After the death of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat seven years ago, many voices called for an official and open investigation into the cause; they were ignored. Palestinian, Arabic and even international parties have been trying to keep the cause hidden or, at least, away from serious discussion.
There are strong suggestions that those behind Arafat’s death were the Israelis, backed by the US, as they used to announce repeatedly and loudly that he was an obstacle to the peace process. That idea was developed after his famous stance at the second Camp David summit in 1999.
The unknown factor is who helped the Israelis and Americans to assassinate the Palestinian President. It seems obvious that he must have been a Palestinian from the leader’s close coterie. Doubts surround Arafat’s successors who divided his heritage among themselves but did not follow the way that he had set out in the way he treated the Israelis; they opted for another, worse way, which is leading the Palestinians to an unknown end.
Not only Fatah members or PLO factions but also all Palestinians used to ask for a public inquiry to know the reasons for Arafat’s death. The issue is still a cause of discontent among the current Palestinian leadership whose members were ready to occupy his position.
Many of Arafat’s successors across the leadership promised to launch a public inquiry, but they have not done so. They did not even publish the report from the French military hospital where Arafat passed away. That created even more suspicions among Palestinian citizens and factions.
Following an investigation by Aljazeera TV, it now seems almost certain that Arafat was killed by a dose of Polonium, the same radioactive substance which was used to kill the ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. It is not known yet who was responsible, or how this substance was administered to Arafat. Some say it was inserted through his ear, some through a poisoned kiss, and others a poisoned meal.
There is a prime suspect, but he will not be named easily until a comprehensive, independent investigation has been carried out. Aljazeera’s report, broadcast on Tuesday, did not name exactly who was involved in Arafat’s death; it did, though, prove that he was killed by Polonium which must have been injected or inserted into his body by one of his close aides.
For now, there are some important facts which should be made public about this issue. The first is that Mahmoud Abbas was the main tool used by Arafat’s foes to diminish his power when he was nominated to be the first Palestinian Prime Minster while the President was still alive. That was clearly against Arafat’s will, and his supporters took to the streets in massive demonstrations all over the Palestinian territories calling Abbas a collaborator with the Israelis and Americans. Those demonstrations continued until Abbas was deposed as PM.
After Arafat’s death, Abbas was in control of all of his positions and somewhat miraculously became the only choice to succeed him as President, supported by all Fatah and PLO leaders. Abbas was also welcomed by the Israelis, Arab, US and other international leaders as Arafat’s logical successor and the real partner for peace in the Middle East.
The fact that Mahmoud Abbas refused any kind of investigation into his predecessor’s death increases doubts about plans to keep the cause a secret. It is known that cultures from Arafat’s body were taken several days after his death to be tested in French, Jordanian and Tunisian laboratories, but they were “lost”.
Even the conditions surrounding Arafat’s burial were suspicious. Sheikh Tayssit al-Tamimi, the Palestinian Mufti who led the funeral prayer, confirmed several times on different occasions that there was suspicion regarding Arafat’s death.
Another important point relates to Mohammed Dahlan, who was one of the planned successors of Arafat. In a meeting in one of Gaza’s mosques in 2006, Yasser Abu-Helal, the founder of Al Ahrar Movement, declared that Dahlan had told Hamas leader Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi that his movement must take part in a campaign of incitement against Arafat in 2004 to protect him from being assassinated by the Israelis.
Rantissi refused and the head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Khaled Meshaal, told a press conference that Yasser Arafat was the target of a dirty tricks campaign by Palestinian figures; he said that Hamas would not keep silent if any harm came to President Arafat.
Neverthess, Yasser Arafat was killed and no formal investigations have been conducted. It is important now, following Aljazeera’s investigations, for a public inquiry to be opened by the International Criminal Court, which has the legal authority to conduct such an investigation. This is an issue of international importance, given that the peace process is still trundling on to nowhere. Palestinians need to know who has their best interests at heart, and who killed Yasser Arafat.
Jewish settlers in Palestine: the most notorious squatters in the world.
Part 1
Israeli settlers have been slowly nibbling away at Palestine’s West Bank territory for four decades. 300,000 setllers now occupy outposts that range in size from plywood shacks to full-blown suburban housing complexes. Their abundance has grounded the much-ballyhooed two-state solution to a halt. VICE correspondent Simon Ostrovsky travels from Tel Aviv to the remote West Bank outposts where young Israelis squat for the sake of their heritage. But first, Simon pops in for some quick counter-terrorism training with a member of Israel’s Special Forces, just in case.
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Part 2
Israeli settlers justify their expansion into the West Bank by digging up ancient artifacts that supposedly prove that they’ve occupied that patch of land for longer than the Palestinians. The twist is that the settlers have the Palestinians do the actual digging under the “supervision” of the Israeli army. Simon stumbles upon one of these infamous archaeological digs and finds that the Israelis are less than eager for their operation to be caught on camera.
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Part 3
Meet Simcha and Yosef, a pair of teenage settlers at the Havat Gilad outpost in the West Bank doing what Israeli settlers do best: building and re-building houses without a permit.
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Part 4
Simon gets mixed up in the West Bank Land Day protests, where Palestinians annually clash with the Israeli army.
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Part 5
Simon travels to Asira al-Qibliya, a Palestinian town that is learning how to defend itself against attacks from the Israeli settlers one hill away.
From America’s “Jewish Triangle” to Iraqi’s “Sunni Triangle” Government Job Notice: No Gentiles Need Apply
“The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century.” –Yuri Slezkine, Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley, “The Jewish Century”; Princeton University Press (Russian Jewish immigrant to the U.S.)
No, America, there is no Zionist Conspiracy running our nation; just well funded organized Zionist Coincidences … From Truman, to Clinton, to Obama, to…
In a Nov. 10, 1945 meeting with American diplomats brought in from their posts in the Middle East to urge Truman not to heed Zionist urgings to recognize Israel, Truman bluntly explained his motivation:
“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents” –Harry Truman, 33rd President
Clinton drew applause for his own commitment to Israel when he stated that should the Iraqis ever cross over the Israeli border for aggression,
“I would personally get in a ditch, grab a rifle, and fight and die.”
–President Bill Clinton, speaking at a Toronto Jewish Fund Raiser, July 30, 2002 (thestar.com) (BUT he avoided fighting for America)
Sixty years after Truman’s recognition of Israel, the 44th President Elect of the United States, Barack Obama, in true allegiance to the Flag of Israel, continues the expected, no, the demanded subservience and pandering to America’s Zionists.
Four Examples of Obama’s Allegiance to Israel at the expense of our national interest in the Middle East. This man of “hope” is nevertheless “hopelessly” devoted to Israel.
1. Obama Asks Shimon Peres (President of Israel):
“What can I do for Israel?” –Haaretz, November 17, 2008
2. Obama’s Letter to President Bush on Israel, June 25, 2008
“A fundamental principle of America’s Middle East policy must be our unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security. I believe that is a bipartisan commitment and I will work to continue and advance that consensus. …The Arab states should support the Palestinians and prepare their own people for peace by making gestures of normalization toward Israel.”
(OBAMA is uninformed: The Arab League did offer just such a Peace Plan to Israel three times, 1981, 2002, 2007); but Israel rejected it each time.
3. Obama’s conference call with 900 U.S. Jewish Rabbis: September 18, 2008 (Ynet.com)
“The senator spoke of his recent trip to Israel, and reaffirmed personal commitment to Israel’s security, calling it sacrosanct: “I think that it’s also important to recognize that throughout my career in the State Legislature and now in the US Senate I have been a stalwart friend of Israel. On every single issue related to Israel’s security, I have been unwavering, and will continue to be unwavering….”My belief is that Israel’s security is sacrosanct and we have to ensure that as the sole democracy in the Middle East, one of our greatest allies in the world, one that shares a special relationship with us and shares our values, we have to make sure that they have the support whether its financial or military to sustain their security and the hostile environment.”
As with all American politicians, Obama made the requisite pilgrimage to Israel to pay homage to the great democracy living in a constant existential threat from its impotent, incompetent, weak, illiterate, unproductive, and failed Arab neighbors, as well as his more important pledge of allegiance to AIPAC where political careers are made or destroyed. The path to the White House or Congress goes through AIPAC.
4. Obama’s Speech to AIPAC, March 2, 2007
“And I can tell you that as a candidate for the president of the United States and as a president of the United States, I vow to work as diligently and as consistently and as determinedly as possible with AIPAC and with the Great State of Israel to bring that vision about.”
–Obama’s Speech at AIPAC, March 2, 2007: Read full text to see the full fledged love fest replete with the lies, myths, and clichés provided by AIPAC to all political cowards and hypocrites seeking office.
Mr. Obama, you’re simply the last in a long line of American politicians who’ve never taken notice of Israel’s true contempt of the only “friend” it has in the entire world. Without our recognition, support and hundreds of billions of tax dollars of aid (Israel is the world’s 16th richest nation), there would be no Israel. Beware of Israel’s rabid bite of the hand that feeds it.
“Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.” –Moshe Dayan, America’s hero of the 1967 Preemptive attack on Arab nations
When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far? —Richard Hofstadter
Israel and its Jewish supporters around the world navigate the paradox oxymoronic paradigm between their boastful pride of Jewish “tribal” power that wields enormous political, economic, and military might around the world—the power to invade, massacre, occupy foreign lands at will with total impunity and immunity from world action; a power to silence and intimidate world governments, none more so than the “wag the tail superpower”, America; and between milking the image of eternal victimhood, weakness, and constant existential threat by a hate filled hostile world; a world genetically born and inbred with “Anti-Semitism”.
While in reality Israel is the military occupier and slum lord of Palestine, Southern Lebanon’s Shebaa farms, and Syria’s Golan Heights. It possesses between 200 – 300 nuclear weapons while Arabs/Iran have none. It has the second most powerful air force in the world (after the U.S.). It is the fourth largest exporter of military weapons and possesses the world’s latest spy technology including access to all U.S. Spy intelligence.
It has the might to destroy the entire world should it come under a doomsday attack.
“Prime Minister Golda Meir also told me, on-the-record during the course of an interview I did with her for the BBC’s Panorama programme, that in a doomsday situation Israel would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it. (Her full quote with its context is as set down on page xii of Waiting for the Apocalypse, the Prologue to Volume One of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews). –Alan Hart, ICH, June 8, 2008.
Mr. Hart was a BBC correspondent, an author, his latest: “Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews”, Vol. 1 and 2, and a researcher.
BUT, it is also the little victim that may be extinguished by its “bad neighbors”.
“Looking at Zionism without taboos means seeing the hard reality of the domination and oppression it has created. Out of the original sins of the world against the Jews grew the original sins of Zionism against the Palestinians.” –Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Original Sins”; An Israeli Scholar at Haifa University (Israel) and author of: “The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why”
“The war’s seventh day, which began on June 12, 1967 (Six Day War) , and has continued to this day, is the product of our choice. We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justifications for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories we developed two judicial systems: One—-progressive, liberal—in Israel; and the Other—cruel, injurious—-in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an APARTHEID regime in the occupied territories immediately after their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.” –Michael Ben-Yar, Israeli Attorney General in Yitzhak Rabin’s government in mid 1990’s. (Quoted in “Herzl’s Nightmare, One Land, Two Peoples” by Peter Rodgers, former Australian Ambassador to Israel, pg. 32 – 33)
“What struck me most about the biblical narrative was that the divine promise of land was integrally linked with the mandate to exterminate the indigenous peoples, and I had to wrestle with my perception that those traditions were inherently oppressive and morally reprehensible…. It was some shock to realize that the narrative presents “ethnic cleansing” as not only legitimate, but as required by the deity…. By modern standards of international law and human rights, what these biblical narratives mandate are “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity… Was there a way of reading the traditions which could rescue the Bible from being a blunt instrument of oppression, and acquit God of the charge of being the Great Ethnic-Cleanser?”
–Dr. Michael Prior, C.M., “Confronting the Bible’s Ethnic Cleansing In Palestine”; The Link, December 2000 (Americans for Middle East Understanding. http://www.ameu.org/)
Dr. Prior is Professor of Biblical Studies in the University of Surrey, England, and visiting professor in Bethlehem University, Palestine. He is a biblical scholar and author of “Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry” and “The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique.”
World Jewry constitutes 0.0019% of the world’s population and less then two percent of the U.S. population. But despite their very small numbers they are without a doubt the richest, most educated, successful, organized, ambitious and motivated tribe in the world. Their intelligence, brilliance, and high education have given the world its most creative thinkers, inventors, artists, physicians, writers, and Noble Prize winners. The world owes a great deal to world Jewry for the enormous contributions they’ve made to this world. They’ve been in the forefront of civil rights, liberal causes, and justice.
No one should begrudge the extraordinary success and accomplishments of Jewish Americans. They worked hard and deserve the respect and admiration of all Americans.
BUT, and here’s the really big rub—organized Jewry has translated their enormous “Jewish Power” of wealth, political activism, media, Hollywood, and industry dominance to ensure that our government is willfully complicity in supporting Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians, refugees on their own land (living on only 18% of their original Palestine) while Israel defies all divine and human laws against its barbaric treatment and occupation of millions of Palestinians.
It is this “Jewish Power/Israel Lobby” that the entire world must have the courage to publicly and forcefully condemn and do all things necessary, sooner rather than later, to end its power and put Israel in its place.
Only when the western governments are free from the albatross of the Israel Lobby will Palestine, the Middle East and the Muslim world be free to cohabit this world in peace and good relations with the West.
Ending Israel’s political and military terrorism will end Muslim terrorism.
In Middle East politics:
Israel manipulates America—America manipulates Arab Dictators—therefore Israel manipulates Arab Dictators.
For almost twenty months Israel, with the full knowledge and support of our U.S. government, has besieged the lives and land of Gaza. Today Gaza is slowly dying without food, water, medicines, fuel, electricity and oxygen for its premature infants and sick elderly. Surgeons don’t have the lights, medicines, or equipment to remove the bullets and shrapnels from Palestinian children courtesy of the American taxpayer and Israeli soldiers. Poverty, mass unemployment, malnutrition, and disease are rampant in Gaza but thanks to decades of a Jewish dominated U.S. media that has dehumanized Palestinians, their lives are not newsworthy, easily ignored and deleteable from western consciousness. The only useful purpose Palestinian children serve is as target practice for the training of new Israeli soldiers.
The useless, incompetent, and inept Arab League lip synchs again to help the Palestinians while in reality their cry is —-with our souls, our blood, we sacrifice ourselves to thee O America.
Why are the Palestinians dying and suffering for decades amidst world silence?
Answer: Jewish Power and the Israel Lobby:
Which includes the Armageddon pushing Christian Fundamentalists; an oxymoronic group of the followers of the prince of peace who seek a world holocaust against Non-Christians; but as long as they support Israel, organized U.S. Jewry will accept them as partners.
“His name is Yusuf Samir, and he is a reporter for the Israeli Arabic service. He tells us….”The Palestinians are animals,” he says. “They are less than human. They are savage beasts. Israel is a land of love. People in Israel love one another. But the Palestinians do not love. They hate. They should be destroyed. We should put fire to them. We should take back Beit Jala, Bethlehem, take back all the land and get rid of them.”
Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered—death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred….Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo—but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
It was in Gaza, where I lived for weeks at a time during the seven years I spent in the Middle East, that I came to know the dark side of the Israeli Defense Force”.
–Chris Hedges (former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief), “A Gaza Diary”; Harper’s Magazine; October 2001
In East Jerusalem, Israel continues the Judaization of the Holy City to three faiths. As part of that official policy the Israeli police in an early morning raid on November 9 forcibly evicted Fawzia al-Kurd, 57, and her partially paralyzed wheel chair bound husband from their home of 52 years. They couldn’t collect any possession and Fawzia’s was still wearing her pajamas upon their eviction. Fawzia was forced to move into a tent while her very ill husband is living with relatives. Not satisfied with just evicting and confiscating their home, the Israeli soldiers chased Fawzia to her make shift tent and destroyed that too. Fawzia is cold, hungry, homeless and separated from her very ill husband. Why? According to Israel she set up the tent “without permission.” This is the democracy we as Americans are paying and dying for in absolute ignorance and silence.
Only Israel of all nations can literally get away with murder. As long as our government is held in the palms of the Israel Lobby; such murder is committed with regularity and impunity.
“New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.” George Bernard Shaw
Thankfully, several prominent Jews have formed a new lobby, J Street, to oppose the influence of the Israel Lobby and its stranglehold on US foreign policy that emphasizes force over diplomacy. J Street supports a peaceful negotiated settlement of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the formation of two independent states although it avoids delineating the borders of such states; for example, by supporting the 1967 borders.
The Iraq War: The “Jewish/Israel Lobby” Triangle
No greater example of the power of the “The Israel Lobby” and the mainly Jewish cabal in the Bush administration than this nation being forced into an illegal, immoral, and destructive war, the Iraq War, that has bankrupted this nation and shed the blood of our youth while killing over a million Iraqi’s. To this date and in our alleged democracy no one, not one single person, has been held accountable for this deliberately manufactured war and genocide against the innocent Iraqi’s; not for the lies, not for shredding our Constitutional system of government and guaranteed civil liberties, not for the trillions of wasted dollars, not for the rivers of blood, not for the torture, rape, murder, and crimes against humanity committed by the war criminals in Washington D.C. . All will or have left office to better financial careers and future book and movie deals.
America has forgotten Abeer Qasim Hamza, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, gang raped by five U.S. soldiers then shot in the head along with her parents and her five year old sister, Hadeel. Abeer’s crime was that she was an Iraqi girl and a Muslim, thus fodder for the “liberators” for freedom. She is dispensable trash as no doubt thousands of other Iraqi girls and women both in and out of prison.
American and Israeli soldiers can kill in cold blood and gang rape at will in their respective occupied territories and know they won’t face prosecution as they simply were carrying their actions in self defense and according to terms of “engagement”, which obviously includes rape.
Would our government, media, Hollywood, think tanks, business leaders have reacted differently if this was a Jewish girl gang raped in Syria or Iran? Would there be hysterical cries for blood and wiping out the two nations?
When Daniel Pearl, Jewish journalist for the Wall Street Journal, was killed in Pakistan, the western media was in rage mode for weeks. Hollywood further enshrined this incident with a movie, “A Mighty Heart” that received endless press. However, most shockingly and as far as I know for the first time, our federal government provided free propaganda for this movie.
The Department of State, the nation’s premier diplomatic agency, had its tax funded website serve as a commercial billboard for this movie about a “Jewish” journalist. It posted a three-part video discussion on Daniel Pearl’s murder and the capture of his killers on its home page under the title “The Daniel Pearl Murder: A First Person Account.”
In an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “White Man’s Burden”, (May 4, 2003), Ari Shavit wrote:
“The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. ..Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It’s the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman (Thomas Friedman of the New York Times) says. It’s the war the neoconservatives marketed… Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.”
An overwhelming majority of political, economic, military experts in the U.S. and around the world have documented in print and interviews that the Pro Israel mainly Jewish Neocons pushed for this war.
“With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country? The answer: President Bush’s policy to secure Israel…. You don’t come to town and announce your Israel policy is to invade Iraq”.
–Former Senator Ernest Hollings May 6, 2004 Charleston Post and Courier
“The lack of public discussion about the role of Israel in the thinking of “President Bush” is easier to understand, but weird nevertheless. It is the proverbial elephant in the room: Everybody sees it, no one mentions it. The reason is obvious and admirable: Neither supporters nor opponents of a war against Iraq wish to evoke the classic anti-Semitic image of the king’s Jewish advisers whispering poison into his ear and betraying the country to foreign interests.”
–Michael Kinsley (Jewish journalist), “What Bush Isn’t Saying About Iraq. President Bush won’t discuss two big reasons he wants to invade Iraq”; Slate, October 24, 2002
“They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating American policy and the op-ed pages of the influential newspapers….Seemingly; all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence on the center of world power”. –Uri Avnery, “The Night After”, Counterpunch, April 10, 2003 (Mr. Avnery is a former Israeli soldier and Knesset Member)
“Jews hold stunningly powerful positions and clout in the United States. The combination of the American state’s power and the Jewish power in the areas of legislation, administration, media, law, business, culture, and entertainment have made the Jews a defining factor of contemporary America. Because Israel is inseparable from the identity of American Jews, Israel is inseparable from the American experience.” –Avraham Burg, in his book: “The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes”, (Oct. 2008) Served as Speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, and Chair of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization.
“How has the Zionist will been imposed on the American people?… It is the Jewish connection, the tribal solidarity among themselves and the amazing pull on non-Jews, that has molded this unprecedented power … The Jewish connection covers all areas and reaches every level. Most Americans may not even sense this gigantic effort, but there is scarcely a Jew who is not touched by its tentacles…The extent and depth to which organized Jewry reached – and reaches – in the U.S. is indeed awesome … The most effective component of the Jewish connection is probably that of media control … Jewish wealth and acumen wields unprecedented power in the area of finance and investment banking, playing an important role in influencing U.S. policy toward the Middle East … In the larger metropolitan areas, the Jewish-Zionist connection thoroughly pervades affluent financial, commercial, social, entertainment, and art circles.” –Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978), pp. 206, 209, 212, 218, 228, 229.
“We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own… ”
–Ari Shavit, May 27, 1996 New York Times, (expressing sorrow and anger at Israel’s deliberate massacre of over 100 Lebanese civilians under U.N. protection in Qana, Lebanon; April 1996)
“Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade’s corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely two percent of the nation’s population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation’s largest newspaper chain and the most influential single newspaper, the New York Times… The role and influence of Jews in American politics is equally marked.”
—Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Univ. of Chicago, 1993), pp. 1, 103.
“The President of the United States, on issue after issue, has reflected the thinking of neoconservatives.” – Richard Perle
This is NOT a discourse or criticism of Judaism or of Jews in general but of an elite of Jewish Americans who dominate the Tripartite triangle of power in this country, what is termed “Jewish Power”; centered in the triangle of Washington D.C. (Government); New York City (Financial/Banking Institutions), and Hollywood/Media.
Thus the power of the Jewish Triangle arising from their dominance in Government, the Financial/Banking Sector, and Hollywood/Media, forced this nation into a war of choice for the sake of Israel.
Coincidentally, Lieutenant General Jay Garner, a staunch supporter of Israel, was appointed after Iraq’s invasion in 2003 as Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, replaced later by Paul Bremer.
Harvard Professor of Law Noah Feldman (Jewish) was the man most responsible for writing Iraq’s constitution.
The most striking facet of the establishment Jewish American “elite” is their rotating political life cycle, playing musical chairs if you will, between top government positions and the private sector be it in business, academia, influential policy “think tanks”, the media and entertainment industry. This has given the Israel Lobby enormous knowledge, insight, and leverage to singularly ensure America’s foreign policy is dominated by Israel’s interests.
Examples of Outrageous Arrogance of Power by Jewish Americans and the Israel Lobby:
“In October 1980, Thomas Dine, became the new staff director of AIPAC…In a 1992 interview (he said):… I wanted APAC to have a much broader reach into the policy-making processes of our own government. And that meant both the Legislative and Executive branches”….Dine’s AIPAC (in addition to Congress would be)…working directly with officials in the executive branch to shape policy at the Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, and anywhere else Israel had business…Dine boasted of a “Jewish Political Power.” –J. J. Goldberg; “Jewish Power” page 200-201
“Why didn’t Jimmy Carter speak from the podium at the Democratic National Convention? Alan Dershowitz said he had something to do with it…..In an interview with Shalom TV, the Harvard Law School professor says he “pushed” Barack Obama “very hard to make that decision,” Dershowitz said in an interview with Shalom TV. “Barack Obama had to make a choice between his Jewish supporters and his anti-Israel supporters like Jimmy Carter, and he did not choose Jimmy Carter. And that was an embarrassment for Jimmy Carter and a show of disrespect.” –Alan Dershowitz, “I helped keep Carter Silent”, Jewish Telegraph Agency, November 13, 2008
“According to the Washington Times, November 4, 1992, AIPAC’s President David Steiner in a taped telephone conversation with AIPAC donor Howard Katz boasted that the lobbying organization was “negotiating” with Clinton over whom the Democratic candidate would appoint as secretary of state and as his national security adviser should he win the election. When asked if AIPAC would participate in the selection of the new secretary of state, Steiner said, “We’ll have access….We have a dozen people in (the Clinton) headquarters. And they are all going to get big jobs,” Steiner, a trustee of the Democratic National Committee, told Katz, who had said he wanted to donate $100,000 to AIPAC-supported candidates.
Katz told the Washington Times that he taped the conversation because “as someone Jewish, I am concerned when a small group has a disproportionate power. I think that hurts everyone, including Jews. If David Steiner wants to talk about the incredible, disproportionate clout AIPAC has, the public should know about it” –Washington Report on Middle East Affairs; “Jews and Israel, AIPAC President Resigns”
December/January 1992/93, Page 69
“In his [Powell’s] own State Department there was a keen awareness of the strength of the Jewish lobbyists. Secretaries of State did not usually meet with lobbyists, but both Jewish officials and Jews that did not officially represent specific groups from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League to Ronald Lauder, could meet with Powell on short notice…. At the State Department, Foxman had an aura of omnipotence. He was held responsible for the appointment of Indyk as Undersecretary of State under Clinton, and was thought to have played a role in the appointments of Secretaries of State Christopher and Albright. Powell related to Foxman almost as if he were someone to whom he must capitulate. Once Foxman told one of his deputies that Powell was the weak link. When the Secretary of State heard this he began to worry. He knew that in Washington a confrontation with the Jewish lobby would make his life difficult. Once he arranged a meeting with Foxman, but the busy Foxman postponed the meeting three times. When they eventually met, the head of the Anti-Defamation League apologized to the Secretary of State [for the postponements]. “You call, we come,” replied Powell, paraphrasing a well known advertisement for a freight company. That statement had much more meaning than just a humorous polite reply.
–Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, “Boomerang: The Failure of Leadership in the Second Intafada”, page 132-133
Let us analyze some aspects of the Jewish Triangle:
1. GOVERNMENT:
Jewish Americans usually dominate top government positions on economic and foreign policy, especially as it relates to the Middle East. During the Clinton Administration the National Security Advisor was Sandy Berger (followed by Anthony Lake) with James Steinberg as his Deputy. Dennis Ross, Aaron Miller, and Martin Indyk served as MidEast envoys. Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State with Stuart Eizenstat, Peter Tarnoff, and James Rubin (son of Robert Rubin) as top Under Secretaries and Deputies. Wililam Cohen was Secretary of Defense.
“The American people…understand the real gamble is having the same old folks doing things over and over and over again and somehow expecting a different result.” —Barack Obama
BUT: His appointees reflect the recycling of Jewish Americans most responsible for the deregulation of Wall Street that led to our economic meltdown. Not one of the 23 Senators or 133 members of the House of Representatives who voted against the Iraq War (his campaign hallmark) are on Obama’s transition team or been among the appointees thus far.
Examples of Top Positions held by Jewish Americans in Government:
White House Chiefs of Staff: Second most powerful position in the White House. All Jews.
–Reagan: Ken Duberstein
–Bush: Joshua Bolten
–Obama: Rahm Emanuel (who volunteered to serve in the Israeli army, not America’s)
–V.P. Cheney: I. Scooter Libby
–V.P. Joe Biden: Ron Klain (former Chief of Staff to V.P. Al Gore)
Additionally: V.P. Al Gore had Leon Fuerth, National Security Advisor
Treasury Secretaries:
–Bill Clinton: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers
–Obama: Timothy Geithner, (President of the New York Federal Reserve: dealt with meltdown of Wall Street Banks, Insurance Companies, and Financial Service Companies). Served as Treasury Under Secretary under both Rubin and Summers.
Director, National Economic Council:
–Bill Clinton: Robert Rubin, Gene Sperling, Stephen Friedman
–Obama: Lawrence Summers
Federal Reserve Chairmen: All Jews
–Carter to Reagan: Paul Volcker
–Reagan (1987) to George W. Bush (2006): Alan Greenspan
–George W. Bush: Paul Wolfowitz; Ben Bernanke
Barack Obama has nominated Paul Volcker as Chariman of the newly created “Economic Recovery Advisory Board”.
Currently 5 out of the 12 Federal Reserve Bank Districts in the country are led by Jewish Americans. (Four others are reported to be Jewish, but couldn’t be confirmed) All Jews.
–Eric S. Rosengren (Boston); Timothy Geithner (New York City, now nominated as Treasury Secretary); –Jeffrey M. Lacker (Richmond); Gary H. Stern (Minneapolis); Janet Yellin (San Francisco)
World Bank:
Always headed by an American has enormous power over third world country’s political and economic stability. Seen as an extension of U.S. foreign policy.
–Recent World Bank Presidents: James Wolfensohn, Paul Wolfowitz, currently Robert Zoellick (Jews)
(Zoellick was previously a managing director of Goldman Sachs, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, and Bush’s U.S. Trade Representative).
Congress:
Congress is the premier institution where the Jewish/Israel lobby has its most influence. It’s been called an “Israeli Occupied Territory” and “The Little Knesset”. In reality, it’s Congressmen who lobby the Jewish/Israeli Lobby for financial, political, and good public relation favors. It is the most damning shameful display of a superpower surrendering and pandering its dignity, and honor to a Pro Israel Lobby. When Congress has to choose between U.S. and Israel’s interests it adopts Israel’s interests.
One Example of Who Congress Really Serves:
June 11, 2008: Americans denied more Unemployment Benefits.
According to an Associated Press Report the House of Representatives defeated an attempt to give unemployed Americans an extra three months of jobless benefits, i.e. extending the average $300 a week benefit check for 13 weeks for all unemployed Americans.
June 27, 2008: Instead, Israel gets the money.
According to an A.F.P. report, just sixteen days later the Congress approved a 170 million dollar increase in security assistance to Israel as part of its new 10-year, 30 billion dollar defense aid commitment to the Jewish state. The legislation gained final approval in a 92-6 Senate vote.
Israel’s automatic access to our tax dollars began in 1948 with a $100 Million grant by President Truman, an extraordinary amount in those days.
While Israel sends Israel $30 Billion ‘EXTRA” in aid, that same amount was denied to expand America’s Children Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), to the 3 American automakers whose industry employs over 1.3 million Americans, and to extend unemployment benefits suffering American families during this Wall Street manufactured economic meltdown. But, in good government fashion Wall Street is getting trillions while Joe the Plumber has to sell his plunger to eat.
“Unbeknownst to most Americans, Israel’s westernmost settlement is not located in Palestine-Israel, but is 6000 miles away on the high ground overlooking Foggy Bottom in Washington D.C. This Capital Hill settlement of pro-Israel lobbies and think tanks strategically controls the high ground overlooking the United States’ Middle East policy landscape by having made kibbutzniks of most members of the executive and legislative branches of the government—including President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden (a wannabe Zionist), and future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (a born Zionist).” –Robert Weitzel, “Israel’s Settlement on Capitol Hill, Counterpunch, November 28, 2008: MUST READ
“An attack on Israel is an attack on America, in my estimation. My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.”–Richard “Dick” Armey, former House of Representatives Majority Leader (1995-2003), in an interview with Jake Tapper, New York Times, “The Way we live now 9-1-02: Questions for Dick Armey, Retiring, Not Shy”, September 1, 2002 –On MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews”, May 1, 2001, Rep. Dick Armey called for the expulsion of Palestinians from the occupied territories.
“It’s almost political suicide . . . for a member of Congress who wants to seek reelection to take any stand that might be interpreted as anti-policy of the conservative Israeli government.” –President Jimmy Carter, “Palestine—Peace or Apartheid”
Former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, wrote in his 2006 book, “Target Iran”:
“Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else.”
“You can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here,”
–Former Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC) on Senate Floor upon leaving office, Congressional Record – Senate, May 20, 2004, pages S5921-S5925.
“The real cost of our so-called “strategic relationship” with Israel is not just in dollars but in American lives. AIPAC, as Israel’s chief representative in Washington, promotes an agenda that undermines U.S. credibility and threatens to draw us into more needless wars in Iran and Syria.”
–Former Congressman Paul Findley (R-IL): author of “They Dare to Speak”, and, “Deliberate Deceptions”; and Founding Chairman of the “Council for the National Interest” (http://cnionline.org/)
“The U.S. Congress is not even handed for “domestic political reason”; and, “Israeli leaders understand our system very, very well [and] because they understand our system they can exploit it.”
–Former Congressman Lee Hamilton, was ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee speaking at a Middle East Symposium October 22-23 on “Conflict and Peace in the Middle East at Carbondale, IL.
Mr. Hamilton was Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission. In an article by Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute, 9/11 Commission Chairmen Admit Whitewashing the Cause of the Attacks, August 7, 2006; Mr. Eland wrote:
“As both the Bush administration and its client government in Israel, with their invasions of Arab states in Iraq and Lebanon, respectively, make the United States ever more hated in the Islamic world, a new book by the chairmen of the 9/11 commission admits that the commission whitewashed the root cause of the 9/11 attacks—that same interventionist U.S. foreign policy……Former Governor Tom Kean and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, chairmen of the 9/11 Commission—have written a tell-all book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (Knopf, Aug. 15, 2006)… makes the shocking admission that some commission members deliberately wanted to distort an even more important issue. Apparently, unidentified commissioners wanted to cover up the fact that U.S. support for Israel was one of the motivating factors behind al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. Although Hamilton, to his credit, argued for saying that the reasons al Qaeda committed the heinous strike were the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and American support for Israel, the panel watered down that frank conclusion to state that U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy on Iraq are “dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.”
111th Congress: 100 Senators: 435 House Representatives
Jews: 13 Senators; 32 Members of House of Representatives.
African Americans: 13% of Population: 0 Senators, 42 Members of the House of Representatives.
Hispanics: 14% of Population: 3 Senators, ~25 Members of House of Representatives.
In the Senate’s entire History only 5 African Americans have been Senators, including Obama.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
The most important Congressional Committee serving Israel’s interests is the Foreign Relations Committee in both the Senate and House. –Senate Chairs of Foreign Relations Committee: Joe Biden (I am a Zionist), to be followed by John Kerry (of Jewish descent), staunch Israeli supporter. –House Chairs of Foreign Relations Committee:
–Tom Lantos (deceased): Israel’s premier Congressman and sponsor/co-sponsor of every Congressional Resolution supporting Israel and attacking Arab nations.
–Howard Berman: In a Jerusalem Post interview, June 23, 2008, the following was reported: “Howard Berman likes to joke that he became a Zionist before he became a Democrat.. He has the helm of one of the most powerful bodies shaping US foreign policy, and he says his decision to run for Congress and focus on international relations while in office was intimately connected to his Jewish background and ties to the Jewish state. “Israel’s security and the US-Israeli relationship is for me an issue that shapes my whole agenda [in] Congress, and guides it,”. Senator Carl Levin (Jewish) is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.
–Oversee all Military budgets and policies (ensures military aid to Israel) Sub-Committee Chairs of House Foreign Relations Committee: (Below, Jews Chair 4 out of the 7 Sub-Committees). Notice the influence on the Middle East, Terrorism, and Western nations.
–Rep. Gary Ackerman: Sub-Committee on Middle East and Asia –Rep. Brad Sherman: Sub-Committee on Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, and Trade
–Rep. Eliot Engel: Sub-Committee on Western Hemisphere
–Rep. Robert Wexler: Sub-Committee on Europe Additionally Rep. Henry Waxman (Jewish) replaced Rep. John Dingell (Catholic, been Congressmen for 53 years) as Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Senator Joe Lieberman despite his opposition to Obama kept his Chairmanship of the powerful Homeland Security Committee. Do you think the Senate feared the Lobby’s backlash if they removed Joe “the traitor” Lieberman? The following officials are responsible for Homeland Security, Justice Department, Terrorism, and Financial Intelligence. They have access to the most sensitive intelligence, military, technology, and international financial transactions. All Jews.
–Michael Chertoff: Secretary of Homeland Security
–Sen. Joe Lieberman: Chair of Senate Committee on Homeland Security –Michael Mukasey: Attorney General of the Justice Department
–Stuart Levey: Under Secretary Treasury Department for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Man most responsible for closing most Muslim Charities in U.S. that assist Palestinians; accusing any Pro Palestinian individual or organization of Terrorism and imprisoning such persons for years (Dr. Sami Al Arian) without charges; and limiting the access and services of the Arab Bank in New York City. Two Jews who’ve served as Chairs of both the Democratic and Republican National Committees. (there have been others such as Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, Chair of DNC in 2000) That’s Jewish power.
Steve Grossman (Jewish): Chair of Democratic National Committee Went from Chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party (1990-1992)—to-Chairman of AIPAC (Israel’s powerful lobby; 1992-1997)—to—Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC: 1997-1999). Only in America can the head of a lobbing group for a foreign nation become chair of one of the two major political parties. According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency , January 17, 1997 (AIPAC’s Steve Grossman takes Democratic Post), Grossman, in a phone interview, stated: “One part of my life will always be dedicated to grass-roots activism in the Jewish community….”My commitment to strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship is unwavering.” Kenneth Mehlmen (Jewish). Chair of Republican National Committee Served as campaign manager for George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign. Became Chairman of the Republican National Committee (2005-2007).
In addition: Rahm Emanuel (Jewish): Served as Chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (decides which candidates gets election funds: a controlling power) for the 2006 election. After the Democratic Party regained control of the House, he was elected as the next Chairman of the Democratic Caucus becoming the fourth highest-ranking Democrat in the House after the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Rep. Eric Cantor (Jewish): Within 2 years of being elected to the House of Representatives he was selected to serve as Chief Deputy Majority Whip, the highest appointed position in the House of Representatives. On November 19, 2008, he was elected to the position of Minority Whip for the 111th Congress becoming the second highest-ranking Republican in the House. He’s on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which is the chief tax-writing committee of the House with broad responsibilities on several programs. He’s also the Chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. Additionally, Representative Sander M. Levin (Jewish) Chairs the Subcommittee on Trade of the Ways and Means Committee.
2. BANKING/FINANCE:
Referring to Vanity Fair’s 100 List of the world’s most powerful people, the Jerusalem Post reports:
“It’s a list of “the world’s most powerful people,” 100 of the bankers and media moguls, publishers and image makers who shape the lives of billions. More than half its members, at least by one count, are Jewish….Joseph Aaron, the editor of The Chicago Jewish News, thinks it’s a list his readers should “feel very, very good about….Talk about us being accepted into this society, talk about us having power in this society,”
–Jerusalem Post, Oct. 11, 2007, “Jewish Power Dominates at Vanity Fair”,
Wall Street Banks, Insurance Companies, and Financial Centers were mostly founded by Jews and usually have Jewish executives:
All institutions below are part of the Wall Street economic meltdown, either going bankrupt, failing, or restructuring. The U.S. taxpayer has poured over $8 Trillion into Wall Street’s financial institutions. It’s an enormous asset to these mainly Jewish firms that their executives rotate in and out of the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and Securities and Exchange Commission. Many sit on each other’s Board of Directors.
Goldman Sachs: (Jewish) founded in 1869 by German Jewish immigrant Marcus Goldman. Later joined by his son in law Samuel Sachs to form Goldman Sachs. Henry Paulson was Chair and CEO before leaving to become Bush’s Treasury Secretary. Robert Rubin was a Co Senior Partner.
Lehman Brothers: (Jewish) founded by Henry and Mayer Lehman. CEO: Richard S. Fuld, Jr. (Jewish) who also is a member of the New York Federal Reserve Bank along with Michael Geinther, Obama’s Treasury Secretary.
Citigroup: Robert Rubin served as Chairman and now is a Director and Senior Counselor. Served as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. Was mentor to Obama’s economic team and is Obama’s financial advisor. Sanford A. Weill was CEO and later Chairman of Citicorp. He also was a Director of the N.Y. Federal Reserve Board…
AIG: (American International Group) Maurice R. Greenberg, Chairman for 35 years.
Bear Stearns: (Jewish), Alan D. Schwartz, President and CEO, Alan Greenberg, Chairm.
The quote below is from an article published in the Jewish Ledger March 19, 2008.
“Bear Stearns” will always be associated with financial failure rather than with its long history of success, a history from which the Jewish community was a major beneficiary….Through it all and until recently, Bear was also Wall Street’s quintessential Jewish firm. That says much in an industry that was distinguished by so many great Jewish names and fortunes: The Seligmans, Hallgartens, Goldman Sachses, Wertheims, Kuhn Loebs, Lehmans, Warburgs, Neubergers, Baches and many others had Jewish roots”.
Software and Internet: Below All Jews.
* Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft
* Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founder of Google
* Lawrence Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation
* Philippe Kahn, founder of Borland
3. HOLLYWOOD/MEDIA: Jews founded all the Hollywood Studios and the 3 Major Television Networks.
Hollywood:
Hollywood has historically portrayed minorities in a negative often barbaric fashion beginning with Native Americans and ending with today’s Arab/Muslim villains. (Read Prof. Jack Shaheen’s “Reel Bad Arabs”). Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians are constantly portrayed as terrorists, barbaric, evil, dirty, and oppressors of women. Dehumanizing a people legitimizes wars, invasions, colonialism, and occupation.
According to the historian Neal Gable, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, “Jews invented Hollywood”.
“Hollywood studios were founded by a few Jewish immigrants like Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky (Paramount Studios; Carl Laemmele (Universal); Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and the Schenks (MGM), Harry Cohn (Columbia); William Fox (Fox Film Corporation); Brothers Harry, Sam, Jack , and Albert Warner (Warner Brothers); Marcus Loew (Loew’s Theatres), along with a dominance of Jewish attorney’s and talent agents in Hollywood”.
“It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture,” acknowledges Michael Medved, a well-known Jewish author and film critic. “Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names.”
–Michael Medved (Jewish), “Is Hollywood Too Jewish?,” Moment, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1996), p. 37.
Jonathan J. Goldberg, editor of the influential Jewish community weekly Forward. in his 1996 book, “Jewish Power”, wrote:
“In a few key sectors of the media, notably among Hollywood studio executives, Jews are so numerically dominant that calling these businesses Jewish-controlled is little more than a statistical observation”.
–Jonathan Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Addison-Wesley, 1996), pp. 280, 287-288. See also pp. 39-40, 290-291.
MEDIA:
Mostly owned, controlled, and run by Jewish publishers, executives, editors, and a plethora of Jewish journalists.
“In the world according to U.S. Media, the high moral ground in the Middle East belongs to Israel’s government—even when it slaughters Lebanese civilians as a matter of policy. In news coverage , Israeli casualties are apt to have names, faces, and bereaved relatives, while Arab victims are likely to be fleeting images: nameless, faceless, distant….Israel’s most crucial allies include the mass media of the United States. Together with top official in Washington, news outlets keep reinforcing the assumption that the Israeli government can do little wrong”.
–Norman Solomon & Jeff Cohen, “Wizards of Media Oz”; p. 243 (courageous Jewish journalists)
–Founders of the 3 Television Networks: All Jews
–William S. Paley: founder of CBS
–David Sarnoff: founder of NBC
–Leonard Goldenson: founder of ABC
“The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the cold war. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media. Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives—not by journalists—whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers. Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home”
–Prof. Paul Craig Roberts, “What We Know and Don’t Know About 9/11”, Vdare.com, August 16, 2006 ~ Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration
THE BIG FIVE Media Conglomerates:
Conglomerates are responsible for over 80% of all news, editorial, sports, and entertainment information in the U.S. Each conglomerate owns many television, cable and radio stations, movie studios, daily newspapers, weekly magazines, and publishing companies in the U.S. and around the world. Below is only a small list of the overwhelming Jewish executives in all facets of these Conglomerate Medias.
–Viacom (CBS): Sumner Redstone (Jewish), Chairman, 39 television stations, 185 radio stations, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, UPN, Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster
–Les Moonves, (Jewish): CEO of CBS Television
–Zev Shalev (Jewish): Executive Producer of CBS “The Early Show” (daily morning show)
–60 Minutes: Don Hewitt (Jewish), Executive Producer for 36 years) followed by Jeff Fager, main Jewish Correspondents: Mike Wallace (retired), Leslie Stahl, Bob Simon, Morley Safer (attacked CBS for not showing Prophet Muhammad’s cartoons, called it cowardly): ALL Jewish
–Time/Warner (CNN): Jeffrey Lawrence Bewkes, President and CEO (Jewish) Time Warner Cable, Warner Bros. Pictures, TNN, HBO, Warner Music Group, Time Publishing (Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Money Magazine).
–Jonathan Klein (Jewish) President of CNN/U.S.
–Barry Meyer: (Jewish) Chairman and CEO, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
–Richard Stengel (Jewish) Time Magazine’s Managing Editor.
–News Corporation: Rupert Murdoch, Chair and CEO (gentile, but some report Jewish mother)
Here’s what the editor in chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, May 5, 2007 said of Rupert Murdoch.
“Murdoch is popular in the pro-Israel community for his newspaper’s and network’s unflinching support for Israel, and he should be. The Journal’s editorial writers also tend to take Israel’s side. But opinion is opinion, and fact is fact. You can rely on the columnists and editorial writers at Murdoch’s New York Post for a rousingly pro-Israel take on the day’s news….. For years the Post’s Israel correspondent was Uri Dan, a right-hand man to Ariel Sharon”.
Murdoch:
Owns Fox Entertainment Group, includes Fox Television (owns 60 television stations with 188 affiliates), Fox Cable (sports, movie channels, National Geographic Channel, 20th Century Fox Movie Studio). World’s largest publisher of english language newspapers, including the New York Post, owns Harper Collins Publishers.
–Peter Chernin (Jewish) President, and Chief Operating Officers of News Corp.; Chair and CEO of Fox Group.
– Roger Ailes (Jewish). President of Fox News Channel and Chair of Fox Television Stations Group.
In an interview with the Vindicator paper of Youngstown Ohio, November 11, 2008, Roger Ailes was quoted as saying:
“I defend the United States, Israel and the Constitution.”
–“The Weekly Standard”: most influential right wing magazine is owned by Rupert Murdoch with a Jewish Neocon Editor, William Kristol
–General Electric: Jeff Zucker (Jewish); President & CEO of NBC Universal (NBC, MSNBC, CNBC)
NBC serves 220 affiliated TV stations, operates 28 TV broadcasting stations, four cable/satellite networks around the world, investments in the Internet, multimedia, cable television, Universal Studios, plus owns Telemundo, one of the two largest Hispanic broadcasting networks.
–Mark Hoffman, (Jewish): President of CNBC (Business channel):
–Ben Silverman, (Jewish): Co-Chair, NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal TV Studio
–Ron Meyer, (Jewish): President and Chief Operating Officer, Universal Studios
–Walt Disney Company: Robert Iger (Jewish): President and CEO Operates ABC Network with 226 affiliated stations, Cable TV including ESPN Sports Network, Movie Studios, International Stations, Retail Store, Internet, Music, Theatres, Theme Parks, ABC Radio Networks with the largest radio sports network in the country; also owns 10 television stations, 44 AM and 18 FM Radio Stations. Publishing, Magazines,
–David Westin (Jewish), President of ABC News
–George Bodenheimer, (Jewish): President of ESPN (Sports Network)
According to a research and network analysis done by Sonoma University on the Boards of Directors of the ten big media organizations, only 118 people comprise the membership of all ten boards. These 118 persons also sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of the ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other.
This is the greatest and purest monopoly of power, influence, and intimidation by a small cabal of men and women who run the world’s access to information. They formulate public opinion, create or destroy governments and careers, and regularly shape and influence government policy.
This is the greatest danger to democracy, not the terrorism of a few thousand murderous fanatics.
Jewish media power is not limited to the U.S. but is found in Europe, Canada, Australia, and other nations.
Major Jewish Newspapers: New York Times, Washington Post (Owns Newsweek), Wall Street Journal
–Tribune Company: Sam Zell (Jewish), Chairman, President and CEO
Owns the following papers: Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Sun Sentinel (South Florida), Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant, Morning Call and Daily Press (among others)
All three major News Magazines are owned or run by Jews:
–TIME: Jewish Chairman of Time/Warner
–Newsweek: Owned by the Washington Post, a Jewish owned Media Company
–U.S. News and World Report: Owned by Jewish billionaire, Mortimer Zuckerman; who also served as President of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; a staunch supporter of Israel.
Special Mention:
1. Corporation for Public Broadcasting: Chair, Cheryl Feldman Halpern (Jewish)
–CPB was created by Congress in 1967 under the Public Broadcasting Act. It receives federal funding and in turn funds PBS and NPR (National Public Radio). Ms. Halpern was appointed by Bush to this post in 2005. Previously she was Chair of the Republican Jewish Coalition for eight years. As such she was a strong critic of NPR, accusing the public network of anti-Israel bias. Now America’s public radio networks are run by a Zionist. That’s power.
2. M.E.M.R.I.: Middle East Media Research Institute, headquartered in Washington D.C.
Founded in 1998 by former Israeli military intelligence officer, Yogi Carmon, and the Israeli born Dr. Meyrav Wurmser (left for the Hudson Institute), wife of David Wurmser, former Middle East Advisor to V.P. Dick Cheney and now Director of Middle East Studies at the American Enterprise Institute
–The sole purpose of this organization is to “translate” Arab and Persian media reports into English and other languages. It’s highly inflammatory, selective, wrong and biased translation is done deliberately to further antagonize western governments and peoples against Arabs and Muslims to further entrench Israel’s sole narrative as a victim of hate and violence. Expectedly MEMRI has received wide flung mention, praise, and free propaganda in the Jewish owned media such as the New York Times.
THINK TANKS
Jews, Neocons, and Pro Israel supporters dominate the landscape of Washington “think?” tanks that basically provides the “thinking” for the White House and Congress. Their policy papers, talking points, and dominance on television news programs as “experts” as well as columnists and opinion writers for the major papers is overwhelming. They’re funded by Jewish philanthropists and wealthy conservative foundations.
A review of their board of directors and advisors reads like a who’s who of the Executive, Legislative, Judicial branches of government; corporate America, media owners, editors, columnists, television broadcasters, academia, entertainment personalities, even foreign governmental officials.
As one example, let’s take the AIPAC founded (Martin Indyk) Washington Institute for Near East Policy:
Its Executive Director is Robert Satloff (Jewish), who served on Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board in the Pentagon (reported to Paul Wolfowitz called the “Architect” of the Iraq War) that pushed for the Iraq War. Dennis Ross (Clinton’s Bush, and Obama’s Mideast Envoy) is a Consultant.
Shockingly, the Board of Directors of this AIPAC formed “think tank” has 4 (bipartisan) Former Secretaries of State: Warren Christopher, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Alexander Haig, and George Shultz.
Plus Robert McFarlane, former National Security Advisor, R. James Woolsey, former CIA Director, Richard Perle, James G. Roche, former Secretary of Air Force, and Publisher Mortimer Zuckerman.
The same goes for other Pro Israel think tanks as well; like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI: Chairman Bruce Kovner, Jewish), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA: Chair, Mark Broxmeyer, Jewish), Project for the New American Century (Chair, William Kristol, Jewish), Council on Foreign Relations (President: Richard Haass: Jewish); Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (President: Clifford May: Jewish); Center for Security Policy (President: Frank Gaffney, Jewish)
Obama, especially with Hilary “Zionist” Clinton as Secretary of State, will not be able to waver from the path of allegiance to Israel. He talks the talk but he walks the Zionist walk. He projects confidence but in reality has shown the same insecurity, lack of confidence, and willingness to sell his political soul and nation to powerful Pro Israel Jews who’ve surrounded him and built him up from the very beginning.
Given America’s propensity to avoid confrontation, to seek a happy medium, it’s general ignorance on all matters political, especially on “foreign affairs”; coupled with the high education, wordsmith eloquence, assertiveness and projection of confidence by the “Jewish” elite who swarm around every politician; Americans willingly surrender the purview of political “expertise” to such an elite trusting that they know what’s best for America. The Cabal Jews tell America—-trust us— we know money, and we know Arabs and Muslims, we know their violent faith, their addiction to terrorism, and the fact that they only understand power.
So trust us, America, we know what’s good for them and what’s best for you. Amen, Shalom.
“Until Israel’s hilltop settlement in our nation’s capital is dismantled, allowing for the possibility of a just and lasting peace in Palestine-Israel, its influence on both branches of our government and its insidious affect on US Middle East policy will continue to make willing—or unwitting—kibbutzniks of all Americans. We will be held as complicit, and as culpable, as the citizens of the country whose leaders sat in the dock at Nuremberg. The world will ask, “Why didn’t you do something to stop it?”
–Robert Weitzel, “Israel’s Settlement on Capitol Hill”, Counterpunch, November 28, 2008 (a must read)
America, our manufactured friend, a friend that loves us to death, that even wallows in the murder of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 as long as it benefits its interests—-with friends like these…. well you know the rest.
“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,”
–Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Haaretz, April 16, 2008, “Report: Netanyahu says 9/11 terror attacks GOOD for Israel (as quoted in Ma’ariv)
As an American who loves freedom and justice for all people I pledge to first work for the freedom of our nation from such foreign influence and betrayal by the few, the rich, the shameless, who commandeer our national interests to serve their allegiance to Israel, not America.
Americans have long endured in silence and ignorance the power of the few who’ve fostered in our psyche a herd mentality that absorbs their lies, myths, and propaganda without question causing this great nation to serve and further the political interests of a foreign nation with the blood and fortunes of our young generation.
In honoring the dead at Gettysburg, President Lincoln left a recording for history on this nation’s eternal vigilance for freedom, equality, and liberty: “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The time for Israel and its Lobby’s stranglehold on our government and future is soon to be over.
Can you hear the Liberty Bell ring again?
“Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.” ~ Henri Amiel
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0410-34.htm
“Abraham Foxman and Intimidation of Colin Powell” Book by two Israeli Journalists: Drucker, Raviv and Shelah, Ofer, Boomerang…, Keter, 2005, pps. 132-133.
http://www.conferenceofpresidents.org/
“Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations” – See List of 50 Major Jewish Organizations; Malcolm I. Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman
Previous postings raised questions about potential nominees to Obama Administration positions regarding their views on Israel, Iran, the Palestinians, and other issues. Today, I focus on reasons to have confidence that the incoming team will do positive things in the Middle East. Many of the candidates already nominated or rumored to be likely appointees, are well known to and highly regarded by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations. My colleagues, and in some cases I, had contacts and dealings with each of these people over the years, and we had evidence that gave us confidence. This includes:
* Rahm Emmanuel, Chief of Staff to the President;
* Ron Klain, Chief of Staff to Vice President Biden;
* Jim Steinberg, likely to be Deputy National Security Adviser or National Security Adviser to Obama;
* Tony Blinken, likely to be National Security Adviser to the Vice President;
* Greg Craig, White House Counsel;
* Pete Rouse, White House adviser;
* Jim Messina, Deputy Chief of Staff to the president;
* Phil Schiliro, Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs;
* Dennis Ross, rumored for several top diplomatic positions;
* Jack Lew, rumored to head the National Economic Council;
* Jane Harman and Tony Lake, rumored for top intelligence positions;
* Janet Napolitano, who will head the Department of Homeland Security;
* Richard Danzig, probable Deputy Secretary of Defense;
* Richard Clarke, rumored for a ntational security post,; and many others.
Not to mention Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama. That certainly doesn’t mean we never had disagreements or will never, but this looks like it will be an Administration full of people quite capable of making wise decisions in the Middle East.
That said, I will continue to look for potential problems among possible nominees and policy developments.
Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC foreign policy chief who now writes a blog hosted by the Middle East Forum. He has been under federal indictment since August 4, 2005 for alleged violations of the Espionage Act in the conduct of AIPAC’s work.
One of the most striking socio-economic features of the past two decades is the reversal of the previous half-century of welfare legislation in Europe and North America. Unprecedented cuts in social services, severance pay, public employment, pensions, health programs, educational stipends, vacation time, and job security are matched by increases in tuition, regressive taxation, and the age of retirement as well as increased inequalities, job insecurity and workplace speed-up.
The demise of the ‘welfare state’ demolishes the idea put forth by orthodox economists, who argued that the ‘maturation’ of capitalism, its ‘advanced state’, high technology and sophisticated services, would be accompanied by greater welfare and higher income/standard of living. While it is true that ‘services and technology’ have multiplied, the economic sector has become even more polarized, between low paid retail clerks and super rich stock brokers and financiers. The computerization of the economy has led to electronic bookkeeping, cost controls and the rapid movements of speculative funds in search of maximum profit while at the same time ushering in brutal budgetary reductions for social programs.
The ‘Great Reversal’ appears to be a long-term, large-scale process centered in the dominant capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America and in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe. It behooves us to examine the systemic causes that transcend the particular idiosyncrasies of each nation.
The Origins of the Great Reversal
There are two lines of inquiry which need to be elucidated in order to come to terms with the demise of the welfare state and the massive decline of living standards. One line of analysis examines the profound change in the international environment: We have moved from a competitive bi-polar system, based on a rivalry between the collectivist – welfare states of the Eastern bloc and the capitalist states of Europe and North America to an international system monopolized by competing capitalist states.
A second line of inquiry directs us to examine the changes in the internal social relations of the capitalist states: namely the shift from intense class struggles to long-term class collaboration, as the organizing principle in the relation between labor and capital.
The main proposition informing this essay is that the emergence of the welfare state was a historical outcome of a period when there were high levels of competition between collectivist welfarism and capitalism and when class-struggle oriented trade unions and social movements had ascendancy over class-collaborationist organizations.
Clearly the two processes are inter-related: As the collectivist states implemented greater welfare provisions for their citizens, trade unions and social movements in the West had social incentives and positive examples to motivate their members and challenge capitalists to match the welfare legislation in the collectivist bloc.
The Origins and Development of the Western Welfare State
Immediately following the defeat of fascist-capitalist regimes with the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and its political allies in Eastern Europe embarked on a massive program of reconstruction, recovery, economic growth and the consolidation of power, based on far-reaching socio-economic welfare reforms. The great fear among Western capitalist regimes was that the working class in the West would “follow” the Soviet example or, at a minimum, support parties and actions which would undermine capitalist recovery. Given the political discredit of many Western capitalists because of their collaboration with the Nazis or their belated, weak opposition to the fascist version of capitalism, they could not resort to the highly repressive methods of the past. Instead, the Western capitalist classes applied a two-fold strategy to counter the Soviet collectivist-welfare reforms: Selective repression of the domestic Communist and radical Left and welfare concessions to secure the loyalty of the Social and Christian Democratic trade unions and parties.
With economic recovery and post-war growth, the political, ideological and economic competition intensified: The Soviet bloc introduced wide-ranging reforms, including full employment, guaranteed job security, universal health care, free higher education, one month paid vacation leave, full pay pensions, free summer camps and vacation resorts for worker families and prolonged paid maternity leave. They emphasized the importance of social welfare over individual consumption. The capitalist West was under pressure to approximate the welfare offerings from the East, while expanding individual consumption based on cheap credit and installment payments made possible by their more advanced economies. From the mid 1940’s to the mid 1970’s the West competed with the Soviet bloc with two goals in mind: To retain workers loyalties in the West while isolating the militant sectors of the trade unions and to entice the workers of the East with promises of comparable welfare programs and greater individual consumption.
Despite the advances in social welfare programs, East and West, there were major worker protests in East Europe: These focused on national independence, authoritarian paternalistic tutelage of trade unions and insufficient access to private consumer goods. In the West, there were major worker-student upheavals in France and Italy demanding an end of capitalist dominance in the workplace and social life. Popular opposition to imperialist wars (Indo-China, Algeria, etc.), the authoritarian features of the capitalist state (racism) and the concentration of wealth was widespread.
In other words, the new struggles in the East and West were premised on the consolidation of the welfare state and the expansion of popular political and social power over the state and productive process.
The continuing competition between collectivist and capitalist welfare systems ensured that there would be no roll-back of the reforms thus far achieved. However, the defeats of the popular rebellions of the sixties and seventies ensured that no further advances in social welfare would take place. More importantly a social ‘deadlock’ developed between the ruling classes and the workers in both blocs leading to stagnation of the economies, bureaucratization of the trade unions and demands by the capitalist classes for a dynamic, new leadership, capable of challenging the collectivist bloc and systematically dismantling the welfare state.
The Process of Reversal: From Reagan-Thatcher to Gorbachev
The great illusion, which gripped the masses of the collectivist-welfare bloc, was the notion that the Western promise of mass consumerism could be combined with the advanced welfare programs that they had long taken for granted. The political signals from the West however were moving in the opposite direction. With the ascendancy of President Ronald Reagan in the US and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, the capitalists regained full control over the social agenda, dealing mortal blows to what remained of trade union militancy and launching a full scale arms race with the Soviet Union in order to bankrupt its economy. In addition, ‘welfarism’ in the East was thoroughly undermined by an emerging class of upwardly mobile, educated elites who teamed up with kleptocrats, neo-liberals, budding gangsters and anyone else who professed ‘Western values’. They received political and material support from Western foundations, Western intelligence agencies, the Vatican (especially in Poland), European Social Democratic parties and the US AFL-CIO while, on the fringes, an ideological veneer was provided by the self-described ‘anti-Stalinist’ leftists in the West.
The entire Soviet bloc welfare program had been built from the top-down and, as a result, did not have a class-conscious, politicized, independent and militant class organization to defend it from the full-scale assault launched by the gangster-kleptocratic-clerical-neo-liberal-‘anti-Stalinist’ bloc. Likewise in the West, the entire social welfare program was tied to European Social Democratic parties, the US Democratic Party and a trade union hierarchy lacking both class consciousness and any interest in class struggle. Their main concern, as union bureaucrats was reduced to collecting members’ dues, maintaining internal organizational power over their fiefdoms and their own personal enrichment.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc was precipitated by the Gorbachev regime’s unprecedented handover of the allied states of the Warsaw Pact to the NATO powers. The local communist officials were quickly recycled as neo-liberal proxies and pro-western surrogates. They quickly proceeded to launch a full-scale assault on public ownership of property and dismantling the basic protective labor legislation and job security, which had been an inherent part of collectivist management-labor relations.
With a few noteworthy exceptions, the entire formal framework of collectivist-welfarism was crushed. Soon after came mass disillusion among the Eastern bloc workers as their ‘anti-Stalinist’ western-oriented trade unions presented them with massive lay-offs. The vast majority of the militant Gdansk shipyard workers, affiliated to Poland’s ‘Solidarity’ Movement were fired and reduced to chasing odd jobs, while their wildly feted ‘leaders’, long-time recipients of material support from Western intelligence agencies and trade unions, moved on to become prosperous politicians, editors and businesspeople.
The Western trade unions and the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left (Social Democrats, Trotskyists and every sect and intellectual current in between), did yeoman service in not only ending the collectivist system (under the slogan: ‘Anything is better than Stalinism’) but of ending the welfare state for scores of millions of workers, pensioners and their families.
Once the collectivist-welfare state was destroyed, the Western capitalist class no longer needed to compete in matching social welfare concessions. The Great Rollback moved into full gear.
For the next two decades, Western regimes, Liberal, Conservative and Social Democratic, each in their turn, sliced off welfare legislation: Pensions were cut and retirement age was extended as they instituted the doctrine of ‘work ‘til you drop’. Job security disappeared, work place protections were eliminated, severance pay was cut and the firing of workers was simplified, while capital mobility flourished.
Neo-liberal globalization exploited the vast reservoirs of qualified low-paid labor from the former collectivist countries. The ‘anti-Stalinist’ workers inherited the worst of all worlds: They lost the social welfare net of the East and failed to secure the individual consumption levels and prosperity of the West. German capital exploited cheaper Polish and Czech labor, while Czech politicos privatized highly sophisticated state industries and social services, increasing the costs and restricting access to what services remained.
In the name of ‘competitiveness’ Western capital de-industrialized and relocated vast industries successfully with virtual no resistance from the bureaucratized ‘anti-Stalinist’ trade unions. No longer competing with the collectivists over who has the better welfare system, Western capitalists now competed among themselves over who had the lowest labor costs and social expenditures, the most lax environmental and workplace protection and the easiest and cheapest laws for firing employees and hiring contingent workers.
The entire army of impotent ‘anti-Stalinist’ leftists, comfortably established in the universities, brayed till they were hoarse against the ‘neo-liberal offensive’ and the ‘need for an anti-capitalist strategy’, without the tiniest reflection over how they had contributed to undermining the very welfare state that had educated, fed and employed the workers.
Labor Militancy: North and South
Welfare programs in Western Europe and North America were especially hit by the loss of a competing social system in the East, by the influx and impact of cheap labor from the East and because their own trade unions had become adjuncts of the neo-liberal Socialist, Labor and Democratic Parties.
In contrast, in the South, in particular in Latin America and, to a lesser degree, in Asia, anti-welfare neo-liberalism lasted only for a decade. In Latin America neo-liberalism soon came under intensive pressure, as a new wave of class militancy erupted and regained some of the lost ground. By the end of the first decade of the new century – labor in Latin America was increasing its share of national income, social expenditures were increasing and the welfare state was in the process of re-gaining momentum in direct contrast to what was occurring in Western Europe and North America.
Social revolts and powerful popular movements led to left and center-left regimes and policies in Latin America. A powerful series of national struggles overthrew neo-liberal regimes. A growing wave of worker and peasant protests in China led to 10% to 30% wage increases in the industrial belts and moves to restore the health and public education systems. Facing a new grassroots, worker-based socio-cultural revolt, the Chinese state and business elite hastily promoted social welfare legislation at a time when Southern European nations like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy were in the process of firing workers and slashing salaries, reducing minimum wages, increasing retirement age and cutting social expenditures.
The capitalist regimes of the West no longer faced competition from the rival welfare systems of the Eastern bloc since all have embraced the ethos of ‘the less the better’: Lower social expenditures meant bigger subsidies for business, greater budgets to launch imperial wars and to establish the massive ‘homeland security’ police state apparatus. Lower taxes on capital led to greater profits.
Western Left and Liberal intellectuals played a vital role in obfuscating the important positive role which Soviet welfarism had in pressuring the capitalist regimes of the West to follow their lead. Instead, during the decades following the death of Stalin and as Soviet society evolved toward a hybrid system of authoritarian welfarism, these intellectuals continued to refer to these regimes as ‘Stalinist’, obscuring the principle source of legitimacy among their citizens – their advanced welfare system. The same intellectuals would claim that the ‘Stalinist system’ was an obstacle to socialism and turned the workers against its positive aspects as a welfare state, by their exclusive focus on the past ‘Gulag’. They argued that the ‘demise of Stalinism’ would provide a great opening for ‘democratic revolutionary socialism’. In reality, the fall of collectivist-welfarism led to the catastrophic destruction of the welfare state in both the East and West and the ascendancy of the most virulent forms of primitive neo-liberal capitalism. This, in turn, led to the further shrinking of the trade union movement and spurred the ‘right-turn’ of the Social-Democratic and Labor Parties via the ‘New Labor’ and ‘Third Way” ideologies.
The ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left intellectuals have never engaged in any serious reflection regarding their own role in bringing down the collective welfare state nor have they assumed any responsibility for the devastating socio-economic consequences in both the East and West. Furthermore the same intellectuals have had no reservations in this ‘post-Soviet era’ in supporting (‘critically’ of course) the British Labor Party, the French Socialist Party, the Clinton-Obama Democratic Party and other ‘lesser evils’ which practice neo-liberalism. They supported the utter destruction of Yugoslavia and US-led colonial wars in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Not a few ‘anti-Stalinist’ intellectuals in England and France will have clinked champagne glasses with the generals, bankers and oil elites over NATO’s bloody invasion and devastation of Libya – Africa’s only welfare state.
The ‘anti-Stalinist’ left intellectuals, now well-ensconced in privileged university positions in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles have not been personally affected by the roll-back of the Western welfare programs. They adamantly refuse to recognize the constructive role that the competing Soviet welfare programs played in forcing the West to ‘keep up’ in a kind of ‘social welfare race’ by providing benefits for its working class. Instead, they argue (in their academic forums) that greater ‘workers militancy’ (hardly possible with a bureaucratized and shrinking trade union membership) and bigger and more frequent ‘socialist scholars’ forums’ (where they can present their own radical analyses … to each other) will eventually restore the welfare system. In fact, historic levels of regression, insofar as welfare legislation is concerned, continue unabated. There is an inverse (and perverse) relation between the academic prominence of the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left and the demise of welfare state policies. And still the ‘anti-Stalinist’ intellectuals wonder about the shift to far-right demagogic populism among the hard-pressed working class!
If we examine and compare the relative influence of the ‘anti-Stalinist’ intellectuals in the making of the welfare state to the impact of the competing collectivist welfare system of the Eastern bloc, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear: Western welfare systems were far more influenced by their systemic competitors than by the pious critiques of the marginal ‘anti-Stalinist’ academics. ‘Anti-Stalinist’ metaphysics have blinded a whole generation of intellectuals to the complex interplay and advantages of a competitive international system where rivals bid up welfare measures to legitimate their own rule and undermine their adversaries. The reality of world power politics led the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left to become a pawn in the struggle of Western capitalists to contain welfare costs and establish the launch pad for a neo-liberal counter-revolution. The deep structures of capitalism were the primary beneficiaries of anti-Stalinism.
The demise of the legal order of the collectivist states has led to the most egregious forms of predator-gangster capitalism in the former USSR and Warsaw Pact nations. Contrary to the delusions of the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left, no ‘post-Stalinist’ socialist democracy has emerged anywhere. The key operatives in overthrowing the collectivist-welfare state and benefiting from the power vacuum have been the billionaire oligarchs, who pillaged Russia and the East, the multi-billion dollar drug and white slave cartel kingpins, who turned hundreds of thousands of jobless factory workers and their children in the Ukraine, Moldova, Poland, Hungary, Kosovo, Romania and elsewhere into alcoholics, prostitutes and drug addicts.
Demographically, the biggest losers from the overthrow of the collectivist-welfare system have been woman workers: They lost their jobs, their maternity leave, child care and legal protections. They suffered from an epidemic of domestic violence under the fists of their unemployed and drunken spouses. The rates of maternal and infant deaths soared from a faltering public health system. The working class women of the East suffered an unprecedented loss of material status and legal rights. This has led to the greatest demographic decline in post-war history – plummeting birth rates, soaring death rates and generalized hopelessness. In the West, the feminist ‘anti-Stalinists’ have ignored their own complicity in the enslavement and degradation of their ‘sisters’ in the East. (They were too busy feting the likes of Vaclav Havel).
Of course, the ‘anti-Stalinist’ intellectuals will claim that the outcomes that they had envisioned are a far cry from what evolved and they will refuse to assume any responsibility for the real consequences of their actions, complicity and the illusions they created. Their outrageous claim ‘that anything is better than Stalinism’ rings hollow in the great chasm containing a lost generation of Eastern bloc workers and families. They need to start counting up the multi-million strong army of unemployed throughout the East, the millions of TB and HIV-ravaged victims in Russia and Eastern Europe (where neither TB nor HIV posed a threat before the ‘break-up’), the mangled lives of millions of young women trapped in the brothels of Tel Aviv, Pristina, Bucharest, Hamburg, Barcelona, Amman, Tangiers, and Brooklyn …..
Conclusion
The single biggest blow to the welfare programs as we knew them, which were developed during the four decades from 1940’s to the 1980’s, was the end of the rivalry between the Soviet bloc and Western Europe and North America. Despite the authoritarian nature of the Eastern bloc and the imperial character of the West, both sought legitimacy and political advantage by securing the loyalty of the mass of workers via tangible social-economic concessions.
Today, in the face of the neo-liberal ‘roll back’, the major labor struggles revolve around defending the remnants of the welfare state, the skeletal remains of an earlier period. At present there are very few prospects of any return to competing international welfare systems, unless one were to look at a few progressive countries, like Venezuela, which have instituted a series of health, educational and labor reforms financed by their nationalized petroleum sector.
One of the paradoxes of the history of welfarism in Eastern Europe can be found in the fact that the major ongoing labor struggles (in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and other countries, which had overthrown their collectivist regimes, involve a defense of the pension, retirement, public health, employment, educational and other welfare policies – the ‘Stalinist’ leftovers. In other words, while Western intellectuals still boast of their triumphs over Stalinism, the real existing workers in the East are engaged in day-to-day militant struggles to retain and regain the positive welfare features of those maligned states. Nowhere is this more evident than in China and Russia, where privatizations have meant a loss of employment and, in the case of China, the brutal loss of public health benefits. Today workers’ families with serious illnesses are ruined by the costs of privatized medical care.
In the current world ‘anti-Stalinism’ is a metaphor for a failed generation on the margins of mass politics. They have been overtaken by a virulent neo-liberalism, which borrowed their pejorative language (Blair and Bush also were ‘anti-Stalinists’) in the course of demolishing the welfare state. Today the mass impetus for the reconstruction of a welfare state is found in those countries, which have lost or are in the process of losing their entire social safety net – like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy – and in those Latin American countries, where popular upheavals, based on class struggles linked to national liberation movements, are on the rise.
The new mass struggles for welfarism make few direct references to the earlier collectivist experiences and even less to the empty discourse of the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left. The latter are stuck in a stale and irrelevant time warp. What is abundantly clear, however, is that the welfare, labor and social programs, which were gained and then lost in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet bloc, have returned as strategic objectives motivating present and future workers struggles.
What needs to be further explored is the relation between the rise of the vast police state apparatuses in the West and the decline and dismantling of their respective welfare states: The growth of ‘Homeland Security’ and the ‘War on Terror’ parallels the decline of Social Security, public health programs and the great drop in living standards for hundreds of millions.
Ankara – Tension between Turkey and Syria along their border is edging closer to flashpoint. Last week a Turkish air force jet was shot down after violating Syrian air space. The Syrian government said the plane was hit while inside Syrian air space. Turkey says it had already left Syrian air space and was hit in international air space.
What the plane was doing inside Syrian air space is another matter. Turkey’s President, Abdullah Gul, said it had ‘strayed’ off course. Other accounts suggest that it was there to ‘light up’ Syria’s radar system or test its missile defences. Turkey immediately sent troops and armor to the border and invoked Article 4 of the NATO Charter, calling for consultation with its partners in the alliance. They immediately endorsed the Turkish version. Hillary Clinton called the shooting down of the plane ‘brazen’ while William Hague thought it was ‘outrageous’, words, one cannot help noting, that they have never used to describe the missile attacks by their armed forces that have killed civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Another ‘incident’ might lead to Turkey invoking Article 5, the common defence article of the NATO Charter, which regards an attack on one member as an attack on all. War between Syria and Turkey would then become war between Syria and all NATO members, leading in turn to confrontation between the NATO/Gulf state bloc on one hand and Russia, China, Iran and their allies on the other.
There is nothing accidental or unwilled about what is happening in Syria. The government in Damascus has been deliberately locked into a cycle of violence fed from the outside by the self-styled ‘Friends of Syria’. Both sides are implicated in the killing of civilians yet the mainstream media has created a narrative in which virtually all the killing is the work of the army or the ‘regime loyalists’ known as the shabiha.
‘Activists’ routinely blame every murder, bombing and act of sabotage on the government even when the victims have been Baath loyalists (as was the professor murdered by armed men in her home on the outskirts of Homs in late June, along with her three children and parents). The suffering of families whose menfolk have been killed after taking up arms against the government is reported in the media but not the suffering of families who have lost members to the armed groups. The jury remains out on the Hula massacre. While the UN Human Rights Council says in its latest report that ‘many’ of the killings ‘may’ have been the work of regime loyalists, other evidence points to the massacre having been the handiwork of jihadis, reportedly including the Faruq Brigade of the so-called Free Syrian Army. As the Human Rights Council admits that it has no conclusive evidence as to who was behind this massacre it might have been more responsible for it say nothing unless and until it did have such evidence.
This unbalanced narrative feeds into the war strategies being framed by the ‘Friends of Syria’. These ‘friends’ insist that the armed campaign they are sponsoring is directed against the government and not the people. What ‘the people’ – by any measure the majority of Syrians – want is hard to gauge amidst such chaos but evidence suggests they see these ‘friends’ as their enemies. The referendum in February and the elections in May were hardly perfect but remain the clearest indications yet of general support amongst Syrians for a political solution to the crisis gripping their country. Outside the enclaves dominated by the armed groups, the people are strongly opposed to these groups and their external backers, knowing that but for the obstruction of Russia and China, NATO warplanes would have been bombing their country long ago.
Outside governments have fastened on Syria’s problems with the tenacity of leeches. The ‘Arab spring’ created the opportunity to reshape the Middle East at its political and geographical centre and they have seized it. Although paying lip service to Kofi Annan’s ceasefire plan they are prolonging the violence in the hope that the army will eventually disintegrate and the government implode. While the destruction of the government in Damascus is an end in itself, Syria must also be seen as a way station on the road to Iran.
If the Baath government can be brought down, the strategic alliance between Iran, Syria and Hizbullah will collapse at the centre. Even if the government is not dislodged, Syria will be in such chaos that it would be unable respond if Iran is attacked. Hizbullah would be similarly immobilized. Israel would be able to attack without having to worry about a second front opening up across its northern armistice lines. President Putin’s assurance while on an apparently unscheduled visit to Israel that Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon may have been a last ditch attempt to ward off an attack on Iran. Perhaps Russian intelligence has found out that a decision has finally been taken and the date and time set.
Turkey’s initial response to the ‘Arab spring’ was sluggish. The Tunisian president was gone before the government had time to react. It waited almost until the end before calling on Mubarak to step down. Prime Minister Erdogan spoke strongly against military intervention anywhere in the region before coming in behind the armed attack on Libya. On Syria he and his Foreign Minister claimed to have given President Bashar al Assad good advice which he refused to take before deciding that he had to go. In late summer they threw their government weight behind the establishment both of the ‘Syrian National Council’ (SNC) and the ‘Free Syrian Army’ (FSA), giving the first a home in Istanbul and the second sanctuary in southeastern Turkey. For the first time in Turkey’s republican history a government had committed itself to ‘regime change’ in a neighboring country; for the first time a government had sponsored an armed group operating across its border to kill the citizens of a neighboring country. Even now the moral and legal implications of this policy have scarcely been touched upon in the Turkish media.
For a country which has a long history of other governments meddling in its affairs the Turkish position is almost surreal. This is not just because of the parallel between the PKK and the FSA, both crossing the borders of neighboring countries to kill the citizens of their own country; both claiming to be fighting in the name of human rights and freedom; and both regarded as terrorist organizations by the governments of the countries in which they are operating. The history of external meddling and support for rebels by outside governments goes deep into the history of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, from the support for the Greek rebels in the 1820s, to support for the Bulgarian rebels in the 1870s and Macedonian and Armenian rebels in the 1890s. Intervention in the name of civilization was replaced in the 20th century by intervention in the name of democracy and freedom and now we have intervention in the name of humanitarian concern – a continuing theme through these two centuries – and the ‘responsibility to protect’. In a paradoxical play on history, Turkey is now intervening in Syria as the imperial powers once intervened in the Ottoman Empire and as they are still intervening in the affairs of other countries.
Other agendas are easy to see. Saudi Arabia wanted the US to attack Iran during the George W. Bush presidency and ‘cut the head off the snake’. Its interests are partly ideological, directed against Shiism in general as well as Iran in particular, while also arising from the traditional Saudi fear of its large northern neighbor. The US put the Syrian government on its list of states that support terrorism in 1979 and since the introduction of SALSA (Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act of 2003) has gradually tightened economic sanctions in an effort to bring the government to its knees. For Israel Syria has always been the visceral Arab enemy and of course, what Israel wants, any US administration will do its best to deliver. Turmoil in the Arab world suits Israel down to the ground, literally. It is tightening its hold on all the territories occupied in 1967 all the time without the world paying any attention because of the drama of the ‘Arab spring’. Not that the world has ever paid much attention but for the moment Israel is having a dream run.
The one agenda that is difficult to determine is Turkey’s. It has the approval of its partners inside NATO and the collective known as the ‘Friends of Syria’ but this has come at a heavy price. Cross-border trade in the southeast has all but collapsed. Relations with Iran, Iraq and Russia have been undermined. Perceptions of government sympathy for a Muslim Brotherhood-type government in Syria have aroused the suspicions of Turkish Alevis, especially in the border province of Hatay, where the population is about 50 per cent Alevi. The region was severed from Syria by the French in 1938 and handed to Turkey. Both Alevis and Christians still have family ties across the border and both see the Assad government as an effective guarantor of minority rights. They certainly do not share their own government’s perspective.
What is being played out is one of the greatest power games since the end of the First World War. Behind the cover of the ‘Arab spring’ the obstacles to renewed western domination of the region are being removed one by one. The destabilization of Syria is bringing the region close to a war with potentially catastrophic global repercussions but the rewards are so great that the western coalition cannot help itself from pressing against all red lines. Turkey’s involvement is central to western strategic planning and if war does come either through accident or design Turkey will be right on the front line. A recent poll carried out by the Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Research shows strong opposition to any deeper involvement in the Syrian crisis. The majority of those polled (56 per cent) do not support military intervention in Syria and only a small number (less than eight per cent) support the arming of the Syrian opposition. The question here is whether the Turkish people realize how deeply their government is already involved. The ruling party dominates parliament but Syria might yet prove to be its Achilles heel.
– Jeremy Salt is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
The Alternative Information Center on 12 June published a seventy word notice that five dunams of land belonging to Rana Talbieh were being confiscated in al-Khader, a village west of Bethlehem. It was something of a banal announcement expressing some expected difficulties for a few nearby farmers, but it is exemplary of the fundamental process beneath what is often misnomered the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’. We can identify this process by distinguishing between two of the many ways that people relocate: immigration and settlement.
We discuss the arrival of Zionists to Palestine with the Hebrew term aliyah (ascend; plural: aliyot ). Aliyot are nearly always described as “waves of immigration”. This mischaracterizes things. When you immigrate someplace, you join or articulate to the sovereignty (the organized society; nation, tribe, kingdom, etc.) you find upon arrival. Settlers do not. Settlers carry their own sovereignty with them which challenges the indigenous sovereignty. Successful settler colonies displace or exterminate the indigenous sovereignty. Alternately put, when the British built colonies on Turtle Island*, they ‘brought Britain with them’, creating settler colonies and displacing the Powhatan sovereignty and Powhatan people they encountered in what the settler society calls Virginia. This simultaneous increase of British—later American—and decrease of indigenous sovereignty is how Turtle Island is transformed into ‘North America’ through the past 500 years. The processes of establishing, perpetuating and extending settler colonies is called settler colonialism.
Zionists did things differently than Britain but still established a settler colony. Unique amongst settler colonies, Israel did not have a primary nation-state from which it drew settler population and logistical support (this relatively minor detail is the traditional explanation for why Zionism is supposedly not colonial). Instead Zionists brought European capital and class privilege with them and established settler sovereignty on site, displacing the indigenous Palestinian sovereignty they encountered. Tel Aviv is not an outgrowth of Shayk Muwannis and the other Palestinian villages buried beneath it nor was it a suburb of neighboring Jaffa. Tel Aviv is the sovereignty that eliminated those villages and with them, Palestinian sovereignty there. Building Tel Aviv and the other Zionist settlements—’collectivish’ kibbutzim included—is settler colonialism, the process of creating Israel where Palestine was and is. Five more dunams of Israel are created now from al-Khader as five more dunams of Palestine are eliminated. This is the settler colonial equation.
The question of sovereignty not only distinguishes settlers from immigrants, but settler colonialism from more widely discussed and studied forms of colonialism. The British in India and Nigeria co-opted, exploited and reorganized the sovereignties and societies they encountered. The British in Turtle Island and Zionists in Palestine eliminated them. Settler displacement of indigenous sovereignty is a primary function of what Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe calls settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination.” There was and is elimination too by the British in India and Nigeria and co-optation, exploitation and reorganization by Zionists in Palestine, but not as the defining process. Wolfe’s seminal 2006 article “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native” focuses primarily on settler elimination of indigenous people but the eliminationist logic he describes is equally applicable to the erasure of sovereignty.
Palestine and Palestinians are eliminated through death, displacement and stripping of identity. Hundreds of thousands were expelled in 1948 as the settler society became the State of Israel and again in 1967 when Israel expanded its control to all of historic Palestine. From 1967 to date, Israel has revoked residency rights of another 240,000Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip condemning them to be ‘illegal’ in their homeland or to exile. The numerous Israeli massacres perpetrated between 1947-49 demonstrate this ‘logic of elimination’ in a most horribly clear manner. Another way to eliminate the indigenous population is to remove their indigeneity. Israel attempts to do this with the category of ‘Israeli Arabs’. Calling Palestinian citizens of Israel ‘Israeli Arabs’ removes their indigenous Palestinian identity and instead articulates them through the settler society. This is never more clear than in the Naqab (what the settler society calls the Negev) where Israel is trying to eliminate the Bedouin population not through killing them, but through preventing them from living as indigenous people. The Naqab Bedouins are not allowed to be pastoralists or otherwise define their relationship with their historical lands. When Naqab Bedouins try, the Israeli government demolishes their houses and fines and arrests them. This is also why the Naqab has to be called the Negev and Palestine must be called Israel. Indigenous peoples and sovereignties have no place inside settler societies.
There is of course, much more to the narrative. The particulars of Zionist colonization and Palestinian resistance are shaped, abetted and contested by numerous factors. These include: European anti-Semitism (including pogroms and the shoah), Ottoman land policies, British and French colonialism, capitalism, ‘Third World nationalism’, Islamism, U.S. and Soviet interventions and the Cold War, U.S. empire, the Egyptian, Iraqi, Libyan, Israeli, Saudi and Iranian quests for regional hegemony and the particulars of Zionist and Palestinian narratives and ideologies. All of these are direly important but we very often lose sight of the fundamental process of settler colonialism while discussing them. Five more dunams of Israel, five less dunams of Palestine.
The settler colonial process has been the same since the Second Aliya (1904-1914) when new Jewish arrivals definitively decided not to articulate to Palestinian society but to create their own, separate sovereignty in Palestine (see Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914for an in depth examination). Settler colonialism is the transformation of Palestine into Israel, the process of the settler eliminating the indigenous, and it is why Palestinians resist—as they have since the beginning—continued Israeli settlement construction. Israeli settlement construction is literally Palestinian destruction (see Walid Khalidi’s All That Remainsand Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks, amongst other works for this narrative). This is why the confiscation of five more dunams, just one and one-quarter acre, in al-Khader tells us more about the fundamental process at work than 99% of all the discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’.
* Turtle Island is one of numerous indigenous terms for what the settler society calls North America. I use it only as an example and not to privilege the term, used primarily by northeastern tribes, over others.
Jimmy Johnson can be reached at johnson [dot] jimmy [at] gmail [dot] com.
Between June 5 – 6, 2007, an international gathering called the Democracy & Security Conference took place in Prague, the Czech Republic. Sponsored, in part, by the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, its List of Participants included Sheldon Adelson, the casino and hotel magnate, worth an estimated $21.5 billion, who, with his wife Miriam, recently gave $22 million to Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, a campaign in which the former speaker referred to Palestinians as “an invented people.”
Other participants included: Natan Sharansky, a member of the Likud party who, in 2006, formed the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies and who, in 2009, became chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the organization in charge of immigration and absorption of Jews worldwide into the Jewish state; Richard Perle, former chair of the Bush administration’s Defense Policy Board during the invasion of Iraq in 2003; Jose Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, who actively encouraged and supported the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq; and U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman, also an outspoken supporter of the Iraq invasion.
There, too, was Reza Pahlavi, identified on the List of Participants as “Opposition Leader to Clerical Regime of Iran.” He is Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Iranian dictator Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi and heir to the Peacock throne, who now lives in Maryland, from where he calls for regime change in Iran. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the major pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., and the conservative Washington D.C. think tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), have both come out for regime change in Iran, and AIPAC has indicated its support for the return of Reza Pahlavi to the throne.
Once again the drums of war are beating to topple yet another Middle East leader. In our Sept.-Oct. 2004 Link “Timeline for War,” we traced the buildup to President Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Now, in this issue, we go back to look at the protagonists of that war—often referred to as neoconservatives or neocons—and we ask what are they up to now?
Richard N. Perle
Our 2004 Link traced Richard Perle’s pivotal role among the neocons in launching President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Dubbed “The Prince of Darkness,” he was chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (DPB), which provided the rationale for war and coordinated public opinion both inside and outside the administration.
In 2006, Perle traveled to Libya twice to meet with Col. Qadhafi. He went as a paid senior adviser to the Monitor Group, a Boston-based consulting firm, whose project was to enhance the profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi. Other prominent figures the Monitor recruited to travel to Libya were Princeton Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis and Nicholas Negroponte, the brother of John Negroponte, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and first ever director of national intelligence. The Monitor group charged the government of Libya $250,000 per month ($3-million per year), plus expenses that were not to exceed $2.5 million.
Also in 2006, Perle received a phone call from an Iranian prisoner, a 30-year-old “student” by the name of Amir-Abbas Fakhravar. From his cell in the notorious Evin prison in Iran, Fakhravar had been phoning the pro-monarchist satellite station in Los Angeles. How he came by a phone in prison is unknown. Equally astonishing is his explanation that the prison authorities, after torturing him, let him out of prison to take a university exam, expecting him to return voluntarily. Instead, he went on the lam for 10 months before showing up in Dubai, where Perle was there waiting for him.
From Dubai, Perle arranged Fakhravar’s entry into the United States, and commenced his public relations tour with a private lunch at the American Enterprise Institute, where the “opposition leader” met State Department and Pentagon officials, as well as the neoconservative hawk, Michael Ledeen.
The celebrated dissident was interviewed by Perle in a 2007 documentary, “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom,” part of a PBS series “America at the Crossroads.” In it, Fakhravar called upon Americans to send the Marines into his country to stop the Hitler-like dictators from making nuclear bombs.
In a Jan. 20, 2007 interview with Ynet, Fakhravar predicted that, if the West did launch a military attack on Iran, “the top brass will flee immediately … many of the mid-level officials will shave off their beards, don ties, and join the (civilians) in the street.”
And in meetings with members of the U.S.-Iranian community, Fakhravar said that he respected Reza Pahlavi and would support the people of Iran if they voted for a constitutional monarchy.
Likewise, in a visit to Israel, he assured his television audience that the Iranians loved Jews.
During this time, more than one commentator observed that Richard Perle, who was promoting Amir-Abbas Fakhravar, was the same Richard Perle who had boosted the cause of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who provided much of the misinformation that had led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
These days Perle criticizes the Obama administration for not supporting Iranian dissidents in exile and anti-government protesters on the inside. Why? Because it is in America’s interest to do so. And why is that? Because, as he explained in a Feb. 18, 2011, Newsmax interview, “The Iranians are killing Americans at every opportunity in the places we are now fighting. They support terrorism around the world, and they’re headed toward nuclear weapons.”
In a Dec. 15, 2011 interview with Kurt Nimmo of Infowars.com, he put it bluntly: “I do not think there is any question about it, I am willing to accuse Iran of building nuclear weapons.”
And what if we don’t act? The Prince of Darkness offered his own Occam’s choice in a 2004 book, “An End to Evil”: “There is no middle way for Americans,” warned Perle, “it is either victory or holocaust.”
Paul D. Wolfowitz
Four days following the 9/11 attacks, President Bush gathered his national security team at Camp David for a war council. Years later, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would recall that the first person in the room to bring up going after Iraq was his deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz.
Wolfowitz’s determination to topple Saddam was reinforced by an unlikely foreign national by the name of Shaha Riza. Paul and Shaha had met in 1999 and had become romantically involved, even though each at the time was married. A British national and Muslim, with family roots in Libya, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia, Shaha held a degree in International Relations from Oxford University, with a focus on spreading democracy in Middle Eastern countries.
After the 2000 election, Wolfowitz was on the short-list to head the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.). That was until his wife of 30 years, Clare Wolfowitz, wrote a letter to president-elect George Bush telling him that her husband’s extra-marital affair with a foreigner posed a national security risk. A mutual friend of the Wolfowitzes, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, tried to dissuade Clare from sending the letter, but she sent it. And it worked. Wolfowitz’s name was removed from consideration. Again, Scooter Libby, at the time Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, intervened to have his boss recommend Wolfowitz for deputy secretary of defense under Donald Rumsfeld.
From this post Wolfowitz would emerge as the most hawkish of the administration’s Iraq policy advocates. Bringing democracy to Saddam’s dictatorship was, he insisted, “doable;” the U.S. would be greeted as liberators; Iraqi oil would pay for the reconstruction costs, and military estimates of needing several hundred thousand troops to do the job were “widely off the mark.”
By March 2005, the “doable war” in Iraq had resulted in the killing of over 1,000 U.S. soldiers and an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Iraqi civilians. It was at this time that President Bush promoted his deputy secretary of state by nominating him to head the World Bank. On March 31, 2005 Paul Wolfowitz was unanimously approved as the Bank’s president. Two years later, he was forced to resign.
The issue, again, was Shaha Riza. She was already employed by the World Bank when Paul took over, which presented a problem since the Bank’s ethic rules precluded sexual relationships between a manager and a staff member, even if one reports to the other indirectly through a chain of supervision. So Riza was assigned a job at the State Department under Liz Cheney, the daughter of the vice-president, with the task of promoting democracy in the Middle East. To compensate her for any potential disruption in her career prospects, Wolfowitz directed the Bank’s human resources chief to increase her salary from $132,660 to $193,590 per year, tax-exempt.
When news of this broke in the Washington Post on March 28, 2007, it sparked calls for the resignation of the Bank’s president. An investigation was launched at the Bank and Wolfowitz handed in his resignation on April 28, 2007.
Today Paul Wolfowitz works for the American Enterprise Institute, known to Washington insiders as Neocon Central.
And he continues the drumbeat for war. In a June 19, 2009 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, the intellectual godfather of the Iraq war criticized Obama for not imposing democracy in Iran, warning, “It would be a cruel irony if, in an effort to avoid imposing democracy, the United States were to tip the scale towards dictators who impose their will on people struggling for freedom.”
By this time 4,315 U.S. military had been killed in the Iraq war, along with some 1.3 million Iraqis.
Lewis “Scooter” Libby
He’s known as “Scooter “— once, when his father watched him crawling across his crib as a baby, he exclaimed, “he’s a scooter!” and the name stuck. True to his name, as Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, he paid multiple visits to the C.I.A. prior to the Iraq war in order to strong-arm its analysts into reporting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as well as links to al-Qaeda. He also provided classified government information to The New York Times reporter Judith Miller that formed the basis of her front-page articles highlighting Iraq’s WMDs. And it was Libby who prodded then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to include in his Jan. 29, 2003 U.N. speech specious reports from a disreputable Iraqi source code-named Curveball about the existence of mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq.
As in the case of Paul Wolfowitz, however, what ultimately got Libby into trouble was a woman. Her name was Valarie Plame Wilson.
In February 2002, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, was asked by the C.I.A. and other agencies to investigate claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. Wilson returned saying the claims were false.
In a July 6, 2003 op-ed for The New York Times, Wilson faulted President Bush for saying in his Jan. 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq sought to buy nuclear material in Niger. He went on to warn that, if his report had been ignored because it didn’t fit preconceptions about Iraq, “a legitimate case can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.”
Several days later, columnist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife, Valarie Plame, was an undercover C.I.A. operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction.
Joseph Wilson shot back that the outing of his wife was retaliation for his article and that revealing Valarie’s cover effectively ended her career, not to mention putting in jeopardy the lives of her covert contacts.
An investigation ensued to find out who leaked the name to Novak. The New York Times produced documents that showed that Scooter Libby may have first learned of Plame’s covert identity from Vice President Cheney. Libby denied under oath he had anything to do with it.
Ultimately, Libby was found guilty on four felony counts of making false statements to the F.B.I., lying to a grand jury and obstructing a probe into the leak. He was acquitted of one count of lying to the F.B.I. On June 8, 2007, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000. Soon after, he resigned his post as Cheney’s chief of staff.
On July 2, 2007, President Bush commuted his sentence but, despite strong urging from his vice president, he did not grant Scooter a presidential pardon before leaving office. On March 20, 2008, I. Lewis Libby was disbarred from the practice of law, at least until 2012.
Still he speaks out. In a Sept. 7, 2010 interview on Fox TV, he warned that he didn’t think sanctions would work, and that Iran would have the bomb within a year.
Douglas J. Feith
He graduated magna cum laude both from Harvard University and, in 1981, from Georgetown University Law Center. That year he joined President Reagan’s National Security Council (N.S.C.) as a Middle East analyst. A year later he was fired after becoming the focus of an F.B.I. inquiry into his giving classified N.S.C. information to an Israeli embassy official in Washington.
Soon after, Douglas Feith was rehired as special counsel to then-Assistant Secretary to the Secretary of Defense, Richard Perle.
In 2001, with help from Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, Feith joined the Bush administration as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the third most senior official in the U. S. Department of Defense. Returning the favor, Feith then worked to have Perle chosen as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
During this time, Feith created the Office of Strategic Influence, whose purpose was to influence policymakers by submitting biased news stories into the foreign media as a build-up to the Iraq war.
He also headed the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, a unit he and Wolfowitz created that was closely tied to a parallel intelligence unit within the Israeli prime minister’s office. Its purpose was to provide key Bush administration people with raw intelligence on Saddam’s Iraq, much of it coming from Ahmad Chalabi, the opportunistic head of the exiled Iraqi National Council.
On Aug. 27, 2004, CBS News broke the story about an F.B.I. investigation of a possible spy for Israel who was working for the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith. The spy, later identified as Lawrence Franklin, was caught passing classified presidential directives and other sensitive documents to an AIPAC lobbyist who, in turn, passed them on to Israel. Franklin pled guilty to several charges of espionage, for which he received a sentence of just under 13 years in prison— later reduced to 10 months house arrest. Two AIPAC employees were also indicted, but their cases were dismissed.
In Jan. 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that his undersecretary would be “stepping down.” Later that year, Feith joined the faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Services at Georgetown University as a Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy; the appointment created an uproar among the school’s faculty. Two years later, the school opted not to renew his contract.
In Feb. 2007, the Pentagon’s inspector general issued a report charging that Feith’s office “developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.”
Currently, Douglas Feith is director of the Center for National Security Strategies and a Senior Fellow at the conservative think-tank, the Hudson Institute.
Dalck Feith, Douglas’s father, was a Holocaust survivor, and a member in Betar, the militaristic, pre-Likud Zionist youth movement in Poland founded by Ze’ev (Vladmir) Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky, whose assistant was Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, declared that every Jew had the right to enter Palestine, that a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan was the only guarantee of Jewish survival, that all Arabs hate Jews, and that active retaliation and overwhelming Jewish armed force were needed to ensure that the displaced population did not fight to retake their land, a reaction he considered quite natural.
Dalck’s son Douglas has hewed to the Likud worldview—both in calling for the overthrow of the Iraqi government, and now for regime change in Iran. In a Winter 2010 inFocus article entitled “Obama’s Failure to Lead,” he argued passionately that the time for talk was past: “There is no realistic prospect that Iran’s leaders can be negotiated out of their determination to obtain nuclear weapons.”
Condoleezza Rice, it is reported, made the comment, following one of Douglas Feith’s presentations to the National Security Council, “Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we’ll invite the ambassador.”
David Wurmser
In fact, according to a June 2, 2007 New York Times article, Condoleezza Rice, at the time secretary of state, was pressured to play down the hawkish talk circulating in Washington of a military option against Tehran. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had called those wanting to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities the “new crazies.” The Times article went on to note that such hawkish statements had been made by a former Pentagon official who was then principal deputy assistant for national security affairs to Vice President Dick Cheney.
His name was David Wurmser.
We first met David Wurmser in our “Timeline for War” Link, on July 9, 1996, when he and his wife Meyrav joined with Douglas Feith and Richard Perle to develop a foreign policy paper for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which called for Israel to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install a pro-Israel regime in his place.
Wurmser next showed up in our July 31, 1998 entry, when he met with Israel’s U.N. representative Dore Gold in an effort to get Israel to put pressure on the U.S. Congress to approve a $10 million grant to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, whose goal was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
In a Nov. 1, 2000 op-ed piece in the Washington Times, Wurmser, now at the American Enterprise Institute, called on the U.S. and Israel to broaden the conflict in the Middle East. The United States, he argued, needs “to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza—in order to reestablish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal.”
Shortly after that piece, Wurmser was named by the incoming Bush administration to the post of principal deputy assistant for national security affairs in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
On Sept. 12, 2001, the day following the 9/11 attacks, Douglas Feith, now Rumsfeld’s undersecretary of defense for policy, tasked Wurmser to form a secret intelligence unit that would report directly to him; called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, its purpose was to find loose ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in order to counter C.I.A. analysts who had found no credible links between the two.
In July 2007, with the war in Iraq well underway, Wurmser left his position with Dick Cheney to found Delphi Global Analysis, a risk-assessment consulting business, with offices in Washington and Israel. While its clients include hedge fund managers and investment bankers, the firm, we are told, also handles a few “sensitive” projects in Israel.
Delphi’s co-founder is David’s wife, Dr. Meyrav Wurmser. Born in Israel and a member of the Likud party, she wrote her doctoral thesis on Revisionist Zionism behind the Herut and Likud parties. She is co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which critics have accused of disseminating the most extreme, often inaccurate, views from the Arabic and Persian media. In 2008, she was listed as a member of the board of advisors of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a group that was involved in the distribution of 28 million DVDs of the film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” a film in which parallels are drawn between Nazi Germany and a monolithic Islam. Twenty-eight million DVDs of the film were provided to at least 70 newspapers that placed them at the doorstep of subscribers in swing states prior to the 2008 presidential election.
Also listed on Delphi’s brochure as a Visiting Scholar is Lee Smith, senior editor at the Weekly Standard. In a Feb. 23, 2012 article in The Tablet, Smith quoted David Wurmser as saying that Israel’s war against Iran’s nuclear program was well under way, with lots of money over the past decade having been spent on all sorts of anti-Iranian options, such as computer worms like Stuxnet, covert operations like the assassination of nuclear scientists, sabotage of military installations, and, possibly, commando raids and air strikes.
Yet as prepared as Israel is, according to Wurmser, it is the United States that should use its military might to topple Tehran. Why? Because Iran is America’s enemy. And how does America go about doing this? Just before he left Vice President Cheney’s office, Wurmser wrote a paper advocating that the U.S. must go to war with Iran, not to set back its nuclear program, but to achieve regime change. To establish a casus belli, the U.S. would launch airstrikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps training camps in Iran in retaliation for their smuggling explosives into Iraq that kill and maim Americans fighting there. Iran then would retaliate, which would allow for a rapid escalation of U.S. military force. Cheney acted on Wurmser’s advice and tried to get Bush to provoke a war with Iran over Iraq. But Pentagon officials turned it down.
Now, the head of Delphi Global Analysis warns, it’s “crunch time” for Israel’s leaders. He notes a marked shift in Israel’s security establishment, the surest sign being President Shimon Peres’s warning that a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to Israel and is “a real danger to humanity as a whole.” And he adds this about his personal friend, Prime Minister Netanyahu, “It’s not just about Bibi and his historical legacy anymore. He doesn’t need to be a leader in a Churchillian mode, because the consensus on attacking Iran is broad-based.”
In the presidential campaign of 2011-2012, candidate Newt Gingrich revealed the names of his foreign policy advisors. Among them was David Wurmser.
William Kristol
On June 18, 2007, the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam arrived in the port of Juneau. On board were three of the Weekly Standard’s top writers: Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor, Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President Bush, and the magazine’s founder William Kristol.
Upon disembarking, they went straight for lunch to the newly elected governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns. By the time they returned to the cruise ship, the conservative pundits had fallen in love with Sarah Palin.
And no one more than William Kristol. It did not go unnoticed that the Alaskan governor displayed the flag of Israel in her office, nor that she attended Protestant evangelical churches that believe the preservation of the state of Israel is a biblical imperative, nor that she understood Israel’s fear of an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons. Months before John McCain picked her for his running mate, Kristol predicted on Fox News Sunday that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin … on the ticket.” As one commentator put it: “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms … and things always work out so well when Kristol engages his pom-poms.”
Bill Kristol received his PhD from Harvard University. He is the son of Irving Kristol, long associated with the American Enterprise Institute and Commentary magazine, and considered by many the godfather of neoconservatism.
Kristol is one of three board members of Keep America Safe, a think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney, which includes former McCain campaign managers Michael Goldfarb and Aaron Harrison. Formed to counter what it considers Obama’s undercutting of America’s war on terror, it promotes the foreign policy objectives of the former vice president, including his support for enhanced interrogation techniques.
Kristol is also co-founder and board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel (E.C.I.). Launched in 2010 as the most pro-Israel of all pro-Israel groups, it was first located in the same office as the old Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, whose Washington, D.C., address happens to be that of Orion Strategies, a consultancy run by Randy Scheunemann—once Sarah Palin’s chief foreign policy advisor. Much of E.C.I.’s initial funding came from hedge fund managers, including $100,000 from Daniel Loeb and $50,000 from Jonathan Jacobson.
E.C.I.’s favorite tactic is publishing ads that attack politicians and political analysts who question America’s unconditional support for Israel. Its campaign to push the U.S. into war with Iran was highlighted in a recent 30-minute video that mocked President Obama’s “unshakeable” commitment to Israel’s security, particularly his record on Iran. Prior to the March 2012 meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama, E.C.I.’s Super PAC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to intimidate critics of the Israeli prime minister and his call to attack Iran sooner rather than later. This included a full-page ad in The New York Times that went after two liberal advocacy groups, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, denouncing their work as anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic, and disclosing the phone numbers of the groups’ donors.
A March 18, 2012 New York Times article cited critics who warned that hawkish voices like E.C.I.’s were indeed pushing the United States closer to military action against Iran and closer to yet another war in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Bill Kristol, the pundit who, 11 years ago, said that President Bush had to attack Iraq because “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight,” now tells Fox News Sunday, “It would be much better if we use force to delay the Iranian nuclear program than if Israel did.”
John R. Bolton
On May 1, 2005, the London Sunday Times published a leaked document in which the chief of Britain’s intelligence agency MI6, Richard Dearlove, advised Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush had decided on attacking Iraq, even though the case for WMDs was “thin.” This, according to the British intelligence head, was not a problem, because “intelligence and facts were being fixed [by the U.S.] around the policy.”
Who was cooking the books?
This was a question that the House Government Reform Committee Member Rep. Henry Waxman wanted answered. Following an investigation that included “sensitive and unclassified” papers provided by the State Department, Waxman fingered John Bolton.
Bolton, known as the neocons’ neocon, was at the time the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. According to Waxman, in December 2002, Bolton arranged for false information about Iraq’s procurement of yellowcake uranium from Niger to be put in a Fact Sheet that went out to the United Nations and the media, despite the fact that the information had been assessed to be false in C.I.A. intelligence evaluations. Bolton, under oath, denied he had anything to do with the Fact Sheet, to which Waxman replied: “When you’re in charge of arms control and the biggest issue is whether we were going to war against Iraq on the issue of nuclear weapons … don’t you think you have some responsibility to know what’s going on?”
In another case involving the undersecretary of state, the May 6, 2006 issue of the Jewish publication The Forward reported that Bolton had been reprimanded for having unauthorized contacts with officials of Israel’s intelligence service Mossad without seeking “country clearance” from the State Department. And in its May 9, 2005 edition, US News and World Report carried the story that Bolton allegedly used his position as the Bush administration’s top arms control official to shield Israel from charges of violating U.S. laws that prohibit the use of U.S. arms for “non-defensive” purposes. The case involved Israel’s July 23, 2000 use of a U.S.-made F-16 bomber to drop a one-ton bomb on a house in a densely populated area of Gaza, killing 14 civilians and injuring more than 100.
In 2005, Bolton was nominated by President Bush to the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—the same institution he allegedly fed false information to. Due to a Democratic filibuster, however, Bush had to wait until congress adjourned before making a recess-appointment. Bolton resigned his U.N. post in December 2006, when the recess-appointment ran out and it was clear he would not receive Senate confirmation.
Before joining the Bush administration, Bolton was at the American Enterprise Institute, which is where he is today. He opines from time to time as a Fox News Channel commentator, and he is involved with other conservative think tanks such the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). In 2010, he contemplated running for president of the United States in 2012, but later thought better of the idea.
Meanwhile, the neocons’ neocon continues boldly on the warpath. In 2009, he suggested to a University of Chicago audience that Israel should consider a nuclear strike against Iran. And in a Feb. 22, 2012 Washington Times article, he promised that a world where Iran has nuclear weapons will be far more dangerous than a world after an Israeli military strike.
Michael A. Ledeen
If Bolton arranged for the false information to go into the Fact Sheet, who falsified the information?
Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism operations at the C.I.A., was asked in a 2005 interview if the man behind the forging of the Niger documents that President Bush used to launch a preemptive war against Iraq was Michael Ledeen, then assistant to Undersecretary of State Douglas Feith. Cannistraro replied: “You’d be very close.” Philip Giraldi, former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer, confirmed that Ledeen was the logical intermediary in coordinating the falsification of the documents. Ledeen has denied he had anything to do with it.
Michael Ledeen, a leading neo-conservative, left the American Enterprise Institute in 2008, where he had been for 20 years, to take a fellowship at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (F.D.D.). Other neocons affiliated with the F.D.D. include Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Newt Gingrich, and Douglas Feith’s father, Dalck who gave the F.D.D. $100,000. Additional donors to the F.D.D. are: Leonard Abramson, founder of U.S. Healthcare, whose family foundation gave over $800,000 between 2001-2004; the Seagram company heirs, Edgar and Charles Bronfman, who have given over $1 million; and Home Depot cofounder Bernard Marcus, who contributed $600,000 between 2001-2003. A 2003 investigative report in The American Conservative put F.D.D.’s annual budget at close to $3 million. In 2008, an F.D.D. spokesman, Brian Wise, confirmed that the foundation had received at least one grant from the U.S. State Department worth $487,000.
Ledeen believes that trying to negotiate with the Iranian regime is nothing short of appeasement. The U.S., he advocates, should work closely with the “Iranian people” to bring about regime change by arming opposition forces inside the country, by acts of sabotage, by targeted assassinations, by sanctions, by rallying the Iranian community in exile. The most promising ally in this last effort, according to Ledeen, is the former shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi.
The crown prince, in turn, has sought closer ties with the neocons, particularly with Ledeen. He addressed the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which Ledeen cofounded and whose members at one time or another included Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, and Douglas Feith. The prince had also met privately with top Israeli officials, including Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, his links to Israel go back to the early 1980s, when he had approached Ariel Sharon with a plan to overthrow the mullahs in Iran.
On May 19, 2003, at a press conference attended by Ledeen, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback announced that he would introduce a bill, the Iran Democracy Act, seeking $50 million dollars to promote democracy in Iran and to fund Iranian opposition groups. Supporters of the Iran Democracy Act included the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Commenting on this support, former AIPAC director, Morris Amitay, noted that it was natural for Jewish groups to openly back regime change in Iran.
The introduction of such a bill was significant because it would extend financial support to Iranian opposition groups, much as the congress did in the case of Ahmed Chalabi’s National Iraqi Congress. Washington, in effect, would be taking a decisive step towards making regime change in Iran official U.S. policy.
Prior to congressional action, Reza Pahlavi spoke at a private briefing on Capitol Hill organized by the Iranian Jewish Public Affairs Committee (IJPAC). In it he urged Hill staffers to support the idea of funding the Iranian opposition. Later, the president of IJPAC in Los Angeles, Pooya Dayanim, observed in the The Forward: “There is a pact emerging between hawks in the administration, Jewish groups and Iranian supporters of Reza Pahlavi to push for regime change.” Jews, he added, were “in love with Pahlavi” because they saw his father’s reign as a golden era for Jews.
In the end, the bill did not pass. Enough senators apparently were able to recall America’s disastrous role in bankrolling Ahmed Chalabi. The bill did pass, however, as a non-binding Sense of the Senate Resolution, denouncing Iran’s lack of democracy. As such it achieved its main goal of hindering the State Department from exploring further dialogue with Tehran.
Most recently, Michael Ledeen was heard commenting on a March 12, 2012 60 Minutes interview with Israel’s ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, in which the former spymaster urged that Iran’s dissidents be better supplied militarily, its nuclear labs sabotaged and more of its scientists targeted for assassination. Ledeen praised the interview. No one, however, noted the inconvenient fact that it was Dagan’s organization, the Mossad, that had built the shah’s hated SAVAK police apparatus—that led to the anti-shah revolution.
Security & Democracy
Those two words—the words chosen for the title of that 2007 conference in Prague—are key to understanding how the Jewish state is portrayed today.
Most Americans know Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” And, because it is surrounded by undemocratic, despotic regimes, its security necessitates having military hegemony in the area, which includes its own arsenal of over 200 nuclear bombs, as well as the full force of the U.S. military. Americans get it when Prime Minister Netanyahu comes before them and says that he, as the leader of a sovereign state, has the duty to make sure that Iran does not get the bomb that would threaten to wipe out his small democracy.
Zionists, particularly pro-Likud Zionists, see it differently.
Israel is not a democracy. No one put this more bluntly than Ariel Sharon. Quoted in an article entitled “Democracy and the Jewish State,” in Yedioth Ahronoth, May 28, 1993, the former prime minister noted that it is no accident that the words “democracy” or “democratic” are absent from Israel’s Declaration of Independence. What did the framers of Israel’s constitution have in mind? Sharon answers: “The intention of Zionism was not to bring democracy, needless to say. It was solely motivated by the creation in Eretz-Israel of a Jewish state belonging to all the Jewish people and to the Jewish people alone. That is why any Jew of the Diaspora has the right to immigrate to Israel and to become a citizen of Israel.” Eretz-Israel, by the way, here refers to the biblical land area roughly corresponding to what is known today as Palestine, Canaan, the Promised Land and the Holy Land; it includes all of the West Bank.
Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper pointed out in our April-May 2012 Link that Israel began exercising its exclusive claim over Eretz-Israel in 1948 when, after seizing half of the partition area allocated to the Arabs, it reduced the Palestinian population living within its expanded borders from 950,000 to 154,000—a drop of 80%. Then, following the occupation of 1967, it established “facts on the ground” to foreclose any coherent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state. In fact, Israel denies even having an occupation, since it believes all Palestinian lands are part of its biblical inheritance. Those Palestinians who were living on Eretz-Israel in 1948 were caretakers, waiting for the owners to return. And those currently living in Israel or on the West Bank are there at the sufferance of the Jewish people.
So what causes the hostility of Arabs toward Israel? Again, the clearest answer comes from the Zionist militant Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the leader for whom Benjamin Netanyahu’s father worked. Jabotinsky saw the Zionist movement as a colonial project, no different from European colonialism. In his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” he argued that attempts at dialogue with the Arabs are fantasy, as no nation—and he recognized the Palestinian people as such—would agree to a foreign entity being established on its lands. His conclusion: Jews must be so dominant militarily as to make it impossible for any of its neighbors to impede its colonial ambitions. Part of this strategy is keeping those neighboring regimes weak. Iraq is a case in point.
Iran is another. In April 1951, the shah of Iran, then the constitutional monarch, appointed Mohammad Mosaddegh prime minister. He turned out to be an exceptionally popular social reformer, introducing unemployment compensation, healthcare benefits, land reform laws, and public works projects. He also strengthened democratic political institutions by limiting the monarchy’s powers, cutting the shah’s personal budget, and transferring royal lands back to the state.
He also called for the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry. On May 1, 1951, Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), later known as British Petroleum or BP, which was the pillar of Britain’s economy and its influence in the Middle East. In response, the British government announced a blockade of all Iranian oil, reducing Tehran’s income to near zero.
The prime minister also severed all relations with Israel. The shah had welcomed the Jewish state as a “little America” in the heart of the Middle East, and he pursued a policy of friendship in order to keep in good with the Zionist lobby in the U.S., which he saw as wielding great influence in the congress and in the media. Mosaddegh, on the other hand, saw Israel as the tool of Anglo-American hegemony in the Middle East. His popularity rose.
In August 1953, the shah, who opposed many of his prime minister’s reforms, including his nationalization of AIOC, dismissed him. Mosaddeqh refused to go, his followers rioted, and the shah fled to Rome.
Winston Churchill called his war-time friend, now U.S. president, Dwight Eisenhower and suggested that Mosaddegh, despite his disgust with socialism and all his democratic reforms, was, or would become, dependent on the Soviet Union. Eisenhower agreed that the Iranian prime minister should go. Under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a senior C.I.A. officer, the C.I.A. and British intelligence funded and led a covert operation to depose Mosaddegh with the help of military forces loyal to the shah.
The plot, called “Operation Ajax,” hinged on orders signed by the shah to dismiss the prime minister and replace him with Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans. Mosaddegh was deposed and on August 22, 1953, the shah returned in triumph. A few weeks later, the U.S. government granted Iran a $45-million emergency loan. Two months after that, Iran resumed diplomatic relations with Great Britain. On August 5, 1954, a new compact was made with the AIOC, and the oil company was compensated for its seized property. The following year the Iranian government and American oil interests in Iran concluded an agreement for an unprecedented 25-75 percent division of profits in favor of Iran.
With the monarchy restored, relations with Israel strengthened. In July 1960, Iran recognized the Jewish state. Israelis, in turn, used their influence in Washington to convince congress to continue the sale of American military equipment to Tehran, while, at the same time, the shah, using his vast oil revenues, purchased up to $500,000,000 worth of arms and police equipment from Israel in an arrangement called “Project Flowers.”
And the shah was buying something else. In 1957, he enlisted Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, and the C.I.A., to create SAVAK, the dreaded secret police force, whose personnel was trained by Mossad to suppress all opposition to the shah, with no limits on the use of torture tools to break dissenters. Over the years SAVAK killed and tortured thousands of Iranians.
It took some 27 years before an exiled cleric, who had been smuggling anti-shah, anti-U.S., anti- Zionist audiocassette sermons into Iran—the precursor of today’s social media uprisings—returned in triumph to establish an Islamic republic.
In March 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressed her regret that Mosaddegh had been ousted, admitting that “the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America.”
Following the shah into exile was his son Reza Pahlavi, born October 31, 1960, who, upon his father’s death in 1980, became heir apparent to the Peacock throne. This is the man, now 51 years old, who participated in the pro-Likud sponsored conference in Prague. Beginning in 2003, the heir began addressing the Iranian community via the internet and satellite television, earning him the sobriquet “The Internet Prince.”
The activism of the exiled, pro-Israel shah-in-waiting did not go unnoticed by the neoconservatives.
Back to the Future
In our Link “Timeline” article, it was on Oct. 1, 2002 that the C.I.A. delivered to the White House its National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.) on the case for war with Iraq. This was a classified report reflecting the consensus of analysts from 16 agencies, and we now know that in it the C.I.A. hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, admitting it wasn’t sure he had them.
Three days later, C.I.A. director George Tenet issued an unclassified white paper, with 79 of the original 93 pages whitened out. This report concluded that Baghdad in fact had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program.
Over the next two weeks, a joint resolution authorizing the use of force was passed by both houses of congress.
We now come to the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran released in 2010. In it the analysts found credible evidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 at the direction of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who issued a fatwa—recently reaffirmed—against the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. According to a March 18, 2012 front-page article in The New York Times, “American intelligence analysts still believe that the Iranians have not gotten the go-ahead from Ayatollah Khamenei to revive the program.”
Israeli intelligence experts also warn against attacking Iran. In April of this year, Yuval Diskin, recently retired chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s FBI, accused the Netanyahu government of “misleading the public” about the likely effectiveness of an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Such a strike, warned Diskin, would dramatically accelerate Iran’s nuclear program.
Even the present head of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, concluded in an April 25, 2012, interview with Haaretz that he did not think Iran’s top leadership would risk building a nuclear weapon.
Not to be deterred, Netanyahu sounds the alarms of war at every opportunity. At an AIPAC gathering on March 12, 2012, the Israeli prime minister warned that “time was running out to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and diplomacy wasn’t working.” And his recently formed unity government with Shaul Mofaz, the Iranian-born head of Kadima, the nation’s largest opposition party, has heightened fears of an Israeli attack on Iran. On May 11, 2012, Israel’s TV Channel 10 reported that authorities in Washington, D.C., were worried that the Netanyahu/Mofaz alliance brought together two influential party leaders who would both favor an attack on Iran.
Meanwhile, the neocons here at home issue their own dire warnings.
John Bolton has dismissed the N.I.E. assessment as “famously distorted.” In a March 28, 2012 posting on GerardDirect.com, he wrote that diplomacy and sanctions were not working and that the only real alternative left to a nuclear Iran was “a pre-emptive military force.”
And Douglas Feith, writing in the February 12, 2012 National Review Online, concluded: “There is no realistic prospect that Iran’s leaders can be negotiated out of the determination to obtain nuclear weapons.”
William Kristol continues to chide President Obama for putting off action against Iran. In an Oct. 24, 2011 issue of the Weekly Standard, he declared: “It’s long since time for the United States to speak to this [Iranian] regime in the language it understands, force … We can strike at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and weaken them. And we can hit the regime’s nuclear weapons program, and set it back. And lest the administration hesitate to act out of fear of lack of support at home, congress should consider authorizing the use of force against Iranian entities that facilitate attacks on our troops … and against the regime’s nuclear weapons program.”
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, calls these neocons the new crazies. But are they? They are well educated, most with post-graduate degrees, many from ivy-league colleges. They are passionately dedicated to advancing the best interests of Israel; Sheldon Adelson, one of the few neocons to have served in the U.S. military, regrets that the uniform he wore was not an Israeli uniform. They have vast sums of money to spend on think-tanks, media outlets—and politicians.
And, despite their championing of a calamitous war in Iraq, and notwithstanding the most recent N.I.E. report, and even assessments from Israeli intelligence agencies, they believe they can convince Americans, and certainly most members of congress, that the United States should send its young men and women yet again into another Middle East war.
In the Saban Center for Middle East Policy’s newest Middle East Memo, “Security in the Persian Gulf: New Frameworks for the Twenty-First Century,” Kenneth Pollack proposes “a new security architecture for the region.” According to a summary on the center’s site:
Pollack analyzes security arrangements in other parts of the world and focuses on two options: expanding the GCC and turning it into a formal military alliance and creating an arrangement modeled on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. In weighing each option, Pollack finds that the latter can better furnish a path toward peace and security.
Any consideration of how likely Pollack’s CSCE model would contribute to “peace and security” in the Persian Gulf requires an understanding of whose interests the author and his employer represent.
The Saban Center was established in 2002 with a pledge of nearly $13 million from the Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban to the Brookings Institution. Having once admitted to the New York Times, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel,” Saban told an Israeli conference in 2010 that establishing think tanks was one of his “three ways to be influential in American politics” — along with making donations to political parties and controlling media outlets — so that he could “protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship.”
Before becoming a senior fellow at the Saban Center, Kenneth Pollack was a member of the U.S. National Security Council. While advising on American security, Pollack was mentioned in relation to the 2005 criminal indictment against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman as one of the government officials who provided classified information to the two former AIPAC employees about Washington’s Iran policy. Presumably, all three were motivated, like Saban, by their overriding concern for the security of the Jewish state.
In light of Saban and Pollack’s profound concern for Israel’s security, “Security in the Persian Gulf” should be seen as yet another attempt to advance Israeli interests in the region by influencing American politics.
Interview with Miko Peled, Buffalo, New York, March 11, 2012.
Miko Peled is Author of General’s Son: Journey of An Israeli In Palestine.
Interviewer is Russel Mokhiber.
Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation at the center of which is a government informant, The Nation magazine reports.
The publication cites the findings of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. The Center has tracked 138 terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since 2001.
As the informants work for money or a reduction of their own criminal charges, their testimony may well be tainted. What’s particularly distressing, writes Petra Bartosiewicz, a New York City journalist in the July 2nd issue of the magazine, is that the FBI informants “have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself.”
The reporter explains that “Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.”
One judge hearing a “terrorism” case, Colleen McMahon, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said it was “beyond question that the government created the crime here” and criticized the FBI for sending informants “trolling along the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role—any role—in criminal activity.”
Adds Amna Akbar, a supervising attorney at CLEAR, the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project of the City University of New York Law School: “The FBI approaches the vast majority of our clients as potential informants to partake in mass surveillance of Muslim communities, unconnected to any real criminal investigation.”
Within a year of the 9/11 attacks, Bartosiewicz writes, the FBI reassigned nearly half of its field office positions formerly devoted to the ‘War on Drugs’ to the new ‘War on Terror.” It also launched 3,000 new counterterrorism investigations. Today, of an $8.1 billion budget, the FBI allocates $4.9 billion to intelligence and counterterrorism, “approximately $1.7 billion more than all other federal crimes combined,” the journalist reports.
The author says the FBI is operating in a post-9/11 environment of relaxed guidelines that allow the FBI “to engage in lengthy and extensive surveillance of individuals and communities with little or no evidence of any wrongdoing afoot.”
If Americans are not shocked that real criminal prosecutions are being scrapped by FBI Director Robert Mueller in favor of “terrorism” probes which may be cooked up by the FBI to feed the nation’s Islamophobic paranoia, perhaps they should be.
A related article published in the same issue of the magazine quotes Andrew Shryock, a University of Michigan professor, having this to say about prosecutions using government informants: “It’s fabricated police work. And the disturbing thing is not that it produces arrests but that the public tolerates it.”
Peter Mertens, leader of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, believes the Eurozone debt crisis is pushing member states towards “a very large number of social conflicts.” Mertens told RT that Europe faces three alternatives – saving the euro with “authoritarian measures by taking national sovereignty overnight to the European level”, breaking up into “two, three or four Europes”, or adopting a socialist model, “where banking system is public, where energy system is public, where there is democracy.” He believes Europe needs radical changes to its financial sector.
UAE security officers detained, tortured, and killed Emirati poet and news editor Habib al-Sayegh in August 2019, shortly after he published a column opposing UAE normalization with Israel, according to a newly published book.
“Princes and Thieves,” a book by investigative journalist Matthew Cole published on 25 October, alleges that UAE security officers raided Sayegh’s Abu Dhabi home shortly after the publication of the column, hooded him in front of his wife and took him to a detention facility where he was tortured to death.
His interrogators reportedly pulled out several of his teeth with pliers and beat him repeatedly with a sharp metal object.
On 11 August 2019, Sayegh criticized the UAE’s plan to normalize relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords in his weekly column for Khaleej newspaper. The column was titled “Israel Is Our Real Enemy and A Dangerous Project.”
Sayegh described Israel as “a real and natural enemy” while questioning “who authorized the normalizers to speak on behalf of everyone?”
Nine days after the column was published, Emirati state media announced his death, without stating a cause. … continue
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