War in Iran Makes Dollars and Sense

This is not normally within the scope of this blog but felt it was important enough to take a stab at to get a better idea of what is really going on in the Middle East.

On November 10th 2005, an article described one of the unspoken reasons why the United States had to invade Iraq: to liberate the U.S. dollar in Iraq so that Iraqi oil could once again be purchased with the petrodollar. See The liberation of the U.S. Dollar in Iraq.

In November 2000, Iraq stopped accepting U.S. dollars for their oil. Counted as a purely political move, Saddam Hussein switched the currency required to purchase Iraqi oil to the euro. Selling oil through the U.N. Oil for Food Program, Iraq converted all of its U.S. dollars in its U.N. account to the euro. Shortly thereafter, Iraq converted $10 billion in their U.N. reserve fund to the euro. By the end of 2000, Iraq had abandoned the U.S. dollar completely.

Two months after the United States invaded Iraq, the Oil for Food Program was ended, the country’s accounts were switch back to dollars, and oil began to be sold once again for U.S. dollars. No longer could the world buy oil from Iraq with the euro. Universal global dollar supremacy was restored. It is interesting to note that the latest recession that the United States endured began and ended within the same timeframe as when Iraq was trading oil for euros. Whether this is a coincidence or related, the American people may never know.

In March 2006, Iran will take Iraq’s switch to the petroeuro to new heights by launching a third oil exchange. The Iranians have developed a petroeuro system for oil trade, which when enacted, will once again threaten U.S. dollar supremacy far greater than Iraq’s euro conversion. Called the Iran Oil Bourse, an exchange that only accepts the euro for oil sales would mean that the entire world could begin purchasing oil from any oil-producing nation with euros instead of dollars. The Iranian plan isn’t limited to purchasing one oil-producing country’s oil with euros. Their plan will create a global alternative to the U.S. dollar. Come March 2006, the Iran Oil Bourse will further the momentum of OPEC to create an alternate currency for oil purchases worldwide. China, Russia, and the European Union are evaluating the Iranian plan to exchange oil for euros, and giving the plan serious consideration.

If you are skeptical regarding the meaning of oil being purchased with euros versus dollars, and the devastating impact it will have on the economy of the United States, consider the historic move by the Federal Reserve to begin hiding information pertaining to the U.S. dollar money supply, starting in March 2006. Since 1913, the year the abomination known as the Federal Reserve came to power, the supply of U.S. dollars was measured and publicly revealed through an index referred to as M-3. M-3 has been the main stable of money supply measurement and transparent disclosure since the Fed was founded back in 1913. According to Robert McHugh, in his report (What’s the Fed up to with the money supply?), McHugh writes, “On November 10, 2005, shortly after appointing Bernanke to replace Greenbackspan, the Fed mysteriously announced with little comment and no palatable justification that they will hide M-3 effective March 2006.” (Click here to learn more about Robert McHugh's work.)

Is it mere coincidence that the Fed will begin hiding M-3 the same month that Iran will launch its Iran Oil Bourse, or is there a direct threat to the stability of the U.S. dollar, the U.S. economy, and the U.S. standard of living? Are Americans being set up for a collapse in our economy that will make the Great Depression of the 1930’s look like a bounced check? If you cannot or will not make the value and stability of the U.S. currency of personal importance, if you are unwilling to demand from your elected officials, an immediate abolishment of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the fiat money scheme that the banking cartel has used for nearly a century now to keep our government and our people in a state of perpetual debt, than you are faced with but two alternatives, abject poverty, or invading Iran.

The plans to invade Iran are unspoken, but unfolding before our very eyes. The media has been reporting on Iran more often, and increasingly harshly. For the U.S. government to justify invading Iran, it must first begin to phase out the War in Iraq, which it is already doing. Next, it must portray the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a threat to the region and the world. Finally, once naive American people are convinced the “weapons of mass destruction” that were to be found in Iraq are actually in Iran, coupled with the almost daily media coverage of Iran’s nuclear power / weapons program aspirations, and what we will soon have on our hands is another fabricated war that will result in tens of thousands of civilian lives being lost, all because the political elected pawns in Washington DC lack the discipline to return our currency to a gold or silver standard, end the relationship with the foreign banking cartel called the Federal Reserve, and limit the activities of the U.S. government to those articulated in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution for the United States of America.

When a wayward and corrupt fiscal policy and fiat currency, coupled with runaway government spending, forces a nation to only be able to sustain the value of its currency with bullets, the citizenry of the country involved in wars primarily to sustain its currency have historically first became slaves to their government, and then to the nations that finally conquer them. If you question the validity of such a premise, or whether it could happen to the United States of America, study the fall of the Roman Empire. If you read the right books on the subject, you’ll quickly discover that towards the end of the Roman reign, the Roman Empire was doing exactly what America is doing today; attempting to sustain a failed fiat money system with bullets.

Understanding fiat money is not an easy task, and the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund have purposely made it that way. They do not want the American people to realize that the money in their wallet loses its value with each new dollar that they print. They do not want people to understand that our money does not become money until it is borrowed. When the Federal Reserve has money printed, when it is in uncut sheets of paper, it is not yet money. After it is cut, bundled, and placed into the Federal Reserve vaults, it still is not money. It only becomes money once it is borrowed. Consequently, if all debt were to be paid, if the United States didn’t have an $8 trillion national debt and the American people were debt free, and if all loans of U.S. dollars made to foreigners were paid in full, there would be exactly zero U.S. dollars in circulation because it will have all been returned to the vaults of the Federal Reserve. This might seem hard to fathom, but it is the gospel of fiat money.


The major news media in the United States, fed by Washington DC which in turn is fed by the Federal Reserve, literally, has already begun conditioning the American people for invading Iran. Media accounts of Iran’s nuclear ambitions along with amplification of the potential instability and core evilness of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is setting the stage to spring the invasion of Iran on the American people. There does appear to be a direct correlation between the winding down effort underway in Iraq and the increase of anti-Iran rhetoric. How American soldiers ultimately arrive in Tehran is uncertain at this time, but it is reasonable to expect that if the Iran Oil Bourse opens for business in March 2006 as planned, it will only be a matter of time before the United States will have to blow it up.

If the United States invades Iran, or if Israel starts military actions by launches missiles at Iran’s nuclear power facilities, which then opens the door for the United States to intervene, most Americans will believe that our military actions in Iran will be to defend freedom and liberty while spreading democracy, when the truth is that we’ll be fighting a war in Iran because of our nation’s relationship with the Federal Reserve, a so-called bank that is not owned by the federal government, maintains no reserve, and isn’t a bank at all, but a cartel. Just like our war in Iraq, Americans and foreigners will die in battle so that the historical power bankers and brokers; cartel members such as Rothschild, Morgan, Lehman, Lizard, Schrader, Lobe, Kuhn, and Rockefeller to name a few, can continue collecting interest on every single U.S. coin and dollar bill in circulation, while controlling the U.S. Congress to the extent that the U.S. taxpayer becomes the collateral and lender of last resort to cover bad loans and unpaid debts that these institutions create by loaning money to third world countries, some of which are devout enemies of the United States. Remember the $400 billion savings & loan bailout approved by the U.S. Congress during the Reagan Administration? America is still paying for it – you and me, and so will our children and grandchildren.

It is well overdue for Americans, every American, to do whatever it takes to fully understand the relationship between the United States and the Federal Reserve, along with the grave consequences of our current fiat money system; for even if the United States wanted to continue to sustain the supremacy of the U.S. dollar with bullets, it is historically, impossible. When bullets become the commodity to secure a currency, it is a clear sign of devastating calamity looming. To ignore the warning signs, is to suffer like you have never suffered before, or to die. Harsh words, but true.

Source

Palestinians Are Not Children of a Lesser God

This is an op-ed piece that I just discovered. It was published by The Jewish Daily Forward

We Palestinians Will Honor Our Word

I know of no way to measure suffering, no mechanism to quantify pain. All I know is that we Palestinians are not children of a lesser God.

Had I been a Jew or a Gypsy, I would consider the Holocaust to be the most atrocious event in history. Had I been a Native American, it would be the arrival of the European settlers and the subsequent near-total extermination of the indigenous population. Had I been an African American, it would be slavery in previous centuries and apartheid in the last. Had I been an Armenian, it would be the Turkish massacre.

I happen to be a Palestinian, and for Palestinians the most atrocious event in history is what we call the Nakba, the catastrophe. Humanity should consider all the above as morally unacceptable, all as politically inadmissible. Lest I be misunderstood, I am not comparing the Nakba to the Holocaust. Each catastrophe stands on its own, and I do not like to indulge in comparative martyrology or a hierarchy of tragedies. I only mention our respective traumas in order to illustrate that we each bring to the table our own particular history.

The fact that the accords reached last week in Mecca between Hamas and Fatah were met with a variety of reactions, ranging from warm to cautious to skeptical, makes it imperative to revisit and learn the lessons of the diplomatic history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Time and again the three “no’s” of the Khartoum summit in 1967 — no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel — are invoked as proof conclusive of Arab intransigence toward Israel. Such a claim, however, conveniently forgets that Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Jordan accepted United Nations Security Council resolution 242 just months after the Khartoum meeting.

Also forgotten is that Syria, after the October War in 1973 — the purpose of which, it should be remembered, was to reactivate a dormant diplomatic process and to capture the attention of American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — accepted U.N. resolution 338, which incorporated resolution 242. Ignored, too, is that the entire Arab world endorsed a peace plan put forth by the then-Saudi crown prince Fahd at a 1982 summit in Fez, Morocco, as well as unanimously backed the initiative put forth by then-Saudi crown prince Abdallah in Beirut in 2002.

For the Palestinian national movement, the October War in 1973 was a demarcation line in strategic thinking. It is then that we concluded that there was no military solution to the conflict. Until then we had advocated a unitary, democratic, bicultural, multiethnic and pluri-confessional state in Mandatory Palestine.

After 1973, a pragmatic coalition within the Palestine Liberation Organization emerged. Composed of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, Nayef Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and As Sa’iqa, the Palestinian branch of the Syrian Ba’ath Party, the coalition demanded not absolute justice but rather possible justice within the framework of a two-state solution. The fact that As Sa’iqa belonged to that school of thought, it is worth noting, is proof that Damascus can be a constructive player in the region if properly engaged and its concerns addressed. Syria is not necessarily the eternal spoiler that needs to use the Lebanese theater or the Palestinian scene in order to remind everyone of its presence.

Led by this pragmatic coalition, the PLO was ready for a historical compromise as far back as 1974. It was not the rejectionist player, as many have labeled it, but rather the rejected party until the Oslo peace talks in 1993. Throughout its presence in Lebanon, the PLO aimed to remain a military factor so as to be accepted as a diplomatic actor.

I have told my many Israeli interlocutors that I believe that the Israeli posture in peace negotiations was to expect a diplomatic outcome that would reflect Israeli power and intransigence, American alignment toward Israeli preferences, declining Russian influence, European abdication, Arab impotence and what they hoped to be Palestinian resignation.

It is this attitude that has resulted in having a durable peace process instead of a lasting and permanent peace. Peace and security will stem not from territorial aggrandizement but from regional acceptance — and make no mistake about it, we Palestinians are the key to regional acceptance of Israel. For years now, the Arab world from Morocco to Muscat has been ready to recognize the existence of Israel if it withdraws back from its expanded 1967 borders. The perpetuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is due not to the Arab rejection of Israeli existence, but to the Israeli rejection of Arab acceptance.

The absence of a credible diplomatic avenue has allowed for the emergence and the strengthening of radical movements. The electoral defeat of Fatah in January 2006 was caused by a plurality of factors, not least of them the fact that Fatah became identified with negotiations and a peace process that was non-existent for the last six years and totally unconvincing during the years preceding. To the Palestinians, the last 15 years of “peacemaking” were years during which we witnessed the expansion of the occupation — with the number of settlers doubling — not a withdrawal from the occupation.

Now, however, there is a chance to move beyond this history. As a result of the agreement reached last week in Mecca, the Palestinian government will be more representative than at any period before. The new foreign minister, Ziad Abu Amr, both enjoys the confidence of Hamas and is a political friend of Mahmoud Abbas — who as PLO chairman is charged with negotiating on behalf of the Palestinian people and as P.A. president has prerogative over the conduct of foreign affairs.

Both Fatah and Hamas are in favor of a cease-fire, for which they can now ensure disciplined Palestinian adherence — especially if it is reciprocated by the Israeli side and extended to the West Bank, where alas we have recently witnessed an escalation in assassinations and arrests. And in Mecca, Hamas and Fatah agreed that the Palestinian government will honor all agreements signed by the PLO, will abide by all the resolutions of previous Arab summits and will base its activity on international law.

The term “honor,” rest assured, has as much a ring of nobility to it in Arabic — if not more — as it does in any other language.

A territory that was occupied in 1967 in less than six days can also be evacuated in six days — so that Israelis can rest on the seventh, and we can all finally engage in the fascinating journey of nation-building and economic recovery.

Afif Safieh is head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Mission to the United States.

Israel and the Media: The Ten Commandments

Well, considering that the subject of my last post barely made the news this week, here are ten rules everyone should memorize before watching the evening news or reading the morning paper. They make everything perfectly clear:

Rule # 1: If the story is about the Middle East, the Arabs always attack first and Israel always defends itself. This is called "reprisals".

Rule # 2: Arabs, Palestinians or Lebanese have no right to kill the soldiers or civilians of the other side. This is called "terrorism".

Rule # 3: Israel can kill civilian Arabs. This is called "legitimate self-defence".

Rule # 4: When Israel kills too many civilians, the West asks Israel to be more "proportionate" in its attacks. This is called "the reaction of the international community".

Rule # 5: Palestinians and Lebanese are not allowed to capture Israeli soldiers, even if it’s only three soldiers, since this would pose "an existential threat to the state of Israel".

Rule # 6: Israelis have every right to kidnap as many Palestinians as they like. They now have approximately 10,000 such prisoners, including 300 children. There is no limit to the number that can be kidnapped and no need to prove the guilt of the kidnapped individuals. It is enough to use the magic word "terrorist" and that settles the matter.

Rule # 7: When you say "Hezbollah", you must always add the words "Islamists", "Shiites" and "backed by Syria and Iran".

Rule # 8: When you say "Israel" you must not add "the Jewish State" or "the Jewish army" and above all must not use the words "backed by the United States, France and Europe" since this implies an unequal conflict.

Rule # 9: Never mention the "occupied territories" or UN resolutions except for Resolution #1559, which called for the disarming of Hezbollah. And do not mention violations of international law or of the Geneva Conventions. This upsets TV viewers and radio listeners by forcing them to think.

Rule # 10: Israelis speak better English than Arabs. This is why we give them and their defenders as much time as possible to speak on the air. This allows them to help us better understand Rules # 1 - 9.

And this is what is called "journalistic neutrality".

Written by Sabri Khayat

Thanks to PAJU Montreal

Israel's High Court Legalizes Assassination

Yup, Israel...(the only democracy in the Middle East) has just legalized assassinations of it's political opponents...nice, eh? Already some 500 Palestinians have been "sentenced" since the year 2000...now, it's legal well at least according to Israel's High Court. I just wanna know what they've been smoking.

Of course this decision will help all of those Israeli military officers in defending themselves against a slew of war crimes lawsuits filed against them in foreign courts.

Read the story

Hamas Promotes Truce with Israel

Here's one that hasn't been picked up by any Western Media yet:

Hamas Promotes Israel Truce in Europe

CAIRO — A delegation from the ruling Palestinian movement has recently embarked on a European tour, including London and Belfast, to market a long-term truce with Israel in return for its withdrawal to the 1967 borders, recognition of the right of refugees to return to their homeland and the release of detainees in its jail, a top aid to Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya said.

"We visited London recently and are scheduled to visit a number of other European capitals to promote this truce, which is similar to the one championed by Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin before Israel assassinated him in March 2004," Ahmad Yusuf told IslamOnline.net.

He was accompanied by Hams MP Sayed Abu Masameh on a ten-day unannounced visit to London.

Yusuf, who leads the delegation in its multi-leg tour, said the proposal has appealed to British officials who pledged to help market it.

"We told the Europeans that Muslims have been known for honoring their promises throughout the centuries and that the truce is a religious commitment and a political vision to resolve the conflict," he said.

The Hams official said the delegation has also met with European Union officials and "American figures".

"They promised us to reconsider their position on Hamas and start a dialogue in a prelude to remove the resistance movement in the future from the EU terror list."

Yusuf declined to name the European officials who met the Hamas delegation but said they are close to the quartet committee for Middle East peace, which comprises the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia.

"American dignitaries have also talked wit us about the truce as a mechanism to stabilize the region for the time being until we reach final and just settlement to the conflict," he added.

Yusuf expected that the Hamas-European dialogue would expand to include several EU countries.

"This dialogue could pave the way for in-depth talks with the US administration," he said.

EU officials could not be reached for comment on the Hamas talks.

Israel's Recognition

Yusuf said the delegation told the Europeans that Hamas cannot recognize Israel under such international circumstances, which deny the Palestinians their inalienable rights.

"Israel does not recognize our right to exist and our basic rights have not been fulfilled, not to mention other pending issues like the holy city of Al-Quds and the refugees," he added.

"We told them that Palestinian rights must be addressed first before reaching a settlement with Israel."

British officials, according to Yusuf, vowed to work on lifting the international blockade on the Palestinians and enhance dialogue with Hamas following the formation of a national unity government.

"The Europeans told us to prepare a list of Hamas cadres who can travel to EU countries to talk with clerics, MPs and politicians about the Palestinian cause and Hamas's platform," Yusuf said.

Talks between rival Palestinian factions on forming a unity government hit new snags on Monday.

An advisor to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas announced that talks between the parties had been suspended.

On the delegation's visit to Belfast, Northern Ireland, Yusuf said they met with a group of British negotiators to make use of their expertise in mediating between the Catholics and the Protestants.

"The talks with leaders from the Irish Republican Army were very much useful," he said, adding that the delegation invited Irish officials to visit the occupied Palestinian territories to have a first-hand experience.

He continued: "I think the European officials who visited the region have realized the Islamists can be a partner and that's why they had talks with some of Islamist figures."

Yusuf categorically denied Israeli reports that the delegation had met with Jewish figures in London.

"We met only Members of Parliament and peers during the London visit," he said.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero announced last week that France, Italy and Spain were seeking a ceasefire, an exchange of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners, a Palestinian national unity government and the dispatch of a fact-finding mission to the Palestinian territories.

The peace initiative, however, was snubbed by Israel, which called the Spanish endeavor "hasty."

Al Jazeera English Goes Live!

My goal here has always been to give my opinion of things and the background going on in the Arab World specifically to do with Palestine. Yesterday, that goal became much easier. Al Jazeera English has gone live! If your cable company does not carry it, demand it first of all OR get the feed off the internet here.

I hope that this channel becomes a trusted tool for understanding what is really happening in the Middle East and it's historical underpinnings.

Mabrook Aljazeera!