By Peter Chamberlin
If it is true that the power belongs to the people in America, and Congress still answers to the people, then what force prevents the people from rising up to demand that Congress answer to the people’s will? The answer to that question is that the "silent majority" is only silent because they have been kept in the dark; they do not know the truth about the dire predicament we are in.
The American mainstream media has allowed itself to serve as a disinformation service for the promotion of neoconservative (Likud) propaganda to the American people, under the guise of the "free press." American media dispenses misinformation which promotes the idea of world war against the Muslims, while systematically censoring international news content to propagate the idea of "bad Muslims." This effectively insulates Americans from any truth that might leak out of the wire services, guaranteeing that graphic images of Iraqi or Palestinian children being pulled out of the American-made rubble or lying stacked-up like cordwood in a local morgue are not seen by many people. It is the powerful censored images of what is being done that will get ordinary, big-hearted Americans to pay attention to our own war crimes.
This is the real unseen war being fought mostly in population centers, where powerful bombs and armor rip through communities to flush-out all the proud patriotic young men who would dare to harbor ideas of self-defense or resistance. This is the cold reality of the war, that we are fighting a war against ideas with heavy bombers and tanks. This is what the self-anointed saints (neocons) describe as a "clash of civilizations." That is the official story line that is fed to the American people by the nightly news, as they create an illusory vision of the war, in order to mislead.
News about the real war that leaks through the media filter undermines the fake publicity war. The revealed contradictions that seem to undermine "the mission" are written off as "mistakes" by reporters (which politicians immediately deny), even though they showed the real war unfolding according as planned. The war planners counted on chaos and sectarian violence to erupt after the overthrow of regimes. The plan had always been to trigger a series of wars of manageable size, by using local gangsters and mercenaries to foment divisive insurrections. The purpose of this strategy was to target local "extremists," the official designation of those who would take up arms against the American proxies.
It is the job of the "news"/propaganda organ to build on this idea of self-defense=terrorism, as the foundation for waging the propaganda war against the American people. The American mercenaries become "linked to al Qaida" in the official deception, as they begin to assassinate the targeted leaders of those who resist the coming occupation. Once begun, any one of these local conflicts could be pumped-up into a real war. Eventually, one of these small wars would explode into the desired regional conflict, which would enable America to use of all the weapons in its arsenal, in a massive campaign to seize all the oil fields and potential supply routes.
In their pursuit of the imperial agenda, the mainstream media has used the campaign for president in a masterful stroke of misdirection, to distract the people with the "shiny object" (the false hope of our first "people’s president" since JFK). The false hope of our first independent president obfuscated the fact that today all political candidates are beholden to a foreign power (Israel), because of the power accumulated by the agents of that foreign government (AIPAC, the Israel lobby), as demonstrated in the "bi-partisan support" for an attack upon Iran.
It is because of this illusory national unity for expanding the war, which directly contradicts the common will among the people for shutting-down the war, that the people are becoming aware of the lies. As people begin to awaken to the truth about the war they start to understand that the "war" being described on television by reporters, politicians and military types is not the real war that is unfolding behind the curtain. When enough people awaken to this truth they will represent an irresistible force to the unwanted expansion. Once this new national consensus is created we will demonstrate to Cheney that we really do oppose his war, even though his opinion will once again be "So?"
Even though the American majority clearly wants this war ended now, that is not the intention of the ruling elite. Cheney’s minions have already set tripwires, beyond our reach in the countries that border Israel, for triggering a larger "defensive" conflict. That is the nature of trip wires; once some careless fool sets such a trap, he has no say about when it is who tripped, or by whom. Our fate has been placed in Israel’s paranoid hands, even though Israel is the only country in the world that has consistently pushed our government to attack Iran or its allies on their behalf.
This intolerable situation presents us with an overwhelming problem that must be dealt with immediately, if we are to avoid the accompanying military disruption of our lives that will come with it. How do we inspire the dazed American people to rise-up and stop this new aggression from happening in their name, against their will? How can you convince a nation that has buried its own conscience that it is in its own interest to take a stand against state genocide?
The sleeping sheeple are blissfully unaware that world war may be imminent. They do not know that the day after Cheney visited the royal house, the Saudi Shura Council announced "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards," because of credible threats to Iran’s Bushehr reactor. Americans will not hear this from the national news, but they will hear every word of Petraeus’ upcoming testimony before Congress, where he will blame everything on Iran once again. This time he may provide the missing catalyst for igniting the war on Iran, since the government has not yet been able to provoke an Iranian misstep to their provocations in Iraq. Somebody has to be forced into fighting back, somewhere, before we can label them "al Qaida" and the use of the really big guns is authorized.
The forbidden reaction of self-defense (which we define as "terrorism") is more likely to come from one of Israel’s ongoing military provocations against the feisty freedom-loving Arabs, than from Iran. Our government is deeply involved in supporting these Israeli attacks upon the Palestinians and their neighbors, in the hopes that one of these attacks will bring sufficient Muslim retaliation upon Israel to justify our waging a larger genocidal war against Islam, in defense of Israel. The centerpiece of this strategy is guaranteeing Israel’s security. That is the central rationalization for utilizing nuclear weapons to disarm Iran.
The fulfillment of the Likud plans of Ariel Sharon for the land of Palestine remains the central foreign policy goal of the Bush Administration. We are the primary diplomatic force pushing the other nations to support the medieval Israeli seige and strangulation of Gaza, as well as the illegal partitioning of the West Bank (Ariel Sharon called it making a "pastrami sandwich" of the territories). Our government has also intervened militarily, by parking the Fifth Fleet off Lebanon’s coast to support the next Israeli attempt to annex southern Lebanon and to eliminate Hezbollah and Syria along with it.
There is a third world war coming, with consequences for all living things. We have the legal authority under our Constitution to prevent our elected proxies from carrying-out this next planned war in support of Israel, yet the feeble American resistance movement cannot even agree on a common purpose. We all must decide whether we are in this volunteer freedom militia to stop the war machine before it becomes unstoppable, or just to validate our own pet theories and vindicate our own biases. The more time we waste fighting over the divisive questions that keep us apart (and keep us isolated from the American majority), the easier we make it for the enemy to bide their time, until their big opportunity arises.
For now, we must put aside all other divisive issues which separate us and make our message undeliverable to the American sheeple. This means that all issues that do not directly contribute to blocking the attack should be considered secondary issues. We cannot question our current course, which leads to the destruction of American democracy to save Israeli democracy, if we cannot get past distracting questions concerning 911.
Identifying the prominence of Israel in our war upon the world, will automatically repel many heavily-indoctrinated Americans, before they ever hear our arguments for opposing this war. It is true that American media is dominated by pro-Israeli interests who regularly censor pro-Palestinian, or pro-Muslim news. This is the nature of our national news filter, the obstacle that must be overcome. We will not be able to get questions out that cross the "red lines," or use words like "Zionism, ethnic cleansing," or "Israeli aggression."
We cannot deal with the Israeli connections to the "mistakes" we have made in our own war on terrorism if we cannot separate the historical record of Israeli actions from ongoing speculation about Israeli connections made in 911 investigations. Going off on these diversionary tangents merely disrupts the debate about Israeli manipulation of American foreign policy, which is a hostile act that must not go unpunished. The temptation is to go off on side issues such as the "holocaust" or "Jewish supremacy" that are unrelated to stopping Israel’s war, only helps to validate charges of "anti-Semitism."
The neocon war plan which flowed outward from the Vice President’s office, becoming American foreign policy, began in Israel’s Likud Party. Israel’s war on terror became the template followed in America’s terror war, from the Islamaphobic strategy at its core, to its indiscriminate policy of assassinations using large missiles on crowded streets. The placement of hundreds of neocon ideologues, many of them citizens of both the US and Israel, brought the Likud war plans for America directly into the heart of American government. This amounted to the wholesale infiltration of our government by elements of the Israeli government. This infiltration was by the aggressive party of the expansionist Zionists, the soldier-settlers who are at the center of the current settlement land grab controversy.
If Congress can be pressured into ignoring calls from the White House to attack Iran, because of the deterioration of Iraq, can the people then produce more pressure than the political pressure generated by the Israel lobby? We don’t have to produce a revolution to take back our country, we just have to be able to generate irresistible political pressure to wrestle control our Congress from the lobby’s hands. You see, they’ve all got it turned all around. It is we the people who control our government, not the other way around.
Questions like these are all over the Internet, but the answers given to them can only be enacted outside the Web, within the mainstream media. Our small minority cannot affect change of this magnitude without help from the silent majority (sheeple). The fact remains that we will never reach this mute/deaf majority until we get some of these questions into that controlled media. I believe that we will begin to successfully penetrate that media filter whenever we learn how to simplify our questions so that they fit within the boundaries that have been set by political correctness. If we focus on one all-important line of questioning, carefully choosing the words that we use (aimed at stopping the planned escalation of the war), we may avoid causing reactionary responses.
There can be no let-up, no peace for the enablers of our dysfunctional government, until they stop their war upon the world.
-Peter Chamberlin contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at : chamberlin_peter@yahoo.com