eileen fleming

On May 5, 2009, Vice President Biden reassured AIPAC/American Israel Public Affairs Committee that while USA foreign policy will change, America remains committed to the peace and security of the state of Israel but that the election of President Obama was a call “to change the trajectory that the world was on."

Self proclaimed Zionist, Biden admitted that “All the good intentions of the last decade have not resulted in a more secure, more stable Middle… we will pursue direct, principled democracy with Iran [and the U.S.] will approach Iran initially in the spirit of mutual respect."[1]

Mutual respect requires that all sides are treated equally and held equally accountable under the same criteria.

Also at the AIPAC conference was Biden successor as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who sucked up and misspoke that “Israel is more than just an ally and fellow democracy.”

Israel's status as ally has been in question by many ever since that other day in infamy on June 8, 1967 when President Lyndon Johnson crucified the truth and failed to support the troops because he would "not embarrass an ally."

The USS LIBERTY was an unarmed spy ship that sailed in international waters during the Six-Day War that was attacked by Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats rendering thirty-four sailors dead, 170 wounded and all scarred for life because the survivors "were ordered to remain silent under threat of court martial, imprisonment or worse...The U.S. government has never challenged the obviously phony Israeli excuse of 'mistaken identity' nor have they attempted to expose the dishonorable cover up that continues to date. Truth and America's honor were ignominiously sacrificed to provide cover for Israel's transparent lies and despicable act of perfidy." -Phillip F. Tourney, President USS LIBERTY Veterans Association, June 8, 2007. [Read more: http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=700&Itemid=180 ]

Israel is also not a democracy "but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in control.”-Jeff Halper, American-Israeli, Founder and Coordinator of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

Kerry did call for talks with Iran for, “If diplomacy is to work, it must be backed by the prospect of tough, escalating, and multilateral sanctions strong enough to actually change behavior."

He also called on the Arab states to start treating Israel "like a normal country" and I imagine if America only had done that, Israel could be one.

"In 1963, President Kennedy tried to force Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’ Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection. When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them. Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.” – Excerpt from June 2005 interview with Mordrechai Vanunu

On October 5, 1986, the world was made aware that Israel had already manufactured upwards of 200 nuclear warheads in a London Times article that published Vanunu's interviews/interrogations with nuclear experts and some of the photos from the two rolls of film he shot in various top secret locales inside of Israel's clandestine underground WMD Facility.

Israel has never allowed international inspectors into the Dimona and they are now suspected of possessing the Jericho III ballistic missile system, which is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead at a distance of up to 7,000 kilometers.

America's favored relationship with the Jewish State has also allowed Israel to escape at least 65 UN resolutions for their human rights abuses and disregard of international law.

American tax payers are complicit because we the people provide more than $6.8 million per day to Israel that all goes to continue the 41 years of military occupation of the indigenous people of the Holy Land.

Also on May 5th, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller called on Israel to join the NPT as, "Universal adherence to the non-proliferation treaty itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea…remains a fundamental objective of the United States." [2]

On April 19, 2009, Gideon Spiro, a founding member of The Israeli Committee for A Middle East Free from Atomic, Biological and Chemical Weapons wrote to President Obama:

"The task of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear arms is an important one, and the way to achieve that objective is not by military action, but through an international effort to create a Middle East free of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. It is impossible to achieve that objective without dealing with the main cause of the Middle East nuclear arms race - Israel.

"Israel pushed the Middle East onto a course of a WMD-race. Israel is armed with hundreds of atom and hydrogen bombs. If we take into account the additional biological and chemical weapons that Israel produces in the Nes Ziona Biological Institute, a frightening picture emerges: a state, smaller than most Congressional Districts in the United States that is a powder-keg of weapons of mass destruction.

"It is an historical irony that Israel, which is home to many Holocaust survivors, has become a hotbed of radical leaders who would create the next holocaust – a nuclear holocaust. But the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran will extend far beyond our region. It is most likely they will have devastating global consequences that will also cause massive harm to the United States….no one knows what Iran is hiding in its facilities, but it can be helpful to draw an analogy from Israel’s case…The only effective and peaceful way to end this destructive WMD-race is through regional nuclear disarmament…Israel’s power rests to a great extent on US military and economic aid. Without the billions of dollars that the US transfers to it, Israel would be unable to finance the Occupation, the settlements, the army, and of course, its nuclear arsenal."

Israel's hold on power also rests in the efforts of AIPAC, but due to their influence "it is business as usual in Washington: criminal wrongdoing continues to corrupt America's core values, rule of law, and Middle East policy, as the Israel lobby's crosshairs shift almost completely to Iran."

In 2002, Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer estimated the total cost of the prolonged conflict in the Middle East at $3 trillion and lays a good deal of the blame for this at the doorstep of AIPAC. [3]

On April 5, 2009, President Obama stood on the world stage in Prague and stated, "As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act…When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays forever beyond our grasp. We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also cowardly thing to do. That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends… the voices of peace and progress must be raised together…Human destiny will be what we make of it…Words must mean something."

The United States has produced over 70,000 nuclear weapons of 72 major types. By the end of the Cold War [1991] the United States had an active arsenal of some 23,000 weapons of 26 major types and nearly 2,000 remain on hair-trigger alert ever since the end of the Cold War in 1991. An estimated 150 – 240 tactical nuclear weapons remain based in five NATO countries and the United States is the only country with nuclear weapons deployed on foreign soil. American taxpayers provide over $54 billion annually to maintain our nuclear arsenal-a drop in the bucket of the overall U.S. military spending.

American money is imprinted with "IN GOD WE TRUST" but our foreign policy chooses to live by the sword. On Armistice Day, 1948 General Omar Nelson Bradley warned, "We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living."

Individually we are powerless to dismantle the insanity of nuclear weapons, but for people of conscience and those with faith in a nonviolent God of love, compassion, justice and peace it is a moral, ethical and spiritual call to work towards the abolition of war and nuclear weapons.

A movement of American Christians under the banner of "The Two Futures Project: 2FP" has evolved and we believe "that we face two futures and one choice: a world without nuclear weapons or a world ruined by them. We support the multilateral, global, irreversible, and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons, as a biblically-grounded mandate and as a contemporary security imperative. Our change strategy is based around the creation of a nonpartisan, conscience-driven, enduring majority of Americans who are committed to a nuclear weapons-free world. By joining together with one voice of Christian conscience, we seek to encourage and enable our national leaders to make the complete elimination of nuclear weapons the organizing principle of American nuclear weapons policy…The field of our service is primarily the church and believers, and secondarily—so that our words will be credible—the government of our nation and all nations.

"As a matter of Christian conviction, we choose a world free of nuclear weapons. We believe that we face two futures: a world without nuclear weapons or a world ruined by them. We proclaim that nuclear weapons today are unjustifiable theologically, politically, and militarily. We renounce nuclear weapons as sin against God and neighbor. We repent of apathy toward devices that cause indiscriminate destruction. We urge the American President's leadership in fulfilling existing commitments toward global and complete nuclear disarmament. We pledge our support to the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide, to the glory of God." [4]

The goal of a world free of nuclear weapons can be equated to what appears to be an insurmountable mountain whose top is clouded by the status quo that reaps cynicism and a lack of imagination that keeps one grounded in despair and apathy. Continuing on the path of inertia will only descend us further down the slippery slope of violence and death. Silence is complicity and people of conscience and those with faith in a nonviolent God of justice and peace are seeking the highest ground together, for only in solidarity will we reach the mountaintop; a world without war, a world when all swords are put down and plowshares are raised up.

AIPAC currently has 515 lobbying appointments scheduled on Capitol Hill.

People of conscience are sending emails to President Obama and their representatives in support of nuclear disarmament through the fill in forms available @

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/161/t/288/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=911

http://twofuturesproject.org/?page_id=130

Sources:

1. http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/biden-defends-outreach-to-iran-in-aipac-speech-2009-05-05.html
2. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/131213
3. http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=959&Itemid=202
4. http://twofuturesproject.org/

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Eileen Fleming, is a feature columnist for The PT, the Founder of http://wearewideawake.org/ Author "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"
She produced "30 Minutes With Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu" because corporate media has been MIA all during a Freedom of Speech Trial in Israel.

Only in Solidarity do "we have it in our power to begin the world again."-Tom Paine

http://wearewideawake.org/