Kourosh Ziabari - If you've ever tried to search for reliable information and analyses which expose the concealed and obscured side of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict, you've surely come across to the website “If Americans Knew.” This website belongs to a non-profit organization which focuses on the Israeli – Palestinian conflict and the foreign policy of the United States toward the Middle East . “If Americans Knew” publishes commentaries and articles that the American mainstream media pusillanimously shun and reject because of their fear of the influential Zionist lobby which predominantly rules the U.S. administration and Congress. “If Americans Knew” releases statistical reports on the history of Israeli – Palestinian conflict including the number of Palestinian casualties, the number of children murdered by the Israel Defense Forces, the number of Palestinians detained in the Israel jails and the number of Israel's illegal settlements on the Palestinian lands.

American freelance journalist and researcher Alison Weir is the founder and executive director of “If Americans Knew.” She has written several articles and compiled investigative reports on the Israeli Palestinian conflict and provoked the furious and frantic criticism of Zionist organizations such as Anti Defamation League. Her articles have appeared on a number of media outlets and news websites including Counter Punch, Antiwar.com, The Link, Znet, Los Angeles Times, Greenwich Post, Poynter.org and Washington Report for Middle East Affairs.

Alison Weir is at the forefront of combating the biased coverage of Israeli – Palestinian conflict in the mainstream media and through her sincere efforts has revealed the plight of the Palestinian nation under the occupation of Zionist regime. She believes that criticizing Israel in public will cost a journalist his career. She says that it's far less damaging for an American journalist to write critically of the United State government than of Israel .

What follows is the complete text of my interview with Alison Weir in which we discussed a variety of topics including the dominance of Israeli lobby over the U.S. administration and Congress and also the biased coverage of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict by the western mainstream media. 

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Kourosh Ziabari - A few weeks ago, German political analyst and author Dr. Christof Lehmann put me in touch with an Australian journalist whom he said possessed precious and valuable information about an underground arm smuggling deal and needed to publicly talk about the long way he has come to unveil one of the most complicated and vicious machinations of the United States for dominating the Caucasus region.

After some correspondence, I conducted an interview with the Australian journalist and filmmaker Tim Byrnes, who was fired from his job at the Australian Government’s Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy after acquiring some secret information and leaked documents about the plans by the U.S. government to illicitly transfer arms and ammunitions to Georgia, where it had successfully brought to power its close ally Mikhail Saakashvilli in a Rose Revolution in 2003.

Byrnes and his American colleague Jeffrey Silverman have obtained some materials and information which indicate that the United States has had furtive plans and an intricate agenda for dominating the Caucasus region by compelling Georgia to become a NATO member and establishing a huge military base in the country, which will then become a potential threat to Iran and may be used as a leverage for containing and pressuring Iran over its nuclear program.

The Australian journalist was dismissed from his job after his employers found out that he has got hold of the leaked documents regarding the U.S. arms smuggling to Georgia, and brought up this excuse that he should have disclosed the documents to them, but failed to do so. Now, Byrnes wants to produce a documentary about the secret relationships between the United States and Georgia and their underground arms deal and is looking for a sponsor to fund his project and an audacious media outlet to air his documentary.

In order to learn more about the important case of Tim Byrnes and his colleague, the reasons why he became involved in this affair, the case which was brought up against him by the Australian government and the details of what he knows about the U.S.-Georgia ties, Iran Review conducted an in-depth interview with him last week. What follows is the full text of this interview

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Kourosh Ziabari - The United States gained independence from Britain 236 years ago, so it’s almost a young nation. However, in these almost two and a half centuries, it successfully managed to thrive as an economic, political and technological superpower thanks to its diligent population and the opportunities it has provided for the immigrants to come and share their manpower, talents and abilities for the wellbeing and prosperity of the nation. Therefore, it’s not the case that they were simply the natural resources or the intelligence of the American people that contributed to these achievements. However, it seems that all of these socioeconomic, political and scientific achievements are gradually disappearing and one of the main reasons contributing to this disappearance, as stipulated by high-ranking political scientists, is the aggressive foreign policy the United States has adopted.

The United States is failing to cooperate and interact with the world nations in a peaceful and constructive manner, and it’s estimated that it has been directly or indirectly involved in some 50 wars and military expeditions since its independence in 1776. This is the main reason the world nations are learning to hate the U.S. militarism and political hegemony as manifested in the killing of innocent civilians and suffering of the masses.

The economic influence and dominance of the United States is also being contested by emerging powers such as Russia, China, Brazil and Iran, and it seems that the economic values which have been promoted and practiced by Washington are giving their place to fresh alternatives.

In order to investigate the compasses of the decline of the U.S. Empire, Iran Review has started to conduct exclusive interviews with world-renowned political scientists. What follows is the 5th interview in the series of U.S. decline interviews conducted with Tahir Abbas, Professor of Sociology at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Prof. Abbas was born in Birmingham, England and is the editor and co-editor of 10 books and author of more than 70 scholarly articles. He has delivered public lectures in some 30 countries and until June 2009, he was the Reader in Sociology and founding Director of the University of Birmingham Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Culture. He has cooperated with different world governments and organizations as the World Economic Forum, EU, the Council of Europe, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the United Nations. What follows is the text of our interview with Prof. Tahir Abbas

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Kourosh Ziabari - What will the future of the U.S. Empire look like? Where is it heading to? Is the United States capable of sustaining its hegemonic dominance over the world or is it becoming costly and expensive for the United States to continue featuring itself as an uncontested economic and political superpower? There are lots of questions and ambiguities regarding the future of the U.S. Empire and the repercussions of the decline it has begun to experience, and these questions are being seriously discussed in the intellectual circles around the world.

Realistic and independent political scientists and even some prudent American officials have been long warning against the consequences of the political downfall of the United States and the serious blows it has been receiving as a result of the strategic mistakes the different U.S. administrations have made in their calculations in dealing with the developing world and the emerging powers such as China, Russia and Brazil.

Along with the foreign contenders, there are a large group of domestic opponents of the U.S. militarism, capitalism and political expansionism who have been challenging the policies of the U.S. government routinely, and are growing more dynamic and vivacious every day. They are the progressive academicians, journalists, intellectuals and peace activists that have been working hard to shed a light on the hidden and unnoticed aspects of how the United States is ruled and rules the world.

Iran Review has started to conduct a series of interviews with the prominent political scientists across the world to investigate and explore the different dimensions of the decline of the U.S. Empire. Today, we have done an interview with Prof. Walter Hixson, a distinguished professor of history at the University of Akron, Ohio. He has been working on the history of American settler colonialism in theoretical and comparative context and is in the process of completing a book manuscript tentatively entitled, “The Boomerang of Savagery: Settler Colonialism, Ambivalence, and Ethnic Cleansing in American History.” Prof. Hixson has also carried out research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and presented a public lecture titled “People and Places in the Israel-Palestine Conflict.”

What follows is the text of Iran Review’s interview with Prof. Walter Hixson, historian and political scientist from the University of Akron with whom we have discussed the different political, social and economic aspects of the decline of the U.S. Empire

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Kourosh Ziabari - A noted U.S. political commentator says the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States will finally move toward reconciliation and rapprochement because they have certain common interests.
 
“Iran and the United States have certain common interests in the region that should be brought to popular attention. But ultimately something more is involved than policy or politics. There is so much that our two nations can learn from one another: You know that Hafez’s ‘Divan’ is the basis for Goethe’s ‘West-East Divan’. That is probably the point at which world literature was born. Tensions exist now between our two states and perhaps they will exist for the near future – but, luckily, forever is a very long time,” Professor Stephen Eric Bronner said in a recent interview with the Tehran Times.
 
Bronner is a political philosopher and distinguished professor of political science, comparative literature and German studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages and he is the senior editor of Logos: A Journal for Modern Society and Culture.
Following are excerpts of the interview

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Kourosh Ziabari interviews Stephen Eric Bronner

Kourosh Ziabari - Glenn Greenwald is a prominent American journalist, author, lawyer and blogger. His writings and articles have appeared on several newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Conservative, The National Interest and In These Times. Greenwald has received different awards including the first Izzy Award for independent journalism in 2009, and the 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary.

Until a few months ago, he was a columnist and blogger for Salon.com, but he left his job there and continued cooperating with The Guardian newspaper which he has been contributing to since June 2011.

Greenwald has published four books which include “How Would a Patriot Act?” and “A Tragic Legacy.” A progressive journalist, Glenn Greenwald is an outspoken critic of the U.S. military expeditions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and its war threats against Iran.

He has written extensively on the underground operations taken by Israel and the United States to empower and finance the exiled Iranian terrorist group MKO which has declared as one of its key objectives the overthrowing of Iranian government. With regards to the U.S. Department of State’s decision in taking the name of MKO off the list of foreign terrorist organizations, he says: “this shows that anything the United States government says about terrorism and really the whole concept of terrorism itself should be viewed as nothing more than a ridiculous joke. MKO is a classic group that is a terrorist organization. They have engaged in violence against innocent civilians, they have devoted themselves to overthrow a government using violence and there are credible reports that they are the ones who are working with Israelis and are behind the assassination of civilian scientists in Iran that included the shooting of not only the scientists, but also in two cases their wives.”

I had the opportunity to talk to Glenn Greenwald for an exclusive interview which was originally appeared in Persian on Tasnim News Agency. What follows is the full text of my interview with Glenn Greenwald in which we discussed a variety of topics pertaining to the international political and military developments.

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Kourosh Ziabari - Glenn Greenwald is a prominent American journalist, author, lawyer and blogger. His writings and articles have appeared on several newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Conservative, The National Interest and In These Times. Greenwald has received different awards including the first Izzy Award for independent journalism in 2009, and the 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary.

Until a few months ago, he was a columnist and blogger for Salon.com, but he left his job there and continued cooperating with The Guardian newspaper which he has been contributing to since June 2011.

Greenwald has published four books which include “How Would a Patriot Act?” and “A Tragic Legacy.” A progressive journalist, Glenn Greenwald is an outspoken critic of the U.S. military expeditions in Afghanistan , Iraq and Libya and its war threats against Iran .

He has written extensively on the underground operations taken by Israel and the United States to empower and finance the exiled Iranian terrorist group MKO which has declared as one of its key objectives the overthrowing of Iranian government. With regards to the U.S. Department of State's decision in taking the name of MKO off the list of foreign terrorist organizations, he says: “[t]his shows that anything the United States government says about terrorism and really the whole concept of terrorism itself should be viewed as nothing more than a ridiculous joke. MKO is a classic group that is a terrorist organization. They have engaged in violence against innocent civilians, they have devoted themselves to overthrow a government using violence and there are credible reports that they are the ones who are working with Israelis and are behind the assassination of civilian scientists in Iran that included the shooting of not only the scientists, but also in two cases their wives.”

I had the opportunity to talk to Glenn Greenwald for an exclusive interview which was originally appeared in Persian on Tasnim News Agency. What follows is the full text of my interview with Glenn Greenwald in which we discussed a variety of topics pertaining to the international political and military developments

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Kourosh Ziabari interviews prominent American journalist Glenn Greenwald

Kourosh Ziabari - Is the United States still as powerful as it had been 50 years ago? Is it possible for the United States to continue ruling the world, placing dictators in place, staging coups against democratically elected governments and waging unjustified and unsanctioned wars? The brief answer which anyone with some minimal familiarity with the global political equations will give is “no,” but we are not after eliciting an unscientific and unsubstantiated response.

We have started a project to explore the different aspects of the decline of American imperialism with the world’s great political scientists and academicians. They join us in exclusive interviews and respond to our questions regarding the prospect of U.S. Empire in an age when the nations have awakened and don’t tolerate the rule of force and tyranny of the hegemons anymore.

The Arab Spring and the courage and audacity the people of countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain have showed in standing up against the dictators the United States had installed decades ago is one of the numerous signs that the U.S. hegemony is in decline and will no longer govern the world.

Iran Review conducted interviews with Prof. Francis Shor and Prof. William C. Wohlforth about the decline of the U.S. empire, and this is the third interview in our series of interviews with world’s renowned political scientists about the future of imperialism.

Prof. Michael Brenner is a Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, SAIS-Johns Hopkins. He is the author of several books and over 60 scholarly articles. His essays have appeared on such journals as World Politics, Comparative Politics, Foreign Policy, International Studies Quarterly, International Affairs, Survival, Politique Etrangere, and Internationale Politik.

What follows is the text of Iran Review’s interview with Prof. Michael Brenner

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Kourosh Ziabari -There’s no doubt that the signs of the decline of the U.S. Empire and the weakening of the bases of imperialism have begun to emerge. The United States, although it lawlessly continues to wage wars on the other countries and threaten independent nations with its aggressive war rhetoric, economic sanctions and media propaganda, is not as powerful and influential as it had been during the Vietnam War.

The United States is now plunged into an unprecedented economic crisis and the people at the White House and Pentagon know well that it’s not too easy to convince the American public that more wars are needed to export the values of imperialism to the other world nations, especially now that the United States is grappling with unemployment, poverty and other socioeconomic crises.

Iran Review has begun to conduct a set of interviews with world’s great political scientists about the decline of the U.S. hegemony and global dominance and the downfall of the American Empire. Our first interview with Prof. Francis Shor was published on December 10.

What follows is our interview with Prof. William C. Wohlforth, political scientist and Daniel Webster Professor of Government at the Department of Government of the Dartmouth College. Prof. Wohlforth was chair of the Department of Government for three years and is the author of “Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War.” He is the co-author of the book “World Out of Balance: International Relations Theory and the Challenge of American Primacy” with Prof. Stephen Brooks.

Prof. Wohlforth has taken part in an exclusive interview with Iran Review and presented his viewpoints regarding the social, economic and political challenges the United States is facing and the future of America’s global hegemony as a supposedly-unrivaled superpower.

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Kourosh Ziabari - U.S. philosopher and cultural critic Henry A. Giroux says that under the influence of the government, the higher education system in the United States has moved toward silencing progressive and alternative voices which try to challenge the U.S. militarism and its expansionistic policies.
 
He also believes that the American students are not trained to be critical thinkers.
 
“I think many students are weary of America’s expansionist policies but there is not enough dissent among college students over such policies at the present time to actually challenge them. Many American students are educated largely to be consumers not critical thinkers and those who do escape the strangulating grip of a poisonous market driven neo-liberalism are suffering under the burden of debt while facing a future in which they will be underemployed or unemployed,” said Prof. Giroux in an exclusive interview with Tehran Times conducted last week.
 
Prof. Giroux is a cultural critic and one of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy who is best known for his contributions to cultural studies, youth studies, higher education and critical theory.
 
Seven books written by Giroux have been chosen as significant books of the year by the “American Educational Studies Association.” He has authored 33 books the latest of which is “Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability” which was published in 2012.
 
He has served as the Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies. He moved to McMaster University in May 2004, where he currently holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies and currently runs the Public Intellectual project. Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors

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Kourosh Ziabari interviews Prof. Henry A. Giroux

Kourosh Ziabari - The signs of the decline and weakening of the U.S. global hegemony and its political and economic dominance have begun to emerge and such serious and powerful contenders as Brazil, Russia, China, Turkey and Iran are gradually contributing to the diminishing of the uncontested power and authority of the United States as the world’s number one superpower.

With the most excruciating and unprecedented economic recession in the United States since the Great Depression of 1930s, and the continued political failures of the United States, especially in supporting and sponsoring its staunch ally in the Middle East, Israel, and the continued revolutionary wave in the Middle East which is rattling the shaky foundations of the U.S.-backed tyrants, Washington is experiencing serious setbacks. In order to investigate the decline of the U.S. imperial power and the movement of world toward a multipolar system of global governance, Iran Review has conducted a series of interviews with prominent political scientists across the world.

The first interviewee in our series of interviews is Prof. Francis Shor. Shor is a professor of history at the Wayne State University. He is the author of several articles and books, and one of his most prominent books is “Dying Empire: U.S. Imperialism and Global Resistance” published in 2009 by the Routledge Press. A veteran activist in peace, justice, and international solidarity campaigns, he is a long-time board member of the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights. Prof. Shor His 2004 article, “Utopian Aspirations in the Black Freedom Movement,” in the “Utopian Studies” journal won an award for best journal article of the year.

Prof. Shor took part in an exclusive interview with Iran Review and offered his viewpoints regarding five hypotheses about the future of the U.S. global hegemony, the challenges capitalism faces and the emerging alternatives to American system of global governance. What follows is the text of the interview

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Kourosh Ziabari interviews Dr. E. Michael Jones

Kourosh Ziabari interviews Prof. Francis Shor for Iran Review

Kourosh Ziabari talks to Prof. Francis Shor

Kourosh Ziabari - A U.S. author says Western states influenced by Israel have lost all sense of morality and are behaving in a criminal way that is dangerous to world peace.

 
“What we see in Obama’s murder of Osama bin Laden (in a helicopter strike) and various other figures by drone strikes is the criminal behavior which comes about as the natural consequence of the undermining of the moral law. St. Augustine pointed out some 1,500 years ago that when governments ceased to adhere to the moral law, they become nothing more than a band of criminals,” said E. Michael Jones in an exclusive interview with the Tehran Times conducted last month.
 
Jones is U.S. journalist, writer, former university professor and editor of the Culture Wars magazine

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Kourosh Ziabari - It was reported on November 23 that the Helsinki conference on the nuclear-free Middle East has been called off after the United States announced that it will not take part in the conference. Some political commentators believe that the U.S. distanced itself from the summit after Iran said that it would participate, and it was quite clear that Iran will raise the issue of Israel’s undeclared, uninspected nuclear arsenal of about 200 – 400 atomic warheads. Israel’s nuclear program is America’s redline and it’s like a nightmare for Washington to see that Tel Aviv’s nuclear stockpiles are open to the scrutiny and inspection of the UN atomic watchdog.

In order to explore the possible reasons why the Helsinki conference was cancelled and the impacts it might have on the U.S. public image and the sincerity of its claims regarding the global nuclear disarmament, we did a brief interview with Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Reader in Comparative Politics and International Relations at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the chair of Centre for Iranian Studies at SOAS.

The interview was conducted just before the UN General Assembly voted unanimously in favor of a resolution calling on Israel to open its nuclear facilities to international inspectors. Israel defiantly rebuffed the overwhelming vote of 174 nations and rejected nuclear transparency and called the 174 nations an “automatic majority” that always votes in favor of anti-Israeli resolutions. However, it’s becoming gradually clear that Israel should soon or late yield to the pressures of the international community, and even its European allies, and put an end to its policy of “deliberate ambiguity” with regards to its underground nuclear program. What follows is the text of Iran Review’s interview with Dr. Adib-Moghaddam of the University of London

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Kourosh Ziabari - The Franco-American journalist Diana Johnstone muses over the evolution of Western policy. The ideals of the French Revolution were slowly replaced by a moral humanitarianism that makes it possible to switch from the defense of oppressed peoples to the apologia for colonization. At the same time, freedom of expression has been shrinking and foreign news sources are censored outright.

Q: I read the article you co-authored with Jean Bricmont regarding the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s declaring EU the Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 2012. Why do you think they have made such a decision? It seems that they apparently selected the EU to help the European nations get out of the current economic crisis and depression. What’s your perspective on that?

Diana Johnstone: The Norwegian Nobel Committee is made up of five or six Norwegian politicians, with a narrow, conformist Eurocentric view of the world. They completely ignore the instructions in the will of Alfred Nobel that the prize should go to an individual who has done most in the past year to reduce armaments and promote peace conferences. An Irish laureate has suggested that the choice should be turned over to international peace activists themselves. They would be qualified to select candidates who have actually worked for peace. That might save the prize from being the laughing stock it has become.

It is possible that the Norwegians thought their choice would avoid controversy rather than stirring it. The world is so polarized now that any choice is likely to be seen as propaganda in the new Cold War between the U.S.-led West and its adversaries – Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and so on. This year, the most prominent and probably most deserving candidate was Bradley Manning, who really did do something against war, by releasing military film showing a flagrant U.S. war crime in Iraq. That choice would have pleased much of the world, but would have infuriated the United States government. Perhaps by choosing the European Union, the Norwegians were in fact running away from controversy. In their milieu, cut off from the reality of the greater world, honoring the European Union could seem like a kind-hearted gesture to a troubled institution. Of course, this gesture can have absolutely no effect on the deepening crisis of the European Union.

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