The Ruthless Truth blog

Khalid Amayreh
Uruknet.info
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:16 EST

Writing in the Ha’aretz newspaper on Thursday, 28 January, under the title "holocaust remembrance is a boon for Israeli propaganda," the noted Israeli journalist Gideon Levy accused Israel of employing the holocaust memory as a Public Relations gimmick to divert attention from the savagery and brutality meted out to the Palestinians.
"When the world is talking Goldstone, we talk Holocaust, as if out to blur the impression. When the world talks occupation, we’ll talk Iran as if we wanted them to forget."
But Levy, like many other conscientious observers, know this won’t help the Israeli goal of making the world forget the Palestinians, or more specifically what Israel has done and is doing to them.
"It won’t help much. International Holocaust Remembrance has passed, the speeches will soon be forgotten, and the depressing everyday reality will remain. Israel will not come out looking good, even after the PR campaign"
To be sure, Levy is not against marking the Holocaust day. In fact, he insists that it is an incomparable event. And it may well be so.
However, he reminds the Israeli establishment that "a thousand speeches against anti-Semitism will not extinguish the flames ignited by Operation Cast Lead, flames that threaten not only Israel but the entire Jewish world."
He adds: "As long as evil is rampant here at home, neither the world nor we will be able to accept our preaching to others, even if they deserve it."
This introduction is necessary to understand the Satanic game Zionism and its numerous propaganda outlets are playing in order to divert attention from the genocidal brutality Israel is carrying out against the Palestinian people.
Today, Jewish-Zionist circles are leaving no stone unturned in order to immortalize the holocaust, not so much to warn the world against the recurrence of such an abomination, but rather to obtain from the world a tacit permission to destroy the Palestinian people either in one fell swoop or step by step.
What else explains all this propaganda about the holocaust while the Israeli state and its para-military thugs, otherwise known as settlers, keep up tormenting and savaging the Palestinian people, destroying their homes, stealing their land and denying them access to food and work?
In so doing, Israel and its hasbara doctors not only are displaying spasmodic sensitivity toward any comparisons between the German holocaust and the quasi-holocaust being carried out against the Palestinian people, but are also using every opportunity to divert attention from Israeli atrocities in places like the Gaza Strip.
In recent days, the Israeli hasbara machine utilized to the fullest the highly-propagandistic rescue mission Israel sent to Haiti in an effort to make the world forget what Israel did to the people of the Gaza Strip last year.
But that won’t erase the ugliness from Israel’s face.
A child killer’s ugly face will remains ugly even if dressed in a boy-scout’s uniform. An Israeli soldier who murdered babies in Gaza several months ago shall not be transformed into a charitable figure just because he took part in efforts to rescue Haitians from under the quake rubble. A murderer remains a murderer even if he, on his way home, helped an elderly lady mow her lawn.
In the final analysis, honest and intelligent people just wouldn’t take it. A country that uses F-16 fighters to rain death on school children and prevents milk from reaching babies in order to make them die by way of starvation is a criminal country even if it dispatches rescuers to Haiti where the propaganda teams are filmed rescuing a few victims from under the rubble. It is always difficult to thank people for doing a favor which they never meant to do in the first place.
Zionism has two main goals behind its obsession with the holocaust, an obsession that has been elevated to the level of a religion: First, there is the declared goal, namely to keep the memory of the holocaust alive and to remind the world of what happened to European Jewry at the hands of the Third Reich more than 60 years ago.
This is a legitimate goal as humanity must learn from its tragic mistakes in order not to repeat them. We study the day before yesterday in order to understand yesterday and we study yesterday in order not to spoil our tomorrow.
The second but undeclared goal behind this holocaust religion is to justify Zionism, a racist ideology that eventually bred a gigantic crime against humanity called Israel. In the final analysis, Israel embodies an evil desire to annihilate the Palestinian people and steal their ancestral homeland. And when the Palestinians cry out for justice and humanity, we see and hear the dogs of Zionism shout "holocaust, Auschwitz , Hitler!!"
Last year, the Israeli army and air force rained death on Gaza for three uninterrupted weeks. Warplanes dropped bombs on unprotected civilians throughout the small enclave. Heavy artillery bombarded homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and public buildings, creating a massive carnage. White Phosphoric fire storms raged over Gaza, incinerating numerous civilians. People fleeing for their lives and carrying white flags were systematically gunned down by Israeli army snipers. This happened as army rabbis were encouraging soldiers to murder men, women and children because this is the way to endear themselves to God.!!
There is no doubt that the massive killings and pornographic destruction in Gaza last year was a genocidal act comparable to what was happening during the holocaust. The world shouldn’t raise its eyebrows when such comparisons are made.
After all, the attempted annihilation of European Jewry didn’t begin with Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. It started much earlier with comparatively innocuous things in the early 1930s. And then in 1938, there was the Kirstallnacht, a pre-taste of which the Palestinian people have been and are experiencing at the hands of the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust.
In short, the holocaust started with very much the type of things Israel is doing to the Palestinians these days. The unmitigated attempted killing and starving of Gaza are merely an epitome of a larger picture which shows the systematic Nazi-like savagery and brutality to which most Palestinians are being subjected.
Palestinians are not claiming that Israel is gassing Palestinians en mass. However, Israel is occasionally murdering Palestinian en mass by bombing their homes and denying them access to food and essential consumer products. Israel is murdering Palestinians by denying them access to health care abroad or in the West Bank.
Israel denies that its treatment of Palestinians is reaching Nazi proportions. Well, then how can we describe the Gaza Strip which has been morphed into a huge concentration camp?
Besides, must the level of Israeli Nazism be equal to that of German Nazism in order sound alarm bells and alert the world that Jews are going wild? And who says that the Palestinian victims of Israeli brutality must reach 6,000,000 in order to grant Palestinians a hearing before the world’s court?
The holocaust was nefarious not because many of the victims were Jewish. (millions of non-Jews were killed during the WWII). It was diabolical because innocent human beings were killed unjustly. The horrendous killings wouldn’t have been less evil had the victims been non-Jewish and their number a few million less.
The world must make every conceivable effort to prevent the recurrence of genocides and massacres and destructive wars. And one of the key ways to do that is to prevent Israel from using the holocaust to bully the world to keep silent in the face of Israel’s genocidal crimes against the Palestinians.
Yes, the holocaust was evil, but it must never be used as an excuse for tormenting and savaging the Palestinian people and trying to destroy their national existence which they have earned in spite of history.
Indeed, if the world allows Israel to strangulate the Palestinians, starve Gaza by transforming it into an updated version of the Warsaw Ghetto, then the world will be transforming itself into a human jungle, a jungle that is far worse than a real animal jungle.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/202277-Israel-Uses-Holocaust-Memory-to-Effect-Own-Holocaust-Against-Palestinians

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by Shah Gilani

Global Research, July 10, 2009

Money Morning

Just when you thought the U.S. banking system had regained its footing, the reality is that a carefully woven federal-government PR campaign may actually be masking the next phase of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Indeed, it’s what’s just out of sight that has some analysts and economists scared to death.

To rebuild public confidence in America’s ailing banks the government has greased the system’s liquidity wheels, directly injected capital, backstopped and guaranteed loan facilities, lowered banks’ cost of funds, changed accounting rules to make balance sheets look better, bestowed passing grades on high profile stress tests and then allowed the propped-up (but still not healthy) banks to pay back government loans.

Analysts and economists question whether this race to instill confidence will outpace rising unemployment and lagging economic data, or will trigger the next phase of the global financial crisis if shaky banks end up snapping borrower lifelines.

The big confidence game began with a single “relief” program. Now, many of the titanic banking system’s torpedoed institutions are remaining afloat only because of some rescue programs developed by the U.S. Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department. Deemed absolutely necessary to prevent total financial collapse at the time of their hasty implementation, the legacy of these programs will be their indiscriminate reinforcement of weak links in the banking system and the acceptance of moral hazard. The Trouble With TARP

The granddaddy of all these rescue plans – the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP – is a $700 billion program that was originally designed on fewer than four pages, and that was sold to Congress as a plan to buy toxic assets from sick banks.

That never happened.

Once passed, TARP immediately morphed into a direct-capital-infusion system for banks, allowing them to meet regulatory capital requirements and stay afloat. A wide variety of other relief programs followed. There were programs to backstop the commercial paper market, money market mutual funds, and issuers and purchasers of various asset-backed securities. There was a mortgage-relief initiative. And now there is even a re-constituted public-private partnership plan – worth between $1 trillion and $2 trillion – that is supposed to buy toxic assets from the same banks that still hold them.

With all the government backstopping going on directly and indirectly behind the scenes, what remains to be seen is whether the banks can succeed without the federal government cheerleading the public into believing that these institutions are actually standing on their own feet – when, in reality, many are still on their knees.

Without these plans, many banks would certainly be on their last legs.

Underlying all the relief programs, the U.S. Federal Reserve has done everything in its power to keep interest rates low – especially the benchmark Federal Funds Rate, the rate at which banks borrow from each other on an overnight basis.

One of the positive signs being pointed to lately by government public relations spinners is the positive net interest income being earned by banks. What they don’t point out is that it’s only as positive as it is because the government is artificially keeping banks’ “cost of funds” low through a 0.00% Fed Funds Rate policy, and by continuing to grease every lever of liquidity to keep funding cheap. What’s eventually likely to be overwhelming will be the impact on net interest income when artificially cheap funding dries up, interest rates rise and commercial-paper and money-market spigots are not gushing funds like they did before the global financial crisis took hold.

The combination of capital injections, relief programs and low interest rates was designed to work together to facilitate liquidity in the vast interwoven system of institutions and markets that makes business and finance possible. Banks are the singular linch-pin in the system, without whose proper functioning the entire system would seize up.

And yet, in spite of all that was being done to keep the banking system afloat, it was still sinking. Rock-Paper-Scissors

Not unlike the children’s game rock-paper-scissors, the Fed’s scissors that were used to cut out impediments to liquidity were smashed by the falling Rock of Gibraltar – namely the continuing erosion of trust in crumbling banks, to the point that only by papering over losses at banks could the game be won.

With a strong push from lobbyists, legislators threatened to make legal changes to accepted accounting standards. With a nod of approval from the highest government powers attempting to triage ailing banks, legal changes weren’t necessary. Instead, two amendments to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) were hastily approved by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB):

* The first of the two amendments gave guidance to assist preparers on how to determine whether a market is not active and a transaction is not distressed, which provides allowances for sidestepping mark-to-market rules and essentially allows internal modeling of asset values. * The second amendment provides a neat trick that facilitates changes in the recognition and presentation of other-than-temporary impairments on debt instruments. In short, if you don’t want to declare losses in full view of the public, stick them in a walled-off section of your financials where you can pretend that they are going to be held to maturity and paid back in full. Scissors beats paper in the children’s game, and in the case of banks the scissors of any sharp accountant will eventually shred the paper façade that’s masking huge losses.

Not content to try and get the public to merely notice things might be getting better, the federal government PR machine decided that bank stress tests would provide definitive proof that progress was being made. The result of the much-ballyhooed stress tests was, indeed, effective. The announcement – more like a pronouncement – proclaimed the system sound, saw a strengthening of institutions in general and only pointed to a few laggards.

But in a recent Bloomberg Markets article entitled, “Stress Management,” Janet Tavakoli, president of Structured Finance Inc., told writer Yalman Onaran that “the Federal Reserve, which designed the stress tests, used a 21% to 28% loss rate for subprime mortgages as a worst-case assumption. Already, almost 40% of such loans are 30 days or more overdue.”

Tavakoli predicts defaults actually might reach 55%. Positive Earnings or Positive Spin?

The release of the stress-test results coincided with some strong first quarter financials from banks. The markets rallied amid fertilized talk of “green shoots” and the actual arrival of spring. Now that’s really good PR. Too bad, like a lot of PR, it was managed to look that way.

Using the accountant’s scissors embedded in Onaran’s Bloomberg Markets article, Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) picked up 25% of its 2009 first quarter net income from a debt securities accounting rule change. It subsequently increased its loan-loss provisions more slowly – even as more loans were souring. Without the accounting changes Citi, would probably have posted a net loss of $2.5 billion for the quarter, concluded Martin Weiss, founder of the Jupiter, Fla.-based Weiss Research. Inc.

Weiss also found that “the new standards let Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) boost its capital $2.8 billion by reassessing the value of some $40 billion of bonds, and augmented net income by $334 million because of the effect of the rule on the value of debts held to maturity.”

In June, in a McKinsey Quarterly piece, writersLowell Bryan and Toos Daruvala are even more outspoken about the problems that accounting rules are masking, stating, “It might seem odd that accounting methodologies can make such a big difference. At the end of the day, what counts is the net present value of the cash flow from each asset, but those are unknowable until after a debt is repaid. Fair-value accounting, based on mark-to-market principles, immediately discounts assets when the expectation of a default arises and ability to trade the asset declines. Fair value therefore makes the holder of the asset look worse, sooner. Hold-to-maturity accounting works in reverse and makes the holder look better for a long time.” Looking Good is All That Matters

Why would 10 banks on the edge of the financial abyss only a few months ago want to pay back $68 billion in government bailout money when they have:

* No idea what the future holds for them? * Or if they’ll need to make a return visit to the taxpayer-filled rescue trough?

And why would the government, after all its bluster, let them pay the money back, especially in the face of a firestorm about extraordinarily excessive executive compensation at those same institutions?

Because it’s all about looking good.

It’s part of the PR spin to make banks look healthier than they are. And it just might spin out of control.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Instead of admitting the depth of systemic risk we’re facing from teetering banks and making the hard decision to shut some of them down or break them up once and for all, the federal government would rather pretty up the picture to try and convince us to open our purses again and more-quickly recharge our consumer-driven economy.

The danger in this government PR campaign to make banks look healthy is that if another meaningful economic bump rattles consumer confidence in a banking system the government says is safe, the resulting fear of a separate reality might engender a run on banks that would make the Great Depression look like a walk in the park.

News and Related Story Links:

* Money Morning Special Investment Report: Money Morning’s Bank Stress Test Says These Three Banks Are the Strongest.
http://www.moneymorning.com/2009/04/30/bank-stress-tests-2
* About.com:  Confidence Game.
http://www.answers.com/topic/confidence-trick
* About.com:  Moral Hazard.
http://www.answers.com/topic/moral-hazard
* Wikipedia: Troubled Assets Relief Program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
* Money Morning News Analysis: Motivations Abound for Federal Reserve’s Delayed Release of Bank Stress Test Results.
http://www.moneymorning.com/2009/05/04/bank-stress-test-results-2/
* Wikipedia: Toxic Assets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_assets
* U.S. Federal Reserve: Federal Funds Rate.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/fomc/fundsrate.htm
* WiseGeek.com: Cost of Funds.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-cost-of-funds.htm
* Wikipedia: Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_Accepted_Accounting_Principles
* Wikipedia: Financial Accounting Standards Board.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASB
* Financial Accounting Standards Board: Determining Fair Value of a Distressed
Security.
http://www.fasb.org/project/fas157_active_inactive_distressed.shtml
* Financial Accounting Standards Board: Other-Than-Temporary Financial Impairments.
http://www.fasb.org/project/other-than-temporary_impairments.shtml
* Money Morning News Analysis: By Relaxing “Mark-to-Market” Rules, Has the
U.S. Switched Off its Financial Crisis Early Warning System?
http://www.moneymorning.com/2008/10/08/fair-value-accounting/

Global Research Articles by Shah Gilani

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