REVEALING FACTS OR ESTABLISHING THEM?: BY DR. BOUTHAINA SHAABAN
16. Dec, 2010
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Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban
By: Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban
The avalanche of top secret cables leaked from the American Departments of State and Defence is still an intriguing enigma to many commentators and political analysts. A large portion of the hundreds of thousands of secret documents and cables posted on WikiLeaks are about the Middle East and the events which have happened in the region over the past decade. They cover the wars waged by the United States and its armed surrogate on Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza and their efforts to destabilize Arab countries, weaken them through military action and drain their monetary reserves under different pretexts. The process included assassinating major political leaders in Lebanon to achieve political objectives. Although this has been spoken of in hushed tones for a while, now we can read all about it on the WikiLeaks website; this begs the question why, and how?
Television news hurried to interview the website’s founder and owner, Julian Assange; he’s another puzzle who, on the one hand, appears to have obtained all these documents without much apparent effort and, on the other, has been indicted in Sweden on rape charges. This makes the whole issue even more sensational; is indicting Assange meant to send the message that the leaks are impossible to control?
After Assange received threats to his life and applied for asylum in Switzerland, his website revealed tens of thousands of confidential messages exchanged between American embassies in the Middle East and the US State Department, between the State Department and Arab officials, and between Israeli and Arab officials. The dominant subject in these cables is the convergence of views between Arab and Israeli officials on Iran and that the source of danger in the region is not Israel alone but also Iran. Some Arab officials – terrified at the thought that Iranian power in the Middle East might disturb their cosy comfort zones call for action to end Iran’s nuclear programme. It appears as if we are being invited to put into practice the theory that my enemy’s enemy is my friend and join with Washington and Tel Aviv against Tehran.
What is remarkable is that American embassies in the region have leaked minutes of meetings which aim to distort the image of the Arabs, even while, for example, some of their officials stress that “a Palestinian state must be demilitarized, without control of its airspace and electro-magnetic field [sic], and without the power to enter into treaties or control its border”. See Robert Fisk in Britain’s Independent newspaper on 30 November. The documents also contain Major-General Amos Gilad’s denouncement of the UN’s Goldstone Report on the war against Gaza. The leaks make the situation murkier when they reveal that some Arab leaders describe Benjamin Netanyahu as “elegant and charming”. The Israeli envoy to one Arab country says that its leader has “a strategic view of the region that is curiously close to the Israeli one”.
In the face of this we should be asking ourselves a simple question: how could American embassies leak thousands of secret documents without their government raising any queries or charging these ambassadors with a breach of diplomatic protocols and their own security integrity? And why didn’t we read any leaks which point the finger at Israel’s Mossad spy agency, known for assassinating Palestinian leaders and other activists, even though there are indications that it has been involved in murdering Lebanese figures in order to achieve well-known Israeli objectives?
What the “secret” documents have revealed is that the United States pays lip-service to democracy and freedom in the Middle East but has no intention of allowing it to flourish. The prime example is the way it conspired to destroy the results of Palestinian democracy; this is still very much alive in people’s minds and WikiLeaks merely confirmed rather than revealed such hypocrisy. The revelations about torturing prisoners and violating human rights were also well known before the leaks.
What is new, however, and what could be the purpose behind the release of these documents, is how they show a new reality at the heart of the Arab world the level of support that Israel and its strategies and policies enjoy, even among Arab leaders. The worldwide coverage of the leaks overshadowed the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People commemorated on 29th November. It also coincided with Israeli arrests, threats and racist policies against Palestinian civilians, across the occupied territories and inside Israel itself. A statement by Israel’s ultra right-wing Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, that the words “settlement freeze” should be eliminated from Israeli terminology went unnoticed and without comment from Arab politicians. And Israel once again arrested elected members of the Palestinian parliament, in addition to its already atrocious crimes against Palestinian children. Avi Issacharoff’s “Childcare experts condemn police treatment of Palestinian stone-throwers” in Haaretz on 1st December blew the cover off the latter. He wrote about the suffering of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli police and the treatment they are subjected to; it is a disgrace to humanity, not just the “Jewish state”. However, this did not merit any coverage in the Western media, or even the Arab media.
WikiLeaks did not offer the Arabs or the Palestinians any insights into Israel’s crimes against them. Nor did they advance the struggle for justice for the Palestinian people one iota. They are the natives oppressed in their own land and facing the same ethnic cleansing that native peoples have been subject to on other continents.
After the international media’s disregard for the suffering of the Palestinians, along come hundreds of thousands of documents on Wikileaks which overlook completely Israel’s crimes against humanity, especially against the people whose land they have occupied. On the contrary, the documents basically confirm that Israel’s vision for the region and its future is shared by many Arab leaders who have not, so far, dared to declare such support for Israel to their own people. Is the WikiLeaks phenomenon, therefore, merely a stage-managed process intended to move the Israel-Palestine conflict yet further against Arab rights and in favour of Israel, despite the illegal Israeli occupation of Arab land and usurpation of Arab rights? Far from revealing new facts about the issue, the WikiLeaks episode establishes those facts in the minds of the people? As it was, I suspect, intended to.
Source: Middle East Monitor
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Thanks to Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban for this provocative and compelling argument which cites bias in Wikileaks revelations aimed at furthering the premise that Arab Nations are in the same page as Israel and the US as regards Iranian ascendancy in the Middle East.
A Palestinian woman in in her fifteenth day of a hunger strike in an Israeli prison, please pray for her and for truth to emerge in world news outlets of Israel’s high crimes against human rights of Palestinians.
I write a bit on this subject as the second wave of cables came out Netenyahu was making hay in the Saudi comment concerning Iran” cut the head off the snake” and it seemed apparent that the press was rigged in defense of Israel aggression mode with this Arab despot as their apologist and facilitator of aggression against Iran.
Some sad faces seemed to be seeing this not so good for Palestine rhetoric frosting over the occupation, US/Israeli? Saudi and UAE aggressions and weapons proliferations from the crouch in the Carlyle Groups complicity with the Crown of England to reinforce the removal of Arabs from Palestine as a deal made with Arab monarchs that gave them security only if they abandoned the Palestinians to a quasi economic zone overseen by the PA Egypt and funded by the US and Saudi Arabia perhaps covertly.
Egg on the faces of the Saudi despots and princes is long established in the Arab middle eastern community of elites which is why their respective nation are run like welfare states with stipends distributed as the gleaning profits of weapons investments energy investments and also investments we are told in Fox news and in militant groups such as Al Qaida, Bin laden from Saudi Arabian elites, close friends with the Bush family because Bush the elder drew them into weapons, sedition, spy ops and funding of their operation Against the Russians in Afghanistan thirty some odd years ago and the relations have only gotten seedier, more intractable and certainly more dangerous for both Egypt and Saidi Arabia, and deadly for Lebanon, Syria Iran Kuwait and Palestine Jordan seems to be fully sold out to the US Israeli captivity of Palestine again for security guarantees.
Just after these thoughts were raised and by some very prominent Arab thinkers and also US ,Ahem, writers in different countries, Noam Chomsky rises up with his assertion on book form that the Arab Middle east street is not as their rules are in terms of whom they feel threatens their sovereignty, human rights and ability to self govern without severe and debilitating meddling by the US and Israel and their agents ops and posts in the middle east.
Thanks to Dr Bouthaina for analysing these effects as profferred by the US and also note the the denials and covers came; One, the State department said they had no will to redact cables before release and , two; threats against the org were floated out there by known hard right zionist aparachiks in the bowels of US Government, so Dr Bouthaina is correct the leak is orchestrated to further US /Israel. Carlysle Group sales of munitions to Arab allaince League states and drive this by also developing facts on the ground in the Indian Ocean New theater of operations and time it with Obama’s reaching into Asian pockets to buy US Carlisle group weaponry from which the Saudis benefit greatly the British Crown Royals get richer, Israel gets more weapons and the Asian are forced to escalate their weapons acquisition’s from the US as Chian and North Korea are set up as imminant and provocative threats to the region.
Gates DOD sec is happy because those his cabinet post represents are the owners and comptrollers of the US energy, industrial weapons production and sales and nuclear armaments proliferation who score huge profits as the world tilts towards security procured by complicity to extort, bribe and threaten to bomb back to the stone age those who are supposedly “against us”.
The general affirmation of these truths holds mant opportunities for Arab writers to instruct their various peoples as to why their leaders shield war criminals, they funded the 911 terrorist acts and provided the actors conspiring with the CIA,
Think about it,The US and Israel are replacing Allah, faith and rational thought with fear, dependence on weapons for security and the general sense that reading between the lines of wikileaks is something activists are too stupid to do and MSM too guilty by the same complicity and conspiraces to publish, what looks like a good feignt by the US State department to clean up their act is really what Dr Bouthaina sees, escalation of every front of agression and escalation into new fronts and the building of political capital for hegemony to march on as ever with Palestine under it’s heel. The Arab people must speak up, organise, analyses and publish as Al Jazeera has, the truth will set this region free, hiding it will freeze them in their weakened state while the war mongers set them up for the kill.
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