By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | January 7, 2014
When waging unconventional warfare, timing is everything.
In some pro-Israel circles, President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry are now being hysterically compared to Neville Chamberlain for their alleged “betrayal” of the self-defined “Jewish state” to yet another imminent Holocaust as a result of Obama’s historic, albeit so far limited, rapprochement with today’s supposed equivalent of a genocidal Nazi regime in Tehran and Kerry’s sustained diplomatic effort to get Israel to return to its so-called “Auschwitz borders” prior to its premeditated 1967 Land Grab. In light of this dual “existential threat” posed by the Obama administration to a Greater Israel, the interview given to Israeli TV by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first published documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the scope of U.S. spying worldwide, is as close to a “game theory warfare” smoking gun as you’re going to get.
Speaking to Israel’s Channel 10 — whose biggest shareholder, cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder, is President of the World Jewish Congress — Greenwald criticized “the continued imprisonment of Jonathan Pollard,” who was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after passing more than a million highly classified documents to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy. (Incidentally, Channel 10 owner Lauder is also a supporter of clemency for Pollard.) As reported today by Haaretz, here’s what Greenwald told his Israeli audience about the spy, who, in the words of former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, “did more damage to the United States than any spy in history”:
Greenwald agreed that the Snowden revelations are relevant to Pollard’s case. “When the U.S. government goes around the world criticizing other countries for spying on allies and prosecuting them,” he said, “are they going to maintain that with a straight face when they’re doing exactly that?”
It’s proper to raise Pollard’s case in the context of U.S. spying on its Israeli ally, he continued, because that underscores the hypocrisy of what the U.S. itself is doing. The U.S. government, Greenwald charged, does exactly what it accuses its enemies of doing, and no country has the right to say other countries shouldn’t do something while it is secretly violating that very same taboo.
While some may be willing to concede that Greenwald’s charge of U.S. government hypocrisy is perfectly valid, the acclaimed “independent” journalist’s remarks that American national security does not require surveillance of its so-called “ally” in Tel Aviv is at best naïve, at worst disingenuous:
Asked about the U.S. government’s claim that the purpose of the eavesdropping is to fight terrorism, he responded by citing the documents’ revelations that the NSA eavesdropped on both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Israeli officials, asking, Does the U.S. government think Angela Merkel is a terrorist? Or that democratically elected Israeli officials are involved in terror?
Although many Greeks and other Europeans may justifiably view Chancellor Merkel’s austerity measures as a form of economic terrorism, could Greenwald seriously be oblivious to Israel’s long track record of terrorism, not only its state terrorism against the indigenous Palestinians and their neighbours but its less widely-known, albeit acknowledged, false flag terror attacks on its American benefactor and imperial proxy?
Given the account of the “Five Dancing Shlomos” caught celebrating in Liberty Park, New Jersey as the twin towers burned on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as much other well-documented evidence pointing toward Israeli complicity in the 9/11 attacks — seized on with great alacrity by Israel loyalists such as Joe Lieberman as a pretext to strip Americans of much of their constitutional rights while others such as Michael Chertoff profited from the hyped “need” for greater “security” in the post-9/11 “Homeland” — what kind of journalist genuinely concerned about civil liberties would deny that monitoring the conversations of a “spook, terrorist or criminal” such as Netanyahu, a harsh critic of NSA spying who infamously admitted that 9/11 as “very good” for Israel, is an essential requirement of any genuine fight against terrorism?
Like that other much-adored Jewish “critic of Israel” Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald would appear to be just the latest branded anti-imperial “hero” serving to provide cover for a less transparent Israeli agenda.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter @O_Cathail.