The Passionate Attachment

America's entanglement with Israel

Anti-Assad Warmongers Drag in the Holocaust

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Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
October 25, 2014

“The irony is that the Nazi holocaust has now become the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression,” Norman Finkelstein tells Yoav Shamir in “Defamation,” the Israeli filmmaker’s award-winning 2009 documentary on how perceptions of anti-Semitism affect Israeli and U.S. politics. “Every time you want to launch a war of aggression, drag in the Nazi holocaust.” If you’re looking for evidence in support of Finkelstein’s thesis today, you need look no further than the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibit of images of emaciated and mutilated bodies from contemporary Syria.

The small exhibit, entitled “Genocide: The Threat Continues,” features a dozen images said to be from an archive of 55,000 pictures allegedly smuggled out of the country by “Caesar,” a mysterious source who claims to have defected from his job as a Syrian military photographer after having been ordered to take photos of more than 10,000 corpses. Emphasizing the threat of an impending genocide, the reportedly conscience-stricken defector warns that a similar fate awaits the 150,000 people he says remain incarcerated by President Bashar Assad’s government.

“They’re powerful images, and viewers are immediately reminded of the Holocaust,” Cameron Hudson, the director of the museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide, was cited as saying in an Oct. 15 Associated Press report. Hudson, whose intriguing career in genocide prevention includes a stint as intelligence analyst in the CIA’s Africa Directorate, added, “They show a side of the Syrian regime that hasn’t really been really seen. You might have heard about it, read about it, but when you’re confronted with these images, they’re impossible to ignore.”

The museum’s promotion of these impossible-to-ignore, Holocaust-recalling images dates from a few months earlier, however. In his July visit to Washington that included a series of meetings with U.S. government and congressional officials, Caesar’s first stop was at the Holocaust Museum.

On July 28, Michael Chertoff, a member of the museum’s governing board of trustees, presented the purported defector to a small group of reporters and researchers. According to the Washington Post’s Greg Miller, this event was the first time that Caesar had appeared publicly to answer questions about the photos deemed by some human rights organizations as evidence of war crimes committed by Assad.

Chertoff, a co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act, hasn’t hesitated to invoke the Nazis either in support of the neoconservative-conceived “global war on terror.” In an April 22, 2007 Washington Post op-ed entitled “Make No Mistake: This Is War,” the then secretary of the Department of Homeland Security wrote, “Al-Qaeda and its ilk have a world vision that is comparable to that of historical totalitarian ideologues but adapted to the 21st-century global network.”

Commenting on the former DHS secretary’s close ties to Israel, Jonathan Cook notes in his book “Israel and the Clash of Civilizations” that Chertoff’s mother was an air hostess for El Al in the 1950s. “There are reports that she was involved in Operation Magic Carpet, which brought Jews to Israel from Yemen,” writes the Nazareth-based British journalist. “It therefore seems possible that Livia Eisen was an Israeli national, and one with possible links to the Mossad.”

Among the other members of the Holocaust Memorial Council noted for their staunch support of Israel and American interventionism are the pardoned Iran-Contra neocon intriguer Elliott Abrams and Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

Writing in Foreign Policy’s The Cable on April 23, 2012, Josh Rogin drew attention to Wiesel’s pointed introduction of President Barack Obama at a ceremony in the Holocaust Museum. Comparing the Syrian president and then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust, Wiesel implicitly criticized Obama’s supposedly obtuse inaction, “So in this place we may ask: Have we learned anything from it? If so, how is it that Assad is still in power?”

As Rogin, a reliable media conduit for anti-Assad interventionism, pointedly observed, the speech was reminiscent of another one Wiesel gave at the opening of the museum in 1993, when he urged then President Bill Clinton to take military action in Bosnia: “Similarly, that speech came at a time when the Clinton administration was resisting getting entangled in a foreign civil war but was under growing pressure to intervene.”

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Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

October 25, 2014 at 1:38 pm

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Ted Cruz’s bible-thumping, carpet bombing Israel-centric foreign policy

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By Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
October 7, 2014

Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer currently executive director of the Council for the National Interest, links to my article on the “In Defense of Christians” D.C. Summit in his latest UNZ Review column:

The disturbing thing about Cruz is that his foreign policy statements are awash in what must be a willful disregard of reality, but, as with the threatened government shutdown, he apparently knows what will sell with the Bible thumping America first crowd that he is primarily targeting. His latest leitmotif which he has been hammering relentlessly is the worldwide persecution of Christians, with the clear implication that it is uniquely a Muslim problem. It is also a line that is being pursued by the Israeli government and American Jewish groups, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is somehow a protector of Christianity.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer and political analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the US-Israeli relationship.

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October 7, 2014 at 3:03 pm

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The Israel Lobby ‘In Defense of Christians’?

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Maidhc Ó Cathail
The UNZ Review
October 2, 2014

Having long since captured the sympathies of America’s evangelical Christians, Israel’s friends have recently been attempting to show empathy for the persecuted Christian churches of the Arab World in what appears to be a concerted effort to garner support for Tel Aviv’s regional aspirations. Only founded earlier this year, a previously obscure non-profit organization called “In Defense of Christians” suddenly attracted international headlines during its inaugural summit (Sept. 9-11). The stated purpose of the three-day Washington, D.C. gathering was to raise awareness about the plight of beleaguered Middle Eastern Christian communities whose continued existence is threatened by the advance of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and other takfiri groups.

Continue reading here.

Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

October 2, 2014 at 10:35 am

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“In Defense of Christians” — Or Israel?

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By Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
September 11, 2014

The shady new non-profit “In Defense of Christians” (IDC), whose D.C. summit is making headlines thanks to reliable Israeli asset Sen. Ted Cruz, would appear to have been created to induce Christians to back further American intervention in the Middle East with the ultimate goal of advancing the Yinon Plan, i.e. the Israeli strategy of breaking up the entire region into ethnic or sectarian mini-states. As IDC executive director Andrew Doran recently wrote in the neocon National Review Online:

As I argued here last year, the intervention in the former Yugoslavia may serve as a compelling model today for Syria and now perhaps Iraq, but this would call for a willingness to see Iraq and Syria dissolved. For the moment, America clings, as it did at the outset of war in Yugoslavia, to nations that no longer exist.

Update: Neocon interventionist Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the pro-Israel Hudson Institute, was one of the main speakers [.pdf] at the IDC summit.

Update II: Yesterday, the neocon Washington Post noted that the IDC summit’s Middle Eastern Christian attendees didn’t necessarily share Doran and Shea’s enthusiasm for interventionism:

Doran said the cooperative spirit of the conference has been heartening, but that it does not mean that all are agreed on how the threat to Christians in the Middle East should be countered. One Orthodox leader on Tuesday (Sept. 9) declared his opposition to military action to stop the Islamic State militants, a view that is not likely widely shared at the conference, Doran noted. The next day, another called the Arab-Israel conflict the root of Middle Eastern chaos. He doesn’t speak for the IDC nor his brother patriarchs, said Doran, adding: “But I don’t think we would be inclined to censor that sort of comment. We welcome a diversity of thought.”

As the IDC statement in response to the booing of Sen. Cruz’s pro-Israel speech subsequently revealed, however, there is a limit to how much diversity of thought is really welcome “In Defense of Christians.”

Update III: In an Aug. 19 New York Times op-ed, Ronald Lauder asks “Who Will Stand Up for the Christians?” Unless one is to believe that the president of the World Jewish Congress is disinterestedly concerned about Christian suffering, there clearly is a concerted effort by pro-Israelis to exploit the persecution of minorities in the Middle East to induce “the strongest military power on earth” to intervene further in the region in order to advance Israeli hegemony.

Update IV: Kristina Olney, IDC’s Director of Government Relations and Outreach, previously served for two years as the Government Relations Associate at The Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). Dubbed “PNAC 2.0,” the FPI, like its neocon predecessor, was also co-founded by Israel partisans William Kristol and Robert Kagan.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer and political analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the US-Israeli relationship.

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September 11, 2014 at 10:32 pm

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Henry Frowde, the mysterious OUP publisher of Zionist Scofield Bible, was a lifelong Darbyite Plymouth Brother

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Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
August 1, 2014

In a 2009 piece entitled “Zionism’s Un-Christian Bible,” I wrote that “it remains a mystery” why the reputable Oxford University Press had a century earlier published The Scofield Reference Bible, the highly influential but controversial work whose annotated Zionist commentary on the Authorized King James Version has “induced generations of American evangelicals to believe that God demands their uncritical support for the modern State of Israel.”

Now, however, thanks to a message I recently received on Twitter, that mystery has been at least partially solved. On an evangelical website called “Gospel Hall,” a biography of Henry Frowde (1841-1927) reveals that although the OUP publisher was “[n]ot demonstrative in his religious views, all his Christian life he was associated with brethren known as “Exclusive.”

The “Exclusive Brethren” refers to the group of Christian evangelicals that in a 1848 split in the Plymouth Brethren followed John Nelson Darby. As Stephen Sizer observed in a November 2012 presentation on the history of Christian Zionism behind the British government’s 1917 Balfour Declaration in support of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”:

John Nelson Darby is regarded by many as the father of Dispensationalism and the most influential figure in the development of Christian Zionism. He was a charismatic figure with a dominant personality. He was a persuasive speaker and zealous missionary for his dispensationalist beliefs. He personally founded Brethren churches as far away as Germany, Switzerland, France and the United States, and translated the entire Scriptures into English. The churches Darby and his colleagues planted with the seeds of Premillennial Dispensationalism in turn sent missionaries to Africa, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand and, ironically, to work among the Arabs of Palestine. From 1862 onwards his controlling influence over the Brethren in Britain waned due, in particular, to the split between Open and Exclusive Brethren in 1848. Darby consequently spent more and more time in North America, making seven journeys in the next twenty years. During these visits, he came to have an increasing influence over evangelical leaders such as James H. Brookes, Dwight L. Moody, William Blackstone and C. I. Scofield.

In light of his lifelong association with the Darbyite Exclusive Brethren, it’s little wonder that the “mysterious” Henry Frowde “expressed immediate interest” in Cyrus I. Scofield’s project when Darby’s American acolyte made a trip to England in search of a publisher for his Zionist reference bible. In The Scofield Bible: Its History and Impact on the Evangelical Church, we further learn that

Frowde coordinated publication of The Scofield Reference Bible with John Armstrong in New York, head of the American branch of the Oxford Press. And so, the publication of Scofield’s Bible by the prestigious Oxford University Press was secured.

And thus an influential member of a tiny cult had helped catalyse a potentially apocalyptic conflict centered on the Holy Land.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

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August 1, 2014 at 7:49 pm

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Is ‘Tony Cartalucci’ a fictional creation of Eric Draitser and/or Nile Bowie?

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By Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
June 12, 2014

Described in his brief bio as “a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer,” has anyone ever met, spoken to, or even seen a of “Tony Cartalucci”?

As readers of The Passionate Attachment are aware, I have long since been suspicious of the elusive Cartalucci for a number of reasons, not least of which is his blatant covering for the Israel Lobby. Although Cartalucci, who used to maintain a popular website called the Land Destroyer Report, regularly cites the influence of certain Brookings Institution policy papers on US Middle East policy, he crucially omits the fact that these papers were invariably published by Brookings’ Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

In 2002, Brookings’ Middle East policy was effectively taken over by Israeli media mogul Haim Saban with the founding of the Saban Center for a donation of almost $13 million. While criticizing the papers’ advocacy of aggressive US policy toward Iran and Syria, Cartalucci typically attributes these policy recommendations to the corporations supporting the Brookings Institution rather than to the Israeli billionaire who has openly admitted that the establishment of think tanks was one of his three ways of influencing American politics in order to “protect” Israel.

Having recently come across a July 5, 2013 blog post by “willyloman,” I learned that Cartalucci has “now hand[ed] over the Land Destroyer Report to two of [his] respected colleagues, Eric Draitser and Nile Bowie.” According to Land Destroyer’s “About Us” section, Eric Draitser is “an American geopolitical analyst based in New York City” while Nile Bowie is “an American geopolitical analyst, photographer, and journalist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.”

In the analyses of Draitser and Bowie, one can’t help noticing a striking similarity to Cartalucci’s attempt to portray Israel as America’s compliant cop on the beat in the Middle East, as if its Lobby had little or nothing to do with shaping US policy.

Perhaps the two young New Yorkers, like many other so-called analysts of US foreign policy, simply share their respectful colleague’s discredited Chomskyan view of US-Israel relations. Or perhaps there is another explanation for their common skewed geopolitical worldview. With Cartalucci having receded deeper into the jungles of Thailand, one wonders if he ever really existed at all. Perhaps he was never anything more than a fictional creation of Draitser and/or Bowie who was given a decidedly Gentile-sounding name to help obscure the blatant covering for Israel’s occupation of Washington and its disastrous influence over its foreign policy.

UPDATE: @TonyCartalucci has just replied to my post in two tweets:

@O_Cathail ur so confused/irrelevant. Iraq’s invaded & you’re obsessing over my insufficient hatred for Israel? Ru cognitive infiltration?

@O_Cathail btw you are blocked. Keep preaching to your 100 followers. I have more important things to do.

Well, that’s one way of avoiding the question!

UPDATE II: “Anthony Cartalucci” has just shown up on my Facebook page to accuse me of “cognitive infiltration.” Pot, kettle, black!

UPDATE III: It seems that I’ve touched a nerve. In response to my question, “Speaking of ‘cognitive infiltration,’ can you explain why the sole partner website of your new site New Eastern Outlook (NEO) is the notorious “anti-Zionist” disinfo site Veterans Today?” Cartalucci made this typically evasive comment:

Maidhc, you know so little of what is going on around you, it is amazing you can find your way to the keyboard. Like I said before, you are irrelevant – there is this thing going on in Iraq and here you are trolling people trying to expose it and stop it. That makes you complicit with the very people you claim are pulling the strings. You are either cognitive infiltration or a useful idiot – what is for sure is no one reads your nonsense so I’m pleased to just ignore you from now on.

Now you are blocked on Facebook.

To which I replied:

“Anthony,” have you ever written how “this thing going on in Iraq” actually originated with the Israel Lobby you continue to divert attention from?

http://maidhcocathail.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/on-tenth-anniversary-israel-partisans-behind-iraq-war-still-remain-at-large/

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

June 11, 2014 at 8:14 pm

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Omar

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June 7, 2014 at 12:23 am

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