The Passionate Attachment

America's entanglement with Israel

Archive for April 2011

Jeff Gates: We need to pull back curtain on chessmasters benefiting from Arab uprisings

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Interestingly, one of the key Israeli promoters of Arab democracy, Natan Sharansky, is a keen chess player, whose defeat of Garry Kasparov (born Garry Kimovich Weinstein) in a noisy simultaneous chess exhibition held in Israel in 1996 was reported by the New York Times to have prompted the then former world champion’s storming out of the event immediately after the last move and his failure to appear at an awards ceremony later. Apparently, the Russian Jewish chessmasters had made up by 2007, when Kasparov, as leader of Russia’s dissident United Civil Front, participated in Sharansky’s Prague conference on “Democracy and Security” — a seminal event which may indeed have sown the seeds of the Arab Spring.

Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

April 30, 2011 at 4:32 am

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Exposing Democracy Promotion in the Middle East (تعزيز الديمقراطية الباطل)

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Middle East analyst and investigative journalist Maidhc Ó Cathail exposes the Israel partisans, embedded in US governmental and quasi-governmental agencies, that have been involved behind the scenes in encouraging “democratic” reform in the Middle East.

Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

April 29, 2011 at 12:41 am

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Spreading democracy in the Middle East is a good idea, founder of One Jerusalem (under Israeli sovereignty) argued in 2007

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Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

April 28, 2011 at 2:31 pm

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Were seeds of Arab Spring sown in Prague?

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Under the direction of Natan Sharansky, the former Israeli minister who resigned his cabinet seat in 2005 in protest over Ariel Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan, the Jerusalem-based Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies held a “Democracy and Security” conference in Prague in 2007. The conference brought together (.pdf) right wing Israelis; their American neoconservative sympathizers, with their favourite Middle Eastern dissidents in tow—most notably, Richard Perle’s Israel-admiring Syrian protégé Farid Ghadry; and the newly-installed Eastern European democrats swept to power in the wake of a wave of neocon-backed “color revolutions,” the latter group presumably serving to inspire the Arab and Iranian participants to emulate them.

Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

April 28, 2011 at 7:27 am

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Blankfort, Ó Cathail discuss Israel and the Arab uprisings

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Jeff Blankfort, preeminent critic of the Israel lobby and host of “Takes on the World” on National Public Radio’s KZYX station, talks with Maidhc Ó Cathail, creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, about the Israel partisans who promote Arab democracy.

Summary: Middle East analyst and investigative journalist Maidhc Ó Cathail exposes US governmental and quasi-governmental agencies that have been involved behind the scenes in encouraging “democratic” reform in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Libya, including the National Endowment for Democracy, Democratic and Republican Institutes, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and its head, Peter Ackerman, plus the roles of George Soros and the pro-Israel neocons like Michael Ledeen and Robert Kagan.

Listen to the interview here.

Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

April 28, 2011 at 6:22 am

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NED’s Republican wing: Our work in Egypt is “exhilarating”

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“U.S. ‘Democracy’ Advisors Suddenly in Demand,” reports IPS:

“It’s exhilarating,” he said of IRI’s activities in Egypt. “We’ve been working since 2005 with Egyptian political activists and now the democratic universe has vastly expanded.”

Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

April 27, 2011 at 12:13 pm

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Was It Just a Dream? Egypt’s Revolution: ‘People Power’ or Military Coup?

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Back on February 14, the ever-reliable debunker of People Power fairy tales Mark Almond wrote:

Was it all a beautiful dream? The Western world’s broadcasters and print-journalists repeatedly characterised the celebratory atmosphere in Cairo and other Egyptian cities after Hosni Mubarak’s resignation late on 11th February as like a rock festival or a big party. It was the happy ending to die for – or was it the end?

Read the rest of this entry »

Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

April 26, 2011 at 6:34 pm

Posted in Uncategorized