John Helmer — PUTIN ENDORSES NETANYAHU FOR RE-ELECTION – SHOIGU AND LAVROV REACT

Putin apparently conflicts with the Stavka (Russian General Staff) and Foreign Ministry.

(Xi is facing similar pressure from the PLA (People's Liberation Army) over what it perceives as Western aggression in the South China Sea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.)

Dances with Bears
PUTIN ENDORSES NETANYAHU FOR RE-ELECTION – SHOIGU AND LAVROV REACT
John Helmer

Caroline Alexander and Amy Teibel — Netanyahu Tells Arab Citizens They’re Not Real Israelis

The prime minister has made it clear that Israel is not a state of all its citizens.

So there you have it.

Bloomberg
Netanyahu Tells Arab Citizens They’re Not Real Israelis
Caroline Alexander and Amy Teibel

Publius Tacitus — Israel Launches Desperate PsyOps and Trump is Buying

The news is not the news. What you are seeing on the tube on the nets is not necessarily the truth. That's a shocker, huh? Today's propaganda blitz came courtesy of Israel's Bibi Netanyahu. In a carefully staged managed presentation, Bibi one upped Colin Powell's lamentable lie fest before the UN Security Council in January 2003. While Powell's mission back then was to get the world in line for an unprovoked, illegal attack on Iraq using the false guise of weapon's of mass destruction, Bibi's task was less audacious and far more manageable--Give Donald Trump ammunition for ending the multilateral agreement with Iran. In other words, put the Iran agreement in the toilet.…

Yet, Bibi failed to provide one shred of evidence that Iran had violated the agreement currently in place. In fact, all Bibi did was dredge up old, dated intelligence and present it as something new. I suspect we will soon learn that Jared Kushner and Mike Pompeo were in touch with Netanyahu and his crowd in coordinating this presentation. This was staged managed so that Trump can announce in 10 days that the United States is pulling out of the accord because Iran "lied." Of course, there will be no evidence whatsoever that Iran lied, but who needs proof when there is a political axe to grind.

I expect we will see more efforts by Israel in the coming 10 days to launch military strikes in Syria against Iranian troops and targets in hopes of triggering retaliation by Iran. But such retaliation will be portrayed in the media as an unprovoked act of aggression by Iran.

The die is cast. Trump is pulling the plug on the Iran agreement. But that is a foolish move. It may feel good today but it will work to Iran's advantage in the long run.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Israel Launches Desperate PsyOps and Trump is Buying

Publius Tacitus

See also

Moon of Alabama
Netanyahoo To Again Cry Wolf - But Something Bigger Is Up (Updated)

b

See also

Serious smackdown of Bibi.

Among Netanyahu’s motives for trying to destroy something that is in Israel’s own security interests is to distract attention from the destructive effects of his own government’s policies and to levy all blame for any regional bloodshed and instability on Iran by keeping it a pariah. The destructive effects in question keep accumulating, and the past few days are no exception. There is the Israeli military’s lethal use of forceagainst Palestinians demonstrating against their confinement in the miserable conditions of the Gaza Strip. There are the lethal Israeli air and missile strikes in Syria, which over the past year or two have numbered in the dozens as compared to a single drone in the other direction that did not fire a shot.

The Israeli government’s vigorous opposition to any agreement with Iran also helps to preclude an American straying from the passionate attachment to Israel, which in practice on many issues has meant attachment to the Israeli government and its policies. If Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s just-concluded visit to the region is any indication, Netanyahu need have no worry about that with the current U.S. administration. Pompeo’s remarks—on Iran, on Syria, on Gaza—could not have been more pleasing to the prime minister’s ears if Netanyahu’s own staff had written the talking points. Such remarks represent prioritizing the passionate attachment over an independent pursuit of U.S. interests and over the interests of regional stabilization and nuclear nonproliferation.

One closing observation concerns the irony of exactly who is energetically accusing another regime of lying about activities related to nuclear weapons. The accusations are coming from the prime minister of a state that has long asserted that it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East—an assertion that almost no one in the region believes.…

LobeLog
Netanyahu Makes a Case for the JCPOA

Paul R. Pillar | 28-year veteran of the CIAm, presently a non-resident senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies and a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, and a contributor to The National Interest.[

Pat Lang — Israel is trying to blow up the ME again

All in all, a bibi scam that is working well

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Israel is trying to blow up the ME again.
Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.)
At the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lang was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism, and later, the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. At the DIA, he was a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service. He participated in the drafting of National Intelligence Estimates. From 1992 to 1994, all the U.S. military attachés worldwide reported to him. During that period, he also briefed President George H. W. Bush at the White House, as he had during Operation Desert Storm.

He was also the head of intelligence analysis for the Middle East for seven or eight years at that institution. He was the head of all the Middle East and South Asia analysis in DIA for counter-terrorism for seven years. For his service in the DIA, Lang received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive. — Wikipedia

See also

Zero Hedge
"Explosive" Leaked Secret Israeli Cable Confirms Israeli-Saudi Coordination To Provoke War

Tyler Durden

Philip Giraldi — Israel's Helpers in Media, Government, and Academia - Al-Jazeera Documentary

Exiled by the media like Seymour Hersh and Noam Chomsky, Philip Giraldi doubles down in the alt-media

Last year, al-Jazeera Media Network used an undercover reporter to infiltrate some U.K. pro-Israel groups that were working closely with the Israeli Embassy to counter criticisms coming from British citizens regarding the treatment of the Palestinians. In particular, the Embassy and its friends were seeking to counter the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which has become increasingly effective in Europe. The four-part documentary released late in 2016 that al-Jazeera produced is well worth watching as it consists mostly of secretly filmed meetings and discussions.

The documentary reveals that local Jewish groups, particularly at universities and within the political parties, do indeed work closely with the Israeli Embassy to promote policies supported by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It also confirms that tagging someone as an anti-Semite has become the principal offensive weapon used to stifle any discussion, particularly in a country like Britain which embraces concepts like the criminalization of “hate speech.”.…

Very revealing article. Read the whole thing and relate it to "Russian influence."

Russia Insider
Israel's Helpers in Media, Government, and Academia - Al-Jazeera Documentary

Philip Giraldi | former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and presently Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest

See also

At first glance, the decision last week by the Trump administration, followed immediately by Israel, to quit the United Nation’s cultural agency seems strange. Why penalise a body that promotes clean water, literacy, heritage preservation and women’s rights?
Washington’s claim that the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) is biased against Israel obscures the real crimes the agency has committed in US eyes.

The first is that in 2011 Unesco became the first UN agency to accept Palestine as a member. That set the Palestinians on the path to upgrading their status at the General Assembly a year later.…

The agency’s second crime relates to its role selecting world heritage sites. That power has proved more than an irritant to Israel and the US.

The occupied territories, supposedly the locus of a future Palestinian state, are packed with such sites. Hellenistic, Roman, Jewish, Christian and Muslim relics promise not only the economic rewards of tourism but also the chance to control the historic narrative....

The third crime is the priority Unesco gives to the Palestinian names of heritage sites under belligerent occupation. 

Counterpunch

The Real Reasons Trump is Quitting UNESCO

Jonathan Cook

Robert Parry — How Netanyahu Pulls Trump’s Strings

If indeed Clinton were right that Trump was Putin’s “puppet,” then he would have agreed to negotiations to address the North Korean crisis; would have accepted constructive diplomacy toward Iran; and would have ended all U.S. support for the Syrian militants and encouraged a quick end to the bloodletting.

Instead, Trump is moving in opposite directions, lining up with Netanyahu and the neocons, whom some European allies refer to as “America’s Israeli agents.” Although dressing up his capitulation to Netanyahu in tough-guy phrasing, Trump is doing what most U.S. politicians do – they grovel before Bibi Netanyahu.

And, if you have any doubts about that reality, you can watch how often both Republicans and Democrats jump to their feet when Netanyahu addresses a joint session of Congress, an honor that he has received three times, tying him with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Those moments of American humiliation – as almost all 535 members of Congress act like puppets on invisible strings – represent the actual subservience of the U.S. government to a foreign power. And that power is not Russia.

President Trump is just the latest American politician to have his strings yanked by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Consortium News
How Netanyahu Pulls Trump’s Strings

Robert Parry

Also

By offering a propagandistic tirade on Iran’s role in the Mideast – a classic neocon screed – President Trump has demonstrated his inability to bring any fresh or honest thinking to the regional crises, as Kathy Kelly explains.

Trump Ignores Israeli/Saudi Abuses

Also

Sooner or later, I see a blowup coming between Trump and Netanyahu, and the U.S. President's brief moment of candor with the UN Secretary General should be lodged in the back of your mind, as it is in mine.

Sic Semper Tyrannis 

Harper: Trump Called Netanyahu Obstacle To Peace

Pat Lang — Israel is testing Russia ...

The plot thickens as Israel feels forced to reveal its hand in the game.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Israel is testing Russia...
Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.), former military intelligence officer at the US Defense Intelligence Agency

RT — Netanyahu to Putin: Iran must withdraw from Syria or Israel will ‘defend itself’

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that Israel is prepared to intervene in Syria to counteract the Iranian influence in the conflict. Moscow, which views Iran as key to resolving the crisis, said it will note Israeli interests.

When the two leaders met in Sochi on Wednesday, Netanyahu told Putin that any peace deal in Syria must entail the full withdrawal of any Iranian forces from the area.

"Iran is already well on its way to controlling Iraq, Yemen and to a large extent is already in practice in control of Lebanon," Reuters quoted Netanyahu as saying. "We cannot forget for a single minute that Iran threatens every day to annihilate Israel."

"Israel opposes Iran's continued entrenchment in Syria. We will be sure to defend ourselves with all means against this and any threat."...

RT
Netanyahu to Putin: Iran must withdraw from Syria or Israel will ‘defend itself’

David Lazare — Israel’s Alarm over Syrian Debacle

Backgrounder on the Middle East.

Consortium News
Israel’s Alarm over Syrian Debacle

David Lazare

Alastair Crooke — A Syrian Cordon Sanitaire: Is Israel huffing & puffing, or is it serious ?

Alastair Crooke also writing at SST now.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
A Syrian Cordon Sanitaire: Is Israel huffing & puffing, or is it serious?

Alastair CrookeSee also

Did Trump Get it Right by Accident?

Publius Tacitus

Robert Parry — Netanyahu Pushes Trump Toward Wider Wars

Russia-gate is empowering Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to strong-arm President Trump into escalating the Syrian war by abandoning a recent cease-fire and challenging Iran and Russia, reports Robert Parry

A weakened, even desperate President Donald Trump must decide whether to stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or to repudiate the Syrian partial ceasefire, which Trump hammered out with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 7.

Whether intentionally or not, this crossroads is where the months of Russia-gate hysteria have led the United States, making Trump even more vulnerable to Israeli and neoconservative pressure and making any cooperation with Russia more dangerous for him politically.

After meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Sunday, Netanyahu declared that Israel was totally opposed to the Trump-Putin cease-fire deal in southern Syria because it perpetuates Iranian presence in Syria in support of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Netanyahu’s position increases pressure on Trump to escalate U.S. military involvement in Syria and possibly move toward war against Iran and even Russia. The American neocons, who generally move in sync with Netanyahu’s wishes, already have as their list of current goals “regime changes” in Damascus, Tehran and Moscow – regardless of the dangers to the Middle East and indeed the world.…

Armageddon arriving.

Consortium News
Netanyahu Pushes Trump Toward Wider Wars

Robert Parry

Under Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israel continues to become more and more intolerant both in its treatment of Palestinians and its attitude toward more liberal tendencies in Judaism, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.

The Lost Liberalism of Netanyahu’s Israel

Paul R. Pillar

Alastair Crooke — Trump Tumbles into Saudi-Israeli Trap

Jared Kushner did his father-in-law few favors when he enticed President Trump into the endless Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” To this end, as one Israeli journalist put it, Trump’s advisers set up the Saudis to “embrace [him], and do the sword dance around [him], add a huge check for the arms deals – and [in return is expected to] create an anti-Shiite, anti-Iranian axis [around them].”

Yes, the iconic salesman (Trump), was himself sold a proverbial “bridge” (by his son-in-law, fueled by the conceit that having known Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for many years, Kushner was “ideal” for bringing peace to Israel). Trump in Riyadh thus paid full homage to the Sunni narrative that they – the Sunnis – are the innocent victims, and the Shi’a, the dark, nefarious, revolutionary, fifth-columnists, who must be driven back into their “pen.”

Trump has thus declared himself an explicit partisan in the geo-strategic power plays between the region’s northern-tier states and the Gulf states. Instead of remaining distant and “above” these Middle East conflicts, he has allowed himself to be persuaded to do the opposite: to dive in, on the Sunni side (perhaps partly to counterpoint with President Obama’s engagement of Iran).

Why? Well, the dollars (should they materialize), will be useful. But essentially, because Kushner persuaded his-father-in-law that flattering the Saudis and demonizing the Iranians, represented the entry price into the peacemaking process between Israel and the Palestinians, which if achieved, would constitute the Trump foreign policy “legacy” for history.

View from the snake pit: This is deal that is destined to blow up in DJT's face. It's bargaining with the devil.

We have here the eternal problem that the Arab leaders cannot afford to normalize without an Israeli concession to the Palestinians, and the Palestinians in turn will not make a gesture, until and unless, Israel halts settlement building, which the latter will not do.

Another reason to think that this plan will come to nothing (after being spun out as long as possible by Prime Minister Netanyahu) is that, while it is true that the Palestinians presently are weak and divided – paradoxically Netanyahu is even weaker. Any concessions to Abu Mazen, however banal, could bring down his government. Netanyahu’s right-wing sees no reason to make any – even symbolic – concessions to the Palestinians. Why should they? They are on the cusp of having it all....

The Trap

This – the Sunni-Israeli regional Alliance; the renewed peace process – is a trap into which Trump has been persuaded to enter. It is a trap, because once entered into, the peace process becomes formaldehyde to all other political processes. How often have we been told “you can’t do this; you can’t do that” because it might endanger the (vacuous) “peace process.”
A peace process gives Israel huge anesthetic leverage in the region – as always it has so done. It is a trap – because it ties Trump into trying to assuage the Irano-phobia of Saudi Arabia, which will prove to be just as insatiable as are Israel’s “security needs.”

These liabilities will undercut Trump’s possibilities for defeating ISIS and for détente with Russia. Russia has been trying to bring the Shi’a and the Turks to the negotiating table on Syria. Trump’s role was to be to help bring the Sunni side to the table – in order to forge a wider regional settlement. That will be less likely now, as Saudi Arabia levers Trump’s visit towards weakening Iran.

With Trump’s homage to the Sunni cause, it is more likely that the Sunni-Shi’a fissure will deepen, rather than its sore edges be reconciled. And, viewed from a pure realpolitik perspective, does Trump really believe that Saudi Arabia and its allies will succeed in weakening the Russia, Iran, Syria, Iraq and Hizbullah alliance?

And Israel? The writing was plainly on the wall, as we now know, at those post-Six Day War Israeli cabinet meetings. The Americans did warn the Israeli cabinet that it would become progressively harder and harder for America to defend Israel’s hold over the disempowered, disenfranchised and dispossessed (and enlarging), Palestinian people – if Israel insisted on its “winner takes all” end of war policy....

Consortium News
Trump Tumbles into Saudi-Israeli Trap

Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum and a former British diplomat who was a senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy 

Robert Parry — The Neocons’ Back-Door to Trump

Is Iran the next Iraq, Syria, and Libya? Robert Parry thinks so.

This blame-Iran “group think” has remarkable similarities to the one that rationalized the disastrous war in Iraq, i.e., that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al Qaeda and was likely to give the terrorists his hidden WMDs. That fake analysis ignored the fact that the secular Hussein was a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda’s fundamentalists and they hated him, too.

So, although the Saddam-allied-with-Al-Qaeda lie was obvious to anyone who knew anything about Middle East politics, it was repeated endlessly by supposedly in-the-know Washington insiders to justify President George W. Bush’s bloody invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis along with nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and spread chaos across the strategic region.

Now, we see a similar self-deception about which country is the principal sponsor for terrorism and other troubles. The truth is that Iran as a Shiite-governed nation is on the opposite side of the region’s sectarian divide from Al Qaeda and Islamic State, the two major Sunni terror groups that have taken aim at the United States and Europe.…

Many analysts view the Iraq fiasco as the worst strategic blunder ever made by the US, worse than Vietnam even.

"Doing Iran" would dwarf both as monumental strategic blunders and could set the stage for another global war.

And, yes, the New York Times again.

The tell will be whether Trump names arch-neocon Elliott Abrams deputy secretary of state, as is expected.

Consortium News
The Neocons’ Back-Door to Trump

Robert Parry

Russ Wellen — When Hillary Clinton Out-Neoconned a Neocon

In the running for moron-in-chief.

Along with her chumminess with Wall Street and inclination to warfare in the Middle East, Hillary Clinton’s insensitivity to state security and lack of knowledge about technology are signs of how out of touch she is with the emerging Democratic zeitgeist, which is opposed to U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, Israel’s authoritarianism, and close relations on the part of a president with Wall Street. Much of that same constituency also knows that a secretary of state shouldn’t run her email off a server in her basement with a tech administrator to whom she paid a but a nominal fee* according to a comprehensive article in the Washington Post on March 27.

Maybe the FBI will save us.

Foreign Policy In Focus
When Hillary Clinton Out-Neoconned a Neocon
Russ Wellen

Putin takes advantage of Obama-Netanyahu rift

Looks like Putin is taking advantage of the Obama-Netanyahu rift. The Israeli Prime Minister met with Putin last month and described relations between the two countries as "good."

Netanyahu, in an interview recorded for broadcast on Sunday on "CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS," did not join the United States and other NATO nations in criticizing Russia's taking military action in Syria.

"We don't want to go back to the days when, you know, Russia and Israel were in an adversarial position," said Netanyahu, who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow late last month. "I think we've changed the relationship. And it's, on the whole, good." Read more.

Remember when Obama was elected and how he promised to repair America's relations with the rest of the world? How's that going?

Robert Parry — Deciphering the Mideast Chaos

Few Americans seem to comprehend what is unfolding in the Middle East – with the latest conflict involving Saudi airstrikes against the Houthi rebels who now control Yemen’s capital of Sanaa. In this swirl of regional wars, it’s often not clear where the U.S. government stands and how American interests are affected.

The reason for the confusion is simple: Many key pundits who get to explain what’s going on from the op-ed pages of the major U.S. newspapers and from the TV talk shows prefer that the American people don’t fully grasp what’s happening. Otherwise, the people might realize the dangers ahead and demand substantial changes in U.S. government policies....

... over the years, the U.S. government has exploited the general lack of knowledge among Americans about the intricacies of Middle East religions and politics by funneling the anger against one group to rationalize actions against another....

In seeking to smash this “Shiite crescent” [from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut], these Sunni-ruled states have been joined by Israel, which has taken the position that Iran and its Shiite allies are more dangerous than the Sunni extremists, thus transforming Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State into the “lesser evils.”

This was the subtext of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on March 3 – that the U.S. government should shift its focus from fighting Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to fighting Iran....

In one of the most explicit expressions of Israel’s views, its Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post in September 2013 that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad.

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

 And, if you might have thought that Oren had misspoken, he reiterated his position in June 2014 at an Aspen Institute conference. Then, speaking as a former ambassador, Oren said Israel would even prefer a victory by the Islamic State, which was massacring captured Iraqi soldiers and beheading Westerners, than the continuation of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria.

“From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said....

Over the past decade, the Israelis and the Saudis have built a powerful alliance, a relationship that has operated mostly behind the curtains. They combined their assets to create what amounted to a new superpower in the Middle East, one that could project its power mostly via the manipulation of U.S. policymakers and opinion leaders – and thus deployment of the U.S. military. 

Israel possesses extraordinary political and media influence inside the United States – and Saudi Arabia wields its oil and financial resources to keep American officialdom in line. Together, the Israeli-Saudi bloc now controls virtually the entire Republican Party, which holds majorities in both chambers of Congress, and dominates most mainstream Democrats as well.

Reflecting the interests of the Israeli-Saudi bloc, American neocons have advocated U.S. bombing against both the Syrian and Iranian governments in pursuit of “regime change” in those two countries. [emphasis added],,,,,

Parry views this as an existential crisis for the United States and neither the background nor the details are being revealed to the American public — as the New York Times calls for war with Iran (see below).

Consortium News
Deciphering the Mideast Chaos
Robert Parry

Also

Just as the New York Times promoted fake facts to rationalize invading Iraq, it has just published a deceptive op-ed to justify bombing Iran, the ranting of one of America’s most notorious warmongers, John Bolton, as Lawrence Davidson describes.

Letting A Warmonger Rant
Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

Weekend Reading

Covers a lot of historical ground.

Consortium News
Neocons: the Echo of German Fascism
Todd E. Pierce

What Berdyaev, Solovyev, and Ilyin actually said.

Distorting Putin’s Favorite Philosophers
Paul R. Grenier