Attorney affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights
Has represented many radicals, revolutionaries, and Islamic extremists
“If I don’t support the politics of political clients, I don’t take the case.”
Views the United States as an intractably racist nation whose criminal-justice system routinely denies fair treatment to racial, ethnic, and religious minorities
Characterizes Israel as a “terrorist state”
BACKGROUND
Born in 1953 to parents whom he has described as “hardworking F.D.R. Democrats,” Stanley Lewis Cohen was raised in Portchester, New York. Though he attended Hebrew school and was bar mitzvahed, he has long considered himself non-religious. Cohen’s current ties to the Jewish faith are based largely on his view that it can serve as a vehicle for redistributive social justice rather than as a conduit to the divine. “I’m proud to be a Jew—very proud of it,” he says. “Not the Judaism of Ariel Sharon. Not the Judaism of the generals of the Israel Defense Forces. But the Judaism that stands with the oppressed, the disadvantaged and the disaffected.”
Cohen became active in the left-wing anti-war movement during his high-school years in the late Sixties and then attended Long Island University. After graduating from LIU, he worked as a volunteer for VISTA, an anti-poverty program initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. Cohen’s VISTA work took place on the Winnebago, Omaha, and Santee Sioux reservations (in Nebraska), where he helped establish a legal-services project.
Following his tenure with VISTA, Cohen worked as a community organizerin New York City, headed a drug program for homeless teens in Westchester County, New York, and administered a federally funded anti-poverty agency. Eventually he enrolled at Pace University Law School, where he earned a J.D. degree in 1983.
COHEN’S EARLY LEGAL CAREER
In the early 1980s, when he was still a law student, Cohen teamed upwith attorney Lynne Stewart to defend a number of far-left radicals against state prosecution in New York. In one of their more high-profile cases, the pair together represented Kathy Boudin—a Weather Underground and May 19 Communist Organization member who had participated in the deadly 1981 Brinks robbery, a heist whose purpose was to acquire the funds needed to finance a war against “Amerikka” and establish a “Republic of Black Afrika” in the United States. Cohen and Stewart would thereafter maintain an enduring, close relationship—both personally and professionally—as evidenced by Stewart’s characterization of Cohen in a 2001 interview as her “dear friend.”
After completing his legal studies, Cohen spent seven years working with the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, where he defended a multitude of robbers, rapists, and killers. “I loved the people I represented,”says Cohen. “Poor people, people of color. People that the system was designed to beat to death.”
Also in the 1980s, Cohen became a protégé of the self-described “radical attorney” William Kunstler, with whom he jointly represented Larry Davis—a longtime violent felon suspected in the killings of several drug dealers—who had recently shot six New York City policemen. Cohen concocted a defense which maintained that Davis, an African American, had shot the officers—who were allegedly part of a rogue-cop drug operation—in self-defense. Though the claim was entirely without substance, a Bronx jury acquitted Davis in 1986.[1]
LONG CLIENT LIST OF RADICALS, REVOLUTIONARIES, & ISLAMISTS
Soon after the Davis trial, Cohen left the Legal Aid Society and went intoprivate practice where he began to compile a client list that included all manner of radicals and revolutionaries. Among these was a group of heavily armed Mohawk Indian separatists who shot a National Guardhelicopter in 1990. Cohen also:
represented the Mohawk Warrior Society during a three-month, armed stand-off with law-enforcement authorities in Quebec—and was himself charged by Canadian authorities, as a result of his participation in that standoff, with seditious conspiracy;
represented the Mohawk Warrior Society during a lengthy, armed, and ultimately deadly jurisdictional battle against state and federal law enforcement in Akwesasne, a territory that straddles the U.S. and Canadian borders;
defended several dozen Mohawk Warrior Society members who were criminally prosecuted for closing down a state highway during a protracted standoff with police; and
assisted in the case of Mohawk students who sued the Salmon River School District (in northernmost New York State) for having removed the Thanksgiving Address, a traditional Mohawk blessing, from events held at a school with a significant population of Mohawk youth.
Patrick Moloney, a Dublin-born priest and avowed Irish nationalist who conspired to hide some of the $7.4 million that was stolen in the January 5, 1993 Brink’s armored-car robbery;
Jose Ortiz, a Puerto Rican street-gang member accused of shooting a New York City police captain as “revenge” for the 1994 police killing of a Puerto Rican youth named Anthony Baez in the South Bronx; and
members of the Peru-based Maoist terror group, The Shining Path.
But it is Cohen’s so-called “Islamic practice,” through which he has defended a host of Muslim terrorists and terrorism-affiliated operatives, that has gained him more notoriety than any other aspect of his legal work.
From 1995-97, Cohen represented Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas political leader who co-founded the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (both terror-related organizations). Specifically, Cohen worked to thwart Israel’s effort to extradite Marzook out of the U.S. and try him for the role that he and Hamas had played in a number of bombings. As the Marzook case dragged on for some 22 months, Cohen visited his incarcerated client in jail almost nightly throughout that entire period. Ultimately, Cohen was successful in helping Marzook win his freedom, evade the Israeli justice system, and resettle in Syria. Articulating his high regard for Marzook, Cohen would later refer to him as “my dear friend” and “the Gerry Adamsof Hamas.”
Other noteworthy Islamists whom Cohen has defended include the following:
a contingent of Albanian Muslim mercenaries bound for Kosovoin the 1990s
Mazin Assi, a Palestinian who tried to firebomb a Riverdale, New York synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur in 2000
the al-Qaeda-affiliated Texas Imam, Moataz Al-Hallak
the Oregon-based Imam and terror suspect Mohamed Kariye,arrested for possessing trace explosives while boarding a plane at Portland International Airport
a Palestinian-American who was jailed for refusing to provide grand jury testimony about Hamas
Amina Farah Ali, a Minnesota Muslim woman convicted of conspiring to provide material support to the al Qaeda-affiliated, Somali terrorist organization al-Shabaab
Mohamed Aleesa (a.k.a. Mohamed Alessa), who in 2011 pledguilty to charges that he had tried to join the al Qaeda-affiliated organization al-Shabaab
Mohamed Hammoud, a North Carolina-based Hezbollah operativeconvicted in 2002 of sending $3,500 to that organization
an Iranian-American international charity and relief organizeraccused of violating Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions against Iran
The Communist publication Revolutionary Worker has lauded Cohen as “a longtime people’s lawyer beloved by many for his uncompromising willingness to provide legal defense for the unpopular … and those [whom] U.S. imperialism may feel should be ‘tried’ with no defense at all.” Joel Blumenfeld, a New York State Supreme Court Justice who formerly worked with Cohen, once said of the latter: “[I]f this were 1941-42, he would be representing the Japanese people who were being detained.”
Notably, Cohen has explained the rationale underlying his choice of clients. “If I don’t support the politics of political clients, I don’t take the case.” “Most of my clients [are] involved with struggle, many of them armed struggle,” he notes, proudly.
Cohen’s sympathy for Islamic terrorists was further reflected in his reaction to the events of 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, he told the Village Voice: “If Osama bin Laden arrived in the United States today and asked me to represent him, sure I’d represent him.” In fact, Cohen was reluctant even to believe that al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks, as he articulted on September 22, 2001: “I don’t think this was an Osama bin Laden job at all. But I think for a lot of reasons the government would prefer it be Osama bin Laden. Because then there’s an identifiable bogeyman.” That same day, Cohen speculated: “I fear the government is going to use this [9/11] as a pretense … to go after those people who have stood up to Israeli interests and the pro-Israel lobby in this country.” Moreover, he said he was “absolutely” certain that “this operation was assisted by ex-CIA, ex-Mossad [Israeli intelligence agency] officers.”
Cohen was also sympathetic to the plight of the so-called “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, who was captured as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan later in 2001. By Cohen’s reckoning, Lindh, who confessed to having taken up arms against the United States, “deserves the presumption of innocence.”
In October 2001, Cohen addressed a Muslim gathering at a Paterson, New Jersey mosque and advised those in attendance not to cooperate with FBI investigators who, in the course of 9/11-related probes, might question them regarding their activities or affiliations. “Just say no,” Cohen stated. “It’s the safest way.” When a Texas resident subsequently called Cohen and told him that it was his [Cohen’s] duty, as an American, to convince his clients to cooperate with law-enforcement, Cohen replied: “First of all, I’m not an American. Right now, I’m a lawyer’ …. The World Trade Centers, they don’t belong to the United States; they don’t belong to George Bush. They belong to New York City. I live in the country of New York City.”
Throughout his adult life, Cohen has regarded the United States as an intractably racist nation whose criminal-justice system routinely denies fair treatment to racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Consistent with this perspective, he portrayed the U.S. government’s post-9/11 war-on-terror as little more than a pretext for depriving Muslims of their civil liberties—analogous, he said, to America’s internment of Japanese civilians during World War II: “The Germans weren’t locked up. The Italians weren’t locked up. Only the Japanese were. This tells you that ‘civil liberties’ in this country are a matter of race.”
In 2004 Cohen served as a consultant to the Lebanon-based, Hezbollah-dominated al-Manar television network, helping the latter develop a litigation strategy for challenging the U.S. government’s decision todesignate it as a terrorist entity—and thus to block and criminalize its broadcast signal. Complaining that “the U.S. has now succeeded in completely convincing Americans that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization,” Cohen cited the organization’s broad popularity in Lebanon and declared: “It is another intimidation by the U.S. administration targeting groups that are independent from Washington’s influence.”
In 2007 Cohen provided consultation to the government of Yemen vis à vis United States v. al Moyaad et. al., a case where a Yemeni tribal leader was convicted of fundraising activities on behalf of Hamas.
CONTEMPT FOR ISRAEL
Cohen’s clear affinity for Islamists finds an alternative expression in the attorney’s harsh rebukes of Israel, which he has long characterized as a “terrorist state.” Asserting that “what Israel does is far more morally repugnant than what Hamas does,” Cohen affirms the Palestinians’ “right” and “obligation” to “resist occupation … by any means necessary.” “To much of the world,” he elaborates, “Hamas is not viewed as a terrorist organization but rather a national liberation movement involved in low-intensity, asymmetric warfare.”
In July 2002 Cohen filed a federal lawsuit demanding that the U.S. government stop giving financial support to Israel’s “program of killing, torture, terror and outright theft” targeting the Palestinians. The suit named President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, various Israeli military officials, and a number of U.S. arms manufacturers, accusing them all of “genocide.” Cohen also sought damages on behalf of Palestinian Americans who had been victimized by Israeli “war crimes” (allegedly carried out with U.S.-made weapons) in Gaza and the West Bank. Joining Cohen in a news conference announcing the lawsuit were American Muslim Council founderAbdurahman Alamoudi and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian.
In a related effort, Cohen was a founding member of an international group of lawyers who, on behalf of Palestinians, have filed suits against Israel in such far-flung locations as Morocco, Belgium, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as before the International Criminal Court. These suits have charged the Jewish state with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and Geneva Convention violations.
Characterizing himself as “among the few Jews in the United States capable of bridging the gap between the West and the militant politics of the Middle East,” Cohen boasts that he once “had lunch with the alleged mastermind of the Achille Lauro ship hijacking,” a 1985 incident where Palestinian terrorists stormed a cruise ship and threw an elderly, wheelchair-bound American man overboard to his death; that he once “spent a day with [Yasser] Arafat in Ramallah on the West Bank” and wastreated “like a head of state”; and that he was given a number of audiences with the late Sheik Ahmed Yassin, former spiritual leader of Hamas. According to a 2002 news report, Cohen’s office decor at that time featured a picture of himself seated alongside Yassin, as well as aphoto of Lenin and a wall poster stating, “History cannot be written with a pen. It must be written with a gun.”
RECENT CASES
Cohen represented Mercedes Haeffer, one of 14 activists affiliated with the computer-hacker group Anonymous who were prosecuted by the U.S. government for allegedly participating in a December 2010 “digital sit-in” on PayPal’s website.
Cohen also represented an activist who was charged with assaulting a police officer during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in 2011.
In late 2012, Cohen came to the legal defense of the internationally known journalist Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian American who (in September 2012) used a can of pink spray paint to deface a poster in a New York City subway station that she claimed bore a message offensive to Muslims. Produced by Pamela Geller’s and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, that poster read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” While Eltahawy was busy spray painting over those words, freelance journalist Pamela Hall tried unsuccessfully to stop her. During the confrontation, Eltahawy spray-painted Ms. Hall and ruined the latter’s reading glasses, camera, and clothing. She was arrested at the scene, and Hall pressed charges. According to Cohen, Eltahawy’s act of vandalism was an exercise in free speech. For a more complete complete synopsis of this case, click here.
SCANDAL
In June 2012 a federal grand jury in Syracuse, New York indicted Cohen for failing to file individual and corporate income tax returns from 2005 through 2010, and for attempting to evade IRS detection of large cash payments he had received from two of his clients in 2008 and 2010.According to the Syracuse Post-Standard:
“The indictment against Cohen says he failed to file a report with the IRS showing his law practice had received cash from two clients for more than $10,000 each. One payment was from a client with the initials TJF for $20,000 in August 2008, and the other was from client JS for $15,000 in the summer of 2010…. Cohen made regular deposits of cash into his personal bank accounts in amounts less than $10,000 to avoid having to file a report with the IRS for deposits of that amount or higher…. Cohen also received non-money payments in exchange for legal services and failed to maintain records of those payments as income, the indictment said.”
In December 2013 a Manhattan federal court similarly indicted Cohen for wire fraud and five counts of failure to file income-tax returns (on more than $3 million in earnings) for the 2006-2010 tax years. An NBC News report stated:
“The government alleged that Cohen was paid at least $500,000 in fees each of those years but hid the money by having clients pay in cash or telling them to wire payments directly to American Express to pay his card bills.”
If convicted, Cohen could be sentenced to as much as 20 years in prison.
Charlie Hebdo As the dust settles from this week’s terror extravaganza in France, more loose ends are turning up (or being tied up), with this latest bizarre bombshell which is already fueling speculation as to the covert nature of theCharlie Hebdo false flag affair.
A police commissioner from Limoges, France, HelricFredou,aged 45 (photo, below), turned up dead from a gun shot to the head on Thursday amid the Charlie Hebdo affair. A high-ranking official within the French law enforcement command-and-control structure, Fredou was also a former deputy directorof the regionalpoliceservice.
According France 3, his body was “found by a colleague” at approximately 1am Thursday – only hours after the initial Paris attack.
At the time of his death, police claim to have not known the reason for his alleged suicide. This was reflected in their official statements to the media: “It is unknownat this timethe reasons forhis actions”. However, a back story appears to have been inserted simultaneously, most likely from the very same police media liaisons, who then told the press that Fredou was ‘depressed and overworked’. For any law enforcement officer in France, it would seem rather odd that anyone would want to miss the biggest single terror event in the century, or history in the making, as it were.
Here is a link to the original report in the French media, which confirms that Commissioner Fredou was indeed working on the Charlie Hebdo case:
“TheFredouCommissioner, like all agentsSRPJ,workedyesterdayon the caseof the massacreat the headquarters ofCharlieHebdo.In particular, hewas investigatingthe family ofone of the victims. He killed himselfbeforecompleting its report. A psychological ‘cell’was set upin thepolice station.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: It is not yet known to 21WIRE exactly how the fatal gun shot occurred, but if any other past political and high-profile ‘suicided’ cases are anything to go by, authorities will claim that this victim either shot himself in the back of the head, with his non-shooting hand. In addition, if that were the case, there would also be a lack of gun powder burns on the hands according to the autopsy.
UK-based investigative reporter Morris108, interviews ‘Phil in France’ regarding this new development:
Even more bizarrely, an almost identical event took place just over one year earlier, November 2013 in Limoges, when the number 3 ranked SRPJ officer had killed himself in similar circumstances, with his weapon in the police hotel. Allegedly, his colleague discovered his body. The prosecution ruled that case was a suicide too, and the police officer had left a suicide note to his family in which he expressed “personal reasons” for his surprising action. Stay tuned for more updates on this story at 21WIRE.
Sputnik News
Police commissioner, who had been investigating the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine committed suicide with his service gun on Thursday night.
Police commissioner Helric Fredou, who had been investigating the attack on the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, committed suicide in his office. The incident occurred in Limoges, the administrative capital of the Limousin region in west-central France, on Thursday night, local media France 3 reports.
Helric Fredou, 45, suffered from ‘depression’ and experienced ‘burn out’ [according to the official statement]. Shortly before committing suicide, he met with the family of a victim of the Charlie Hebdo attack and killed himself preparing the report.
Fredou began his career in 1997 as a police officer at the regional office of the judicial police of Versailles. Later he returned to Limoges, his hometown. Since 2012 he had been the deputy director of the regional police service.
“We are all shocked. Nobody was ready for such developments”, a representative of the local police union told reporters.
On January 7, 2015, two gunmen burst into the editorial office of Charlie Hebdo magazine, known for issuing cartoons, ridiculing Islam. The [suspected] attackers, later identified as brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, killed 12 people and injured 11, and escaped from the scene. Following two days of nationwide manhunt, the suspects were killed on Friday by French police some 20 miles northeast of Paris.
Gaza (along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem) is occupied Palestinian territory under international law, determined by the vast majority of the world, as well as the highest court in the world, the UN’s International Court of Justice. Gaza cannot commit aggression against Israel, since Israel is in constant and continual commission of illegal aggression against Palestine by occupying it (illegally and sadistically blockading it and frequently committing terrorism against its civilians, including by targeting them with chemical weapons provided by US taxpayers – see “Rain of Fire” by Human Rights Watch). As documented by Amnesty Int’l, Human Rights Watch, and many others, Israel intentionally targets and murders civilians, including children, en masse.
But, even ignoring international law and that Gaza is under illegal Israeli occupation, Gaza did not initiate this current round of violence; Israel did:
Western/US/Israeli propaganda says the violence started with the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli youths on June 12th. That is a lie:
On May 20th, the Israeli government murdered 2 unarmed Palestinian teens, one on video, and wounded a third.
The firing of pathetic scrap metal rockets from impoverished Gaza, which have killed no one, were in fact launched in response to earlier Israeli bombings, killings, assassinations, and arrests of Palestinians, including children.
Since the year 2000, Israel has killed 1,500 Palestinian children, while Palestinians have killed 132 Israeli children. That means Israel has killed over 1,000% percent more Palestinian children than vice versa.
According to a landmark, comprehensive study of all of Israel’s wars, by Zeev Maoz, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis, former head of the Graduate School of Government and Policy and of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and former academic director of the M.A. Program at the Israeli Defense Forces’ National Defense College:
“. most of the wars in which Israel was involved were the result of deliberate Israeli aggressive design . None of these wars – with the possible exception of the 1948 War of independence – was what Israel refers to as Milhemet Ein Berah (war of necessity). They were all wars of choice . ” – Defending the Holy Land, pg. 35, (bold added)
“I review a number of peace-related opportunities ranging from the Zionist-Hashemite collusion in 1947 through the collapse of the Oslo Process in 2000. In all those cases I find that Israeli decision makers – who had been willing to embark upon bold and daring military adventures – were extremely reluctant to make even the smallest concessions for peace . I also find in many cases Israel was engaged in systematic violations of agreements and tacit understandings between itself and its neighbors.” – Defending the Holy Land, pg. 40
Israel has violated more UN resolutions than any other country. That includes Iraq under Hussein.
Hamas is the government elected by Gaza in elections that Jimmy Carter (and many others) observed and said were completely fair and free. Israel constantly says Hamas uses human shields. But in Israel’s biggest massacre of Gaza, the one in 2009, all the human rights organizations, including Amnesty, HRW, and the jurist Richard Goldstone, found that Hamas DID NOT use human shields. On the contrary, Israel used human shields, which is a regular practice for Israel. Israel uses civilians as human shields.
Israel forced Palestinian civilians to dig and lay naked in trenches around Israeli tanks. See here at 6:45.
XIV. THE USE OF PALESTINIAN CIVILIANS AS HUMAN SHIELDS
“The Mission received allegations that in two areas in north Gaza Israeli troops used Palestinian men as human shields… The Mission found the foregoing witnesses to be credible and reliable. It has no reason to doubt the veracity of their accounts and found that the different stories serve to support the allegation that Palestinians were used as human shields.”
Noam Chomsky: “Hamas is regularly described as ‘Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.’ One will be hard put to find something like ‘democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus’—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.”
In the history of all rocket and mortar fire into Israel, 26 people, total, have been killed. And remember, Palestine breaks ceasefires far less often than Israel, as documented above.
This number of 26 is in contrast to the minimum number of 1,400 people who were murdered by Israel in a single one of its terrorist atrocities, the 2009 Gaza Massacre.
Noting that in the current massacre, zero Israelis and over 100 Palestinians have thus far been killed, and noting that Gaza is a concentration camp – Israel allows no one to enter or leave – Dan Sanchez gives a perfect description of the disparity in arms between the US/Israeli war machine and Palestinian scrap metal projectiles: “They [the Gazans] are like fish in a barrel, being blasted by a shotgun from above. It’s like some of the fish in the barrel pathetically spitting water at the gunman, and [US media calls] that a “shooting battle.”
The rhetoric and tactics of Hamas and other groups resisting Israeli occupation and colonization can be brutal (though far less so than Israel). Propagandists try to attribute this to anti-Semitism, to distract from the fact that these groups are resisting having their country stolen and their people dispossessed and annihilated. Native American resistance to European colonizers was sometimes extremely brutal, as was their rhetoric, but everyone universally recognizes that this was not because of “anti-White-ism”, or “anti-European-ism”, but because they were having their land stolen and their people massacred, the same thing that Israel is doing to the Palestinians.
Palestinians have the right under international law to resist occupation, ethnic cleansing, colonization, aggression, and annexation. Miko Peled, son of an Israeli general, recently stated that if Israel doesn’t Like rockets, they should decolonize Palestine. Dr. Norman Finkelstein notes that “The Palestinians have the right to use arms to resist an occupation . However, the fact that morally and legally they have that right doesn’t mean that it’s the most prudent strategy. In my opinion, a national Palestinian leadership committed to mobilizing nonviolent resistance can defeat the Israeli occupation if those of us living abroad lend support to it.”
In 1948, the people who wanted to form a Jewish state carried out a massive terror and ethnic cleansing campaign against the occupants of Palestine, expelling about half of them (750,000) from their land and into concentrated areas (Gaza and West Bank). Israel has slowly continued colonizing even those areas, which were specifically reserved by the UN for Palestinians. Israel takes all the best land and resources, such as water. Here is a visualization of what has happened, and is currently happening with massive support from Obama:
Israeli settlement building in Palestine is a war crime under international law. Under Obama, Israeli settlement building is up over 130%.
For about 40 years, there has been an international consensus that Israel must stop colonizing territory outside its 1967 borders. The consensus has been blocked by the United States, in isolation from the international community (much like the USA’s isolated, strong support for South African Apartheid). Every year there is a UN vote on the issue, and every year it goes about 165 to 2, the world against the US and Israel. This continues under Obama. All human rights groups support the consensus, as does Hamas, the Arab League, Iran, the Organization of the Islamic Conference… Virtually everyone, except the US and Israel. (More details on this page.)
Hypocricy Defined
Palestinians are brutalized, repressed and impoverished by Israel. To get a quick visual understanding of the difference between Gaza and Israel, take a look at the images of people and cities being wantonly pummeled by Israeli terrorism when you search the word “Gaza“, and the images of opulence, wealth and luxury that come up when you search “Tel Aviv“.
Israel, whose government intentionally targets, tortures, and murders civilians, including children, including with chemical weapons, and whose government uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and whose government is the last entity on Earth carrying out old-style ethnic cleansing and colonization of foreign countries, is the single biggest recipient of US aid, at over three billion dollars a year and huge amounts of lethal weaponry such as attack helicopters and white phosphorous chemical explosives.
To reiterate, Obama requested more military aid for Israel than any president ever. This is not because Obama and the USA love Jewish people. Obama was recently an accomplice in a literal neo-Nazi-led coup d’etat in Ukraine, and is currently fully supporting the junta-integrated Ukrainian government, which is staffed with several neo-Nazis in high ministries, and which uses neo-Nazi paramilitaries to carry out massacres (and possibly genocide) against people resistant to the junta. The actual reason the US supports Israel is discussed below.
As Amnesty International has noted, all aid to Israel is illegal under international (and US) law, because Israel is a consistent violator of human rights.
Amnesty International also noted that Israel’s 2009 massacre of Gaza would not have been possible without the illegal funding (money and weapons) and support Israel gets from the USA.
This is also true of the current massacre Israel is committing in Gaza.
However, in a way, that is good news.
That means US citizens can STOP the massacres.
MSM Refuses to Cover Anti-Israel War Crime Protests
If we stop our money and weapons-flow to Israel, which is illegal anyway, we stop Israeli terrorism! All we have to do is stop committing a crime, and we will stop more crimes! That’s great news.
Here is a previous example of how this has worked: When the USA cut its funding for Indonesia’s genocide against East Timor, which the USA was funding almost exclusively, Indonesia was forced to stop and withdraw. All it took was cutting off our illegal flow of money and weapons to the criminals.
The same thing would happen if we cut our illegal funding for Israel’s genocides and acts of terrorism, ethnic cleansing, colonization, and annexation against Palestine.
But since the USA is an anti-democratic country, the only way to stop US plutocrats from using our money to fund Israeli terrorism is to force it through massive, non-violent pressure.
One way it happens is when it becomes too politically costly for the plutocracy to keep funding genocide and terror, meaning the costs of their illegal support outweigh the benefits, as in Indonesia. In that case, massive publicity and indigenous resistance accomplished the goal.
But Israel is the USA’s main imperial – and nuclear – base for controlling the Middle East, which US planners, in 1945, called the greatest material prize in world history, due to the oil and gas. Thus, it might require more, as in non-violently making our country into a democracy so that people control their own institutions and money, and thus the way we operate as a society and interact with the world.
Last note: To be clear, Israel is a legal state, but only within the borders allotted to it by the United Nations – the Pre-1967 borders, which existed before Israel started eating away, through terror, ethnic cleansing, colonization, and annexation, at the areas reserved by the United Nations for Palestinians, as well as areas of other countries, such as Syria (the Golan Heights).
Per international law, US domestic law, and common sense, Israel doesn’t deserve any support until it abandons isolationism and accepts that it can’t steal other people’s countries, and stops blockading and withdraws its soldiers and settlers, all there illegally, from those countries.
Israel is, militarily, the most powerful country in the Middle East, by far. Removing our support for the Israeli government (which we are legally required to do) will not put Israelis in danger. It will pressure the Israeli government to stop doing what endangers Israelis, which is committing aggressive acts against Israel’s neighbors.
If Israel ends its status as a consistent violator of human rights, decolonizes Palestine, and respects its neighbors, it could be a pleasure – and legal – to work with and support Israel.
Germany, Japan, and South Africa went from being the most reviled countries on Earth to being some of the most admired. Maybe Israel could undergo the same transformation, but not unless we, US citizens, help by ceasing to enable Israeli terrorism and war crimes by illegally supporting them.
Max Interviews guest Eric Jon Phelps on the Jesuits Part III
Topics Covered:
Jesuit Coadjutors- Alex Jones, Jesse Ventura, George Noory, Ron Paul
Iran, Palestine/Gaza Conflict & History, Jews vs Muslims, Civil Rights Movement, Malcom X, Ku Klux Klan, Muslim Immigration to Western Europe, Islam: Sunni vs Shia, ‘RECONSTRUCTION’, JFK, Jesuit control of Detroit, Demonic Fallen Angels, and more!
The official story surrounding the events of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya which left four Americans dead, has now officially fallen apart.
After numerous flips and flops by the Obama administration, which originally attempted to paint the incident as a Muslim outcry over an anti-Islamic video, whistle blowers throughout the U.S. government, including within the White House, the State Department, national intelligence agencies and the U.S.military have made available stunning details that suggest not only did operational commanders have live visual and audio communications from drones overhead and intelligence assets on the ground, but that some commanders within the military were prepared to go-it-alone after being told to “stand down.”
Africom commanding officer U.S. General Carter Ham, after being ordered to essentially surrender control of the situation to alleged Al Queda terrorists and let Americans on the ground die, made the unilateral decision to ignore orders from the Secretary of Defense and activated special operations teams at his disposal for immediate deployment to the area.
According to reports, once the General went rogue he was arrested within minutes by his second in command and relieved of duty.
“(The) basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on; without having some real-time information about what’s taking place,” Panetta told Pentagon reporters. “And as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.”
The information I heard today was that General Ham as head of Africom received the same e-mails the White House received requesting help/support as the attack was taking place. General Ham immediately had a rapid response unit ready and communicated to the Pentagon that he had a unit ready.
General Ham then received the order to stand down. His response was to screw it, he was going to help anyhow. Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he was now relieved of his command.
The question now is whether the American people will hold to account the chain of command responsible for leaving our people behind, fabricating a politically expedient story, and continuing to sell the now defunct lie(s) even after all of their variations of the story were found to be false and misleading.
A General who made the decision to assist diplomatic and intelligence assets on the ground has been arrested and will likely be retired or worse, while those who ordered the removal of embassy security details and ordered U.S. forces to stand-down are left to go on about their business and likely risk more American lives in the future.
In some circles the actions of those at the very top of the command structure during the Bengzahi attacks would be considered traitorous.
NEW YORK – As a student at Harvard Law School, then-bachelor Barack Obama’s practice of wearing a gold band on his wedding-ring finger puzzled his colleagues.
Now, newly published photographs of Obama from the 1980s show that the ring Obama wore on his wedding-ring finger as an unmarried student is the same ring Michelle Robinson put on his finger at the couple’s wedding ceremony in 1992.
Moreover, according to Arabic-language and Islamic experts, the ring Obama has been wearing for more than 30 years is adorned with the first part of the Islamic declaration of faith, the Shahada: “There is no God except Allah.”
Sincere recitation of the Shahada is the sole requirement for becoming a Muslim, as it expresses a person’s rejection of all other gods
Egyptian-born Islamic scholar Mark A. Gabriel, Ph.D., examined photographs of Obama’s ring at WND’s request and concluded that the first half of the Shahada is inscribed on it.
“There can be no doubt that someone wearing the inscription ‘There is no god except Allah’ has a very close connection to Islamic beliefs, the Islamic religion and Islamic society to which this statement is so strongly attached,” Gabriel told WND.
“Dreams from My Real Father” producer Joel Gilbert, an Arabic speaker and an expert on the Middle East, was the first to conclude that Obama’s ring, reportedly from Indonesia, bore an Islamic inscription.
Photographs published last week by the New Yorker from Obama’s time at Occidental College, taken by fellows students, indicate that the ring Obama wore three decades ago is the one he is wearing in the White House.
Barack Obama
As WND reported in July, previously published photos have shown Obama wearing a gold band on his wedding-ring finger continuously from 1981 at Occidental, through graduation at Columbia in 1983, in a visit to Africa in 1988 and during his time at Harvard from 1988 to 1991. But none, until now, have displayed the ring with enough detail to identify it as the one he currently is wearing.
WND reported a satirical edition of the Harvard Law Review published by students in 1990 contains a mock Dewers Scotch profile advertisement poking fun at Obama. Among a list of Obama’s “Latest Accomplishments” is: “Deflecting Persistent Questioning About Ring On Left Hand.”
The comment suggests the ring was a subject of student curiosity at the time and that Obama was not forthcoming with an explanation.
He still has not explained why he wore the band on his wedding-ring finger before he married Michelle.
Declaration
Gabriel, born to Muslim parents in Upper Egypt, grew up immersed in Islamic culture. He memorized the Quran at age of 12 and graduated in 1990 with a Masters degree from the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the preeminent Sunni Muslim institution of learning.
He explained that on Obama’s ring, the declaration “There is no god except Allah” (La Ilaha Illallah) is inscribed in two sections, one above the other.
On the upper section, “There is no god” is written in Arabic letters, from right to left: Lam, Alif, Alif, Lam, Ha.
On the lower section is “except god,” written in Arabic letters from right to left: Alif, Lam, Alif, Alif, Lam, Lam, Ha.
In the lower section, the word “Allah” is written partially on top of the word “except,” noted Gabriel, the author of “Islam and Terrorism” and “Journey Inside the Mind of an Islamic Terrorist.”
It is common in Islamic art and Arabic calligraphy, especially when expressing Quranic messages on jewelry, to artfully place letters on top of each other to fit them into the allotted space.
The exhibit below shows how the Arabic inscription fits over the two parts of the Obama ring.
“There is no God except Allah” overlaid on Obama ring
‘First-rate accent’
In an interview during the 2008 presidential campaign, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof questioned Obama about his Islamic education in Indonesia, where he lived from 1967 to 1971.
After acknowledging that he once got in trouble for making faces during Quran study classes in his elementary school, Obama recited for Kristoff the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, the Adhan.
The prayer incorporates the Shahada, the expression of Islamic faith, with each line repeated twice:
Allah is supreme! Allah is supreme!
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that Muhammad is his prophet
Kristof noted Obama recited the prayer in Arabic “with a first-rate accent.”
“In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as ‘one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset,’” Kristoff wrote.
Gabriel told WND that a person wearing a ring with “There is no God except Allah” demonstrates the significance of Islam in his life.
“Christians never use the statement,” he pointed out. “By wearing the Shahada on jewelry, a person communicates that Allah is in control of all circumstances. Allah controls you; Allah is the one and only one.”
Obama, who attended Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for two decades, has repeatedly insisted he is a Christian.
Obama’s hand in a White House photo
‘Blessed statement in Islam’
Gabriel emphasized the importance of the Shahada in the profession of faith in Islam.
“Muslims recite the Shahada when they wake up in the morning and before they go to sleep at night,” he said. “It is repeated five times every day in the call to prayer in every mosque. A single honest recitation of the Shahada in Arabic is all that is required for a person to convert to Islam.”
Gabriel believes it would be impossible for Obama not to be aware of what is written on the ring, calling it a “blessed statement in Islam.”
“By wearing this religious statement on one’s hand, it connects the person to Islam,” he said. “It is worn in hopes that Allah’s protections would be with the person, in hopes of gaining favor with Allah.”
He affirmed that Muslim men do wear gold rings, despite prohibitions in Islamic law.
“Though Islamic law prohibits the wearing of gold jewelry by men, it is a widely accepted custom, even in strictly Muslim countries,” he said. “The wearing of gold rings is even more acceptable when it contains a religious message, such as ‘There is no god except Allah.’”
He noted there is also widespread acceptance of men wearing gold jewelry in non-Arab Islamic societies such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Pakistan, where Muslims generally understand that Muslims are subject to strong influences of local non-Arab cultures.
“Therefore, even though technically prohibited, a Muslim man wearing a gold ring is not looked down upon, especially if the jewelry reflects a love of Islam and a connection to Islamic society,” he said. “An even greater level of acceptance is for businessmen who deal with infidels, because such a person would be regarded as a person of influence.”
“Now we have a new context for what Obama meant when he told the Islamic audience in Cairo that he has ‘known Islam on three continents,” Gilbert said. “He also told the Cairo audience that he considered it part of his responsibility as president of the United States ‘to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.’ All religious Muslims are by definition required to defend Islam.”
Gilbert’s most recent documentary films on the Middle East are “Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and The Revolt of Islam” and “Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad’s Coming War and Obama’s Politics of Defeat”
Obama in Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009
Obama in Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009, close-up
The Occidental ring
The photographs published last week by New Yorker magazine indicate Obama was wearing the ring at Occidental College.
One photo shows Obama sitting alongside Occidental roommate Hasan Chandoo in 1981, apparently waiting for a meal to be served.
Barack Obama and roommate Hasan Chandoo at Occidental College in 1981
Obama’s extended left hand clearly shows the ring, as seen below.
The second of the recently released photos shows Obama reaching for a book from an Occidental College library shelf.
Barack Obama in Occidental College library in 1981
A close-up of the library photo can be seen below.
Detail of Barack Obama ring in Occidental College library in 1981
In the above photo, the ring’s design can be seen, including a series of parallel bars that distinguish its outer circumference.
In the story, Jodi Kantor described its “intricate gold design,” noting it came from Barack Obama’s boyhood home of Indonesia and was not traditional, like Michelle’s.
Kantor wrote:
Just before the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. pronounced Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson man and wife on the evening of Oct. 3, 1992, he held their wedding rings – signifying their new, enduring bonds – before the guests at Trinity United Church of Christ. Michelle’s was traditional, but Barack’s was an intricate gold design from Indonesia, where he had lived as a boy.
There was no mention in the article that Obama already had been wearing the ring for more than a decade.
The photos of the ring from the 1980s can be compared with more recent photos, such as the ones published by the Huffington Post in 2010 in an article by Anya Strzemien, “Obama’s ‘Intricate’ Indonesian Wedding Band: A CLOSE-UP,” seen here.
Obama wedding ring, Huffington Post, March 18, 2010
Obama wedding ring, Huffington Post, March 18, 2010
At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists.
Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world.
These two groups have changed the world but not in the way either intended.
Thoe with the darkest fears became the most powerful
Together they created today’s nightmare vision of an organized terror network.
A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.
The rise of the politics of fear begins in 1949 with two men whose radical ideas would inspire the attack of 9/11 and influence the neo-conservative movement that dominates Washington.
Both these men believed that modern liberal freedoms were eroding the bonds that held society together.
The two movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay. But in an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neo-conservatives turned to fear in order to pursue their vision.
They would create a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see.
The Islamists were faced by the refusal of the masses to follow their dream and began to turn to terror to force the people to “see the truth”‘.
The Power of Nightmares will be broadcast over three nights from Tuesday 18 to Thursday, 20 January, 2005 at 2320 GMT on BBC Two. The final part has been updated in the wake of the Law Lords ruling in December that detaining foreign terrorist suspects without trial was illegal.
A General who made the decision to assist diplomatic and intelligence assets on the ground has been arrested and will likely be retired or worse, while those who ordered the removal of embassy security details and ordered U.S. forces to stand-down are left to go on about their business and likely risk more American lives in the future.
Thoe with the darkest fears became the most powerful