The U.S Is Israel's Lapdog
Byrnzie
Posts: 21,037
So now the Israeli's are asking the U.S to hand back one of their agents jailed for illegally spying in the U.S in exchange for not continuing to build more illegal settlements.
I think it's pretty clear that the U.S is now Israel's lapdog. Must feel pretty great knowing that $4 Billion of your tax dollars are going to fund this foreign regime who have you by the balls.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/se ... ent-freeze
Israel seeks release of spy in exchange for extending settlement freeze
Binyamin Netanyahu hopes release of spy will appease right wing but US intelligence likely to oppose the deal
Chris McGreal in Washington and Rachel Shabi in Jerusalem
guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 September 2010
Israel is seeking the release of an American jailed for life for spying for the Jewish state in return for concessions in the renewed peace process with the Palestinians, including the extension of a partial freeze on the expansion of settlements in the occupied territories.
According to Israel's army radio, the prime minister's office has approached Washington with a deal to continue the moratorium for another three months in return for the release of Jonathan Pollard, a former navy intelligence analyst convicted of spying in 1987. Binyamin Netanyahu, has long pressed for Pollard to be freed, but winning his release would help him sell concessions to rightwing members of his cabinet and the settlers.
Army radio said that Netanyahu had asked an unnamed intermediary to sound out the Obama administration on the proposal, but it is not known what response was received. Other Israeli media reported that the prime minister dispatched the intermediary to approach the Americans "discreetly, and unofficially".
Netanyahu's office initially said: "We know of no query to the Americans on this matter", but later was more equivocal. Israeli officials dismissed the prospect of a deal for Pollard's release over such a short time frame but, given that Netanyahu has attempted to attach the convicted spy's freedom to earlier peace talks, it is likely that the issue is being broached.
Danny Dayan, head of the Yesha Council of Jewish settlers, condemned any proposal to swap Pollard for an extension of the settlement freeze: "The very idea is an ugly form of blackmail. Should we also agree to give up the Golan Heights in exchange for Gilad Shalit [an Israeli soldier held by Hamas in Gaza]?"
However, any deal is likely to meet stiff resistance from US intelligence which has previously scuppered plans to free Pollard. Netanyahu has said Israel does not plan to extend the moratorium on settlement building, and officials are not commenting on how the issue might be resolved, saying only that Israel "does not want people leaving the table".
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, told a French news agency that peace talks would be over if Israel abandoned the settlement freeze. "The negotiations will continue as long as the settlement remains frozen," he said. "I am not prepared to negotiate an agreement for a single day more."
Pollard's supporters in Israel and the US have tried to portray his actions as motivated by loyalty to the Jewish state. However, that position has been undermined because he was paid for the information and the FBI has claimed he also sold secrets to apartheid South Africa and attempted to pass them to Pakistan.
Pollard began passing US secrets to Aviem Sella, an Israeli military officer, in 1984 in return for cash and jewellery. He was caught the following year having passed tens of thousands of pages of documents. The full extent of the damage done by Pollard to US intelligence interests has not been made public but he is known to have given Israel comprehensive details of the US's global electronic surveillance network. Pollard was jailed for life under a plea agreement and his wife sentenced to five years in prison.
For more than a decade after Pollard was jailed, Israel denied that he was on its payroll, saying he was part of a rogue operation, even though it granted him citizenship in 1995.
Israeli leaders have persistently pressed for Pollard's release. At peace talks in 1998, Netanyahu told President Bill Clinton that "if we signed an agreement with Arafat, I expected a pardon for Pollard". Clinton later said he was minded to free Pollard but US intelligence, including George Tenet, director of the CIA, was strongly against it. However, another former CIA director, James Woolsey, has endorsed Pollard's release.
American intelligence was also angered by Israel's lack of co-operation in recovering the material passed on by Pollard and by its promotion of Sella to head an air force base – they saw this as a deliberate snub. Sella was eventually removed from that position after the US Congress threatened to cut funds to Israel.
I think it's pretty clear that the U.S is now Israel's lapdog. Must feel pretty great knowing that $4 Billion of your tax dollars are going to fund this foreign regime who have you by the balls.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/se ... ent-freeze
Israel seeks release of spy in exchange for extending settlement freeze
Binyamin Netanyahu hopes release of spy will appease right wing but US intelligence likely to oppose the deal
Chris McGreal in Washington and Rachel Shabi in Jerusalem
guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 September 2010
Israel is seeking the release of an American jailed for life for spying for the Jewish state in return for concessions in the renewed peace process with the Palestinians, including the extension of a partial freeze on the expansion of settlements in the occupied territories.
According to Israel's army radio, the prime minister's office has approached Washington with a deal to continue the moratorium for another three months in return for the release of Jonathan Pollard, a former navy intelligence analyst convicted of spying in 1987. Binyamin Netanyahu, has long pressed for Pollard to be freed, but winning his release would help him sell concessions to rightwing members of his cabinet and the settlers.
Army radio said that Netanyahu had asked an unnamed intermediary to sound out the Obama administration on the proposal, but it is not known what response was received. Other Israeli media reported that the prime minister dispatched the intermediary to approach the Americans "discreetly, and unofficially".
Netanyahu's office initially said: "We know of no query to the Americans on this matter", but later was more equivocal. Israeli officials dismissed the prospect of a deal for Pollard's release over such a short time frame but, given that Netanyahu has attempted to attach the convicted spy's freedom to earlier peace talks, it is likely that the issue is being broached.
Danny Dayan, head of the Yesha Council of Jewish settlers, condemned any proposal to swap Pollard for an extension of the settlement freeze: "The very idea is an ugly form of blackmail. Should we also agree to give up the Golan Heights in exchange for Gilad Shalit [an Israeli soldier held by Hamas in Gaza]?"
However, any deal is likely to meet stiff resistance from US intelligence which has previously scuppered plans to free Pollard. Netanyahu has said Israel does not plan to extend the moratorium on settlement building, and officials are not commenting on how the issue might be resolved, saying only that Israel "does not want people leaving the table".
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, told a French news agency that peace talks would be over if Israel abandoned the settlement freeze. "The negotiations will continue as long as the settlement remains frozen," he said. "I am not prepared to negotiate an agreement for a single day more."
Pollard's supporters in Israel and the US have tried to portray his actions as motivated by loyalty to the Jewish state. However, that position has been undermined because he was paid for the information and the FBI has claimed he also sold secrets to apartheid South Africa and attempted to pass them to Pakistan.
Pollard began passing US secrets to Aviem Sella, an Israeli military officer, in 1984 in return for cash and jewellery. He was caught the following year having passed tens of thousands of pages of documents. The full extent of the damage done by Pollard to US intelligence interests has not been made public but he is known to have given Israel comprehensive details of the US's global electronic surveillance network. Pollard was jailed for life under a plea agreement and his wife sentenced to five years in prison.
For more than a decade after Pollard was jailed, Israel denied that he was on its payroll, saying he was part of a rogue operation, even though it granted him citizenship in 1995.
Israeli leaders have persistently pressed for Pollard's release. At peace talks in 1998, Netanyahu told President Bill Clinton that "if we signed an agreement with Arafat, I expected a pardon for Pollard". Clinton later said he was minded to free Pollard but US intelligence, including George Tenet, director of the CIA, was strongly against it. However, another former CIA director, James Woolsey, has endorsed Pollard's release.
American intelligence was also angered by Israel's lack of co-operation in recovering the material passed on by Pollard and by its promotion of Sella to head an air force base – they saw this as a deliberate snub. Sella was eventually removed from that position after the US Congress threatened to cut funds to Israel.
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What was it Netanyahu said about Obama recently? Something about him 'just not getting it' in response to Obama's calls for a settlement freeze. And now we have this: Israel asking for one crime to be replaced with a temporary freeze on another crime.
I think it's pretty clear that the Israel lobby have Washington by the balls.
The Independent | By Robert Fisk | 17 July 2010
They’re all grovelling and you can guess the reason
Robert Fisk
It is the season of grovelling.
Only a week after CNN’s Octavia Nasr and the British ambassador to Beirut, Frances Guy, dared to suggest that Sayyed Hassan Fadlallah of Lebanon was a nice old chap rather than the super-terrorist the Americans have always claimed him to be, the grovelling began. First Ms Nasr, already fired by the grovelling CNN for her effrontery in calling Fadlallah a “giant”, grovelled herself. Rather than tell the world what a cowardly outfit she had been working for, she announced that hers was “a simplistic comment and I’m sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah’s life’s work. That’s not the case at all”.
What is this garbage? Nasr never gave the impression that she supported “Fadlallah’s life’s work”. She merely expressed her regret that the old boy was dead, adding – inaccurately – that he had been part of Hizbollah. I don’t know what her pompous (and, of course, equally grovelling) “senior vice president” said to her when she was given her marching orders. But like victims of the Spanish Inquisition, Nasr actually ended up apologising for sins she had never even been accused of. Then within hours, British ambassador Guy began her own self-flagellation, expressing her regrets that she may have offended anyone (and we all know what that means) by her “personal attempt to offer some reflections of a figure who, while controversial, was also highly influential in Lebanon’s history and who offered spiritual guidance to many Muslims in need”.
I loved the “controversial” bit – the usual “fuck you” word for anyone you want to praise without incurring the wrath of, well, you know who. The Foreign Office itself took down poor Ms Guy’s blogapop on old Fadlallah, thus proving – as Arab journalists leapt to point out this week – that while Britain proclaims the virtues of democracy and the free press to the grovelling newspaper owners and grotty emirs of the Middle East, it is the first to grovel when anything might offend you know who.
For that was the collective sin of Misses Nasr and Guy. What they said might have made Israel’s supporters angry. And that will never do. The reality is that CNN should have told Israel’s lobbyists to get lost, and the Foreign Office – which was indeed upbraided by the Israeli foreign ministry – should have asked the Israeli government when it is going to stop thieving Arab land. But as my old mate Rami Khoury put it in the Jordanian press this week, “We in the Middle East are used to this sort of racist intellectual terrorism. American and British citizens who occasionally dare to speak accurately about the Middle East and its people are still learning about the full price of the truth when Israeli interests are in the room.”
Which brings us, of course, to the Grovel of the Week, the unctuous, weak-willed, cringing figure of Barack “Change” Obama as he strode the White House lawn with Netanyahu himself. For here was the champion of the underdog, the “understanding” president who could fix the Middle East – finding it “harder than he thought”, according to his spokesman – proving that mid-term elections are more important than all the injustice in the Middle East. It is more than a year now since Netanyahu responded in cabinet to Obama’s first criticisms with the remark: “This guy doesn’t get it, does he?” (The quote comes from an excellent Israeli source of mine.) Ever since, Netanyahu has been McChrystalling Obama on a near-weekly basis, and Obama has been alternatively hissing and purring, banning Netanyahu from photo calls, but then – as those elections draw nearer – rolling over and talking about how the brave Netanyahu, whose government has just destroyed some more Arab homes in East Jerusalem, is taking “risks for peace”.
Needless to say, the only good guys in this story are the courageous Jewish Americans who oppose the thieves in Netanyahu’s government and the racism of his foreign minister, the Ahmadinejad-like Avigdor Lieberman. And which Western newspaper was bold enough to point out that the house destruction in Jerusalem “effectively end(ed) an unofficial freeze of such internationally condemned demolitions”? The New York Times? The Washington Post? No, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, of course. And anyone who thinks Haaretz is alone in condemning the illegal actions of the Israelis should read the excellent Jewish magazine Tikun in the US, which goes for Israel’s Likud lobbyists – for they are Likudists – like a tiger. Their latest target was Neal Sher, the Likudist who used to be in the US Justice Department and who is trying to persuade La Clintone to ban Judge Goldstone from America (where he holds a university professorship) for accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza. And whose government was it that also condemned Goldstone’s report? Well, Obama’s of course.
Looking back, the Obama grovelling started in that famous Cairo reach-out-to-the-Muslim-world speech, when he referred to the Palestinian “relocation” of 1948 (as if the Palestinian Arabs got up one morning on the birth of Israel and decided that they all wanted to go on holiday to Lebanon). But the moment the world should have got wise was when Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. A man of greater dignity would have acknowledged the honour of such an award, but explained that his own unworthiness prevented him from accepting. But he did accept. He wanted the Nobel Prize. It was more important to accept it even though he did not deserve it. And now? Well, we’ve all been watching the little groveller this week. Middle East peace? Further colonisation of Arab land? Crisis in southern Lebanon? The continued siege of Gaza? Forget it. Think of mid-term elections. Remember the fate of Nasr and Guy. And grovel.
this is a terribly dirty trick, to place the onus on the US to act in order for the israeli government to stop breaking international law... where the fuck is the international community on this one?? :twisted: :twisted:
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
like we've been discussing ... the right hold all the cards ...
but i think to byrnzie's point - how can israel, who receives $4 billion worth of military aid annually from the US and continues to violate international law, have any authority to demand anything from the US? ... well, it's simple - the jewish lobby is about as powerful an entity as exists in the US ...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
as long as netanyahu is in power - there is no true desire for peace by the israeli state ...
no ... i am not ... i am also sure, that when you ask your "objective self" - you will also come to that conclusion ... netanyahu is beholden to the right and the right do not seek peace (if they do, it will surely be only as a result of mass concessions by the palestinians) ...
history dictates that this is true. what is past is prologue.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
i would love nothing more than to be proven wrong
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=137470
did he not?
and bringing it up over and over again doesn't make it any less true.
hahaha ... and yet the president of iran isn't afforded the same benefit ... go figure ...
I don't know WHY that is.... but, that's what it certainly seems like. Otherwise, we would not side with Israel everytime.
Hail, Hail!!!
so it was insulting and yet nothings changed??
i mean what's the point of condemning them, and still offering unconditional support to Israel?
it's so wrong.
and further proof ... the US is Israel's lapdog is the change of tone shortly after ...
I'm just trying to untangle your logic.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
political posturing ... the US would like a volatile middle east ... the worst thing that could happen in the middle east would be peace for the US ... the engine that drives the US is economic imperialism aimed at taking advantage of political instability ... whether it be thru arms sales or infrastructure budgets ... plus the entire notion of oil ... as long as that area is volatile ... there will be sure to be arms sales (such as the thread you started) and there is sure to be reconstruction projects ... with that instability - it affords the US the ability to maintain military bases by which they can run their operations of destabalizing the region ...