USING THE HOLOCAUST TO JUSTIFY WAR ON ASSAD
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
http://on.rt.com/puo7p8