Bassem Tamimi: "Our destiny is to resist"

Max Blumenthal

The Electronic Intifada

2 May 2011

Bassem Tamimi at his court hearing in Ofer prison, 12 April 2011. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)

When I met Bassem Tamimi at his home in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh this January, his eyes were bloodshot and sunken, signs of the innumerable sleepless nights he had spent waiting for Israeli soldiers to take him to prison. As soon as two children were seized from the village in the middle of the night and subjected to harsh interrogations that yielded an unbelievable array of “confessions,” the 44-year-old Tamimi’s arrest became inevitable. On 25 March, the army finally came, dragging him away to Ofer military prison, a Guantanamo-like West Bank facility where he had previously been held for a 12-month term for the vaguely defined crime of “incitement.” His trial before a military court that convicts more than 99 percent of Palestinians brought before it is scheduled to begin on 8 May.

Like nearly all of his neighbors, Tamimi has spent extended time in Israeli detention facilities and endured brutal treatment there. In 1993, he was arrested on suspicion of having murdered an Israeli settler in Beit El. Tamimi was severely tortured for weeks by the Israeli Shin Bet in order to extract a confession from him. Tamimi said that during the torture he was dropped from a high ceiling onto a concrete floor and woke up a week later in an Israeli hospital. In the end, he was cleared of all charges.

With his wife, Nariman, and his brother, Naji, Tamimi has been at the center of Nabi Saleh’s popular resistance against the occupation since its inception in 2009. The village’s unarmed struggle has brought hundreds of Israelis and international activists to participate each Friday in boisterous and theatrical demonstrations that invariably encounter harsh Israeli violence, including the use of live ammunition against children. While other villages involved in the popular struggle have seen their ranks winnowed out by a harsh regime of repression and imprisonment, Nabi Saleh’s protests continue unabated, irking the army and frustrating the settlers of Halamish, who intend to expand their illegal colony further onto Nabi Saleh’s land.
Tamimi and I spoke amid the din of a stream of visitors parading in and out of his living room, from international activists living in the village to local children to a group of adolescent boys from the nearby town of Qurawa, who told me they came to spend time with Tamimi and his family “because this is what the Palestinian struggle is about.” Tamimi is a high school teacher in Ramallah and his professorial nature is immediately apparent. As soon as I arrived at his front door for what I thought would be a casual visit, he sat me down for an hour-long lesson on the history, attitudes and strategy that inform the brand of popular struggle he and his neighbors had devised during weekly meetings at the village cultural center.
Our discussion stretched from the origins of Nabi Saleh’s resistance in 1967 to the Oslo Accords, when the village was sectioned into two administrative areas (Areas B and C), leaving all residents of the Israeli-controlled portion (Area C) vulnerable to home demolition and arbitrary arrests. Tamimi insisted to me that Nabi Saleh’s residents are not only campaigning to halt the expropriation of their land, they seek to spread the unarmed revolt across all of occupied Palestine. “The reason the army wants to break our model [of resistance] is because we are offering the basis for the third intifada,” Tamimi said.

Max Blumenthal: There are rumors that the Israeli civilian administration will demolish your home if you continue the popular resistance. Is there any truth to that and on what grounds can they carry out the demolition?
Bassem Tamimi: My house was built in 1964 when this area was controlled by Jordan. Back then it was easy for me to get a permit to renovate. Now when I want to add a second level to the house for my family of course I can’t get a permit from the Israelis so I am forbidden to build. In this way they are forcing the next generation of our village to move to Area B in the center of the village. Their goal is to carry out a form of indirect transfer that will make Nabi Saleh into a refugee camp in the near future. The village will then be nothing more than a hotel that provides workers for the Palestinian Authority, maybe with no school and definitely with no relation to our land, since we will be forced off of all the parts we can farm. In the future, Area C will be empty and all of us who live there will have to move to places like Birzeit which are located in Area A.
I wanted to build a wall around my garden and I didn’t do it. The reason I didn’t was that it would have only been demolished since I am not able to get a permit. I didn’t want to risk them demolishing my house. All the new houses built after Oslo were in Area B but we have not been able to build a single new house in Area C.
MB: How has the expansion of the nearby illegal Jewish settlement Halamish influenced the popular resistance in Nabi Saleh?
BT: In 1976, the settlers came to an old British military camp on our land. The next year they built a settlement called Halamish. I asked one of them what right he had to the land. He told me his right was in the Bible. The Labor government blocked construction of the settlement, but a year later when Menachem Begin and Likud were elected, they allowed it to go ahead. During the second intifada, the army made the whole area around our village a closed military zone. This allowed Halamish to expand even more onto our land. Then in 2008 the army demolished the second fence around our village, another step for more expansion. So we see the steps they are taking to push us out of Area C and off our land.
Our problem is not just with the settlement of Halamish. Our problem is the whole occupation. The settlement is merely a face of the occupation. In Bilin and Nilin they set specific goals like moving the separation fence to the green line [Israel’s internationally-recognized armistice line with the occupied West Bank]. That is a problem. Our only goal is to end the occupation. So if the American consul came to us and said, “I am Superwoman; I can immediately remove Halamish,” I would say, “Fine, but we want to end the whole occupation.”
MB: When did Nabi Saleh choose to wage an unarmed popular struggle and why?
BT: This village has a long history of resistance. It is part our culture. We have had 18 martyrs since 1967. Most of our youth are taken away to prison. I have been arrested ten times and placed under administrative detention.
We have experience in military resistance but we decided the best way to resist was nonviolent. We want to build a model that looks like the first intifada, an alternative to military resistance. Our village knows exactly what to do because we were involved in the intifada. And the reason the army wants to break our model is because we are offering the basis for the third intifada.
For my whole life most of the Israelis I met were soldiers and interrogators. But when we started the popular resistance in 2009 I began to see that there were some Israelis who had removed the occupation from their minds. Like Jonathan [Pollack], who was the main person to bring Israelis and internationals here in the beginning. So we became friends.
The occupation is continuous in Israeli society and this is why they lose — because they try to force us to accept them as an occupier, and that will never happen. We don’t have any problem with Jewish people. Our problem is with Zionism. We don’t hate them on the other side; we simply demand that they end the occupation of their minds. The separation between us is between different ways of thinking, not between land. If we change our ways of thought and remove the mentality of occupation from our minds — not just from the land — we can live together and build a paradise.
MB: Your demonstrations have been criticized by outsiders because the throw stones at the soldiers. Meanwhile, the Israeli army claims stone-throwing is an armed attack or a form of violence so the popular resistance is not really nonviolent. What do you make of these claims?
BT: We are building the popular struggle from our culture and our history. Only after we build an authentic struggle do we begin to debate our tactics. And throwing stones is a part of our culture. Historically we threw stones when something frightened us like a snake or a bear. Now, when a soldier comes into our village and shoots tear gas we won’t just sit there like a victim. They are protected from live bullets so we’re clearly not trying to take a life. With stones we are simply saying, “We don’t accept you here as an occupier. We don’t welcome you as a conqueror.”
MB: What is your relationship with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority like?
BT: We had an intifada based on popular struggle but the Oslo accords crushed it. Now the people are tired after the second intifada was crushed. So Fatah talks and talks but they can’t manage to bring [the popular struggle] across the West Bank. Fayyad wants to come here and be seen and use our struggle as a theater to have his picture taken. We know that Fatah could bring thousands of people here but they don’t want to. They don’t order their members to join the struggle. We want to ask them to make popular struggle everywhere. We do all that we can but without them, we can only do so much.
MB: Do you see any role for the peace process in ending the occupation?
BT: In thirty years the Europeans and the United States paid 5 billion dollars for normalization projects but they give us no steps towards a solution. If they want to do something to stop the occupation they should stop these initiatives that put people up in five star hotels to do dialogue. It’s not common sense! And all these academics who come here to study us and then go and write about how throwing stones is violent — that means nothing to us! Popular resistance is a way of life that means being close to the ground. I’ve been in the dialogue workshops and they are a complete waste of money. Both sides are suffering under the occupation but in a different way. [Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit was captured but who sent him to occupy and kill? The normalization initiatives never address questions like this.
MB: One of the key differences between the demonstrations in Nabi Saleh and in a place like Nilin is the role of women. Every time I come here on a Friday the women are at the front of the protest while in Nilin they are not always that visible. Is this deliberate?
BT: From the beginning of our struggle the Israelis targeted the women of our village. For example, my wife, Nariman, was arrested and jailed for ten days. The army targets the women here because they know our culture; they know that we see women as 50 percent of our struggle and no less. Women [raise] our children. Women can convince people more easily than men. When our men see the women being brave, they want to be more brave. Women are in the center of our struggle because we believe women are more important than men. It’s that simple.
MB: What do you think army’s long-term objective is?
BT: The army is determined to push us toward violent resistance. They realize that the popular resistance we are waging with Israelis and internationals from the outside, they can’t use their tanks and bombs. And this way of struggling gives us a good reputation. Suicide bombing was a big mistake because it allowed Israel to say we are terrorists and then to use that label to force us from our land. We know they want a land without people — they only want the land and the water — so our destiny is to resist. They give us no other choice.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author working in Israel-Palestine. His articles and video documentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al-Jazeera English and many other publications. He is a writing fellow for the Nation Institute. His book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party, is a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

Interview: Hamas lawmaker defies order to leave Jerusalem

 

Jillian Kestler-D'Amours

The Electronic Intifada

20 April 2011

Muhammad Totah (Jillian Kestler-D’Amours)

Approximately a hundred persons gathered in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah on Friday, 15 April for midday prayer, and to show their solidarity with three Palestinian politicians who have lived inside a makeshift tent at the International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters since last July.
Shortly after the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections, three Jerusalem deputies and the former minister of Jerusalem affairs — Muhammad Abu Tir, Ahmad Attoun, Muhammad Totah and Khaled Abu Arafeh, respectively — were told by Israeli authorities that they must resign from the Hamas-led Palestinian government or have their East Jerusalem permanent resident status revoked.
Prosecuted before an Israeli military court, the four Hamas-affiliated lawmakers were sentenced to two to four years in Israeli prison when they refused to resign from their posts. Shortly after their release in the summer of 2010, the Israeli authorities again threatened to forcibly transfer the men and strip them of their East Jerusalem residency rights.
Muhammad Abu Tir was arrested on 30 June 2010 when he refused to leave the city. The next day, the three remaining deputies took refuge at the International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem to avoid a similar fate. As of Friday, 15 April 2011, when the following interview was conducted, they had spent 289 days living there.
The Electronic Intifada contributor Jillian Kestler-D’Amours spoke with Muhammad Totah about why he and his colleagues decided to request help from the Red Cross, the impact the situation has had on his family, and what he hopes for in the future.

Jillian Kestler-D’Amours: What led you and your colleagues to seek refuge at the Red Cross headquarters?

Muhammad Totah: Our case started in 2006, when there were [Palestinian Legislative Council] elections in the [occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem]. … All the factions participated in the elections. [The international community] said that they wanted us as Palestinians to practice democracy. They said that they will respect the results. The election was fair and free and it was monitored and witnessed by the international community. But after the results were announced, the international community denied the results and refused to deal with the [Hamas] list Change and Reform, which won in these elections.
Four or five months after these elections, the Israeli occupation [authorities] arrested 64 [persons]. All of them were ministers in the government, deputies in the parliament and mayors. Me and my other three colleagues from East Jerusalem [Ahmad Attoun, Muhammad Abu Teir and Khaled Abu Arafeh] have endured what our colleagues have endured and I have spent time in the prison, three and a half years.
I was released on 2 June 2010. After one day only, they gave me and my other three colleagues an order to leave Israel within ten days. The main reason given was that we are disloyal to Israel because we participated in the election and we have been members in the Palestinian parliament. They have asked us to resign from the parliament.
After three or four days, they have arrested one of our colleagues, Muhammad Abu Tir, on 30 June. We thought that our case would be the same. For that reason, on 1 July 2010, we came to the Red Cross, to the headquarters here in East Jerusalem, to put our case on the [radar] of the international community.
JKD: What will happen if you and your colleagues are deported from Jerusalem?

MT: It means deporting thousands of people from East Jerusalem for disloyalty. This word does not have any dimensions or any measures, so they can claim that anybody living in East Jerusalem … is disloyal to the Israeli occupation and then deport him. We know that it is one of the main objectives of the Israeli plan to empty East Jerusalem of the Palestinian people.
East Jerusalem is an occupied territory and it is illegal to deport people who are under occupation. It is now the tenth month that we haven’t left these headquarters. If we leave it, then we will be immediately arrested.
We think the only way to cancel the decision of the deportation is with the intervention of the international community. We are constantly asking the international community to uphold its responsibility regarding us, since we are occupied and it is their responsibility to take care of the people who are under occupation.
JKD: What impact has the situation had on you personally and on your family?


MT: We and our families are suffering from this separation since we have been in the prison, and we are again now separated from our children, from our wives.
I have five children. Most of them couldn’t understand the situation here because it is the first time that people are coming and [seeking refuge] in the Red Cross. It is the first time in the history of Palestine. So they couldn’t understand. They have understood that when we were in the prison, that the Israelis have imprisoned us. They understand that we have been deported but they couldn’t understand, why here? Why are we living in the Red Cross?
My little child, each time he comes here, he takes my hand he says, ‘OK, I can understand that when you were in the prison, the door was closed so you couldn’t go out. I can understand that. But now I can’t understand that the gate is open, it’s a very big gate, and you cannot go out.’
‘You have very strong legs, you can go,’ he says. He takes my hand and goes to the gate and asks me, ‘Come on, I can take you if you cannot go out.’ Then, he starts to cry and says, ‘OK, it means that you do not like me and my brothers. You hate us.’ And then he goes running to his mother.
He’s now six years old; who can explain to him the situation? I tried. And I have asked many of my friends to try with him to explain. But he couldn’t understand.

JKD: What do you think will happen in the future?

MT: We don’t have very many choices. The only choice that we have is to leave this headquarters but that means opening the door to deporting thousands of people from East Jerusalem. It is very dangerous.
It is not easy to put yourself in one place and not move. It is very difficult. We feel that it is more difficult than prison. Because prison, the decision to go out is not [yours] because the door is closed. It is not your decision to go or not to go. Here, it is your decision, to leave or not to leave.
We know that we have to endure what we are enduring now for the benefit of our people, for the Palestinian people. For that reason, we will not leave even though it is very difficult for us. We are hoping that the international community will uphold its responsibility.

Jillian Kestler-D’Amours is a reporter and documentary filmmaker based in Jerusalem. More of her work can be found at http://jkdamours.com/.

Breathing a word of truth about 9/11 will kill your career: Kevin Barrett

- 19. Apr, 2011

ED NOTE:

Kevin Barrett might have gained a bit more credibility with the great unbelieving kafir American public if he had left out some of his religious” zeal for “jihad,” and not turned the work into some religious crusade, but his thrusts at the press, the public blindness and failure to “believe,” the way they treat hard truths, and the duplicity of the officialdom as well as the false and non-evidence involved in the story of 9-11, are all to the point, and effective thrusts to the heart of the matter.

Altogether, a thoroughly effective interview by Kourosh Ziabari with Kevin Barrett.
***

Interview by Kourosh Ziabari

Kevin Barrett is a renowned American journalist, writer and former university lecturer. He has taught English, French, Arabic, American Civilization, Humanities, African Literature, Folklore, and Islam at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin. Being a Muslim convert, Dr. Barrett is a founding member of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance (MUJCA) and member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11 (SPINE).

According to Salem-News, In July 2004 he rashly rejected a plum post-doc at the University of California because it was funded by the 9/11-disinformation-sponsoring CIA-linked Ford Foundation. “In the summer of 2006, Republican state legislators and Fox newscasters demanded that Barrett be fired from his job teaching an introductory Islam class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but the University refused to buckle, and Barrett got high marks from his students.”
In fall 2006 Barrett began hosting an Internet talk show weekly on Republic Broadcasting Network titled “Truth Jihad Radio.” Twice a week he had another Internet talk show on the Genesis Communications Network called “The Dynamic Duo.”
Dr. Barrett is internationally renowned for his well-substantiated researches on the 9/11 which he describes as a false-flag operation and inside job which took place with the foreknowledge of the high-ranking personalities inside the U.S. executive structure.
He wrote three articles for the Madison’s Capital Times newspaper in which he tried to reveal the truth behind the 9/11 attacks; however, the newspaper was shortly closed after running his articles.
Kevin Barrett kindly accepted my interview request and joined me in an in-depth conversation, answering my questions regarding the 9/11 attacks and the influence of Israeli lobby over the U.S. policymakers. What follows is the complete text of my interview with Dr. Kevin Barrett, journalist, writer and university lecturer.

Kourosh Ziabari: You have selected the title “Truth Jihad” for your personal website. Although being functionally and semantically a sublime and precious concept in Islamic thought, Jihad has been constantly vilified and denigrated by the extremist neo-cons and Zionists who want to portray a distorted and black image of Islam. They claim that Jihad is tantamount to terrorism and Muslims who follow the principle of Jihad are terrorists as well; however, the reality is that Jihad is a mobilized, logically sustained and concerted confrontation with those who want to plunder your values and treasures and violate your rights. Although you’re a Muslim convert, you are a Western citizen; however, you have selected an Islamic name for your website. Would you please explain about this selection for me and my readers?

Kevin Barrett: Being a Western citizen and a convert does not make me any less of a Muslim. Islam, after all is a deen, a religion and a way of life, not a race or ethnicity.
In any case, jihad is a noble religious concept. As you know, the word means “effort” or “striving.” In one sense, jihad is the complement of “Islam” whose root meaning is “surrender” to God. So jihad means to exert effort in the cause of God.
One very intense form of effort, exertion or striving in the cause of God is armed struggle in defense of the community. Those who wage this form of jihad risk everything in an all-out struggle in service to the community and to God.
Today, Islam as a deen, and the world Muslim community, is under attack. 9/11 was a mass human sacrifice designed to ritually inaugurate a New World Order of global government by satanists and atheists. With Christianity and the other big religions co-opted or neutered, only Islam stands between the perpetrators of 9/11 and their goal of a New World Order. Under these circumstances, is incumbent upon Muslims to wage effective jihad in self-defense and in defense of our religion, and in defense of all of our fellow human beings and our planet, fi sabili llah [in the way of God].
After thinking things through, I have concluded that the most effective way that I can wage jihad is by wielding the weapon of truth — especially the truth about 9/11. The 9/11 perpetrators seem to have made several big mistakes and left unmistakable evidence incriminating themselves. Their single biggest mistake, apparently, was failing to demolish World Trade Center Building 7 on the morning of 9/11; presumably due to some logistical problem, they had to wait to demolish it until late that afternoon. Anyone who spends a few minutes informing themselves about WTC-7 must either choose intellectual dishonesty, or admit that 9/11 was an inside job. See:


http://youtu.be/MxmdYOorqs0

When Americans and Westerners face the fact that 9/11 was an inside job, their attitude toward Islam, and the New World Order’s war on Islam, changes radically. They realize that they, and Muslims, share a common enemy. They become deserters from the war on Islam, and join the oppressed peoples of the world, and the bearers of the scriptures, in a common struggle for justice.
While I am very serious about waging this “truth jihad,” I realize that Western culture fears and loathes the word “jihad.” So I use a technique common in certain forms of comic literature — for example, the novel Don Quixote — of being simultaneously serious and humorous. I make fun of myself by using hyperbole (exaggeration) in order to play the role of the “crazy radical jihadi for truth.” What is most hilarious, and most deeply serious, is that this “crazy radical jihadi” character I’m playing, like King Lear’s fool, is the only sane character in the play, the only one who understands and tells the whole, painful truth. The humor makes my uncompromisingly honest message palatable for Western audiences. As the saying goes, “If you tell the truth, make it funny or they’ll kill you.”
By accepting this role, which Allah’s qadr seems to have prepared for me, I am straddling the boundary between Islamic and Western culture, between seriousness and humor, between reality and imagination, in a unique way. As an American Muslim literary scholar with an odd Irish sense of humor, and a whole lot of outrage about 9/11 and the 9/11 wars, this is my way of waging jihad fi sabili llah.

KZ: What’s your precise stance on the 9/11 attacks? Do you believe that the U.S. officials had foreknowledge of the incident? Do you think that it was an inside job or a false flag operation? Have you traced any sign of the Israel’s involvement in the attacks?


KB: To know means to believe based on sufficient evidence. So I know, not just believe, that 9/11 was a false-flag attack, that many individuals at or near the top of the US Executive Branch, military, and intelligence apparatus were complicit in the attack, and that the state of Israel and its American agents were heavily involved. This is the inescapable conclusion of anyone who reads David Ray Griffin’s books on the subject, alongside Bollyn’s Solving 9/11, with an open mind.

KZ: Your publication “Bin Laden’s Dead, the Tape is Phony” is considered to be the first pro-9/110-truth op-ed ever written and published in a mainstream media outlet. You have written three such op-eds in “Capital Times” of Madison. Why don’t the mainstream media publish op-eds and articles revealing the truth of 9/11 attack? Why do they shun the publication of materials which are critical of the mainstream interpretation of the attacks?

KB: The American mainstream media are owned by just a few huge corporations, and thoroughly penetrated by the CIA. Google “Operation Mockingbird”. The owners and key decision-makers of these outlets are disproportionately Jewish and pro-Zionist (see Philip Weiss’s “Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What if We Do?”). Deep down inside, a great many of these Zionists suspect the truth about 9/11, and are terrified that if revealed it could trigger an anti-Jewish pogram and/or the destruction of Israel. Additionally, many Americans, Jewish and otherwise, who are not Zionists, feel threatened by the possibility that the truth about 9/11 would reveal them as fools, and perhaps even annihilate their whole world-view. It is difficult for journalists who are trained to believe that America is an exceptional nation, and that America’s leaders always have good intentions, to believe that their own leaders would conspire in the ritual slaughter of thousands of their own people. The few who are cynical enough to realize how evil their leaders are, are also cynical enough to know on which side their bread is buttered. Everyone in the media knows that breathing a word of truth about 9/11 will kill your career. It may not be coincidental that shortly after publishing my three 9/11 truth op-eds, the Capital Times was closed down by the company that owned it, leaving Madison with only one newspaper: The lying, corrupt Wisconsin State Journal.

KZ: In October 2004, the 9/11 hero William Rodriguez filed a lawsuit against the then President George W. Bush and 155 other parties and accused them of complicity in the 9/11 attacks. He claimed that the Twin Towers were devastated by means of “controlled demolitions” which the members of New York fire department were ordered on instructions of the CIA. Is it true that FDNY conspired with Larry Silverstein under the patronage of CIA to deliberately destroy the Twin Towers?

KB: The short answer is “yes.” But it should be noted that the NY Fire Department was not complicit as a whole department. Rather, its leadership is penetrated by the CIA and perhaps Mossad, in the same way that state governments, state and local police departments, the FBI and other agencies are penetrated by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. According to Jesse Ventura, upon his inauguration as Governor of Minnesota, a group of state government officials who were also undercover CIA officers summoned him to a briefing in which it was made clear who was really running the State of Minnesota. The FDNY is undoubtedly infiltrated as well. Larry Silverstein’s hesitation in mentioning the “er…Fire Department Commander” who decided to “pull” WTC-7 suggests that this “FDNY Commander” was actually a high level intelligence operative whose job may have included a cover position in FDNY.

KZ: Physicist Dr. Crockett Grabbe has pointed out in a 2007 article that the NIST account of the 9/11 attacks has been thoroughly erroneous, unrealistic and fallacious. He has pointed out that “the rapidly expanding huge concrete dust clouds from the towers, the very-quick appearance of multiple squibs on all 3 collapsing buildings, and the destruction of hundreds of autos for several blocks around the World Trade Center from these squibs” indicate that the Twin Towers did not simply collapse as a result of the planes crashing into the towers, but due to explosive materials. Jim Hoffman’s article also attests to the same fact and admits the presence of unignited aluminothermic explosives in dust samples from the Twin Towers, whose chemical signature matches previously documented aluminothermic residues found in the same dust samples. What does this fact signify? Who should be held accountable if we admit that the explosive materials brought down the Twin Towers?

KB: Everyone who is lying about it and who should know better — meaning the entire GW Bush Administration, the top levels of the military and intelligence command, all of the NIST people responsible for the scientific fraud represented by NIST’s reports on the WTC, and a great many others (see www.whodidit.org/) should be immediately arrested and aggressively interrogated, with relatively leniency offered in exchange for the whole truth delivered in a timely manner. If our judicial system cannot do this, citizens, including honest police and military, should arm themselves in preparation to make citizens arrests in what will amount to a second American revolution. Likewise, foreign nations ought to demand the truth about 9/11, and to cut off all relations with the USA until war crimes prosecutions reveal the full truth about 9/11 and the 9/11 wars.

KZ: You are a founding member of the Muslim-Jewish-Christina Alliance which is aimed at improving interfaith dialogue, coexistence and understanding in light of the 9/11 events. It’s a very fantastic goal to bring together the followers of divine religion and improve mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence between them; however, there are people who don’t tolerate this religious convergence and want to sow the seeds of incompatibility, dissention and strife between the Muslims, Jews and Christians. They are extremist and radical conservatives who follow the Marx’s viewpoint that religion is the “opium of masses”, hence downgrading interfaith dialogue and undermining it. How is it possible to realize an all-out, all-encompassing interfaith dialogue while the media moguls, hawkish statesmen and warmongering politicians want to bring about conflict and disagreement between the followers of divine religions?

KB: That is a very good question! I am disappointed at the slow progress of 9/11 truth in the Jewish and Christian communities, and by the failure of the global Muslim community to offer its full support to the 9/11 truth movement. The New World Order atheists and satanists have cleverly pitted the revealed religions against each other, while fostering an atmosphere of hopelessness and despondency that prevents many from taking action. Since Muslims by and large are better acquainted with the facts, both about 9/11, and about the brother- and sisterhood between good followers of the revealed religions, I think Muslims need to take the initiative in reaching out to those Christians and Jews who will listen. An excellent resource is the work of Mark Siljander, a conservative Christian who has come to understand the considerable similarities between Islam and Christianity. http://www.marksiljander.com/

KZ: The United States and its European allies invaded two Muslim countries following the 9/11 attacks under the pretext of eradicating terrorism and combating religious fundamentalism in these countries. They branded Iran as a part of the so-called Axis of Evil and threatened Tehran of a military strike several times during the years since 9/11 attacks. Who is, in your view, the real terrorist? Who has spread violence and unrest in the Middle East? Does the United States have enough credibility and reputation among the nations of the region to assert that it looks for their well-being and safety? Who has murdered 1 million Iraqis in 8 years and displaced thousands of others? Who turned Afghanistan into the world’s number one smuggler of narcotics and drugs? Overall, what’s your estimation of the military expedition of the United States to the region and its consequences?

KB: The question answers itself! Seriously, the US completely lacks credibility and moral authority, and has no business threatening anybody, or even offering anybody advice, until it solves its internal problems, starting with the crime of 9/11. The US and its psychopathic settler colony, Israel, should leave the Middle East and prepare to pay trillions in reparations to the people of that ravaged region. So who will fill the vacuum? Iran and Turkey are the two countries in the region that have developed a degree of moral authority and leadership, and their respective forms of Islamic democracy will be the obvious models as the US-puppet Arab dictators fall. I hope these two great Islamic democracies will engage in close cooperation rather than competition, perhaps leading to the restoration of the caliphate in the form of a loose federation that would eventually expand to include all of the Muslim-majority countries.

KZ: What’s your estimation of the plight of Palestinian people under the Israeli occupation? We already know that both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claim that the Land of Israel historically belongs to them and that they are the genuine inhabitants of the Land and should be allowed unrestricted freedom to live in a state which they’ve been endowed with by the Almighty God. Who says the truth? Who is righteous in this conflict? Do the Israelis have the right to occupy the Palestinian lands under the pretext that six million Jews were massacred by the Nazi regime in the Second World War? What’s your take on that?

KB: Clearly, whatever the Germans did to the Jews cannot possibly justify the theft of even one square foot of Palestinian land. Those struggling against Zionism, including the real Jews of Naturei Karta, are the righteous ones in this conflict. I believe that Zionism’s days are numbered, and that the Palestinians will reclaim their land within my lifetime or my children’s, God willing.

KZ: Please tell us a little about the situation of press freedom in the West. We are usually told that the American media are unrestrictedly free to publish materials critical of the government and propagate ideas which the regime is not content with. Is it true that the United States, as proclaimed by former President Bush, is a “beacon of freedom” with equal rights for the minorities, political dissidents and non-conformist thinkers?

KB: Here in the USA, those of us in the genuinely alternative media are remarkably free to express ourselves. I can say nearly anything I want to say on my radio shows and in my blog posts. But the “genuinely alternative media” is kept very small and under-funded. When someone from the genuinely alternative media develops a broad audience, like Alex Jones, he will be pressured to tone it down — especially by the Zionists. It’s no accident that the one line Alex Jones will not cross is the borderline of anti-Zionism. Because he has such a large audience, if Alex Jones were to try to steer his audience toward anti-Zionism, something bad would probably happen to end his career, and perhaps his life.
It does seem strange that the biggest limit on press freedom here concerns speaking out against Zionist interests. Helen Thomas and others have found that out the hard way. In today’s USA, it is much easier to criticize American interests and get away with it than to criticize Zionism.

Apparently the Zionists have the USA in a stranglehold, a real death-grip, thanks primarily to the 9/11 coup d’état. And they are doing their best to force the US into a war against Iran. Such a war would serve Israeli interests, but badly damage American interests, and the interests of humanity. So far, the American leadership has refused to take this suicidal step. By helping educate the American people about 9/11 and other Zionist false-flag attacks, and by helping them free themselves from Zionist control and Zionist conditioning, we can help save both the Iranian and American people from a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian media correspondent, freelance journalist and interviewer. He is a contributing writer of Finland’s Award-winning Ovi Magazine and the the Foreign Policy Journal. He is a member of Tlaxcala Translators Network for Linguistic Diversity (Spain). He is also a member of World Student Community for Sustainable Development (WSC-SD). Kourosh Ziabari’s articles have appeared in a number of Canadian, Belgian, Italian, French and German websites. He can be reached at kziabari@gmail.com

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian