Conjuring Holocaust Netanyahu brought Israel closer to War

[seemslikeadream]

By conjuring the Holocaust, Netanyahu brought Israel closer to war with Iran
Haaretz's editor-in-chief says that the Prime Minister publicly booby-trapped himself to war with Iran by comparing the need to strike its nuclear program with the Jewish request to bomb Auschwitz.

By Aluf Benn

In his speech to the AIPAC conference Monday night Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved closer than ever to the point of no return en route to war with Iran.

Netanyahu compared Iran to Nazi Germany, its nuclear facilities to death camps, and his current trip to the White House to a desperate plea to former U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt by the U.S. Jewish community to bomb Auschwitz.

The request, as Netanyahu told a sympathetic AIPAC crowd, was denied, using justifications similar to those used today by those who object to a military strike against Iran.

"Israel has patiently waited for the international community to resolve this issue. We've waited for diplomacy to work, we've waited for sanctions to work. None of us can afford to wait much longer," Netanyahu warned, adding that, as Israeli premier, he would "never let Israel live under the shadow of annihilation."

It was the same reason former Prime Minister Menachem Begin used to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981: preventing the possibility that Jewish children would face the peril of another Holocaust. Now it’s the turn of his successor, Netanyahu, to remove the danger hovering over the heads of Jewish children.

Netanyahu was in the habit of comparing the Iranian nuclear threat to the Holocaust back when he was opposition leader, claiming that the western powers were not doing enough to thwart it. But, since coming back to power, three years ago, he has refrained from making these kinds of statements, opting for a vaguer rhetoric and asking his ministers to keep the fervor down. That vagueness dissipated on Monday. In his speech to AIPAC, coming mere hours after his meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in the White House, Netanyahu escalated the tone, both in his reference to a clock that was running out, and in his expressed disappointment from U.S.-led diplomatic sanctions.

The Holocaust talk has but one meaning: they force Israel to go to war and strike the Iranians. The justifications against an attack, weighty as those may be, turn to fumes when put up against the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Treblinka. No calculus of missiles falling on Tel Aviv, rising oil prices and economic crisis can hold water when compared to genocide. If that's the situation, the option of sitting quietly, expecting the "world" to neutralize Iran, or of a stable balance of terror, becomes nonexistent. If Netanyahu doesn't act and Iran achieves nuclear weapons capabilities, he'll go down in history as a pathetic loud mouth. As a poor man's Churchill.

But Netanyahu booby-trapped himself back when he was still making his way to Washington, when he presented Iran with a public ultimatum: dismantle the underground enrichment facility near Qom, cease all enrichment activity, and remove the medium-grade uranium from Iranian territory. He realizes that the Iranian government will never agree to those terms, which seems more like setting up a casus belli that a reasonable diplomatic demand. But Netanyahu's Holocaust speech at the AIPAC conference went much further than that.

Obama asked Netanyahu to avoid inflammatory statements in regards to Iran, to keep gas prices down in America's gas station. It's an important issue when trying to rebuild the American economy as well as, of course, his reelection bid. And while Obama's thinking may seem reasonable, he's living in an entirely different world than that of Israel's prime minister. From the White House, Iran looks like a strategic problem, not as a Holocaust. Thus, time isn't of the essence, and diplomacy and sanctions should still be given a chance. Netanyahu is motivated by other things.

It's possible to detect enough loopholes that would allow Netanyahu to escape an imminent decision to go to war. Netanyahu has a political interest to aid his Republican friends against Obama, so his statement that "there wasn't a decision to attack" seems more like an attempt to stir things up ahead of the U.S. presidential elections than a command to Israel Air Force units. There are those who believe he's just a second-guessing coward who would never take it upon himself to initiate a war. It could be that all those interpretations are true. Nevertheless, Netanyahu took on a public obligation on Monday that would make it very hard for him to back away from the path of war with Iran.

[StarmanSkye]

Ugh! Isn't ANY mainstream media discussing the bad-and-worse case issues of an attack on Iran? Like, its leading to a much-wider and uncontrollable conflagration as national interests from Pakistan & India to Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Syria etc. are incited to take-sides -- potentially resulting in oil-supply sabotage and tanker-traffic shutdown thru Strait of Hormuz, regional conflict escalating to another global war.

The duplicity and arrogance here in the drum-beats for war based on an irresponsible false comparison is patently criminal provocation for war, the penultimate crime against peace. I mean, the irony here is breathtaking -- in that Iran is at least 1000 times more vulnerable to Israeli nukes than Israel is to Iranian nukes.

60 years on, the US and world are STILL dealing with the disasterous consequences & implications of US betraying Iran's democracy, making an utter travesty of the US's claimed championing of national self-determinism, international agreements & rule of law in the context of genuine free trade, diplomacy committed to ideals of human rights, freedom & peace, and co-prosperity commerce.

[Nordic]

What a turd. Makes me want to vomit in Netanyahu's face.

How dare he.

How can other Jews let him get away with that? I mean just for bad taste alone, it's enough to make you lose your lunch.

Talk about exploiting the Holocaust.

Sickening as shit.

[AlicetheKurious]

Insane? Yes. But hardly new. Since its establishment, Israel has been surrounded by Hitlers, and all its massacres of helpless men, women and children, and its other crimes against humanity have been committed to avert the Final Solution:

“People in Israel misuse the Holocaust in politics and other areas all the time,” says Yehuda Bauer, a Holocaust historian and the academic adviser to Yad Vashem, Israel’s primary Holocaust memorial and museum. “It’s used mainly by the right wing but also by the left and center” to vilify political adversaries.

In its more benign (?!!?!!) form, Israelis might talk about the 1967 line that divides Israel and the West Bank as “the Auschwitz border,” or equate Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Adolf Hitler. Link

In 1982, Israel launched a massive bombardment and invasion of Lebanon, killing more than 20,000 Lebanese and forcing 100,000 to flee their homes, using as a pretext the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to London by an unknown assailant.

During his term as prime minister, Menachem Begin repeatedly invoked the Holocaust as a justification for his policies. He often compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler, referring to him as a "two-legged beast," a phrase he had used earlier to describe Hitler. Begin compared the PLO's Palestine National Covenant to Mein Kampf. "Never in the history of mankind has there been an armed organization so loathsome and contemptible with the exception of the Nazis," he said.

On the eve of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Begin told his cabinet, "You know what I have done and what we have all done to prevent war and loss of life. There is no other way to fight selflessly. Believe me, the alternative is Treblinka, and we have decided that there will be no more Treblinkas."

A few weeks after the war in Lebanon began, Begin responded to international criticism of Israel, [historian Tom] Segev points out, "by repeating a premise that his predecessors had shared: after the Holocaust, the international community had lost its right to demand that Israel answer for its actions. 'No one, anywhere in the world, can preach morality to our people,' Begin declared to the Knesset.

"A similar statement was included in the resolution adopted by the cabinet after the massacres in Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of Beïrut... In a letter to President Reagan, Begin wrote that the destruction of Arafat's headquarters in Beirut had given him the feeling that he had sent the Israeli army into Berlin to destroy Hitler in the bunker." Link

[seemslikeadream]

[Searcher08]

Insane? Yes. But hardly new. Since its establishment, Israel has been surrounded by Hitlers, and all its massacres of helpless men, women and children, and its other crimes against humanity have been committed to avert the Final Solution:

“People in Israel misuse the Holocaust in politics and other areas all the time,” says Yehuda Bauer, a Holocaust historian and the academic adviser to Yad Vashem, Israel’s primary Holocaust memorial and museum. “It’s used mainly by the right wing but also by the left and center” to vilify political adversaries.

In its more benign (?!!?!!) form, Israelis might talk about the 1967 line that divides Israel and the West Bank as “the Auschwitz border,” or equate Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Adolf Hitler. Link

In 1982, Israel launched a massive bombardment and invasion of Lebanon, killing more than 20,000 Lebanese and forcing 100,000 to flee their homes, using as a pretext the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to London by an unknown assailant.

During his term as prime minister, Menachem Begin repeatedly invoked the Holocaust as a justification for his policies. He often compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler, referring to him as a "two-legged beast," a phrase he had used earlier to describe Hitler. Begin compared the PLO's Palestine National Covenant to Mein Kampf. "Never in the history of mankind has there been an armed organization so loathsome and contemptible with the exception of the Nazis," he said.

On the eve of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Begin told his cabinet, "You know what I have done and what we have all done to prevent war and loss of life. There is no other way to fight selflessly. Believe me, the alternative is Treblinka, and we have decided that there will be no more Treblinkas."

A few weeks after the war in Lebanon began, Begin responded to international criticism of Israel, [historian Tom] Segev points out, "by repeating a premise that his predecessors had shared: after the Holocaust, the international community had lost its right to demand that Israel answer for its actions. 'No one, anywhere in the world, can preach morality to our people,' Begin declared to the Knesset.

"A similar statement was included in the resolution adopted by the cabinet after the massacres in Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of Beïrut... In a letter to President Reagan, Begin wrote that the destruction of Arafat's headquarters in Beirut had given him the feeling that he had sent the Israeli army into Berlin to destroy Hitler in the bunker." Link

After seeing Bibi and Obama, the analogy of dealing with a paranoid delusional man armed with a gun seems very accurate to me.

I think the Iranians need to employ someone with superlative hostage negotiation skills.
Trying to engage a delusional paranoid person with a gun via logic and facts probably isnt going to end well.

[seemslikeadream]

Back-Seat Driver

An Israeli October Surprise on Obama?
March 7, 2012
President Obama is walking a political tightrope between constraining Iran’s nuclear program and restraining Israel’s war threats, while political critics are shaking the supports. But ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar says Obama’s predicament may be even trickier, with Israeli hardliners possibly eyeing an October surprise.


By Paul R. Pillar

The celebration and display of political muscle known as the AIPAC policy conference this year rode a crescendo of alarm and bellicosity about Iran’s nuclear program. The connection between the lobbying power assembled in the convention hall and the wave of saber-rattling rhetoric about Iran was strong and profound.

The AIPAC meeting merely underscored what has been obvious for some time: that the primary reason the Iranian nuclear program has become such a high-profile issue in the United States is that the government of Israel has chosen to make it so.


President Obama talks with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office on March 5. (White House photo by Pete Souza)
In the absence of the Israeli agitation, the nuclear activities of Iran — which does not have a nuclear weapon and probably has not to date made a decision to make one — would percolate along with many other national-security matters worth watching and addressing but not worth beating a war drum about.

Certainly it would not rate more alarm than, say, the nuclear weapons owned by the desperadoes in Pyongyang known as the government of North Korea. If the saber rattling and even more destructive actions such as terrorist attacks were not interfering with the handling of relations with Iran, the next step in that relationship would be acceptance of Tehran’s offer of negotiations and concentration on the kind of long, deep and broad diplomacy with Iran that has never been tried.

Nothing that Iran has been doing lately accounts for the Iranian nuclear issue having reached what appears to be almost a crisis point. In the long history of Iran’s program, which has been the subject of repeated overestimates of progress, what is happening this year is not fundamentally different from what was happening in many previous years.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak talks about a “zone of immunity,” but the zones of immunity or vulnerability that matter most to the Israeli government have to do with the U.S. electoral calendar.

The greatest danger the United States (and any peace-loving person in the Middle East) currently faces is that Barak and Prime Minister Netanyahu will spring an October surprise (or a surprise in any month between now and the first Tuesday of November) in the form of an armed attack on Iran. [For more on a historical precedent, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter.”]

A key consideration for them is the possibly different reactions of a U.S. president facing a fight for reelection (while also facing that political muscle represented at the convention center) and a newly reelected president who knows he never would be running for anything again.

Because Netanyahu and his government probably prefer that President Obama not be reelected, any of the aftereffects of their surprise — such as a big spike in gasoline prices and maybe even a slide of the U.S. economy back into recession — that would hurt Mr. Obama’s reelection chances would be a bonus for them. The welfare of American consumers and workers is not high on their list of decision-making criteria.

What is billed as an Iran problem is thus mainly an Israel problem. If the United States were to be sucked, or pushed, into a new war in the Middle East, the Israel dimension would be significantly greater than it was even with the Iraq War, despite the many disturbing similarities between the run-up to that conflict and the current situation regarding Iran.

Shared perspectives of the Israeli Right and some American neocons did figure into promotion of the war against Iraq, but Israel was only a contributing factor to a desire for a war that was based on an ideology that had a life of its own. If there is a war with Iran, Israel will be not just a contributing factor but instead the prime mover.

President Obama’s attempt to handle this problem was reflected in his speech on Sunday to the AIPAC conference. He and his speechwriters pushed back as much as it was politically safe to do. In addition to recounting the ample evidence that “when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back” and recalling how his administration has mustered far more international pressure on Iran than his predecessor did, Mr. Obama spoke favorably and optimistically about diplomacy, rightly observed that there is “too much loose talk of war,” and talked about nuclear weapons as distinct from mere nuclear-weapons capability.

But staying with what is politically safe still leaves an unsquared circle. The president said more than enough about the unacceptability of an Iranian nuclear weapon to set the stage for Netanyahu to demand later that the United States do whatever it takes to prevent such a weapon.

In the nearer term, the president’s comments about how “no Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of” Iran and reference to “Israel’s sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs” sound almost like an invitation to Netanyahu to launch a war.

An episode of the past that comes to mind is how Germany in 1914 allowed itself to be sucked into a large war through unflinching support for its Austrian ally, which was determined to start what it thought would be a small war to show who was boss in the Balkans. Before I get in trouble with the analogy police: no, I am not predicting another World War I.

And yes, there are innumerable differences between the European crisis of 1914 and what we face now. One of those differences is that Germany’s leaders regarded support for Austria-Hungary as strategically essential because without that ally Germany would have been surrounded by adversaries and almost bereft of friends.

By contrast, the automatic U.S. backing of Israeli behavior is rooted in emotions, tribal sentiments and domestic politics — not strategic considerations, which if heeded would imply a much different U.S. policy. But the analogy does provide something to think about regarding how unquestioning backing of a truculent lesser ally can lead to highly damaging consequences for a greater one.

Anyone who considers himself or herself a patriotic American as well as a friend of Israel should think about some other things as well when considering Netanyahu address to the AIPAC conference on Monday. Despite the smoothness with which he operates in U.S. political circles, he does not have U.S. interests at heart.

That observation by itself is unremarkable; we should not expect any leader of a foreign government to have U.S. interests at heart. But of course the U.S.-Israeli relationship has been not just another bilateral relationship.

Despite the enormous, exceptional and automatic support that the United States bestows on Israel, Netanyahu has not hesitated to slam the door in the face of Israel’s patron and protector. He has done it repeatedly regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — most notably concerning the continued Israeli colonization of captured and disputed land — and now he is doing it again regarding Iran.

Notwithstanding the huge effort the Obama administration has put into constructing an unprecedented international-sanctions regime that supposedly is intended to get Tehran to change its nuclear policies, Netanyahu’s government has been undermining any chance of negotiations that would be the forum for registering and confirming such a change.

It has done so by stoking hostility and distrust through terrorist attacks inside Iran and by insisting on conditions (involving an end to uranium enrichment) that clearly are nonstarters for Iran. In remarks in Ottawa before coming to Washington, Netanyahu flatly denounced any negotiations with Iran as unwise.

Netanyahu and his government do not represent the views of Israelis in general. At least some of the objectives that drive that government’s posture toward Iran, including maintaining Israel’s regional nuclear-weapons monopoly and diverting attention from the situation on the West Bank, do not represent U.S. interests either.

Then there is the emotional side of the Israeli attitude toward this issue, which does extend beyond the Israeli government to much of the population. Given history and the awful anti-Israeli rhetoric of Iranian leaders and especially Iran’s president, this side is understandable.

Netanyahu clearly feels this side, in ways that — as Jeffrey Goldberg has described — involve a legacy from Netanyahu’s father. At a personal level, this is all not only understandable but maybe even laudatory. President Obama seemed to be saying so when he noted in his AIPAC speech “the profound historical obligation that weighs on the shoulders of” Netanyahu, Barak and other Israeli leaders.

But actions that flow from viscera and emotions are not to be equated with what is in the interests of Israel. And they certainly are not in the interests of the United States.

[Nordic]

So obvious that the greatest threat to world peace is Israel. They are like the sons of Saddam Hussein, with the US playing the role of Daddy.

Insane.

[Nordic]

I wish there was a "Fuck Israel" thread to put things like this in:

http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2012/03 ... estinians/

Israeli settlement waste ‘poisoning Palestinians’
Ma’an – 06/03/2012



NABLUS – Sewage from Israeli settlements near Salfit in the northern West Bank is flowing into nearby Palestinian communities and causing serious disease, a health ministry official said Tuesday.

Speaking at an environmental conference in Salfit, the head of Salfit’s ministry of health office said the situation had become “intolerable” for communities affected by disease from the sewage, including cases of cholera.

Waste from factories in an industrial zone inside an Israeli settlement is threatening Salfit’s agriculture, the Salfit governor said.

Barqan settlement, near Salfit’s Qana Valley, has the largest industrial complex of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Gov. Isam Abu Bakr said.

He warned that the dumping of waste in 11 sites surrounding Salfit had become a major cause of cancer in the area.

All Israeli settlements built in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal under international law.

How dare these genocidal maniacs claim to be "victims" of genocidal maniacs.

[seemslikeadream]

Netanyahu Takes a Joke at His Own Expense

Employing the time-honored strategy of reappropriation, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a spoof video, based on his speech at Tuesday’s AIPAC session, in which his words about Iran’s alleged plans for its nuclear program are intercut with footage of a cartoon classic and mixed to a lively techno beat. This way, he’s in on the joke, see? Or so his Facebook page suggests. —KA

[Nordic]

I would watch that, but they say the acid in vomit is bad for your teeth.

[StarmanSkye]

"How dare these genocidal maniacs claim to be "victims" of genocidal maniacs."

Indeed, its absolutely mind-blowing hypocritical conceit. This also shows how absolutely hijacked and corrupted the International Criminal Court has become, essentially transformed into a partner with the globalist-military, neoliberal and corporate elites that aids-abets-excuses and legitimizes their crimes of empire while being inaccessable to and ignoring the victims of empire.

I guess (!?) this is yet another manifestation and consequence of US exceptionalism, extended to the US's allies and international institutions which do their bidding. And which the public is traditionally inurred to through intense psycholigical and disinfo conditioning that totally subverts intellectual rigor, moral reciprocity, personal courage, individual codes of conduct, integrity and honor. These are some of the types of social corrosion caused by the Deep State's rampant abuse of power, excesses, corruption and barely-concealed embrace of criminality, all of which is justified by appeal to the end-justifies-means argument of true believers.

Its too revolting and pathologically self-defeating to easily put into words. It offends everything that is noble, gracious, decent and good which people are capable of.

and Heh! Ditto on the stomach bile is bad for your teet -- it also makes your breath stink and is nasty to clean-up besides generally considered rude to do in public.

[AlicetheKurious]

Then you REALLY don't want to watch this... Although if you have an empty stomach, you might want to give it a shot. It's quite amazing, in a morbid way; after praising the cold-blooded war criminal Shimon Peres (aka the Butcher of Qana) so that you'd confuse him for Desmond Tutu, he segues into a brief paean to the US and Israel's "shared commitment" to human rights, or freedom or whatever, before cutting the crap and listing all the weapons he's given to Israel, how he's defended Israel from accountability for its war crimes, prevented the Durban Conference on Racism from passing a resolution declaring zionism to be a form of racism (which it is, duh!), etc.

[seemslikeadream]

Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo

by Keith Harmon Snow

www.allthingspass.com
7 February 2008

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL
THOU SHALT NOT COVET
THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS
THOUGH SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS
THOU SHALT NOT KILL
A PRAYER FOR THE DEAD
THOU SHALT NOT RAPE AND PLUNDER
HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER

Maurice Templesman is one of the top funders of Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Templesman was the unofficial ambassador to the Congo (Zaire) for years, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, the MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all hidden by the Western media. The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six to ten million people in Congo since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily.[1] But while the Africans are the victims of perpetual Holocaust, the persecutors hide behind history, complaining that they are the persecuted, or pretending they are the saviors. Who is responsible?

For Israeli-American Dan Gertler, business in blood drenched Congo is not merely business, it is a quest for the Holy Grail. Young Dan Gertler goes nowhere—does nothing—without the spiritual guidance of Brooklyn-born Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Leibovitch, a personal friend of Condoleeza Rice.[2] Gertler and Leibovitch are two of the principals behind a diamond mining company, Emaxon Finance Corporation, involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Gertler and gang won the majority rights to the diamonds from the state mining company, Société Minière de Bakwange, MIBA, found near the government-controlled town of Mbuji-Mayi, the rough diamond capital of the world.

Emaxon Finance Corp. has apparently out-maneuvered diamond competitors, especially the big rivals Energem and De Beers. Energem is one of the many shady mining companies connected to Anthony Teixeira, a Portuguese born businessman now residing in South Africa whose daughter married Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba. The warlord’s deadly battle in Congo in March 2007 was a bid between rival agents—Jean-Pierre Bemba and Joseph Kabila—to be the black gatekeeper for the mining cartels run by dynastic families like Templesman, Oppenheimer, Mendell, Forrest, Blattner, Hertzov, Gertler and Steinmetz, and for companies like NIKANOR, whose stock prices rose early in July 2006 in expectation of a July 30th “win” for Joseph Kabila.[3] Africa Confidential called President Kabila’s 2003 visit to the Bush White House a “coup” for the Israeli diamond magnates Dan Gertler and Beny Steinmetz.

Canadian-based Energem, formerly DiamondWorks, is owned by British mercenary Tony Buckingham and its director/shareholders include Mario and Tony Teixeira, J.P. Morgan, and Gertler’s partner Israeli-American Beny Steinmetz (50%).[4] Through subsidiary Branch Energy, the Energem-DiamondWorks gang has perpetuated war in 11 African countries.[5] In December 2007, Energem re-launched itself on the London Stock Market with the newly laundered image of a renewable energy company. Regarding diamonds, it said only it “had decided to give up exploration rights in the Central African Republic.”[6] The Energem spokesman explained that Tony Teixeira “had a clean bill of health” etc., etc. Of course, Energem “quit” the C.A.R. because Jean-Pierre Bemba marched his troops into C.A.R., where they raped and pillaged widely.[7] Energem is still operating in Congo, but Dan Gertler is the new, unofficial ambassador to the Congo for the George W. Bush gang.

Gertler and partners like Beny and Danny Steinmetz, Nir Livnat, Chaim Leibovitz and Yaakov Neeman run a hornet’s nest of companies involved in African hotspots, including: Dan Gertler International (DGI), Steinmetz Global Resources, International Diamond Industries, NIKANOR and Global Enterprises Corporate.
“Dan Gertler is ‘the new kid on the block,’” writes Yossi Melman in Israel’s Haaretz news. “Bold, sophisticated, brutal, he is an adventurer with a short fuse.” Haaretz confirmed that Dan Gertler owns a complex network of interconnected companies, often registered in offshore tax havens and involved in India, Russia, Belgium and the United States, and that Dan Gertler is looking to God for guidance. [8]

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL

“In the diamond industry,” Melman wrote, “Gertler is considered something of an odd bird. He maintains few ties with the other merchants and is not very sociable... Alongside his business affairs, most of his energy is channeled into matters of faith. He is a donor to religious institutions and from time to time makes a pilgrimage to the rabbi he most admires, Rabbi David Abuhatzeira, from Nahariya, in order to consult with him and receive his blessing. Gertler is surrounded mostly by religious people and laces his speech liberally with praise to God.” [9]

In 2003, Condoleeza Rice, then Assistant to President Bush for National Security Affairs, introduced Dan Gertler and Chaim Leibovitch to U.S. official Jendayi Frazer, a Harvard Kennedy School affiliate and former National Security Council agent focused on Africa. On December 6, 2006, Frazer, then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was one of seven special Bush delegates sent to the inauguration of Congo’s newly installed President Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa.[10]

When Dan Gertler and Chaim Leibovitch and their friends visit the luxury Gertler villa in Lumumbashi, the capital of Katanga, Congo’s large southern province, their kosher meals arrive by private plane from Kinshasa. The special executive jet that flies their kosher meals a few hundred miles over the roadless Congo costs some $US 23,000 per trip.[11]

The average income for Congolese citizens each year—if they survive it—is about $95. Shootings at mining facilities and diamond mines are common, land is stolen from Congolese people, strikes are crushed by security forces that companies are partnered with, and black overseers of state terror routinely arrest and torture any vocal opposition—and sometimes disappear them—in support of white bosses. The Société Minière de Bakwange—MIBA—and the diamond fields of Mbuji-Mayi in Congo have a long history of bloodshed backed by Western powers, including Israel, from the beginning.[12] Amnesty International points out that not a single state agent has ever been prosecuted for the extrajudicial executions of suspected “illegal” miners in Mbuji-Mayi.[13]

After a century of exploitation and slavery, we find MIBA consistently withholding payment of salaries to starving Congolese laborers and middle managers for months at a time. April and May 2007 saw strikes and protests leading to the Kabila government’s arbitrary arrest, detention and torture of trade union organizers like Leon Ngoy Bululu; police have also shot protestors.[14] So-called ‘illegal’ diamond workers—disenfranchised local Congolese people forced into “criminal” activities to survive—were summarily executed on MIBA concessions in Mbuji-Mayi. MIBA security guards have also been sniping unemployed diamond miners.[15]

Meanwhile, Dan Gertler’s kosher meals depart Kinshasa, the capital of the big Congo, through the arrangements of Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila, high priest of the Chabad of Central Africa. Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila has been a Kinshasa Rabbi since 1991, and he was a spiritual force who survived the terrorism of the old dinosaur, Mobutu Sese Seko, the way most elites did: by working with him. Rabbi Bentolila is a member of the Chabad Lubavitch Global Emissary Network, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, and his wife Miriam is the sister of Rabbi Mena’hem Hadad, a high priest in Brussels.[16]

“Kosher does not mean that a Rabbi blesses the food,” Rabbi Betolila corrected me, “but rather that the food was supervised by a Rabbinical Thora [sic] authority who sees that the ingredients were in accordance with the laws of Kashrut expressed in the Bible (Leviticus and Deuteronomy).” [17]

Dan Gertler often flies people into Congo, on his private jet, for sacred Jewish rituals. For the Bar Mitsvah of Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila’s son Binyamin Avrahim in June 2005, guests included eminent Rabbis, Hassidic singer Yoni Shlomo and special orchestra Yossef Brami, all arriving in “special flights” from Israel, New York and Brussels. The reception was held at the luxurious and exclusive Memling Hotel. Joseph Kabila sent a sizeable delegation but did not attend: his closest advisers provided a blessing on his behalf.[18]

The Gertler, Steinmetz and Templesman interests are advanced in part through the support of the Committee of the Jewish Community of Kinshasa—le Comité de la Communauté Israélite—that is tightly coordinated with the power structure in Kinshasa to exert influence and assure control of Israeli-Belgian-Anglo-American interests over the geopolitical arena.

From June 26-30, 2007, the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa received a visit from the Israeli Ambassador Yaakov Revah, director of the Africa Department of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Revah also flew to Lumumbashi for meetings with Dan Gertler and his agents, including Moishe (Moses) Katumbi, the Governor of Katanga, and they most likely enjoyed a lovely, $23,000 kosher meal sent from the Chabad in Kinshasa.[19] The Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa maintains very intimate political relations with President Joseph Kabila’s PPRD party, the People's Party for Reconstruction and Democracy. On March 1, 2006, in a formal ceremony, the President of the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa, Ashlan Piha, was awarded the Congo’s Medal of Civil Merit.

THOU SHALT NOT COVET

Before his assassination on January 16, 2001, Laurent Desire Kabila—the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—made a deal with the Gertler gang that would play out in favor of the current President Joseph Kabila and, it seems, be a central factor in relation to both Congo’s ongoing war and the bloody warlord’s battle in Kinshasa in March 2007.[20]

Back in 2000, former Congolese president Laurent Kabila offered a monopoly on Congolese diamonds, and 88% of the proceeds, to Gertler’s International Diamond Industries (IDI) in exchange for Israeli military assistance to his new government.[21] Top Congolese military officials apparently flew to Israel in 2000 to negotiate the deal. Gertler pledged military assistance to President Laurent Kabila through top Israeli officials.[22]

The original Gertler-Kabila deal fell through after Laurent Kabila was assassinated for not cooperating with the Great White Fathers of industry (January 2001), but Gertler and Leibovitch and their disciples formed another company, Dan Gertler International, and advanced their Congo plan.[23] By 2002 Gertler’s company was the leading exporter of Congolese gems, controlling a diamond mining franchise worth about $US 1 billion annually. [24]

In 2003, the mighty Congolese diamond parastatal Societe Miniere De Bakwanga (MIBA)—which has been forever controlled by the Great White Fathers in Belgium, Israel and America—signed an exclusive contract with Gertler’s startup company, Emaxon Finance International. The deal involved Israeli’s Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Organization (SIBAT), and high-level Israeli defense and intelligence officials. Gertler and his buddies reportedly bribed Congolese officials and Angolan generals who, on and off, have commanded Angolan Army troops protecting Kinshasa, Congo’s capital.[25],[26]

Security for mining operations in Congo is provided by exclusive security companies like Overseas Security Services (OSS) one of the many DRC interests of Belgian billionaire tycoon Philippe de Moerloose. A member of the Kinshasa elite, de Moerloose supplies jets and other presidential toys to DRC President Kabila. In 2006, President Joseph Kabila’s campaign helicopter was at the centre of a legal battle involving Philippe de Moerloose.[27] De Moerloose’s companies operated in Mobutu’s Zaire from at least 1991, backing state terrorism and Western corporate plunder that was rendered invisible by the Western media. De Moerloose is also an adviser to European Union (EU) Commissioner—and diamantaire—Louis Michel.

Dan Gertler and Philippe de Moerloose were, reportedly, the only two white men who attended the wedding of Joseph Kabila and the two clearly share interests in “security” provided by OSS at MIBA and elsewhere in Congo. The April 2003 secret agreement signed between the Gertler/Steinmetz company Emaxon Finance and the Kabila government involved MIBA and two de Moerloose companies, OSS-Congo and Demimpex, and other firms.

Overseas Security Services (OSS) operations are apparently grounded in the experience of top expatriate security operatives formerly involved with the biggest security firm in Mobutu’s Zaire.[28] According to OSS public relations materials, “these persons have a not unimportant experience in the safety of this country.”[29] Providing mine security, body-guard and protection services, OSS operates in Burundi, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Dubai, South Africa, Republic of Congo (Brazzavile) and Belgium, placing them in cahoots with all sides warring and plundering eastern Congo today.[30]

Emaxon Finance International is a real gem, one of these octopuses of mining tangled up with interlocking companies and subsidiaries based in specious geographical offshore “tax havens” that work to shield from prosecution people who are responsible for money laundering, weapons and drugs operations, assassinations and other terrorism.

NIKANOR is registered as an Isle of Man (UK) company, an offshore tax haven that helps to conceal criminal activities and maximize profits. NIKANOR directors include Dan Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel (2001-2005) and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research under Madeleine Albright. NIKANOR partners include Mende and Moshe Gertner [sic], Israeli property tycoons with vast holdings in London who control 22 percent of NIKANOR. Another partner is Israeli-born Nir Livnat, managing director of Johannesburg-based Ascot Diamonds, a member of the Steinmetz Group of Diamond Companies, and a principal involved in numerous U.S.-based businesses from Miami to New York.[31]

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS

Back in 2001, when the Gertler enterprises surfaced in dirty diamond deals, public relations was handled by Lior Chorev, the “Special Strategic and Communications Consultant” to International Diamond Industries (IDI), and Chorev continued in this role to support Dan Gertler businesses.[32] Today, Lior Chorev is partnered with the brothers Yuval and Eyal Arad as director-owners of the Israeli marketing and public relations firm, ARAD Communications.[33]

“We do work for Mr. Gertler on some of his business issues,” said Lior Chorev.[34] ARAD’s many clients include Dan Gertler companies, Los Angeles-based Coral Diamonds and an Israeli aeronautics weaponry manufacturer producing Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs)—robotic weapons and intelligence platforms like those being used against the people of Congo today.[35] As a political strategist, Lior Chorev has worked for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.[36] He has also participated in Israel-NATO defense planning conferences.[37]

Dan Gertler is close to Israeli politicians, especially Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, and he is very close to diamantaire Beny Steinmetz, a good friend of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Gertler’s inseperable friend, Chaim Leibovitz, is also very close to Lieberman, and was “a regular fixture” in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offices.[38]

Beny Steinmetz is considered to be one of the richest billionaires in Israel. The Steinmetz Group, controlled with his brother Daniel, is one of the biggest clients of the de Beers diamond syndicate. Steinmetz is also involved in an Israeli real estate group that purchased the assets of the British Haslemere real estate company for $1.46 billion. Steinmetz’s real estate partners include the billionaire Israeli investors David and Simon Reuben, and the Saudi Arabian Olayan Group, an investment company that is deeply connected with Bechtel Corporation.[39] The Steinmetz web site map of operations hides their involvement in war-torn Congo.[40]

Seems Dan Gertler’s land grabs and exclusion in Congo have a lot in common with the current crimes against humanity being committed by Israel through its illegal partition in the Middle East. On January 3, 2008, the Jerusalem Post reported that Lior Chorev was an integral part of past Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s advisers, and he was recently quoted to say that even though Sharon did not get to finalize Israel’s final borders (he suffered a debilitating stroke in 2006), the route of the security fence—which he decided—would ultimately serve as the basis for the border and as Sharon's lasting legacy.[41]

“He felt he needed to set the border because he didn't trust the younger generations,” Chorev was quoted to say. “He knew the fence route by heart and the reason for every stretch of land being on one side or the other.”[42]

In 2003, the U.N. Panel of Experts on war in Congo revealed that Emaxon Finance International is controlled by Israeli diamond traders Chaim Leibovitz and Dan Gertler.[43] Emaxon lists as its address an office in Montreal, Canada, but Emaxon’s majority shareholder is listed as FTS Worldwide, a nebulous global corporation whose business address is that of a firm of lawyers, Mossack Fonseca & Company, in Panama City. FTS Worldwide is registered with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to lawyer Andre Zolty of Geneva Switzerland. A copy of the MIBA-Emaxon contract was signed on 13 April 2003 by Israeli-Americans Yaakov Neeman and Chaim Leibovitz.[44]

Yaakov Neeman is a founding partner of Herzog, Fox and Neeman, Tel Aviv, one of Israel’s top law firms, and he has held Israeli government cabinet and ministerial positions.[45] Neeman is on the Advisory Board of Markstone Capital Group, a very influential group of investment bankers, with Eli Hurvitz. On the board of Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries with Eli Hurvitz is Northrup-Grumman director Philip Frost.[46] Both Philip Frost and Maurice Templesman are top-level councilors for the American Stock Exchange. Eli Hurvitz sat on the International Advisory Counsel of Harvard University’s Belfer Center, 2002-2005, during the period when the Belfer Center and their intelligence operative Robert Rotberg formalized the “Kimberley Process” to officially whitewash blood diamonds.[47] Yakov Neeman is also a governor of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency for Israel.

One of the main objectives of the Kimberley Process, and the Harvard Belfer Center’s role, was to protect the South African Oppenheimer and De Beers diamond cartels and their leading buyers and agents like Maurice Templesman and Beny Steinmetz.[48] Added to those diamond industry firms whitewashed by the Kimberley Process are all the Zionist diamond dealers and cartels that have risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Holocaust.

The Israeli-American enterprises of the Gertler/Steinmetz gang have proliferated and today are major shareholders or owners of diamond concessions in Congo’s Kasai province and copperbelt concessions in Katanga. The copperbelt is the big money in Congo. Copper prices recently hit an all time high due to monopoly control by corporations and new applications in transportation, aerospace and weaponry. Cobalt is used in dye and paint processes for manufacturing. More importantly, it is elemental to superalloys used for tank armor, spacecraft, turbines, ship hulls, ship hulls, blast furnaces, refineries, petroleum drilling rigs, nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Like coltan, or columbium-tantalite, cobalt is also used in cell phone batteries. The Katanga copperbelt is also rich in germanium, a rare metal used in optical fibers, infrared lenses and telecommunication satellites.[49]

The entire military-industrial-prisons complex revolves around minerals like cobalt, niobium and heterogenite (cobalt oxide), yet the truth about what happens to African people in lands taken over by these mining companies is hidden by the corporate media. More and more land is being stolen, more and more atrocities committed, with less and less transparency, and less and less accountability, and fewer and fewer voices for the voiceless. And, as usual, there are always a lot of empty promises.

THOUGH SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS

Over the past fifty years, elite Israeli nationals have perpetrated conflict and injustice in Africa, fueled by and for minerals. Operatives associated with the Israeli military or intelligence services—the Mossad—maintain strategic criminal syndicates in competition and in partnership with other syndicates involving men like Philippe De Moerloose, Louis Michel, Viscount Etienne Davignon, John Bredenkamp and Tony Buckingham.

Israeli trained shock troops became Mobutu’s bodyguards, with Mossad advisers. According to a report by the American Jewish Committee: after 1980 “Mossad agents, military emissaries, and a small group of private businessmen… replaced diplomats as Israel’s main interlocutors with African leaders and political (mainly opposition) groups.” The report cites rising involvement of private defense and security interests, especially in Angola, DRC and Central Africa Republic, since 1992.[50]

Israeli operatives and “businessmen” appear everywhere there is egregious suffering and dispossession. Dan Gertler’s forays into the bloody world of diamonds involve Israeli arms dealers Yair Klein, who is reportedly wanted by the U.S. for training Medellin drug-cartel militias in Colombia, and Dov Katz.[51] Klein was convicted by Israel (1991) for his involvement with groups that targeted and assassinated Colombian politicians, journalists, and police. Jailed in Sierra Leone in 1999, Klein was a field representative for Gertler in war-torn Sierra Leone and Liberia. Gertler also mingles with the Russian Military Brotherhood, a group of “retired Russian generals whom Gertler describes as good friends.” [52],[53]

Retired Israeli Defense Forces Colonel Yair Klein reportedly organized arms for diamonds networks in Sierra Leone and Liberia after President Charles Taylor was deposed. In 1999 Klein was arrested in Sierra Leone on charges of smuggling arms to the rebel Revolutionary United Front.[54] The U.N. also documented collaborations between Sierra Leone’ rebels and Lazare Kaplan agent Damian Gagnon; Lazare Kaplan International is one of the organized crime syndicates of Jewish American Maurice Templesman.[55]

The Steinmetz Group of companies are also involved in the bloody diamond fields of Sierra Leone, along with Energem (formerly DiamondWorks), the company described above that is connected to the white mercenaries depicted in Hollywood’s Blood Diamond propaganda film.[56] In December 2007, local people in Sierra Leone struggling to gain the smallest livelihood from their own resources were shot by police during peaceful protests against the Steinmetz-controlled Koidu Holdings site. It’s the same old local people’s story, happening everywhere. These were people from communities driven off their own land by mining companies that promised the world, cajoled the trusting people, and gave nothing after. The Steinmetz gang called in the local paramilitary, a curfew was imposed and people were shot; the police, as usual, falsely claimed that protesters were armed.[57]

Like most mining mafias in Africa, the Israeli octopus—organized crime syndicates, offshore subsidiaries, interlocking directorships and affiliated mercenaries—has gripped the very heart of Congo like an octopus grips and stuns its prey. Mining regulates the pulse of Congo, and foreign mining companies with their black sell-out agents are sucking the blood out of the people and the wealth out of the land.

THOU SHALT NOT KILL

Beyond the intriguing Jewish rivalry for diamonds in the heart of darkness, this tale takes a chilling turn with the involvement of certain German firms and New York City lawyers. NIKANOR, another Gertler/Steinmetz company of dubious origins operating in DRC, has a subcontract with the notorious ThyssenKrupp conglomerate, a company comprised of two former Nazi weapons manufacturers linked to the New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, to Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., Lehman Brothers, Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan, DuPont and IBM, in the great Nazi-American money plot.[58]

These companies were all behind the Jewish Holocaust. The infamous German Krupp firm is the industrial corporation that collaborated with former CIA director Allen Dulles and former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Clients of the Dulles brothers’ law firm Sullivan and Cromwell included Adolph Hitler.[59] Ted Terry, one of the senior counselors of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell today, is also a director of a philanthropy called the Harold K. Hochschild (HKH) Foundation, named for the mining magnate behind AMAX, a company operating in the copperbelt in Zambia, but whose parent company, Phelps Dodge, operates in Katanga, Congo. Harold K. Hochschild was close to the CIA, and he appears to have backed the Katanga succession in the 1960’s just as Dan Gertler in recent years backed the reorganization of power in Congo by force. Sullivan and Cromwell was also the law firm for AMAX. [60],[61]

Brown Brothers Harriman & Company (BBH) was the primary Wall Street connection for German companies and the U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, an early financial backer of the Nazi party. BBH bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, steel, fuel, coal, and U.S. treasury bonds to Germany. These were used to build Hitler's war machine, and the ties proliferated even after the Nazi concentration camps began churning out skeletons. The horrors of the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buckenwald became public knowledge long before they became public outrage. It is the same story for Congo.

A PRAYER FOR THE DEAD

There are no records or statistics of the numbers of people brutalized or killed in the diamond or cobalt mining areas, like Kolwezi, Mbuji Mayi, Tshikapa, Banalia, or Kananga in DRC, or Ndola in Zambia, and many of the victims of security abuses will never be known.

When Gertler and Steinmetz and their buddies came to Congo it was soon clear that they had to challenge Zimbabwean tycoons John Bredenkamp and Billy Rautenbach—two cronies of dictator Robert Mugabe involved in pillaging Congo and Zimbabwe for decades. The United Nations Panel of Experts on DRC named both men for plundering copper and cobalt from Katanga, and both deal globally in weapons. Bredenkamp is one of the fifty richest men in England and he reportedly owns a mansion several doors down from Margaret Thatcher’s residence in London.

On November 7, 2007 it was reported that Dan Gertler was instrumental in putting together a deal in which Katanga Mining Ltd. would buy rival NIKANOR for $2.1 billion and merge their adjacent mine projects in Congo to form the world’s largest cobalt company. Also announced was a joint venture between the Central African Mining & Exploration Company (CAMEC) and another Gertler-controlled firm called Prairie International Limited.

The CAMEC/Prairie joint venture will exploit DRC’s Luita copper processing facility, develop the Mukondo Mountain cobalt mine—called the world's richest cobalt mine—and work on “other” exploration properties. Prairie is majority owned by the family of Dan Gertler. CAMEC is connected to Zimbabwean/South African/British tycoon Billy Rautenbach.[62] The DRC government effectively banned controversial Zimbabwean businessman Billy Rautenbach from the country by declaring him persona non grata in July 2007, but this doesn’t seem to stop him from getting what he wants. Rautenbach is also wanted in South Africa on 300 charges of fraud, corruption and theft.Rautenbach is a former motor car rally driver who controls a business empire in Southern and Central Africa through a British Virgin Islands company called Ridgepoint Overseas Development Limited. In 1998, the short-lived President of Congo, Laurent Kabila, named Rautenbach the managing director of La Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines), one of Africa's biggest cobalt mines, the Katanga properties of the Union Miniere de Haut Katanga formerly developed by the Belgian colonial government. Rautenbach today is one of the Africa's largest exporters of heterogenite (cobalt ore) from the DRC through his Congo Cobalt Company (CoCoCo), but he also has shares in two other lucrative DRC mining firms—Boss and Mukondo—which reportedly earn over US$100 million a month.[63]

While there has been a lot of Western media fanfare over the Kabila governments’ supposed “independent” review of mining contracts, little substantive change can be expected.[64] Structural factors exploit the Congolese people and lands and benefit white businessmen, arms dealers, bankers, and their embraceable black agents. Big business benefits from perception management articles well-placed in media to give the impression that the international system is just, that there are watchdogs, checks and balances.

However, while the DRC and the World Bank present a propaganda front about their ostensible attention to mining reform and the new mining code, NIKANOR—Mining Journal reports—“is in the advantageous position of having entered into a post mining-code contract, ‘which makes us [NIKANOR] relatively comfortable’” [65] In other words, the mining review is a sham, it may force some changes, but it will be cosmetic at best.

Dan Gertler and the Steinmetz Group’s partner Jewish-American Nir Livnat is also a director of Anglovaal Mining with Rick and Brian Menell and Basil Hersov of the South African Menell and Hersov dynasties.[66] Hersov has been named as a beneficiary of fraud and racketeering involving British BAE Systems weapons deals with shady offshore companies.[67]

The octopus of South African connections is a story in itself, with links to top officials from Britain to Canada, like Canadian Senator J. Trevor Eyton, and offshore mining companies involved in all the big money (diamonds, gold, petroleum, cobalt) and big corporations with interlocking directorships: Coca Cola, Nestlé, General Motors, and the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation. Barrick, of course, is partnered up with the Oppenheimer/De Beers firm Anglo-American Corporation at six sites in Africa, including Congo.

Rick Menell is a director of Bateman Engineering—owned by Benny Steinmetz—the junior partner of the NIKANOR projects in Katanga. Britain’s Earl of Balfour is a director of both Bateman and NIKANOR. Menell is also the director of Teal Exploration and Mining, whose directors include Joaquim Chissano, former President of Mozambique; Murray Hitzman, a Clinton administration official with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1994-1996); Hannes Meyer, who worked with Anglo-Gold Ashanti in Congo, 1999-2006, when militias in Ituri were funded to get the gold out. Teal Exploration also has ties to Anvil Mining and Anglo-American Corporation.[68]

Brian Menell, Nir Livnat’s associate on the board of Anglovaal, is on the board of Energem (formerly DiamondWorks) with Tony and Mario Teixeira. The Livnat connection ties Teixeira into networks that have supported both Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba in Congo’s bloody wars. Energem is also involved in the trans-Uganda-Kenya pipeline, along with Nexant, a subsidiary of the deep intelligence and defense insider Bechtel Corporation.[69]

Brian Menell is also on the board of First Africa Oil, which operates in seven African countries, and First Africa Oil director John Bentley is a director of Osprey Oil and Gas, whose directors include Carol Bell, a director of the Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Bentley is also on the board of Adastra Minerals—formerly America Mineral Fields (AMF, AMFI, AMX), a company based in 1995 in Hope, Arkansas—and set up by Robert Friedland and Max and Jean-Raymond Boulle, notable “friends of Bill” Clinton. Since 1995, American Mineral Fields has been involved in Brazil, Russia, Norway, Zambia, Angola and the DRC. A criminal backer of the war in DRC, Jean-Raymond Boulle, who holds 36.4 % of the company stock, was the former General Director of De Beers in Zaire, part of the Templesman alliance of terrorism under the Mobutu regime.[70],[71]

The Gertler/Steinmetz interests apparently curry huge favors with Congo’s number two most powerful man, Augustine Katumba Mwanke, one of Joseph Kabila’s closest allies and financiers, former Governor of Katanga (1998-2001) and director of Australia’s Anvil Mining. The UN Panel of Experts (2002) cited Mwanke for illegal arms deals and plunder of Congo: Mwanke negotiated arms purchases through Belgian banks and the DRC mining company MIBA.[72] Reportedly, Mwanke personally clears $US 1,000,000 a day through his interests in Katanga mining deals.[73]

Anvil Mining has been involved in massacres in DRC.[74] Anvil directors include former U.S. Ambassador Kenneth L. Brown, who served at U.S. embassies in Brussels, Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville and South Africa. Brown was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (1987-1989) under George Schultz and George H.W. Bush and Director of Central African Affairs (1980-1981). The former top internal intelligence and security chief of the United Nations Observer’s Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) has been worked for Anvil mining in Katanga since 2006.[75]

THOU SHALT NOT RAPE AND PLUNDER

Gertler/Steinmetz interests have also been jostling for copper and cobalt concessions with Kinross-Forrest Group. Gertler has bought up or invested heavily in companies just to close them down. George Forrest also made the UN hit list of Congo’s looters and Forrest and his three sons helped bankroll Joseph Kabila’s 2006 election “victory”.[76] George Forrest’s daughter is reportedly married to the son of Louis Michel. Malta and George Forrest are controlling directors in Katanga Mining Limited.

Born as Entreprise Générale Malta Forrest, the Belgian Forrest interests have been pillars of exploitation in Congo since at least 1922, when they launched mining operations in Katanga. Forrest’s Katanga Mining directors include: three Canadians; Congo’s Jean-Claude Masangu Mulongo, a former Governor of DRC and high official at the IMF and World Bank; and the current Governor of the Central Bank of DRC. The Forrest dynasty has munitions factories in Belgium and Kenya, and has partnered with OM-Group, in Ohio [USA], dealing in Congo’s cobalt and coltan. Forrest International also operates in Europe, Burundi—involving him on both sides of Congo’s bloody war—and the Middle East.[77] Forrest interests in DRC include aviation, foods, plantations, construction, logging, copper and cobalt mining. Forrest companies are enmeshed in the coltan plunder in eastern Congo.

Katanga is the world’s richest mining metropolis, part of the vast copper belt that stretches across northern Zambia and southern Congo—and the home to unprecedented human misery due to state orchestrated repression and communities overrun with toxic mining, tuberculosis, cancers, immune disorders, racial discrimination and slavery. The Zambian copperbelt concessions over the border involve many of the same companies and interests mentioned above, and others.[78]

Workers and communities in and around these mines suffer all the standard treatable maladies (typhoid, malaria, tetanus, polio, malnutrition) as well. However, such stories are off the agenda for the North American, European, Japanese, Australian and Israeli media corporations providing the mainstay of English language indoctrination meant to instill racial superiority and a vast ignorance and obliviousness that leaves westerns populations shaking their heads and wringing their hands and clicking their tongues, while all the while wondering “what is to be done?” It does not cross people’s minds that their own hands are dirty, that their own consciousness has been falsified, as all the raw materials from Congo enrich the lives of people in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel.

The immediate capital investment required for just one Gertler project in Katanga—the Komoto Oliveira Virgule (KOV) project—is reportedly $US 1.8 billion dollars, income to kick start billions of dollars of unused equipment mothballed in the middle Mobutu era. There are rumors that Bechtel is involved, but the KOV project involves ThyssenKrupp AG as a minor player.[79]

The Krupp firm is one of several German firms involved in the plunder in eastern Congo, exploitation which involves the DeutscheGesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—GTZ—a “German technological cooperation agency” whose Supervisory Board has representatives of four Federal [German] Ministries.[80] Krupp industries use coltan and cobalt for superalloys.[81] Dr.-Ing. Ekkehard D. Schultz, a ThyssenKrupp director, is also a director of Bayer AG, the Germany firm whose subsidiary H.C. Starck was named for its involvement in the ongoing illegal plunder of coltan and cassiterite (tin) in eastern Congo. NIKANOR director Jay Pomrenze is also a consultant for the Deutsche Bank.[82] Certain German and U.S. firms benefit from the military occupation of Rwandan-backed warlord Laurent Nkunda in North Kivu, DRC, where Nkunda controls the Lueshe niobium mine “owned” by Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH, a subsidiary of New York-based Mettalurg Group.[83], [84]

HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER

Dan Gertler’s grandfather, Moshe Schnitzer (d. November 2007), was known in Israel as “Mr. Diamond;” in youth he joined the pre-state underground organization Etzel (Irgoun), an Israeli military cell self-defined as an “untra-nationationalist Jewish militia,” but one that committed acts of terrorism in service to the Israeli cause.[85] Moshe Schnitzer assumed a major role in the Africa-Israeli diamond trade in the 1950’s in a partnership business called Schnitzer-Greenstein. Schnitzer later founded the Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv in 1960, which today brings Israel $14 billion annually in blood business, and is the country’s second-largest industry, but Israel’s top export. King Leopold III of Belgium decorated Schnitzer in recognition of his activities favoring the close relationship of Belgium, Israel and the DeBeers diamond cartels, and Schnitzer was also President of the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum in Israel.[86]

The diamond jewellery trade in the United States is more than $30 billion annually, and 99%—everything that is not synthetic or artificial diamonds—involves blood diamonds and the above organized crime syndicates. Israel buys more than 50% of the world’s rough diamonds, and the U.S. buys two-thirds of these. The diamond factories are located in Nethanya, Petach Tikvah, Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Jerusalem, and other cities around the country, but most of the offices were in Tel Aviv in the financial district on Ahad Ha'am Street.[87] Dan Gertler’s father, Asher Gertler, and his uncle, Shmuel Schnitzer, manage the original family business, and Shmuel is Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council—the entity that spends more money promoting the false image of “conflict-free” diamonds than it does helping any of the people dispossessed or brutalized by the diamond industry.[88]

On August 16, 2007 Rabbi Bentolila in Kinshasa received a communication asking: “What does the Torah say about men exploiting other men for vast profits while other men are starving and dying all around them? Is there some hierarchy to the Torah that suggests, for example, that black people or Africans are lesser beings, and therefore not to be a concern where profound profits are being made?”

There was no reply from Rabbi Bentolila, he was apparently busy readying for another Bar Mitsvah in Belgium. Unfortunately for Dan Gertler and his spiritual advisers, the Torah says that a Jew can keep a slave, but a Jew kept as a slave must be redeemed, and that—an empty, foolish justification for exploiting innocent people—is how religion falsifies spirituality.

[seemslikeadream]

Netanyahu to Obama: Not Quite the Whole Megillah

by Abby Zimet


Not known for his subtlety, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu gave as his gift to President Obama a Scroll of Esther, which tells the ancient story of a plot by Persia - today's Iran - to annihilate the Jews. The story is the heart of Purim, which starts tonight. "Then, too, they wanted to wipe us out," he explained, adding that the book was meant as "background reading" to help fire up Americans for yet another ill-advised war of choice. Now that he's home and boasting about Israel's "many courageous friends," most of them at AIPAC, perhaps Netanyahu could do some background reading of his own. He could read the results of the first-ever poll on political opinion in 12 Arab countries, representing 84% of the Arab world, finding that Israel and the US are deemed more threatening than Iran by a 15-1 ratio. He could read the tracking by Just Foreign Policy of the many factual errors in belligerent U.S. reporting on Iran. Or he could read a criticism of the cynical ploy of using religious scripture for political purposes, and the role that religious tribalism too often plays in leading us, entirely unjustifiably, to war. He could. But our guess is he won't.