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blackcat
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 Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:31 am Post subject: Turning the Tables on the Israel-Firsters |
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http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=13139
| Quote: | Turning the Tables on the Israel-Firsters
by Michael Scheuer July 16, 2008
Now that the dust has settled in the spat between journalist Joe Klein and the ideologues at Commentary, it is time to regret the ink spilled over the non-issue of "dual loyalties." The idea that there are U.S. citizens who have equal loyalties to the United States and Israel is passé. American Israel-firsters have long since dropped any pretense of loyalty to the United States and its genuine national interests. They have moved brazenly into the Israel first, last, and always camp. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, the Rev. Franklin Graham, Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Giuliani, Douglas Feith, the Rev. Rod Parsley, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Bill Kristol, the Rev. John Hagee, and the thousands of wealthy supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appear to care about the United States only so far as Washington is willing to provide immense, unending funding and the lives of young U.S. service personnel to protect Israel. These individuals and their all-for-Israel journals – Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal – amount to nothing less than a fifth column intent on involving 300 million Americans in other peoples' religious wars, making them pay and bleed to protect a nation in which the United States has no genuine national security interest at stake.
The Israel-firsters' success is, of course, the stuff of which legends are made. Most recently, for example, we heard President Bush echo Sen. Lieberman's insane and subversive contention that the United States has a "duty" to ensure the fulfilling of God's millennia-old promise to Abraham regarding the creation and survival of Israel. Bush told the Knesset all Americans are ready to endlessly bleed and pay to ensure Israel's security. And where does the president derive authority to make such a commitment in the name of his countrymen? From the Constitution? On the basis of America's dominant religion? From – heaven forbid – a thoughtful, hardheaded analysis of U.S. interests?
No, Bush's pledge was based on none of these. Bush's decision to more deeply involve America in the eternal Arab-Israeli war was based on nothing less than the corruption wrought on the American political system by the Israel-firsters, AIPAC's enormous treasury, and the lamentable but growing influence of America's leading evangelical Protestant preachers.
The Israel-firsters started the Iraq war and now have the United States locked into an occupation of that country that may not end in any of our lifetimes. Unless Americans ignore the likes of Hanson, Podhoretz, Lieberman, Woolsey, and Wolfowitz, the cost in blood and treasure will ultimately bankrupt America.
AIPAC is a perfectly legal organization, and the wealth of its members is channeled into reliable campaign contributions for any candidate from either party who will put Israel's interests above America's. From McCain to Obama, from Pelosi to Giuliani, from Hillary Clinton to Vice President Cheney, AIPAC pumps money to any and every American politician who is willing to adopt an Israel-first policy.
Leading American Protestant evangelical preachers – men like Hagee, Parsley, and Graham – are the newest and perhaps most anti-American members of this fifth column. They serve two purposes: (1) to reinforce in the minds of their flocks the Bush-Lieberman absurdity that the United States has a "duty" to ensure Israel's survival; and (2) to use religious rhetoric to steadily convince the Muslim world that U.S. leaders are interested only in taming – and if need be, destroying – Islam.
The reality and power of this anti-American, pro-Israel triangle – Israel-first politicians, civil servants, and pundits; AIPAC's corrupting influence; and the warmongering of major evangelical Protestant preachers – is so obvious and palpable that the only way its members can blur reality is to deny the triangle's existence and identify their critics as anti-Semites. Well, the time has come to simply ignore these folks' knee-jerk hurling of that epithet. Indeed, the slur ought to understood for what it is: a sure sign that the Israel-firsters know that their fifth column would be destroyed in a minute if their fellow Americans come to recognize that their sons and daughters are dying in Iraq and soon elsewhere to protect an Israeli state whose existence is just as important to U.S. interests as the creation of a Palestinian state – that is, of no importance whatsoever.
American voters must start using the democratic process to begin removing themselves from the religious war known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Disengagement will take time, hard work, and a steadfast commitment to the rule of law. Three actions are well within the voters' capability, and their use would bring pressure on federal officials to stop killing America's children in wars between Arabs and Israelis.
Voters should press federal representatives to end taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for Democracy and other such organizations. These organizations' main function is to promote the fallacy that U.S. interests are served by making sure that Israel – "the embattled island of democracy in the Middle East" – is protected, and that the lives of American children should be joyfully spent to bring democracy to foreigners in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Voters should not vote for any candidate for federal office who accepts contributions from AIPAC or any other Israel-first organization. This decision would be an important step in beginning to sweep clean the Augean stable that is American politics.
Voters of all faiths must press their religious leaders to regularly, publicly, and specifically denounce the evangelical Protestant preachers whose fire-and-brimstone support for Israel involves Americans in religious wars in which U.S. interests are not threatened.
Neutralizing the Israel-first fifth column must be done, but it must be accomplished using legitimate democratic tools: voting, lobbying, free speech, and support for candidates pledged to keep America out of other peoples' religious wars. The invocation of the anti-Semite epithet by the Israel-firsters should be ignored. To be silenced by the slurs of the Israel-firsters is to ignominiously invite the end of American independence by subordinating U.S. interests to those of a foreign nation, as well as to forget the warning of the greatest American. "If men are precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind," George Washington said in March 1783, "reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter." As long as the Israel-firsters can define the limits of acceptable public discourse, Americans are on their way to the slaughter. |
Not ONE mention of the J word!!! C'mon Dogsmilk etc. riddle the thread with them then play your "Get out of jail free" card of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
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"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell. |
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Alexander
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kbo234
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 11:11 am Post subject: |
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| Excellent article. |
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chek
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 3:30 pm Post subject: Re: Turning the Tables on the Israel-Firsters |
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| blackcat wrote: | http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=13139
| Quote: | Turning the Tables on the Israel-Firsters
by Michael Scheuer July 16, 2008 |
Not ONE mention of the J word!!! |
So do you see now that it's perfectly possible to criticise US policy on Israel without doing so?
| blackcat wrote: | | C'mon Dogsmilk etc. riddle the thread with them then play your "Get out of jail free" card of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. |
The US policy towards the 'Middle East' (read:oilfields) of maintaining tension and sporadic conflict via its Israeli proxy, rather than allowing a self-supporting regional economic bloc sharing and solving common problems to develop, needs to be exposed and addressed.
It seems to me that the mythical 'Get out of jail free card" is a self-justifying self-invention of the AS'ites and HD'ers, invariably introduced by the proto-nazi tendency (and their ilk) which only serve to obscure and confuse that very obvious issue every time.
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kbo234
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 3:52 pm Post subject: Re: Turning the Tables on the Israel-Firsters |
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| chek wrote: |
It seems to me that the mythical 'Get out of jail free card" is a self-justifying self-invention of the AS'ites and HD'ers, invariably introduced by the proto-nazi tendency (and their ilk) which only serve to obscure and confuse that very obvious issue every time. |
Blackcat. Here's an individual, of a certain 'ilk' himself, who wants to stir up the whole can of worms again.......by agreeing with you.
He loathes the actions of the Israel-first fifth columnists and the threat they pose to the USA, world peace and, maybe, ourselves.......
......yet supports (and attacks opposition to) the psychological memes and spiritual paradigms that are used by these fifth columnists to dominate us.
"Proto-Nazi"?
Fool.
.....or am I for taking the bait? It is pretty hard to maintain any kind of innocence in the cesspit of this issue. |
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Alexander
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 4:40 pm Post subject: |
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Here's an interesting article from a Jewish anti-zionist author...
| Quote: | Jewish power has, in fact, been trumpeted by a number of Jewish writers, including one, J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish weekly Forward, who wrote a book by that name in 1996. Any attempt, however, to explore the issue from a critical standpoint, inevitably leads to accusations of anti-Semitism, as Bill and Kathy Christison pointed out in their article on the role of right wing Jewish neo-cons in orchestrating US Middle East policy, in Counterpunch (1/25/3):
"Anyone who has the temerity to suggest any Israeli instigation of, or even involvement in, Bush administration war planning is inevitably labelled somewhere along the way as an anti-Semite. Just whisper the word "domination" anywhere in the vicinity of the word "Israel," as in "U.S.-Israeli domination of the Middle East" or "the U.S. drive to assure global domination and guarantee security for Israel," and some Leftist who otherwise opposes going to war against Iraq will trot out charges of promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the old czarist forgery that asserted a Jewish plan for world domination."
Presumably, this is what Zunes would call an example of the "latent anti-Semitism which has come to the fore with wildly exaggerated claims of Jewish economic and political power." And that it "is a naÔve assumption to believe that foreign policy decision making in the US is pluralistic enough so that any one lobbying group...can have so much influence."
This is hardly the first time that Jews have been in the upper echelons of power as Benjamin Ginsberg points out in "The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, but there has never been a situation anything like the present. This was how Ginzberg began his book:
"Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade's corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely 2 % of the nation's population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation's largest newspaper chain and the most influential single newspaper, the New York Times".
That was written in 1993, Today, ten years later, ardently pro-Israel American Jews are in positions of unprecedented influence within the United States and have assumed or been given decision making positions over virtually every segment of our culture and body politic. This is no secret conspiracy. Regular readers of the New York Times business section, which reports the comings and goings of the media tycoons, are certainly aware of it. Does this mean that each and every one is a pro-Israel zealot? Not necessarily, but when one compares the US media with its European counterparts in their respective coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the extreme bias in favour of Israel on the part of the US media is immediately apparent.
This might explain Nation Columnist Eric Alterman's discovery that "Europeans and Americans... differ profoundly in their views of the Israel/Palestine issue at both the elite and popular levels.. with Americans being far more sympathetic to Israel and the Europeans to the Palestinian cause..."
An additional component of Chomsky's analysis is his insistence that it is the US, more than Israel, that is the "rejectionist state," implying that were it not for the US, Israel might long ago have abandoned the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians for a mini-state.
Essential to his analysis is the notion that every US administration since that of Eisenhower has attempted to advance Israel's interests in line with America's global and regional agenda. This is a far more complex issue than Chomsky leads us believe. Knowledgeable insiders, both critical and supportive of Israel, have described in detail major conflicts that have taken place between US and Israeli administrations over the years in which Israel, thanks to the diligence of its domestic lobby, prevailed.
In particular, Chomsky ignores or misinterprets the efforts made by every US president beginning with Richard Nixon to curb Israel's expansionism, halt its settlement building and to obtain its withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.
"What happened to all those nice plans?" asked Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery.
"Israel's governments ... mobilized the collective power of US Jewry--which dominates Congress and the media to a large degree--against them. Faced by this vigorous opposition, all the presidents; great and small, football players and movie stars--folded one after another."
Gerald Ford, angered that Israel had been reluctant to leave the Sinai following the 1973 war not only suspended aid for six months in 1975, but in March of that year made a speech, backed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, that called for a "reassessment" of the US-Israel relationship. Within weeks, AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), Israel's Washington lobby secured a letter signed by 76 senators "confirming their support for Israel, and suggesting that the White House see fit to do the same. The language was tough, the tone almost bullying." Ford backed down.
We need to only look at the current Bush presidency to see that this phenomenon is still the rule. In 1991, the same year as Chomsky's talk, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir asked the first Bush administration for $10 billion in loan guarantees in order, he said, to provide for the resettlement of Russian Jews. Bush Sr. had earlier balked at a request from Congress to appropriate an additional $650 million dollars to compensate Israel for sitting out the Gulf War, but gave in when he realized that his veto would be overridden. But now he told Shamir that Israel could only have the guarantees if it would freeze settlement building and promised that no Russian Jews would be resettled in the West Bank.
An angry Shamir refused and called on AIPAC to mobilize Congress and the organized American Jewish community in support of the loan guarantees.
A letter, drafted by AIPAC was signed by more than 240 members of the House demanding that Bush approve them, and 77 senators signed on to supporting legislation.
On September 12, 1991, Jewish lobbyists descended on Washington in such numbers that Bush felt obliged to call a televised press conference in which he complained that "1000 Jewish lobbyists are on Capitol Hill against little old me." It would prove to be his epitaph.
Chomsky pointed to Bush's statement, at the time, as proof that the vaunted Israel lobby was nothing more than "a paper tiger "It took scarcely more than a raised eyebrow for the lobby to collapse," he told readers of Z Magazine. He could not have been further from the truth.
The next day, Tom Dine, AIPAC's Executive Director, declared that "September 12, 1991 is a day that will live in infamy," Similar comments were uttered by Jewish leaders who accused Bush of provoking anti-Semitism. What was more important, his friends in the mainstream media, like William Safire, George Will, and Charles Krauthammer, not only criticized him, they began to find fault with the economy and how he was running the country. It was all downhill from there. Bush's Jewish vote, which has been estimated at 38% in 1988, dropped down to no more than 12%, with some estimates as low as 8%.
Bush's opposition to the loan guarantees was the last straw for the Israel lobby. When he made disparaging comments about Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem in March, 1990, AIPAC had begun the attack (briefly halted during the the Gulf War). Dine wrote a critical op-ed in the New York Times and followed that with a vigorous speech to the United Jewish Appeal's Young Leaders Conference. "Brothers and sisters," he told them as they prepared to go out and lobby Congress on the issue, "remember that Israel's friends in this city reside on Capitol Hill." Months later, the loan guarantees were approved, but by then, Bush was dead meat.
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http://www.israelshamir.net/friends/blankfort.html
Further to this and quite remarkably although it never seems to get brought up much, ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky's second book - The Other Side of Deception - alleges that the Mossad intended to assassinate President George H.W. Bush in Madrid in 1991, and had their chosen patsies(Muslims needless to say) ready to take the fall....
| Quote: | And now there was this peace process, put forth by the country club idiot. The right-wingers' silent cry was to somehow stop the process, which they believed would lead to a compromise that would force Israel to return more land. Refusing to believe that such a compromise would ever be made, settlers in the Occupied Territories had launched a new wave of construction, with the unrelenting help of Ariel Sharon, the minister of housing.
A certain right-wing clique in the Mossad regarded the situation as a life-or-death crisis and decided to take matters into their own hands, to solve the problem once and for all. They believed that Shamir would have ordered what they were about to do if he hadn't been gagged by politics. Like many others before them, in countless countries and administrations, they were going to do what the leadership really wanted but couldn't ask for, while at the same time leaving the leadership out of the loop - they were going to become Israeli versions of Colonel Oliver North, only on a much more lethal level.
{p. 279} To this clique, it was clear what they must do. There was no doubt that Bush would be out of his element on October 30 when he arrived in Madrid to open the peace talks. This was going to be the most protected event of the year, with so many potential enemies meeting in one place. On top of that, there were all those who were against the talks: the Palestinian extremists and the Iranians and the Libyans, not to mention the decimated Iraqis with their endless calls for revenge for the Gulf War.
The Spanish government had mobilized more than ten thousand police and civil guards. In addition, the American Secret Service, the Soviet KGB, and all the security services of all the countries involved would be on hand.
The Madrid Royal Palace would be the safest place on the planet at the time, unless you had the security plans and could find a flaw in them. That was exactly what the Mossad planned to do. It was clear from the start that the assassination would be blamed on the Palestinians - perhaps ending once and for all their irritating resistance and making them the people most hated by all Americans.
Three Palestinian extremists were taken by a Kidon unit from their hiding place in Beirut and relocated incommunicado in a special detention location in the Negev desert. The three were Beijdun Salameh, Mohammed Hussein, and Hussein Shahin.
At the same time, various threats, some real and some not, were made against the president. The Mossad clique added its share, in order to more precisely define the threat as if it were coming from a group affiliated with none other than Abu Nidal. They knew that name carried with it a certain guarantee of getting attention and keeping it. So if something were to happen, the media would be quick to react and say, "We knew about it, and don't forget where you saw it first."
Several days before the event, it was leaked to the Spanish police that the three terrorists were on their way to Madrid and that they were probably planning some extravagant action. Since the Mossad had all the security arrangements in hand, it would not be a problem for this particular clique to bring the "killers" as close as they might want to the president and then stage a killing. In the ensuing confusion, the Mossad people would kill the "perpetrators," scoring yet another victory for the Mossad. They'd be very sorry that they hadn't been able to save the president, but protecting him was not their job to begin with. With all the security forces involved and the assassins dead, it would be very difficult to discover where the security breach had been, except that several of the countries involved in the confer-
{p. 281} ence, such as Syria, were regarded as countries that assisted terrorists. With that in mind, it would be a foregone conclusion where the breach was.
As far as this Mossad clique was concerned, it was a win-win situation.
Ephraim called me on Tuesday, October 1. I could sense from the tone of his voice that he was extremely stressed. "They're out to kill Bush," he said. At first, I didn't understand what he was talking about. I thought he meant that they were going to ruin the president. I'd already heard of several books that were in the making on the man, and there was a smear campaign regarding his alleged involvement in the Iran-Contra affair (which I knew personally to be fake).
"What's new about that? They've been out to get him for a long time."
"I mean really kill, as in assassinate."
"What are you talking about? You can't be serious. They would never dare do something like that."
"Don't go naive on me now," he said. "They're going to do it during the Madrid peace talks."
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The rest here...
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/ostrovsky.html |
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blackcat
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 8:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Chek wrote: | The US policy towards the 'Middle East' (read:oilfields) of maintaining tension and sporadic conflict via its Israeli proxy, rather than allowing a self-supporting regional economic bloc sharing and solving common problems to develop, needs to be exposed and addressed.
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Yeah right! Its the USA who is buggering Israel and not the other way around. Course it is. 
_________________
"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell. |
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chek
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 10:11 pm Post subject: |
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| blackcat wrote: | | Yeah right! Its the USA who is buggering Israel and not the other way around. Course it is. |
I wondered awhile about what it might take to persuade someone determined to look the wrong way down a telescope.
Would it be the huge number of serious journalistic and academic results obtained by google searching 'US controls Israel' compared to the lesser and noticeable tendency for increasingly fruit-looping and associated nazi-flavoured sites suggested after an 'Israel controls US' search?
But then I thought 'no'; a simple question will do.
What if it were possible to practical joke two entire nations?
If the morning news in the US were to announce that Israel had ceased to exist overnight, and similarly the Israeli media announced that the US had been obliterated overnight, which nation would likely have the greater percentage of what we may politely call scheissenhosen that morning?
I can think of at least 40 States that conceivably would require a map to even be sure where Israel was, before needing emergency laundry services.
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Dissolution of the Global Corporations.
It's the only way.
It's them or us. |
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blackcat
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| Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 8:17 am Post subject: |
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http://washingtonindependent.com/view/i-know-what-jews
| Quote: | I Know What Jews Like
By Spencer Ackerman 07/16/2008 12:55PM
Actually, J Street knows. The pro-peace/pro-Israel/pro-Palestine Jewish lobby just released a monster of a poll on American Jewish political attitudes. The takeaway: we're liberal as hell; we hate Bush; we know Bush has been a disaster for Israel; we'll support any peace deal the Israelis make; and the only thing we're uncomfortable with to that end is giving East Jerusalem back to the Palestinians.
Let's go down the line. Seventy-four percent of us view Bush unfavorably and 83 percent of us disapprove of his job performance. While 76 percent of the country as a whole says the U.S. is on the wrong track, an astonishing 90 percent of American Jews say the same. Only 21 percent of us approve of the Iraq war and only 29 percent think Bush is good for Israel, and those are clearly the shmucks that kissed ass in Hebrew school and snitched when the rest of us used the synagogue phone booth and cloakroom to make out.
When asked if the U.S. should or shouldn't actively broker Mideast peace, it broke down 55 percent for U.S. involvement and 30 percent against. J Street, the menschen, took that a step further and examined support for the hard choices piece requires. "Even if it meant the United States publicly stating its disagreements with both the Israelis and the Arabs?" Yes -- 75 percent; no -- 25 percent. "Even if it meant the United States exerting pressure on both Israelis and Arabs to make the compromises necessary for peace?" Yes -- 70 percent; no -- 30 percent.
In terms of negotiating positions for an Arab-Israeli settlement, 59 percent agree that Israel will need to "withdraw from most of the West Bank and dismantle many of the Israeli settlements." Another 58 percent agree that for full peace with Syria -- and an abandonment of their support for Hamas and Hezbollah -- Israel should get out of the Golan. Only 44 percent, though, endorse the statement that Palestinian East Jerusalem should be part of the state of Palestine. And while that's the only non-majority position among American Jews for what can fairly be called the dovish line, 44 percent is still a substantial amount of support.
J Street's poll supports its contention that the attitudes of most of us are far, far out of whack with what this country's self-appointed Jewish leaders -- the Joe Liebermans, the AIPACs, the Sheldon Adelsons, the Commentary magazines -- say we're about and what we're actually about.
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J Street's poll supports its contention that the attitudes of most of us are far, far out of whack with what this country's self-appointed Jewish leaders -- the Joe Liebermans, the AIPACs, the Sheldon Adelsons, the Commentary magazines -- say we're about and what we're actually about.
Well worth repeating!
_________________
"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell. |
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