Yesterday, on Thursday, August 12, activists blocked the entrance to a Raytheon facility in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. The action was organized by the FANG Collective and RAM INC (Resist and Abolish the Military Industrial Complex) in protest of the defense contractors weapons sales to Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as its connections to the U.S/Mexico border.
RAM INC put out a statement citing the connections between local lawmakers and the company. “Raytheon spends millions of dollars a year lobbying politicians to escalate global conflicts and inflate the Pentagon’s budget just so that their profits can grow. Right here in Rhode Island Raytheon is the second highest donor to both Senator Jack Reed and Representative Jim Langevin. We can no longer allow rogue corporations like Raytheon to determine our foreign policy”, it reads.
Raytheon, which is the second largest weapons contractor in the world, has made billions selling weapons to the Saudi coalition attacking Yemen. According to a 2020 investigation by the New York Times, the company sold over $3 billion worth of bombs to the Saudis shortly after the war on Yemen began.
“Intent on pushing the deals through, Raytheon followed the industry playbook: It took advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials, who were not required to be registered as lobbyists, to press their former colleagues to approve the sales,” reads the report. “And though the company was already embedded in Washington — its chief lobbyist, Mark Esper, would become Army secretary and then defense secretary under Mr. Trump — Raytheon executives sought even closer ties.”
In 2020 Raytheon Missiles & Defense announced that it partnering with the Israeli company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to establish a United States production facility for Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense system. According to numerous reports, Israel plans to request an additional $1 billion from the U.S. to replenish Iron Dome. Although that decision will be left up to congress, the Biden administration has repeatedly indicated that they support supplying Israel with those funds.
“Raytheon profits from the killing of civilians, families and children in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere,” said one of the protesters. “We can’t sit idly by while Raytheon engineers new and more destructive ways of killing innocent people, Raytheon must be stopped and held accountable.”
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Scholars believe that when Israel tested a nuclear weapon in the Indian Ocean in 1979, the Carter administration covered it up. In 2009, when a journalist asked Barack Obama if he knew of ‘any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons,’ Mr. Obama responded, ‘I don’t want to speculate.’
“Feigning ignorance about Israeli nuclear weapons makes a mockery of America’s efforts at nonproliferation. Mr. Obama vowed to pursue a nuclear-free world. Yet to prevent public discussion of Israel’s arsenal, his administration helped squelch a United Nations conference on a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The Biden administration continues to impose punishing sanctions on Iran in an attempt to force its government to accept inspections more stringent than those required by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Meanwhile, Israel, which has never signed the N.P.T., permits no inspections at all.
“This hypocrisy leads many around the world to smirk when American diplomats claim to be defending the ‘rules-based order.’ It also empowers those Iranians who claim Tehran has the right to match its regional rival.”
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Opinion | America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel’s Nukes – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
New York Times, August 11/21, by Peter Beinart
“America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel’s Nukes”
EXCERPT:
“American politicians often warn that if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, it will spark a nuclear stampede across the Middle East. Allowing Tehran to get the bomb, Senator Robert Menendez, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, predicted in March 2020, could ‘set off a dangerous arms race in the region.’ In an interview in December, President-elect Joe Biden cautioned that if Iran went nuclear, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt might too, ‘and the last goddamn thing we need in that part of the world is a buildup of nuclear capability.’
“Such statements are so familiar that it’s easy to overlook their artifice. In warning that Iran could turn the Middle East nuclear, American politicians imply that the region is nuclear-free now. But it’s not. Israel already has nuclear weapons. You’d just never know it from America’s leaders, who have spent the last half-century feigning ignorance. This deceit undercuts America’s supposed commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and it distorts the American debate over Iran. It’s time for the Biden administration to tell the truth.
“American officials began hiding the truth about Israeli nuclear weapons after Israeli leaders hid the truth from them. In the early 1960s, writes Avner Cohen in his book “The Worst Kept Secret,” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion repeatedly told President John F. Kennedy that the reactor Israel was building in the desert town of Dimona ‘was for peaceful purposes only.’ When the United States sent inspectors to the site, the Israelis concocted an elaborate ruse, which included building fake walls to conceal the elevators that led to an underground reprocessing plant. By decade’s end, the die was cast. The C.I.A. concluded that Israel already possessed nuclear warheads.
“So Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir hatched a deal. Neither Israel nor the United States would acknowledge that Israel had nuclear weapons, and Washington would not pressure Israel to submit them to international oversight. For 50 years now, American presidents have abided by the bargain.(cont’d)
The most significant crime perpetrated by Iran was to stand shoulder to shoulder with the victims of Israeli crimes. How dare they refuse to bow to the new hegemons.
The most significant crime perpetrated by Israel is… hang on they invent new atrocities daily.
Note that according to the report Iron Dome is a missile defense system. DEFENSE. Iron Dome saves lives, Israelis and Palestinian.