By Stuart Littlewood

Mitt Romney is listed among People magazine's 50 'most beautiful' of 2002. He was up there with Nicole Kidman, Britney Spears and Julia Roberts. But how pretty does he look in 2012?

This US presidential hopeful from AIPAC’s Republican wing came here to England and put his foot in it by questioning Britain‘s readiness to host the Olympics. We were already on the case, thank-you Mr Romney. But please remember that it’s largely America’s misbehaviour around the world that puts such a colossal strain on Olympic security and makes other nations’ teams so nervous.

His remarks drew some sharp responses, and thus began a series of “mis-steps” that characterized the presidential candidate’s misadventure into the wider world and culminated in an unforgettable “kiss my ass” invitation by one of his campaign aides. Mis-steps is a curiously polite US word that seems to be gaining currency here. It conjures up the erratic progress of a stumblebum.

No surprise that while in London he met with the Quartet’s zio-stooge Tony Blair to have his mind further poisoned and confused.

Romney then went to Israel to annoy the Palestinians by stating the bleedin’ obvious - that the Israeli economy had outpaced the Palestinians' - and suggesting that this phenomenon could be explained by the superior “culture”.

He came to a fundraiser attended by the mega-rich at the King David Hotel Jerusalem with, he said, "a sense of profound humility". After all, he was expecting a nice fat cheque for $1 million. Was he aware that this is the same King David Hotel that was blown up by a Jewish terror gang in 1946 when it served as the British administration’s headquarters, murdering 91?

That infamous attack had Menachem Begin's fingerprints all over it and was one of the deadliest bombings in the Arab-Israel conflict. Begin of course went on to become an Israeli prime minister, having all the qualifications.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz observed that Romney’s speech “sounded as if it could have been written by Netanyahu's bureau”. He said: “As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.”

This brilliant analysis is apparently based on a book Romney had read called “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” in his search for reasons why two neighbouring places have such disparate prosperity. “Culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference,” he said, this being his conclusion.

A few weeks ago a World Bank report said that the Palestinian economy’s modest growth was not sustainable because it was driven by aid – it was artificial and therefore not strong enough to support statehood. Before that, an Israeli government report had said the Palestinian set-up was not economically stable enough to support a state. And why would that be? Because Israel is pulling every dirty trick imaginable to impoverish and incapacitate the Occupied Territories and keep them in subjugation.

Given their freedom like other people the Palestinians of course could stand on their own feet and would not need Western taxpayer support.

Had Romney spent as much time in Palestine as he did in Israel he could have discovered the truth first-hand. He’d have seen the bleedin’ obvious - that the reason the Palestinian economy is on it knees has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with the illegal and brutal military occupation, and the fact that donor countries like the US, Britain and the EU have been propping up and perpetuating the occupation for decades. How can the Palestinians prosper when the Israelis won't allow them to export or import or otherwise do business freely with the outside world?

As for Palestine's weakening agricultural sector what has happened to their water? It’s been stolen and the Israelis are filling their swimming pools and washing their cars with it and channeling it to their own agricultural crops on confiscated Palestinian land, while the Palestinian farmers’ supply is down to a trickle.

And are Palestinians allowed to develop their own energy resource - the Gaza offshore gas field? No. Israel is trying to steal that too.

Romney also ignores the endless checkpoints and other restrictions that block freedom of movement and commerce within the Occupied Territories. It’s bleedin’ obvious the Palestinians can't grow their economy until they shake off Israel's shackles. The dimmest American politician, surely, can figure that out.

But it suits the West’s corrupted political class to let the evil continue.

Romney scheduled a very brief meeting with the Palestinian Authority’s unelected prime minister Salam Fayyad and laced it with a second insult by not traveling to Ramallah. Did he pop over to Gaza and shoot the breeze with Haniyeh and Al-Zahar? Nah, such a reality-check would have been too much for a sheltered Republican softie.

Instead he donned the obligatory kippah for the Zionist cameras and hasbara scribes and prayed at the Western Wall. He met Netanyahu, Israel's belligerent prime minister. One of Romney's senior policy adviser promised support for a unilateral military strike by Israel, which has some 400 nuclear warheads, against Iran which has none... notwithstanding that the Israeli regime is considered by more and more people to be clinically mad.

And to underscore his ignorance he declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. Well, Israel would certainly like Jerusalem to be its capital and for everyone in the world to acknowledge it, but few do for very good reason.

“All I can say is that this man needs a lot of education,” said Saeb Erekat, top Palestinian Authority negotiator. “He doesn’t know the region, he doesn’t know Israelis, he doesn’t know Palestinians, and to talk about the Palestinians as an inferior culture is really a racist statement,” At last, here's something Erekat says that we can agree with.

Romney’s visit to Poland on the final leg of his visit to the real world was hardly a public affairs triumph either, according to the BBC. As Mark Mardell reported, “even his press team finds it difficult to respond to the most basic inquiries about what their candidate has said”. And Romney’s press secretary spectacularly lost his rag with reporters and refused to answer questions after their visit to Warsaw’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “Shove it” and “kiss my ass”, he told reporters.

Far better if glamour-boy Romney had stayed home to irritate the good people of Massachusetts. I thought we Brits were hard up for political talent. But, dear God, is this charmless individual the best presidential material our American friends can offer a world that cries out for integrity and courageous leadership?

As I was about to file this, an email from JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace) arrived with the text of an open letter to Romney, which they hope to deliver at the end of the week. It says:

“To Governor Mitt Romney,

“Your statements in Jerusalem regarding the growth of the Palestinian and Israeli economies were inaccurate and misleading. Israel's Occupation of Palestinian land makes it impossible for the Palestinian economy to succeed, not ‘cultural differences.’ Your comments were not a reflection of the values Jews, Americans, and our allies hold dear. We call on you to apologize to the Palestinian people for your willful lack of understanding of the facts on the ground and the racist assumptions behind them.”

JVP also point out that Romney managed to get his facts completely wrong in claiming the Israeli GDP is twice that of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, when it is actually about ten times greater.

 Stuart Littlewood’s book Radio Free Palestine can now be read on the internet by visiting www.radiofreepalestine.org.uk . He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

"Countdowns in Teheran and Jerusalem –

Op-ed: The belief among the press and political establishments is that Netanyahu is an obstinate paranoid who is playing games with them.


By Daniel Greenfield

First Publish: 8/26/2012, 2:58 PM


If Israel jets show up in Iranian airspace, it will most likely happen while Obama is too busy accusing Mitt Romney of secretly storing all his money in a giant cave in the Rocky Mountains to do more than dispatch a flunky to chew out Netanyahu over the phone. The election is the perfect window for a strike on Iran’s nuclear program, because Team Obama will be too tied down on the Romney Front to do much damage to Israel.

Despite the signs being brandished at your local Anarchists for Peace rally, accusing the United States of being a puppet of the Zionist regime, the United States and Israel have different interests. Israel is interested in not getting bombed and the United States is interested in regional stability. And regional stability means keeping the Sunni Arab oil countries happy.

The United States is interested in somehow making Iran’s nuclear capabilities go away in the interests of regional stability. Particularly the regional stability of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. But the last thing that this form of regional stability needs is Israeli planes flying over Saudi Arabia to take out that nuclear capability.

Just like during the Gulf War, regional stability demands that the United States protect Saudi Arabia and the Gulfies, while keeping Israel out of it. Since Iran’s Revolutionary Guard isn’t camped out in Kuwait City, protecting them is a matter of posture. That posture is there as a deterrent, a warning that Iran had better not interfere with our oil suppliers or there will be hellfire missiles to pay.

The posturing is hollow because everyone knows that Obama is not about to bomb Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia and its colony in Bahrain. He is as likely to do it for Israel as he is to move to South Carolina and join the NRA. But he isn’t alone in that regard. Despite the fevered fantasies of everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ron Paul, no American president would ever bomb Iran for Israel. If a third Gulf War is fought, it will be fought for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, one more time.

The last time the United States fought Iran, in 1988, it was to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers. If Iran interferes with oil tankers from our friendly Gulfie terrorist states, then a future administration is likely to bomb Iran. If oil prices go high enough to potentially cost Obama the election, then he might pry away his foreign policy people from drawing up maps of Syrian targets and actually hit some Iranian naval installations.

None of this has anything to do with Iran’s nuclear program… and that’s the point. George W. Bush did appear to think that Iranian nuclear weapons might be bad news for the United States, not just for the balance of power in the region. He was nearly unique in that regard. The diplomatic and military establishment is full of experts who view Iranian nuclear weapons purely as factors in the balance of power and utterly refuse to look at them from any other angle. To them, Israel isn’t really concerned about a nuclear attack, it’s only playing a regional power game along with everyone else.

For Israel, violence is not a posture or a theory. It has few trading connections and no alliances in the region. Its foreign policy has always been about dissipating physical threats to its people, whether through diplomatic or military means. It does not follow this line because it is a saintly state, but because it is a state always on the edge. It has too little territory and too many enemies around it to follow any other path.

Surrounded by countries for whom destroying it is a matter of national pride and religious fervor, its only real deterrent is military. Winning several wars won it enough breathing room to try diplomatic solutions. And now the first and last of those diplomatic solutions has failed. It can still count on the military as a deterrent, but there is no deterrent against a nuclear attack carried out by terrorists under plausible deniability. The only remaining deterrent after a nuclear attack is killing as many of those responsible as possible before succumbing to radiation poisoning.

To the United States, Iranian nukes and an Israeli attack on them are equally unacceptable because they both disturb regional stability. The opponents of an attack insist on calling it a “War”, not that a war is even structurally possible unless Iran decides to march an army through Iraq and Syria to get to Israel. They spread hysterical bulletins warning that an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program could spark “another” recession.

Their message is that the cost of attacking Iran is more than the cost of allowing it to go nuclear. That may be true for the United States, which did not suffer too much from accepting that the Bolsheviks had taken over Russia, that Mao had taken over China and other once unacceptable phenomena that forced it the up its defense spending, but did not do any lasting damage. A nuclear weapon in the hands of people who believe that the world needs to be cleansed by fire for the arrival of the Mahdi and have dozens of terrorist front groups at their disposal may be a different story. Or it may not.

Washington D.C. did not get overrun by Communist forces. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Tibet and a few hundred million other people who did not have oceans to protect them from the reasonable commissars in Moscow and Beijing, did. And that is why Israel’s interests fundamentally diverge from those of the United States. Israel is not playing a grand game from across the ocean; it is trying to survive in a region that is as hostile to it, as Asia and Eastern Europe became to non-Communist countries.

That is why, no matter what speeches politicians deliver, the actual interests of the United States and Israel are only loosely aligned. The United States is trying to protect the tattered fabric of regional stability from Iran and Israel. Israel is trying to protect itself from Iran. The United States needs Israel to promote regional stability by going back to the table and negotiating with the terrorist front groups backed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulfies. Israel needs to protect itself while Obama is too busy telling senior citizens that Paul Ryan will cook them in a frying pan to pay attention to what it’s doing.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been cobbling together a national unity government, which in Israeli terms means that he is either running for sainthood or trying to get as much of the political system behind him as possible in a critical time. It could all be a monumental bluff, a way to panic Obama into taking action out of fear that Israel will act instead. But that would make Netanyahu a very stupid man, and while he is not all that Americans think he is, neither is he likely to be playing such a silly game.

Everyone in the region understands the nature of the countdown. Most of the Sunni Gulfies also privately welcome Israel doing something about Iran’s nuclear weapons, even as they redouble their efforts against the Jewish State to avoid allowing their Shiite enemies to benefit ideologically from a confrontation with the Zionist Entity. The rhetoric out of Iran now echoes the rhetoric out of Egypt in the 1960′s. That buildup eventually ended in a preemptive Israeli strike that destroyed Egypt’s air force.

But in Washington D.C., the countdown is not a real thing. The received wisdom among the press and the political and diplomatic establishments is that Netanyahu is an obstinate paranoid man who is playing games with them. They don’t believe that Israel will do anything about Iran, because they wouldn’t do anything about Iran and they assume that Netanyahu is just like them, only more deceptive because he pretends that he will do something about Iran.

The problem is that Israel really isn’t playing a game. Its political establishment is as bad as that of any Western country. Its politicians are no better than their American or French counterparts, but its survival actually is on the line. Iran isn’t playing a game. That’s why Israel can’t afford to play a game either.

It has become fashionable among Western elites to view aggression as either a posture or madness. They have forgotten that sometimes violence isn’t a move on an international chessboard or a prelude to a set of political steps. Sometimes it’s as simple as one side wanting to kill the other and the other side not wanting to be killed.

In the Middle East ideas that are considered aberrant insanity in the West are commonplace. Killing people is no great big thing. Most regimes do it from time to time to stay in power. Iran dispatched its Islamic militias to kill its own best and brightest in the streets of its capital. Virginity is believed to act as an instant pass to heaven for a woman, so teenage girls sentenced to death must first be forcibly married to their jailers and raped, before being hanged.

The very idea that people think this way is incomprehensible in Washington D.C. But the simple question that Israel has to answer is, if this is what the Ayatollahs do to their own daughters, what would they do to those they consider the spawn of pigs and apes?

Israel already knows the answer to that. When Muslim mobs got their hands on Israeli Jews, before or after independence, they tore them to pieces and then sold snapshots of the remains. The policy of targeting all Jews, men, women and children, is not just something that terrorists do because they have no choice, it is the ideological position of Islamist leaders like Yusuf Al-Qaradawi in Egypt or Rashid Al-Ghannushi in Tunisia, and the policy of the Arab countries fighting Israel.

The liberal West has its illusions about the enemy. Israel has little room for those illusions. It will act when Washington is too busy fighting itself to focus on restraining it. It will act because it is alone as few other countries on earth are. It will act because it cannot afford to be Poland, Czechoslovakia or Tibet– sacrificed in the great game of nations. It will act because it has no real choice but to act. It will act because for it this is not a set of talking points, a diplomatic program or a regional agenda, it is life or death. It will act, because for all its flaws, its survival is on the line.

That sense of a nation’s survival and the life of a people hinging on a single course of action has become an alien one in an insulated world. It is not a thing that Washington D.C or Brussels can take seriously. It is not even a thing that all Israelis take seriously anymore. But those who hear the clock ticking know what is coming. They know the hard choices that will come in the months ahead.

And they will make those choices as they made them before, because they will choose to survive.



Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century. He blogs at sultanknish.blogspot.com/."

Taliban kill Afghan 'party-goers' in Helmand

Seventeen civilians have been killed by Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province, reportedly for attending a party.

The bodies of two women and 15 men were found by the side of a road in the Kajaki district.

They were either beheaded or had had their throats cut. Some showed signs of beatings or had gunshot wounds.