Netanyahu's circus an insult to common sense

Consider this ridiculous theater: In yet another theater of the absurd, the Zionist regime’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, April 30, deployed props and PowerPoint slides in an attempt to distort facts and convince his audience of one – US President Donald Trump - that Iran is failing to comply with the nuclear accord.

From a stage in Tel Aviv Netanyahu claimed, "Iran lied, big time, after signing the nuclear deal in 2015," dramatically unveiling shelves of disks and binders that he was so desperate to prove contain conclusive proof that Iran is still pursuing nukes.

That the "incriminating blueprints, photos, videos, and more" Netanyahu supposedly revealed for the first time on Monday as "evidence" largely consisted of old information that has been repackaged for political purposes but does nothing to undermine the nuclear accord, is beyond dispute. The question, however, is that: How come a country that had no bomb, still went ahead and signed a nuclear deal in 2015 with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, and according to the IAEA’s numerous reports has been in full compliance with the international accord ever since, is still being threatened with economic? Iran is threatened with sanctions and warfare even more than a country like North Korea that has the actual bomb, is not a member of NPT, and hasn’t signed any accord with the United States?

The answer is obvious. By overstating the importance of Iran’s aid to Hamas, Netanyahu and his opinion-makers aim to increase hostilities with Iran, to bolster an increasingly shaky Israeli rationale to justify massacre of unarmed protesters who are demanding return to their usurped and occupied lands.

For years, it has been a commonplace among neoconservatives that Iran is the real source of opposition to the US and the usurper regime of Israel throughout the Middle East, from Palestine to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. After the failed regime-change war on Syria, prominent neoconservatives as well as the Zionist lobby in Washington are doing whatever they can to force the United States to focus less on Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Yemen, and more on Iran.

Similarly, the neoconservatives have taken the current war with Yemen as a sign that “the Saudis cannot finish off the Yemeni revolutionaries” unless Washington takes a harder line with Iran. The argument is that it’s because of Iran that US-backed, Saudi-led war on Yemen failed. They also argue that it’s all because of Iran that the Saudis are left to contend with the Ansarullah resistance fighters, with no avail in sight.

It’s against this backdrop that pathological liar Netanyahu claims Iran has been cheating from day one of signing the historical nuclear deal with the P5+1 group of countries. It’s also against this backdrop that the warmongering hordes in Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh say they have been unable to regime change Iraq, Syria and Yemen to their liking. Far from it.

The United States, the usurper regime of Israel, Saudi Arabia and their terror proxy forces of Daesh and Al-Qaeda lost the twin wars against Syria and Yemen because of the national resistance fronts and mobilization units of those countries. Simply put, Iran sent its military advisors to Syria and Iraq upon an official request from the governments there and as per International Law. The same is true in Yemen. Iran is not involved militarily in that war-torn country either – much less giving them cruise missiles. Else, as maintained by the leaders of Ansarullah, the Yemeni resistance fighter would have been by now in Riyadh!

As for the ongoing Palestinian protests in Gaza, it suffices to state that the enclave has been under Israeli siege for many years now. People have now taken matters into their own hands and they are not taking orders from Hamas at all. They want to restore their right of return and no force in the world can stop that. It is silly to argue that Tehran can “stop and start the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at will.” In Gaza, the real enemy is the Apartheid regime of Israel.

In the prevailing environment, the international civil society should be very skeptical whenever they see PowerPoint slides and figures shown by Netanyahu in the media. Simply put, telling lies about his alleged Iran’s non-compliance or framing the Palestinian conflict as an US-Iran proxy war is a tendentious move by the prime murderer in Tel Aviv that is meant to advance several covert political goals.

As it seems, the Zionist regime and Saudis are setting the scene for indeed a great distraction from domestic troubles in the occupied lands and Saudi Arabia. Yet, the most important objective is giving US President Donald Trump some excuse to justify his abrogation of the nuclear deal.

By the way, it is Israel’s nuclear weapons that pose the greatest threat to Middle Peace, not Iran’s nuclear deal with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. It gets particularly worse when you realize that the United States and other nuclear powers are also hypocritically ignoring their own disarmament commitments in between.

However, it has been well understood by US and European officials since the 1960s that the illegal and dangerous regime of Israel has the capacity to build its own nuclear weapons. Publicly, Israel has a policy of not confirming nor denying its nuclear stockpile, even though by now it is a well-established fact. Since 1968, Israel has amassed a secretive arsenal thought to amount to 200-400 nuclear warheads. In a hacked 2015 email, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote that Israel has “200 nuclear bombs, all targeted on Tehran.” The latter figure might be an underestimation, but there’s no doubt that Israel has the bomb, in significant numbers, and it is willing to use them against any nation that happens to be at loggerheads with its Apartheid policies in occupied Palestine.

Moreover, there seems to have been a deliberate policy of successive US presidents turning a blind eye to what is going on in the occupied lands called ‘Israel’, ignoring their own intelligence briefs. Instead, some like Donald Trump even try unashamedly to derail the current nuclear agreement Iran signed with the P5+1 in 2015. There is no doubt about which side Britain is also on. Britain First, whose deputy leader’s messages Trump re-tweeted recently, is extremely pro-Israel, while Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu is very pro-Trump. Within this sort of context, Israel’s nuclear weapons today are considered far more likely to create a new nuclear nightmare than to stop one like Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

It is indeed time for the international community, particularly those in power in Europe and the United States, to call out Israel for its nuclear weapons. That’s because the only regime in Middle East with a proven, clandestine nuclear weapons stockpile is the child-killer regime of Israel – the same rogue regime that refuses to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT. This hypocrisy cannot be allowed to continue, with Israel having hundreds of nuclear weapons, no inspections and no adherence to any nuclear treaty, calling out Iran on nuclear weapons!

Lest anyone forgets, a striking example of Israel's hypocrisy and refusal to confirm what virtually the entire international community has known for decades came when Netanyahu was asked recently about Israel’s nukes by CNN's Chris Cuomo.

CNN's Chris Cuomo asked, "Does Israel have nuclear capabilities and nuclear weapons, yes or no?" Netanyahu offered an evasive response, claiming "we've always been the first to say we wouldn't introduce it so we haven't introduced it." After Cuomo continued to press for a "yes or no answer," the Zionist regime’s prime minister said, "That's as good an answer as you're going to get."

This should be a wake-up call for the international civil society to realize that it is not Iran they should focus their attention on; rather, the inconvenient fact that Israel continues to shroud its own nuclear stockpile in secrecy as it levels accusations against Iran. Unlike Israel, whose hands have the blot of innocent Palestinians, the Islamic Iran allows the IAEA inspectors to examine its nuclear facilities to prove they are being used for peaceful purposes.

The international civil society, chiefly UN member states, should also speak publicly about the policy of opacity in both Israel and Washington, and ask some tough questions as to why at the political level, no one wants to deal with it. Last of all, the world body should realize that there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo in the Middle East. Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia also wants to have its own nukes and has even threatened to build them. And that's why the UN is required to take immediate action to stage a conference on denuclearization at the earliest; a matter that has been insisted in by Iranian officials at the international forums. The UN is required to exert pressure on dangerously-nuclear armed Israel to declare its nuclear arsenal and join the NPT, and get a resolution that creates a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East for global peace and security.

(Courtesy of FNA)

EA/ME