What are we to make of the "furore" surrounding the publishing of anti-Islam cartoons by Dutch and French daily papers? The intent seems clear enough - to portray Islam, and therefore all Muslims as fanatic terrorists, and to provoke Muslim groups to confirm for the world that this portrayal is accurate - which is exactly what has happened. Flag and effigy burning has ensued in Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Palestine territories. In Iran, hundreds of thousands of worshippers staged a protest demonstration against the insulting cartoons, shouting "Death to America," "Death to Israel" and "this insult will not remain unanswered."

But who benefits from "furore"?

It is not the average Muslim who has been further demonised as a 'terrorist'. Neither is it the average Westerner who has been further manipulated to believe the lies and propaganda of the American Israeli and British governments that average Muslim is a terrorist.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, while expressing condemnation for the cartoons, urged militant groups not to harm European nationals and institutions. He said:

"While we condemn these offensive cartoons of our prophet published in Danish and other European newspapers, we distinguish between what was published ... and European citizens who bear no responsibility for what was published."

Indeed. But can the average Western citizen distinguish between the image that has been crafted by American and Israeli governments and their media slaves of Islam as a terrorist religion and the vast majority of ordinary Muslims around the world who have no interest in creating a world-wide extremist Islamic caliphate?

Recently the calls from the American and Israeli governments for Iran to 'disarm', and the subtle suggestions that the Iran's nuclear program poses a deadly threat to Israel and/or America, have been growing. Now we have the publication of the cartoons that have 'inflamed the Islamic world' (we are told), with Iranian protestors shouting "death to America" and "death to Israel." Sounds like a perfect preface to a nuclear attack on either the US or Israel that could then be 'convincingly' attributed to Iran, does it not? Consider also a story from the Guardian today which is entitled: Pentagon sets up robot unit to identify source of nuclear attacks, and which informs us that:

The Pentagon has set up a special unit complete with robots to conduct forensic tests in the event of a nuclear attack on the US, with the aim of identifying attackers for possible retaliation, a Pentagon official said yesterday.

Major Susan Idziak, a defence department spokeswoman, told The Guardian that the unit was called the the Domestic Nuclear Event Attribution (DNEA) program and that it had been launched in 2000. It is made up of nuclear experts equipped with "specifically modified" robots for collecting and analysing fallout at ground zero of any future attack by a nuclear device or a dirty bomb (radioactive material scattered by conventional explosives).

Well hells bells! Who's gonna argue with a cutting-edge robot with the brains of many "nuclear experts" when it reports from a nuclear ground zero in the American heartland and intones: "Iran did it!" Case closed! Send in the Stealth Bombers!

What will be missing from the collective consciousness in such a scenario is the fact that members of the current US government have already proven themselves capable of attacking American citizens in order to further political and personal goals. When such a government makes references to the likelihood of a nuclear attack on the U.S., the people of the world, and particularly Americans, should be very, very worried.

Since 9/11, the modern American intelligence apparatus has grown to be extremely pervasive (and invasive) with a level of homeland surveillance that is probably unprecedented in any country in recent history. The offical explanation for this widening of the eye of 'big brother' is that it is necessary to protect Americans from further terrorist attack. In the case that a real threat of nuclear attack from a foreign nation existed - be it a conventional rocket attack or an improvised 'suitcase nuke' attack - and to carry out the attack that nation had to circumvent American defences - including the massive integrated surveillance network -  American citizens could feel confident that such an attack could and would be thwarted.

The problem, however, is in our understanding of the nature of the attacks of September 11th 2001 and the real reason for the subsequent ramping up of surveillance. To the unbiased and unemotional eye, the 9/11 attacks bear all the hallmarks of an inside job and, as such, the massive increase in the power and reach of the U.S. state and military intelligence apparatus that resulted from the 9/11 attacks cannot have been intended to provide the means by which the American people could be better protected. A much more logical explanation is that the overhauling of US intelligence agencies, clampdown on civil liberties, co-opting of the judiciary etc., all of which has been implemented by same people that orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, is designed to allow these very same people the freedom to carry out another terror attack on the American people if an when they so choose.

Under these circumstances, when the heads of agencies of this same American government start talking up the possibility of a nuclear attack on American soil, the reality is that they are simply  planning to engage in the age-old covert military tactic of false flag, where one party carries out an attack and blames a second party.

For many years, successive American governments have been abusing and grossly neglecting their position as the supposed protector of the American people. To use an apt analogy, the American people find themselves in the tragic role of 'battered wife' to their 'violent husband' of a government. Statistics show that battered wives that fail to find the will to remove themselves from a destructive relationship, who return time and again to their husbands, who refuse to see reality and delude themselves with the belief that things will get better - that “he is a good man at heart” - succeed only in reducing what little respect their violent husbands had for them, and ultimately extinguishing it completely. In such scenarios, and particularly when the husband is of a psychopathic nature, he can come to see his wife as entirely less than human, a ‘thing’ denuded of any humanity whose only purpose is to be used and abused as his deranged mind sees fit. It goes without saying that the fate of a person (or group of people) viewed as less than human by another more powerful person (or group of people) is often dire.   

Time and again, millions of Americans have refused the opportunity to accept the truth about the nature of their government. No level of carnage or death wrought abroad, or duplicity at home, seems sufficient to move them out of their intransigence. From stolen elections, to illegal wars, to Presidential lies and obfuscation on an almost daily basis, nothing is too ‘in their faces’ that it cannot be shoved under the rug or rationalised away. It is not, therefore, that Americans cannot see this reality - the ability to see the truth is a gift extended to all human beings - it is that they lack the desire to see it in all is frightening detail. And it is because the reality of the current situation in the U.S. and around the world is so frightening that so many reject it or ridicule it as the much maligned yet eminently rational concept of ‘conspiracy theory’.