The Occupy Wall Street Protest.

Just as the high level segment of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) was getting underway in New York on September 17th some protesters set up camp on Wall Street also in New York to protest for or against something or other. In the process they caused security headaches and travel problems for UNGA delegate as they made their way between various meetings and to and from their hotels. It was at this point I have to admit that I got bored and went off and did something else.

However it turns out that the whole thing was slightly more targeted then just the Americans trying to annoy all the UNGA delegates and provide a pre-text to monitor and disrupt the off the books bilateral meetings going on. It was also designed to cause specific problems for the Israeli and Chinese delegations.

While it was billed as a Tahrir Square style demonstration the absence of tanks, petrol bombs and lunatics with swords on camels meant it looked and felt much more like Israel's Levinsky Park demonstrations which were used as a justification for building even more Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. These protests were fuelled in no small part by the Strauss Group's - a large Israeli food manufacturer - decision to massively increase the cost of everyday essentials like milk and hummus and everyday treats like chocolate and coffee. The chair of the Strauss Group is a woman called Ofra Strauss who is a very close associate of Tony Blair, the quartets middle east peace envoy. This parallel made the protests seem Jewish in origin and forced the Israel Prime Minister to explain what was going on in his own country. Always a difficult position for a national leader to find themselves in.

Although the protest was called by the technically Canadian Adbusters Foundation it was widely promoted by the Anonymous group. While Anonymous are a loose and fluid group their core has previously behaved in such a pro-Israeli manner - undermining the US' largest export industry etc - that they're seen as a Mossad front organisation. So their involvement also made the protest look like a Jewish thing while at the same time putting the Mossad under great pressure to find out how deeply the Americans have been able to penetrate Anonymous.

The Chinese of course were under pressure to make sense of all this while at the same time making a decision about the Palestinian statehood bid and the IMF meeting on Greece. Also the anti-bank nature of the protest seemed like a direct American attempt to de-rail the Eurozone bailout which contains provisions for some Italian banks to be compensated for some of the losses incurred by a Greek default.

Needless to say the Wall Street protest has generated so much international attention that a host of other governments are currently trying to recruit cannon fodder to stage their own retaliatory protests on October 15th;

http://15october.net/