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  		• No tears for warmonger Liam Fox
  		• Still under wraps: crimes and cover-ups waiting for answers
  		• Libya between tyranny and an uncertain future
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  		• The Guardian of Israel
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  		• Rendezvous with a British minister on Palestine and Iran
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  		• The Arab Spring – hello or goodbye to democracy?
  		• UK government spoiling for a fight with Iran
  		• The whistleblower as hero
  		• Crippling Iran: questions for UK Foreign Secretary William Hague
  		• An idiot’s overview of why Western capitalism is crashing
  		• Politics and the challenge of perception
  		• Iran economic sanctions: the diplomacy of cowards?
  		• Syria, the myth of Assad’s popularity and the media of disinformation
  		• The ongoing war against truth
  		• Democratic elections in the Middle East: why the Islamists win
  		• The BBC censors its own report on Tunisia’s Jews saying “No” to Israel!
     
    Swinging Gates

    USA’s Israel lobby seeks to discredit the facts about Iran’s nuclear programme

    By Paul J. Balles*

    17 December 2007

    Paul J. Balles argues that the Israeli lobby’s puppets in the US, including President Bush and Defence Secretary Gates, are toeing the Israeli hawks' line that Iran not Israel is the danger, despite the fact that Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East.

    While pretending to recognize the results of the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report on Iran's ending of a nuclear weapons development programme in 2003, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) went to great length, through innuendo and outright lies, to discredit the report.

    The reference by AIPAC to Iran’s earlier programme included the repeated use of the denigrating term "clandestine". The only country in the Middle East with a clandestine nuclear weapons programme has been Israel. They don’t admit it, but former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu served 18 years in Israeli prisons, including 11 years in solitary confinement, for exposing the truth about Israel’s clandestine nuclear activities.

    When US Defence Secretary Robert Gates spoke in Bahrain on 8 December 2007, he "defended Israel's reputed nuclear programme", according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The paper added that "Israel is widely assumed to have the region’s only atomic arsenal, but refuses to confirm or deny it".

    At the conference, Gates, asked if he thought Israel's nuclear programme posed a threat to the region, replied: "No I do not." The government officials from Middle Eastern countries greeted the response with laughter and rolled eyes.

    On Iran, Gates also said: "Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents   Christians, Jews and Muslims alike."  In fact, Israel, not Iran, is the Middle East country that foments instability and chaos.

    Gates added:

    There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing.

    About Gates's last two comments, author / journalist / radio host Jeffrey Blankfort astutely remarked,

    Iran has launched no war against its neighbours as has Israel or across the oceans as has the US, and both Hezbollah and Hamas are, as we know, genuine grassroots movements fighting for their respective people's liberation from Israel's chronic invasions in the first instance and six decades of occupation in the second. Neither group has attacked the US and the accusation that Hezbollah, then in its infancy, was responsible for the attack on the US Marine barracks in 1983, has never been proved.

    Minister Yitzhak Cohen of Shas (Israeli political party) said during a security cabinet meeting on the Iranian nuclear issue.

    The manner in which the Americans relate to the intelligence report on Iran is similar to the way in which they viewed those reports they received during the Holocaust on railways transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their death at Auschwitz.

    As Jeff Blankfort noted, "For sure they are getting desperate when they drag in Auschwitz."

    Adding to his fear mongering rant, Cohen said:

    It cannot be that [US President George W.] Bush is committed to peace as was declared at Annapolis, and then the Americans propagate such an intelligence report which contradicts the information we have proving Iran intends to obtain nuclear weapons.

    Cohen added: "How can we rely on the Americans if they publish this report that emasculates what the world explicitly knows regarding Iran, and renders impotent the entire struggle against the Iranians?" choosing to ignore the fact that Israel has more than 200 nuclear bombs while Iran wants to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

    Puppets of AIPAC, the Israeli lobby in the US, starting with G.W. Bush and including Defence Secretary Gates, are toeing the Israeli hawks' line that Iran not Israel is the danger.

    *Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for 38 years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

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