New York

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu will meet in New York on Monday, at the start of a week in which they intend to launch a concerted assault at the United Nations against the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The US and Israeli leaders are expected to use their speeches to the UN general assembly on Tuesday to highlight the threat to Middle East stability and security represented by Tehran.

While anxiety about Iran’s expansive role in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon is widely shared, Trump and Netanyahu’s antipathy to the multilateral deal agreed in Vienna two years ago binds them together, even as it sets them apart from the overwhelming majority of other world leaders attending the annual UN summit.

Western allies in Europe – most notably the UK, France and Germany, co-signatories of the 2015 deal – remain committed to the agreement and have signalled they are willing to disagree sharply and openly with Trump on the issue.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN who made herself the principal channel for the president’s critique of the deal, has been a lonely voice against it on the security council.

The stance taken by Netanyahu and Trump has also set them apart from their most senior national security advisers.

On a visit to Buenos Aires on Tuesday, the Israeli prime minister declared: “Our position is straightforward. This is a bad deal. Either fix it – or cancel it.” Netanyahu is supported in that position by his defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and the US ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer. But he is reportedly not backed by the Israeli defence and intelligence establishment, which believes Iran is abiding by the agreement and its strict limits on nuclear activities and stockpiles of fissile material.

“The nuclear agreement is a good example of the kind of solutions to which I aspired,” Carmi Gillon, a former chief of the internal security service Shin Bet, wrote in July. “It has neutralized a major threat to the world, while ensuring that the United States and its allies have the tools, the information and the leverage that they need to confront the Iranian danger and make the region, and the world, a safer place.”

Netanyahu’s view of Israeli security interests are markedly different, said Daniel Levy, head of the US Middle East Project.

“In line with Netanyahu’s perception of what serves Israel, his interest is in maintaining a strong American presence in the region including militarily and in a maximally adversarial US-Iran relationship,” Levy said. “Getting Trump to do his bidding on Iran also helps Netanyahu to present a domestic political image of being a winner.”

Trump has signalled his intention to withdraw certification of the Iran deal in a report the state department is due to submit to Congress by 15 October. Although that would not lead directly to the end of the agreement, it would open the door to new US sanctions which would represent a violation of the deal and trigger its unravelling.

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Such a move is known to be opposed by both the secretaries of defense and state, James Mattis and Rex Tillerson. Both are generally hawkish on Iran but argue that the US should not provoke a new crisis – and possibly a nuclear arms race – in the Middle East in the midst of a tense nuclear and missile stand-off with North Korea.

The regional and global threat represented by Pyongyang’s rapidly accelerating nuclear weapons programme will be another theme of Trump’s first address to the UN. His administration has repeatedly threatened that it is ready to resort to military action if UN sanctions do not curb Iran’s missile and nuclear tests.

Global action to combat climate change will be a priority for many of the world leaders Trump will meet this week, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, who will have a bilateral meeting with the US president on Monday afternoon, after Netanyahu’s lunchtime session.

Trump – a climate sceptic – may not put much emphasis on the issue in his UN speech but Tillerson signalled on Sunday that the US may stay in the Paris climate change agreement if the right conditions can be negotiated.

Trump and Netanyahu in Jerusalem ... ‘The desire to obliterate Obama’s mark on history may be something else that Trump and Netanyahu share.’ Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

If Trump’s vow to bail out of the Paris agreement is dropped it could redouble his resolve to dump the Iran nuclear deal, another Obama legacy. One of his avenues of attack, already outlined by Haley, will be to argue that the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is not being assertive enough in inspections of suspect military sites in Iran.

Netanyahu is likely to supply ammunition for that approach. Israeli officials told Haaretz the IAEA had been prevented by Tehran from visiting one site and had not asked to inspect others where suspected nuclear weapons research was going on, according to intelligence handed to the agency (presumably by Israel, though the report does not say that specifically).

The push for military base inspections, with its echoes of contentious UN meetings in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, is likely to meet stiff resistance in the security council. Even those capitals which might agree that the IAEA could be more assertive, point to the certain and tangible benefits of the Vienna deal, which has reduced the Iranian stockpile of low-enriched uranium by nearly 99%.

Mattis, Tillerson and European US allies are reported to have suggested ways the US could take a tougher line with Iran in other arenas, like Yemen, Syria and Iraq, while staying in the nuclear deal.

However, Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian American Council, which advocates diplomacy and engagement with Tehran, says Trump is swayed by Netanyahu and the Saudi leadership, who oppose the nuclear deal, not primarily for nuclear-related reasons but because of the recognition it gives Iran’s role as a regional power-broker.

Barack Obama had an acrimonious relationship with the Israeli leader during his time in the White House. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

“The perspective of those who didn’t like this deal, is that, at the end of the day, this deal is not just about the Iranian nuclear issue,” Parsi, the author of a book on the deal, Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy. “The most important thing is that beyond that, it ended three decades of American policy of containing Iran. It accepted than Iran is a major power in the region.”

Since making Riyadh the destination of his first foreign trip as president, Trump has stuck closely to Saudi side on its disputes with Iran and Qatar, to a degree that has frequently baffled some of his own advisers.

The president’s circle also includes several prominent US lobbyists for a violent Iranian opposition group, Mujahideen e-Khalq (MeK), including Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton and Elaine Chao, Trump’s transportation secretary.

Another driving motive appears to be a desire to undo as much of Obama’s presidential legacy as possible, at home and abroad.

“President Trump himself appears motivated to oppose reflexively nearly all of President Obama’s major agreements,” Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state for political affairs. “That is a major mistake in judgement on his part.”

The desire to obliterate Obama’s mark on history may be something else that Trump and Netanyahu share. The Israeli leader had an acrimonious relationship with Obama, who successfully fended off Netanyahu’s bid to derail the Iran deal in the US Congress two years ago.

“What Netanyahu and Trump have in common, among other things, is their inability to accept criticism, their tendency to turn critics into enemies and their fervent wish to wipe the smile off what they see as Obama’s condescending face,” Israeli commentator Chemi Shalev, wrote in Haaretz on Sunday.

“This is the backdrop to the meeting in New York on Monday between Trump and Netanyahu, the two senior members of the Obama Victims Club, who are both seeking payback by trying to erase his signature foreign policy achievement.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/18/trump-netanyahu-iran-nuclear-deal-united-nations-general-assembly

zondag 17 september 2017

Hardline Israeli rabbis use tough checks on Jewish identity to block marriages

An ultra-orthodox religious court is infringing human rights by demanding Israelis prove their Jewish status, critics say

A rabbi leads worshippers in Ashdod on the shore of the Mediterranean Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters

Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem

Reut T, a 28-year-old Israeli secretary, regards herself as a traditional and observant Jew, attending synagogue each week. So having her Jewishness questioned when she wanted to marry was shocking and humiliating.

The news, delivered in a summons to a rabbinical court, came out of the blue. Not only could she not be married by the rabbinate, she was told, but her very status as Jewish was being questioned, in a case now being challenged before Israel’s supreme court.

Reut – who asked not to be identified to prevent further issues for her family – is not alone. According to figures seen by the Observer, she is one of a growing number of Israeli citizens who, despite being recognised as Jewish by the state, have had their Jewishness questioned by an official rabbinate that enjoys an almost exclusive monopoly on state marriage and other issues.

This was once a rare issue that affected only a handful of Israelis, but this has changed under a newly assertive chief rabbinate, dominated by the ultra-orthodox. A group called ITIM: Resources and Advocacy for Jewish Life, which is representing Reut and other families, says the rabbinate has summoned scores of people in the past two years for investigation to prove their Jewish status.

According to figures acquired by the group under a freedom of information request, there was an increase of 100% from 2011-2016 in the number of people labelled “pending confirmation of Jewish status”. In the same period there has been a 460% rise in the number of people rejected as “non-Jews” by the rabbinical courts. This is both shaming and painful, as Reut attests, and many of those affected have chosen to keep their experience private to protect other relatives whose own Jewishness could also be questioned.

“These are family members who have undergone thorough examination of their Jewishness and came to live in Israel,” lawyers for Reut and ITIM argued in an appeal contesting that the rabbinical courts have no authority, by law, to investigate or reject, on their own initiative, the Jewishness of Israeli citizens. “Suddenly and without their will or consent, a cloud of doubt is cast over their Jewishness. They are required to answer to the rabbinical court, without having done anything to deserve a trial over their identity. There is not enough space to describe the personal and emotional damage this situation creates.”

Ultra-orthodox Jews — Smoke fills the air as ultra-orthodox Jews burn leavened items in final preparation for the Passover holiday in Jerusalem. Photograph: Oded Balilty/AP

The sudden rise in investigations also coincides with a vaguely worded but far-reaching ruling issued by the rabbinical courts in 2016 calling for investigation if “a doubt has arisen considering the Jewishness of a relative” requiring the courts “to clarify the matter of their Jewishness for the purpose of marriage according to Jewish law”.

The increase comes amid a wider cultural conflict between the ultra-orthodox-dominated chief rabbinate and less hardline groups in Israel and the wider Jewish diaspora over what it means to be Jewish and who is allowed to define Jewishness. This led, among other things, to a clash this year over plans to allow men and women to pray together at Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

It has also resulted in the disclosure of an alleged “blacklist” of 160 rabbis worldwide whom the rabbinate does not trust to check the Jewishness of immigrants to Israel: among the names on the list is the US rabbi who oversaw the conversion of Ivanka Trump.

Reut’s problem is that she came to Israel from the former Soviet Union aged 10 months, the granddaughter of an orphaned Holocaust survivor adopted by a non-Jewish couple who made antisemitic comments to her. Her grandmother was scarred by her experience, Reut said, and after fleeing her adoptive parents as a teenager hid the fact she was Jewish on official USSR papers, a decision that has come back to haunt their family.

“When I decided to get married I knew I would have to go through a registration process so I got in touch with a religious organisation that helps with the paperwork,” she told the Observer. “One of the rabbis said it was problematic because we didn’t have my grandmother’s birth certificate, but that they would try to find it in the archive.”

But far from helping Reut, the rabbi instead raised the issue of her Jewishness with the rabbinate. “The next thing I knew,” she recalled, “was that I had been summoned to a rabbinical court in Tel Aviv to discuss my Jewish status.”

The process led to Reut, her brother and her mother being listed as “not Jewish” according to the rabbinate.

Rabbi Seth Farber, director of ITIM, says it is a question of how Jewishness is defined in Israel, and how the rabbinate is using this – not least for almost a million former Soviet Jews who came to Israel under a state-administered right of return that has already ruled on their Jewish status for citizenship purposes.

“This is a very worrisome trend. Israel is a nation of immigrants. If this continues, it puts in danger the most basic human rights of more than a million citizens,” said Farber. “Beyond this, it is also against Jewish law, which states that one must take at their word a person who says they are Jewish. A small group is imposing its fundamentalist views on the Israeli immigrant population.

“For the first 50 years of the state it was largely a pro forma thing. You defined yourself as Jewish and you brought witnesses who said you were Jewish. But then as the rabbinate became more powerful and independent, and as new technology allowed it, it became no longer a question of trust.

“A whole department was created to check on documentation which morphed – seven years ago – into the compilation of an entire handbook. That was the first time such a book was published. That all led to the latest development, the initiating of Jewishness investigations, a process that started escalating in 2015. And now it appears they’re not only checking people registering to get married but rechecking people already married if they have any basis for suspicion.”

Farber believes there is a wider issue at stake than simply individuals and families. “It’s about what Israel is going to be. We don’t interrogate Jews and put them through investigations.”

He links recent moves by the chief rabbinate and courts in part to Israeli coalition politics, which has allowed the small ultra-orthodox parties that prop up prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing government to wield disproportional influence.

For Reut the experience has been humiliating. “It was very important to me to get married according to Jewish law. In the end I had to go through a private organisation to do it and then get married in Cyprus to be recognised as married under civil law in Israel.

“I feel like a second-class citizen. It is absolutely ridiculous that as an Israeli citizen who goes to synagogue every week I am not allowed to get married here just because someone decided they had doubts about my Jewishness.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/16/rabbis-block-marriages-israeljewish-identity-human-rights

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My Comments :

1. Efraim Halwevy - a former Mossad director and himself the founder of an org. that assists in retrieving (mostly from civil archives) "proof" of "jewish origins| of Russian immigrants in "Israel" - did warn explicitly of the steep rise of the influence from the ultra-orthodox jews in "Israel", which, he stated, could even easily lead up to a civil war in the not too distant future.

2. We abstract in this context of course for a moment of the fact, that there is no such a phenomenon as "Diaspora Jews" - because there never has been a jewish diaspora at all (Shlomo Sand et al.) in the first place.

3. A thesis that has been mirrored by the many academic genetic studies, that all concluded, that there is no such a thing as " a jewish gene", but that the so called diaspora societies are merely deriving from the population that they are (or have been) living in, so that their claims on jewish origin (i.e., blood-ties with ancient / antique Canaan nationals) are a purposely designed zionist hoax.