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Using The Holocaust To Justify War On Assad

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  • Using The Holocaust To Justify War On Assad

    USING THE HOLOCAUST TO JUSTIFY WAR ON ASSAD

    http://on.rt.com/puo7p8
    Published time: October 30, 2014 11:06

    Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images/AFP

    Since its creation after WWII, Israel and friends have been masters
    at manipulating emotions, endlessly invoking the memory of Hitler's
    Germany as a pretext for starting further wars as in the recent
    Holocaust-themed propaganda against Syria's government.

    "The irony is that the Nazi holocaust has now become the main
    ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression," Norman
    Finkelstein tells Yoav Shamir in "Defamation", the Israeli filmmaker's
    award-winning 2009 documentary on how perceptions of anti-Semitism
    affect Israeli and US politics. "Every time you want to launch a war
    of aggression, drag in the Nazi holocaust."

    If you're looking for evidence in support of Finkelstein's thesis
    today, you need look no further than the US Holocaust Memorial
    Museum's exhibit of images of emaciated and mutilated bodies from
    contemporary Syria.

    The small exhibit, entitled "Genocide: The Threat Continues," features
    a dozen images said to be from an archive of 55,000 pictures allegedly
    smuggled out of the country by "Caesar", a mysterious source who claims
    to have defected from his job as a Syrian military photographer after
    being ordered to take photos of more than 10,000 corpses.

    Emphasizing the threat of an impending genocide, the reportedly
    conscience-stricken defector warns that a similar fate awaits the
    150,000 people he says remain incarcerated by President Bashar
    Assad's government.

    "They're powerful images, and viewers are immediately reminded of
    the Holocaust," Cameron Hudson, the director of the museum's Center
    for the Prevention of Genocide, was cited as saying in an October
    15 Associated Press report. Hudson's intriguing career in genocide
    prevention includes a stint as intelligence analyst in the CIA's
    Africa Directorate.

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

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

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

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

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

    Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images/AFP

    The Israel lobby's Syrian Interpreter

    In a revealing interview published on August 11, 2013, by the Turkish
    newspaper Today's Zaman, Caesar's interpreter at the museum echoed
    Wiesel's criticism of President Obama's resistance to doing the bidding
    of the neocons and "liberal interventionists"seeking greater American
    intervention in Syria.

    Asked by the Gulen movement-aligned daily if America had forgotten
    the Syrian war, Mouaz Moustafa replied, "It is the president who is
    against action in Syria not the whole of the US government. President
    Barack Obama has been very insular and cautious about Syria."

    It is hardly a coincidence that Moustafa's rhetoric bears a striking
    resemblance to that of Israel's friends like Wiesel. One of best
    known media-promoted faces of the Syrian opposition in Washington, the
    executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force has undeniable
    links to one of the Israel lobby's leading think tanks.

    After it emerged that Moustafa's non-profit had coordinated Senator
    John McCain's May 2013 trip to meet with the so-called "moderate"
    Syrian rebels, an examination of the SETF executive director's
    background revealed that he was one of the Washington Institute
    for Near East Policy's "experts"; a contributor to WINEP's Fikra
    Forum,"an online community that aims to generate ideas to support Arab
    democrats in their struggle with authoritarians and extremists"; and
    had addressed the AIPAC-created think tank's annual Soref symposium
    entitled"Inside Syria: The Battle Against Assad's Regime."

    Even more damningly, it was discovered that one of SETF's web addresses
    was"syriantaskforce.torahacademybr.org." The "torahacademybr.org" url
    belongs to the Torah Academy of Boca Raton, Florida whose key values
    notably include promoting "a love for and commitment to Eretz Yisroel."

    When confronted with these embarrassing revelations, Moustafa responded
    via Twitter, "call me terrorist/Qaeda/nazi as others have but not
    Zionist Im [sic] denied ever entering palestine but it lives in
    me.." Dismissing the intriguing connection to a pro-Israel yeshiva in
    Florida, he claimed that the"url registration was due to dumb error
    by web designer."

    The WINEP-linked Moustafa also interpreted for Caesar, who was wearing
    dark glasses and a blue rain jacket with the hood pulled over his head,
    when he testified before a closed-door session of the House Committee
    on Foreign Affairs this July. At least some of its members would no
    doubt have recognized the interpreter, however.

    As Foreign Policy's The Cable reported on June 6, 2013, two leaders of
    the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Reps. Ed Royce (R-CA) and Eliot
    Engel (D-NY), dispatched aides to Turkey to meet leading members
    of the Syrian Free Army between May 27 and June 3. As The Cable
    had learned, the meeting had been coordinated by Moustafa's Syrian
    Emergency Task Force.

    Interestingly, the FP article noted that "the two lawmakers don't
    exactly see eye-to-eye on the question of whether the United States
    should intervene more aggressively in the protracted civil war," with
    thestridently pro-Israel Democratic congressman from New York having
    "carved out one of the most hawkish positions in Congress on Syria,
    being the first to introduce legislation authorizing lethal assistance
    for the rebels."

    While Caesar and his American-based Palestinian-Syrian interpreter
    clearly have the enthusiastic support of Israel's friends
    in Washington, the photos presented as evidence of an alleged
    Syrian"holocaust" by Assad's forces received their initial boost from
    one of Tel Aviv's closest, albeit covert, Arab allies in their mutual
    war against the Syrian government.

    Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images/AFP

    The Israeli-Qatari Nexus

    As part of a review of the photos commissioned by the government of
    Qatar, David Crane, a former war-crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone,
    reportedly spent hours interviewing Caesar. An October 13 Yahoo News
    report by Michael Isikoff quotes Crane as saying that they document
    "an industrial killing machine not seen since the Holocaust."

    Like the director of the Holocaust Museum's Center for the Prevention
    of Genocide, Crane has also worked for the US government in the
    intelligence field. His former posts include Director of the Office
    of Intelligence Review, assistant general counsel of the Defense
    Intelligence Agency and the Waldemar A. Solf Professor of International
    Law at the United States Army Judge Advocate Generals School.

    Having ostensibly left the intelligence world behind him, Crane
    founded and directs the Syrian Accountability Project (SAP) at Syracuse
    University's College of Law, which describes itself as "a cooperative
    effort between activists, non-governmental organizations, students,
    and other interested parties to document war crimes and crimes against
    humanity in the context of the Syrian Crisis."According to its website,
    SAP has "worked closely with the Syrian National Coalition" which is
    listed as one of its clients.

    Founded in Doha, Qatar in November 2012, the Syrian National Coalition
    represents the Free Syrian Army, which has reportedly collaborated with
    the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham in
    massacres of Syrian civilians such as the one this March in the village
    of Kassab, an ancestral home of Syria's minority ethnic Armenians,
    on the Turkish border.

    Professor Crane is also vice-president of I Am Syria, whose mission
    statement describes it as "a non-profit media based campaign that
    seeks to educate the world of the Syrian Conflict." I Am Syria's
    president, Ammar Abdulhamid, has been a fellow at two of the most
    prominent Washington-based pro-Israel think tanks, the Saban Center
    for Middle East Policy and the neocon Foundation for the Defense of
    Democracies; while one of its education directors, Andrew Beitar,
    is a regional education coordinator for the Holocaust Museum.

    As the case of the mysterious Caesar and his trove of photos clearly
    shows, those who want to launch a war of aggression on Syria (as they
    have succeeded in doing in Iraq and Libya) have at every opportunity
    sought, as Finkelstein put it, to drag in the Nazi holocaust.

    As more and more people become wise to this ruse, they should keep
    in mind the two wordsespoused by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
    "Never Again."

    Maidhc Ó Cathail

    Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer and political analyst

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