Canadian scholar Prof. Michael Keefer believes that the
US-engineered project of War on Terror is a “criminal fraud” that has
virtually extinguished American democracy and the civil liberties of the
American people.
“The so-called War on Terror is a criminal
fraud, designed to frighten Americans and the citizens of its allies
into supporting systematic violations of international law. It was from
the outset Islamophobic both in intention and in the wars of aggression
it has been used to justify,” said Prof. Michael Keefer in an exclusive
interview with Fars News Agency.
On the US special relationship with Israel and
Washington’s unconditional support for the Tel Aviv regime, Prof. Keefer
says, “The US policy of seeking to dominate Eurasia through control of
Middle Eastern and central-Asian hydrocarbon resources aligns with
Israel’s concern to ensure that no Middle Eastern state has the power to
interfere with its policies of continued colonization of Palestinian
land.”
“The powerful and well-funded Israel lobby
supports these policies—though there is evidence of a growing alienation
among young Jews both from this lobby and from the state of Israel,” he
added.
Michael Keefer is a professor emeritus at the
University of Guelph’s School of English and Theater Studies. He is a
former president of the Association of Canadian College and University
Teachers of English. He studied at the Royal Military College of Canada,
the University of Toronto, and Sussex University, and has held research
fellowships at Sussex University in the UK and at the
Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität, Greifswald, Germany.
He has published widely on English Renaissance
literature and early modern philosophy, and has also written widely on
issues of contemporary politics and cultural politics. His books include
an edition of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (2008), Antisemitism Real and
Imagined (2010), and Sabotaging Democracy, a forthcoming study of
electoral fraud in Canada’s 2011 federal election. He has written
numerous articles about the US foreign policy, the War on Terror,
Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories and the plight of the
Palestinian nation since 1948.
FNA had the opportunity to conduct an extensive
interview with Prof. Keefer and ask him questions on the
Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions movement against Israel, the influence of
the Israeli lobby on the US government, the excuse of anti-Semitism and
how it is used to vilify the critics of Israel and the US foreign policy
in the Middle East. What follows is the text of the interview
Q: One of your recent articles has touched upon the
Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions movement against Israel, which is
apparently gaining momentum across the world. However, it seems that the
Western governments will resist the movement and won’t allow their
firms and companies to implement economic sanctions against Israel.
What’s your view on that? Do you think that the Western companies and
firms have the readiness and freedom to impose sanctions against Israel
over its policies in the Occupied Territories and the Gaza Strip?
A: Corporations are not moral agents; they act
according to calculations of profit and loss. But they can be persuaded
by public pressure to withdraw from economic activity and investment in
the Occupied West Bank and in Israel. Boycott campaigners have been able
to prevent companies implicated in the infrastructure of the occupation
from winning contracts for similar work in Europe; other companies are
becoming increasingly concerned about damage to their reputation, and
hence their sales, in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. And in
Norway, the Netherlands, and the US, large pension funds have begun to
respond to demands that they withdraw investments from Israel. This is
the same process that led to the collapse of apartheid in South Africa.
Most Western governments, meanwhile, are providing ever more
flagrant displays of the same hypocrisy they showed decades ago in
dealing with South African apartheid. Israel is in open violation of
many instruments of international law, among them the Fourth Geneva
Convention, whose first article requires signatories “to respect and
ensure respect for” that convention “in all circumstances.” Western
governments can’t stop corporations from withdrawing from Israel, but
some of them (France, followed in this by the US, Australia and Canada)
have been attempting to criminalize the human rights activism of BDS
supporters as an “incitement of hatred.”
Q: Would you please share with us your
perspective on the unofficial ban on the criticism of Israel in the mass
media and academia in the West? The critics of the actions and policies
of Israel are being branded anti-Semite and Jew-hater and those
journalists, university professors and government officials who direct
the most insignificant criticism against Israel are vilified and
demonized. Is there any way to combat this criminalization of the
criticism of Israel?
A: The campaigns conducted by supporters of
Israel—which go beyond slander and vilification into demands that
critics of Israel be fired—can best be resisted by calm, rational,
persistent, and evidence-based argument. Jewish scholars and public
intellectuals have played a very important role in this struggle: people
like Jacqueline Rose, Brian Klug, and the late Tony Judt in the UK;
Judith Butler, Norman Finkelstein, and William I. Robinson in the US;
Naomi Klein and Yakov Rabkin in Canada; and Eva Illouz, Neve Gordon, and
David Shulman in Israel. It helps that these are all scholars and
writers of high distinction and international reputation; the fact that
they are also Jewish makes it idiotic to insinuate that their solidarity
with the Palestinians and their ethical and far-reaching critiques of
Israel’s actions and policies could be motivated by anti-Semitism.
Organizations like Independent Jewish Voices in
the UK and Canada, and Jewish Voice for Peace in the US, have also been
important in helping to persuade their compatriots that firm and
principled criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic.
The fall-back position of the slanderers is to insinuate that Jewish
critics of Israel must be “self-hating Jews,” animated by a perverse
hatred of their own people. The historian Tony Judt offered a
characteristically witty response when a hostile journalist asked if he
was indeed, as supporters of Israel had claimed, a “self-hating Jew.”
After a meditative pause, Judt conceded that he did in fact hate
himself—but not for being Jewish.
It is of course a large further step to criminalize criticism of
Israel through revisions to the penal code of a country. Canadian
supporters of Israel’s actions and policies have made repeated attempts
in this direction—to which human rights activists have reacted with
rational, evidence-based arguments. The book I edited and co-authored in
2010, “Antisemitism Real and Imagined”, brought together responses to
one such attempt; my recent essay “Criminalizing Criticism of Israel in
Canada” analyzes a current attempt by the Canadian government to make
pro-Palestinian human rights discourse vulnerable to prosecution as hate
speech.
Q: Do you agree with the comparison drawn
by some scholars and intellectuals between the Israeli regime and the
apartheid South Africa? Is it true that the measures adopted by Israel
in the Occupied Territories, the West Bank and Gaza Strip resemble the
characteristics of an apartheid, racist regime?
A: The comparison is correct and accurate. In making it, one is of
course not claiming that the apartheid regime in South Africa and the
apartheid regime imposed by Israel on the Palestinians resemble one
another in all respects. I’m content to be guided in this matter by the
South African scholars and jurists who wrote the report “Occupation,
Colonialism, Apartheid?” A reassessment of Israel’s policies in the
occupied Palestinian territories under international law, published by
the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa in May, 2009.
According to this report, what the Israeli government is doing puts it
in breach of the International Convention on the Suppression and
Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.
Insofar as the two systems of apartheid differ, Israel’s is more
violent and more oppressive. According to Ronnie Kasrils, one of the
many South African Jews who struggled honorably against apartheid, and
who subsequently served as a minister in Nelson Mandela’s government,
“Israel’s methods of repression and collective punishment” are “far, far
worse than anything we saw during our long and difficult liberation
struggle.”
One of Israel’s leading sociologists, Eva Illouz
of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has argued in “47 years a slave,”
a long and compelling essay published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
on February 7, 2014, that the Israeli occupation in fact subjects
Palestinians to what she defines as “a condition of slavery.”
Q: Some critics of the US government believe that Washington
has attached its interests and foreign policy priorities to Israel and
many of its differences with the Muslim world emanate from its
unconditional support for Tel Aviv even at the time when it is applying
discriminatory measures against the Palestinian people and suppressing
them. Why has the United States engaged in such an unusual relationship
with Israel to the extent of deteriorating its ties with many Muslim
nations which disfavor the Israeli policies?
A: The United States and other Western countries
had mixed motives in supporting the founding of the state of Israel in
the years immediately following World War Two. One motive was
anti-Semitism—a desire to ensure that Jewish survivors of the Nazi
genocide in Europe settled in Palestine rather than in their countries.
Canada’s behavior in this regard was especially shameful:
restrictions against the admission of Jewish refugees were in place
throughout the years in which the Nazis held power in Germany, and were
not relaxed until 1948.
Another motive was a desire to see a garrison culture that would be
geopolitically dependent on the West implanted in the Muslim Middle
East—with the explicit calculation that this settler colony would serve
Western interests in a region whose hydrocarbon reserves are of immense
strategic importance.
During George W. Bush’s first term, the US enunciated a policy of
attacking and fragmenting every Middle Eastern state that is not
completely subordinate to US economic and geopolitical plans. The
attacks on Libya and Syria show that that policy is still in place—and
US actions in organizing the coup in Ukraine are part of the same
geopolitical strategy.
The US policy of seeking to dominate Eurasia through control of
Middle Eastern and central-Asian hydrocarbon resources aligns with
Israel’s concern to ensure that no Middle Eastern state has the power to
interfere with its policies of continued colonization of Palestinian
land. The powerful and well-funded Israel lobby supports these
policies—though there is evidence of a growing alienation among young
Jews both from this lobby and from the state of Israel.
Q: What’s your viewpoint regarding the dominant US policy on
the Middle East in the recent years? Our region has been witness to
numerous wars and military expeditions waged by the United States and
its allies; wars which many prudent people have termed as wars for oil
and other energy resources available in the region. What’s your idea on
that? Does the United States really intend to bring democracy to the
countries it invades and attacks, or are there other reasons at work?
A: I’ve begun to answer this question in my response to the previous
one. US wars of aggression have had a number of goals: gaining control
over oil and gas reserves (Iraq, Libya); denying or controlling access
by competing powers such as China, or Western European nations to these
reserves; gaining control over important pipeline routes (Afghanistan,
Ukraine); preventing nations that possess important oil and gas deposits
from using the revenues from them to fund social infrastructure or a
“civil commons” (Iraq, Libya); preventing oil and gas-exporting
countries from escaping from the petrodollar exchange system; and
attempting to weaken and intimidate opposing powers like Iran and Russia
(Syria).
The notion that the US has any interest in ‘exporting democracy’ is absurd, and amply refuted by its behavior.
Q: In February 2006, you wrote an article
about the Bush administration’s preparations for launching a military
strike against Iran over the nuclear standoff. Israel had also
repeatedly threatened Iran with aerial attacks on its nuclear
facilities. But there were commentators and analysts who believed that
the war threats were nothing more than a sort of media hype and
propaganda campaign aimed at bullying Iran and leading it into making
concessions. The attacks never happened, while people like John Bolton
had categorically announced the dates of the possible attacks. What do
you think about the veracity of their claims? Weren’t they simply trying
to intimidate the Iranians?
A: My view at the time was that a principal
motive for US war plans against Iran was a desire to prevent Iran from
opening an oil bourse in which currencies other than the US dollar would
be the medium of exchange. The position of the US dollar as a global
fiat currency used in the vast majority of commercial transactions
involving oil and gas is to a large degree what sustains an otherwise
radically unstable imperial power. A significant shift away from
reliance on the dollar in this capacity, which could result, for
example, from Russia deciding at some point that its future gas sales
will be conducted in currencies other than the US dollar, would have a
major impact on the US economy, and on the US’s ability to finance and
sustain its military aggressions. The US was indeed seeking to bully
and intimidate Iran—and has continued to do so. But threats of
aggression, coming from a country with the US’s record in such matters,
should be taken very seriously.
American elites have long since forgotten that their invasion of
Canada in 1812-14 was a failure, and resulted in the burning of
Washington, DC, in return for their sack of what is now the city of
Toronto. They don’t need to remember it, since they have long since had
something close to complete control of Canadian foreign policy. They
have also forgotten that they overthrew the government of Mossadegh in
1953, and subjected Iran to a quarter-century of brutal dictatorship.
But they have not forgotten their humiliation at the time of the Iranian
revolution in 1979.
Q: As you note in your articles, there’s no evidence showing
that Iran has ever intended or is trying to produce nuclear weapons;
however, it has been under intensive, severe economic sanctions for some
10 years, and these sanctions, except for troubling the lives of
Iranian citizens and complicating the process of talks between Iran and
the six world powers, have produced no useful results. What do you think
about the sanctions regime? Do you agree that it’s now up to West to
lift the sanctions as a confidence-building measure?
A: I regard the sanctions against Iran as a very
serious violation of international law. Although I am opposed to nuclear
power generation, on the grounds that the technology is irreducibly
dangerous, and that the risk calculations offered by the nuclear
industry are systematically misleading, Iran has every right under
international law to develop a civil nuclear power program. The behavior
of the US and the European nations in their negotiations with Iran has
been dishonest at every stage. The sanctions should be lifted
immediately and unconditionally.
Q: What’s your viewpoint on the official
accounts of 9/11 terrorist attacks presented by the mainstream media and
propagated by the Bush administration officials? Is it really the case
that they were the Muslims who masterminded and perpetrated the attacks?
If so, then how can we find appropriate answers for such questions as
the five dancing Israelis arrested at the moment of the collapsing of
the Twin Towers or the absence of 4,000 Israeli workers of the World
Trade Center on September 11, 2001?
A: The official account of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is
systematically false. The narrative of the planning and organization of
the terror attacks of 9/11 that is provided by the 9/11 Commission
Report is almost entirely based upon ‘evidence’ acquired by torture. But
the epistemic and evidential value of statements elicited under torture
is zero. The Report is an impudent fiction, and should be catalogued in
the same section of libraries as the equally foolish and tendentious
fictions of Tom Clancy.
The key facts about the events of 9/11, in my opinion, are the
following. First, the US air defense system in the northeastern US was
effectively disabled on September 11, 2001 by overlapping exercises
which transferred many of the available interceptor aircraft out of the
region and confused the military control systems, whose operators were
for an extended period of time uncertain as to which dots on their radar
screens were electronic simulations and which represented actual
aircraft, and which of those real aircraft were part of an exercise and
which were the victims of actual hijackings. Secondly, the planes that
hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon could not have been flown by the
supposed hijackers; the hijacking was carried out electronically, and
not by suicidal fanatics wielding box-cutters. Thirdly, there is
conclusive scientific evidence that the Twin Towers and World Trade
Center Building 7 were destroyed by controlled demolitions.
None of these things was within the power of Osama bin Laden and his
agents. The official story that Muslims carried out these terror attacks
is therefore false.
Israeli operatives appear to have been involved in some peripheral
aspects of the plot. But to the best of my knowledge, the story that
thousands of Israelis working in the Twin Towers were warned to stay
away is quite simply false. Significant numbers of Israelis and people
with dual Israeli-American citizenship were victims of the attacks.
Q: The War on Terror project that began
immediately following the 9/11 attacks has so far claimed the lives of
thousands of innocent civilians in different Muslim countries and nobody
has been held responsible for the excessive, brutal killings. Do you
agree that the War on Terror is in practice a war on Islam and the
Muslims?
A: The so-called War on Terror is a criminal fraud, designed to
frighten Americans and the citizens of its allies into supporting
systematic violations of international law. It was from the outset
Islamophobic both in intention and in the wars of aggression it has been
used to justify. But a lack of concern for the lives of Muslims was
already apparent in US policy: former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright calmly took responsibility for the deaths of half a million
Iraqi children caused by the sanctions regime imposed during the 1990s;
she thought this was an acceptable consequence of a valid policy.
Q: Do you agree with the premise that the 9/11 attacks laid
the groundwork for the US government to impose restrictions and
limitations on the civil liberties and social freedoms of the American
people, silent the dissents and prevent the mass media from giving
coverage to the controversial and sensitive matters of the US domestic
and foreign policy?
A: The events of 9/11 are defined by some American
social scientists, notably Lance DeHaven Smith and Matthew Witt, as a
“state crime against democracy.” American democracy has for decades been
under threat by corporate power—in particular the power of what
President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 called “the military-industrial
complex,” and the power of state agencies operating outside of any
control by democratic institutions, and effectively constituting an
overtly anti-democratic shadow state.
The unsolved assassinations of the 1960s—of John
F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy—marked an
important stage in the growing ascendancy of these agencies. In the
opinion of many political analysts in the US, 9/11, and the policies
pursued since 9/11 by Presidents Bush and Obama, have marked the
effective end of constitutional democracy in the US. Many of the forms
and much of the rhetoric of democratic governance still persist, in much
the same way as the forms and rhetoric of a senatorial republic
persisted in ancient Rome long after the state’s devolution into a
military-autocratic empire under Augustus and his successors. But the US
Constitution and Bill of Rights have been displaced by War-on-Terror
legislation.
The consequences of the stifling of civil
liberty, dissent, and, more generally, of the capacity for innovative,
generous, and public-spirited critical thinking in the US and its allies
may have tragic consequences on a global scale. Human civilization
currently faces a wide array of crises related to planetary resource
limits and processes of change triggered by human interventions. These
include, in no particular order, peak oil; desertification and soil
loss; increasing problems of access to clean drinking water; rising
ocean acidity and the imminent extinction of fish stocks; and ecosystem
and genetic damage caused both by nuclear weaponry including, very
importantly, depleted uranium munitions, and by nuclear accidents like
Fukushima. Overarching all of these are the processes of chaotic climate
change and global warming that have been set in motion by greenhouse
gas emissions: unchecked, these processes will accelerate a global
mass-extinction event that is already underway. Over the past decade and
more, the predictions of climate scientists have repeatedly been
overtaken by climate change events that are moving much more rapidly
than anticipated.
At this moment in history, more than any other,
we are in desperate need of creativity, open-mindedness, cross-cultural
and inter-faith generosity, and a commitment to justice and human
solidarity, based on a firm assertion of the dignity and equality of our
brothers and sisters everywhere.
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari
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