Wayne Madsen

"Heute Israel, morgen die Welt!" - Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis were fond of saying, "Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt!" (“Today Germany, tomorrow the world!”), when describing the Nazi Party’s goals for global domination.

Many of Israel’s dominant political parties espouse the same goals for Zionism, which many observers believe take a page from the Nazi playbook when it comes to expansion not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but beyond to the Golan Heights of Syria, southern Lebanon, Sinai, eastern Libya, northern Iraq, and even further afield.

The top polling Israeli political parties heading into the January 22 election all advocate varying degrees of expansion. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud alliance with former Foreign Minister illegal settler-based Yisrael Beitenu is staking their election bid on building thousands of new housing units in occupied east Jerusalem, starting in the Gilo area. There are also plans to build thousands of more illegal housing units in occupied West Bank towns, including Ariel, Hebron, and the north Dead Sea and Jordan River Valley.

As expansionistic as the Likud-Beitenu bloc is, the rising star of Naftali Bennett, a dual U.S.-Israeli national who leads the new Home Party is even more nationalistic, with its platform centered on annexing 60 percent of the West Bank, referred to as “Area C” in the now all-but-dead Oslo Peace Accords. Palestinians would exercise nominal control in a Palestine fully dependent on Israel that would resemble the “bantustans” created for blacks by the apartheid government of South Africa: non-contiguous reservations that would be at the mercy of further encroachment by a militarily-dominant Israel.

But just as the Zionists contend that it is entitled to control what it refers to “Judea and Samaria” based on some mythological prose written in ancient Hebrew, they will not stop with controlling the West Bank. There are calls by many Zionists for Israel to expel the 1.7 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and forcibly relocate them in other Arab countries. Other right-wing Israelis wish to abrogate the peace treaty with Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt and seize back control of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel occupied from 1967 to 1982. The Zionists were always hungry for Sinai. During their occupation of Sinai, Sharm-el-Sheikh was renamed Ofira by the Israelis and settlements were established in the occupied Egyptian territory.

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Ray McGovern

The Israel Lobby is hell bent on sabotaging President Barack Obama’s tentative plan to appoint former Sen. Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. And – with Obama now dithering about this selection – the Lobby and its neocon allies sense another impending victory.

Perhaps The New Yorker’s Connie Bruck described Hagel’s predicament best in assessing why the Israel Lobby is so determined to destroy the Nebraska Republican though he is “a committed supporter of Israel.”

But, as Bruck explained, “Hagel did not make the obeisance to the lobby that the overwhelming majority of his Congressional colleagues do. And he further violated a taboo by talking about the lobby, and its power.” Hagel had the audacity, in an interview for a 2008 book, to say something that you are not supposed to say in Official Washington, that the Israel Lobby pulls the strings on many members of Congress.

In Aaron Miller’s book, The Much Too Promised Land, Hagel is quoted as saying that Congress “is an institution that does not inherently bring out a great deal of courage.” He added that when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee comes knocking with a pro-Israel letter, “you’ll get eighty or ninety senators on it. I don’t think I’ve ever signed one of the letters” — because, he added, they were “stupid.”

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Stephen Lendman

America's political process is lawless, corrupt and dysfunctional. Fiscal cliff hype, noise and theater continue. Destroying fundamental civil society social protections aren't mentioned.

Rushed through legislation targeted Iran's growing Latin American influence. On December 28, Obama signed the Countering Iran in Western Hemisphere Act. It requires the State Department to "address Iran's growing hostile presence and activity." Washington wants the Islamic Republic shut out of the region entirely. It wants it isolated globally. In 2005, Iran had five regional embassies. Today it has 11. Washington's influence is declining. Its traditional backyard grows more independent. Over time, imperial extremism makes more enemies than friends.

Police state harshness intensifies domestically. Presidential diktat authority overrides constitutional law. Secret kill lists mark targeted individuals for death. US citizens and permanent residents are as vulnerable as others. Occupy Wall Street activists are called domestic terrorists. Indefinite detention is institutionalized. Innocent US citizens and others can be held uncharged, denied due process and judicial fairness, and isolated in military dungeons forever.

America is unsafe to live in. It threatens humanity. Permanent war is policy. It rages abroad. It targets US citizens, permanent residents, and others domestically. Those least advantaged are most harmed. So is anyone opposing US lawlessness. Dissent is an endangered species.

Democracy never existed and doesn't now. Rule of law principles are spurned. Wealth, power, privilege, and dominance alone matter. Official policy may destroy humanity to control it.

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