An Al Quds day letter to Tony Blair. From Lauren Booth, in Iran

Gilad Atzmon: I guess that Tony Blair’s sister in law, Lauren Booth, could easily use the phone and tell Tony what she thinks of him, his politics and his new memoir. However, being a peace activist she decided also to share it with the rest of us.Dear Tony,

Congratulations on your political memoir becoming an instant bestseller. I’m in Iran and have the only copy in the country. I can tell you, its so fiercely fought over, it’s worth its weight in WMD’s. Note to Random House; have ‘A Journey’ translated into Farsi and Arabic asap, it’ll fly off the shelves in this part of the world.

Tony, yesterday I went the Al Quds day protest in Tehran. You may have heard of it? It’s the rally where Iranians gather to protest against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, including the Holy city of Jerusalem.

I’m being sarcastic by asking if you’ve heard of Al Quds day, because I know you have. It is after all your very worst nightmare right? It must be horrifying with the ‘world view,’ you express in your memoirs to watch scenes on the BBC news showing the precise meeting point of politics and Islam.

Personally I’ve never understood this fear of ‘political Islam’ it seems to me that religious people should always be educated on world events rather than kept in ignorance like say, Mid West Christian Zionists in the US who can’t even find their home city on a map of their state.

Anyway, yesterday, I stood in the midst of more than one million Iranian Muslims all chanting in unison ‘Marg Bar Isre-hell!’ and ‘Marg Bar Am-ri-ca!’ You know what that means Tony I’m sure ; ‘Down with Israel, down with America’. The men, women and children around me withstood a day of no water and no food (it’s called Ramadan, Tony, it’s a fast). Coping with hunger and thirst in the hundred degrees heat, as if it were nothing. They can withstand deprivation in the Muslim world, and think it a proud thing to suffer in order to express their fury at the continued slaughter of Palestinians. To protest the theft of what little remains of Palestinian land by settlers. To protest the blockade of Gaza causing immense suffering to millions.

Now, the Christian Zionists in the US and the Jewish Zionists in Israel would have you believe that I was am in danger in Iran, especially on a day like Al Quds. Well here again Tony, you’ve been fed and have consumed in its entirety, a massive lie. The lie that says that when Muslims march they march against infidels (like me I suppose) in some kind of Middle Eastern homage to the ancient crusades.

Yet the crusade Tony is yours, not ‘theirs.’

Today I spoke with many women on the Tehran protest. One mother who wept, not out of hatred for ‘the West’ but out of empathy for the mothers of Rafah, Khan Younis, Nablus and Jenin. Do you recognise these place names Tony, as Middle East peace envoy you really should. Israel has massacred children in all of these cities in recent years. Didn’t you know?

Anyway the women I met were gentle, frustrated by the refusal of the international community to stop the arrests of Palestinian children, to stop the routine bombing of the tunnels (the main access still for food and essential items in the Gaza strip). We embraced in the streets of Tehran like sisters. Not in Islam Tony, but in the fight against your brand of extremism and prejudice.

And today when the streets of London reverberate with cries of ‘Allahuakbar!’ and ‘Down Down Israel.’ Christians and Jews will join the thunderous cries of ‘Down Down Israel, marching against the ‘political’ Muslims you say you fear so much, That you would have me fear too if you could.

Having spent a good deal of time in Palestine in recent years, certainly more than you and your the ‘peace envoy’ supposedly. It repulsed me to read your blatant swallowing of the Israeli narrative regarding Palestine and its people.

The ‘conflict’ between Palestine and Israel is according to you all about religion and has nothing at all to do with the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population, nor the degredation of those who remain by their Israeli occupiers. You say that Arabs have and always will see ‘Jews’ as enemies. For God’s sake Tony do your history. And if you’re going to run a ‘Faith Foundation’ then better gen up on Islam 101 don’t you think? Did your pals in Tel Aviv forget to tell you how many thousands of Jews lived in Historic Palestine in harmony with their Arab neighbours before 1948? Do you really not know that even today tens of thousand of Jews reside contentedly in Iran?

I’ve sat with dozens and dozens of Muslim families, those whose children have been burned by Israeli/US phosphorous bombs. Those who are still suffering hunger due to the Israel siege of Gaza. Those who have lived through the early days of sanctions against Iran when they needed food vouchers just to live. And every single Muslim in these suffering families has the same message ; ‘We don’t hate anyone for their race or their religion. We cannot hate Jews they are in our holy book it is against the teachings of the Koran.’ But Tony let me ask you this. Why should any people Muslim or otherwise have NO right to justice and NO right to challenge an evil being done to them and their children? or to those who share a set of common beliefs? Do you have no understanding of what it is like to live in Gaza? Under siege, attacked with chemical weapons, your children’s schools razed to the ground by Israeli missiles, your hospitals shelled, your electricity limited, your water undrinkable?

Or do understand the ‘idea’ of the hardships suffered by millions in the Middle East as a direct result of your support for Israel and just think they deserve it?

In your book you say you knew full well how many Beirut homes were flattened, how many civilians died in Lebanon in 2006. Yet you dismiss Lebanese rage about Israeli land theft of ‘Shebas Farm’ as being an irrelevance, about a ‘tiny’ amount of land. You cannot see it as part of an attack on Lebanese life as a whole, by it’s heavily armed aggressive neighbour. You see it as: ‘Israel is attacked. Israel strikes back.’ As if Israel lives in placid peace, being kindly to all around it in between these massacres.

As other world leaders came out to demand Israel immediately cease its 2006 bombing raids on Lebanese cities, you stayed silent.

‘If I had condemned Israel’ you say ‘I would have been more than dishonest. It would have undermined my world view.’

Your world view that Muslims are mad, bad, dangerous to know. A contagion to be contained. Your final chapter is a must read here in the Middle East Tony, congratulations! For it lays out the ‘them’ and ‘us’ agenda of your friends in Washington and Tel Aviv and in David Milliband, the ambassador of Zionism that he is.

In the final chapter you say; ‘we need a religious counter attack’ against Islam. And by ‘Islam’ you mean the Al Quds rallies, the Palestinian intifada (based on an anti Apartheid struggle Tony, NOT religious bigotry), against every Arab who fails to raise a flag as the F16s rain on their homes and refugee camps and breaks out singing ‘Imagine all the people…’

When you say ‘extremism’ must be ‘controlled and beaten’ you mean the message of solidarity shared by Non Muslims alike on the streets of London and across the world today, joining the Al Quds day protests.

‘Not only extremism must be defeated’ you say but ‘the narrative that has to be assailed.’

Iran is indeed the place where Islamic tradition meets political action.

But I’m not afraid here Tony. The people are kind, friendly, full of good humour.

They are also highly aware of the history of this region, the wrongs perpetrated by Israel against Palestine and the political machinations of the US and the UK governments.

And as your book remains highly sought after here in Tehran. It’s that and not Islam, that you and your Israeli chums should be afraid of because it reveals you in all your ignorant glory.

Lauren Booth
Broadcaster and Journalist

http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2010/09/an-al-quds-day-letter-to-tony-blair-from-lauren-booth-in-iran/

Mohamed Khodr – With Blair-Bush Lies, Muslims Died

“For wicked men are found among my people; they lurk like fowlers lying in wait. They set a trap; they catch men”

- Jeremiah 5:26-29, (Bible: Old Testament)

“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.”

– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

For 100 years the Arab and Muslim world have known that when it comes to European and American imperialistic designs on the Middle East there are two separate universes with separate political, economic, racial and legal standards. With self assured arrogance, hypocrisy and double standards western powers reserved the "right of might" to inflict devastating invasions, occupations, mass murders, ethnic cleansing and the Anti-Jewish cleansing of Europe by gifting a land, without ownership or right, to European Jews who proceeded to emulate European colonialism to attack and ethnically cleanse an innocent people from their land. Israel was born by England's illegal gifting of a foreign land and subsequently immorally supported by the United States at the expense of a hapless population living under the most dire and brutal of occupations.

Throughout the history of their imperialistic, colonial designs those western powers and Israel, the fate of the indigenous populations was never an issue or matter of concern to these warring states. From the Native Americans, North and South, to Africans, Arabs, Muslims, Asians and the Aborigines of Australia and New Zealand, their lives, history, religion, culture and language were fodder for extinction to satisfy the economic greed of western powers.

In 1917, a simple typed letter of 68 words signed by Lord Balfour, foreign minister of England and addressed to the Jewish banker, Lord Rothschild, proscribed Palestine, still under Ottoman rule, "a national homeland for the Jews." It became known as the “Balfour Declaration” and used a manifesto by Zionists to justify their illegal, immoral and genocidal design on Palestine.

"In Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…Zionism, be it right or wrong, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

– Lord Balfour, UK Foreign Minister

From David Lloyd George (“We have the right to bomb niggers”), Prime Minister of England 1916-1922 – to Lord Arthur Balfour, UK Foreign Minister 1916-1919 and author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration – to President Truman – to the current Vice President of the United States, Joseph Biden, all have declared themselves to be “Zionists”.

Not since World War II has one western leader, not even one, ever been charged or prosecuted for war crimes against humanity. While Holocaust museums are being erected around the world, often at taxpayers’ expense, not one single museum in a western capital, with the exception of Latin America, has ever been built to memorialize the genocides against African Americans, Latinos, Africans, Arabs, Muslims, Asians and Aborigines – all victims of imperial holocausts.

These days in London an “inquiry”, not trial, named after its chair, the Chicot Inquiry, has been looking into the reasons and justifications that led to the massively illegal war and devastation of an innocent nation, Iraq.

So far, former British government officials have presented evidence that the war was “illegal”, did not have support from the U.N., nor from the entire world except for UK and US, – that Tony Blair had been told that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that intelligence was “sexed up” and manipulated to justify Blair’s war crimes against Iraq.

Blair launched his war crime against Iraq with the same zeal, lies and fear mongering propaganda used by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defense, called by Time Magazine, the “Architect” of the Iraq War, was asked in a Vanity Fair interview, May 2003, why was the Iraq War based on Saddam’s alleged possession of WMD’s. This time, he actually told the truth. Wolfowitz stated:

“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

As a second reason he stated that the war gave the U.S. the opportunity to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia where Saudi hostility against the presence of the troops was high.

Tony Blair’s lies to the British people, despite their immense opposition to the war, and to Parliament have been aptly documented. But this arrogant war criminal, ironically a MidEast "peace envoy", told the Chicot Inquiry that he did not lie about his justifications for war and unconscionably stood by his false assertions for the devastating illegal war. He was unrepentant and unremorseful for the millions of dead, injured and displaced Iraqis. Nor was he repentant for the sacrifice of British soldiers. In true narcissistic and pathological fashion he said he would make the same decision to invade Iraq again today. Even Saddam’s death wouldn’t have stopped their messianic psychosis to invade Iraq. Got to do it for Oil and Israel.

Blair quotes that reveal a pathological liar with no conscience but possessing a hypocritical racist soul, much like all Israeli leaders, including today’s war criminal du jour, Netanyahu.

“Yes, there are consequences of war. If we remove Saddam by force, people will die and some will be innocent. And we must live with the consequences of our actions, even the unintended ones.”

“Ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity. It is leaving him there that is in truth inhumane.”

“The document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them."

-Foreword to UK Government dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction

Tony Blair's arrogant testimony to the Chicot Inquiry is a blatant genocidal example of a western leader trying to justify the unjustifiable. Both Blair and Bush knew beforehand that Iraq had no WMD's and that their falsified intelligence came from an alcoholic liar (“Curveball”) and Iraqi dissident, Ahmad Chalabi, whose lies gave Blair and Bush the weapons for mass destruction of Iraq. The British Intelligence even plagiarized statements from a U.S. PhD student’s thesis on Iraq which included the outrageous claim that Saddam can launch WMD’s within 45 minutes.

Blair, in true contempt to truth and history, used Bush’s fallback position that 9/11 changed their outlook on world affairs and became their pretext for a world “war on terror”. Blair’s testimony showcased that the best defense was a good offense.

The U.N., Fourth Geneva Convention, I.C.C., and International Laws were created by western powers and thus easily manipulated and selectively applied by them to the third world and not to themselves who self ascribe the right to devastate in the name of self defense, even pre-emptively. Using such logic any nation can invade another pre-emptively if it can manufacture hysteria, lies and self perceived threats to itself. Thus China is totally justified to invade Taiwan, Russia can invade Poland and the Czech Republic given America’s deployment of missile defense systems, Cuba can invade the U.S., Turkey can invade Armenia and so on.

Within this cabal of righteous powers is Israel, a nation born out of violence, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing; a nation that has repeatedly launched pre-emptive wars using the western mantra of "self defense". Israel, a state unlike any other that commits genocides with total impunity daring the world to criticize much less consider prosecuting its leaders for documented crimes against humanity, as evidenced by the Goldstone Report.

Not satisfied with the bloodshed in Iraq, Blair has the audacity to call for the same devastation of the Muslim nation du jour, Iran, thereby joining the Israeli motivated policy of “next stop, Tehran”. Iran, like Iraq, poses no threat to either, the west or Israel, even if it does possess nuclear weapons. Would Iran commit suicide or would it insanely nuke Israel thereby committing a holocaust against Palestinians, the very people Iran loves and defends? Would it destroy Jerusalem, while causing massive nuclear radiation in the entire region and risking massive nuclear retaliation from Israel, a state in possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons and a non-signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty? Blaming, then bombing Muslims seems to be Blair's, Obama's, and Israel's policy. Nuclear Israel, demonstrably a criminal nation, is untouchable while non-nuclear Muslim nations are bombable. Justice lies in the eye of the criminal.

TRUTH has always been the enemy of western civilization and in due time will be its undoing.
http://palestinethinktank.com/2010/02/02/mohamed-khodr-with-blair-bush-lies-muslims-died/