Why Interventionists Won’t Help the Kurds
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | October 16, 2019
An interesting aspect of the controversy over Syria is the reaction of interventionists to what they call President Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds. They’re saying that Trump should have kept those 50 U.S. troops serving as a tripwire between Turkish military forces and the Kurds. Removing the tripwire, they say, enabled Turkey to attack the Kurds.
Why is that interesting?
Because, as far as I know, not one single interventionist has traveled to Syria to join up with the Kurds to help them fight the Turkish forces attacking them!
What’s up with that?
After all, let’s keep in mind that it’s really not that difficult for an interventionist to travel to Syria. Just buy a plane ticket, pack your bags, grab your passport, and head on out. No one is going to stop you. Once you get into the Middle East, there will be plenty of people to direct you on how you get to the Kurds.
Then, once you reach the Kurds, just volunteer your services to them. Tell them that you would like to help them. You can be a shooter, or a cook, or a medic. Older interventionists can volunteer to be suicide bombers. What’s important is that you interventionists will be living your principles. You will be helping out people who you ardently believe need help.
As far as I know, not one single interventionist has done that. Instead, they’ve just been filling the newspapers and television talk shows about how important it is that “we” help the Kurds.
Here’s my prediction: Not one single American interventionist is going to travel to Syria to join up with the Kurds and help them out.
Why not?
The reason is simple: Interventionists place a higher value on their everyday lives here in the United States than they do on helping the Kurds. They have jobs. They like going home to their families. They like going on vacation. They like going to sporting events and concerts. They enjoy television. They have hobbies.
All of those things are more important to interventionists than going to Syria to help the people that they say “we” need to help.
Vicarious bravery
There’s that pronoun again — “we.” Interventionists love to use it, they don’t really mean “we” because that pronoun would include them, and they would rather stay here at home than go to Syria to take up arms against the Turks.
By “we,” the interventionists are always referring to U.S. soldiers. Interventionists feel like they are showing how brave and courageous they are by boisterously exclaiming how “we” need to help the Kurds.
What type of “help” are interventionists referring to? Why, military help, of course. They want U.S. soldiers to be killing and dying to help the Kurds, while the interventionists remain here at home going to work, spending time with their families, going on vacation, and attending sporting events and concerts.
Equally interesting, interventionists are willing to sacrifice whatever number of U.S. troops are necessary to keep the Kurds from being killed by the Turks. After all, don’t forget: the purpose of using those 50 U.S. troops as a tripwire is to guarantee that more U.S. soldiers will be committed to battle if the tripwire is triggered. In the mind of the interventionist, if that means thousands or even tens of thousands of U.S. troops losing their lives or limbs in the defense of the Kurds, well, that’s just the way it is.
Maybe U.S. soldiers ought to keep all this in mind the next time an interventionist thanks them for their service. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Pinning an ‘Antisemite’ Label on President Trump
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | October 9, 2019
In a Friday The Intercept editorial, Mehdi Hasan wrote that President Donald Trump “and his acolytes” have been “banging their anti-Semitic drum in plain sight” since United States House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s September 24 announcement of an impeachment inquiry in regard to Trump. But, Hasan then offers no substantial evidence to back this bold claim.
The first pittance Hasan presents as supposed backing for his claim is a September 28 Twitter post from Trump. In the tweet, Trump complains about the treatment of Trump by “Do Nothing Democrat Savages, people like Nadler, Schiff, AOC Plus 3.” The people referenced are all House members: Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) (“AOC”) and three other freshman House members who are seen by Trump and many other people as forming a group with Ocasio-Cortez based on common interests — Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).
Hasan notes that Schiff and Nadler are Jewish. Hasan also mentions that Ocasio-Cortez is a “woman of color.” Plus, observes Hasan, Trump only chose to mention these House members from among the more than 200 House members who “have signed onto an impeachment inquiry.”
From this information, Hasan presents the following rhetorical question as if he has proven something: “How is such rhetoric not racist?”
How, indeed? A negative comment does not become a racist comment just because the individuals about which the comment is made are of particular races, ethnicities, or religions.
Of course, Trump has a long and well-known record of harshly criticizing people of various races, ethnicities, and religions. The fact that his presidential primary and general election opponents were not mostly Jewish people or “women of color” did not prevent Trump from leveling at many of them verbal and written attacks similar in strength to the attack found in the tweet Hasan references.
Further, there is good reason, other than racism, that Trump would single out the House members he did for criticism. Nadler and Schiff, as Hasan notes in his editorial, are chairmen, respectively, of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees. In those roles the two men have been devoting much time and effort to developing and promoting the case for Congress removing Trump from the presidency. While “AOC Plus 3” lack committee chairmanships, they have been very harsh in their criticism of the president. Trump’s inclusion of these four additional Congress members in the tweet also makes sense as part of his ongoing trading of barbs with them.
So, in answer to Hasan’s question, there is plenty of reason not to interpret Trump’s tweet as racist or antisemitic.
Next up, Hasan makes this claim:
On October 2, Trump escalated his brazenly anti-Semitic attack on Schiff. ‘We don’t call him “Shifty Schiff” for nothing,’ the president told reporters in the Oval Office. ‘He’s a shifty, dishonest guy.’
Hold on. Why is this a “brazenly anti-Semitic attack”? It just sounds like Trump being Trump. He frequently attacks people verbally and in writing, often doing so by calling them names. Wikipedia even provides a long list of nicknames, many of them negative, that Trump has used for people. Among the listed nicknames are multiple negative nicknames for people including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer (most of whom are not Jewish), along with Schiff.
But, insists Hasan: “The stereotype of Jews as ‘shifty,’ the suggestion that they are sneaky and manipulative, has a long and ignominious history.” Whatever. There is a long history of people calling non-Jewish people shifty too.
An obvious reason Trump would choose to use the insulting nickname “Shifty Schiff” is because the nickname is made up of two words that share a first syllable. That helps make the nickname catchy. Indeed, looking at the Wikipedia list, you can see Trump has applied similar types of nicknames playing on the sound of people’s names before — “Lamb the Sham” for House Member Conor Lamb (D-PA) and “Wacky Jacky” for Senate Member Jacky Rosen (D-NV), for example.
That’s it for Hasan’s argument that Trump is saying antisemitic things since Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry regarding Trump. Talk about underwhelming.
Just as underwhelming is how Hasan then proceeds to argue in support of his assertion that Trump’s “acolytes” are doing the same thing. To support the claim, Hasan points to two October 2 Twitter posts from Trump’s son Donald Trump, Jr.
Before dealing with those tweets it should be noted that it is absurd to have trump’s son stand in for all Trump’s “acolytes.” Even if Donald Trump, Jr. wrote something antisemitic that does not mean that all supporters of President Trump, or even a substantial portion of them, agree with it.
Hasan points to Donald Trump, Jr. saying in two October 2 tweets that Schiff is a “radical liberal” who “has been hand picked and supported by George Soros” and is “a George Soros *puppet.*” Hasan apparently has a problem with these tweets because Soros is Jewish. Hasan writes:
Radical liberal. Handpicked by George Soros. A Soros puppet.
Don Jr.’s tweets provoked a rare response from Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, who referred to his invocation of Soros, a left-leaning Jewish billionaire, as an ‘anti-Semitic trope’ and a ‘dangerous’ insinuation.
Alleging politicians are taking actions and making public stands because of pressure from wealthy individuals, or from businesses or interest groups, is common practice in American political debate. Soros comes up in some of those allegations, but so also do many other individuals, groups, and organizations — Charles Koch, the military-industrial complex, and the National Rifle Association, for example — that are not generally seen as connected to Jewish ethnicity or religion.
The truth is that Soros directs much effort to influence political action in America and across the world. Saying that people should refrain from noting and criticizing such effort because Soros is Jewish is saying that some major players in political influence should have a free pass from recognition and criticism. That is not a call for suppressing antisemitism. Rather, that is a call for suppressing debate.
After presenting his milk-toast evidence, Hasan asks the following question:
So why isn’t there more outrage over Trump’s blatant and dangerous anti-Semitism, in the specific context of this impeachment inquiry?
All that “blatant and dangerous anti-Semitism” is in Hasan’s head, not in reality. Hopefully Hasan, and other people offering the spurious arguments in Hasan’s editorial, will find little success in their effort to recruit people to believe their fantasy assertions of Trump’s expressions of antisemitism.
Copyright © 2019 by RonPaul Institute
Extinction Rebellion is a carnival for middle classes who love to dress up as activists
By Professor Frank Furedi | RT | October 7, 2019
I know a protest when I see one. Walking around in London today it is evident that the tens of thousands of adults playing at being children are not so much protesting but putting on a performance of protest.
Unlike normal protest the men and women wearing uniforms in London today, are not there to police but to be helpful and assist this very noisy and very colorful performance.
For their part the chanters of apocalyptic slogans and the boisterous participants declaring that they know what’s best for everyone, have rehearsed their role for this mass expensive street theatre. Queuing up to get arrested is all part of this drama. There are even celebrities lurking about to provide a sense of the occasion.
When I encounter a group of middle aged distinguished-looking activists tucking into their lunch, while sitting on the pavement by the Embankment, I am reminded of the kind of street parties that occurred during the Queen’s Jubilee. Talking to these chaps and chapettes, it becomes evident that not only are they having the time of their life, they are also under the impression that their picnic contributes to the saving of the planet. When I put to them my view that ‘this is a self-indulgent carnival of reaction’, they don’t argue back. One of them tells me to go to hell. An elderly lady sneers at me and simply states that ‘I will not have a bad word said against these young people’. As far as she and her companions are concerned, Extinction Rebellion now possesses the kind of moral authority previously associated with the Church and the institutions of the state.
The ease with which Extinction Rebellion has succeeded in occupying the moral high ground has little to do with the quality of their arguments and the strength of their case. In all but name, the political establishments of the western world have given up the attempt to exercise moral authority. The elite no longer upholds the values of their ancestors and is all too aware of its loss of legitimacy. It no longer believes in itself and is evidently prepared to be flagellated by its environmentalist critics. In turn Extinction Rebellion knows that when it instructs its posh friends to jump, their answer is likely to be ‘How High’!
A lot of people on the streets of London and elsewhere are of course really miffed and angry about the way this carnival of reaction has disrupted to their life. In private conversations they murmur and swear at ‘these wastrels’. But as long as the performers enjoy backing of the media, the cultural elites, a significant section of the political establishment, and of course the all-important celebrities, their voice can be safely ignored by the protesters.
Until now participating in a Climate Extinction performance has been a risk-free activity. Unlike real protests which always incur serious risks, this week’s performance is unlikely to cost the performers very much. The cost will be borne by an increasingly fed-up public who was never asked whether or not they wanted their life to be turned upside-down.
Professor Frank Furedi is a sociologist and author. His, ‘How Fear Works: The Culture Of Fear In The Twentieth Century’ is published by Bloomsbury.
Risking Women’s Health, While Widening the Door to Techno-Eugenics
By Tina Stevens and Stuart A. Newman | CounterPunch | September 26, 2019
In September, California’s legislature passed AB 922, a bill legalizing the payment to women for their eggs for research purposes. Additionally, next year, the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) is expected to return to the voters to secure passage of an initiative that will supply billions of dollars to fund entrepreneurial bioresearch. If Governor Newsom does not veto AB 922, CIRM will have a green light to fund research that will not only jeopardize women’s health through egg extraction but will enable the controversial genetic manipulation of human embryos. (Already, there are bioentrepreneurs who have created genetically engineered human embryos for implantation.)
This human genetic engineering would be massively amplified by vastly expanding the market in women’s eggs, the raw material necessary for the industrialization of human production. (see Stuart A. Newman: “Our Assembly-Line Future? CounterPunch, July 28, 2018 ). AB 922 and the expected repeat funding of CIRM constitute the leading edge of a juggernaut roaring down the road to techno-eugenics.
When instituted in 2004, CIRM was specifically prohibited from funding research that paid women for eggs. Only reimbursement for expenses directly associated with donation was allowed. Federal guidelines similarly reflected caution and continue to do so. According to the National Academy of Sciences 2010, “no payments, cash or in kind, should be provided for donating oocytes [i.e., egg cells] for research purposes.” AB 922 constitutes an end-run around these well-justified provisions.
The Center for Genetics and Society (CGS), Friends of the Earth, Alliance for Humane Biotechnology, many women’s advocacy groups, including Our Bodies Ourselves, and reproductive justice groups, including Black Women for Wellness and California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, came out in opposition to AB 922. But this bill is only the most recent attempt of bio-entrepreneurial interests and well-funded lobbying over the course of more than a decade, to expand access to women’s eggs. The physically invasive egg retrieval process has resulted in serious complications for many women who have donated eggs and its short-term and long-term health risks have not been adequately studied. Moreover, these risks are shouldered inequitably. As a CGS and Pro-Choice Alliance for Responsible Research fact sheet on the bill underscores:
“Paying women for their eggs for research creates an “undue incentive” for women of limited financial means to participate in a procedure that has not been shown to be safe. Since low-income women are disproportionately women of color and immigrants, they are likely to be the most affected. They may also have limited access to medical care should they experience adverse health effects beyond the current standard of care for egg providers, and less likely to benefit from any scientific advances that may result from the research.”
Finally, the push to commercialize eggs has been accompanied by claims that research in human reparative medicine will be thwarted without it. But such claims should not be accepted uncritically. While ethical considerations may see some lines of investigation foreclosed, the historical record shows that scientists resourcefully find other avenues to reach desired goals. Consider, for example, the once prevailing scientific imperative that brought CIRM into existence in 2004: that human embryos, not funded as research materials by the Federal government, were the only source of stem cells that could turn into a wide variety of reparative cell types. But just two years later Dr. Shinya Yamanaka introduced the scientific community to induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These cells have much the same properties as embryonic stem cells but were made from mature tissues. Importantly, they do not require the harvesting of women’s eggs. Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for his work in 2012. Virtually all stem cell biologists now use iPS cells instead of the embryonic ones. This includes recipients of CIRM funds as well, notwithstanding the fact that the raison d’etre of CIRM, the fact that the federal government would not fund research on the most versatile stem cells (at the time those derived from embryos), no longer exists in the era of iPCs. Why then, is the demand for women’s eggs for bioresearch growing?
One highly controversial reason is to fund research seeking to create gene edited embryos. This is something that CIRM has considered, as recounted in Biotech Juggernaut: Hope, Hype, and Hidden Agendas of Entrepreneurial BioScience. Surely the public, which pays for CIRM funded research, has the right to steer it away from techno-eugenicist uses. Blocking AB 922 would be a start.
Time is running out. The governor has until October 13 to veto or sign bills. It is not known when he might get to AB 922. Please contact Governor Newsom’s office to call for a veto of AB 922.
Visit: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov40mail/ or tweet @GavinNewsom to veto AB 922.
For more information about AB 922, visit:
https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/california-shouldnt-expand-market-womens-eggs
For more information about the risks and consequences of egg harvesting, visit:
http://www.humanebiotech.org/egg-donors-project
Tina Stevens and Stuart Newman are the authors of Biotech Juggernaut: Hope, Hype, and Hidden Agendas of Entrepreneurial BioScience (Routledge, 2019.)
The Bigotry of Environmental Pessimism
By Michael Shellenberger | Quilette | August 15, 2019
Democratic Presidential candidates and the New York Times rightly condemned the use of inflammatory words like “invasion” by President Donald Trump and Fox News hosts to describe the desperate people coming from Latin America to seek a better life in the U.S. Such language is irresponsible and may very well have contributed to the motivation of a man suspected to have killed 13 Americans, eight Mexicans, and one German in El Paso last week. In a manifesto he posted online before the attack, the suspect also used the word “invasion.”
While they are at it, they should condemn the inflammatory rhetoric used by environmentalists, which also may have contributed to the motivations of the El Paso shooting suspect. The suspect justified his mass shooting of people in a Walmart by arguing that “our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country.” The suspect writes, “y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”
For over 50 years, environmentalists have argued that a significant down-sizing of American living standards is required to prevent environmental catastrophe. They have been attacking the American lifestyle since the 1960s, and Walmart since the 1990s. The El Paso shooting suspect named his manifesto “The Inconvenient Truth,” a title nearly identical to the 2006 documentary about Al Gore’s slideshow on global warming. In it, Gore says: “The truth about the climate crisis is an inconvenient one that means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives.”
Many Democrats and New York Times readers will object that we cannot attribute the El Paso shooting subject’s actions to Gore or to the language he uses. But if that’s true, then we can’t attribute them to Trump and Fox News, either. We can’t have it both ways.
After I made this point on Twitter, some people replied that while the suspect may have had environmental concerns, he acted on his anti-immigrant beliefs. Others said that had he acted on his environmental concerns, he would have shot up ExxonMobil. But such claims demonstrate ignorance of what the shooting suspect wrote, his worldview, and the ways in which it “echoes,” to use the Times’ word, the long history of anti-immigrant, Malthusian environmentalism.
The suspect clearly states that his decision to kill immigrants was, in significant measure, because of their impact on the natural environment. “Of course these migrants and their children have contributed to the problem, but are not the sole cause of it,” he writes. “The American lifestyle affords our citizens an incredible quality of life.”
The El Paso suspect said he was partly inspired by the suspected shooter of Muslim immigrants in New Zealand in March, who also made clear in a manifesto that environmental concerns motivated his anti-immigrant ones. “Why focus on immigration and birth rates when climate change is such a huge issue?” the New Zealand shooting suspect asks. “Because they are the same issue, the environment is being destroyed by overpopulation, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not overpopulating the world.”
It is not surprising that the two manifestos echoed environmentalist ideas. For two centuries, prominent scientists, conservationists, and journalists, have blamed immigrants, the poor, and non-whites for their degradation of the natural environment. Much of what we call “environmentalism” is simply a repackaging of the ideas of 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus. He believed overpopulation of the poor would deplete resources, and that the ethical thing to do was let the poor die of hunger and disease to prevent more hunger and disease in the future. “Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits,” he wrote, “and court the return of the plague.” The British government and media used Malthus’ ideas to justify the policies that led to mass starvation in Ireland from 1845 to 1849.
After the Second World War, leading conservationists embraced Malthus’ view that overpopulation would result in resource depletion. Their concerns were directed at poor non-whites in other countries, particularly India, even though North Americans and Europeans consumed and produced an order of magnitude more resources and pollution. Anti-humanist environmentalism came full bloom in Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 Sierra Club book, The Population Bomb, which used dehumanizing language similar to that used by today’s anti-immigrant activists. In the opening pages of his book, Ehrlich depicted poor people in India as animals, “screaming… begging… defecating and urinating.”
More recently, environmentalists and scientists concerned about overpopulation tried to get the Sierra Club to oppose immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries, expressing the concern that, by adopting an American lifestyle, immigrants will use up supposedly scarce natural resources—the same argument used by the El Paso shooting subject—and increase pollution.
Both the El Paso and New Zealand suspects echo the exaggerated rhetoric of environmentalists. “Nothing is conserved,” wrote the New Zealand shooting suspect. “The natural environment is industrialized, pulverized and commoditized.” The El Paso suspect blames “consumer culture” for plastic and electronic waste, and “urban sprawl” for environmental degradation.
The El Paso suspect says environmental destruction was “brilliantly portrayed in the decades old classic The Lorax,” which is a children’s book about a greedy entrepreneur who shortsightedly chops down all of the trees. “Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources,” he writes. The New Zealand shooting suspect agrees. “Not a thing has been conserved other than corporate profits and the ever increasing wealth of the 1% that exploit the people for their own benefit.”
Both men’s views are highly simplistic. Happily, Malthusian environmentalists, including the two shooting subjects, are wrong about the environment, and have been since Malthus wrongly predicted that too many people would result in famines and resource scarcity. Technology has outpaced increases in population and consumption, so that today humankind faces the prospects of reducing the total amount of our usage of natural resources, including land.
It is simply not the case that “nothing is conserved,” nor that “urban sprawl” is a major problem in comparison to other uses of land. Humans use about half of the ice-free surface of the earth, with just one to three percent of it used for cities. In fact, by increasing the size of cities through industrialization, we have been able to return more of the countryside to nature. Urbanization and industrialization have mostly been good, not bad, for the natural environment. When people move to cities and grow more food on less land, forests grow back and wildlife returns. This has been happening in developed nations for over 100 years, a process that could begin in most poor and developing nations before mid-century. If we encourage the process of ecological modernization, it will happen faster. That means humanistic environmentalists should help poor countries move up the energy ladder, from wood to hydroelectricity and coal to natural gas to uranium[?].
The “Lorax” view of environmental problems as a consequence of greed has always been wrong and depressing. Environmental problems, from climate change to plastic waste to species extinctions, mostly result from people trying to improve their lives, not from a few greedy corporate fat cats. Around the world, where important natural grasslands and forests are vulnerable, they are usually threatened by people seeking to expand agriculture to produce the food that people need, not to build suburban Walmart stores.
Anti-humanist environmentalists have long exaggerated high birth rates in poor nations, even while condemning the most effective ways to lower them. The New Zealand shooting suspect opens his manifesto by repeating “it’s the birth rates” three times. He later writes, “There is no Green future with never ending population growth, the ideal green world cannot exist in a World of 100 billion 50 billion or even 10 billion people.”
But technology is a far bigger factor in determining humankind’s environmental impacts than fertility rates. Modern agriculture reduces by half the amount of land we need to produce the same amount of food. Nuclear plants require less than one percent of the land that solar and wind farms need to produce the same amount of electricity. With abundant clean[?] nuclear energy, we will never run out of food, because it can be used to desalinate water, produce fertilizers, and even power indoor farms.
Birth rates among wealthier, more industrialized populations are a product of choice, driven mostly through a reduced need of children for farming. Unsurprisingly, the New Zealand suspect cites China as a model. For decades it enforced a draconian “one child” policy when birth rates would have fallen on their own.
Why do the shooting suspects and other pessimists get the environment so wrong? Perhaps because doing so makes them feel better about themselves and their place in society. Environmentalist concern over birth rates has always been disproportionately focused on immigrants, non-whites, and people in poor countries. The sad reality is that many weak and desperate humans—the kind who gun down innocent people—feel more powerful by seeking to hurt others and keep them down.
While it’s easy to dismiss the Christchurch and El Paso shooting suspects as insane, it’s also dangerous. Their manifestos, like the one written by the “Unabomber” before, suggest that the problem isn’t just psychological but also ideological—a consequence of believing people are inherently greedy, the environment is in decline, and the future is dark. As such, both anti-human and anti-immigrant influences may be having a larger influence on recent shootings than either side in the culture war wants to admit.
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and president of Environmental Progress. Follow him on Twitter @ShellenbergerMD.
Feeding the Israel Lobby
Congress gives the Jewish state whatever it wants
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • August 6, 2019
If you have been wondering when the twenty Democratic aspirants for the presidency will begin a serious discussion of American foreign policy in the Middle East, where Washington has been bogged down in both current and impending wars, you are not alone. With the honorable exception of Tulsi Gabbard, no one seems keen to touch that particular live wire.
Part of the problem is the journalists who are asking the questions in the debates. To be sure, the publication of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt back in 2007 opened the door to a frank discussion of why the United States is involved in unresolvable conflicts on behalf of a tiny client state. But unfortunately, while it is now possible to find in the mainstream media some honest analysis of Israel’s ability to corrupt policy formulation in Washington, in general the Jewish state continues to get a pass from both the press and politicians on all issues that matter.
And then there is the problem of Congress itself, which is precisely the institution that has been most corrupted by Israel and Jewish money. Almost thirty years ago, American politician Pat Buchanan described Congress as “Israeli occupied territory.” As a result, he was viciously attacked by the mainstream media and the political leadership of both parties, demonstrating beyond all doubt that he was correct in his observation. Today the Israel Lobby in the United States is far more powerful than it was in 1990, so much so that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually boasts to his voters that he directs U.S. policy.
The hypocrisy inherent in the Israel-philia of America’s political leadership is such that it sometimes produces comic results. The whiney head of the House Intelligence Committee Congressman Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, was beside himself prior to the Robert Mueller testimony before Congress on July 24th, denouncing Russia and President Donald Trump, saying that the president’s actions amounted to “Disloyalty to country… Those are strong words… But disloyalty to country violates the very obligation of citizenship, our devotion to a core principle on which our nation was founded, that we, the people, not some foreign power that wishes us ill, we decide, who shall govern, us.”
Strong words indeed, but Adam Schiff knows perfectly well that Moscow’s alleged involvement in the 2016 election, which was relatively insignificant, had no measurable impact on the result. And both he and Mueller have been coy about presenting any real evidence that Russia is gearing up to do major damage in 2020, which is what they claim to be the case. By way of contrast, everyone in Washington knows very clearly but will never admit that Israel has seriously corrupted the United States government and its elected officials at all levels. But Schiff did not mention Israel, nor did he express concern that Israel’s clearly unsavory involvement with Trump transition team members General Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner was never thoroughly investigated or included in the final Mueller report. One might assume that a deliberate decision was made by some parties in power to avoid embarrassing Israel. Those parties almost certainly included Schiff.
Schiff, who is Jewish, frequently tells audiences about his love for Israel, sometimes complaining that it is treated unfairly. It might be suggested that if anyone in the government is partial to a foreign power it is Schiff, and that foreign power is Israel, not Russia.
Unfortunately, Schiff is far from unique. Perhaps he and a number of other Congressmen should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as required by law. Congressmen are not exempt when they work to benefit a foreign nation, though they frequently believe themselves to be not subject to the very laws that they pass. In May a letter was sent to the White House with the signatures of 400 congressmen, purely to express America’s legislature’s solidarity with Israel and to give it a green light to do whatever it wishes vis-à-vis its neighbors. The letter cites some questionable American interests relating to Syria, but it also mentions Israel no less than 13 times.
If that does not convince one that Congress has always been and continues to be Israeli occupied territory, check out some bills that have been working their way through the legislature. The House voted overwhelmingly on July 23rd to formally oppose the Palestinian-backed nonviolent movement to boycott Israel. The measure, H.Res.246 opposes “efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement [BDS] targeting Israel.” The bill had 349 co-sponsors and passed by a 398–17 vote. Sixteen Democrats and only one Republican opposed the bill. The bill is not a law but is rather intended to express the will of congress, which is perhaps the only good thing to say about it.
Other bills have not yet been voted on, presumably because friends of the Jewish state are looking for more goodies to add in. The pending legislative action includes the aid to Israel bill H.R.1837 the “United States-Israel Cooperation Enhancement and Regional Security Act”, which has 279 cosponsors. When the bill is approved, which it will be, it will increase the amount of aid given to Israel over ten years to $38 billion, though this is now regarded as a minimum figure which will be supplemented to meet the Jewish state’s expressed needs. And the aid is now unconditional, meaning that Israel will receive the money no matter how it behaves, while the Jewish state will also be able to use the U.S. taxpayer provided money to buy weapons from its own arms industry, cutting American defense contractors out of the loop and costing jobs in the United States.
Another bill to benefit Israel is also pending: H.R. 1850, the “Palestinian International Terrorism Support Prevention Act of 2019,” a law that would authorize and encourage financially sanctioning any foreign organization or individual that provides “support” to any group, organization or individual considered to be part of the Palestinian resistance. Interestingly, the bill does not even pretend to be based on U.S. national security: it is all about and for Israel. It could mean that foreign supporters of BDS, which is now considered a hostile entity by “the will of” Congress, could be subject to sanctions even though they are non-violent and threaten no one.
One final bit of bipartisan legislation best described as a pander to both Israel and the Jewish community is a bill that has appeared recently in the Senate that will prioritize and pay for health care and nutrition services for those who claim to be holocaust survivors. The bill is entitled the “Trauma-Informed Modernization of Eldercare for Holocaust Survivors Act” or “TIME for Holocaust Survivors Act.” It is intended to “increase the chances that survivors could age in their own homes” and also “to ensure that holocaust survivors have care and services tailored to their needs.”
Sponsor Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, who is of course Jewish, elaborated: “Holocaust survivors came to the United States seeking refuge from unimaginable horrors. They have lived their lives here and enriched our nation. With an average age of 85, we have an obligation to provide Holocaust survivors the community support and special services they need to live out their final days,”
WE have an obligation? How about you and your co-religionists Ben as you seem to have a lot of money to spend on lobbying for Israel and corrupting our government? Special services? Why do they need help? Because, the bill states, “institutionalized settings, with confined spaces or restrictions on food, can induce panic, anxiety, and re-traumatization due to their holocaust experiences.”
What about other elderly Americans who have problems with “institutionalized settings” or “confined spaces” or “restrictions on food?” How the Senate will justify special benefits for a small group of self-described victims drawn from the wealthiest demographic in the U.S. remains to be seen. If there is anyone who actually needs help, it is the U.S. taxpayer, who has to bear the burden of this utter nonsense, which sets up Jews as a special privileged group within our social services network. So-called holocaust survivors are identified in the bill’s “Findings” as “(2) More than 200,000 Jews fleeing from Nazi occupied territory found refuge in the United States from 1933 through 1945, and approximately 137,000 additional Jewish refugees settled in the United States from 1945 through 1952. (3) Hundreds of thousands of additional Jewish refugees continued to immigrate to the United States from Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union during the subsequent decades. (4) The number of Holocaust survivors living in the United States at the end of 2018 was approximately 80,000 individuals, down from an estimated 127,000 in 2010.”
Thus, holocaust survivors who will benefit from the bill are inevitably and by intention only Jews – no Christians who went through 1933-1945 in Europe need apply. That one highly privileged group should deserve special benefits from government that other retirees cannot have is a disgrace. So, is the United States Congress Israeli and also, by extension, Jewish occupied territory? I think the question answers itself.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Special envoy calls for armed guards at synagogues & Jewish schools
RT | June 19, 2019
US President Donald Trump’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism has called for an armed presence at Jewish institutions across the US, insisting synagogues, schools and community centers beef up on security.
The appointee, Elan Carr, said American Jews face a “time of danger” and must take steps to protect themselves from attacks and persecution, according to the Jerusalem Post.
“Any synagogue, every JCC [Jewish community center], should have guards,” Carr told an interviewer on Wednesday at a conference in Israel. “God willing, may they never be needed, but they should be there.”
President Trump tapped Carr to be the State Department’s pointman on anti-Semitism issues in February, after complaints from Democrats and Jewish advocacy groups pressured him to fill the position, which sat vacant for the first two years of his term.
Carr also spoke at the conference of the president’s commitment to protecting Jewish minorities in the US and around the world.
“The rhetoric of the president couldn’t be clearer,” he said. “Every time the president speaks on this issue, he calls it [anti-Semitism] a vile poison that must be rooted out.”
Some Jews reject Carr’s description of the president, however, and argue his policies and rhetoric actually put Jewish communities in more danger. In a recent survey of 1,000 American Jewish voters, nearly 60 percent of respondents said Trump “bears at least some responsibility” for recent synagogue shootings in Pennsylvania and California. Seventy-three percent said they thought Jews were less safe in the US than they were two years ago.
In his proposal for armed guards at Jewish institutions, Carr may have taken pointers from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made a similar suggestion in May as one way to address rising anti-Semitism in Germany.
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Omidyar’s Intercept Teams Up with War-Propaganda Firm Bellingcat
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | October 8, 2018
The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies. The exact details of what occurred during the workshop have not been made public and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins declined to elaborate on the workshop when pressed on social media.
The decision on the part of The Intercept is particularly troubling given that the publication has long been associated with the track records of its founding members, such as Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, who have long been promoted as important “progressive” and “anti-war” voices in the U.S. media landscape. … continue
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Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
By Aletho News | January 9, 2012
This article will examine some of the connections between the US and UK National Security apparatus and the appearance of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory beginning after the accident at Three Mile Island. … continue
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