On
May 5, 2009, Vice President Biden reassured AIPAC/American Israel Public
Affairs Committee that while USA foreign
policy will change, America remains committed to the peace and security of the
state of Israel but that the election of President Obama was a call “to change
the trajectory that the world was on."
Self
proclaimed Zionist, Biden admitted that “All the good intentions of the last
decade have not resulted in a more secure, more stable Middle East… we will pursue
direct, principled democracy with Iran [and the U.S.] will approach Iran
initially in the spirit of mutual respect."[1]
Mutual
respect requires that all sides are treated equally and held equally
accountable under the same criteria.
Also
at the AIPAC conference was Biden successor as chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who sucked up and misspoke that
“Israel is more than just an ally
and fellow democracy.”
Israel's status as ally has been
in question by many ever since that other day in infamy on June
8, 1967
when President Lyndon Johnson crucified the truth and failed to support the
troops because he would "not embarrass an ally."
The USS LIBERTY was an unarmed spy ship that sailed in international waters
during the Six-Day War that was attacked by Israeli fighter jets and torpedo
boats rendering thirty-four sailors dead, 170 wounded and all scarred for life
because the survivors "were ordered to remain silent under threat of court
martial, imprisonment or worse...The U.S. government has never challenged the
obviously phony Israeli excuse of 'mistaken identity' nor have they attempted
to expose the dishonorable cover up that continues to date. Truth and America's honor were ignominiously
sacrificed to provide cover for Israel's transparent lies and
despicable act of perfidy." -Phillip F. Tourney, President USS LIBERTY
Veterans Association, June 8, 2007.
[Read
more: http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=700&Itemid=180
]
Israel
is also not a democracy "but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run and
controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up with
Jews in control and structured to keep them in control.”-Jeff Halper,
American-Israeli, Founder and Coordinator of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against
House Demolitions.
Kerry
did call for talks with Iran for, “If diplomacy is to
work, it must be backed by the prospect of tough, escalating, and multilateral
sanctions strong enough to actually change behavior."
He
also called on the Arab states to start treating Israel "like a normal
country" and I imagine if America only had done that, Israel could be one.
"In
1963, President Kennedy tried to force Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the
Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant.
The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’ Kennedy
insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben
Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection. When Johnson became president, he
made an agreement with Israel that two senators would
come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would
build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to
’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of
the Dimona from them. Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the
situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In
1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium
for ten bombs a year.” – Excerpt from June 2005 interview with Mordrechai
Vanunu
On
October 5, 1986, the world was made aware that Israel had already manufactured
upwards of 200 nuclear warheads in a London Times
article that published Vanunu's interviews/interrogations with nuclear
experts and some of the photos from the two rolls of film he shot in various
top secret locales inside of Israel's clandestine underground WMD
Facility.
Israel
has never allowed international inspectors into the Dimona and they are now
suspected of possessing the Jericho III ballistic missile system, which is
capable of delivering a nuclear warhead at a distance of up to 7,000
kilometers.
America's
favored relationship with the Jewish State has also allowed Israel to escape at
least 65 UN resolutions
for their human rights abuses and disregard of international law.
American
tax payers are complicit because we the people provide more than $6.8 million per day
to Israel that all goes to continue the 41 years of military occupation of the
indigenous people of the Holy Land.
Also
on May 5th, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller called on
Israel to join the NPT as, "Universal adherence to the non-proliferation
treaty itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea…remains a
fundamental objective of the United States." [2]
On
April 19, 2009, Gideon Spiro, a founding member of The Israeli Committee for A Middle East Free from Atomic, Biological and
Chemical Weapons wrote to President Obama:
"The
task of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear arms is an important one, and
the way to achieve that objective is not by military action, but through an
international effort to create a Middle East free of nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons. It is impossible to achieve that objective without dealing
with the main cause of the Middle East nuclear arms race - Israel.
"Israel
pushed the Middle East onto a course of a WMD-race. Israel is armed with hundreds of atom and
hydrogen bombs. If we take into account the additional biological and chemical
weapons that Israel produces in the Nes Ziona Biological Institute, a
frightening picture emerges: a state, smaller than most Congressional Districts
in the United States that is a powder-keg of weapons of mass destruction.
"It
is an historical irony that Israel, which is home to many Holocaust survivors, has
become a hotbed of radical leaders who would create the next holocaust – a
nuclear holocaust. But the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran will
extend far beyond our region. It is most likely they will have devastating
global consequences that will also cause massive harm to the United States….no
one knows what Iran is hiding in its facilities, but it can be helpful to draw
an analogy from Israel’s case…The only effective and peaceful way to end this
destructive WMD-race is through regional nuclear disarmament…Israel’s power
rests to a great extent on US military and economic aid. Without the billions
of dollars that the US transfers to it, Israel would be unable to finance the
Occupation, the settlements, the army, and of course, its nuclear arsenal."
Israel's
hold on power also rests in the efforts of AIPAC, but due to their influence "it is
business as usual in Washington: criminal wrongdoing continues to corrupt
America's core values, rule of law, and Middle East policy, as the Israel
lobby's crosshairs shift almost completely to Iran."
In
2002, Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer estimated the total cost of the
prolonged conflict in the Middle East at $3 trillion and lays a good deal of
the blame for this at the doorstep of AIPAC. [3]
On April 5,
2009, President Obama stood on the world stage in Prague and stated, "As the only
nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral
responsibility to act…When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays
forever beyond our grasp. We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To
denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also cowardly thing
to do. That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends… the voices of
peace and progress must be raised together…Human destiny will be what we make of it…Words
must mean something."
The
United States has produced over 70,000 nuclear weapons of 72 major types. By
the end of the Cold War [1991] the United States had an active arsenal of some
23,000 weapons of 26 major types and nearly 2,000 remain on hair-trigger alert
ever since the end of the Cold War in 1991. An estimated 150 – 240 tactical
nuclear weapons remain based in five NATO countries and the United States is
the only country with nuclear weapons deployed on foreign soil. American
taxpayers provide over $54 billion annually to maintain our nuclear arsenal-a
drop in the bucket of the overall U.S. military spending.
American money is imprinted with "IN GOD WE TRUST" but our foreign
policy chooses to live by the sword. On Armistice Day, 1948 General Omar Nelson
Bradley warned, "We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants,
in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without
conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of
the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more
about dying than we know about living."
Individually we are
powerless to dismantle the insanity of nuclear weapons, but for people of
conscience and those with faith in a nonviolent God of love, compassion,
justice and peace it is a moral, ethical and spiritual call to work towards the
abolition of war and nuclear weapons.
A movement of American
Christians under the banner of "The Two Futures Project: 2FP" has evolved and we believe
"that we face two futures and one choice: a world without nuclear weapons
or a world ruined by them. We support the multilateral, global,
irreversible, and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons, as a
biblically-grounded mandate and as a contemporary security imperative. Our
change strategy is based around the creation of a nonpartisan,
conscience-driven, enduring majority of Americans who are committed to a
nuclear weapons-free world. By joining together with one voice of
Christian conscience, we seek to encourage and enable our national leaders to
make the complete elimination of nuclear weapons the organizing principle of
American nuclear weapons policy…The field of our service is primarily the
church and believers, and secondarily—so that our words will be credible—the
government of our nation and all nations.
"As a matter
of Christian conviction, we choose a world free of nuclear weapons. We believe that
we face two futures: a world without nuclear weapons or a world ruined by them.
We proclaim that nuclear weapons today are unjustifiable theologically,
politically, and militarily. We renounce nuclear weapons as sin against God and
neighbor. We repent of apathy toward devices that cause indiscriminate
destruction. We urge the American President's leadership in fulfilling existing
commitments toward global and complete nuclear disarmament. We pledge our
support to the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide, to the glory of
God." [4]
The goal of a
world free of nuclear weapons can be equated to what appears to be an
insurmountable mountain whose top is clouded by the status quo that reaps
cynicism and a lack of imagination that keeps one grounded in despair and apathy.
Continuing on the path of inertia will only descend us further down the slippery
slope of violence and death. Silence is complicity and people of conscience and
those with faith in a nonviolent God of justice and peace are seeking the
highest ground together, for only in solidarity will we reach the mountaintop;
a world without war, a world when all swords are put down and plowshares are
raised up.
AIPAC
currently has 515 lobbying appointments scheduled on Capitol Hill.
People
of conscience are sending emails to President Obama and their representatives
in support of nuclear disarmament through the fill in forms available @
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/161/t/288/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=911
http://twofuturesproject.org/?page_id=130
1. http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/biden-defends-outreach-to-iran-in-aipac-speech-2009-05-05.html
2. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/131213
3. http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=959&Itemid=202
4. http://twofuturesproject.org/