By Maidhc Ó Cathail 
The recent call by U.S. Senator Charles Schumer for increased rail safety funding and the creation of a “no-ride” list for Amtrak trains is yet another reminder of just who is stoking fear of Muslims in America.
In an interview last year with a Jewish radio talk show in New York, Senator Schumer said he believed that HaShem (an Orthodox Jewish term for “God”) gave him the name “Schumer” — which means “guardian” — so that he could fulfill his “very important” role in the U.S. Senate as a “guardian of Israel.” Presumably, Schumer’s God-given role also includes turning the country he is actually paid to represent — the United States — into an Islamophobic police state.
Americans wondering what happened to their freedoms since 9/11 need to understand the key role played by ardent pro-Israelis like Schumer in undermining their civil liberties under the guise of protecting them from terrorism.
On October 11, 2001, exactly one month after 9/11, Senator Joe Lieberman introduced a bill to establish the Department of Homeland Security. Since then, “the No. 1 pro-Israel advocate and leader in Congress” has been the main mover behind such draconian legislation as the Protect America Act of 2007, the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, and the proposed Terrorist Expatriation Act, which would revoke the citizenship of Americans accused of providing “material support” to a foreign terrorist organization, i.e. groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah that are legitimately resisting Israeli occupation and aggression. Lieberman, who was Barack Obama’s mentor when he entered the Senate, has even proposed a bill which would give the president the power to kill the Internet in the event of a so-called “national cyber-emergency.”
Although it would be hard to think of anyone who has done more to undermine American freedoms than Joe Lieberman, Michael Chertoff runs him a close second. A mere 45 days after the September 11 attacks, the infamous 342-page document known as the USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law. It was co-authored by Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division. Chertoff, whose mother, Livia Eisen, was an El Al air hostess believed to have had links to the Mossad, was appointed secretary of Homeland Security in 2005, after having been endorsed for the job by Senators Schumer and Lieberman.
Since he left public service in 2009, Chertoff co-founded the Chertoff Group, a security and risk-management firm, whose clients include a manufacturer of full-body scanning machines. After a young Nigerian without a passport — the so-called Christmas Day “underwear bomber” — was allowed, in the words of Ha’aretz, to “slip through” security at Schiphol Airport by the Israeli security firm, ICTS International (which was established by former members of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet), the former Homeland Security chief was all over the mainstream media touting full-body scanners as the answer to America’s airline security problems.
On September 11, 2001, within hours of planes having struck the World Trade Center (recently leased by an extraordinarily “lucky” Larry Silverstein, a friend of not one but four Israeli prime ministers), the then former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak dropped into the BBC studios in London to interpret what the attacks would mean for travellers’ civil liberties. “In this area, we will suffer,” Barak confidently suggested. “It will not be so easy to go aboard an airplane in the near future. But we have no way but to stand firm facing terror. Otherwise, all our way of life will be threatened.”
Later that evening, Benjamin Netanyahu let slip that the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans was “very good” for Israel. In particular, the mass murder proved to be very good for an emerging sector of the Israeli economy. In “Laboratory for a Fortressed World,” Naomi Klein detailed the post-9/11 “explosion of Israel’s homeland security sector.” Writing in 2007, Klein observed: “Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion — an increase of 20 percent.”
Consequently, Americans concerned about what “homeland security” is doing to their civil liberties need to be asking: Exactly whose “homeland” and whose “security” is being protected by the likes of Schumer, Lieberman and Chertoff?
It certainly isn’t America’s.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst.
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I hope the ordinary americans read it.
I will do my part to get it out for the ordinary common Amers to read this. iA
USA has been run by Israel is an open secret.
First, even if it were true that the public had “overwhelming sympathy” for Israel, it does not immediately follow that United States policy would necessarily follow suit. U.S. officials frequently do things that a majority of Americans oppose,
Second, to the extent that the American public does have a favorable image of Israel — and there’s no question that it does — that is at least partly due to the lobby’s own efforts to shape public discourse and stifle negative commentary. The lobby doesn’t “control the media,” but “pro-Israel” groups like the ADL and CAMERA work actively to influence how Israel is portrayed in the United States, aided by reliably supportive publications like The New Republic. (As its former editor-in-chief Marty Peretz once admitted, “there’s a sort of party line on Israel” at the journal). That’s their privilege, of course, but groups and individuals in the lobby have also tried to silence or smear virtually any one who criticizes the “special relationship,” and all-too-often those efforts succeed (if perhaps less frequently than they used to). If Americans were exposed to a more open discourse — such as the discourse that prevails in Europe or in Israel itself — Israel’s favorable image would almost certainly decrease (though by no means disappear).
Third, and most important, the evidence suggests that the American people are not in favor of a one-sided “special relationship” where Israel gets unconditional American backing no matter what it does. Although there is no question that Americans have a generally favorable image of Israel and want the United States to help it survive and prosper.
For starters, many Americans recognize that one-sided support for Israel is a problem for the United States, and that figure is even higher among “opinion leaders.” A Pew survey in November 2005 found that 39 percent of Americans saw the special relationship as a “major source of global discontent,” and 78 percent of the news media, 72 percent of military leaders and 69 percent of foreign affairs specialists believed that backing Israel seriously damages America’s image around the world. A 2003 survey by the University of Maryland reported that over 60 percent of Americans would be willing to withhold aid to Israel if it resisted pressure to settle the conflict with the Palestinians, and 73 percent said the United States should not favor either side. In fact, a survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League in 2005 found that 78 percent of Americans believed that Washington should favor neither Israel nor the Palestinians. A 2010 survey by the Brookings Institution found similar results: although 25 percent of Americans thought the United States should “lean toward Israel” in its efforts to resolve the conflict, a healthy 67 percent believed the United States should “lean toward neither side.”
I always say, what they talk a lot to blame others, they themselves commit it in real…they do it out of a guilty conscious. Same is the case with the ‘tolerance’ rhetoric, which they lack fundamentally and blame the Muslims communities for the same. West and the US are croocked lier nations.
worth looking into what Christian Church of America says as it continues with its struggle against Zionist themes and propaganda
http://www.truthtellers.org/
Documentary: THE OTHER ISRAEL
You Tube Links (1 to 7)
It is neither a myth nor an exaggerated conspiracy theory. But as always, only realization of a fact cannot change it. One has to go for serious ACTION if course of events needs to be modified in order to redefine the future. Those who have the courage to DO something practical to challenge the zionizm are called “Terrorists” as per current definition. And if those are Muslims too, the definition becomes even more applicable.
Thnx for the post ms. Yasmeen an eye opener for sure
The lesson of the Iraq affair is that the American-Israeli connection is strongest when it seems that American interests and Israeli interests are one (irrespective of whether that is really the case in the long run). The US uses Israel to dominate the Middle East, Israel uses the US to dominate Palestine.But if something exceptional happens, such as the Jonathan Pollard espionage affair or the sale of an Israeli spy plane to China, and a gap opens between the interests of the two sides, America is quite capable of slapping Israel in the face It is no accident that American (as well as British) fundamentalist Christians invented the Zionist idea well before Theodor Herzl hit upon it. The evangelical lobby is no less important in today’s Washington than the Zionist one. According to its ideology, the Jews must take possession of all the Holy Land in order to make the second coming of Christ possible (and then – the part they don’t shout about – some Jews will become Christians and the rest will be annihilated at Armaggedon, today’s Meggido in Northern Israel).
At the basis of the phenomenon lies the uncanny similarity between the two national-religious stories, the American myth and the Israeli. In both, pioneers persecuted for their religion reached the shores of the promised land. They were forced to defend themselves against the “savage” natives, who were out to destroy them. They redeemed the land, made the desert bloom, created, with God’s help, a flourishing, democratic and moral society.
Both societies live in a state of denial and unconscious guilt feelings – over there because of the genocide committed against the Native Americans and the horrifying slavery of the blacks, here because of the uprooting of half the Palestinian people and the oppression of the other half. Both here and there, people believe in an eternal war between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness”.
Anyway, the American-Israeli symbiosis is unique and far too complex a phenomenon to be described as a simple conspiracy
.The dog wags the tail and the tail wags the dog. They wag each other.
In his powerful 2006 book titled, “The Power of Israel in the United States,” James Petras explained the enormous Jewish Lobby influence on US Middle East policies. Often harming American interests, they’re pursued anyway because of its grassroots and high-level control over government, business leaders, academia, the clergy and mass media since at least the 1960s.
As a result, anyone challenging Israeli policy risks being intimidated, blackmailed, smeared, pressured, removed from positions of authority, or called a national security or terrorist threat, leaving them vulnerable to unprincipled ostracization, persecution or worse.
Today, masquerading as a domestic lobby, it’s a stealth foreign Israeli agent, supporting policies harming US interests. Calling itself “America’s leading pro-Israeli lobby,” its web site says it “works with both Democratic and Republican political leaders to enact public policy that strengthens the vital US-Israel relationship.”
In fact, functioning as a virtual fifth column, it’s poisoned the body politic since exempted from operating lawfully. As a result, as part of the destructive Israeli Lobby, it has virtual veto power over war and peace, trade and investment, multi-billion dollar arms sales, and all Middle East policies under Democrat and Republican administrations alike.
Ralph Nader calls Washington corporate occupied territory. It’s also Israeli Lobby-controlled, including AIPAC, assuring what Israel wants, it gets, but not without independent voices denouncing its poisonous influence.
Reference this debate about US being a Zionist supporting state and those who confront it are called “Terrorists.”
I beg our thoughtful people to concentrate on ourselves and Pakistan first. This is our country while US is not. See how we have succeeded in creating an industry that manufactures terrorists and we spend billions on stopping them. Yet is it not true that many of the main terrorists have been created into monsters after they suffered the abuse of interrogation at the hands of the police/intelligence agencies. The Ranger execution in Karachi is a case in point. Many hundreds are killed unknown to the world. Pakistan has become the country where abused persons live. It is only a matter of time that it catches up with us. What then makes us so different from the Israelis who bomb Ghaza when we do it so often in Balochistan, Karachi, Waziristan, Mohmand, Swat and Bajaur? Zionism is a form of abuse and we too are Zionists in that sense.
Atrocities and molestation of humanity, in whatever form, needs to be resisted. Any such crime committed by our people is of course as serious as done by others and should be treated alike. Long term solution however lies with analysis of root cause(s), devising a treatment accordingly and then giving that treatment as per prescription.
When it comes to the design and schemes of Zion it bears a special attention and as often as necessary, it is not that can be generalized for discounting this easy, US is not Zionist but Zionists have held US as a captive and as a captive audience that is not provided the opportunity to look outside the walls built by the Zionist for their own purposes, it is deep rooted and needs to be recognized whenever it surfaces.
Propaganda culminates brainwashed brains and that is quite evident in this regards, while APOLOGIZERS are abundant too.
The situation would start improving immediately after saying NO to so called “war on terror”. Internal insurgency would come within very controllable limits and the generation of suicide bombers we are creating through our actions would become transformable. The deteriorating image of our forces would also start improving and gap between military and public at large would start reducing.
First and foremost requirement for a sustainable long term solution is to revive “Islam” as the binding force between people of Pakistan. This piece of land was created at the cost of millions of lives and the slogan, we all need to recall, was “Pakistan Ka Matlab Kya – La Ilaha Il-Allah”. Nationalism won’t work here as a substitute.
Secondly, pro-american approach of our military and civilian elite should be replaced with self-reliance. Of course we should be having good bilateral relations with all but “Slavery” is not acceptable. The most important factor to break the shackles of slavery is to become economically independent. I am 200% confident that we have the resources and people to do it in a very short time. We all know why we are pushed towards getting ourselves in the ditch of “Loans”, “Aid” and whatever name with which you call it. We also know whose interest is protected when we go blindly for these instruments of slavery as a result of which we have to follow the instructions even at micro level while devising our economic and financial strategy.
Third important factor is important realization of our armed forces that they have a duty to perform and to “Rule” is not their birth right. They should not only let but should help the “system” to get strong. And that “system” should be our own, designed in the light of guiding principals of Islam and not 100% copy of western form of democracy.
Thank you all for your comments.
In those comments, I believe you have identified the means to combat the forces that threaten us all, i.e. we need to work on two fronts simultaneously: Americans need to be made aware of how they are systematically deceived into fighting wars against Israel’s enemies at a tremendous cost to their freedom, wealth and credibility; and those at the receiving end of that deception such as Pakistanis need to assert their political, strategic and, perhaps most importantly, their economic independence from Washington (Israel’s most important occupied territory) before they facilitate their own destruction.
Kind regards,
Maidhc Ó Cathail