By Dr. Kevin BarrettWe have heard it before: Shrill, panicky warnings that Iran is a few years, or months, away from deploying nuclear weapons.In 1984, Jane’s Defence reported that Iran’s production of a nuclear bomb “was entering its final stages.” Allan Cranston, a Zionist-funded US senator, estimated that Iran would have nuclear weapons by 1991.
In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Iran was three to five years away from having nuclear bombs, and begged the US to intervene. The same year, Shimon Peres said that Iran would have nuclear warheads by 1999. Peres claimed Iran was an off-the-charts threat “because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militancy.”
In 1995, the New York Times quoted anonymous Israel and US officials: “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought.”
In 1998, Donald Rumsfeld said Iran could build an ICBM capable of hitting the US within five years.
In 2003, Colin Powell told CNN that “Iran is much further along — with a far more robust nuclear weapons development program — than anyone said it had.”
In 2004 various newspapers reported that Iran was “months away” from nuclear weapons.
In 2006, the situation hadn’t changed. CNN cited Israeli PM Ehud Olmart: “Iran ‘months’ away from making nukes.”
In 2007, reputed Mossad asset John McCain said Iran was two years away from nuclear weapons.
In 2008, former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit said that Israel had only one year left to stop the imminent deployment of an Iranian bomb. Shavit asserted that Iran would use nuclear weapons as soon as it obtained them.
In 2009, the Times of London cited anonymous intelligence sources: Iran was ready to deploy nuclear weapons within one year and was only awaiting the Supreme Leader’s orders.
In 2011, Israeli Minister for Military Affairs Ehud Barak said Iran was less than a year away from producing nuclear weapons.
In 2012, Leon Panetta said Iran was one year away from producing nuclear weapons.
Today, as we near the end of 2013, Benjamin Netanyahu is saying the same thing.
The US intelligence community knows he’s lying. A 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) by all sixteen US intelligence agencies asserted “with high confidence” that Iran was not working on nuclear weapons. And Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has actually declared that nuclear weapons are forbidden by Islam.
Why does anyone listen to Netanyahu?
The answer, in one word: Islamophobia.
Listen to Netanuyahu’s bigoted rant: “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.”
In fact, an Islamic believer knows that human life is sacred, that killing one person is like killing all of humanity, and that the rules of just warfare (lesser jihad) require that combatants must not hurt innocent civilians or damage their property or infrastructure. That is why Ayatollah Khamenei has banned nuclear weapons. And that is why Iran refrained from retaliating in kind against Saddam Hussein’s Western-aided chemical weapons attacks and assaults on Iran’s civilian population during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.
The Western notion of chivalry – warrior knights sworn to protect civilian women and children, holding to the highest standards of ethics in both war and peace – was imported from Islamic Spain, where Muslim knights had developed the concept of al-futtuwa (Islamic chivalry). Throughout the Crusades, the Christian invaders of Palestine repeatedly noted that Muslim warriors adhered to a chivalrous code of ethics. The Muslim commander who defeated the Crusades, Salah ad-Din Yusuf Ibn al-Ayyub (known as Saladin in the West) was praised extravagantly by his Christian enemies for his chivalry and mercy.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the Crusaders themselves, who butchered entire civilian populations on numerous occasions.
Obviously not all Muslim warriors have been as chivalrous as Saladin, nor have all Christian warriors been as evil as those who sacked Jerusalem in 1099. The history of warfare is replete with brutality and greed, occasionally restrained by the ethics of what might be called “just war theory” – whether Islamic, Christian, or secular humanist.
But in today’s secular-West-dominated world, it seems that “total war” has replaced “just war” as the guiding principle. The absence of religious restraint in Western culture has led to an “anything goes” mentality in sexuality, consumption, and mass killing. From Sherman’s butchery of Southern civilians in the US Civil War, to the mass killing of millions of brown-skinned civilians by Euro-American imperialism and colonialism, to Hitler’s depredations against Slavs, Jews and Gypsies, to the firebombings of German cities and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the Israelis dumping white phosphorous on the inmates of the Gaza concentration camp, it seems that Western leaders are completely unrestrained by any fear of facing final judgment for their actions.
According to the new book Western Terror by Noam Chomsky and André Vltchek, the US and its vassals have murdered between 55 and 60 million civilians in military and CIA interventions since World War II. If we add to this the carnage of the two World Wars, and that of the imperial-colonial wars preceding World War II, the grand total of people murdered by secular-led Western terrorists since the beginning of the 20th century is close to 200 million.
Compared to that, the number killed by “Islamic terrorists” (whose Islamic credentials are usually doubtful) is minuscule. In the US, the FBI says that radical Muslims (so called by the FBI, by they are certainly not real Muslims) commit only 6% of domestic terrorist attacks – less than the number committed by radical Jews. Yet, Western mass media and popular culture promote the stereotype of Islam as a “messianic wide-eyed apocalyptic cult” whose name is synonymous with terrorism.
Netanyahu has played on this ludicrous, cartoonish “Islam = terrorism” slur in his last two appearances at the United Nations. Even the US government outlet Public Radio International, which is normally pro-Israel, questions Netanyahu’s cartoonish bigotry:
“First, cartoon bombs. Now it’s Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog. Has Benjamin Netanyahu raided the Warner Brothers’ cartoon vaults for metaphors?”
PRI was referring to Netanyahu’s latest verbal cartoon: “Ahmadinejad was a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Rouhani is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
What PRI author Marco Werman missed is that Netanyahu was not raiding the Warner Brothers cartoon vaults. He was raiding the Disney vaults.
The original “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” was not Ralph Wolf. It was the Big Bad Wolf in Walt Disney’s 1933 blockbuster “The Three Little Pigs.” And that original Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing was not an anti-Islamic stereotype, but an anti-Jewish one.
In Disney’s original “Three Little Pigs,” the Big Bad Wolf is dressed as a Jewish peddler, wearing a big fake Jewish nose and sporting a Yiddish accent. His attempt to destroy the homes of the heroes is equated to the perceived threat of Jewish pushiness in sales and ruthlessness in business – a common anti-Jewish stereotype in the 1930s USA. And his dressing up in sheep’s clothing is a reference to the perceived Jewish practice of hiding behind non-Jewish business names to infiltrate and eventually take over whole sectors of local and national economies.
Today, such anti-Jewish bigotry is no longer acceptable. The “Jewish peddler” sequence in “The Three Little Pigs” has been excised in current releases, but Islamophobia is still acceptable.
As you may know, Zionist mogul Michael Eisner took over the Disney corporation, and the the fat, bald little nice-guy king in Aladdin (1992) represents the compliant and sybaritic oil sheikhs of the Zio-American vassal states of the Arabian Peninsula.
The real-life versions of those fat, debauched Persian Gulf rulers are the ones working with Netanyahu to send “Islamic terrorists” to attack Syria. Those supposedly “Islamic” terrorists butcher civilians and even cannibalize their victims.
Such actions have nothing to do with Islam. They are the fruit of a long-term plan by the enemies of Islam, including Netanyahu and his intellectual godfather Bernard Lewis, to defeat the Islamic Awakening by manufacturing the specter of “Islamic terrorism” as the West’s alleged civilizational enemy.
This Zionist-manufactured cartoonish Islamophobia is the main factor pushing Western public opinion to consent to wars and “interventions” around the world, including Netanyahu’s planned war on Iran, which would likely explode into World War III. – Eurasia Review
