Iranian holy city of Mashhad has hosted a three-day international conference on the wake of much changes in the Middle East region some of the most important on the issue of Palestine. Seventh constant weeks of rallies on Gaza border, dubbed as ‘The Great March of Return’ and Trump’s relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem al-Quds.
 
On the sideline of the 6^th international conference conducted by New Horizon, the city of Mashhad has hosted more than 60 prominent figures, peace activists and journalists from the US, UK, Scotland, Australia and Canada among many others in a three-day event titled,” Jerusalem al-Quds, the Eternal Capital of Palestine”.
 
Paul Laroudi, Iranian-born peace activist from the US, in an interview conducted on the sideline of the major event, has touched upon the role of Israel in the US foreign and domestic policy and its war-mongering policies in regards to any country defiant to its strategies.
 Following are some of the highlights in this interview:
 
John Bolton, a product of Zionist lobby
 
This is extremely dangerous time. In effect Zionism is infecting everyone and it is the cause for very dangerous developments now. For example the most recent dangerous development is that John Bolton was named as the head of the national security Agency in the United States. The minute that happened many of us said this is war because the only thing that John Bolton ever talks about is war and specifically war with Iran. Why because he is the product of Zionist lobby in the United States and the Zionist lobby has never stopped talking about this.
 
Israel and New American Century
 
If you go back to 1996 more than, more than 22 years ago, there was a group who advised Netanyahu in his election campaign of 1996 and they came up with the idea that Israel should destroy all of the nations surrounding them, split them up and weaken them. This became the basis for New American Century which came a few years later and that became the policy and people of this project went into the Bush administration and it was carried on during Obama administration as well.
 
Basically since the Regan administration the neoconservatives have been extremely influential. Now Trump, nobody likes him very much but many preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton said,” We will destroy Syria, Iran, and Russia and overthrow Ukraine.” So we knew what to expect with Clinton. We were a little bit less sure with Trump and he said some of the right things, not very many but he said some of the right things which were: we should get out of Syria, we should not have wars, we should not intervene.
 
No Israel critic becomes a US member of congress
When you become president you become prisoner of the people who make you president and these in terms of foreign policy is neoconservatives who are actually the Zionists. So they eventually said,” You need to sell yourself to us” If you want to do anything, you first have to get our support and the way you get our support is that you do what we say in terms of the foreign policy and Middle East and then you can go and we’ll help you in the congress because you have many enemies and we will not be your enemies. We’ll help you and this is the way it works in the United States. The President doesn’t have very much power and the congress has less power. Why? Because nobody becomes a member of the congress in the United States when they criticize Israel or when they support the Palestinians. Nobody 535 members of the congress every last one of them owes a debt to the Zionists and to the Israelis in order to get into the congress and all the assistants the secretarial staff, office staff all of them are actually chosen by the Zionist lobby. So there is not much choice there.
 
US occupied by Israel same way Palestine is
 
If we say that Palestine is occupied by Israel, the United States is also occupied by the Israel and even Saudi Arabia partly belongs to Israel and this is the model which they have replicated in the UK, France, Hungary, and Poland and even in India.

In India they live with Islamophobic Hindu nationalist parties. They work and cooperate with them. I went to India to speak to a 23’000 young audiences and the Israeli embassy discovered after I arrived in the country that I was there otherwise they would have stopped me before and they told the Indian government that I should not be there.

So they sent the police to stop me but I was sitting on the stage ready to talk to the students and so they said,” If you talk to the students then we will arrest you, put you in jail and send you back to your country but if you say you are not going to talk to the students then we’ll let you go. I spoke to the organizers as,” I am ready to go to jail. I think it’s good for you if you have somebody like me in jail. It’ll make a lot of publicity for you.” And they rejected the idea; so, I spoke to the students telling them,” You need to make trouble here. You asked me to speak here and I am a trouble maker so the only possible reason for you to ask me is that you are also trouble makers and trouble making is a good thing.
 
In India they press the Muslims and that is a natural partnership with Israel so Israel is trying to control as many countries as possible.
 
An Israel to rule the world

The idea is they want Israel to essentially rule the world and if they destroy, as they have, through the United States use the United States to destroy Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. Then they have the chance to do many things one of them is to expel the rest of Palestinians from Palestine. No more Palestinian problem, just send them out which they practiced in Lebanon. They wanted to see how long does it take to expel one million Lebanese? Answer: 10 days.
 
I was there. I saw the refugees come and we tried to go to south when it was occupied by the Israelis. OK they left again and the refugees went back but that is how long it takes. They can empty the west bank and push them into the east bank in less than 10 days so this is what they have in mind. There is a war that is very possible coming soon then, I’m sure that is what they do. They will send them.
 
The geographical occupation of Palestine has happened in Palestine but the ideological occupation has already spread throughout the world. I think the idea is that they control all of these countries by their lobbies and by the Zionist groups that exist in and control those countries, the big and most powerful countries on this planet. They control them and at the same time they will militarily take an annex to what they call Israel.
 
Beyond analysis and advocacy, let’s act!
 
It is not enough to analyze and to advocate, to explain or to educate. We have to do resistance. It is all about resistance and some of the resistance is by information, some by action. We have to build a resistance movement as much as we can. We have to support the existing resistance movement, resistance to Zionist movement.
 
This conference is a good mechanism for building resistance because in this conference we bring together people that nobody else is going to bring together. Here in Iran it is possible to invite people who don’t get invited elsewhere. Also in Beirut which is a good place to meet. Here in Iran, if they want, for example we could meet representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah. In Beirut we can do the same but not in London or San Francisco. So this is a very good place to make a network of people who otherwise have no chance to meet together.
 
A co-founder of the movement to break the siege of Gaza by sea, the Free Palestine Movement and the Northern California chapter of the International Solidarity Movement, Dr Paul Larudee has had several visits to Syria to assess the situation in the war-torn country.
 
Iranian-born American political activist is a graduate of Georgetown University who has also spent 14 years in Arab countries as a student, teacher, lecturer and US government advisor.
 
KD