THE WISDOM FUND: News & Views
December 25, 2014
Consortium News

Selling 'Peace Groups' on US-Led Wars

The U.S. government has made 'perception management' of the American people a high priority, feeding them a steady diet of propaganda about foreign crises, even getting "peace groups" to buy into 'pro-democracy' wars

by Margaret Sarfehjooy and Coleen Rowley

"War is peace" double-speak has become commonplace these days. And, the more astute foreign policy journalists and commentators are beginning to realize the extent of how "liberal interventionists" work in sync with neocon warhawks to produce and sustain a perpetual state of U.S. war.

More and more "peace and social justice" groups are even being twisted into "democracy promotion," U.S. militarism style. But rarely do we get a window to see as clearly into how this Orwellian transformation occurs as with the "Committee in Solidarity with the People of Syria" (CISPOS) based in Minnesota's Twin Cities, a spin-off of "Friends for a Nonviolent World" (FNVW), steering its Quaker-inspired founding in nonviolence to promote speakers and essayists with strong ties to the violent uprising to topple the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, resulting in a war that has already taken some 200,000 lives. . . .

Often Syrian "experts" speaking to peace groups, such as FNVW/CISPOS's upcoming speaker, Mohja Kahf, have ties to the early destabilization of Syria. This American Prospect article documents how Najib Ghadbian, Kahf's husband of over 20 years (apparently up to last year when they divorced) was one of the Syrian dissidents who attended the early 2006 meeting with Liz Cheney (then-Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter), along with other Syrian dissidents to plan how to destabilize Syria and topple its government. Like some Syrian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the neocons' choice to run post-invasion Iraq, Kahf's husband apparently got himself invited to Liz Cheney's "Iran-Syria Operations Group" by having signed the "Damascus Declaration" in 2005, the year before. . . .

James Prince, the founder and President of the Democracy Council, is also an adviser to CyberDissidents.org , a project created in 2008 by the Jerusalem-based Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, founded and funded by Sheldon Adelson, a patron and confidant of Benjamin Netanyahu. . . .

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Enver Masud, "Regime Change American Style," The Wisdom Fund, February 15, 2001

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby," London Review of Books, March 23, 2006

"Letter to President Obama About Libya Signed by Hundreds of 'Democracy' Activists," March 14, 2011

Enver Masud, "Revealed: America's Hidden Hand Behind The UN Resolution For A No-fly Zone Over Libya," March 19, 2011

Robert Parry, "The Neocon Plan for War and More War," Consortiumnews.com, November 11, 2014

Robert Parry, "The Victory of 'Perception Management'," Consortiumnews.com, December 28, 2014

[Israel is America's number one foreign policy problem in that it is able and willing to start potentially catastrophic wars with countries that it has demonized but that do not threaten the U.S.--Philip Giraldi, "Understanding Jewish Power," unz.com, June 12, 2018]

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