Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

A February 17th Gallup Poll showed that Americans prefer the chief nation that sponsors international terrorism, when given a choice between that terrorist-sponsoring nation and Iran. The disapproval shown of Iran is 79%; the approval is 14%. Back in 2014, the disapproval/approval were 84%/12%. At that time, Saudi Arabia had figures of 57%/35%. Iran was seen by Americans as being even more hostile toward Americans than is Saudi Arabia.

Americans are profoundly misinformed about international relations — and there’s a reason for this: the deep corruption within the American Establishment (the people who shape American political opinions).

Here are the facts: 92% of Saudi Arabians approve of ISIS. That country’s leadership — both the Saud family who own the country, and their clerics — teach them this way. In fact: on youtube you can see the “Former Imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Adel Kalbani: Daesh ISIS have the same beliefs as we do,” and he has high religious authority in Saudi Arabia. And, so, how can the Saudi public be blamed for believing what they hear in their churches — the mosques — such as that ISIS are devout believers, like they themselves are? Those clerics keep the ideology, and keep the royal family in power. That’s why the Saud family fund their clergy.

Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, and the bookkeeper/bagman who had collected, in cash, every one of the million-dollar-plus donations to Al Qaeda up till 9/11, said under oath, in U.S. court-testimony which Western news-media have hidden from the public: virtually all of the Saudi Princes, and many of their close friends (each of which individuals he identified by name) were $1M+ donors to the Al Qaeda organization; and, without those funds, any attacks such as 9/11 would have been simply impossible for them to do.

The bag-man and bookkeeper for Osama bin Laden was captured by the United States and was sent to a maximum-security U.S. prison where he is unable to speak to anyone, but the 9/11 families managed to get his testimony in a court case that they were bringing against Al Qaeda — against the people behind it, the people who fund it, the people who enabled Osama bin Laden to hire and train the 9/11 hijackers — and this man who had personally picked up in cash each one of the million-dollar-plus donations to Al Qaeda, named many of the leading Saudi Princes and their closest friends as having been the people who had provided the funds. And he said: “Without the money of the — of the Saudi, you will have nothing” of Al Qaeda.

Here’s one exchange:

Q: To clarify, you’re saying that the al-Qaeda members received salaries?

A: They do, absolutely.

The royals’ ‘charity’ that pays not only Al Qaeda but ISIS and other such organizations, is from the donors, to their warriors; the warriors are being paid by those ‘charitable donations.’ That’s what pays their salaries. Jihadist organizations are religious charities — whose aim is to spread the Islamic faith (which is why the mullahs or ‘holy men,’ who are also being paid by that same Saud family, approve of the Sauds to be the rulers).

Here’s another exchange:

Q: What — what was bin Laden’s attitude towards the Saudi ulema [the religious scholars, the clerics]?

A: It was of complete reverence and obedience. [It was like a Roman Catholic’s attitude] toward the Pope.

Among the mega-donors that he could remember off the top of his head were Prince Waleed bin Talal al-Saud, Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Saud, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (affectionately known in the U.S. as “Bandar Bush” (he was Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Ambassador at the time of 9/11; he later became Chief of Saudi intelligence).

The bagman explained:

The Saudi government is — they have two heads of the snake, they have the Saudi, like Al Saud, and the Wahhabi [clerics] were in charge of the Islamic Code of the Islam [the lawmakers and judges] — or Islamic power in Saudi Arabia, okay, and that’s why they have the name ‘Wahhabi,’ okay, okay. So the Saudi [the Saud royal family] cannot keep [the Executive or ruling] power in Saudi Arabia without having the agreement, okay, of the Wahhab, the Wahhabi, the scholar [the clerics, who interpret the Quran, the nation’s real Constitution), okay.

One might reasonably wonder, then: why do Americans hate and fear Iran, over and above even the nation — the royal family and their clerics — that were actually behind 9/11? Might it be, perhaps, because the Shia clerics of Iran are as fundamentalist as the Sunni ones in Saudi Arabia? Not at all; but, yet, Americans seem to assume that that’s the case.

The American public are duped by lying ‘news’ media, which don’t let them know the reality — the American people are kept in the dark.

The Sauds, the one family who own Saudi Arabia, hate the Iranian public, just as much as they hate the American public; and they do so because they (the Saud family) intend ultimately (their descendants) to conquer and rule over both, and over the entire world. But first, they need to kill all Shiites (and Iran is ruled by Shiites), because otherwise even the Islamic world itself won’t be united. Without a united Islam, how could they have a chance ultimately to conquer the non-Islamic world? It wouldn’t even be possible — and they know this. In fact, their nation was created in 1744 by a mutual oath between Mohammed Ibn Saud and Mohammed Ibn Wahhab that embodied it.

The U.S. aristocracy have been allied with the Saudi royal family for decades. When the fascist John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had Kim Roosevelt — Teddy Roosevelt’s fascist grandson — organize the 1953 CIA overthrow of the progressive democratic secular freely elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and install there the barbaric Shah and his torture-chambers, it sparked the Iranian public to hate Americans, who had brought this hell to them. The Eisenhower Administration did this.

Then, in 1979, came the Iranian revolution installing not a Mossadegh-type secular democracy such as America overthrew, but instead a Shiite clerical dictatorship, to replace the American fascist one, which had been entirely alien to Iran (though this alien regime used a local dictator, the Shah, as its figurehead — who answered to Washington). In succession now, Mossadegh’s two enemies — first the U.S. aristocracy, and now the Shiite clergy — have replaced an alien, U.S., dictatorship by a native one. But that native one (after 1979, the Shia clergy) has no international-jihadist ideology. Though Shia clerics hate the apartheid Israeli regime and fund Hezbollah to fight it, there is otherwise nothing that’s even remotely comparable to jihadism, in the Shia branch of Islam. Jihad (global conquest) is strictly a Sunni phenomenon, and it centers around the Saudi government, which is owned by the Saud family, and whose laws are made by the Wahhabist (the Sauds’ extremely fundamentalist Islamic) clergy, which is financed by the Sauds and by the subjects that the royal family own — the ‘citizens’ of Saudi Arabia. This is why 92% of the Saudi public think that ISIS is good. (By contrast, in the multicultural nation of Syria, which is allied with Iran and Russia and is ruled by a decidedly non-sectarian and secular government that’s composed mainly of Shia, and which has been invaded by Wahhabist-Salafist foreign fighters who are financed by America’s jihadist allies, 78% of the population disapprove of ISIS, and 82% blame the U.S. as being the chief power behind ISIS.)

The original sin that has shaped America’s role in the Mideast (other than our siding with the apartheid nation of Israel and so being widely despised around the world by Muslims) occurred when America’s aristocracy took over Iran in 1953, for their oil companies. But Americans hate Iranians as a result of that original sin, which was done by the Dulleses to Iranians on behalf of U.S. oil-company friends, which include the Sauds. The American people are getting the blowback from the American aristocracy’s international crimes abroad.

And, now, as Gallup is consistently finding, Americans hate the Iranians. That’s because the Iranians have called America “the great Satan” because that’s what America (our aristocracy and its agents) had actually been to them — to the Iranian people. Iran’s public are right, even though the clergy that rule over them are wrong — but Americans don’t know that distinction, and so condemn the Iranian nation.

Meanwhile, the Sauds, from whom the American public have suffered 9/11 and lots else, are ‘American allies’ according to the duplicitous U.S. press. They are not allies actually of the American public, but of the American aristocracy, which the American press don’t even expose to the public: this country, after all, is (not) a ‘democracy.’

On February 22nd, Gallup headlined “Four Nations Top U.S.’s Greatest Enemy List” and reported that they were: North Korea, Russia, Iran, and China. Those were the four nations whose names had been volunteered by respondents in answer to “What one country anywhere in the world do you consider to be the United States’ greatest enemy today? (open-ended).” The complete list of nations identified by one or more of the 1,021 respondents included 25 nations. Saudi Arabia came near the bottom of that list. (On 22 April 2015, CNN issued a poll finding that the same four nations came up as posing the biggest “threat” to the U.S.; but also finding that ISIS was considered by Americans to be a far bigger threat than any nation.)

And our government won’t prosecute, nor attempt to prosecute, the people who actually fund terrorism — not even the terrorism that hits here, never mind in Europe etc. That refusal to prosecute the people who were behind the 9/11 attacks is also what the expurgated 28 pages in the U.S. Senate’s 9/11 report are all about. (And, since the American public don’t know, there’s no pressure from the public on that, either.)

Instead, our lying politicians, who are empowered (in both Parties) by money from the same people, constantly call Iran the major backer of international terrorism, though they know that the allegation is rabidly false. Hillary Clinton says, “We have a lot of other business to get done with Iran. Yes, they have to stop being the main state sponsor of terrorism.” But, actually, she and the other agents of America’s aristocracy are the ones who have to stop their constant lying, because plenty of American suckers believe their lies — and it ends up showing in the Gallup and other opinion-polls, and ultimately in the people that the thus-deluded American public vote for to serve in Congress and the Presidency. Americans are deluded by their aristocracy’s constant lies.

After all: it’s not hard for any authentic news-reporter to prove that Hillary herself is aware that what she said there was false — that her remark was a lie, not merely a slip-up. When she was the U.S. Secretary of State, one of the first things she did (after assisting the fascist junta that had taken over in Honduras on 28 June 2009 to stay in power) was to send a cable to the U.S. Ambassadors in all of the capitals where the donations to Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups, were coming from, requiring those Ambassadors to the local aristocracy to tell them to stop doing that; these were the Ambassadors only in fundamentalist-Sunni-run countries: Saudi Arabia (the center of it all), Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Pakistan. It’s because Sunni-run countries are where almost all of the jihadists and especially the funding for jihadism come from. In that private cable, she even said things like: “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” “Qatar’s overall level of CT [Counter Terrorist] cooperation with the U.S. is considered the worst in the region.” “Kuwait … has been less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait. Al-Qa’ida and other groups continue to exploit Kuwait both as a source of funds and as a key transit point.” “UAE-based donors have provided financial support to a variety of terrorist groups, including al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups, including Hamas.”

Those are our ‘allies’? She knows that Al Qaeda and ISIS received no money from Shia. She knows that Al Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni-only groups, which hate all Shia — they want to defeat Iran, they don’t represent Iran. (But the American public seem to be unaware of that reality.)

Garbage like what Hillary said there against Iran makes it into Presidential candidates’ debates; and none of the ‘press’ says the person was either lying or else incredibly ignorant for saying such a thing. A statement like that poisons the well of U.S.-Iranian relations, even more than a half-century after it had already been poisoned big-time, back in 1953. Why is this poisoning so persistent?

This lie that Hillary Clinton and so many other American politicians spout, is one of many lies that our ‘news’ media can’t expose, because to do that would also expose themselves — that the media themselves have deceived the American public by not pointing out that the politicians are lying about these major, determinative, issues. In this regard, it’s similar to the lie that Bush didn’t lie but merely had been mistaken about “Saddam’s WMD”: how could the press now acknowledge that Bush had lied, when they refused to even examine his lies while they were being made, which is when it counts? And that’s why politicians such as Clinton can get away with their lies against Iran.

America is now piling up with lies, which the nation’s ‘news’ media can’t expose without exposing themselves as being part of the deception of the American public. (After they had stenographically reported George W. Bush’s lies about ‘Saddam’s WMD,’ they could never admit how rotten the U.S. press were — and still are. They have to hide that, too.) This piling-on of lies is now becoming extremely dangerous, even to the very possibility of restoring democracy to America. Without an honest press, democracy is impossible. Without an honest press, democracy won’t be able to be restored in America.

There is nothing that the U.S. press is as dishonest about as Russia and its traditional allies, such as Ukraine, Syria, and Libya. (And: Iran — because America since 1953 has joined with the jihadist Sunni royal families on that, and virtually forces Iran to ally with Russia for protection against us.) And this nest of subjects includes the entire topic of jihadism, which America’s aristocracy secretly back (and use as a tactic against Russia and its allies) but which Russia’s aristocracy and public both oppose, consistently — and not only by tokens such as killing Al Qaeda’s leaders, but by getting done the entire ugly job that needs to be done (which was described there with a remarkable lack of bias, in a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine, by Joshua Yaffa, headlining “Putin’s Dragon”). There is no way to defeat jihadism without destroying the jihadist culture, itself. Instead, the U.S. has been and is allied to it. Not just in Saudi Arabia, but also in the other Arabic Sunni oil-kingdoms: Qatar, Kuwait, and UAE — and, more recently, also in the resurgently-Sunni NATO ‘ally’: Turkey. So: our ‘press’ must lie big-time, and with only very few exceptions of honesty, about these matters.

That’s what is merely being reflected in Gallup’s latest, and prior, polls about the opinions that Americans have regarding Iran. This is a severe, worsening, and dangerous, sickness of the American ‘press.’ And nobody seems to have any solution for it. How can the people of a nation boycott its corrupt press? How can they even know that they should? How can they ever know that they are “being had” — that they are being governed by lies? That their government, politicians, and press, surround them with those lies?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.