While the current destroys walls and sweeps along rocks, the soft thing remains standing. Thus the Exile destroys and breaks and uproots great pillars and enormous walls, but the Holy One, Blessed be He, saves the weak and soft nation, that the current not sweep it along.

– R Maimon ha-Dayan, Iggeret Nehamah (“Letter of Consolation”), 12th cent. c.e.

Netanyahu is expected to inform Likud ministers on Sunday that any Likud minister who votes for the Outpost Law will be fired from the government. The bill, authored by Minister Zevulun Orlev (Jewish Home), would forbid eviction and demolition orders for Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria that have stood for four years and have at least twenty families. It also stipulates that all petitions disputing land claims must be proven through accepted evidentiary means in a court competent to hear the case. Should such a claim be found valid, the court would be directed to order monetary compensation or alternative grant of land for the plaintiff. Netanyahu, who has pointedly refused to bring the law to the Ministerial Committee on Legislation for several weeks in fear it will pass over his objections, wishes to ensure the law fails in the Knesset plenum. Without the backing of the Ministerial Committee, laws generally fail to garner sufficient support to be passed into law. But Netanyahu and his office are painfully aware that many Likud ministers and faction heads intend to back the law, irrespective of his position.

Orlev is expected to put the Outpost Law on the Knesset agenda, even without the Ministerial Committee’s endorsement, on Monday. Observers say the Outpost Law would could then be brought to a vote in the plenum as early as Wednesday. Nor, they say, will Netanyahu likely be able to convince Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin to refuse to bring the law to a vote. Rivlin has gone on record saying that “one way or another” the community of Migron, which the bill seeks to save (among others), will be legalized. Orlev is well aware that his bill has strong support among Likud lawmakers and other MKs in the ruling coalition who see it as a way to stop further demolitions of Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria. According to a recent poll 67% of the Likud-base supported the Outpost Law, while only 26% opposed it and 7% held no opinion. When asked whether Likud ministers or faction members opposing the Outpost Law would cause them to vote against them in the coming Likud primaries 45% answered in the affirmative, 38% said it would have no impact, and 22% said they were unsure. However, more telling was that 32% of the Likud base said that, were Lieberman to champion the Outpost Law, they would seriously consider transferring their support to his Israel Beiteinu faction in the next elections, if Netanyahu opposes it and the threatened communities are uprooted.

Analysts say that with Likud primaries just around the corner, that Likud lawmakers find themselves faced with a double-edged sword vis-a-vis the Prime Minister and Likud base. Additionally, the faction heads who head the party’s comprising Netanyahu’s coalition and represent a majority of seats in the Knesset have demanded the Prime Minister find a way to legalize threatened Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Some rightist experts are critical of the law, saying it has no legal standing, as Israeli law does not apply to Judea and Samaria, making the upholding of the law in international circles an impossibility. However, with temperatures on the issue rising, they say there is little question that were MKs allowed to vote freely in the plenum without threats, the Outpost Law would have sufficient votes to pass. The Prime Minister’s Office refused to comment after Shabbat on Saturday evening. Netanyahu has backed moving Migron to a nearby location on land that is clearly the state’s, as was done for Ramat Gilad. In response to the threat to sack ministers who back the Outpost Law, MK Yaakov Katz (National Union) said:

The Netanyahu government has failed in its central role as a nationalist government: to save and secure the land of Israel. It not only prohibited the construction of thousands of needed homes, but has also demolished Jewish homes, and it refuses to normalize the status of neighborhoods and communities established by the governments of Israel facing destruction. MK Orlev and I brought brought this to the Ministerial Committee on Legislation to prevent the demolition of threatened neighborhoods and communities. It will be a further test of this government and perhaps its last test before it falls.

In the Syrian Revolution, we are witnessing the beginnings of the greatest hot military victory the world has ever seen in a cold war. As we speak, in Syria, the dark evil forces of Iran are, hopefully, in the process of being militarily defeated by the bright, good forces of Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, the strategic importance to the West of what will be an inexorable Iranian Shi’ite defeat and a Saudi Sunni victory in Syria is not even partially understood by the mainstream narrative. A Sunni victory in Syria may very well spare the world from a looming world war, which is casting Iran as the new Nazi Germany bent on world military domination. It is as if in 1938, instead of the West’s Munich’s appeasement, an Italian revolution had crushed Mussolini and turned Italy into enemy of Hitler and forward base of operations against Hitler for allied forces. Such a 1938 anti-Hitler Italian revolution would have likely dealt a catastrophically fatal counterstroke to Hitler’s world-wide ambitions. In a heartbeat, Hitler’s entire order of battle calculus, which had otherwise enabled Hitler to confidently start WW2 and invade Poland, would have been reversed against the Third Reich. Similarly, the immediate consequence of the liquidation of Bashar Assad and his Shi’ite Alawite clan from its minority tyrannical and sectarian rule of Syria would clearly be a catastrophic sui generis defeat for Iran, Syria’s senior partner in the until-now waxing Pan-Shi’ite crescent. But that’s only the beginning of the fall of Iran’s house of cards. This Iranian Shi’ite defeat in Syria will have many second- and third-order immediate consequences that are already beginning to be felt like an earthquake throughout the entire region.

1. The Iranian sphere of Iraq will no longer be an Iranian sure-thing walkover, let alone an Iranian sphere. With the new Sunni Syria as an Iranian enemy instead of an Iranian puppet state to the West of Iraq, all of a sudden, Iraq will have the ability to stand up to Iran in the East in ways that Iraq never had before when it was bookended to the West and East by two long-standing Iranian military powerhouses. Also, to the Iraqi Sunnis in Western Iraq, a Sunni-Ruled Syria gives them a real Sunni Big Brother to the West that can defend them against the Iraqi Shi’ite Central Government. In fact, if the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi central government doesn’t begin to show respect the Western Iraqi Sunnis, Western Iraq could very well secede from Iraq, and form a Greater Sunni Syria as a counterweight to al-Maliki’s pipe-dreams of being a Shi’ite Saddam Hussein. All of this would leave al-Maliki’s anti-Sunni tactics as a one-way ticket to nowhere in a hurry unless he quickly changes his anti-Sunni, pro-Shi’ite sectarian course and douses the flames of the rampant sectarian suicide explosions (Shi’ite ones? – RB).
2. Without the Iranian Syrian puppet state weapons candy store, the Iranian Mini-Me Hizbullah will be without any land access to the Iranian weapons supply line. Without that guaranteed land-based Iranian weapons pipeline through Syria, Hizbullah can and will be rolled up by the Lebanese government and the Western-allied Sunni Cedar revolution forces that want to take back their hijacked country from the Iranian Hizbullah Resistance crazies. Without the Syrian weapons supply train, Hizbullah’s initiating any war with Israel, for any reason, would be suicidal. Lebanese voices are already being loudly and brazenly (? – RB) raised that Hizbullah had better see the writing on the Syrian wall and voluntarily disarm, before they are forcibly disarmed once Assad turns to dust. Such a Cedar Lebanon will escape from the Iranian Resistance Camp and seek safe refuge in the Saudi anti-Iranian camp (? – RB).
3. With Syria and Lebanon out of Iran’s axis of evil and militarily allied with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the beginnings of a natural indigenous anti-Iranian Sunni military counterweight to Iran will have been sparked. Such a Pan-Arab Sunni force could form a vast and strategically formidable defense of the Sunni and Western World against a waxing nuclear-armed Iran. In such a Sunni Arab military counterweight, the West will have a natural Sunni ally against Iran which will serve as the tip of the West’s spear against Iran.
4. The Iranian people themselves will see that Sunni world was able to successfully and forcibly rid itself of the cancer that is the Iranian reign of Mahdi terror. Iran’s billions in foreign investments in mayhem, bedlam, and death will have collapsed before the Mullahs’ very eyes. In the face of such a strategic calamity and the squandering of Iran’s precious billions in resources to foment pure bloodshed, the Iranian forces of good may be able to complete the revolution haltingly started in the spring of 2009.
5. The last thing this nascent, or even full-grown, Sunni Mesopotamian Alliance will want to do is start a war with the militarily benign Israel (!! – RB), and put the entire Levant into play. Israel provides the Mesopotamian Sunni Alliance with a cost-effective de facto non-hostile and indestructible logistics node for US and Western resupply for pan-Sunni defense against an Iranian westward attack. If anything, the current Syrian revolution has only conclusively proved that Israel is not the cause of Middle East instability, but rather, the bedrock of Middle East stability.

In conclusion, the anti-Assad Sunni Syrian revolution has the promise of forming an embryonic, indigenous Sunni Arab military counterweight capable of possibly defending itself against the waxing nuclear Iran. Such a natural congealing of the Arab Sunni peoples may be the world’s best and only long-term hope of defeating the Iranian mad Mahdian march to world nuclear domination.

While the Likud primary race has been low profile, the Kadima contest is anything but. There are only four days left until the Likud leadership primary between Netanyahu and party activist Moshe Feiglin, yet it seems as if the race is being kept a closely guarded secret. There have been no headlines about it on the cover of any mainstream newspaper since Netanyahu initiated the primary on Dec 4. The JPost was the only paper that covered Feiglin’s major campaign event in Jerusalem. None of Netanyahu’s events were opened to the press until two rallies Thursday night in far-flung Beit She’an and Nesher. Looking at this week’s papers, one would think that if there is a contest going on right now inside Likud, it is between rival advisers in Netanyahu’s office, who raced to the attorney-general to deliver accusations against each other. Conspiracy theorists would blame the lack of coverage on a purported decision by the press as a whole to not grant Feiglin legitimacy. But the truth is that Feiglin has neither said nor done anything particularly controversial or interesting during the campaign like he has in the past. Both he and Netanyahu seem to have an interest in letting the race pass quietly: Feiglin because he is confident that his Manhigut Yehudit activists will bring out the vote, and Netanyahu because he wants to be seen as statesman-like and above the political fray.

Behind the scenes, both Netanyahu and Feiglin have bypassed the press by sending automated messages to Likud members urging them to vote. The same tactic has been employed by hawkish Likud activists who are calling upon Likud members to boycott the vote to protest the imminent destruction of the Migron outpost. Opponents of the Migron evacuation sent an automated message to thousands of Likud members on Wednesday pretending to represent a fictional organization called “Left Now.” The message called upon the Likud members to vote for Netanyahu. The message said:

Please come and vote Netanyahu so we can finally evacuate Migron and then destroy the rest of the settlements in the occupied territories. Only Netanyahu is good for us. So don’t stay home. Don’t listen to your friends. We know what’s best for you.

The organizers of the boycott hope that if less than 50% of the members vote, the election won’t be regarded as legitimate and there will have to be another election for head of the party. But Netanyahu’s associates are confident that enough members will come out to legitimize the vote and help him surpass the 73% he won in the last Likud race in 2007. What makes Netanyahu so confident is that he quietly passed a proposal in the Likud election committee last month promising money to contestants who bring out the vote in the race for the Likud central committee that is being held together with the leadership contest. In past elections for the central committee, if a Likud branch decided on the makeup of its representatives with a political deal, the branch received the money that the party saved from canceling the election. This time, no branch is allowed to cancel its election, even if the number of central committee memberships allotted to a branch and the number of candidates is the same. Contestants in branches that have a turnout of at least 40% of the vote will be refunded 50% of the fee they paid to run. In branches with a 65% turnout or higher, the refund will be 100%. Netanyahu’s associates believe that the higher the turnout, the greater the chance his margin of victory will be similar to that of other leaders in the Middle East.

With a race that far from being close, it is no wonder that the press is paying much more attention to the hotly contested competition in Kadima. Incumbent Tzipi Livni gained the upper hand at first by setting a Mar 27 date for the race and immediately announcing endorsements she received from half the Kadima faction. But this was the week of Livni’s bitter party rival, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee head Shaul Mofaz. Thirteen Kadima MKs announced their support for Mofaz this week, equalizing Livni’s support. Former Kadima leadership candidate Meir Sheetrit is expected to announce next week that he will support Mofaz rather than run again, tipping the faction in Mofaz’s favor. The fact that Mofaz’s support has risen from just five MKs in the last race is not a coincidence but the product of three years of hard work on his part. As part of Mofaz’s strategy for winning the election, he drafted a diplomatic plan that was praised in Washington. He wrote an economic plan before last summer’s protests began. And he devised a plan to change the political system by instituting regional elections for half the Knesset, raising the electoral threshold, giving the largest faction the automatic right to form a coalition and guaranteeing that governments would last four years. While all of those plans brought Mofaz headlines, he also worked quietly on his political plan, the first step of which was bringing respected MKs who once supported Livni into his political orbit. The endorsements of MKs Ze’ev Bielski and Yohanan Plesner gave him momentum.

Livni’s associates responded that the first week in a primary always belongs to the incumbent, who sets the agenda, and in the second week the competition tends to recover. They said all of the MKs who endorsed Mofaz did so for personal rather than ideological reasons, and that Livni maintained an advantage over Mofaz among Kadima members and the general public. But a Smith Research poll published in Thursday’s Globes newspaper found that Mofaz had also bridged the gap in the number of mandates he could bring to Kadima. While polls last week found that Livni would win the party four more seats, the Smith survey predicted that they would both win 13, destroying Livni’s main argument that she would be a more serious candidate against Netanyahu. Livni is expected to be further harmed as more negative stories come out about her management of the party. Itzik Hadad, the treasurer she fired, and MK Avi Dichter intend to make sure there will be more and more negative headlines about Livni until the election. Hadad sent all Kadima members an e-mail this week complaining about Livni.

The second step for Mofaz will be to meet with as many Kadima members as possible ahead of the election and tell them that he, unlike Livni, would bring Kadima a post-primary bounce in the polls like Shelly Yacimovich brought to Labor. He will say that Kadima keeping the same leader would not enable the party to grow. If he wins the race, Mofaz intends to use socioeconomic issues to try to bring down Netanyahu. He is well-positioned to do that because he was raised poor, unlike Livni and new politician Yair Lapid who were raised wealthy by fathers who Knesset members. The last step in Mofaz’s plan is to cast the Likud in Feiglin’s image, regardless of the result in the Likud primary. He will compare Netanyahu to his former colleague at the Boston consulting group, Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney. Mofaz will argue that just like Romney is perceived as centrist but his party has gone to the Right, if re-elected, Netanyahu will be constantly pressured to go rightward by the members and activists in Likud. If Mofaz succeeds in persuading the public that he could be a legitimate contender for prime minister, perhaps, despite polls predicting a landslide victory for Likud in the next general election, that race will look more like the one currently being held in Kadima and less like the one taking place in Likud.

China, India and Turkey have warned that they won’t support a ban on Iranian oil imports and will try and prevent the US from blocking Iranian oil supplies. Japan and South Korea are planning to follow suit. Europe introduced an embargo on Iran oil imports this week. The new package of sanctions against Tehran which was approved by EU foreign ministers on Monday provides for a gradual ban on the import of Iranian oil and oil products. The EU plans to stop purchasing oil from Iran by Jul 1. Until recently, the main buyers of Iranian oil in Europe were Greece, Italy and Spain, who bought 600,000 b/d. Europe decided to buy itself some time so that it could find alternatives to Iranian oil imports. Yevgeny Satanovsky of the Institute of the Middle East says:

Europe will have no problems replacing Iranian oil with oil from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Kuwait. The GCC has already made it clear that it will recoup the losses.

Meanwhile, Europe might be facing quite a headache as its oil refineries were designed to refine Iranian oil, and what’s more, a particular brand of it. Experts have been speculating on who will be hit by the embargo harder, the seller or the buyers? The IMF predicts a 20% to 30% increase in the cost of oil. That means an increase by $20 to $30. Sergei Druzhilovsky of the Moscow Institute for International Relations says:

18% to 20%of Iranian oil is purchased by Europe. A ban on these exports will cause no serious problems for the Iranian economy. It might affect oil prices set for China and India, which could create a bit of a problem. It looks like ‘dumping’ is inevitable, as Iran will definitely have stockpiles of oil it will need to sell. Iran is now switching to payments in currencies other than the dollar: the Japanese yen, the Indian rupee, the Chinese yuan.

This week, China and India reiterated their determination not to support the embargo. Japan is gradually changing its position, having initially yielded to pressure from the US. It has now asked, as an exception, not to be forced to cut its imports from Iran. South Korea has been dragging its feet over the decision, forced to choose between the political solidarity with its pushy overseas partner, and the country’s energy security. Unlike Tokyo and Seoul, Ankara was quick to reject the pressure from the US without hesitation. Analyst Stanislav Tarasov comments:

Turkey’s position is purely pragmatic. It is well aware that Europe is going through a depression and that cutting Iranian oil imports would only make things worse. Iran is Turkey’s main partner, accounting for half of its oil imports. Ankara won’t find any alternatives to Iranian supplies among Arab countries from which it is trying to distance itself. And Iranian oil offers it freedom to act as it pleases. Turkey is simply being sensible about the issue. A primitive political game is under way aimed at forcing Iran into joining six-party talks on its nuclear program. This game testifies to the deteriorating quality of western diplomacy. The problem is that the moment Turkey completed its mediatory mission to obtain Iran’s consent to a meeting with six-party representatives in Istanbul, the West started torpedoing the talks.

Islamabad will take part in a project to build a gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan despite the threats of the imposition of international sanctions, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry announced on Friday. In commenting their stance on the issue, Islamabad insisted that international sanctions should be limited to Iran’s nuclear program and should not affect Islamabad because of its participation in a gas project with Iran.

This week it was revealed that more than about 1,500 New York police officers were shown the 71-minute anti-Islam film “The Third Jihad” while taking anti-terrorism training classes. Press TV’s Gary Anthony Ramsay reports from New York.

In the US, dozens have gathered demanding the resignation of the NYPD commissioner over his appearance in the film. On Friday, representatives from dozens of Muslim and non-Muslim groups congregated at New York’s City Hall demanding the resignation of Ray Kelly. The protesters also demanded the resignation of his Deputy of Public Information Paul Browne. According to the documentary:

Muslim extremists are trying to establish global Islamic governance.

The film also includes a 14-second interview by Kelly. Kelly expressed his remorse late Wednesday, saying:

I offer my apologies to members of the Muslim community, in particular, who would find the film inflammatory and it’s airing on department property, though unauthorized, to be inappropriate.

The department claims a sergeant placed the film in a display loop that flashed on the walls of the training facility. Through a number of statements, the NYPD has insisted that its officers are trained to protect all of the citizens of New York regardless of race or religion. US Muslims, however, say that is hard to believe, especially if those officers are shown films that depict Muslims as radicals and terrorists that deserve neither protection nor respect.

Argentina has captured a three-man Iranian-Hizballah cell and is hunting for the rest of the network, according to exclusive DEBKAfile sources. Its counter-terror police were a step ahead of attacks plotted against several of the 10 Chabad centers in the country, part of a worldwide joint terrorist offensive against Israeli and Jewish targets. Two strikes were thwarted earlier this month in Thailand and Azerbaijan. The three-man cell was captured in the Argentine resort town of San Carlos de Bariloche, 1,680 km from Buenos Aires. Argentina’s T4 anti-terrorist Federal Special Operations Group waylaid the three terrorists on tips from US and Israeli intelligence. In their possession were incriminating documents and maps. Chabad centers and Jewish institutions in the country were then shut down and given extra security guards, as was the Israeli embassy in the capital. DEBKAfile’s sources reveal that one of the things the investigation seeks to discover this time is whether the captured Iranian-Hizballah cell was given a safe house, guidance and aid from family members of WW2 Nazi criminals who won sanctuary in Argentina. At the time of the Israeli embassy bombing twenty years ago the Iranian and Hizballah terrorists were suspected of working hand in glove with local pro-Nazi elements. Argentina, Germany and Israel never confirmed this. However, San Carlos de Bariloche is known as a post-1945 Nazi haven. Two books by British writers published in 2011 even claimed that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had managed to escape from Berlin and reach safety in this region. This rumor was always denied.

The terror alert Buenos Aires declared this week was also communicated to Chile, Peru, Uruguay and Mexico, in case additional Iranian-Hizballah teams were heading for Israeli and Jewish targets there too. The plot Argentina foiled after Thailand and Azerbaijan indicates that Iranian intelligence and Hizballah’s special security arm are in the midst of a worldwide terror offensive against Israel and Jews. Habad centers were picked out because their doors are always open to travelers and easily identifiable and accessible. They are often packed with large numbers of Jewish and Israeli visitors. The attackers are therefore assured of a big splash in the international media if they pull off an attack. In Nov 2008, Lashkar e-Taiba, the Pakistani arm of al Qaeda, seized Habad House in Mumbai and murdered eight Israelis and American Jews before blowing the building up. The rabbi’s small child was the only survivor, rescued from the captured building by his Indian nanny. In Bangkok, a member of the Iranian-Hizballah terrorist team, on his way with at least two confederates to blow up the Habad center after holding its occupants hostage and killing them, was captured two weeks ago, thwarting the attack. Then, on Jan 19, Azerbaijani authorities nabbed a second Iranian intelligence-Hizballah cell in Baku in time to save the local Habad community center in the city. Joint Iranian-Hizballah terrorist tentacles have already reached into three continents for an all-out drive to reach their prey, so far without success, owing to the cooperation among counter-terror agencies on sustained high alert.

However, I find it hard to escape the impression that, the six million figure having become canonical, successive exercises in Holocaust scholarship fixed the facts around this figure – RB

1986 – 1990	1995 – present

Holocaust denial trumps freedom of expression
Natan Lerner, Haaretz, Jan 27 2012

In a recent opinion piece, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, Dr Efraim Zuroff, called upon the Israeli government and Jewish defense organizations to combat the dangers involved in the “ongoing assault on the accepted Holocaust narrative” taking place in some countries. He is right. But more vexing than the trends seen among some groups eager to gain political advantage by distorting the prevailing Holocaust narrative, are the stands adopted in respected human rights quarters claiming that restrictions on expression of opinions that deny historical facts are incompatible with principles of international human rights. Such tendencies cannot be dismissed as mere anti-Semitism or biased historical revisionism. They involve serious legal issues and it is essential for Jewish organizations sensitive to these issues to deal seriously with them.

In particular, I have in mind a “general comment” adopted last summer by the Human Rights Committee, the UN agency in charge of implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This document states that “Laws that penalize the expression of opinions about historical facts – ‘memory laws’ – are incompatible with the obligations that the Covenant imposes – in relation to the respect for freedom of opinion and expression.” Though the statement does not refer by name to the denial of the Holocaust, it seems quite obvious, in view of earlier discussions in the committee and other similar developments, that it is aimed at laws that exist in a large number of European states (and in Israel as well) prohibiting just that. As a participant in a recent UN expert seminar on the prohibition of incitement to national, racial or religious hatred, I felt the need to caution against opinions of experts voiced there in favor of decriminalizing views likely to incite against religious or ethnic groups.

These are not isolated cases. In 2007, Spain’s constitutional court made a controversial distinction between “justification” and “denial” of the Holocaust, declaring the punishment of plain denial unconstitutional. In 2009, in an important book on the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, Christian Tomuschat, a prominent German scholar of international law, while concurring that attempts to approve or to justify the Holocaust “deserve being repressed and prosecuted,” makes a distinction between “qualified denial,” which reveals a hostile attitude toward Jews, and “simple denial,” which he argued should not be made a criminal offense. The same author considers inconclusive the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, which has stated repeatedly that negation of clearly established historical facts such as the Holocaust does not constitute protected speech.

A short newspaper article does not allow for analysis of the legal complexities of the matter from the perspectives of either criminal or human rights law. At this stage, as we are reminded today, as we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the international community as a whole has a clear-cut stand on the subject: the UNGA resolved in 2005 that Holocaust denial should be prohibited. This does not mean that such complexities and the views of those voicing doubts about the legality of Holocaust denial laws should be ignored by Jewish institutions and scholars. There has always been a need to strike a balance between respect for freedom of expression and protection of populations endangered by the abuse of that freedom.

Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights proclaims the right of freedom of expression. But the exercise of such rights may be restricted out of concern for the rights or reputation of “others” and for the protection of public order. Article 20 of the same Covenant provides that any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law. The principal international and regional human rights instruments contain similar provisions, and legislation in several countries prohibiting the denial of the Holocaust, as well as the decisions of international bodies urging the outlawing of such denial, also deal with this issue. It may in some cases be difficult to establish precisely when denial is innocent enough not to imply advocacy of or incitement to hatred or hostility or bias or prejudice toward the victims or their group. But it is not impossible.

Some of the criticism being raised against criminalization of denial tends to make a distinction between denying the Holocaust of the Jewish people, a clearly established historical fact, in the words of the European Court of Human Rights, and other mass killings in the past characterized as genocide. Such a distinction implies the assumption that Holocaust denial is likely to incite to violence, discrimination or hatred against the group that was the victim of the crime, or its members, irrespective of the existence of a clearly detected specific intent. To date, no good-faith denials of the Holocaust have been identified. Decriminalizing such denials would obviously be bad policy from a public interest viewpoint. Freedom of expression should not be invoked to protect incitement, even if the intention to engage in such incitement may sometimes be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable reading of political realities and the consequences of denial.

The EU oil embargo recently slapped on Iran and the threats voiced by the US and other Western countries to come up with further sanctions against the country led watchers to conclude that an armed conflict between Iran and the West finally became imminent. The first potential scenario in the context is that the current standoff would eventually escalate into a war. The US forces in the Gulf area currently number 40,000, plus 90,000 are deployed in Afghanistan, just east of Iran, and several thousands of support troops are deployed in various Asian countries. That adds up to a considerable military potential which may still fall short of what it takes to keep a lid on everything if armed hostilities break out. For example, Colin H Kahl argues in a recent paper in Foreign Affairs that, even though “there is no doubt that Washington will win in the narrow operational sense,” the US would have to take a vast array of pertinent problems into account. At the moment, maintaining the status quo is not in the US interest, holds Stratfor’s George Friedman:

If al Assad survives and if the situation in Iraq proceeds as it has been proceeding, then Iran is creating a reality that will define the region. The US does not have a broad and effective coalition, and certainly not one that would rally in the event of war. It has only Israel.

If the conflict with Iran takes the shape of a protracted bombing campaign and comes as a prologue to the occupation of the country, the US will need to strengthen its positions in adjacent regions, meaning that Washington will be trying to draw the Caucasian republics (Georgia, Azerbaijan) and those of Central Asia into the orbit of its policy and thus tightening the “Anaconda loop” around Russia. An alternative scenario also deserves attention. The EU sanctions would surely hurt many of the European economies, notably, Greece, Italy, and Spain, by a ricochet. In fact, Spanish diplomacy chief José Manuel García-Margallo Y Marfil bluntly described the sanctions decision as a sacrifice. As for Iran, the oil blockade can cause its annual budget to contract by $15b to $20b, which generally should not be critical but, as the country’s parliamentary elections and the 2013 presidential poll are drawing closer and the West actively props up its domestic opposition, outbreaks of unrest in Iran would quite possibly ensue.

Tehran has already made it clear it would make a serious effort to find buyers for its oil export elsewhere. China and India, Iran’s respective number one and number three clients, brushed off the idea of the US-led sanctions momentarily. Japan pledged support for Washington over the matter but did not post any specific plans to reduce the volumes of oil it imports from Iran. Japan, by the way, was badly hit in 1973 when Wall Street provoked an oil crisis and the US guarantees turned hollow. Consequently, Tokyo can be expected to approach Washington’s sanction suggestions with utmost caution and to ask the US for unequivocal guarantees that the White House will be unable to provide. Right now the US is courting South Korea with the aim of having it cut off the import of oil from Iran.

The opposition mounted to the plans underlying the military scenario by China, Russia, and India seems to hold the promise of an alliance of countries seeking to tame the US hegemony and raging unilateralism. Stratfor’s Friedman has a point: time is not on the US’s side, considering that the BRICs countries have some opportunities to influence the situation in the potential conflict zone by launching joint anti-terrorism and anti-piracy maneuvers in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf etc. Inducing the regime change in Iran, which is Washington’s end goal, still takes a pretext. The US has long been eying various factions in Iran in the hope to capitalize on the country’s existing domestic rivalries parallel to the employment of tested color revolution techniques such as the support for the Green Movement or the establishment of a virtual embassy for Iran.

Richard Sanders, a vocal critic of US foreign policy, opined that, at least since the invasion of Mexico in the late nineteenth century, the US permanently relied on the mechanism of war pretext incidents to compile justifications for its military interventions. Pat Buchanan cited in his opinion piece titled “Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?” the fairly common view that the US financial circles knowingly provoked the Pearl Harbor attack to drag the US into a war with the remote goal of ensuring the dollar empire’s global primacy. The lesson to be learned from the history of the Vietnam War, namely the Gulf of Tonkin incident in which the Maddox entered Vietnam’s territorial waters and opened fire on the boats of its navy, is that the initial conflict was similarly ignited by the US intelligence community, the result being that the US Congress authorized LBJ to militarily engage Vietnam. By the way, no retribution followed in June 1967 when the Israelis attacked USS Liberty, killing 34 and wounding 172. The morally charged concepts of humanitarian interventions and war on terror had just as well been invoked to legitimize downright aggressions against Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Speaking of the current developments around the Persian Gulf, Washington’s choice of pretexts for an aggression comprises at least three options, namely:

1. Iran’s nuclear dossier;
2. an engineered escalation in the Strait of Hormuz;
3. allegations that Iran supports international terrorism.

The US objective behind the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, to make everybody in the world accept Washington’s rules of the game, has never been deeply hidden. The abundant alarmist talk is intended to deflect attention from the simple truth that building a nuclear arsenal with the help of civilian nuclear technologies is absolutely impossible, but Matthew H Kroenig of the CFR recently went so far as to warn that Iran would some day pass its nuclear technologies to Venezuela. The motivation must be to somehow bundle all critics of the US foreign policy.

The Strait of Hormuz, which is the maritime chokepoint of the Persian Gulf, is regarded as the epicenter of the coming new war. It serves as the avenue for oil supplies from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the Saudi Arabia, and the UAE and is therefore being closely monitored by all likely parties to the conflict. According to the US Dept of Energy, the 2011 oil transit via the Strait of Hormuz totaled 17 bb, or roughly 20% of the world’s total. Oil prices are projected to increase by 50% if anything disquieting happens in the Strait of Hormuz. Passing through the Strait of Hormuz takes navigation across the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. Iran grants as a courtesy the right to sail across its waters based on the UN Treaty on Maritime Goods Transportation. It must be understood in connection with Washington’s recurrent statements concerning the Strait of Hormuz that in this regard the US and Iran have the same legal status as countries which penned but did not ratify the treaty, and thus the US has no moral right to references to the international law. Iran’s administration stressed recently after consultations with the national legislation that Tehran would possibly subject to a revision the regulations under which foreign vessels are admitted to the Iranian territorial waters. Navies are also supposed to observe certain international laws, in particular, those defining the minimal distance to be maintained to vessels of other countries. It constantly pops up in the US media that Iranian boats come riskily close to US vessels but, as watchers note, provocateurs like the CIA-sponsored separatists from Iran’s Baluchistan could in some cases be pulling off the tricks in disguise.

Chances are that a part of the oil embargo plan is to make the West encounter oil supply problems and start constructing pipelines across Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Qatar, and Iraq as alternative routes reaching the shores of the Arabian, Red, and Mediterranean Seas. A few of these projects, the Hashan–Fujairah pipeline, for instance, are as of today in the process of being implemented. If that is the idea, the explanation behind Washington’s tendency to convince its allies to create a “safer” pipeline infrastructure is straightforward. Geopolitics being an inescapable reality, it does have to be taken into account, though, that the region’s countries remain locked in a variety of conflicts and, due to geographic reasons, Tehran would be a key player even if the pipelines are launched. Since the new US military strategy implies focusing on two regions, the Greater Middle East and South East Asia, the issue of the Strait of Hormuz appears coupled to that of the Strait of Malacca which offers the shortest route for the oil supply from the Indian Ocean to China, Japan, South Korea, and the rest of South East Asia. The arrangement implicitly factors into the Asian countries’ decision-making related to Iran.

The precedent of “the war on terror”, a campaign during which the US occupied under dubious pretexts Iraq and Afghanistan at the costs of thousands of lives, must also be kept in mind. Ages ago, the White House sanctioned subversive activities against various parts of the the Iranian administration, including the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi writes that the US and Israeli agents have been active in Iran for quite some time and are responsible for the epidemic of the Stuxnet virus and the series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear physicists. The groups within Iran which aligned themselves with the country’s foes are the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, the Baluchistan-based separatist Jundallah whose leader Abdolmajid Rigi was arrested in Feb 2010 by the Iranian security forces and admitted to cooperating with the CIA, and the Kurdish Free Life of Kurdistan. In essence, a war against Iran, up to date a secret war, is underway. The problem the parties involved are trying to resolve is to find a way of prevailing without entering the “hot” phase of the conflict.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and its largest oil producer, is from all evidence being systematically thrown into chaos and a state of civil war. The recent surprise decision by the government of Goodluck Jonathan to abruptly lift subsidies on imported gasoline and other fuel has a far more sinister background than mere corruption, and the IMF is playing a key role. China appears to be the likely loser, along with Nigeria’s population. The recent strikes protesting the government’s abrupt elimination of gasoline and other fuel subsidies, which brought Nigeria briefly to a standstill, came as a surprise to most in the country. Months earlier Jonathan had promised the major trade union organizations that he would conduct a gradual four-stage lifting of the subsidy to ease the economic burden. Instead, without warning, he announced an immediate full removal of subsidies effective Jan 1 2012. It was “shock therapy” to put it mildly. Nigeria today is one of the world’s most important producers of light, sweet crude oil, the same high quality crude oil that Libya and the British North Sea produce. The country is showing every indication of spiraling downward into deep disorder. Nigeria is the fifth largest supplier of oil to the US and twelfth largest oil producer in the world, on a par with Kuwait and just behind Venezuela, with production exceeding 2 mb/d.

Despite its oil riches, Nigeria remains one of Africa’s poorest countries. The known oilfields are concentrated around the vast Niger Delta roughly between Port Harcourt and extending in the direction of the capital Lagos, with large new finds being developed all along the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. Nigeria’s oil is exploited and largely exported by the Anglo-American giants—Shell, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco. Italy’s Agip also has a presence and most recently, to no one’s surprise, the Chinese state oil companies began seeking major exploration and oil infrastructure agreements with the Lagos government. Ironically, despite the fact that Nigeria has abundant oil to earn dollar export revenue to build its domestic infrastructure, government policy has deliberately let its domestic oil refining capacity fall into ruin. The consequence has been that most of the gasoline and other refined petroleum products used to drive transportation and industry, has to be imported, despite the country’s abundant oil. In order to shield the population from the high import costs of gasoline and other refined fuels, the central government has subsidized prices. Until Jan 1 2012, that is. That was the day when, without advance warning Jonathan announced immediate removal of all fuel subsidies. Prices for gasoline shot up almost threefold in hours from 65 naira (35 US cents) a liter to 150 naira (93 cents). The impact rippled across the economy to everything including prices of grains and vegetables. In justifying the move, Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi insisted:

The monies will be used in provision of social amenities and infrastructural development that will benefit Nigerians more and save the country from economic rift.

Jonathan says he is phasing out the subsidy as a part of a move to “clean up the Nigerian government.” If so how he plans to proceed is anything but apparent. The huge unexpected price hike for domestic fuel triggered nationwide protests that threatened to bring the economy to a halt by mid-January. The president deftly took the wind out of protester sails by announcing a partial rollback in prices, still leaving prices effectively double that of December. The trade union federation immediately called off the protests. Then, revealingly, Goodluck Jonathan’s government ordered the military to take to the streets to “keep order” and de facto prevent new protests. All that took place during one of the bloodiest waves of bombings and murder rampages by the terrorist Boko Haram sect creating a climate of extreme chaos.

What has been buried from international accounts of the unrest is the explicit role the IMF played in the situation. With suspicious timing IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde was in Nigeria days before Jonathan’s abrupt subsidy decision. By all accounts, the IMF and the Nigerian government have been careful this time not to be blatant about openly announcing demands to ends subsidies as they were in Tunisia before food protests became the trigger for that country’s Twitter putsch in 2011. During her visit to Nigeria Lagarde said:

President Jonathan’s ‘Transformation Agenda’ is an agenda for Nigeria, driven by Nigerians. The IMF is here to support you and be a better partner for you.

Few Nigerians were convinced. On Dec 29 Reuters wrote:

The IMF has urged countries across West and Central Africa to cut fuel subsidies, which they say are not effective in directly aiding the poor, but do promote corruption and smuggling. The past months have seen governments in Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon and Chad moving to cut state subsidies on fuel.

Further confirming the role US and IMF pressure on the Nigerian government played, adviser to UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-Moon Jeffrey Sachs, during a meeting with Jonathan in Nigeria in early January days after the subsidy decision, declared Jonathan’s decision to withdraw petroleum subsidy “a bold and correct policy.” Sachs, a former Harvard economics professor, became notorious during the early 1990’s for prescribing IMF “shock therapy” for Poland, Russia, Ukraine and other former communist states which opened invaluable state assets for de facto plundering by dollar-rich western multinationals.

Making the sudden decision to end the domestic fuel subsidy even more suspicious is the manner in which Washington and the IMF are putting pressure on only select countries to end subsidies. Nigeria, whose oil today sells for the equivalent of $1 a liter or roughly $3.78 a US gallon, is far from cheap. Brunei, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia all offer their petrol very cheap to their people. The Saudis sell their oil at 17 cents, Kuwait at 22 cents.10 In the US gasoline averages 89 cents a liter. That means the IMF and Washington have forced one of the poorest economies in Africa to impose a huge tax on its citizens on the implausible argument it will help eliminate corruption in the state petroleum sector. The IMF knows well that the elimination of subsidies will do nothing about corruption in high places. Were the IMF and World Bank genuinely concerned with the health of the domestic Nigerian economy, they would have provided support for rebuilding and expanding a domestic oil refinery industry that has been let to rot so that the country need no longer import refined fuels using precious state budget resources to do so. The easiest way to do that would be to expedite a two-year-old deal between China and the Nigerian government to invest some $28b in massive expansion of the oil refinery sector to eliminate need for importing foreign gasoline and other refined products. Quite the opposite: the criminal cabal inside NNPC and the Government making huge profits on the old subsidy system are suddenly making double and potentially triple more to maintain the old corrupt import system, and, of course, to sabotage Chinese refinery construction that could put an end to their gravy train.

Rather than benefit ordinary Nigerians as the IMF proclaims to want, the elimination of the subsidies has further pauperized the 90% living on less than $2 a day, according to Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Nigerian Central Bank governor. An estimated 40 million Nigerians are unemployed in the country of 148 million. Because transport costs are a significant factor in delivery of food to the cities, food price inflation has soared along with costs of public transportation for the majority of poorer Nigerians. According to the Nigerian Leadership Sunday:

Prices of commodities which shot up as a fallout of the fuel pump price increase have refused to come down.

Everything from street vegetable sellers to carwashes to roadside photographers are feeling the shock of the rise in fuel prices. Unemployment is rising as small businesses fold. The argument of the IMF and the Jonathan Administration is that by freeing fuel prices, funds would be available to more social services and rebuild Nigeria’s “infrastructure.” Both the IMF and the Government know it would have been far more economically viable to replace the current corrupt system of importing refined gasoline and fuels with investing in rebuilding Nigeria’s domestic refining capacity. Son Gyoh of the Nigerian Awareness for Development organization stated:

Would it not be more expedient to pressure government to service the refineries to full production capacity given the implications on overhead and competitiveness for local industries? Why have successive governments left the refineries in a state of disrepair while spending huge sums on subsidy? Is there any chance that the savings from subsidy withdrawal will go directly into rehabilitating the refineries? Does deregulation imply NNPC will no longer operate a monopoly in importation of refined petroleum product or is this lobby a self-serving lifeline to continue its monopoly? In any case, there is good reason to doubt subsidy removal will solve the fuel scarcity problem as the cabal will only regroup to change tactics, a fact Nigerians are only too aware of.

After Nigeria partly nationalized its oil sector in the late 1970’s they also took control of Shell Oil’s Port Harcourt I refinery. In 1989 Port Harcourt II refinery was built. Both refineries fell into serious disrepair after 1994 when the Abacha military dictatorship cut the “take” of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) from domestic sale of refined oil products such as gasoline from 84% to 22%. That caused a cash crisis for NNPC and a halt to refinery maintenance. Today only one of four refineries operates at all. What developed since was a system of NNPC importing foreign gasoline and other refined products for Nigeria’s domestic needs, naturally at a far more expensive cost. The price subsidies were to relieve that higher import cost, hardly a sensible solution but a very lucrative one for those corrupt elements in the state and private sector making a killing, literally, off the import process.

The IMF is well aware of the real cause of Nigeria’s fuel industry problems. A Nigerian legislative committee examining the sources of the industry’s problems recently released a report documenting that at least $4b/yr is taken from taxpayers in fuel industry corruption with the state Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) at the center. According to the commission:

Every day, fuel importers drop off 59 million liters of fuel. The country consumes 35 million liters daily. That leaves 24 million liters of oil available for smugglers to export, paid for by government fuel subsidies. This costs the Nigerian people roughly $4b/yr, according to Reuters.

The Nigerian government has said that the $7.5b/yr spent on fuel subsidies could be used to provide desperately needed infrastructure. But they omit any mention of the rampant siphoning off of $4b/yr of oil by black market smugglers, reportedly with connivance of high NNPC government officials, to sell to neighboring countries at a hefty profit. The refined imported fuel is reportedly smuggled into neighboring countries like Cameroon, Chad and Niger where petrol prices are far higher, according to Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, Deputy Governor of Kano State.

One major geopolitical factor that is generally ignored in recent discussion of Nigerian oil politics is the growing role of China in the country. In May 2010, only days after Jonathan was sworn in, China signed an impressive $28.5b deal with his government to build three new refineries, something that in no way fit into the plans of either the IMF or of Washington or of the Anglo-American oil majors. China State Construction Engineering Corporation Limited (CSCEC) signed the deal to build three oil refineries with Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), in the biggest deal China has made with Africa. Shehu Ladan, head of NNPC, said at the signing ceremony that the added refineries would reduce the $10b/yr spent on imported refined products. As of Jan 2012, the three Chinese refnery projects were still in the planning stage, reportedly blocked by the powerful vested interests gaining from the existing corrupt import system.

A report in China Daily last November quoted Nigeria’s Olusegun Olutoyin Aganga, the minister of trade and investment that Nigeria was seeking added Chinese investors for its energy, mining and agribusiness industries. Last September on a visit to Beijing, Nigerian central bank governor Lamido Sanusi announced his country planned to invest 5% to 10% of its foreign exchange reserves in yuan, noting that he sees the yuan becoming reserve currency. In 2010 China’s loans and exports to Nigeria exceeded $7b, while Nigeria exported $1b of crude oil, Sanusi stated. Until now Nigeria has held some 79% of her foreign currency reserves in dollars, the rest in Euro or Sterling, all of which look dicey given their financial and debt problems. The move of a major oil producer away from dollars, added to similar moves recently by India, Japan, Russia, Iran and others, augurs bad news for the continued role of the dollar as dominant world reserve currency. Clearly some in Washington would not be happy with that.

The Chinese are also bidding to get a direct stake in Nigeria’s rich oil reserves, until now an Anglo-American domain. In Jul 2010, China’s CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) won four prospective oil blocks, two in the Niger Delta and two in the frontier Chad Basin, with plans to become core investor in the Kaduna refinery, and construction of a double track Lagos-Kano railway. As well China’s oil company, CNOOC Ltd has a major offshore production area in Nigeria. The IMF and Washington pressure to lift subsidies on imported fuels is at this point in question as is the future of China in Nigeria’s energy industry. Clear is that lifting subsidies in no way will benefit Nigerians. More alarming in this context is the orchestration of a major new wave of terror killings and bombings by the mysterious and suspiciously well-armed Boko Haram. This we will look at next in the context of Nigeria’s recent transformation into a major narcotics hub.