Ayoon wa Azan (A Mistake... and the Bigger Mistake)

According to the Gospels, Jesus Christ was led to the Mount of Golgotha and crucified between two Jewish criminals. This week, Israel, the Israeli lobby in the United States, the Republican contenders for the party’s presidential nomination and the Republican Party are leading Barack Obama to his crucifixion, for reasons that have to do with Israel and not the US. (In the Quran, it is said about Christ that "they killed him not, nor was he crucified, but so it was made to appear to them") Obama was scheduled to address the annual conference of AIPAC on Sunday, and this column went to print before the speech. I expect that he will cater to American Jews and Israel once again, and call himself a loyal ally who serves the interest of a state I call fascist, and a criminal occupier, with no right to exist in Palestine. His speech at AIPAC will be followed by a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House on Monday, to keep up the pressure on the president, who is in the middle of a re-election campaign. An election season means that Obama will be crucified – in theory, if not in fact. He does not want and cannot provoke the lobby, or the Republicans, or else he will lose money for his re-election campaign and will be attacked by the entire American media, and not just the pro-Likud media. In short, Israel and its American cabal of supporters want to extract a promise from Obama of military action against Iran’s nuclear program. The last two words require some clarification; for a while now, there has been American and Israeli talk about “red lines,” but I have discovered that the meaning of this differs between the US and Israel. For the White House, Iran’s production of a nuclear bomb is a red line, while for the Netanyahu government, Iran’s capacity to produce a bomb or have the means to do so constitutes a red line. Thus, the Obama administration wants to hold Iran accountable for something tangible, while the Israel war criminals are adamant about Iran’s intentions justifying a military strike; I believe that such a strike would lead to a third Gulf war, and losses for neighboring Arab countries even as far afield as Syria and Lebanon and the entire Arab Levant. Obama does not want to see wars break out, but this stance does not suit those calling for a war on Iran. Israel, its American cabal of supporters, and the US congress, which is owned by the pro-Israeli lobby, have the power to crucify him. Obama has said that “all options are on the table,” while Netanyahu considers this too vague. The US Congress is more Israeli than the Knesset, and it supports wars against Arabs and Muslims with a level of near-unanimity that you do not even see in the Knesset. A few days before the AIPAC conference and Netanyahu’s visit, the Senate passed a non-binding “Sense of the Senate" resolution introduced by Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, who represent Israel before the US, and supported by 32 members of the upper house. The goal of the bill is to limit the administration’s ability to work for compromise solutions in the confrontation with Iran. The resolution holds that Iran’s acquiring "nuclear weapons capability" is a red line, which is exactly the opinion of the Netanyahu government. It “rejects any United States policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran,” which is also the Israeli position. Arab states do not want Iran to have nuclear weapons, and there is no mistake in this. The mistake is that these countries do not oppose Israel’s nuclear weapons with the huge enthusiasm they have for working against Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons. The bigger mistake is that our countries rely on the US and Israel, which have identical foreign policies and are hostile to Arabs and Muslims, to save them from Iran’s nuclear weapons, which I once again say do not exist. Arab countries should begin nuclear weapons programs. If they did, American and the west, and the east would work to make the Middle East a region free of weapons of mass destruction, and we would be safe from the danger of such weapons in Israel and Iran. Anything else is just a fantasy.