Israel’s “Religious Coloration” Nukes

It’s not only Iran an Syria, Meir Dagan, Mossad boss, told Haaretz, but it is also Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Arabs want nukes and you know what Arabs with nukes will do to Israel. Dagan didn’t say Egypt and Saudi Arabia would necessarily nuke Israel. But he did say Iran is urging “Hezbollah to carry out terror attacks in Israeli territory, and giving assistance to Palestinian terror organizations,” in other words organizations resisting Israeli occupation. As for “Israel territory,” we can only assume Dagan is talking about the Shebba farms area, part of Syria until the Israelis stole it. Last week Hezbollah blew up an Israeli bulldozer near Shebba farms and the Israelis responded by bombing villages in southern Lebanon, an obvious violation of that nation’s sovereignty, although it was not framed that way in Haaretz.
Shimon Peres chimed in on the Israeli broken record mantra. “Iran is the problem of the Middle East,” Peres said. “It is a group of people who have freed themselves from speaking the truth, who think that the means justify the ends, and who hide everything they do,” he told Army Radio. “It is the center of terrorism in the Middle East. It is trying to create a nuclear option with a religious coloration.”
Never mind that Israel’s nukes—numbered between 200 and 400 and ready to go—have both a religious and nationalist coloration. Israel is a weapons of mass destruction state, the only one in the Middle East with the exception of Pakistan, and is not shy about using them. In 1948, specialized Israeli military units sabotaged water wells with typhoid and dysentery bacteria in Acre (near Haifa), a rather vicious war crime. Israel is not a signatory to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and it has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. As James Brooks points out, Israel has used chemical warfare against Palestinians demonstrating against the apartheid wall. “What the army used here [in the West Bank village of al-Zawiya] yesterday [June 10th, 2004] was not tear gas,” wrote Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group.
We know what tear gas is, what it feels like. That was something totally different…. When we were still a long way off from where the bulldozers were working, they started shooting things like this one (holding up a dark green metal tube with the inscription “Hand and rifle grenade no.400″ - in English). Black smoke came out. Anyone who breathed it lost consciousness immediately, more than a hundred people. They remained unconscious for nearly 24 hours. One is still unconscious, at Rapidiya Hospital in Nablus. They had high fever and their muscles became rigid. Some needed urgent blood transfusion. Now, is this a way of dispersing a demonstration, or is it chemical warfare?
Further evidence of Israeli development of chemical weapons surfaced on October 4, 1992, when a Boeing 747 airliner of the Israeli airline El Al crashed into apartment blocks at Bijlmermeer, near Schiphol Airport, south-east of Amsterdam, en route from New York to Tel Aviv. “At least 47 people were killed and over a thousand local residents fell ill to respiratory, neurological and mobility ailments and experienced a rise in cancer and birth defects,” writes Neil Sammonds. In 1998 the Dutch daily Handelsblad revealed that the Israeli plane not only carried depleted uranium, but “10 tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopropanol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) —three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas.”
In 1998, the London Times reported Israel has conducted research into “ethnic bombs,” a “biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, according to Israeli military and western intelligence sources. … In developing their ‘ethno-bomb’, Israeli scientists are trying to exploit medical advances by identifying distinctive genes carried by some Arabs, then create a genetically modified bacterium or virus. … The programme is based at the biological institute in Nes Tziyona, the main research facility for Israel’s clandestine arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.”
Not surprisingly, the biological studies were first initiated by the racist South African Apartheid regime, a natural ally of the equally racist and vicious Israelis. “The idea of a Jewish state conducting such research has already provoked outrage in some quarters because of parallels with the genetic experiments of Dr Josef Mengele, the Nazi scientist at Auschwitz.” The claim Israel is developing ethnic weapons was confirmed by the Foreign Report, a Jane’s publication that closely monitors security and defense matters. “It reports unnamed South African sources as saying Israeli scientists have used some of the South African research in trying to develop an ‘ethnic bullet’ against Arabs.”
In short, Israel is “the center of terrorism in the Middle East,” not Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. It has more weapons of mass destruction than all of the countries Dagan mentioned—and it has used them against Palestinians. Considering this, it is perfectly natural for Iran to build a nuclear program in response to Israel’s use of WMD and its non-stop threats issued against the Iranian government and the people of Iran. It has little to do with “religious coloration” and everything to do with making sure Israel does not attack, something they continually urge the Americans to do.
Obviously, tiny Israel, barely capable of containing Palestinian resistance to occupation, is unable to take on Iran. “Peres cautioned against Israel taking on the burden of confronting Tehran,” notes Haaretz. “The Iran issue is a global one. Let the world conduct the war. How much do we need to take upon ourselves,” said Peres. “In any event, Peres continued, diplomatic solutions must be explored by Washington and others before any decision for military action should be taken.”
“Pentagon hardliners,” i.e., Strausscons in the Pentagon, are mulling “the use of air and special operations attacks against Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities” in order to “stop the ruling clerics in Tehran [from] acquiring warheads,” write Julian Borger and Ian Traynor. “Washington has stood aside from recent European negotiations with Iran, and Pentagon hardliners are convinced that the current European-brokered deal suspending nuclear enrichment and intensifying weapons inspections is unenforceable and will collapse in months.” In other words, the Strausscons and the Likudites are waiting for the European negotiations to fail before they attack Iran, telling the world it will be a last ditch effort to get rid of Iran’s phantom nukes of “religious coloration.”
This is scary business. Iran’s Shahab-4 and Shahab-5 missiles are more than capable of striking Israel with conventional explosive payloads. If Israel or the United States attack Iran—as they will most assuredly do after the Europeans give up on negotiations—Iran will undoubtedly respond by attacking Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. If this happens, all hell will break loose and Israel will respond with its weapons of mass destruction. It will be the first chapter of World War IV, as envisioned by the Strausscons.
You can almost hear the exuberant salivation of the “civilians” over at the Pentagon in response to the prospect of waging “total war,” a quote apparently misattributed to Michael Ledeen. In fact, the quote is attributed to Adam G. Mercurial, a National Review columnist. Mercurial wrote:
if we are going to win a total victory in the war on terrorism while deterring other major wars around the globe, we will first have to rid ourselves of our aversion to total war. By ‘total’ war, I mean the kind of warfare that not only destroys the enemy’s military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends that spawned the war in the first place. A total-war strategy does not have to include the intentional targeting of civilians, but the sparing of civilian lives cannot be its first priority… The purpose of ‘total’ war is to permanently force your will onto another people group… [T]octal war pits nation against nation, even culture against culture.
It is “total war” the Strausscons want to wage against the Iranians, Arabs, and the Muslims of South Asia. How better to do this than to nuke them, or unleash an “ethno-bomb” to decimate them because “sparing of civilian lives cannot be its first priority"? For as Ledeen has said, “There is every reason to believe we will succeed in revolutionizing the Middle East, for we have always excelled at destroying tyrannies… We wage total war, because we fight in the name of an idea—freedom —and ideas either triumph or fail.”
“Freedom,” or rather “a reversal of the cultural trends that spawned the war in the first place” (because Likudites and Strausscons hate Muslim culture) through bunker-buster, cruise missile, depleted uranium, and possibly nukes and ethno-bombs is what the Strausscons are all about, as Iraq and Afghanistan make painfully obvious.
Bush has his “political capital,” plans to spend it, and the Strausscons are “ascendant,” as the corporate media reports, so we can expect perpetual bombing campaigns, invasions, and occupations in the near future. It is, after all, what the Strausscons have promised for more than a decade now. Surprise in response to the unleashing of World War IV will be inappropriate.