Al-Jazeerah: Cross-Cultural Understanding
www.ccun.org www.aljazeerah.info |
Opinion Editorials, January 2012 |
||||||||||||||||||
Archives Mission & Name Conflict Terminology Editorials Gaza Holocaust Gulf War Isdood Islam News News Photos Opinion Editorials US Foreign Policy (Dr. El-Najjar's Articles) www.aljazeerah.info
|
Fort Sumter, False Flags, and The Empire's Coming Crusade Against Iran By Mark Dankof Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, January 18, 2012
It is no accident that Michael Gerson, a major schill of the Establishment Corporate Media’s (ECM) chorus for a Zionist-inspired war with Iran, has stepped forward in the Washington Post to broadside Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, and to concurrently publish a breathtaking synthesis of ignorance and duplicity regarding the American War Between the States in the 19th century. Gerson is joined in his transparent machinations for the Israeli Lobby against the Presidential campaign of the Texas Republican Congressman by fellow agents Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash of CNN, who pulled the plug on U. S. Army Corporal Jesse Thorsen during an on-air interview with the Corporal on the night of the January 3rd Iowa Caucus. It seems the young man’s comments on why the United States didn’t need to be a surrogate military force in the Middle East for the Jewish State were too much on target to be placed before the American people for honest examination and consideration. George Orwell lives. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), which has ruthlessly exposed the backgrounds of Blitzer and Bash, has the video of the latest version of the Hasbara Project online. Check out the following synopsis from WRMEA: Blitzer is a former employee of AIPAC, Israel’s behemoth Washington, DC lobby (see former Sen. James Abourezk’s “Wolf Blitzer, AIPAC, and the Saudi Peace Initiative” in the July 2007 Washington Report, p. 16, also posted on our Web site). The CNN anchor also is the author of Territory of Lies: The Exclusive Story of Jonathan Jay Pollard: The American Who Spied on His Country for Israel and How He Was Betrayed (the title seeming to imply that it was Pollard, rather than his native country, who was betrayed). Senior congressional correspondent Bash joined CNN as Dana Schwartz, her maiden name. Her father, Stu Schwartz, is a senior broadcast producer at ABC News and her mother, Frances Weinman Schwartz, is, according to Wikipedia, “an educator in Jewish studies and author of the book, Passage to Pesach, and co-author with Rabbi Eugene Borowitz of two books, Jewish Moral Virtues and A Touch of the Sacred.” In 1998 the CNN correspondent married her first husband, Jeremy Bash, chief of staff to Leon Panetta in his capacities as both defense secretary and former CIA chief. The son of the chief rabbi of the Arlington Fairfax (VA) Jewish Congregation, Bash was chief minority council to the House Intelligence Committee when the pro-Israel Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) was its top Democrat prior to the 2006 elections. The Bashes divorced in 2007. The following year Dana Bash married fellow CNN congressional correspondent John King, who converted to Judaism prior to their marriage. But we are not to worry. There was no conspiracy to silence Corporal Thorsen on international television on January 3rd. And there is nothing to the allegation that Jews disproportionately control major American and world media outlets. . . . We return to Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo, the author of The Real Lincoln. He dissects Michael Gerson this week in print, exposing the latter for the historical ignoramus he truly is. Di Lorenzo’s post is essential reading, as is my review of his magnum opus on Lincoln penned during the beginning of King George’s War on Terror which commenced a decade ago and continues to unfold as a tragedy with eschatological dimensions under King Barack. The essential point clinched by DiLorenzo is this: The pattern of Presidential duplicity, criminality, and mythologically-wrapped spin which legitimized unnecessary state-sponsored violence and war, was foundationally established by the 16th President of the United States, a pattern which was expanded in relentless application by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the typological 20th century Presidents of the American Empire. Wilson and Roosevelt, in turn, have strengthened the hand of either the 44th or 45th President of the United States in the 21st century in launching the genesis of World War III, at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu and the cabal of central bankers and Zionist agents utilizing the American government as their personal instrument in the achievement of global conquest and the solidification of the New World Order. The pattern of Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Bush, and Obama has essential components and ingredients. Chief among these are: 1) The understanding of each of these Presidents that their continuance as a Chief Executive of the United States necessitated the furtherance of the power agenda of a central banking cabal; 2) This furtherance would require the involvement of their nation in a war; 3) Hostilities would commence courtesy of a false flag incident, used to disguise the identity of the real perpetrators and their agenda; 4) The war would of necessity involve the employment of mass media in legitimizing the rationale for the conflict among the masses with a barrage of viscerally powerful images and metaphors soaked in notions of moral crusade, absolutism, the sanction of Divine Providence, blind nationalism, and religious visions containing distorted notions of Manifest Destiny, messianic fervor, and millennial fanaticism; 4) Legitimate dissent from the Crusade, rooted in sounder notions of Constitutional restraint, diplomacy, and what Jesus Christ actually teaches about the Kingdom of God, would be met with demonization, economic impoverishment, persecution, imprisonment, and death. What worked for Lincoln in this final regard, is being arranged nicely for Obama in the form of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as demonstrated recently by Jonathan Turley in The Guardian (UK). Building on the foundations of the two Patriot Acts, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the jettisoning of Posse Comitatus laws, the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretap program, and the circumventing of the Federal Court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the NDAA has formally codified George W. Bush’s observation that the Constitution of the United States is nothing but a “Goddamned piece of paper.” Presumably the lives and liberties of American citizens, not to mention The Empire’s victims abroad, fall into the identically condemned status and subsequently fateful demise. Thomas DiLorenzo (“The Lincoln Myth“) and Frank Conner, author of The South Under Siege 1830-2000: A History of Relations Between the North and the South, largely agree on the fundamental causes of the War Between the States and the agenda of Abraham Lincoln and the banking/mercantilist cadre which instigated its ignition. Conner’s contribution is especially valuable in outlining the path of America’s 16th President in arranging for the “First Shots” at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, an installation on an island in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. As for DiLorenzo, he reminds his readers of what they are not likely to have ever been told in an American grade school, or by Michael Gerson and Wolf Blitzer, about Lincoln as the prototype for Bush and Obama and their ongoing war with Persia. The Loyola College professor debunks the six (6) most prominent myths about the most mythologized Chief Executive in American history as follows: Myth #1: Lincoln invaded the South to free the slaves. Ending slavery and racial injustice is not why the North invaded. As Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it . . .” Congress announced to the world on July 22, 1861, that the purpose of the war was not “interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states” (i.e., slavery), but to preserve the Union “with the rights of the several states unimpaired.” At the time of Fort Sumter (April 12, 1861) only the seven states of the deep South had seceded. There were more slaves in the Union than out of it, and Lincoln had no plans to free any of them. The North invaded to regain lost federal tax revenue by keeping the Union intact by force of arms. In his First Inaugural Lincoln promised to invade any state that failed to collect “the duties and imposts” and he kept his promise. On April 19, 1861, the reason Lincoln gave for his naval blockade of the Southern ports was that “the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed” in the states that had seceded. Myth #2: Lincoln’s war “saved the Union.” The war may have saved the Union geographically but it destroyed it philosophically by destroying its voluntary nature. In the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, the states described themselves as “free and independent.” They delegated certain powers to the federal government they had created as their agent but retained sovereignty for themselves. This was widely understood in the North as well as the South in 1861. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle editorialized on Nov. 13, 1860, the Union “depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people of each state, and when that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone. The New York Journal of Commerce concurred, writing on Jan. 12, 1861, that a coerced Union changes the nature of government from “a voluntary one, in which the people are sovereigns, to a despotism where one part of the people are slaves.” The majority of Northern newspapers agreed. Myth #3: Lincoln championed equality and natural rights.. His words and, more importantly, his actions, repudiate this myth. “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races,” he announced in his Aug. 21, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas. “I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” And, “Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. . . . We cannot, then, make them equals.” In Springfield, Illinois on July17, 1858 Lincoln said, “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.” On Sept. 18, 1858 in Charleston, Illinois he said: “I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.” Lincoln supported the Illinois Constitution, which prohibited the emigration of black people into the state, and he also supported the Illinois Black Codes which deprived the small number of free blacks in the state any semblance of citizenship. He strongly supported the Fugitive Slave Act, which compelled Northern states to capture runaway slaves and return them to their owners. In his First Inaugural he pledged his support of a proposed constitutional amendment that had just passed the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives that would have prohibited the federal government from ever having the power “to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” In his First Inaugural Lincoln advocated making this amendment “express and irrevocable.” Lincoln was also a lifelong advocate of “colonization” or shipping all black people to Africa, Central America, Haiti – anywhere but here. “I cannot make it better known than it already is, “he stated in a Dec. 1, 1862 Message to Congress, “that I strongly favor colonization.” To Lincoln blacks could be “equal,” but not in the U.S. Myth #4: Lincoln was a defender of the Constitution. Quite the contrary: Generations of historians have labeled Lincoln a “dictator.” “Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North’s successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms,” wrote Clinton Rossiter in Constitutional Dictatorship. And, “Lincoln’s amazing disregard for the Constitution was considered by nobody as legal.” James G. Randall documented Lincoln’s assault on the Constitution in Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln. Lincoln unconstitutionally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and had the military arrest tens of thousands of Northern political opponents, including dozens of newspaper editors and owners. Some 300 newspapers were shut down and all telegraph communication was censored. Northern elections were rigged; Democratic voters were intimidated by federal soldiers; hundreds of New York City draft protesters were gunned down by federal troops; West Virginia was unconstitutionally carved out of Virginia; and the most outspoken member of the Democratic Party opposition, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, was deported. Duly elected members of the Maryland legislature were imprisoned, as was the mayor of Baltimore and Congressman Henry May. The border states were systematically disarmed in violation of the Second Amendment and private property was confiscated. Lincoln’s apologists say he had “to destroy the Constitution in order to save it.” Myth #5: Lincoln was a “great humanitarian” who had “ malice toward none.” This is inconsistent with the fact that Lincoln micromanaged the waging of war on civilians, including the burning of entire towns populated only by civilians; massive looting and plundering; rape; and the execution of civilians (See Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War). Pro-Lincoln historian Lee Kennett wrote in Marching through Georgia that, had the Confederates somehow won, they would have been justified in “stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command” as war criminals. Myth #6: War was necessary to end slavery. During the 19th century dozens of countries, including the British and Spanish empires, ended slavery peacefully through compensated emancipation. Among such countries were Argentina, Colombia, Chile, all of Central America, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, the French and Danish Colonies, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. (Lincoln did propose compensated emancipation for the border states, but coupled his proposal with deportation of any freed slaves. He failed to see it through, however). Only in America was war associated with emancipation. In sum, the power of the state ultimately rests upon a series of myths about the alleged munificence of our rulers. Nothing serves this purpose better than the Lincoln myth. This should be kept in mind by all who visit the new Lincoln statue in Richmond. The essential connection of the dots provided by DiLorenzo with contemporary events is this: Just as Lincoln’s war of aggression against the South had nothing to do with the moral issue of slavery, but the agenda of the Northern banking cabal, the ideology of British economic mercantilism, Henry Clay’s “American System,” and the preservation of Lincoln’s personal power, the coming war with Iran has nothing to do with any credible military threat against the United States. It has everything to do with preserving Israel’s regional supremacy in the Middle East; forcing Iran at gunpoint to fully integrate its banking system into that of the Globalist Cabal’s; protecting the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency; and purloining oil and natural gas deposits and pipelines for energy consortiums. It is inextricably linked with the money trail which bankrolls American Presidential and Congressional elections, and Establishment Corporate Media (ECM). Discerning readers worldwide have already concluded that the American-Israeli conflict with Iran is based on the overt aggression of the former, and being perpetrated for publicly stated reasons that are palpable falsehoods soaked in mythology and the American commitment to “democracy,” the ”rule of law,” ”human rights,” and the ”security of the international community.” These convenient canards are belied by the employment of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), the Kurdish PJAK, and the Jundallah terrorist organizations for bomb detonations and assassinations of Iranian citizens within their borders, acts of criminality etched with the fingerprints of the Israeli Mossad. Covert incitement of ethnic/tribal tensions by Western intelligence in Iranian Azerbaijan, Khuzestan, and Balochistan Provinces is a supplement to this strategy. Violation of Iranian airspace with American drones will continue. As Ron Paul has underscored, the economic sanctions aimed at the Iranian banking and oil sectors are additional overt acts of war. It is also crystal clear that the American Fifth Fleet in Bahrain is being publicly touted as the ace in the hole of the War Party in an escalating war of words that may well make the Strait of Hormuz a 21st century Fort Sumter. And for what? To remove the “threat” of an Iranian weaponized nuclear program, an accusation unsupported by the last American National Intelligence Estimate on this issue and the ambiguity of recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports? Even as Israel, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), sports a nuclear monopoly in the region with supplemental chemical and biological stockpiles and the area’s premier conventional military? The smell of the putrid stench of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and their “substantiation” of Saddam Hussein’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” is in the air. And for Americans who dissent from their government’s policies in the Middle East, especially in the last decade, Lincoln’s 19th century Crusade against the Constitution of the United States stands as a warning. Chapter Six (6) of The Real Lincoln warns us that America’s 16th President launched an invasion of the South without consulting Congress, as required by the Constitution; declared martial law; blockaded Southern ports; suspended habeas corpus for the duration of his administration; imprisoned without trial thousands of Northern citizens; arrested and imprisoned newspaper editors critical of him; censored all telegraph communication; nationalized railroads; created several new States without the consent of the citizens of those States; ordered Federal troops to interfere with elections in the North by intimidating Democratic voters; deported United States Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio for criticizing the administration’s income tax proposal at a Democratic Party rally; confiscated private property; confiscated firearms in violation of the 2nd Amendment; and eviscerated the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution. DiLorenzo puts a 19th century historical perspective on the current vulnerability of those Americans who oppose the codification of the suspension of habeas corpus by Barack Obama and a complicit American Congress in the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA): “Secretary of State William Seward established a secret police force that made thousands of arrests on mere suspicion of ‘disloyalty,’ broadly defined as disagreement with Lincoln’s war policies. Prisoners were not told why they were being arrested, no investigations of their alleged ‘crimes’ were carried out, and no trials were held. There was no legal process at all, and many Northern citizens were imprisoned for such alleged infractions as ‘being a noisy secessionist,’ selling Confederate trinkets, or ‘hurrahing for Jeff Davis.’ An Episcopal minister in Alexandria, Virginia was arrested for omitting a prayer for the President of the United States in his church services as required by the Lincoln Administration. A New Orleans man was executed by General Benjamin Butler for merely taking down a U. S. flag. [The Real Lincoln, page 138]“ And as the Loyola College professor ominously reminds us, Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor came to be known as the ‘American Bastille’ [read Guantanamo] because it housed so many political prisoners during the Lincoln Administration [more than 13,000 is the consensus among historians]. I will say again on this day of the New Hampshire Republican Primary: World War III is coming; it will be accompanied by a catastrophic destruction of American citizens domestically whose lives and Constitution will be eradicated forever by its ignition in an unjustifiable attack on Iran; and the not-so-hidden Hand behind it all is the government of Israel and the domestic Zionist lobby in the United States which owns the American Presidency, the Congress, the Judiciary, and the Establishment Corporate Media [ECM]. Ron Paul: Will you finally connect the dots and step up to home plate on this in your remaining time in this Presidential campaign, or will your equivocation and obfuscation continue? The clock is ticking toward midnight. The clock is also ticking toward the ultimate irony and tragedy in human history, if the 44th President of the United States, from The Land of Lincoln and mythologically “emancipated” by the 16th President, proves to be the ultimate consummation in history of the utilization of capricious and usurped powers that destroy the Constitutional freedoms of his countrymen, even as the planet itself is engulfed in mass murder and death. We may live to see the fateful lifting of the Seventh Seal. |
|
Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah & ccun.org. editor@aljazeerah.info & editor@ccun.org |