Assemblyman Hikind Objects To Ads Asking U.S. Military To Stop Funding Israel
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork)— New billboards went up across New York City on Wednesday night with a message that could have subway riders doing a double-take.
They’re paid for by a group that wants the U.S. to stop funding for the Israeli military.
CBS 2's Dave Carlin talked to both sides of this billboard controversy.
The ads greeting subway riders across the city feature smiling dads and kids. Palestinians and Israelis pictured together, with the headline "Be on our side."
"It says be on our side, so it's like who's side are we on?" resident Kayla Sanders said.
That "side" is revealed on a smaller line of the ad.
"'End U.S. military aid to Israel,' that is going to cause some controversy," Jessica Hover said.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind said the group behind the campaign, "Two People's, One Future" is pro-Palestinian and is seeking to weaken Israel by having the U.S. cut billions of dollars in military aid to its closest ally in the Middle East.
"I see this as something very, very dangerous," Hikind said. "This is a one-sided mean-spirited attempt to undermine the security and well being of the people of Israel. "They say this is for peace. This is not for peace. This is for war."
New Yorkers got their first look at this campaign on Sept. 5 when the billboards were installed in 18 subway stations. A Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman said it didn't take long for some complaints to roll in.
Carlin asked the publicly funded MTA why it agreed to the controversial campaign.
"We have specific guidelines for advertising. It cannot promote anything illegal, be obscene or imply the MTA's endorsement. This campaign adhered to the guidelines," MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said.
Ethan Vesely-Flad is with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a lead sponsor for the ads in New York.
"This is a voice that needs to be heard," he said. "We believe that that military aid is actually protracting the conflict between Israel and Palestine instead of working to end it."
The campaign is spreading across the nation. Assemblyman Hikind and pro-Israeli activists promise they'll respond with a series of response ads reminding the U.S. to remember its friends and keep supporting them.
Other cities in the "Be on our side" campaign include Chicago, Washington D.C., San Francisco and Boston.
Why the Marching Band and Confetti on Beck TV?
Posted on May 3, 2011, The Blaze, at 8:14am,
On TV last night, Glenn Beck started with a somber message: the celebrations that broke out yesterday — people jumping in lakes, etc — seemed inappropriate. But then there was a twist. They weren’t inappropriate because of what they were, but because of what they weren’t. After all, they didn’t have a marching band, confetti, and cookies (via PopWatch):
“This is a great day in the war on terror. But as I watched all the celebrations taking place on the streets of America, all over America, you may have — and maybe I’m alone — had a strange feeling,” Beck said. “You may have seen students jumping into the lake in Ohio and rushing to the White House bearing signs and smoking cigars. As I watched these things happen last night, I couldn’t help but be reminded of when the Palestinians danced in the streets and passed out candy after the 9/11 attacks, when they danced in the streets over the killing of five American students and the slaughter of a Jewish family. All of these things, you know and I know, were offensive. All of those victims were innocent. America, we are better than this. We are better than jumping into lakes and holding signs and cigars. I think we’re better than that. I mean, why hand out candy… when you can have cookies, and confetti, and a marching band, huh?”
So he rectified that by throwing his own celebration on TV:
Later in the program, Beck explained why he could throw a marching-band party:
"Every time I think that, 'Oh, I don't know if we could do the cookies or the confetti or whatever,' I see that it's not marching in the streets forinnocent victims. It is celebrating in the streets for a journey that has been and hard and been fought valiantly with honor. And people have tried to do the right thing. And this guy was certainly not innocent…."
September 11, 2011, - 3:02 am
9/11 Muslim Attacks on US: Remember What Happened. Who Did It & Who Celebrated,
by Debbie Schlussel,
It's amazing, but no surprise, that–ten years after the 9/11 Muslim attacks on America, in which 19 Muslim men mass murdered 3,000 Americans–I still can and need to put up the same message. Those who say we should "remember" 9/11, but who skip over the part about WHO DID IT and WHO CELEBRATED IT, are not remembering it at all. The 9/11 attacks were not committed by ghosts or the invisible man. They were not perpetrated by Fijians or Samoans or Wiccans. And those same groups didn't celebrate the attacks. Nope, it was one group, with 1.8 billion adherents worldwide that did both the mass murder and the celebrating afterword. If you won't admit that, you aren’t remembering a thing. You're in fantasyland (and not the kind with the 72 re-virginized).
And after that group of people–Muslims–mass murdered 3,000 Americans and celebrated all over the globe (including on U.S. soil), President Bush (and also Obama) rewarded them by helping them expand their numbers inside America by an additional 2/3rds through immigration. And he expanded their rights, giving them special treatment and entitlements for eight years, with President Obama following suit. At least a third of that group in America, Muslims, openly supports Al-Qaeda and suicide bombings against Americans.
Clearly, we didn't remember what happened on 9/11. Thus, I must repeat my "Three Things Americans Must Remember Every 9/11 . . . And Every Single Other Day of Every Year":
* Remember Who Was Murdered & Died on that Day:
Nearly 3,000 innocent people targeted and murdered in cold blood because they were Americans. People like my cousin, Jon Schlissel, who heroically went back to his office to save someone who needed help getting out. The Muslims who died that day were collateral damage and not the target of the Muslims who perpetrated the attacks. Clearly, their deaths meant nothing to their fellow Muslims around the world, who cheered the attacks, passed out candy, danced in the streets, and let out their stupid hyena-like, "lalalalalalahs." The deaths of these Muslims are important to them and the mainstream media only for politically correct public relations purposes.
Palestinian Woman on Ramallah Street Cheers 9/11 Attacks.
March 20, 2011, crombouke.blogspot, How to destroy Islam - non-violently,
It's the evil or our time - ISLAM - Let's not leave it for our children
If we don't destroy Islam as an ideology it will exterminate us culturally and physically. Islam is an utterly ruthless totalitarian political system disguised as a religion. Islam will literally stop at nothing to achieve its objective of world domination, with all non-Muslims exterminated or enslaved. Muslims who deny this are lying (Muslims are encouraged to tell lies to further the expansion of Islam). Terrorism is an intrinsic and inseparable part of Islam.
January 13, 2012, Foreign Policy, False Flag, A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran, by Mark Perry,
Buried deep in the archives of America's intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush's administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives -- what is commonly referred to as a "false flag" operation.
The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah -- a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.
But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel's Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel's recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel's ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.
The officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad's efforts.
"It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with," the intelligence officer said. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought."
Interviews with six currently serving or recently retired intelligence officers over the last 18 months have helped to fill in the blanks of the Israeli false-flag operation. In addition to the two currently serving U.S. intelligence officers, the existence of the Israeli false-flag operation was confirmed to me by four retired intelligence officers who have served in the CIA or have monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.
The CIA and the White House were both asked for comment on this story. By the time this story went to press, they had not responded. The Israeli intelligence services -- the Mossad -- were also contacted, in writing and by telephone, but failed to respond. As a policy, Israel does not confirm or deny its involvement in intelligence operations.
There is no denying that there is a covert, bloody, and ongoing campaign aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear program, though no evidence has emerged connecting recent acts of sabotage and killings inside Iran to Jundallah. Many reports have cited Israel as the architect of this covert campaign, which claimed its latest victim on Jan. 11 when a motorcyclist in Tehran slipped a magnetic explosive device under the car of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a young Iranian nuclear scientist. The explosion killed Roshan, making him the fourth scientist assassinated in the past two years. The United States adamantly denies it is behind these killings.
According to one retired CIA officer, information about the false-flag operation was reported up the U.S. intelligence chain of command. It reached CIA Director of Operations Stephen Kappes, his deputy Michael Sulick, and the head of the Counterintelligence Center. All three of these officials are now retired. The Counterintelligence Center, according to its website, is tasked with investigating "threats posed by foreign intelligence services."
The report then made its way to the White House, according to the currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush "went absolutely ballistic" when briefed on its contents.
"The report sparked White House concerns that Israel's program was putting Americans at risk," the intelligence officer told me. "There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians."
Israel's relationship with Jundallah continued to roil the Bush administration until the day it left office, this same intelligence officer noted. Israel's activities jeopardized the administration's fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks in kind on U.S. personnel.
"It's easy to understand why Bush was so angry," a former intelligence officer said. "After all, it's hard to engage with a foreign government if they're convinced you're killing their people. Once you start doing that, they feel they can do the same."
A senior administration official vowed to "take the gloves off" with Israel, according to a U.S. intelligence officer. But the United States did nothing -- a result that the officer attributed to "political and bureaucratic inertia."
"In the end," the officer noted, "it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat." Even so, at least for a short time, this same officer noted, the Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate among Bush's national security team, pitting those who wondered "just whose side these guys [in Israel] are on" against those who argued that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
The debate over Jundallah was resolved only after Bush left office when, within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, according to multiple serving and retired officers.
The decision was controversial inside the CIA, where officials were forced to shut down "some key intelligence-gathering operations," a recently retired CIA officer confirmed. This action was followed in November 2010 by the State Department's addition of Jundallah to its list of foreign terrorist organizations -- a decision that one former CIA officer called "an absolute no-brainer."
Since Obama's initial order, U.S. intelligence services have received clearance to cooperate with Israel on a number of classified intelligence-gathering operations focused on Iran's nuclear program, according to a currently serving officer. These operations are highly technical in nature and do not involve covert actions targeting Iran's infrastructure or political or military leadership.
"We don't do bang and boom," a recently retired intelligence officer said. "And we don't do political assassinations."
Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and current intelligence officers. "They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads," one highly placed intelligence source said, "and we say to them -- 'Don't even go there. The answer is no.'"
Unlike the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the controversial exiled Iranian terrorist group that seeks the overthrow of the Tehran regime and is supported by former leading U.S. policymakers, Jundallah is relatively unknown -- but just as violent. In May 2009, a Jundallah suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mosque in Zahedan, the capital of Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province bordering Pakistan, during a Shiite religious festival. The bombing killed 25 Iranians and wounded scores of others.
The attack enraged Tehran, which traced the perpetrators to a cell operating in Pakistan. The Iranian government notified the Pakistanis of the Jundallah threat and urged them to break up the movement's bases along the Iranian-Pakistani border. The Pakistanis reacted sluggishly in the border areas, feeding Tehran's suspicions that Jundallah was protected by Pakistan's intelligence services.
The 2009 attack was just one in a long line of terrorist attacks attributed to the organization. In August 2007, Jundallah kidnapped 21 Iranian truck drivers. In December 2008, it captured and executed 16 Iranian border guards -- the gruesome killings were filmed, in a stark echo of the decapitation of American businessman Nick Berg in Iraq at the hands of al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In July 2010, Jundallah conducted a twin suicide bombing in Zahedan outside a mosque, killing dozens of people, including members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The State Department aggressively denies that the U.S. government had or has any ties to Jundallah. "We have repeatedly stated, and reiterate again that the United States has notprovided support to Jundallah," a spokesman wrote in an email to theWall Street Journal, following Jundallah's designation as a terrorist organization. "The United States does not sponsor any form of terrorism. We will continue to work with the international community to curtail support for terrorist organizations and prevent violence against innocent civilians. We have also encouraged other governments to take comparable actions against Jundallah."
A spate of stories in 2007 and 2008, including a report by ABC News and a New Yorker article, suggested that the United States was offering covert support to Jundallah. The issue has now returned to the spotlight with the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and has outraged serving and retired intelligence officers who fear that Israeli operations are endangering American lives.
"This certainly isn't the first time this has happened, though it's the worst case I've heard of," former Centcom chief and retired Gen. Joe Hoar said of the Israeli operation upon being informed of it. "But while false-flag operations are hardly new, they're extremely dangerous. You're basically using your friendship with an ally for your own purposes. Israel is playing with fire. It gets us involved in their covert war, whether we want to be involved or not."
The Israeli operation left a number of recently retired CIA officers sputtering in frustration. "It's going to be pretty hard for the U.S. to distance itself from an Israeli attack on Iran with this kind of thing going on," one of them told me.
Jundallah head Abdolmalek Rigi was captured by Iran in February 2010. Although initial reports claimed that he was captured by the Iranians after taking a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan, a retired intelligence officer with knowledge of the incident told me that Rigi was detained by Pakistani intelligence officers in Pakistan. The officer said that Rigi was turned over to the Iranians after the Pakistani government informed the United States that it planned to do so. The United States, this officer said, did not raise objections to the Pakistani decision.
Iran, meanwhile, has consistently claimed that Rigi was snatched from under the eyes of the CIA, which it alleges supported him. "It doesn't matter," the former intelligence officer said of Iran's charges. "It doesn't matter what they say. They know the truth."
Rigi was interrogated, tried, and convicted by the Iranians and hanged on June 20, 2010. Prior to his execution, Rigi claimed in an interview with Iranian media -- which has to be assumed was under duress -- that he had doubts about U.S. sponsorship of Jundallah. He recounted an alleged meeting with "NATO officials" in Morocco in 2007 that raised his suspicions. "When we thought about it we came to the conclusion that they are either Americans acting under NATO cover or Israelis," he said.
While many of the details of Israel's involvement with Jundallah are now known, many others still remain a mystery -- and are likely to remain so. The CIA memos of the incident have been "blue bordered," meaning that they were circulated to senior levels of the broader U.S. intelligence community as well as senior State Department officials.
What has become crystal clear, however, is the level of anger among senior intelligence officials about Israel's actions. "This was stupid and dangerous," the intelligence official who first told me about the operation said. "Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they're supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don't think that's true."
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