Opinion Editorials, December 2011

Mark Dankof, Omar Nashabi, and Philip Giraldi Interviewed by Press TV on Israeli Threats to Attack Iran

Press TV, Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, December 8, 2011

'Anti-Iran sanctions tantamount to war'

Interview with Mark Dankof, political commentator Share

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Israel has been keeping up its anti-Iran rhetoric despite growing domestic and international opposition.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Tel Aviv will take drastic measures to “protect” itself. He was speaking at the annual memorial service for Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. He said Gurion was under great pressure to avoid declaring Israel's foundation in 1948.

Israeli media suggest Netanyahu was implying that Israel would go ahead with its aggressive plan against Iran and would resist objections just like what Gurion did.

Political commentator, Mark Dankof joins Press TV from San Antonio to share his opinions on the issue.

The video offers the opinions of two additional guests: Omar Nashabi, a judicial affairs expert from Beirut, and Philip Giraldi who is a former CIA officer. What follows is the transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Israel has been retching up its war rhetoric against Iran in the past few months. What do you make of Netanyahu's recently claimed "history lesson"? What is behind Israel's rhetoric? What is it trying to achieve?

Dankof: I think the answer to that is to be found in a couple of essays that are currently on the internet. M.J. Rosenberg has a piece for the so-called political correctness site that deals with the American enterprise institute admitting that Israel's increasingly militant attitude toward Iran has little of anything to do with the Iran's alleged nuclear program and its alleged nuclear weaponized program.

The other essay is that of Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya which can be found in Intifada Palestine and also Global Research dealing in the title that piece is 'Iran and the strategic encirclement of Syria and Lebanon'. Israel basically wants to maintain hegemony in the region as the leading power and the only power in that region when it comes to ultimate military strength and its relying, of course, upon the United States and Britain principally to continue backing it and virtually anything that it does.

This is absolutely disastrous for the region of course and will be similarly disastrous for the United States and for Great Britain and for Europe for pulling into what it is that Netanyahu wants to do.

Press TV: Mark, let's look at the relationship between the US and Israel specifically when it comes to the issue of the attack and the rhetoric on Iran. Now, first of all, would you agree that Washington is actually having the same stance of Israel but rather it does not want to make it public, it does not want to be supporting that publicly and also with things that have been said by Ron Paul, why should the US even team up with Israel?

Dankof: That is exactly right. I would argue and I suspect that some of the other guests would argue that it is not in the true American national interest to be supporting Israel at all. The fact of the matter is that when you look at what they are doing in Iran, it is not an accident that the Washington Post reported just a few days ago that there has been fivefold increase in unexplained bomb blast in Iran just in the last year or the last two years.

This involves military isolations, oil and natural gas sites and so forth and so on. It becomes very clear especially when we understand the relationship between the Israeli Mossad and the CIA, on the one hand, and the Mojahidin E Khalq (MEK) and the Kurdistan Pezhak Organization and the Jundallah Organization operating out of Pakistan and conjunction with the MEK that there is really a full-fledged undercover war going on against Iran right now, in terms of these bomb blasts, in terms of the MEK's assassination of these three Iranian nuclear scientists presumably at the behest of the Israeli Mossad are continued violation of Iranian airspace with surveillance drones, not to mention all of these economic sanctions including ones that are now beginning to target Iran's Central Bank.

So the war has actually started. It is just the question of when the wider shooting war begins and like Dr. Giraldi (the other guest in the show), I believe that Netanyahu is fully capable of arranging a false flag incident, be that in Israel, be that in Iran, be that in the Persian Gulf, be that in Europe or the United states that can depend on Iran falsely and they will then justify a further escalation in American, Israeli and British aggression against the Iranian regime.

This is a terrifying time frankly and in conjunctions with the economic problems in the West, it suggests that Benjamin Netanyahu may simply drag Americans by the nose into something that is not in their national interest because again the power of the Jewish lobby in the United States is unquestioned.

If you follow the money trail into these American congressional races, if you look at the amount of Jewish influence that exists in the American news media and in the American educational system, it is clear what is happening here and I am afraid the United States is somehow tragically is going to become more involved.

Press TV: The next question is about Israel's position in the Middle East. There has been a lot of concern about Israel's nuclear weapons for instance and WMD. Ron Paul has been raising that concern and also even for the people in the United States.

He is talking about the nuclear stockpiles of Israel. Do you think that this alliance between the US and Israel is starting to turn into a liability rather than an asset for the United States at least when the people look at it?

Dankof: This relationship is a liability for the United States in every conceivable way and always has been. It is a liability politically in terms of our standing in the world, not to mention in the Middle East and in central Asia. It is an absolute economic liability when you look at the billions of dollars that gets out of this country for the Zionist enterprise.

It is clearly a liability in terms of the fact that the project for the New American Century Crowd and their clean break document of 1996, the so-called Strategy for Securing the Realm, that ideology which was Israeli inspired and Israeli driven has been totally behind what the United States has now done in both Iraq and in Afghanistan militarily on a surrogate basis.

The fact of the matter is that Israel is the tail that wags the American dog; the Zionist occupied territory that Pat Buchanan has termed the American Congress correctly will continue to be led by Netanyahu, by the Congressional nose. He will, if he starts a war with Iran, drag the United State into it because of that dynamic and it is a great tragedy.

Do not forget we are in an American presidential election year. If the Israelis cannot get what they want out of Barack Obama, they certainly will get what they want out of either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or whatever the Israeli driven neoconservative ends up with the Republican nomination and Obama knows it.

MSK/GHN

The video can be seen at:

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