Jonathan Cook

Iran is the new Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler. Or so Israeli officials have been declaring for months as they and their American allies try to persuade doubters in Washington that an attack on Tehran is essential. And if the latest media reports are to be trusted, it looks like they may be winning the battle for hearts and minds. US Vice-President Dick Cheney is said to have diverted the White House back on track to launch a military strike.
There is an interesting problem with selling the “Iran as Nazi Germany“ line. If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel’s Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave despite repeated enticements from Israel and American Jews?
What is the basis for Israel’s dire forecasts--the ideological scaffolding being erected, presumably, to justify an attack on Iran? Helpfully, as George W Bush defended his Iraq policies last month, he reminded us yet again of the menace Iran supposedly poses: it is “threatening to wipe Israel off the map“.
This myth has been endlessly recycled since a translation error was made of a speech Ahmadinejad delivered nearly two years ago. Farsi experts have verified that the Iranian president, far from threatening to destroy Israel, was quoting from an earlier speech by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in which he reassured supporters of the Palestinians that “the Zionist regime in Beit-ul-Moqaddas“ would “vanish from the page of time“.
Ahmadinejad was not threatening to exterminate Jews or even Israel. He was comparing Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians with other illegitimate systems of rule whose time had passed, including the shahs who once ruled Iran, apartheid South Africa and the Soviet empire. Nonetheless, this erroneous translation has survived and prospered because Israel and her supporters have exploited it for their own crude propaganda purposes.
In the meantime, the 25,000-strong Iranian Jewish community is the largest in the Middle East outside Israel and traces its roots back 3,000 years.
Iranian Jews enjoy many freedoms. They have an elected representative in parliament, they practice their religion openly in synagogues, their charities are funded by the Jewish Diaspora, and they can travel freely, including to Israel. In Tehran, there are six kosher butchers and about 30 synagogues. Ahmadinejad’s office recently made a donation to a Jewish hospital in Tehran.
As Ciamak Moresadegh, an Iranian Jewish leader, observed: “If you think Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the Taliban are the same, and they are not.“ Iran’s leaders denounce Zionism, which they blame for fuelling discrimination against the Palestinians.
Despite the absence of any threat to Iran’s Jews, the Israeli media reported recently that the Israeli government has been trying to find new ways to entice Iranian Jews to Israel. The Maariv newspaper pointed out that previous schemes had found few takers. There was, noted the report, “a lack of desire on the part of thousands of Iranian Jews to leave“. According to the New York-based Forward newspaper, a campaign to convince Iranian Jews to emigrate to Israel caused only 152 out of these 25,000 Jews to leave Iran between October 2005 and September 2006, and most of them were said to have emigrated for economic reasons, not political ones.
To step up these efforts--and presumably to avoid the embarrassing incongruence of claiming Iran’s genocidal intent while thousands of Jews live happily in Tehran--Israel is now backing a move by Jewish donors to guarantee every Iranian Jewish family $60,000 to settle in Israel, in addition to a host of existing financial incentives that are offered to Jewish immigrants, including loans and cheap mortgages. The announcement was met with scorn by the Society of Iranian Jews, which issued a statement that their national identity was not for sale. “The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money. Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran’s Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews.“
More important than the welfare of Iranian Jewish families, it seems, is the value of Iranian Jews as a propaganda tool in Israel’s battle to persuade the world that coexistence with the Muslim world is impossible. For those who want to engineer a clash of civilizations, the 3,000-year-old Jewish legacy in Iran is not something to be treasured, but is merely an obstacle to war.
Jonathan Cook
JKCOOK.NET

Visitors gather at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, August 5.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago were stunning and sobering events. They brought World War II to an end, and everyone was thankful for that. Not too many of us stopped to think about the full implications of those bombs for our future. We were too busy celebrating the end of that terrible war.
One of the people who had it absolutely right at the very beginning about the meaning of Hiroshima was the great French writer Albert Camus. He wrote in a French resistance newspaper: “Our technological civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.“ We are still facing that choice.
Both the US and the USSR tested nuclear weapons in the atmosphere until the early 1960s, while they continued to create more efficient weapons. It didn’t take either country long to get those weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles and then submarine-launched ballistic missiles. They created a situation in which the world could be destroyed in a matter of minutes. This threat of a massive nuclear exchange was thought to provide an ad hoc policy to prevent nuclear war. It was called the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, for which the acronym was M.A.D. or MAD. Never was an acronym more accurately descriptive.
We came very close to a nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a very frightening time, and we can all be thankful that sanity managed to prevail. There were high-ranking US officials at the time who were pressing for bombing Cuba, which would have meant a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. That was one of many close calls during the Cold War.
With the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be a real chance again to put nuclear dangers behind us, and once again the opportunity was largely missed. Today, in the 60th year of the Nuclear Age, we still have some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and some 4,000 of these are on hair-trigger alert. You have to wonder about a species that seems so incapable of eliminating the greatest danger to its own survival. Not so incidentally, the United States has more nuclear weapons in its arsenal than any other nation.
There has been much emphasis in the news about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in such countries as North Korea. All countries should abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Few Americans are aware, however, that the treaty also provides that the US and other nuclear-weapons states must reduce their numbers of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, disarmament by nuclear-weapons states receives limited attention in news reporting, at least within the United States. I think this might be because the continuing existence of our own vast arsenal doesn’t seem to Americans, even if they are aware of it, to be nearly as dangerous as the threat of new nations acquiring the ghastly weapons.
The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--the hibakusha--have continually warned, “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist.“ In the end, I believe this is the most important lesson of Hiroshima. We must eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.
The best security, perhaps the only security, against nuclear weapons being used again, or getting into the hands of terrorists, is to eliminate them. Most of the people of the world already know this. Now it is up to the world’s people to impress the urgency of this situation upon their governments. We must act now. The future depends upon us.
Anything less would be to abandon our responsibility to future generations.
Walter Cronkite
WAGINGPEACE.ORG

General Pervez Musharraf will be re-elected as president, without casting of votes by the Electoral College, if he faces no candidate during his re-election bid, as per the Constitution.
“If all but one of the candidates have withdrawn,“ [their candidacies] “that one shall be declared by the Chief Election Commissioner to be elected“ [as president], reads clause 7 of the Second Schedule of the Constitution.
Such a declaration in Musharraf’s favour will be possible only if the entire parliamentary opposition puts up no candidate or any other contestant doesn’t jump into the fray. There is a strong likelihood that the opposition would keep its hands off Musharraf’s re-election from the present assemblies and shout at the top of its voice against the process. The opposition unanimously believes that the vibrant Supreme Court will block Musharraf’s re-election from the present assemblies, and he may not reach the stage of being declared re-elected as president. However, in the case of a contest for the presidential race, Musharraf is in a position to secure his re-election with a narrow margin from the present assemblies even without the support of legislators of exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Muttahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and smaller opposition groups, if there are no large scale defections from the ruling coalition.
Musharraf can bag a simple majority from the Electoral College Ð the Senate, the National Assembly and the four provincial assemblies Ð required for the success under the Constitution. The Electoral College for the presidential election consists of 702 votes. This means that a minimum of 352 votes are needed to win.
The ruling coalition’s numerical strength in the Electoral College is the precise reason behind it and the president’s persistent harping on the theme that the present assemblies would elect him as president once again. They fear that they may not be able to maintain their current tally in the future national and provincial assemblies. They also have the apprehension that the next assemblies may not be as easily swayed by Musharraf as the existing ones are.
Desertions from both sides of the divide are not ruled out because a secret ballot would be held for the presidential election. Upsets generally take place in the secret ballot but when the political situation is too fluid and unpredictable, defections may be more than usually expected.
So far, Musharraf has not pitched himself against any rival in his entire political life in any election since October 1999 because he never contested any public office in an electoral process. His present five-year term as president doesn’t owe to his election from his electoral college. In fact, he considered himself elected as president through the public referendum that he held before the October 2002 general elections. Later, he got a vote of confidence from the National Assembly and considered himself elected as president by the legislature. This was similar to what General Ziaul Haq had done.
But this time, Musharraf may have to face a candidate from the opposition parties. However, they will field a nominee only if they accepted the presidential election from the present assemblies as valid.
Every MNA of the 342-member Lower House, every senator of 100-member Upper House and every MPA of the 65-member Balochistan Assembly has one vote in Electoral College for the presidential election whereas this is not true in the case of the provincial assemblies of the Punjab, Sindh and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Every provincial assembly has a total of 65 votes in the presidential election.
Under the Constitution, the procedure to count votes cast in a provincial assembly (except that of Balochistan) is that the number of all votes cast in favour of each candidate shall be multiplied by the total number of seats in the provincial assembly for the time being having the smallest number of seats (which is the Balochistan Assembly with 65 seats), and divided by the total number of seats in the provincial assembly in which the votes have been cast.
THENEWS.COM

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s appointment of Bernard Kouchner as France’s foreign minister was a brilliant political stroke. Having beaten his Socialist rival, Segolene Royal, Sarkozy decided to compound the Socialists’ crisis by appointing to his government several political figures long associated with the center-left.
Sarkozy persuaded two women from immigrant backgrounds, Rama Yade and feminist activist Fadela Amara, to accept sub-Cabinet positions, while Kouchner has been the most popular political figure in France for the past several years.
Kouchner’s popularity is a curious phenomenon. Although he has been in politics for decades, he has not held a government post since serving as deputy health minister under former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
Yet, whether through the force of his intellect and talent, as he and his supporters say, or his genius at self-promotion, as many of his detractors contend, Kouchner succeeded in remaining at center stage no matter who was France’s president or prime minister.
But the hour was growing late. Kouchner, cofounder of the relief group Doctors Without Borders, who later split with the organization to found a second humanitarian organization, Doctors of the World, and who ran Kosovo as a United Nations protectorate after NATO’s war with Serbia in 1999, is now 67. Realistically, Sarkozy’s invitation was probably Kouchner’s last chance to play a major political and international role. But what kind of role?
Kouchner did not invent the “droit d’ingerence,“ which can be rendered in English as the right of intervention. That title belongs to the Italian legal theorist Mario Bettati. But he is best known as its champion. Since the 1970s, Kouchner has argued that states have a duty to prevent dictatorial governments from committing the worst abuses against their people. While not denying that state sovereignty was the basis of the international system, Kouchner insisted that it could not be a license for governments to kill.
His words were eloquent and resonated with people of conscience throughout Europe. Arguably, the “droit d’ingerence“ served as the inspiration for much of the so-called humanitarian intervention in the Balkans and in Africa in the 1990s.
Kouchner’s stance also set the stage for the U.N. adoption of the still more interventionist doctrine of the “responsibility to protect“--a call for outside military force to prevent genocide or widespread human rights abuses--during the secretary generalship of Kofi Annan.
Kouchner was consistent throughout his career. His vision of humanitarian action was one in which relief was not only an end in itself--the traditional Red Cross view that humanitarians palliate the worst effects of war and natural disaster-- but also a means for righting wrongs. That difference is fundamental.
While the Red Cross view, adopted by Kouchner’s former colleagues at Doctors Without Borders, insists that humanitarian action is a vital but limited activity that can be coherent and effective only if it understands its limitations, the Kouchner view is that humanitarian action can be a lever for changing the world. Anything less is a dereliction of moral duty.
In practical terms, whereas the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders believe in neutrality and remain skeptical of the motives of outside states that might intervene, Kouchner’s view is that humanitarian action should be understood as part of what the Canadian writer-politician Michael Ignatieff calls a “revolution of concern.“ Grave human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing, and genocide would no longer be permitted. When they occur, states would stand ready to intervene to put an end to them, peacefully if possible, by force if necessary.
The often unstated corollary to this doctrine is regime change. That was what activists like Kouchner called for, regardless of whether they admitted it even to themselves, in Rwanda and Kosovo. It probably explains why Kouchner was one of the few important French political figures to support the Anglo-American overthrow of Saddam Hussein (something Sarkozy did not do).
Given the debacle in Iraq, it is surprising that a man with regime change inscribed in his DNA could occupy so central a position in the French government.
Perhaps fewer lessons have been learned from Iraq than might have been hoped. In fairness to Sarkozy, his motives in appointing Kouchner had more to do with wrong-footing his Socialist adversaries than with the “droit d’ingerence.“
JAPANTIMES.COM