Yes, there is a Santa Claus !  Or, let us call it the “Metaphorical Santa Claus” who in the last two weeks has brought us renewed hope by good news and the expectation of more of the kind to follow.

As the 2014 year approaches its end, a seismic series of events have ushered in a surge of hope on the national and international level, that irreversible moves which have yet to reach full maturity and momentum, will lead to the beginning of the end of festering threats to social and economic stability coupled to threats to national and international security resulting from injustices and horrific reprisals thereto which begged to be addressed for more than four decades.

So, in accordance with this preamble, the Argentum Post announces the following winners of the “Metaphorical Santa Claus” Peace Through Justice and Accountability awards to the following distinguished individuals/organizations (in chronological order).

* Senator Dianne Feinstein for her principled, intrepid, courageous, incisive leadership in exposing the egregious violation of United States 1994-ratified  Convention Against Torture by the President and Vice-President of the United States, namely George W. Bush and Richard Cheney.

* The European Union Parliament for its overwhelming vote of 498 to 88 recognizing the right of the autochthonous residents of Palestine for centuries to claim, at least, their 1967 illegally occupied lands and properties stolen and occupied by the Zionist misleardership of Israel in brazen violation of international law, thereby demonstrating that the undue influence lobby of the extremist Zionist organizations worldwide can be rendered irrelevant, as they do not represent the humanistic principles and aspirations of European, American, and global decent Jewry which yearns for a truly equitable, peaceful, and sustainable resolution of the problems which were generated by the implantation of the nationalized embodiment of the Jewish religion into the land of the said autochthonous residents of Palestine whose rights were grotesquely and violently ignored for much too long.

* The President of the United States, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis, for their fabulous and inspiring collaboration in bringing at long last to an end the unjust and futile attempts to isolate and sabotage Cuba for having dared to adopt a socialist model of social and economic development, thereby isolating and rendering irrelevant the undue influence lobby of the extremist right-wing Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) Miami lobby whose die hard right wing extremist ideologues are those who benefitted from the bloody dictatorship of Fulgencio Baptista until the genuine people’s Revolution cast off the yoke of that decadent racist authoritarian.

* The New York Times reporter James Risen who in his book “Pay Any Price :  Greed, Power, and Endless War” revealed, inter alia, that the U.S. covertly used measures to sabotage Iran’s nuclear energy generating program to which it is legally entitled by having  signed on the to the Non Nuclear Proliferation Treaty which bans only the weaponization of nuclear energy, something which Israel has done but refuses to admit, after acquiring and implementing the nuclear weaponization technology in 1969 by a secret agreement between PM Golda Meier and President Nixon, and by further illegally then disseminating said technology to the white supremacist Apartheid regime of South Africa, as reported, inter alia, in the book by Jewish author Sasha Polakow-Suransky in “The Unspoken Alliance : Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa”.     David Risen was threatened by prosecutors to reveal his sources but now they apparently dropped their threat.

BTW, it is noteworthy that as relates to the Iran nuclear “scare”, according to investigative journalist Gareth Porter’s just published a book titled “Manufactured Crisis : The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare” the “scare” is based on falsehoods alleged as regards to Iran’s program, particularly by Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu who made quite a fool of himself at the General Assembly of the UN when he was showing a risible ball about to explode which was symbolizing the WMD of Iraq threat used by Richard Cheney as well to incite war on Iraq on the false additionally false allegations that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

* Finally last and not least and on an ongoing basis, all of the principled, scholarly, authors, investigative journalists, broadcast television producers, bloggers, and whistleblowers who risk their lives, their careers, their co-existence with their own families at times, in order to go where the truth sends them and expose wrong doing, a most needed and noble endeavour for which some wind up in total isolation outside of their own countries and even in prison.

To name a few there are the following :   Mordechai Vanunu who was abducted by Mossad agents in Italy and place in solitary confinement for 11 years for revealing to the world that Israel had acquired a program of nuclear WMD in 1986, and others very well-known such as Richard Falk, Daniel Ellsberg, Adrian Assange, Edward Snowden, Glen Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman, and many more to whom we in the U.S. and worldwide are indebted enormously.  These are heroes who suffer for discovering and/or reporting on serious criminal wrongdoing, yet the establishments in the U.S. and abroad, instead of punishing the wrongdoers, it persecutes those who expose the wrongdoing.

The remaining weeks will bring joy and hope, particularly for the long oppressed peoples of Cuba and of Palestine, but the journey to the final objective for the redemption of their rightful claims is an arduous and long one but the path has now been charted and  cleared and there cannot be any return.

There are two imperatives for the full realization of the benefits of torture exposure and for the now global recognition that Israel can no longer act with impunity in its violent and abusive mistreatment of Palestinians, and that it will be forced by the UN and the International Criminal Court to come to terms with the reality of its being held accountable without further delay.

In the case of the former, namely the torture exposure, it is an imperative that President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney now be prosecuted.  No amount of frivolous euphemism will obstruct the fact that they, and not the CIA, ordered the use of torture.  For the sake of the preservation of our societies’ ethical standards and for the sake of the our national prestige, security and the security of our citizens abroad, prosecution is a must.

In the case of the latter, namely the Palestinian recognition by the EU and by the UN, it is an imperative that this time President Obama withhold the abusive use of the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council.   Since 2006 when the UN Human Rights Council was created, every time Israel carried out crimes against the humanity of unarmed Palestinian civilians, and was universally condemned, bizarrely and in a knee-jerk fashion the U.S. would veto the UN Security Council resolution. This occurred 45 times since 2006.  This practice coupled to the fact that the U.S. is the only nation on earth which supports Israel militarily as it sits in illegally occupied land and practices lethal collective punishments and house demolitions, and the U.S.  supplies Israel with approximately $20 million dollars per day.  This posture results in becoming the generator of the intense hatred of Arabs and others towards the U.S. and it is also what feeds those who then resort to extremist violence which winds up maiming and killing Americans abroad.  The U.S.  is perceived clearly as an enabler of Israel state terrorism, and this must end now, and end it will once the legitimate claims of Palestinians are met.

The U.S. mainstream media unfortunately and engagingly opts to ignore or at times deliberately underreports, or worse, misreports extremely relevant and revealing facts such that on March 7, 2014 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. a one day conference took place which was attended by some 500 distinguished scholars and other members of the public titled “National Summit to Reassess the U.S. – Israel ‘Special’ Relationship”.  This writer attended this conference and reported on it in this Argentum Post.

On April 10, 2015, again at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., a one-day conference will take place organized by the Network for Good and this conference is titled “The Israel  Lobby : Is It Good For the U.S. ?”.   Will the public at-large learn about it ?

What is certainly not good for the U.S. is that such vital conferences receive practically no journalistic coverage by the nation’s capital only major newspaper, namely The Washington Post.  So, the average man and woman who do not have the time to research what is going on in the world which directly affects them, remain totally in the dark and therefore are prey to the corrupted political demagogues who specialize in hate and fear mongering round the clock to advance their narrow minded agendas of self empowerment, something they have shown adeptness for when it came to the obstructionist tactics of the Congressional session which was hijacked by the Tea Partying GOP .

This writer hopes to have achieved the objective of instilling hope and optimism on the basis of what our “Metaphorical Santa Claus” has brought us during the last week or so, in terms of progress and opportunities for real change we can and must embrace, and therefore giving credit where credit is due as regards to the above named individuals and organizations and to all the unnamed who have contributed veritable and noble public services  so we can begin to realistically aim to recover a genuinely participative democracy, is the way we can show our gratitude to them.

Happy year’s end celebrative observations to all.

Fred