The Abraham Accord Declaration and the Art of Deception through Propaganda and Public Relations

Anthony Hall1

The Declaration:

We, the undersigned, recognize the importance of maintaining and strengthening peace in the Middle East and around the world based on mutual understanding and coexistence, as well as respect for human dignity and freedom, including religious freedom.

We encourage efforts to promote interfaith and intercultural dialogue to advance a culture of peace among the three Abrahamic religions and all humanity.

We believe that the best way to address challenges is through cooperation and dialogue and that developing friendly relations among States advances the interests of lasting peace in the Middle East and around the world.

We seek tolerance and respect for every person in order to make this world a place where all can enjoy a life of dignity and hope, no matter their race, faith or ethnicity. We support science, art, medicine, and commerce to inspire humankind, maximize human potential and bring nations closer together.

We seek to end radicalization and conflict to provide all children a better future. We pursue a vision of peace, security, and prosperity in the Middle East and around the world.

In this spirit, we welcome and are encouraged by the progress already made in establishing diplomatic relations between and its neighbors in the region under the principles of the Abraham Accords. We are encouraged by the ongoing efforts to consolidate and expand such friendly relations based on shared interests and a shared commitment to a better future.

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1- Tenured professor of globalization studies, University of lethbridge The spin doctors of the military-industrial complex residing at the very heart of the Israel-US alliance regularly present the demons of death and destruction in their arsenals of war as celestial angels seeking to save humanity from conflict and destruction.

The lies of the Zio-American Ministries of Military Propaganda regularly misrepresent the smashing of Muslim-majority countries, cities, peoples, and life-support networks as acts of edification. The Abraham Accord Declaration offers a classic example of a new military alliance presenting itself as a peace initiative decked out in the holy hallelujah language of love, enlightenment and reciprocal relations.

The Abraham Accord

It is often posited that the “normalization” of diplomatic relations between UAE and Israel continues trends that reflect a gradual process. The process is presented as if the Arab population in Western Asia are coming to accept the presence in their midst of the Israeli entity. This observation fails to take into account the scope and depth of how much Arab animosity to the Abraham accord has been expressed on social media. Now the Abraham accord lays out a framework for continuing the process aimed at securing more Arab acceptance of Israel.

The Abraham accord was soon extended to include Bahrain. Before 1968 Bahrain hosted a British naval base. Now it hosts a huge US naval base. Its often-unstable governing structure is complicated by the fact that Bahrain’s population is majority Shiite Muslim while its ruling family is Sunni.

President , whose son-in-law Jared Kushner played a significant role in the negotiations, indicated that other Arab polities will probably join the Abraham accord in the future. The government of Sudan did join the Zio- American-dominated polity in late October on the basis of a deal that removed the country from being on the US list of terrorist polities.

Presenting War Plans as Initiatives for Peace

The Abraham Accord Declaration is written in the extravagant language of Public Relations (PR) and American advertising. Edward Bernays, the nephew of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, came up with the term, Public Relations, after 1945. The biggest and most lucrative Public Relation contracts involve the design of many forms of subliminal advertising to engineer public opinions meant to support aggressive warfare. The career of Edward Bernays mapped out this trajectory of propaganda, politics and warfare.

The demonization and dehumanization of the targeted group is an essential process in selling an aggressive war to the citizens of a country whose government wants to push forward an agenda of military invasion.

For example, US President, George H. W. Bush, hired the Public Relations Company, Hill and Knowlton, to conduct a psychological operation to convince the American people that a US-led invasion of Iraq was justified. At the time the Iraqi government led by Saddam Hussein had just invaded and occupied Kuwait. The executives at Hill and Knowlton hired the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States to pretend she had witnessed an atrocity in a Kuwaiti hospital.

Over the course of many years, powerful interests including Public Relations companies have been working hard to turn public opinion against the people and government of the Islamic Republic of . The government of Israel has been especially aggressive in taking advantage of all its influence in the United States to get the people and government there behind an invasion of Iran.

One of the needs in this campaign is to make the envisaged regime-change invasion of Iran look like a mission of mercy to protect good people against bad people and bad government as depicted in the propaganda manipulations of war hawks. The Abraham accord is part of the process of presenting a military alliance being formed to invade Iran as if it is an alliance for “strengthening peace in the Middle East and around the world.”

The Abraham Accord Declaration is quite obviously written by Public Relations specialists well schooled in the propaganda techniques. Edward Bernays largely pioneered these techniques of creating public support for military invasions of targeted groups. The Abraham Accord is quite clearly a rosy Public Relations document to misrepresent the recruiting and arming of Arab polities in preparation for a military invasion of Iran.

Weapons Deals and Intercultural Dialogue By invoking “a vision of peace, security, and prosperity in the Middle East and around the world,” the Abraham Accord Declaration gives cover to an overt plan for augmented war in West Asia and Eurasia. This war plan has nothing to do with “tolerance and respect for every person in order to make this world a place where all can enjoy a life of dignity and hope, no matter their race, faith or ethnicity.” Rather the Abraham accord seeks to exacerbate ethnic distinctions to divide Arabs from Persians. It seeks to draw in widened Arab involvement in an Israeli-inspired regime change war directed at toppling the Islamic Republic of Iran in its present form.

The effort to stir up antagonism between Arabs and Persians has a long and dishonorable history in the history of many European powers’ efforts to assert imperial authority in the heartland of Eurasia. The tactics of divide-and-conquer are as old as imperial empires that have long looked for ways of asserting dominance in the strategic cross-roads of the world’s biggest land mass.

For decades the Israeli government has worked to persuade the US government and people to direct the military muscle of the US Armed Forces toward the destruction of Iran. The Israeli IDF is in no position to itself to defeat a country of over 80 million people possessing an ancient civilizational heritage and a sophisticated military apparatus. The government of the Jewish state requires the exercise of US military muscle to engage in the biggest and most ambitious of the series of US wars for Israel that picked up in pace after the false flag terror event of September 11, 2001.

The Israelis found in US President Donald Trump a willing collaborator in the demonization, dehumanization and attempted destruction of Iran. On his way to buying into the Netanyahu agenda on Iran, Trump pulled out the United States from adherence to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The JCPOA is a UN agreement meant to provide regular international inspection of the operation of Iran’s nuclear energy program in exchange for some relief for Iran from US-led economic sanctions.

The plan of these sanctions is to impose so much suffering on the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran that they will be pushed into revolt against their leaders and the governing system itself. The sanctions are constructed in such a way that they impact most strongly the lives of average people including those requiring medicines that can only be obtained outside Iran. The Trump government outdid previous US governments in the harshness of its push to cut Iran off from healthy reciprocity with many countries. The mentality animating this maltreatment of the Iranian government and peoples runs in the opposite direction of Abraham accord’s empty propaganda claim that it stands for unwavering “support of science, art, medicine, and commerce to inspire humankind, maximize human potential and bring nations closer together.”

On the way to the Abraham accord Donald Trump took credit for the murder by drone of Iranian soldier and diplomat, General Qassem Soleimani plus his entourage and Iraqi hosts. This violation of international criminal law took place during the opening days of 2020. Later in 2020 the Israeli government took responsibility for an elaborate operation to kill Iran’s senior nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

The assassination of nuclear scientists in Iran has been a regular occurrence. These operations seem to be executed by , sometimes with the involvement of MEK, a group that is classified as a terrorist organization in Iran.

How do these war crimes and crimes against humanity “encourage efforts to promote interfaith and intercultural dialogue to advance a culture of peace among the three Abrahamic religions and all humanity”? What is wrong with the Abraham Accord Declaration where it claims the intention of cultivating conditions where “mutual understanding and coexistence, as well as respect for human dignity and freedom [that can stimulate] friendly relations among States.”

The prelude to the public announcement of the first stage of the Abraham accord was in fact a negotiation of US arms sales to the United Arab Emirates. What wisdom is there in a further arms buildup of high-tech weaponry in one of the most volatile zones of militarism in the world? Who can doubt that the major target of the weapons buildup described in the secret provisions of the Abraham accord would be Iran and its allies in the ?

The main commitment to UEA involves the US promise to sell 50 F-35 fighter jets to the UAE government led by Prince Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The UEA will also take possession of a number of General Atomics’ MQ-9 reaper drones. The government of Bahrain followed suit making its own separate arms deals. It is quite possible that some of the weapons might be to provide “security” against popular uprisings in Bahrain or some kind of disruptions by migrant workers in UAE. The US arms deal with the Arab polities displeased Israeli Prime Minister who demanded added transfers of top-level US weapons to Israel. This demand emerges from some sort of understanding that Israel must always retain a high-tech “military edge” in its region.

What is to be made of a US guarantee to Israel that Arab nations must always be militarily subordinate to the imperial core of the Zio-American Empire? How does such an entrenched hierarchy of the military capacity to murder and maim reflect a philosophy of “tolerance and respect for every person in order to make this world a place where all can enjoy a life of dignity and hope, no matter their race, faith or ethnicity”?

Palestinian People Face Yet Another Exclusion

The decision to exclude the Palestinians and their organizations from a deal that significantly alters Israel’s relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds runs profoundly contrary to Justice. This exclusion is inconsistent with an accord that is advertised as being supportive of the spirit of “human dignity.“ Like the Yemenis, the Palestinians end up suffering the consequences of yet further betrayal by the some of the most rich and influential plutocrats in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

The exclusion of the indigenous Arab people of Palestine from any role whatsoever in an agreement aimed at altering the balance of Arab-Israeli relations is indicative of the lack of good faith by those on different sides of the negotiation. This phenomenon illustrates that the Abraham accord continues a trajectory of imperial rule in historic Palestine. This new stage in the exercise of imperial rule formalizes the role of Arab compradors as partners and collaborators in the expansionary designs of the Zio-American Empire.

The Zio-American Empire continues the heritage of the Anglo-American empire that set the Zionist plan for Jewish nationhood in motion in the international community. In 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration outlining the plan for “a national home for the Jewish people.” The Palestinians were not referred to by name. Instead the assertion was made that “nothing should be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

This exclusion of Palestinian people from being named, let alone being allowed a voice or a vote in determining their own future was replicated by the United States after 1945. The US role was to exercise its great influence in the international community with the goal of encouraging support for the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. There has never been a serious debate in the international community of why Palestinian people should have beeen rendered the victims of the project to create Israel as fitting atonement for the treatment of Jews in Europe.

Now that exclusion is being repeated yet again in the international rejigging initiated in the name of the Abraham accord. How does this renewal and replication of an historic and still unaddressed injustice qualify as an initiative to “promote interfaith and intercultural dialogue to advance a culture of peace among the three Abrahamic religions and all humanity.” How is humanity served by projecting the historic crimes against the Palestinian people into the present and into the future?

The Abraham accord maintains the status quo on the West Bank of the Jordan River, part of the territory illegally seized through Israeli conquest contrary to provisions in the UN Charter. That status quo involves the continued building and expansion of Jewish Settlements in the Occupied Territories that have been the subject of literally hundreds of critical UN resolutions in the General Assembly. That status quo continues the assault of Palestinian lives, habitations, olive groves, water resources and many categories of human rights.

The Axis of Resistance Being Targeted

Both UAE and Bahrain are collaborators in the assaults on Houthi militias in Yemen, assaults that the UN has declared to be the basis of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Half of the people of Yemen are considered to be at risk of famine and most of the country’s inhabitants experience severe shortages of drinking water. Along with the likes of Canada, the United States, the UK and of course Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain share the responsibility for creating the basis of this human rights travesty.

I would like to see some reckoning with the misleading contents of the Abraham Accord Declaration, a text obviously created by Public Relations experts to deceive the public into regarding a military alliance pointed towards war with Iran. It is the height of cynicism to depict a military pact as a peace treaty “to inspire humankind, maximize human potential and bring nations closer together.”

The Zio-American targeting of Iran also targets those who support the Syrian supporters of the elected government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It targets whose members have played an essential role in creating the capacity of all citizens and residents of Lebanon to live in a country not occupied by the Armed Forces of Israel as was the case before 2000.

Saudi Arabia, Radicalization and the Abraham Accord

The royalist dynasty governing Saudi Arabia has held back from formally entering into the Abraham accord which would carry with it formal recognition of Israel. This position was explained by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and the US President’s senior adviser on the Middle East.

Kushner indicated that in spite of the extremely close collaboration between Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States over many years, the Saudi King Abdullah is holding true to the historical position that the act of establishing formal relations with Israel must be dependent on the granting of Palestinian statehood.

The irony of Saudi Arabia’s refusal at this time to sanction the Abraham accord does point to the agreement’s discordant relationship to international law. It also points to the denial by the leadership of the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan of the heritage of Arab elders’ strong identification with the Palestinian plight as integral to the Arab world’s essential political and religious identity.

In the Muslim world there is no question that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been by far the most consistent and unbending backer of the cause of justice for the Palestinian people. This position was strongly established by Ayatollah Khomeini from the very inception of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. After the fall of the Shah, the government of Israel was asked to vacate its embassy in and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was invited by Ayatollah Khomeini to move into the vacated building.

As Jared Kushner sees it, those more elderly Arabs, including King Abdullah, hold to a picture of an outmoded past that must be transcended to meet the expectations of a younger generation. Probably Kushner has in mind the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who operates as the hands-on, day-to-day ruler of the Saudi Kingdom. Kushner and MBS developed a friendship that has probably been important in enabling President Trump’s son-in-law to become a major US envoy to Western Asia. As Kushner sees it, the younger generations of Arabs are anxious to join in the milieu that is making Israel the “Silicon Valley” of the region.

There is no doubt that the two of very prominent Iranians in 2020, one ordered by Trump and the other ordered by Netanyahu, both violated international criminal law. This legacy of extremism casts an ironic light on the statement in the Abraham Accord Declaration that “We seek to end radicalization and conflict to provide all children a better future.”