The US political elite and media that conceals the brutality of the Israeli occupation for sectional political gains are accomplices to this sadism, and their silence endangers the security of the United States. When we cannot understand why Arab audiences, who are perfectly aware of what the Israeli army has been doing to Palestinians for decades, are outraged, it leads us into policy mistakes in dealing with the Middle East.
Juan Cole
Neocons and the right wing political parties in Israel,not Islamofascism, are the greatest danger to peace in the Middle East and the world. Neocons and the pro Likud lobby are behind the brutal occupation, apartheid, and colonial policies imposed by Israel on the Palestinian people of the West Bank and Gaza. These sadististic policies have enraged Islamic peoples and have led to resistance including the terrorism of 9/ll. In the US, the Neocons and the Likud lobby (who do not represent mainstream American Jewry or Israelis) use propaganda against Palestinian and Islamic peoples. They label them Islamofascists and terrorists, when, in fact, they are the victims of terrorist practices designed and supported by the Neocons and Likudiks.
Neocons are the intellectual architects of Americas policies in the Middle East. Those policies indiscriminantly side with right wing Israeli politicians and support its agenda of land theft, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza.
In order to promote an agenda that is grossly unfair and one sided the Neocons use their influence in the media and the academy to intimidate and distort the facts, and when that doesn’t work, surpress dissent. It is well known that anyone who criticizes Israel in public, whether that person be a Nobel prize winner like Jimmy Carter or Desmond Tutu, or a distinguished professor like Walt or Mearsheimer, will have his or her personhood attacked viciously in the mainstream press. It is usual and customary for dissenting voices to be silenced through pre-emptive cancellation of public events such speaking engagements, etc. Desmond Tutu speech cancelled The pervasive climate of fear that is designed to squelch dissent in our universities is a direct result of intimadation tactics of the Neocons. Academic Freedom is at risk Fear of the facts getting out is behind these neocon fascistic tactics.
But the #1 tactic used by the Neocons to surpress the truth is to blame the victim. Victim blaming wikipedia This is a technique psychologists know a great deal about. It has been used frequently against women who are rape victims. "She was asking for it," goes the refrain. The neocon/likudnik refrain is well known: Palestinians are terrorists and you can’t negotiate with terrorists; Islam is a failed culture that is antimodern; Arabs are killers who hate freedom; etc etc. In other words it's all their fault. Facts don’t count when the media is controlled by friendly neoconartists. What you don’t get are facts. Facts like this one: last year the IDF killed 143 Palestinian children; Palestinians killed exactly one Jewish child.
Despite America’s talk of spreading Democracy in the Middle East, the sad reality is that America is on the wrong side in the "war on terrorism". We invented, marketed and sold that war. We are the terrorists. The US is responsible for the genocide that has killed 1 million in Iraq. The US is responsible for backing the ethnic cleansing in Palestine. The US provided the cluster bombs that destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon. We are the ones who now want to bomb Iran back to the stone age. It is time that Americans take to heart the Bible injuction that says that we ought to attend less to the mote in the eyes of others, and more to the beam in our own eyes. It is time that America focus on repairing the world it has broken, than on destroying more of it.