Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Islamophobia, the Israel lobby and the Western media

By Paul J. Balles | August 3, 2009

Most of us have had fears of one kind or another. Some fears are quite rational. If someone threatens you, and you have reason to believe that person will carry out his threat, your fear is rational. Not all fears are rational.

Have you ever been short of breath, shaking, nauseated and light-headed within elevators, closed rooms or crowded places? Experienced a panic attack in a high-rise building? Do you have an irrational fear of germs? Of strangers or foreigners? Of shadows? Of thunder or lightening? Of spiders? Of public speaking? Afraid of flying?

If you’ve experienced any of these, you’re suffering from a type of irrational fear called a phobia. These are some of the most common phobias. People suffer from literally hundreds of phobias.

A relatively recent irrational phobia that hasn’t even appeared on all the lists is Islamophobia – fear of Islam.

Kofi Annan told a UN conference on Islamophobia in 2004: “When the world is compelled to coin a new term to take account of increasingly widespread bigotry, that is a sad and troubling development. Such is the case with Islamophobia.”

In 1996, the Runnymede Trust established the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. The term was defined by the trust as “an outlook or world-view involving an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims, which results in practices of exclusion and discrimination”.

The Runnymede report identified eight perceptions related to Islamophobia:

  1. Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.
  2. It is seen as separate and “other”. It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.
  3. It is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive, and sexist.
  4. It is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a clash of civilizations.
  5. It is seen as a political ideology, used for political or military advantage.
  6. Criticisms made of “the West” by Muslims are rejected out of hand.
  7. Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
  8. Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural and normal.

Of course, Muslims and others who have lived in Muslim countries know how absurd these perceptions are. Why, after more than a decade, do Westerners still believe these false assumptions about Islam? What are the sources of the baseless fears feeding these perceptions?

Many of the distorted impressions come from Zionist propaganda:

  • Israel’s use of words like disputed territory rather than occupied, redeeming for stealing land, terrorists rather than resistance fighters for Palestinians, anti-Semites for critics of Israel (self-hating Jews if the critics are Jewish).
  • American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) bulletins and lobbying – AIPAC’s only purpose is to ensure American support for Israel. No matter what Israel does, it cannot do any wrong.
  • American Jewish Committee (AJC) newsletters – despite efforts by Jewish organizations to stifle criticism of Israel and objections to Zionism, anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Not all Jews are Semites. Most Arabs are.
  • ZOA – Zionist Organization of America.

Western brainwashing comes from the media:

  • Articles by writers like Daniel Pipes, (who claims an Islamist goal is to take over the United States and replace the constitution with the Koran).
  • Anti-Arab, anti-black radio broadcasts by Rush Limbaugh and Arab-hater Ann Coulter.
  • TV influence of Fox News anchors, like Bill O’Reilly, labelling Arabs as anti-Semites and terrorists.
  • Hollywood films have been vilifying Arabs for more than 50 years.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Fear always springs from ignorance.”

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

March 21, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Islamophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Mexico’s Oil Belongs to Its Citizens, Not the Global 1%

Mexico's oil

Thousands of people march in Mexico City in protest of the privatization of Mexico’s oil industry. Photo by flickr user eneas, March 18, 2013.

By Yoshua Okón | Creative Time Reports | March 18, 2014

Mexico City, Mexico – Oil in Mexico is much more than a symbol of national pride. For the past 75 years it has been an enormous source of income for developing Mexico’s infrastructure and improving social welfare. When, on this day in 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated U.S.- and U.K.-owned oil companies, he allowed Mexico to achieve relative independence and modest prosperity. The nationalization of oil saved Mexico from becoming a paralyzed, essentially colonized country like Guatemala, which has a major mining industry that is almost entirely foreign-owned.

Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the state-owned company with exclusive access to Mexico’s oil, is one of the most lucrative companies in the world. In 2012 it declared profits of over 900 billion pesos (or $70 billion), earnings comparable to those of American oil and gas giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron. More importantly, PEMEX has historically distributed its profits among the Mexican population more equitably than any other industry in the country. Sixty percent of Mexico’s spending on social welfare comes from oil income. Among the things this income currently pays for are education, health care and programs to fight extreme poverty. Every Mexican citizen owns PEMEX, and the profits the company generates have made palpable differences in all of our lives.

Lucrative as it is, PEMEX could make and distribute much greater revenues if it were not so corrupt, inefficient and archaic. We have long known of grave problems with the oil industry and union, such as losses in refining and production. (Output has fallen 25 percent since 2004.) If PEMEX isn’t brought up to date in the next few years, there is a serious danger that the company will collapse. But instead of reforming the institution, the current government has exploited PEMEX’s deficiencies under the guise of reform to fiercely promote a very different agenda: the privatization of oil in Mexico.

Far from modernizing PEMEX, eliminating corruption or directing more income to Mexico’s citizens, the so-called energy reform passed by Congress and signed into law by President Enrique Peña Nieto in December will radically shift the distribution of oil profits from the public to a few private investors. The bill modified Mexico’s constitution to allow private oil companies to compete with PEMEX in every aspect of oil production. Underground oil reserves will still belong to Mexico, but since all profits derived from production will go to corporations, these reforms effectively constitute a privatization. Yet the president never admitted to this underlying agenda in the lead-up to the bill’s passage; his administration has altogether avoided using the word “privatization,” in favor of vague references to “modernization” and “the need for private investment.” This lack of honesty has generated tremendous confusion among the Mexican population, greatly debilitating potential opposition to the bill.

As Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) prepare a new set of bills that will implement the changes to oil laws, a multimillion-dollar publicity campaign of disinformation initiated last year by his administration still saturates the mass media, diverting the debate on “energy reform” by reducing it to obvious questions: Is reform necessary? Is PEMEX efficient? Do we need progress and modernization? As a result, we have skipped over the most pressing and fundamental questions: What should the nature of this reform be? How will profits be distributed? What measures are in place to fight the corruption that causes us to lose so much of our oil income? In order to modernize, do we have to abandon the idea that Mexican oil belongs to the people of Mexico?

The recent history of PEMEX is a story of deliberate sabotage. PEMEX managers have enabled politicians to keep a portion of the company’s profits for decades, laying the groundwork for privatization by making corruption seem like the natural result of a nationalized industry. But the underlying problem has always been and still is political corruption, not a lack of private investment. Consider Romero Deschamps, the leader of PEMEX’s union since 1989, who is accused of stealing an estimated 3 billion pesos’ worth of the union’s assets and of having illegally created secret “private” companies that undertake contract work for PEMEX. In spite of the abundant proof of his guilt, Deschamps is currently a senator for the ruling PRI. Peña Nieto claims that stamping out such criminality is one of the primary objectives of the current “reform,” but his policy for overhauling the industry doesn’t contain a single strategy aimed at fighting corruption.

The majority of the proposed structural changes to PEMEX aren’t even necessary for the task of modernizing Mexico’s oil industry. PEMEX already has access to cutting-edge technologies since private oil companies can operate in Mexico and have been doing so (for example, PEMEX is currently contracting the services of Halliburton and OHL). Whether or not PEMEX should contract private companies is irrelevant; what matters are the terms on which it partners with the private sector. The fact that the Peña Nieto administration is permitting profit-sharing contracts—which have historically been imposed on poor countries, with disastrous results—rather than limiting partnerships to licensing permits that would pave the way for increased efficiency without signing away the democratic ownership of resources, is another clear indicator of the underlying agendas behind the “energy reform.” As former PEMEX director general Adrián Lajous has argued, profit-sharing contracts render private companies unaccountable, leaving the state, its resources and its people vulnerable.

Peña Nieto presents his “reform” as the magic solution to PEMEX’s problems, as if the neoliberal dream of privatization without regulation were synonymous with social justice, economic well-being and democracy. But the facts paint a very different picture. Since neoliberal policies surged in the 1980s and former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed NAFTA into law in 1994, a weakened state, incapable of protecting the environment and the rights of its poorest people, has created the perfect conditions for political and corporate corruption. We live every day with the consequences of Carlos Slim’s acquisition of Telmex, the telecommunications company that Salinas privatized in 1990. Because there is little regulation, prices are high and service is poor, and Slim is now one of the richest men in the world. Another dark legacy of Salinas is his privatization of the banking sector and creation of Fobaproa, an agency intended to prevent banks from going bankrupt. After Mexico’s 1994 economic crisis, the institution of Fobaproa meant that the public paid off banks’ massive debts. High-ranking politicians and businessmen have pocketed extraordinary profits, while everyday people have borne greater economic burdens, with each move to privatize. The result is a spectacular growth in inequality. More than 53 million people in Mexico today—nearly half the country—live in poverty, and 11.5 million Mexicans live in extreme poverty. Meanwhile, the eleven richest men in the country have accumulated roughly 11 percent of the GDP.

We cannot undertake true energy reform in Mexico without first undertaking political reforms that would decisively and effectively tackle corruption. Sadly, because it does nothing to change political structures and curb corruption, the current legislative process is taking us further away from democratic values and constitutes a huge step in the wrong direction. Approved by politicians who never consulted voters, the bill passed in December opens the field for companies that are known the world over for their abusive practices and for co-opting politicians (ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, OHL) to operate in Mexico without regulation or restriction. In the words of the historian Lorenzo Meyer Cossío, we are opening the door to “mercenaries.” The Mexican government expects its citizens to place ownership of our hydrocarbons in private hands, without our agreement and in exchange for minimal revenue. But modernization does not require that we give up our resources. Improvement shouldn’t entail changing the basic principle that natural resources belong to us all.

The “energy reform” currently under way is a huge step toward greater inequality, environmental devastation and the loss of economic and political independence for Mexico. It is one example of the neoliberal fantasy of unregulated capitalism that has landed us in our present situation, in which the 85 richest people in the world hold the same amount of wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest. We are living through the greatest inequality in the history of humanity and unprecedented ecological destruction. To combat this urgent situation, we need to strengthen fragile regulatory structures by creating independent, democratically owned institutions. By instead dismantling the few supportive social structures left, Peña Nieto’s government is pushing Mexico to a dangerous place. Against a backdrop of extreme poverty and social injustice, the PRI’s “reforms” will, sooner or later, lead to revolt.

Translated by Georgia Phillips-Amos.

This piece was made possible, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

March 21, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Visa, MasterCard Freeze Cards at Sanctioned Russian Banks

RIA Novosti | March 21, 2014

MOSCOW – US-based Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. have stopped processing payments by cardholders at Russian banks targeted by the United States for financial sanctions on Thursday, a number of Russian banks said Friday.

The news signaled the first impact on ordinary Russian citizens by a series of Western sanctions against Russia over the ongoing situation in Ukraine, the greatest geopolitical showdown between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War.

Earlier sanctions had been restricted to targeting high-level officials.

Several banks reported that customer cards were being declined for payment and that they had received no advance notification of the changes. Customer deposits remained unaffected.

Visa confirmed Friday that it had blocked cards issued by four Russian banks for use on its payment network for online or retail purchases.

Visa said the list of the banks facing sanctions announced by the US Treasury on Thursday includes Rossiya Bank, SMP Bank, Sobinbank and Investcapitalbank, the latter two being part of Rossiya Bank.

“The management of Rossiya Bank understands the difficulties experienced by clients in this situation, and assures them that everything possible is being done to help,” Rossiya Bank said in a statement on its website.

The bank added that customers could still withdraw cash from the bank’s ATMs without difficulties, as well as those owned by partner banks.

Sobinbank said that its call centers had been swamped by customers who were abroad and suddenly found their cards were not working.

SMP Bank is majority owned by brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who were both named on the US sanctions list.

“All other operations, including the issuance of deposits and making payments remain unaffected and without any restrictions,” SMP Bank said in a statement, adding that it has no assets in the United States.

The US and EU announced asset freezes and travel bans targeting a number of Russian officials close to Putin on Monday, following a referendum in Crimea that saw voters overwhelmingly support reunification with Russia after 60 years as part of Ukraine.

Those lists were expanded – including the addition of Rossiya Bank to the US list – following the ratification of the reunification treaty by Russia’s lower house of parliament Thursday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned earlier this month that sanctions against Russia threatened to cause mutual damage in the modern, integrated global economy.

Leaders in Crimea refused to recognize the legitimacy of the government in Kiev that came to power amid often violent protests last month, instead seeking reunification with Russia.

March 21, 2014 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Origins of the Israel Lobby in the US

By Alison Weir | CounterPunch | March 21, 2014

The immediate precursor to today’s pro-Israel lobby began in 1939[i] under the leadership of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, originally from Lithuania. He created the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), which by 1943 had acquired a budget of half a million dollars at a time when a nickel bought a loaf of bread.[ii]

In addition to this money, Zionists [adherents of “political Zionism,” a movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine] had become influential in creating a fundraising umbrella organization, the United Jewish Appeal, in 1939[iii], giving them access to the organization’s gargantuan financial resources: $14 million in 1941, $150 million by 1948. This was four times more than Americans contributed to the Red Cross and was the equivalent of approximately $1.5 billion today.[iv]

With its extraordinary funding, AZEC embarked on a campaign to target every sector of American society, ordering that local committees be set up in every Jewish community in the nation [for decades the larger majority of Jewish Americans had been either non-Zionists or actively anti-Zionist]. In the words of AZEC organizer Sy Kenen, it launched “a political and public relations offensive to capture the support of Congressmen, clergy, editors, professors, business and labor.”[v]

AZEC instructed activists to “make direct contact with your local Congressman or Senator“ and to go after union members, wives and parents of servicemen, and Jewish war veterans. AZEC provided activists with form letters to use and schedules of anti-Zionist lecture tours to oppose and disrupt.

A measure of its power came in 1945 when Silver disliked a British move that would be harmful to Zionists. AZEC booked Madison Square Garden, ordered advertisements, and mailed 250,000 announcements – the first day. By the second day they had organized demonstrations in 30 cities, a letter-writing campaign, and convinced 27 U.S. Senators to give speeches.[vi]

Grassroots Zionist action groups were organized with more than 400 local committees under 76 state and regional branches. AZEC funded books, articles and academic studies; millions of pamphlets were distributed. There were massive petition and letter writing campaigns. AZEC targeted college presidents and deans, managing to get more than 150 to sign one petition.[vii]

Rabbi Elmer Berger, executive director of the American Council for Judaism, which opposed Zionism in the 1940s and ‘50s, writes in his memoirs that there was a “ubiquitous propaganda campaign reaching just about every point of political leverage in the country.”[viii]

The Zionist Organization of America bragged of the “immensity of our operations and their diversity” in its 48th Annual Report, stating, “We reach into every department of American life…”[ix]

Berger and other anti-Zionist Jewish Americans tried to organize against “the deception and cynicism with which the Zionist machine operated,” but failed to obtain anywhere near their level of funding. Among other things, would-be dissenters were afraid of “the savagery of personal attacks” anti-Zionists endured.[x]

Berger writes that when he and a colleague opposed a Zionist resolution in Congress, Emanuel Celler, a New York Democrat who was to serve in Congress for almost 50 years, told them: “They ought to take you b…s out and shoot you.”[xi]

When it was unclear that President Harry Truman would support Zionism, Cellar and a committee of Zionists told him that they had persuaded Dewey to support the Zionist policy and demanded that Truman also take this stand. Cellar reportedly pounded on Truman‘s table and said that if Truman did not do so, “We’ll run you out of town.”[xii]

Jacob Javits, another well-known senator, this time Republican, told a Zionist women’s group: “We’ll fight to death and make a Jewish State in Palestine if it’s the last thing that we do.”[xiii]

Richard Stevens, author of American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1942-1947, reports that Zionists infiltrated the boards of several Jewish schools that they felt didn’t sufficiently promote the Zionist cause. When this didn’t work, Stevens writes, they would start their own pro-Zionist schools.[xiv]

Stevens writes that in 1943-44 the ZOA distributed over a million leaflets and pamphlets to public libraries, chaplains, community centers, educators, ministers, writers and “others who might further the Zionist cause.”[xv]

Alfred Lilienthal, who had worked in the State Department, served in the U.S. Army in the Middle East from 1943-45, and became a member of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, reports that Zionist monthly sales of books totaled between 3,000 and 4,000 throughout 1944-45.

Richard Stevens reports that Zionists subsidized books by non-Jewish authors that supported the Zionist agenda. They would then promote these books jointly with commercial publishers. Several of them became best sellers.[xvi]

Zionists manufacture Christian support

AZEC founder Silver and other Zionists played a significant role in creating Christian support for Zionism.

Secret Zionist funds, eventually reaching $150,000 in 1946, were used to revive an elitist Protestant group, the American Palestine Committee. This group had originally been founded in 1932 by Emanuel Neumann, a member of the Executive of the Zionist Organization. The objective was to organize a group of prominent (mainly non-Jewish) Americans in moral and political support of Zionism. Frankfurter was one of the main speakers at its launch.[xvii]

Silver‘s headquarters issued a directive saying, “In every community an American Christian Palestine Committee must be immediately organized.”[xviii]

Author Peter Grose reports that the Christian committee’s operations “were hardly autonomous. Zionist headquarters thought nothing of placing newspaper advertisements on the clergymen’s behalf without bothering to consult them in advance, until one of the committee’s leaders meekly asked at least for prior notice before public statements were made in their name.”[xix]

AZEC formed another group among clergymen, the Christian Council on Palestine. An internal AZEC memo stated that the aim of both groups was to “crystallize the sympathy of Christian America for our cause.”[xx]

By the end of World War II the Christian Council on Palestine had grown to 3,000 members and the American Palestine Committee boasted a membership of 6,500 public figures, including senators, congressmen, cabinet members, governors, state officers, mayors, jurists, clergymen, educators, writers, publishers, and civic and industrial leaders.

Historian Richard Stevens explains that Christian support was largely gained by exploiting their wish to help people in need. Steven writes that Zionists would proclaim “the tragic plight of refugees fleeing from persecution and finding no home,” thus linking the refugee problem with Palestine as allegedly the only solution.[xxi]

Stevens writes that the reason for this strategy was clear: “… while many Americans might not support the creation of a Jewish state, traditional American humanitarianism could be exploited in favor of the Zionist cause through the refugee problems.”[xxii]

Few if any of these Christian supporters had any idea that the creation of the Jewish state would entail a massive expulsion of hundreds of thousands of non-Jews, who made up the large majority of Palestine‘s population, creating a new and much longer lasting refugee problem.

Nor did they learn that during and after Israel’s founding 1947-49 war, Zionist forces attacked a number of Christian sites. Donald Neff, former Time Magazine Jerusalem bureau chief and author of five books on alison weir bookIsrael-Palestine, reports in detail on Zionist attacks on Christian sites in May 1948, the month of Israel’s birth.

Neff tells us that a group of Christian leaders complained that month that Zionists had killed and wounded hundreds of people, including children, refugees and clergy, at Christian churches and humanitarian institutions.

For example, the group charged that “‘many children were killed or wounded’ by Jewish shells on the Convent of Orthodox Copts…; eight refugees were killed and about 120 wounded at the Orthodox Armenian Convent…; and that Father Pierre Somi, secretary to the Bishop, had been killed and two wounded at the Orthodox Syrian Church of St. Mark.”

“The group’s statement said Arab forces had abided by their promise to respect Christian institutions, but that the Jews had forcefully occupied Christian structures and been indiscriminate in shelling churches,” reports Neff. He quotes a Catholic priest: “‘Jewish soldiers broke down the doors of my church and robbed many precious and sacred objects. Then they threw the statues of Christ down into a nearby garden.’ [The priest] added that Jewish leaders had reassured that religious buildings would be respected, ‘but their deeds do not correspond to their words.’”[xxiii]

After Zionist soldiers invaded and looted a convent in Tiberias, the U.S. Consulate sent a bitter dispatch back to the State Department complaining of “the Jewish attitude in Jerusalem towards Christian institutions.”[xxiv]

An American Christian Biblical scholar concurred, reporting that a friend in Jerusalem had been told, “When we get control you can take your dead Christ and go home.”[xxv]

Zionist Colonization Efforts in Palestine

In order to reach their goal of a Jewish state in Palestine, Zionists needed to clear the land of Muslim and Christian inhabitants and replace them with Jewish immigrants.

This was a tall order, as Muslims and Christians accounted for more than 95 percent of the population of Palestine.[xxvi] Zionists planned to try first to buy up the land until the previous inhabitants had emigrated; failing this, they would use violence to force them out. This dual strategy was discussed in various written documents cited by numerous Palestinian and Israeli historians.[xxvii]

As this colonial project grew, the indigenous Palestinians reacted with occasional bouts of violence; Zionists had anticipated this since people usually resist being expelled from their land.

When the buyout effort was able to obtain only a few percent of the land, Zionists created a number of terrorist groups to fight against both the Palestinians and the British. Terrorist and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin later bragged that Zionists had brought terrorism both to the Middle East and to the world at large.[xxviii]

By the eve of the creation of Israel, the Zionist immigration and buyout project had increased the Jewish population of Palestine to 30 percent[xxix] and land ownership from 1 percent to approximately 6-7 percent.[xxx]

This was in 1947, when the British at last announced that they would end their control of Palestine. Britain turned the territory’s fate over to the United Nations.

Since a founding principle of the UN was “self-determination of peoples,” one would have expected to the UN to support fair, democratic elections in which inhabitants could create their own independent country.[xxxi]

Instead, Zionists pushed for a General Assembly resolution to give them a disproportionate 55 percent of Palestine.[xxxii][xxxiii] (While they rarely announced this publicly, their plan, stated in journal entries and letters, was to later take the rest of Palestine.[xxxiv])

U.S. Officials oppose creation of Israel

The U.S. State Department opposed this partition plan strenuously, considering Zionism contrary to both fundamental American principles and U.S. interests.

For example, the director of the State Department‘s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs consistently recommended against supporting a Jewish state in Palestine. The director, named Loy Henderson, warned that the creation of such a state would go against locals’ wishes, imperil U.S. interests and violate democratic principles.

Henderson emphasized that the U.S. would lose moral standing in the world if it supported Zionism:

“At the present time the United States has a moral prestige in the Near and Middle East unequaled by that of any other great power. We would lose that prestige and would be likely for many years to be considered as a betrayer of the high principles which we ourselves have enunciated during the period of the [second world] war.”[xxxv]

When Zionists pushed the partition plan in the UN, Henderson recommended strongly against supporting their proposal, saying that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and was “not based on any principle.” He warned that partition “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future…”

Henderson elaborated further on how plans to partition Palestine would violate American and UN principles:

“…[Proposals for partition] are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [UN] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based. These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race…”[xxxvi]

Zionists attacked Henderson virulently, calling him “anti-Semitic,” demanding his resignation, and threatening his family. They pressured the State Department to transfer him elsewhere; one analyst describes this as “the historic game of musical chairs” in which officials who recommended Middle East policies “consistent with the nation’s interests” were moved on.[xxxvii]

In 1948 Truman sent Henderson to the slopes of the Himalayas, as Ambassador to Nepal (then officially under India).[xxxviii] (In recent years, at times virtually every State Department country desk has been directed by a Zionist.)[xxxix]

But Henderson was far from alone in making his recommendations. He wrote that his views were not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by “nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the [State] Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems.”[xl]

He wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism.

In 1947 the CIA reported that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.”[xli]

Ambassador Henry F. Grady, who has been called “America’s top diplomatic soldier for a critical period of the Cold War,” headed a 1946 commission aimed at coming up with a solution for Palestine. Grady later wrote about the Zionist lobby and its damaging effect on U.S. national interests.

“I have had a good deal of experience with lobbies but this group started where those of my experience had ended,” wrote Grady. “I have headed a number of government missions but in no other have I ever experienced so much disloyalty…. [I]n the United States, since there is no political force to counterbalance Zionism, its campaigns are apt to be decisive.”[xlii]

Grady concluded that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had “the ill-will with the Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the soviets.”[xliii]

Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson also opposed Zionism. Acheson‘s biographer writes that Acheson “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Another author, John Mulhall, records Acheson‘s warning of the danger for U.S. interests:

“… to transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.”[xliv]

The Joint Chiefs of Staff reported in late 1947, “A decision to partition Palestine, if the decision were supported by the United States, would prejudice United States strategic interests in the Near and Middle East” to the point that “United States influence in the area would be curtailed to that which could be maintained by military force.”[xlv]

The Joint Chiefs issued at least sixteen papers on the Palestine issue following World War II. They were particularly concerned that the Zionist goal was to involve the U.S.

One 1948 paper predicted that “the Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the United States] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.”[xlvi]

The CIA stated that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.”[xlvii]

The head of the State Department‘s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned against the partition plan on moral grounds:

“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter – a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN‘s own charter.” [xlviii]

Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate prediction.

An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:

“… the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN.… In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.”[xlix]

And American Vice Consul William J. Porter foresaw one last outcome of the “partition“ plan: that no Arab state would actually ever come to be in Palestine.[l]

This essay is excerpted from Alison Weir’s Against Our Better Judgment: How the US was Used to Create Israel.

Alison Weir is the president of the Council for the National Interest and executive director of If Americans Knew.

Citations for this excerpt, which also contain additional information, are available in the book. Discounted bulk orders can be obtained by writing orders@ifamericansknew.org

Notes.

[i] “American Zionist Movement (AZM),” Jewish Virtual Library, 2008,

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0002_0_00978.html.

[ii] Neff, Pillars, 23.

The executive secretary of AZEC was a man named Isaiah Kenen, who went on to found today’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), rated as one of the most powerful lobbying organization in the U.S. Grant Smith, in his book Declassified Deceptions: the Secret History of Isaiah L. Kenen and the Rise of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2007) describes Kenen‘s activities in detail, particularly how he worked to elude U.S. legal requirements that he register as a foreign agent.

[iii] Elmer Berger, Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978), 9.

Originally there had been two organizations, the United Palestine Appeal (the main Zionist fund-raising effort in the U.S.) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was dominated by non-Zionists and which raised more money. Its purpose was to “provide assistance to Jews in the countries in which they lived, hoping to facilitate their eventual integration into those societies.” Berger reports, “Never at a loss for maneuver – or dissembling– however, the Zionist manager persuaded the ‘big givers’ that a ‘united campaign’ would be more efficient than the competing, double campaigns,” and they managed to push through the creation of the United Jewish Appeal.

[iv] Christison, Perceptions, 73; Wilson, Decision on Palestine, 134.

Wilson reports that Zionists, wishing to pressure the U.S. government to support partition and end its arms embargo, raised $35 million (the equivalent of $349 million today) in just two weeks for the United Jewish Appeal in just two weeks.

[v] Neff, Pillars, 23; Tivnan, The Lobby, 24.

[vi] Tivnan, The Lobby, 24

[vii] Neff, Pillars, 23.

[viii] Berger, Memoirs, 11.

In 1947 the American Council for Judaism submitted a 27-page memorandum to the UN opposing Zionism. ACJ President Lessing J. Rosenwald railed against what he termed Zionists’ “anti-Semitic racialist lie that Jews the world over were a separate, national body.”

Smith, Declassified Deceptions, 29.

[ix] Stevens, American Zionism, 101.

[x] Berger, Memoirs, 17.

[xi] Berger, Memoirs, 22.

[xii] Wright, Zionist Cover-up, 25.

Wright was General staff G-2 Middle East specialist, Washington, 1945-46; Bureau Near East-South Asian-African Affairs Department of State, since 1946, country specialist 1946-47, advisor U.N. affairs, 1947-50, advisor on intelligence 1950-55. He retired from the State Department in 1966.

[xiii] Lilienthal, What Price Israel, 63.

[xiv] Stevens, American Zionism, 24.

[xv] Stevens, American Zionism, 22.

[xvi] Stevens, American Zionism, 22-23.

[xvii] Neff, Pillars, 23.

Herbert Hoover, “Message to the American Palestine Committee, January 17, 1932,” The American Presidency Project,

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=23121.

Patai, ed. “American Palestine Committee,” Encyclopaedia of Zionism and Israel, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.iahushua.com/Zion/zionhol10.html.

[xviii] Neff, Pillars, 23-24.

[xix] Grose, Mind of America, 173.

[xx] Neff, Pillars, 23-24.

[xxi] Stevens, American Zionism, 28.

[xxii] Stevens, American Zionism, 28.

Joseph M. Canfield, The Incredible Scofield and His Book (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2004).

Researchers may wish to explore an interesting though speculative discussion about what might have been an earlier effort by Zionists to influence Christians. Many years before AZEC targeted Christians, an annotated version of the bible known as the Scofield Reference Bible had been published, which pushed what was a previously somewhat fringe “dispensationalist“ theology calling for the Jewish “return” to Palestine.

Some analysts have raised questions about Cyrus Scofield and how and why the Oxford University Press published his book. Scofield, a Texas preacher who had been something of a shyster and criminal and had abandoned his first wife and children (when his wife then filed for divorce, the court ruled in her favor, noting that Scofield was “…not a fit person to have custody of the children”). (Canfield, Incredible Scofield, 113) He mysteriously became a member of an exclusive New York men’s club in 1901. Biographer Joseph Canfield comments:

“The admission of Scofield to the Lotus Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield.” (Canfield, Incredible Scofield, 220)

Canfield suggests that Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermyer, who was also a member of the Lotus Club, may have played a role in Scofield‘s project, writing that “Scofield‘s theology was most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermyer‘s pet projects – the Zionist Movement.” (Canfield, Incredible Scofield, 219)

Professor David Lutz, in “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” writes: “Untermyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.”

David Lutz, “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” in Neo-Conned! Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq, ed. D. Liam O’Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe (Vienna, VA: Light in the Darkness Publications, 2005), 127-169.

According to the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy website, Untermyer “was a partner in the law firm of Guggenheimer, Untermyer & Marshall, and was the first lawyer in America to earn a one million dollar fee on a single case.  He was also an astute investor, and became extremely wealthy.

He was instrumental in the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, was an influential Democrat and a close ally of Woodrow Wilson.

The bio continues: “Samuel Untermyer was one of the most prominent Jews of his day in America. He was a prominent Zionist, and was President of the Keren Hayesod.  In addition, he was the national leader of an unsuccessful movement in the early 1930’s for a worldwide boycott of Germany, and called for the destruction of Hitler‘s regime.”

“Samuel Untermyer,” Untermyer Gardens Conservancy, accessed January 1, 2014,

http://www.untermyergardens.org/samuel-untermyer.html.

Irish journalist Maidhc Ó Cathail suggests that “absent such powerful connections, it is hard to imagine ‘this peer among scalawags’ ever getting a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his bible.”

Maidhc O Cathail, “Zionism‘s Un-Christian Bible,” Middle East Online, November 25, 1999,

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=35914.

[xxiii] Donald Neff, “Christians Discriminated Against By Israel,” in Fifty Years of Israel (Michigan: American Educational Trust, 1998).

[xxiv] Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel (Brattleboro: Amana, 1988), 20.

[xxv] Millar Burrows, Palestine Is Our Business (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949), 116.

[xxvi]    See citation 7.

[xxvii]   Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007).

Masalha Nur, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, 4th Ed. (Washington, DC: Inst. for Palestine Studies, 2001).

Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle (London: Pluto, 2004).

Mazin Qumsiyeh, “Palestinian Refugees Right to Return and Repatriation” in Sharing the Land of Canaan (London: Pluto, 2004). Online at

http://ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-qumsiyeh.html.

[xxviii] Russell Warren Howe, “Fighting the ‘soldiers of Occupation’ From WWII to the Intifada,” in Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters with the Middle East and Islam, Ed. Richard H. Curtiss and Janet McMahon (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1997), 38-39.

Warren and his film crew were filming an interview with Begin in 1974. “The red light had come on, under the lens. Without preamble, I turned my shoulder to the camera, stared straight into Begin’s eyes, and asked: ‘How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?’ ‘In the Middle East?’ he bellowed, in his thick, cartoon accent. ‘In all the world.’”

[xxix]    McCarthy, Population of Palestine, 35.

[xxx]    British Mandatory Commission, A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991), 243-267.

This gives Jewish ownership in 1945 as approximately six percent.

A UN map showing percentages of each district can be seen at http://domino.un.org/maps/m0094.jpg.

Israeli author Baruch Kimmerling gives the landownership in 1947 as seven percent.

Robert J. Brym, review of Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, by Baruch Kimmerling, The Canadian Journal of Sociology 11, no. 1 (1986), 80.

It is interesting to note that the Arab position was largely based on democratic principles. At a British conference on Palestine in 1946, Arabs presented a proposal “calling for the termination of the Mandate and the independence of Palestine as a unitary state, with a provisional governing council composed of seven Arabs and three Jews.” (Wilson, Decision on Palestine, 97)

[xxxi]    “Charter of the United Nations: Chapter I, Purposes and Principles.” UN News Center, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml.

[xxxii]   “United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181,” The Avalon Project, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/res181.htm.

“UN Partition Plan,” BBC News, November 29, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/middle_east/israel_and_the_palestinians/key_documents/1681322.stm.

For a US equivalent, see:

“UN Partition Applied To US,” Palestine Remembered, September 10, 2001,

http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Maps/Story581.html.

[xxxiii] Neff, Pillars, 41.

[xxxiv]   Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (Boston: South End, 1983), 161.

“In internal discussion in 1938 [David Ben-Gurion] stated that ‘after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine.’”

[xxxv]   Neff, Pillars, 30-31.

[xxxvi]   Neff, Pillars, 46-47.

[xxxvii] Berger, Memoirs, 21.

Berger writes that in a personal conversation with him, Henderson had said:

“I hope you and your associates will persevere. And my reason for wishing this is perhaps less related to what I consider American interests in the Middle East than what I fear I see on the domestic scene. The United States is a great power. Somehow it will surmount even its most foolish policy errors in the Middle East. But in the process there is a great danger of creating divisiveness and anti-Semitism among our own people. And if this danger materializes to a serious extent, we have seen in Germany and in Europe that the ability of a nation to survive the consequences is in serious question.”

[xxxviii]             Richard D. McKinzie, “Oral History Interview with Edwin M. Wright,” Truman Library, Wooster, OH, July 26, 1974,

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm.

“Mr. Henderson was, therefore, told, ‘You’ve got to leave the State Department or the Zionists are going to keep after us.’ The State Department suggested he be sent as an ambassador to Turkey. The Zionists had a clearance process going and they said, ‘No, that’s too near the Middle East, we want to get him completely away from the Middle East.’ The result was that they sent him as ambassador to India to get him out of the area completely.”

[xxxix]   Revealed during conversation with State Department associate.

[xl] Neff, Pillars, 46; Wilson, Decision, 117; Wright, Zionist Cover-up, 21.

[xli]     Green, Taking Sides, 20.

[xlii]    Henry Grady, “Chapter 9,” Adventures in Diplomacy (unpublished manuscript), (Washington D.C.: Truman Library, n.d.), 170. Online at

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/israel/large/documents/index.php?documentdate=0000-00-00&documentid=4-7&studycollectionid=ROI&pagenumber=1.

Henry Francis Grady and John T. McNay, The Memoirs of Ambassador Henry F. Grady: from the Great War to the Cold War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 2009). Online at

http://books.google.com/books?id=7BKTLX0mppoC&hl=en.

[xliii]    Grady, Adventures, 166.

Benzion Netanyahu, a Zionist who travelled to the US from Palestine to propagandize Americans and father of future Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, tried – unsuccessfully – to use the Cold War as a rationale for the U.S. to support Israel. Netanyahu believed that “arguments appealing to American fears of Soviet expansion” would be the best way to win over U.S. officials. He used this argument in 1947 in meetings with Loy Henderson and General Dwight Eisenhower, but found no takers, (though Eisenhower arranged for him to meet with someone else). (Medoff, Militant Zionism, 146)

[xliv]    Mulhall, America, 130.

Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: a Life in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 215.

[xlv]     Mark Perry, “Petraeus wasn’t the first,” Foreign Policy, April 2, 2010,

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/04/01/petraeus_wasnt_the_first.

[xlvi]    Perry, “Petraeus wasn’t the first.”

The paper speculated that the eventual goal was sovereignty over “Eretz Israel,” which included Transjordan and parts of Lebanon and Syria.

[xlvii]   Green, Taking Sides, 20.

[xlviii]   Neff, Pillars, 42-43.

[xlix]    Neff, Pillars, 65. Citation: “Draft Memorandum by the Director of the Office of United Nations Affairs (Rusk) to the Under Secretary of State (Lovett),” Secret, Washington May 4, 1948, FRUS 1948, pp. 894-95.

[l]       Wilson, Decision on Palestine, 131.

Related articles

March 21, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Kiev, EU sign ‘political provisions’ of association deal

Press TV – March 21, 2014

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy says Ukraine’s interim government has signed the “political” provisions of an association agreement with the EU.

“Signing [the] political part [of the] EU-Ukraine Association Agreement symbolizes [the] importance of relations [and] will to take it further,” Van Rompuy said in message on his Twitter account on Friday.

The 28-nation bloc and the new Ukrainian government signed the core chapters of the Association Agreement on the sidelines of a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday.

The document reportedly carries the signatures of Van Rompuy, Ukraine’s interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso as well as the heads of the 28-nation bloc.

The association agreement between the EU and Ukraine was initially to be signed last November. However, Ukraine’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych, refrained from signing the deal in favor of closer ties with neighboring Russia.

Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the accord triggered turmoil in the country, with months of unrest that led to the ouster of Yanukovych on February 23. He has travelled to Russia, where he was given sanctuary.

On March 11, Yanukovych said in a public statement that he is still Ukraine’s legitimate president and commander-in-chief. The ousted president also stated that he has never fled his country and promised to return.

Related article

March 21, 2014 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment