Iran: The New Scapegoat

William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat, 1854-56.

"We cannot refasten the bindings because we now know that the scapegoats of sacrifice are innocent. Christ’s Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence." - René Girard, On War and Apocalypse, First Things: August/September 2009.

"Christianity destroyed sacrificial cults. Christianity reveals that our world is founded on violence. The main resource of government and civilization, in the archaic world, is the scapegoat phenomenon. The great paradox is that the scapegoat phenomenon operates only as long as it remains unperceived by the people it unites. The gospels make it visible that Jesus is a scapegoat. When people say there is no difference between a myth and Christianity, it is almost true. In both instances, the story culminates in a big drama: A victim is collectively killed and is divinized. But, in these two instances, the victim is not divinized for the same reason. Jesus is divinized because he suffers the Passion, in spite of his innocence, and he reveals their own violence to his murderers. In archaic religions, the guilt of the murderers remains invisible, unperceived. It’s the reconciliation effect of scapegoating which is emphasized as the positive significance of the process. In Christianity, the criminal violence of the murderers is revealed as well as the innocence of the victim.

An archaic religion is nothing but a scapegoat phenomenon that succeeds, so to speak, as it is naively interpreted by the scapegoaters themselves. In the gospels, this scapegoat phenomenon fails and its meaning is revealed to the scapegoaters themselves, that is, mankind as a whole. Christianity destroys archaic religions because it reveals to us their reliance on scapegoat violence." - René Girard, "Christianity Will Be Victorious, But Only In Defeat": An Interview with René Girard, by Cynthia L. Haven, First Things, July 16, 2009.

Over the last several months, officials in Washington and Tel Aviv have intensified their psychological warfare against Iran. Their campaign of lies includes manufacturing a fake Iranian-Saudi assassination plot, connecting Iran to Al-Qaeda and 9/11, and accusing Iran of planning to strike civilian targets in the United States.

The aim of this onslaught of deception is to paint Iran as a demonic and irrational monster and cast it into the global wilderness to suffer the fate of a scapegoat. The death of Osama Bin Laden, who was the original scapegoat in the war on terror and was transformed into a god of terror by Washington and Tel Aviv, left a vacuum of hate and fear which Iran is filling.

Iran is a manufactured Enemy. It poses no danger to the security of America or Israel, but that's not the impression you get when you read crazy warmongers and propagandists like Reza Kahlili, whose most recent article screams "attack Iran" with a baseless headline that reads: "Ayatollah: Kill all Jews, annihilate Israel." People who have no understanding of Iran's conception of its national self-interest, and its soft power strategy, believe the crap that Kahlili and others in the psychosphere pump out.

Iran is a threat not because it wants to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map, but because it is exposing the war crimes and epic hypocrisy of the war criminals in Washington and Tel Aviv.

In times like these, when mass ignorance is more dangerous to human civilization than messianic terrorism, we need to listen to rational, intelligent, and constructive voices like Chris Floyd. Below is an excerpt from his latest article, "Runaway Train: Stop the War Against Iran -- Now":

"The Obama administration is carefully -- and deliberately and knowingly -- building up the Iranian "threat" to such monstrous heights that it will be impossible to back down: Tehran terrorists striking in the Homeland with Al Qaeda while they ready their nukes to destroy America -- we're supposed to negotiate with such monsters? There is only one way to save our sweet little children from nuclear obliteration -- strike the Persian aggressors before they kill us! It's a plain case of self-defense.

There is of course absolutely no substance to any of this. There is no substance to the claim that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. And there would be no "threat" to the United States if they did build one. (And no threat to Israel either, which is sitting there with its vast nuclear arsenal, fully able -- right now, in real time, in real life -- to "wipe Iran from the map" at the push of a button.) The only "threat" Iran poses -- with or without nuclear weapons -- is to the domination of the Middle East and its oil wealth by the American elite and its international partners."

President Obama, who promised to have peaceful talks with Iran, is leading America and the world down the road to world war III based on a series of lies and provocations engineered by the forces of endless war in the United States and Israel. These criminal forces are ready to stage a new false flag attack on American soil to scapegoat Iran for their disasters in the Middle East, which they have planned for years.

In his article on Sunday, February 5, called, "Brookings: ‘Horrific Provocation’ and ‘Tehran-Sponsored 9/11′ Needed to Trigger Iran Invasion," Jurriaan Maessen drew attention to the kind of false flag attacks that the bad guys in Washington and Tel Aviv are planning to stage in America to justify a total war against Iran. Maessen concluded his article by saying:

"All this hinting at another false-flag attack underway and prepping the international community for a future invasion of Iran is becoming increasingly serious as the warmongering is being stepped up. This is the time to fix our eyes upon these globalists and their think tanks. If their blatant arrogance permits them to openly publish their bloodthirsty musings, we should be vigilant enough to pass this knowledge around lest we have another 9/11 on our hands."

The threat to America of another U.S./Israeli false flag attack against American citizens, a "9/11 Redux," has occupied the minds of many of us in the global alternative media. But something is different this year. We all have the feeling that the psychopaths in power in Washington and Tel Aviv may actually kill innocent American citizens again and blame another scapegoat for the crime.

If these crazy war criminals orchestrate another ritual of mass murder and terror on American soil and blame Iran for the event, two things will happen for sure. One, martial law will be declared in America, and the patriotic resistance to the fascist police state will be targeted like never before. And two, the gates of Hades will be blasted open in the Middle East and the blood of millions will flow like lava from Jerusalem to Tehran.

Fiver years ago, the psychopath Dick Cheney was thinking about provoking an event in the Persian Gulf that would be used to mobilize global public opinion in favour of a U.S./Israeli war against Iran, but the Generals opposed him.

Seymour Hersh reported that Cheney planned to use Navy Seals as sacrificial pawns by putting them in Iranian gear on Iranian boats and then have them strike American ships. If implemented, this barbaric policy would have led to American deaths at the hands of Americans.

On February 24, 2007, Arthur Silber warned that the U.S. government could pull off such an event in his article, "Dispatch from Germany, Summer of 1939," comparing it to Nazi Germany's provocation against Poland called the Gleiwitz incident. Silber wrote:

"Let me offer the introductory paragraphs concerning the Gleiwitz incident:

The Gleiwitz incident was a staged attack on 31 August 1939 against the German radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany (since 1945: Gliwice, Republic of Poland) on the eve of World War II in Europe.

This provocation was one of several actions in Operation Himmler, a Nazi Germany project to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany, which would be used to justify the subsequent invasion of Poland.

This is our posture and strategy toward Iran: the posture and strategy of Nazi Germany toward Poland. But we are America the Good. We cannot commit evil of this kind. Many Germans believed the same thing about their country.

Germany, in the summer of 1939. Like most Germans then, most Americans will do nothing."

Other writers and commentators have drawn similar comparisons between Germany in 1939 and America in 2012. But there are huge differences. Germany did not have Ron Paul. Germany did not have Alex Jones and the 9/11 truth and justice movement. Germany did not have the Internet. Germany did not have the Oath Keepers. Germany did not have anti-war activists like Ray McGovern and Chris Hedges. Germany did not have the American tradition of liberty.

America is not Nazi Germany in 1939. It is the Soviet Union in 1989.

It is not politically, financially, and militarily wise for Washington to start a new war in the Middle East. It will be national suicide. The criminal U.S. ruling class knows the American people and the international community will not stand for an unnecessary war against Iran. They know that engineering another illegal war against an innocent and non-threatening country would spell the end of their long reign of terror and tyranny over the world.

They will be finished like the Nazis.

So they face two choices: either get tough with Israel and force it to abandon its course of aggression against Iran, or join Israel in its stupid war, and thereby bring America down as well.

Since we know that the globalist oligarchs who control Washington wish to destroy America and her people, we can expect that they will join Israel in staging a new false flag attack in America and then use the shocking event to unleash hell on Iran.