Is Israel slyly inciting genocide against Alawites as prelude to creation of Kosovo-style enclave in Syria?
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | July 11, 2012
Within the past week, fellows at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have used rather unfortunate analogies to describe the plight of Syria’s besieged Alawite minority. The comparison of the Alawites to two of the region’s least popular interlopers in Arab and Muslim memory was hardly calculated to endear them to an already resentful Sunni majority.
Writing in the neoconservative flagship Weekly Standard on July 6, Tony Badran claimed:
Bashar al-Assad’s campaign against his Sunni adversaries recalls the strategy employed by the Crusaders, as invading European armies fortified themselves against various Muslim coalitions in the Levant, from the 12th to the 13th century. Indeed, the Crusader castles dotting the Western part of Syria may give us some sort of insight into the regime’s military thinking, and perhaps a preview of its future.
Three days later, Jonathan Kay wrote an oddly sympathetic piece in Canada’s staunchly pro-Israel National Post:
A small, marginalized people, kicked around the Middle East for centuries by Muslim empires, finally carves out an independent home for itself on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. But life remains precarious: Islamists seek to delegitimize the newly established homeland, declaiming the ruling sect as a gang of infidel occupiers. Now, the simmering hatred of the occupied people finally has transformed into an unstoppable political and military intifada — cheered on by Western human-rights advocates.
The country I have just described is Syria. For all the pathological hatred that President Bashar Assad and his father Hafez have focused on Israel, the histories of the two countries betray some striking similarities. And those similarities help explain why the Assad clan and its hangers-on refuse to be dislodged from Damascus.
Like Israel’s Jews, members of the Alawi sect in Syria regard their control of the nation as an existential issue. There is only one Alawi state, just as there is only one Jewish state, and its destruction would mean the end of the Alawis as a political entity on the world stage — probably forever. With the passage of generations, it might even mean their gradual assimilation into other nations, as with Zoroastrians, Samaritans and a hundred other now-obscure Middle Eastern peoples.
It may be just a coincidence that in the space of a few days two fellows from the same pro-Israel think tank that has been in the forefront of calls for regime change in Damascus compared the ruling Alawites to Crusaders and Jews. However, given Israel’s record of fomenting strife in the region along ethnic and religious lines, the possibility that these articles are part of a deliberate campaign of incitement should not be discounted.
Over the past year, there have been a number of intriguing references in the Israeli press to the Jewish state’s purported concern for the plight of the Alawites. In an August 3, 2011 op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, John Myhill wrote:
At some point, as the civil war in Syria develops, the Alawites will have no choice but to retreat to their mountain stronghold in the northwest and appeal for military assistance to protect them and help them establish their own state there (as they unsuccessfully petitioned the French in the interwar period).
From personal contact with Alawites, I know that they are already beginning to discuss the possibility of appealing to Israel for help. If they do – and they probably will at some point – and the international community does not help them, Israel should step in to aid the Alawites, which would also mean helping their Shi’ite allies, who will by that point be similarly embattled.
According to Myhill, this humanitarian act would also have strategic benefits for Tel Aviv:
The result would be the formation of a bloc of states in the western Levant which would share the common interest of avoiding Sunni domination. For the first time, Israel would have actual state allies in the region, as opposed to temporary peace treaties.
Then in early January this year, Haaretz reported the same humanitarian impulse from an even more unlikely source:
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz said Tuesday that Israel is preparing to absorb Alawite refugees once Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime collapses, which he expects to happen in the coming months.
Analyzing the IDF’s improbable humanitarianism, the Beirut-based political analyst Ghassan Dahhan observed:
Let’s assume that Israel’s analysis is correct in which Assad would fall after which a civil war erupts in Syria between Sunnis and Alawites. Given the sectarian composition of Syrian society the Alawites would find themselves at the end of the gun barrel, and an exodus could take place in similar vein with the Christians of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Looking for safe refuge, many Alawites might feel forced to accept Israel’s offer to be resettled in the Golan and subsequently seek its protection from the Syrian Sunni majority.
The current population of the Golan currently stands at less than a hundred thousand, consisting mostly of Druze. Even a minor flow of Alawite refugees to the Golan would thus have significant demographic consequences for the configuration of the territory’s society. The Israeli occupied Golan would in effect be turned into de-facto Alawite enclave. For Israel to grant Alawite refugees legal status would be unacceptable to most Israelis, especially if the size of refugees is tangible.
The option that would render Israel the best position is to encourage the creation of a Kosovo-style Alawite state.
The reference to Kosovo brings to mind an article in the Atlantic from almost two decades ago, in which Robert D. Kaplan predicted the inevitable Balkanization of Syria:
Syria will not remain the same. It could become bigger or smaller, but the chance that any territorial solution will prove truly workable is slim indeed. Some Middle East specialists mutter about the possibility that a future Alawite state will be carved out of Syria. Based in mountainous Latakia, it would be a refuge for Alawites after Assad passes from the scene and Muslim fundamentalists—Sunnis, that is—take over the government. This state would be supported not only by Lebanese Maronites but also by the Israeli Secret Service, which would see no contradiction in aiding former members of Assad’s regime against a Sunni Arab government in Damascus.
Could it be that Tel Aviv and its American lobby are slyly inciting genocide against the Alawites as a prelude to the creation of an Israel-dependent Kosovo-style enclave somewhere in Syria? This would certainly be in keeping with the strategy for the Middle East outlined in the early 1980s by Oded Yinon, as summarized by Khalil Nakhleh:
The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.
July 11, 2012 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Alawi, Alawite, Israel, Middle East, Syria | Leave a comment
Israel Disses US While Seeking ‘Bi-Lateral Alliance’ with Russia
By FRANKLIN LAMB | CounterPunch | July 6, 2012
Beirut – Two interpretations by the participants themselves, of what significant international meetings achieved, the first on 6/25/12 and the second five days later, remind us about subjectivity in the eyes of the beholders.
Post-event statements, whether following last weekend’s Geneva meeting on Syria which produced markedly different interpretations of the final communiqué language by the Russian and American Foreign Ministers, Sergei Lavrov (that Syria’s President Bashar Assad need not necessarily depart-depending on what the Syrian people decide) and Hillary Clinton, (Assad’s departure is absolutely required) may have sent French, Russian and English language interpreters looking for their thesaurus.
Similarly, vastly divergent Russian-Israeli interpretations about what was agreed to during the 24 hour “ just passing through” visit by Vladimir Putin to Palestine and the Zionist lobby’s touting of “ a new Israel-Russia bi-lateral alliance” suggests serious wishful thinking by one side according to an official at the Russian Embassy in Beirut with whom this observer discussed last week’s Putin visit.
At a joint news conference after their meeting, Mr. Netanyahu said he and Mr. Putin had agreed that the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran “presents a grave danger first of all to Israel, and to the region and the world as a whole.” Israel, Netanyahu announced on 6/25/12, to raised eyebrows from some among the 400 member visiting Russian delegation, expects the once and likely future superpower to support expanded sanctions against Tehran, demand a halt to all uranium enrichment by Iran, insist on the removal of all enriched uranium from Iran and the dismantling of an underground nuclear facility near the city of Qum.
For Putin’s part, he only proffered that he and Netanyahu had discussed Syria and the Iranian nuclear program and that the talks had been “useful”. During his short visit Putin inaugurated a memorial in Netanya for Soviet troops killed in World War II and presumably had others motives given Russia’s interest in Israel’s defense industry. In the last two years Russia has purchased 12 drones from different Israeli companies.
The newly inaugurated Russian president, who has said he regarded the breakup of the Soviet Union as a geopolitical catastrophe, defended the Iranian people’s right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes but pointed out at the same time that Iran should guarantee non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, but in any case, the problem should be solved peacefully, by way of talks.
Israel’s Prime Minister repeatedly expressed reservations about Russia’s role in the long-stagnant Israeli-Palestinian “peace process”. He complained to Putin that Russia, a member of the so-called quartet of Middle East peacemakers has consistently sided with the Palestinians during disputes. Netanyahu called on Putin to urge the Palestinians to return to negotiations but received a puzzled look from his guest as if Putin might have been wondering why Israel has not suspended illegal settlements expansion and land confiscations, as the Palestinians and the international community have demanded for over four decades. Undaunted, Netanyahu appeared not to notice Putin’s quizzical expression while insisting that he was sure that the Russian visit would improve ties in agriculture, science, technology and space, “among other fields’.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s staff explained that the Soviet Union had been hostile to Israel and now relations should improve while Defense Minister Ehud Barak said at an Independence Party meeting that “Russia is a very important world power, a country that played a very important role in Syria’s history in the past few years and that is why it will play a key role in the shaping of post-Assad Syria.” Barak also stressed Russia’s importance in “the international effort vis-à-vis Iran in terms of sanctions and diplomacy and his belief that Putin understood that in dealing with Iran, Israel faces a decision between “bombing or the bomb” and if Israel doesn’t attack, Iran will eventually obtain nuclear weapons.
Yet, according to Russian Embassy discussions in Beirut, Putin repeatedly warned Israeli officials that the very existence of Israel was at risk if it attacked Iran and that Israel should not delude itself that Russia will ever sanction an attack on Iran or that Russia will get involved with Israel’s attack in anyway. Putin emphasized that Israel should think twice before taking any action on Iran and should learn lessons from the United States’ experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Look what happened to America in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Putin said. “I told Obama also. You don’t need to jump to things too early; you don’t need to act before thinking. In Iraq there is a pro-Iranian government after everything that happened there. You need to think well before doing something you’ll be sorry about.” Putin also told Netanyahu that Russia will recognize a Palestinian state.
Several high ranking Bush administration officials, drawing salaries from US taxpayers while serving Israel, and who pushed the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq are currently attempting the same fate for Iran. Backed by the Zionist lobby, they and the Russians are in agreement that only US incompetence gave both countries to Iran with more quite likely in the pipeline from the Persian Gulf area.
Arab and Islamophobe, Ruthie Blum, former senior editor at the Jerusalem Post, and author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring’, claims that President Obama and the American taxpayers have betrayed Israel.
Blum, writing in the current issue of Israel Hayom explains that “Since the minute that Barack Obama became president of the United States nearly four years ago, it was clear that the Jewish state was being tossed aside like an unappreciated, loyal, long-time wife for a far more alluring, utterly inappropriate, and dangerous lover. Indeed, Obama has not hidden the hots he has always had for the Islamic world; nor has he been the least bit discreet about his attraction to its more anti-Western elements. It is the height of tragic irony that, in the absence of its previous protection by its adulterous spouse, America, the Israeli government has nowhere to turn but to Russia.
Netanyahu’s staff, which sent her piece to US Zionist lobby outfits, reportedly sees, as their boss does, Israel’s very existence at stake, and he’s prepared for Israel to go it alone or link with Russia because he’s “unwilling to entrust the survival of the Jewish state to America.”
Meanwhile, during a talk-show when Ruthie finally gave him a chance to get a word in edgewise, Israeli journalist and TV show host, Dan Margalit, announced that: “In a time when the Arab-Left-anti-Semitic axis is doing its utmost to delegitimize and marginalize Israel, Putin’s visit has the power to counter dozens of evil-hearted artists and musicians who boycott Israel. If such visits were the norm, Israel would have laid the red carpet at Ben-Gurion International Airport and welcomed U.S. President Barack Obama by now, but he is understandably not trusted here while Romney is plus if Mitt is elected President he promised his first trip will be to Israel. Obama has never come once since he became President.”
The Obama administration, but not apparently the Congress, was taken aback and issued a statement from Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman: “Governor Romney has said he would do the opposite of what President Obama has done in our relations with Israel. Now he must specify how — does that mean he would reverse President Obama’s policies of sending Israel the largest security assistance packages in history? Does it mean he would let Israel stand alone at the United Nations, or that he would stop funding the Iron Dome system? Does it mean he would abandon the coalition working together to confront Iran’s nuclear ambitions?”
Netanyahu advisor Benny Goldberg explained Israel’s seemingly awkward overtures to Russia as realpolitik. “Look, it’s like the coming Mitt Romney visit. We will welcome him as well as Obama if he decides to visit. After all, in the US Congress we seek support from both sides of the aisle so it’s logical that we want the same relationship with Moscow as we have with Washington.”
So much for the Obama administration’s fantasy of the US-Israel special, one of a kind devoted, legendary, eternal, rock solid, unbreakable, forever and ever iron-clad bond and indivisible alliance which gives America a reliable, democratic strategic Gemini-twins like partnership with America and her very generous, if uninformed, taxpayers.
Some cynical Congressional staffers have commented that Israel already has the US government in its back pocket and that Congress will guarantee that it remains so; therefore Israel has nothing to lose by intimating to the Russians that will discard the US at least to the extent of promoting Russian interests in the region. After all, as is well known in the White House, Israel sold to the USSR, through a third party, stolen top secret specialized code-word compartmented (TS/SCI) intelligence via Jonathan Pollard, which from his KGB tenure Putin presumably has direct knowledge of.”
Goldberg also explained recently that in the past it was only logic that dictated switching Israeli acceptance of the “keeping the Golan Heights quiet Alawi Shia regime in Syria” which at the time made sense given the concomitant danger from Sunni Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. But now Israel has switched its support for a Sunni regime in Syria that it hopes will confront Iran and Hezbollah. Realpolitik also dictates that if the Sunnis fail to topple Assad Israel can live with that also because it believes that Israel’s annexation of the Golan will not be challenged with more than words.
There is little conflict between Russia’s and Israel’s interests because neither country is as powerful as it would like to be in the region. Russia has few of the options it had during the Cold War and Israel has little influence in the outcome in Syria or in Egypt.
On the other hand, Russia and Israel do have some complementary interests. One example is Azerbaijan where Russian is a major weapons provider for the regime and the Israelis are also selling it large amounts of weapons. The CIA suspects it has set up a base from which to spy on, and, according to rumors, prepare to attack Iran. Apparently Russia does not feel threatened by Israeli involvement in Azerbaijan or that both are there, and each operate in ways that would appear to be in conflict but don’t, according to Stratford’s George Freeman.
There are also some bilateral interests on an economic and a strategic level, because Russia is looking for new partners in the area.
In addition, both Russia and Israel have benefited enormously from U.S. “terrorism wars” in the Islamic world. It is not just that these wars alienate Muslims, which is beneficial to Israel, but they also help the Russians due to the debilitating human and economic cost for America.
As the US staggers, and with Russia and China practicing shrewd Middle East politics, one imagines that Israeli leaders might be recalling the days and reasons that the Zionist colonial enterprise dumped England for America following World War II.
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Beirut and is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com
July 6, 2012 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, Netanyahu, Obama, Putin, Russia, United States, Vladimir Putin, Zionism | Leave a comment
On History and Intellectual Courage
Empire Strikes Black | July 6, 2012
I want to talk about something which is taboo yet cliche. It is widely accepted yet universally denied. Those who talk about this are ridiculed as conspiracy theorists and racists. On the other hand, many people freely admit this reality but dismiss it as inconsequential and ‘the way it is’.
Jews dominate Hollywood, the global news media, and the global financial system. By extension it is often argued that ‘Jews run the world’. Essentially, one group of people with a unifying ideology and vested interest, is controlling the institutions by which we receive news. In addition to this, the film industry and cinematic media is something which we develop a very profound emotional attachment to and identify with closely. In other words, we are talking about an instrument of brainwashing. Is this not something we should talk about? If, for example, Hollywood, the global news media, and our ‘fiat money’ financial institutions were dominated by Arab Muslims, would we perceive this as a problem?
Of course we would, and rightly so. But this is not the case currently – we are afraid of speaking out and tackling this. Why?
What other group would be capable of attacking the world’s most powerful superpower, killing thousands in a sophisticated terror attack, and get away with it, blaming it on someone else? 9/11 is but one example, the USS Liberty is another. Most Americans have not even heard about the Liberty – a false flag attack designed to draw the USA into nuclear war with Soviet Russia.
The truth of the matter is, Jews are largely exempted from criticism in the West, and this runs much much deeper than any of us care to admit. Most people reading this are subconsciously thinking: ‘He just hates Jews because he’s Muslim’, ‘He’s a conspiracy theorist and he’s got nothing better to do’. Well, no I don’t hate Jews. No I’m not Muslim. No I’m not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ either; I am merely trying to exercise intellectual courage. We are constantly singing the praises of freedom, liberalism and democracy, but we are nothing more than a servile herd of cattle when it comes to being intellectually courageous. Our claims of love for democracy and freedom are utterly hollow without this.
Even the more ‘enlightened’ activists and bloggers (no point talking about the bought-and-paid-for mainstreamers) are more obsessed with catering to their readers’ ignorance and stroking their own ego, than performing an honest appraisal of these issues. Let’s be honest – it’s nice to get lots of ‘likes’ and to be patted on the back by your nodding, agreeing peers. To paraphrase Mark Twain, if you find yourself on the side of the majority, then it’s time to check yourself.
It is clear – talking about this issue makes one severely unpopular. This fact alone is a startling clue as to the underlying truths. Those who discuss this topic are stigmatized and ostracized, and it would be silly to think that there is no reason for this.
On a not unrelated note, I want you to help me with something. The popular reading of history portrays Jewish people as perennial victims who are persecuted anywhere they go for no reason other than that they are Jews, and irrational ‘anti-Semites’ hate them. The ‘holocaust’ is a paradigmatic example of this, and this is another issue which cannot be discussed in an open forum (so much for democracy). What I would like help with is this: history is replete with massacres, murders, torture, wars, and a myriad of different crimes that have been perpetrated by everybody from the Romans to the Americans; can you name a single historical event wherein, in the popular reading of history, Jews are portrayed as the aggressors and criminals?
Perhaps Jews really are perennial victims and have never done anything wrong. Or perhaps our reading of history is manipulated, censored, and reconstructed to convey a certain narrative? We often repeat the adage: history is written by the victor. Is there some truth in the idea that history is written by the powerful? If so, are we not being subjected to what is essentially mind control, whereby we harbor a completely incorrect interpretation of history? And is it not time that we started to put all historical events, especially those which we are told not to question, under the microscope?
Related articles
- There are two kinds of people in this world (empirestrikesblack.com)
July 6, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Antisemitism, Hollywood, Jews, United States, USS Liberty | Leave a comment
US-Israel war against Ethiopian Muslims
Rehmat’s World | July 5, 2012
“Imperialist powers have always labeled as terrorists the people who fight for their right. Irishmen were terrorists until they signed an agreement. Abbas was a terrorist. Now, he is a friend,” Mohamed Hassan, former Ethiopian diplomat in Washington, Beijing and Brussels.
“Israel sees Islam as the greatest danger to its dominance over the Middle East, itself built on cruelty, violation and oppression,” – Professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi (Haifa University).
The Ethiopian Muslim majority is sick of the US-Israel backed Meles Zenawi crime dynasty and want regime change. Tens of thousands of Muslims and Christians are demonstrating in various cities especially the country’s capital Addis Ababa against the Meles Zenawi regime. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s Holy Synod in exile, Archbishop Abune Melketsekik, and other church leaders have called on the people of Ethiopia to boycott all businesses that are affiliated with dictator Meles Zenawi’s ruling party, TPLF.
Meles Zenawi, the chairman of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) militant group, is half Eritrean and naturalized Yemeni. He maintains very close relations with both Tel Aviv and Washington. Meles’ legal adviser, Fasil Nahom is half Eritrean and half Jewish.
Meles Zenawi as country’s prime minister visited the Zionist entity in 2004 where he was praised a “friend of Israel” by then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. There is a 125,000-strong Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel whose members are routinely targeted by the racist Jewish majority.
The Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia and several other groups have asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Meles Zenawi for the 2003 genocide of the Anuak people of the Gambella region in Ethiopia. However, ICC Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo has refused to take an action in this regard.
The Zionist entity’s collaboration with anti-Muslim Ethiopian regimes goes back to King Haile Selassie rule. Selassie’s 3,100-strong ‘Emergency Police’ was trained and supplied with arms by the Israeli armed forces and Mossad. It was in 1971 when Gen. Haim Bar-Lev visited Ethiopia – two strategic islands (Halep and Fatima) were opened for the Israeli Navy. Late Israeli Gen. Matti Peled had admitted that it was Israeli protection which saved the King from three assassination attempts. When Haile Selassie was overthrown by a Marxist coup lead by Mengistu in 1974 – the Zionist regime changed its loyalties to continue their genocide of Muslims in both Ethiopia and Eritrea. Tel Aviv increased its military and diplomatic links with the new Marxist-Leninist regime. The Israeli cooperation has continued under the Ethiopian prime minister Meles, a horrific human rights abuser, in power since the fall of Marxist-Leninist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.
Muslim presence in Abyssinia (currently Ethiopia) goes back to the early 7th century when its powerful Orthodox Christian King Ashama (Nejash in Arabic) converted to Islam during the Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) life time (in 616 CE).
Thomas C. Mountain, an independent journalist living in Eriterea, recently wrote an article, entitled ’Islam Ignites in Muslim Majority Ethiopia ‘ exposing Washington’s strategy to maintain dictatorships in the African continent.
While Ethiopia is historically portrayed as a Christian country, in reality, most Ethiopians are of the Islamic faith. Starting with the Oromo people, who make up at least half or more of the Ethiopian population, 40 million or more, and are almost entirely Muslim; and then adding the Afars and Somali people of the Ogaden, it becomes indisputable that Ethiopia is a majority Muslim country.
So when for the first time in modern Ethiopian history the leadership of the Islamic community called for the overthrow of the government, and are joined in this call by the leadership of the Ethiopian Christian Orthodox Church, it means only one thing, that the end of the hated USA backed Meles Zenawi regime is finally in sight.
With insurgencies growing in size and strength throughout Ethiopia, in the east, south, west and north; soaring inflation and economic hardships; and now the unprecedented politicization of the leadership of the Muslim community, the consensus of those in the know in the Horn of Africa is that the foreign funded rule of Meles Zenawi may last a year, a year and a half at best, possibly even less.
And once Meles is driven from power and his military either destroyed or having joined the uprising, who will the USA have left to enforce Pax Americana in the strategically critical Horn of Africa?
Related articles
- Ethiopian Regime war on ancient Ethiopian Monasteries (ethiopiahot.wordpress.com)
July 5, 2012 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Addis Ababa, Africa, Ethiopia, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Meles Zenawi, Mengistu Haile Mariam, United States | Leave a comment
How Zionists Occupy Two Nations: America and Palestine
By Mohamed Khodr • December 3rd, 2008
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
MUST WATCH VIDEOS:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2451908450811690589 (MUST SEE DOCUMENTARY) “Occupation 101” on Israel’s Founding, Terrorism, and Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians out of their land)
http://ahmedismailibrahim.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/for-those-who-want-to-see-the-ugly-truth-of-israel-you-gotta-see-this-video-shot-in-1950/ (A Moving Video of Palestinian ethnic cleansing filmed in 1950)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWZTTrceV8
BBC’s “THE WAR PARTY—Zionism and Neocon Foreign Policy”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20155.htm (Must watch Danish Video on: THE ISRAEL Lobby)
Sources:
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0591/9105017.htm (Truman on having Jewish, not Arab, Constituents)
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/moshe_dayan.html (Moshe Dayan Quote on American aid)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20443.htm (jAlan Hart, ICH, June 8, 2008: Mr. Hart was a BBC journalist, an author, and researcher)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7729487.stm
Eviction in battle for East Jerusalem, November 15, 2008 (Fawzia al-Kurd)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081119/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictexpulsionjerusalem
Tent of expelled Jerusalem Palestinian family torn down, November 19, 2008
http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3560118,00.html
(Obama ‘s Letter to Bush: Hamas must recognize Israel 6?25/08 )
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3598462,00.html
(Obama in a Conference call with 900 Rabbis: Israel’s security is “sacrosanct”, Ynet, 9/18/08)
http://www.aipac.org/Publications/SpeechesByPolicymakers/Barack_Obama_-_AIPAC_Policy_Forum_2007.pdf (AIPAC: Barack Obama’s Speech: March 2, 2007)
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/rls/86530.htm (State Dept. Website and the Daniel Pearl Story)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E05E7DB1E3CF932A3575AC0A9649C8B63 (Interview with Dick Armey, NYT, Sept 1, 2002: The Way We Live now, Questions for Dick Armey—‘an attack on Israel is an attack on America”)
http://www.counterpunch.org/armey0502.html
(Counterpunch: “Rep. Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, May 2, 2002)
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/neoconQuotes.html
(Empire Builders: NeoConservatives and their Blueprint for U.S. Power: Almost all are Jewish)
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/11/lets-dont-be-naive-about-obama-and-the-jewish-establishment.html (Avraham Burg Quote)
http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2008/11/13/1000960/ders
“Dershowitz: I Helped Keep Carter Silent”, Jewish Telegraph Agency; November 13, 2008
http://njdc.typepad.com/njdcs_blog/2007/12/steve-sheffey-g.html
(December 04, 2007; “DEMOCRATS & ISRAEL” A summary of Democrats pandering to Israel)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279&contrassID=2&subContrassID=14&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
(White Man’s Burden, Ari Shavit; Haaretz), May 4, 2003)
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=648 (How the Jewish Lobby Pushed for the Iraq War)
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://backissues.cjrarchives.org/owners/ (Columbia Journal Review) “Who Owns What” in Media)
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0624-25.htm
Big Media Interlocks with Corporate America, 6/24/08)
(Sonoma University Research: 118 people compost membership of boards of directors of 10 biggest media)
http://www.corp-research.org/ (Info on Top 5 Media Conglomerates)
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Media-conglomerate
(Comprehensive Info on Media Conglomerates)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
The Weekly Standard/ Owned by Rupert Murdoch, William Kristol, Editor
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/5306/edition_id/98/format/html/displaystory.html (On Steve Grossman)
http://www.njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/051007/edcolHowNow.html
(Editor of New Jersey Jewish News on Rupert Murdoch)
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery04102003.html
Uri Avnery, “The Night After”, April 10, 2003
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1785
“9/11 Commission Chairmen Admit Whitewashing the Cause of the Attacks, August 7, 2006;”
http://www.newamericancentury.org/ “Project for American Century”
(List of signatories of Letter to Clinton, June 3, 1997 to attack Iraq)
Elliott Abrams Gary Bauer William J. Bennett Jeb Bush
Dick Cheney Eliot A. Cohen Midge Decter Paula Dobriansky Steve Forbes
Aaron Friedberg Francis Fukuyama Frank Gaffney Fred C. Ikle
Donald Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad I. Lewis Libby Norman Podhoretz
Dan Quayle Peter W. Rodman Stephen P. Rosen Henry S. Rowen
Donald Rumsfeld Vin Weber George Weigel Paul Wolfowitz
http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/1292/9212069b.html
Washington Report on the Middle East, Jews and Israel, AIPAC President Resigns After Being Taped Boasting of negotiating “Sect of State” for Clinton”; December/January 1992/93, Page 69
http://jta.org/news/article/2008/11/05/1000795/the-chosen-jewish-members-in-the-111th-us-congress “The Chosen: Jewish members in the 111th U.S. Congress”, Jewish Telegraph Agency, Nov. 5, 2008
List of 13 Jewish Senators and 32 Members of House of Representatives
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1214132663714&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
“Time to Rethink”; Jun. 23, 2008 Interview with Rep. Howard Berman
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1191257286817
On Vanity Fair’s List of 100 most powerful men and women in the world (51% Jewish)
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/newestablishment/ (Vanity Fair 100)
http://www.jewishledger.com/articles/2008/07/17/editorials/edit930.txt (On Bear Stearns, Jews in Wall Street)
http://www.cjh.org/education/essays.php?action=show&id=10 Center for Jewish History)
“All That Glitters is not Goldwyn: Early Hollywood Moguls”
http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/Barrier_Report_July_2008.pdf (United Nations: The Humanitarian Impact of Israel’s Wall))
http://www.kibush.co.il/datapage.asp?lang=1%20§ion=10
(Occupation Magazine: Articles, Maps, Stats)
http://jinsa.org/ (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs)
http://aipac.org/index.asp “America’s Pro Israel LOBBY” (quote from its website)
http://adl.org/ (Anti Defamation League)
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
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/clinton-obama-and-the-jews/
“Clinton, Obama and the Jews”, Feb. 1, 2008: “an embarrassment of riches for Jews to have both these candidates)
http://www.aei.org/ (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)
http://www.heritage.org/ Heritage Foundation: A Conservative Think Tank
http://www.cato.org/ Cato Institute: funded by two Jews: Charles Koch and Murray Rothbard
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1296.html
Good Search Site on Right Wing persons and organizations
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/
Center for Foundation of Democracies: President, Clifford May (Jewish)
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm
“Tentacles or Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history”; MUST READ
Lewis Lapham / Harpers Magazine v.309, n.1852, September 2004 1sep04
http://www.vindy.com/news/2008/nov/11/fox-news-chairman-ailes-comes-home-discusses/ “Interview with Roger Ailes, Nov 11, 2008: “I defend…Israel”
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/060816_what_know.htm
Prof. Paul Craig Roberts, “What We Know and Don’t Know about 9/11)
http://www.jewishachievement.com/domains/ceos.html
Overview of Jewish CEO’s, past and present
http://jiw.blogspot.com/2008/11/good-news-about-obama-appointments.html MUST READ
(Jewish Issues Watchdog)
“Good News About Obama Appointments”. November 24, 2008
From Middle East Forum, by Steve Rosen, Wed, 19 Nov 2008:
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.
http://www.counterpunch.org/weitzel11282008.html
Robert Weitzel, Israel’s Settlement on Capitol Hill, Counterpunch, Nov. 28, 2008: MUST READ
http://www.masada2000.org/shit-list.html
List of Self Hating Israel Threatening Jews
~~~
All rights reserved by author
Related articles
- A Primer on Settler Colonialism (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- On Choseness and Kosher Independence (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Romney Adds Israel To Campaign Itinerary (wnyc.org)
July 4, 2012 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | AIPAC, Bill Clinton, Israel, Obama, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
Straight Talking: The Syrian Cauldron
By Jeremy Salt | Palestine Chronicle | July 3, 2012
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.
July 4, 2012 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Free Syrian Army, Iran, NATO, Ottoman Empire, Syria, Turkey | Leave a comment
Israel as Mad Dog
By Philip Giraldi | The Passionate Attachment | July 4, 2012
An article by Scott McConnell “The Special Relationship with Israel: Is it worth the cost?” which appeared in the Spring 2012 Middle East Policy Council Journal, reviews an interesting analysis attributed to Professor Ariel Roth of John Hopkins University. Roth accepts that the only US strategic interest in the Middle East is to maintain relative stability to keep the oil flowing. Because the greatest threat to stability is Israel, which is paranoid about its own security, he argues that it is therefore in America’s interest to be bound tightly to the Jewish state so it will not do something stupid, like lashing out with its nuclear arsenal to start a war against a neighbor. Scott expands on the argument, “This claim is at once alarming and compelling. Roth is asserting that the principal ally of the United States in the twenty-first century — its main source of strategic advice, the nation whose leaders have an unequaled access to American political leadership — is not a rational actor. The United States is in the position of a wife whose spouse is acting erratically. A ‘panicked and unrestrained Israel,’ armed with an estimated 200 nuclear weapons, could do an extraordinary amount of damage. The only conclusion one can draw is that the special relationship would now be very difficult to exit, even if Israel had no clout whatsoever within the American political system, even if the United States desired emphatically to pursue a more independent course.”
The argument made by Roth and McConnell assumes that while Israel might be an irrational player, Washington is not and is acting out of self-interest. I am not really convinced that either congress or the White House is intelligent enough, collectively speaking, to have carefully thought through the possible consequences of a rogue Israel, therefore responding preventively to the mad dog in the room. American politicians have difficulty in seeing beyond their own very narrow personal self-interest, which is certainly why Mitt Romney has just announced that he will be making his fourth trip to Israel before the Tampa GOP nominating convention. He will hope for a photo op or two to make him look like an experienced foreign hand while receiving his marching orders on what is acceptable from Netanyahu. He will not be thinking of what a reckless Israel might do if Washington were not restraining it, a formulation that would never enter into his tiny mind.
It is, in fact, difficult to conclude that Israel has in any way been seriously restrained by its relationship with the US. On the contrary, Washington has provided it with the resources and political cover to enable it to act recklessly. If one considers events in Lebanon, the war against Iraq, the current drive to bring about a civil war in Syria leading to the breakup of that country, and the near constant urging to attack Iran, it might instead be argued that Israel’s influence over Washington has evolved to such a point that it is no longer taking the lead on aggressive military operations because it is able to have the United States do the fighting and dying for it.
The Romney foreign policy agenda is a symptom of the sickness that has seized control of the Republican Party in particular and the Washington elite in general. Romney is focused on supporting Israel at all costs while reverting to a new cold war with Russia, stitching together the most dangerously ignorant doctrine to emerge from the recent presidential primary campaign. Draft dodger Romney’s truculent posturing can only bring grief. And worse still, all the politically ambitious excepting only Ron Paul are falling into line. Demonstrating that wisdom does not necessarily run in families, Senator Rand Paul’s specific endorsement of the Romney foreign policy should be seen for what it is, a thoughtless pandering to a GOP establishment that is dedicated to catering to every Netanyahu whim while simultaneously going about in search of new enemies.
Philip Giraldi is the executive director of the Council for the National Interest and a recognized authority on international security and counterterrorism issues.
Related articles
- Israel Lobby Always Believes More Is Better (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- The Wake-Up May Be Too Late (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- The Israel Lobby Never Sleeps (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Congressional Crusade for Israel (alethonews.wordpress.com)
July 4, 2012 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Wars for Israel | Council for the National Interest, Israel, Middle East, Mitt Romney, Philip Giraldi, Republican, Romney, United States | Leave a comment
The Neocons… They’re Back
AMEU | May 27, 2012
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.
Truth is, they are not the crazies.
July 3, 2012 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | American Enterprise Institute, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Amir-Abbas Fakhravar, Iran, Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, Reza Pahlavi, Richard Perle | Leave a comment
Pro-Israel Saban Center Proposes New Framework for Persian Gulf Security
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | July 3, 2012
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.
Related articles
- Media Propagates Myth of Israel’s Non-Involvement in Syria (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Israel formulates tripartite plot to destroy Syria (intrepidreport.com)
July 3, 2012 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Brookings Institution, Haim Saban, Israel, Kenneth Pollack, Persian Gulf, Saban Center, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, United States | Leave a comment
The History of US-Israel Relations
How the “special relationship” was created
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | September 2011
While many people are led to believe that US support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests, the facts don’t support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. experts opposed Israel and its founding movement. They were simply outmaneuvered and eventually replaced.
Like many American policies, U.S. Middle East policies are driven by a special interest lobby. However, the Israel Lobby, as it is called today in the U.S.[1], consists of vastly more than what most people envision in the word “lobby.”
As this article will demonstrate, the Israel Lobby is considerably more powerful and pervasive than other lobbies. Components of it, both individuals and groups, have worked underground, secretly and even illegally throughout its history, as documented by scholars and participants.
And even though the movement for Israel has been operating in the U.S. for over a hundred years, most Americans are completely unaware of this movement and its attendant ideology – a measure of its unique influence over public knowledge.
The success of this movement to achieve its goals, partly due to the hidden nature of much of its activity, has been staggering. It has also been at almost unimaginable cost.
It has led to massive tragedy in the Middle East: a hundred-year war of violence and loss; sacred land soaked in sorrow.
In addition, this movement has been profoundly damaging to the United States itself.
As we will see in this two-part examination of the pro-Israel movement, it has targeted virtually every significant sector of American society; worked to involve Americans in tragic, unnecessary, and profoundly costly wars; dominated Congress for decades; increasingly determined which candidates could become serious contenders for the U.S. presidency; and promoted bigotry toward an entire population, religion and culture.
It has promoted policies that have exposed Americans to growing danger, and then exaggerated this danger (while disguising its cause), fueling recent actions that dismember some of our nation’s most fundamental freedoms and cherished principles.
All this for a population that is considerably smaller than New Jersey.[2]
The beginnings
The Israel Lobby is just the tip of an older and far larger iceberg known as “political Zionism,” an international movement that began in the late 1800s with the goal of creating a Jewish state somewhere in the world. In 1897 this movement, led by a European journalist named Theodore Herzl[3], coalesced in the First Zionist World Congress, held in Basle, Switzerland, which established the World Zionist Organization, representing approximately 120 groups the first year; 900 the next.[4]
While Zionists considered such places as Argentina, Uganda, and Texas,[5] they eventually settled on Palestine for the location of their proposed Jewish State, even though Palestine was already inhabited by a population that was 95 percent Muslims and Christians, who owned 99 percent of the land.[6] As numerous Zionist diary entries, letters, and other documents show, Zionists planned to push out these non-Jews – financially, if possible; violently if necessary.[7]
Political Zionism in the U.S.
In the 1880s groups advocating the setting up of a Jewish state began popping up around the United States.[8] Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words would adorn the Statue of Liberty, promoted Zionism throughout this decade.[9] A precursor to the Israeli flag was created in Boston in 1891.[10]
In 1887 President Grover Cleveland appointed a Jewish ambassador to Turkey, which at that time controlled Palestine. Jewish historian David G. Dalin reports that presidents recognized the importance of the Turkish embassy for Jewish Americans, “… especially for the growing number of Zionists within the American Jewish electorate, since the Jewish homeland of Palestine remained under the direct control of the Turkish government.”
Every president, both Republican and Democrat, followed this precedent for the next 30 years. “During this era, the ambassadorship to Turkey came to be considered a quasi-Jewish domain,” writes Dalin.[11]
By the early 1890s organizations promoting Zionism existed in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.[12] Reports from the Zionist World Congress in Basle, which four Americans had attended, gave this movement a major stimulus, galvanizing Zionist activities in American cities that had large Jewish populations.[13]
In 1897-98 numerous additional Zionist societies were founded in the East and the Midwest. In 1898 the first annual conference of American Zionists convened in New York on the 4th of July, where they formed the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ).[14]
By 1910 the number of Zionists in the U.S. approached 20,000 and included lawyers, professors, and businessmen. Even in its infancy, when it was still considered relatively weak, Zionism was becoming a movement to which Congressmen listened, particularly in the eastern cities.[15]
The movement continued to expand, and by 1914 several additional Zionist groups had cropped up. The religious Mizrachi faction was formed in 1903, the Labor party in 1905 and Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, in 1912.[16]
By 1922 there were 200,000 Zionists in the U.S. and by 1948 this had grown to almost a million.[17]
From early on Zionists actively pushed their agenda in the media, one Zionist organizer proudly proclaimed in 1912 “the zealous and incessant propaganda which is carried on by countless societies.”[18] The Yiddish press from a very early period espoused the Zionist cause. By 1923 only one New York Yiddish newspaper failed to qualify as Zionist. Yiddish dailies reached 535,000 families in 1927.[19]
The State Department Objects
Unlike politicians, State Department officials not dependent on votes and campaign donations, and charged with recommending and implementing policies beneficial to all Americans, not just one tiny sliver working on behalf of a foreign entity – were less enamored with Zionists, who they felt were trying to use the American government for a project damaging to the United States. In memo after memo, year after year, U.S. diplomatic and military experts pointed out that Zionism was counter to both U.S. interests and principles.[20]
Secretary of State Philander Knox was perhaps the first in the pattern of State Department officials rejecting Zionist advances. In 1912, when the Zionist Literary Society approached the Taft administration for an endorsement, Knox turned them down flat, noting that “problems of Zionism involve certain matters primarily related to the interests of countries other than our own.”[21]
Despite that small setback in 1912, Zionists` garnered a far more significant victory in the same year; one that was to have enormous consequences both internationally and in the United States and that was part of a pattern of influence that continues through today.
Louis Brandeis, Zionism, and the “Parushim”
In 1912 prominent Jewish American attorney Louis Brandeis, who was to go on to become a Supreme Court Justice, became a Zionist. Within two years he became head of the international Zionist Central Office, which had moved to America from Germany a little while before.[22]
While Brandeis is an unusually well known Supreme Court Justice, very few Americans are aware of the significant role he played in World War I and of his connection to Palestine.
Brandeis recruited ambitious young men, often from Harvard, to work on the Zionist cause – and further their careers in the process. Harvard author and former New York Times journalist Peter Grose, sympathetic to Zionism[23], writes:
“Brandeis created an elitist secret society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate,’ which grew out of Harvard’s Menorah Society. As the Harvard men spread out across the land in their professional pursuits, their interests in Zionism were kept alive by secretive exchanges and the trappings of a fraternal order. Each invited initiate underwent a solemn ceremony, swearing the oath ‘to guard and to obey and to keep secret the laws and the labor of the fellowship, its existence and its aims.’”[24]
At the secret initiation ceremony, the new member was told:
“You are about to take a step which will bind you to a single cause for all your life. You will for one year be subject to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at any time, in any place, and at any cost. And ever after, until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life–dearer than that of family, of school, of nation.”[25]
‘We must work silently, through education and infection’
An early recruiter explained: “An organization which has the aims we have must be anonymous, must work silently, and through education and infection rather than through force and noise.” He wrote that to work openly would be “suicidal” for their objective.
Grose writes: “The members set about meeting people of influence here and there, casually, on a friendly basis. They planted suggestions for action to further the Zionist cause long before official government planners had come up with anything. For example, as early as November 1915, a leader of the Parushim went around suggesting that the British might gain some benefit from a formal declaration in support of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.”[26]
Brandeis was a close personal friend of President Woodrow Wilson and used this position to advocate for the Zionist cause, at times serving as a conduit between British Zionists and the president.
In 1916 President Wilson named Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Although Brandeis officially resigned from all his private clubs and affiliations, including his leadership of Zionism, behind the scenes he continued this Zionist work, receiving daily reports in his Supreme Court chambers and issuing orders to his loyal lieutenants.[27]
When the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) was reorganized in 1918, Brandeis was listed as its “honorary president.” However, he was more than just “honorary.”
As historian Donald Neff writes, “Through his lieutenants, he remained the power behind the throne.” One of these lieutenants was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, another particularly well-regarded justice, and another whose Zionist activities have largely gone unnoted.[28]
Zionist membership expanded dramatically during World War I, despite the efforts of some Jewish anti-Zionists, who called the movement a “foreign, un-American, racist, and separatist phenomenon.”[29]
World War I & the Balfour Declaration
Unlike some wars, most analysts consider WWI a pointless conflict that resulted from diplomatic entanglements rather than some travesty of justice or aggression. Yet, it was catastrophic to a generation of Europeans, killing 14 million people.[30]
The United States joined this unnecessary war a few years into the hostilities, costing many American lives, even though the U.S. was not party to the alliances that had drawn other nations into the fray. This even though Americans had been strongly opposed to entering the war and President Woodrow Wilson had won with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”
Americans today are aware of these facts. What few know is that Zionists pushed for the U.S. to enter the war on Britain’s side as part of a deal to gain British support for their colonization of Palestine.
From the very beginning of their movement, Zionists realized that if they were to succeed in their goal of creating a Jewish state on land that was already inhabited by non-Jews, they needed backing from one of the “Great Powers.” They tried the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Palestine at the time, but were turned down (although they were told that Jews could settle throughout other parts of the Ottoman empire and become Turkish citizens).[31]
They then turned to Britain, which was also initially less than enthusiastic. Famous English Arabists such as Gertrude Bell pointed out that Palestine was Arab and that Jerusalem was sacred to all three major monotheistic faiths.
Future British Foreign Minister Lord George Curzon similarly stated that Palestine was already inhabited by half a million Arabs who would “not be content to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the latter.”[32]
However, once the British were embroiled in World War I, and particularly during 1916, a disastrous year for the Allies,[33] Zionists were able to play a winning card. Zionist leaders promised the British government that Zionists in the U.S. would push America to enter the war on the side of the British, if the British promised to support a Jewish home in Palestine afterward.[34]
As a result, in 1917 British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour issued a letter to Zionist leader Lord Rothschild. Known as the Balfour Declaration, this letter promised that Britain would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”
The letter then qualified this somewhat by stating that it should be “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The “non-Jewish communities” were 90 percent of Palestine’s population at that time, vigorous Zionist immigration efforts having slightly expanded the percentage of Jews living in Palestine by then.[35]
The letter, while officially signed by British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, was actually written by Leopold Amery, a British official who, it came out later, was a secret and fervent Zionist[36].
While this letter was a less than ringing endorsement of Zionism, Zionists considered it a major breakthrough as it cracked open a door that they would later force wider and wider open.
These Balfour-WWI negotiations are referred to in various documents. For example, Samuel Landman, secretary of the World Zionist Organization, described them in a 1935 article in World Jewry:
“After an understanding had been arrived at between Sir Mark Sykes and [Zionists] Weizmann and Sokolow, it was resolved to send a secret message to Justice Brandeis that the British Cabinet would help the Jews to gain Palestine in return for active Jewish sympathy and for support in the USA for the Allied cause, so as to bring about a radical pro-Ally tendency in the United States.”[37]
British Colonial Secretary Lord Cavendish, in a memorandum to the British Cabinet in 1923, reminded his colleagues: “The object [of the Balfour Declaration] was to enlist the sympathies on the Allied side of influential Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world… and it is arguable that the negotiations with the Zionists… did in fact have considerable effect in advancing the date at which the United States government intervened in the war.”[38]
Former British Prime Minister Lloyd George similarly referred to this deal, telling a British commission in 1935: “Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. They kept their word.”
American career Foreign Service Officer Evan M. Wilson, who had served as Minister-Consul General in Jerusalem, writes that the Balfour declaration “…was given to the Jews largely for the purpose of enlisting Jewish support in the war and of forestalling a similar promise by the Central Powers [Britain’s enemies in World War I]”.[39]
In 1917 President Wilson, who had been voted into office by Americans who believed his promises that he would keep them out of the war, changed course and plunged the U.S. into a tragic and pointless European conflict in which hundreds of thousands were killed and injured.[40] Over 1,200 American citizens who opposed the war were rounded up and imprisoned, some for years.[41]
The influence of Brandeis and other Zionists in the U.S. had enabled Zionists to form an alliance with Britain, one of the world’s great powers, a remarkable achievement for a non-state group and a measure of Zionists’ immense power. As historian Kolsky states, the Zionist movement was now “an important force in international politics.”[42]
Paris Peace Conference 1919: Zionists defeat Christian leaders’ calls for self-determination
After the war, the victors met in a peace conference and agreed to a set of Peace Accords that addressed, among many issues, the fate of Ottoman Empire’s Middle East territories. The Allies stripped the defeated Empire of its Middle Eastern holdings and divided them between Britain and France, which were to hold them under a “mandate” system until the populations were “ready” for self-government. Britain got the mandate over Palestine.
Zionists, including Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, the World Zionist Organization, and an American delegation, went to the conference to lobby for a Jewish “home”[43] in Palestine and to push for Balfour wording to be incorporated in the peace accords.[44] The official U.S. delegation to the Peace Conference also contained a number of highly placed Zionists.
Distinguished American Christians posted in the Middle East, who consistently supported self-determination, went to Paris to oppose Zionists. Numerous prominent Christian leaders in the U.S. – including two of the most celebrated pastors of their day, Harry Emerson Fosdick and Henry Sloane Coffin[45] – also opposed Zionism. However, as a pro-Israel author notes, they were “simply outgunned” by Zionists.[46]
The most prominent American in the Middle East at the time, Dr. Howard Bliss, President of Beirut’s Syrian Protestant College (later to become the American University of Beirut), traveled to Paris to urge forming a commission to determine what the people of the Middle East wanted for themselves, a suggestion that was embraced by the U.S. diplomatic staff in Paris.[47]
Princeton Professor Philip Brown, in Cairo for the YMCA, provided requested reports to the U.S. State Department on what Zionism’s impact would be on Palestine. He stated that it would be disastrous for both Arabs and Jews and went to Paris to lobby against it.[48]
William Westermann, director of the State Department’s Western Asia Division, which covered the region, similarly opposed the Zionist position. He wrote that “[it] impinges upon the rights and the desires of most of the Arab population of Palestine.” Westermann and other US diplomats felt that Arab claims were much more in line with Wilson’s principles of self-determination and circulated Arab material.[49]
President Wilson decided to send a commission to Palestine to investigate the situation in person. After spending six weeks in the area interviewing both Jews and Palestinians, the commission, known as the King-Crane commission, recommended against the Zionist position of unlimited immigration of Jews to make Palestine a distinctly Jewish state.[50]
The commissioners stated that the erection of a Jewish state in Palestine could be accomplished only with “the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” pointing out that to subject the Palestinians “to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle [of self-determination] and of the peoples’ rights…”[51]
They went on to point out that “the well-being and development” of the people in the region formed “a sacred trust,” that the people should become completely free, and that the national governments “should derive their authority from the initiative and free choice of the native populations.”[52]
The report stated that meetings with Jewish representatives made it clear that “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine,” concluded that armed force would be required to accomplish this, and urged the Peace Conference to dismiss the Zionist proposals.[53] The commission recommended that “the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.”[54]
Zionists through Brandeis dominated the situation, however, and the report was suppressed until after the Peace Accords were enacted. As a pro-Israel historian noted, “with the burial of the King-Crane Report, a major obstacle in the Zionist path disappeared.”[55] The US delegation was forced to follow Zionist directives.[56]
Ultimately, the mandate over Palestine given to Britain, supported the Zionist project and included the Balfour language. According to the mandate, Britain would be “responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour] declaration … in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”[57]
Brandeis and Frankfurter vs. U.S. diplomat
The idea behind Zionism was to create a state where Jews worldwide could escape anti-Semitism.[58]
There are various documented cases in which fanatical Zionists exploited, exaggerated, invented, or even perpetrated “anti-Semitic” incidents both to procure support and to drive Jews to immigrate to the Zionist-designated homeland.[59] A few examples are discussed below.
One such case involved a young diplomat named Hugh Gibson, who in 1919 was nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to Poland. After he arrived in Poland, Gibson, who was highly regarded and considered particularly brilliant,[60] began to report that there were far fewer anti-Semitic incidents than Americans were led to believe. He wrote his mother: “These yarns are exclusively of foreign manufacture for anti-Polish purposes.”[61]
His dispatches came to the attention of Brandeis and his protégé (and future supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter, who demanded a meeting with Gibson. Gibson later wrote of their accusations:
“I had [Brandeis and Frankfurter claimed] done more mischief to the Jewish race than anyone who had lived in the last century. They said… that my reports on the Jewish question had gone around the world and had undone their work…. They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against the Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it.”[62]
Frankfurter hinted that if Gibson continued these reports, Zionists would block his confirmation by the Senate.
Gibson was outraged and sent a 21-page letter to the State Department. In it he shared his suspicions that this was part of “a conscienceless and cold-blooded plan to make the condition of the Jews in Poland so bad that they must turn to Zionism for relief.”
In 1923 another American diplomat in Poland, Vice Consul Monroe Kline, echoed Gibson’s analysis: “It is common knowledge that Zionists are continually and constantly spreading propaganda, through their agencies over the entire world, of political and religious persecution.”[63]
Zionists and Nazis
Perhaps the most extreme case of Zionist exploitation of anti-Semitism to further their cause came during the rise of Adolf Hitler. Historians have documented that Zionists sabotaged efforts to find safe havens for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in order to convince the world that Jews could only be safe in a Jewish state.[64]
When FDR made efforts in 1938[65] and 1943[66] to provide havens for Nazi refugees, Zionists opposed these projects because they did not include Palestine.
Morris Ernst, FDR’s international envoy for refugees, wrote in his memoir that when he worked to help find refuge for those fleeing Hitler, “…active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration [into the U.S.] in order to undermine political Zionism… Zionist friends of mine opposed it.”[68]
Ernst wrote that he found the same fanatical reaction among all the Jewish groups he approached, whose leaders, he found, were “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.”[69]
FDR finally gave up, telling Ernst: “We can’t put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.”[70]
Journalist Erskine B. Childers, son of a former Irish Prime Minister, wrote in the Spectator in 1960, “One of the most massively important features of the entire Palestine struggle was that Zionism deliberately arranged that the plight of the wretched survivors of Hitlerism should be a ‘moral argument’ which the West had to accept.”
He explained that “this was done by seeing to it that Western countries did not open their doors, widely and immediately, to the inmate of the DP [displaced persons] camps.”
Childers, author of several books on conflict resolution and peace-keeping who later became Secretary General of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, commented: “It is incredible that so grave and grim a campaign has received so little attention in accounts of the Palestine struggle – it was a campaign that literally shaped all subsequent history. It was done by sabotaging specific Western schemes to admit Jewish DPs.”[71]
Zionist fake “hate” attacks on Iraq Jews
Zionists wished for a massive “in-gathering of Jews” in one state, but most Iraqi Jews wanted nothing to do with it, according to Iraq’s then-Chief Rabbi, who stated: “Iraqi Jews will be forever against Zionism.”
“Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges for 1,000 years and do not regard themselves as a distinctive separate part of this nation,” the rabbi declared.[72]
Zionists worked to change that by covertly attacking Iraqi Jews so as to induce them to “flee” to Israel. Zionists planted bombs in synagogues and in an American building “in an attempt to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews,” according to Author and former CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland.
“Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel,” writes Eveland, and “… most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had ‘rescued’ really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.”[73]
Similarly, Naeim Giladi, a Jewish-Iraqi author who later lived in Israel and the U.S., describes this program from the inside: “I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called ‘cruel Zionism.’ I write about it because I was part of it.”
Giladi states that “Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel.” In order “to force them to leave,” Giladi writes, “Jews killed Jews.” He goes on to say that in an effort “to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors.”[74]
The modern Israel Lobby is born
The immediate precursor to today’s pro-Israel lobby began in the early 1940s under the leadership of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, originally from Lithuania. He created the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), which by 1943 had acquired a budget of half a million dollars at a time when a nickel bought a loaf of bread.
In addition to this money, Zionists had become influential in creating the United Jewish Appeal in 1939[75], giving them access to the organization’s gargantuan financial resources: $14 million in 1941, $150 million by 1948. This was four times more than Americans contributed to the Red Cross.[76]
With its extraordinary funding, AZEC embarked on a campaign to target every sector of American society, ordering that local committees be set up in every Jewish community in the nation. In the words of AZEC organizer Sy Kenen, it launched “a political and public relations offensive to capture the support of Congressmen, clergy, editors, professors, business and labor.”[77][78]
AZEC instructed activists to “make direct contact with your local Congressman or Senator” and to go after union members, wives and parents of servicemen, and Jewish war veterans. AZEC provided activists with form letters to use and schedules of anti-Zionist lecture tours to oppose and disrupt.
A measure of its power came in 1945 when Silver disliked a British move in 1945 that would be harmful to Zionists. AZEC booked Madison Square Garden, ordered advertisements, and mailed 250,000 announcements – the first day. By the second day they had organized demonstrations in 30 cities, a letter-writing campaign, and convinced 27 U.S. Senators to give speeches.[79]
Grassroots Zionist action groups were organized with more than 400 local committees under 76 state and regional branches. AZEC funded books, articles and academic studies; millions of pamphlets were distributed. There were massive petition and letter writing campaigns. AZEC targeted college presidents and deans, managing to get more than 150 to sign one petition.[80]
Rabbi Elmer Berger, executive director of the American Council for Judaism, which opposed Zionism in the 1940s and 50s, writes in his memoirs that there was a “ubiquitous propaganda campaign reaching just about every point of political leverage in the country.”[81]
The Zionist Organization of America bragged of the “immensity of our operations and their diversity” in its 48th Annual Report, stating, “We reach into every department of American life… ”[82]
Berger and other anti-Zionist Jewish Americans tried to organize against “the deception and cynicism with which the Zionist machine operated,” but failed to obtain anywhere near their level of funding. Among other things, would-be dissenters were afraid of “the savagery of personal attacks” anti-Zionists endured.[83]
Berger writes that when he and a colleague opposed a Zionist resolution in Congress, Emanuel Cellar, a New York Democrat who was to serve in Congress for almost 50 years, told them: “They ought to take you b……s out and shoot you.”
When it was unclear that President Harry Truman would support Zionism, Cellar and a committee of Zionists told him that they had persuaded Dewey to support the Zionist policy and demanded that Truman also take this stand. Cellar reportedly pounded on Truman’s table and said that if Truman did not do so, “We’ll run you out of town.[84]
Jacob Javits, another well-known Congressman, this one a Republican, told a Zionist women’s group: “We’ll fight to death and make a Jewish State in Palestine if it’s the last thing that we do.”[85]
Richard Stevens, author of American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1942-1947, reports that Zionists infiltrated the boards of several Jewish schools that they felt didn’t sufficiently promote the Zionist cause. When this didn’t work, Stevens writes, they would start their own pro-Zionist schools.[86]
Stevens writes that in 1943-44 the ZOA distributed over a million leaflets and pamphlets to public libraries, chaplains, community centers, educators, ministers, writers and “others who might further the Zionist cause.”[87]
Alfred Lilienthal, who had worked in the State Department, served in the U.S. Army in the Middle East from 1943-45, and became a member of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, reports that monthly sales of Zionist books totaled between 3,000 and 4,000 throughout 1944-45.
He reports that Zionists subsidized books by non-Jewish authors that supported the Zionist agenda. They would then promote these books jointly with commercial publishers. Several of them became best sellers.[88]
Zionists manufacture Christian support
Silver and other Zionists played a significant role in creating Christian support for Zionism, a project Brandeis encouraged.[89]
Secret Zionist funds, eventually reaching $150,000 in 1946, were used to revive an elitist Protestant group, the American Palestine Committee. This group had originally been founded in 1932 by Emanuel Neumann, a member of the Executive of the Zionist Organization. The objective was to organize a group of prominent (mainly non-Jewish) Americans in moral and political support of Zionism. Frankfurter was one of the main speakers at its launch.[90]
Silver’s headquarters issued a directive saying,“In every community an American Christian Palestine Committee must be immediate organized.”[91]
Author Peter Grose reports that the Christian committee’s operations “were hardly autonomous. Zionist headquarters thought nothing of placing newspaper advertisements on the clergymen’s behalf without bothering to consult them in advance, until one of the committee’s leaders meekly asked at least for prior notice before public statements were made in their name.”[92]
AZEC formed another group among clergymen, the Christian Council on Palestine. An internal AZEC memo stated that the aim of both groups was to “crystallize the sympathy of Christian America for our cause.”[93]
By the end of World War II the Christian Council on Palestine had grown to 3,000 members and the American Palestine Committee boasted a membership of 6,500 public figures, including senators, congressmen, cabinet members, governors, state officers, mayors, jurists, clergymen, educators, writers, publishing, and civic and industrial leaders.
Historian Richard Stevens explains that Christian support was largely gained by exploiting their wish to help people in need. Stevens writes that Zionists would proclaim “the tragic plight of refugees fleeing from persecution and finding no home,” thus linking the refugee problem with Palestine as allegedly the only solution.[94]
Stevens writes that the reason for this strategy was clear: “… while many Americans might not support the creation of a Jewish state, traditional American humanitarianism could be exploited in favor of the Zionist cause through the refugee problems.”[95]
Few if any of these Christian supporters had any idea that the creation of the Jewish state would entail a massive expulsion of hundreds of thousands of the non-Jews who made up the large majority of Palestine’s population, creating a new and much longer lasting refugee problem.
Nor did they learn that during and after Israel’s founding 1947-49 war, Zionist forces attacked a number of Christian sites. Donald Neff, former Time Magazine Jerusalem bureau chief and author of five books on Israel-Palestine, reports in detail on Zionist attacks on Christian sites in May 1948, the month of Israel’s birth.
Neff tells us that a group of Christian leaders complained that month that Zionists had killed and wounded hundreds of people, including children, refugees and clergy, at Christian churches and humanitarian institutions.
For example, the group charged that “‘many children were killed or wounded’ by Jewish shells on the Convent of Orthodox Copts… ; eight refugees were killed and about 120 wounded at the Orthodox Armenian Convent… ; and that Father Pierre Somi, secretary to the Bishop, had been killed and two wounded at the Orthodox Syrian Church of St. Mark.”
“The group’s statement said Arab forces had abided by their promise to respect Christian institutions, but that the Jews had forcefully occupied Christian structures and been indiscriminate in shelling churches,” reports Neff. He quotes a Catholic priest: “‘Jewish soldiers broke down the doors of my church and robbed many precious and sacred objects. Then they threw the statues of Christ down into a nearby garden.’ [The priest] added that Jewish leaders had reassured that religious buildings would be respected, ‘but their deeds do not correspond to their words.’”
After Zionist soldiers invaded and looted a convent in Tiberias, the U.S. Consulate sent a bitter dispatch back to the State Department complaining of “the Jewish attitude in Jerusalem towards Christian institutions.’”[96]
Zionist Colonization Efforts in Palestine
As early Zionists in the U.S. and elsewhere pushed for the creation of a Jewish state, Zionists in Palestine simultaneously tried to clear the land of Muslim and Christian inhabitants and replace them with Jewish immigrants.
This was a tall order, as Muslims and Christians accounted for more than 95 percent of the population of Palestine. Zionists planned to try first to buy up the land until the previous inhabitants had emigrated; failing this, they would use violence to force them out. This dual strategy was discussed in various written documents cited by numerous Palestinian and Israeli historians.
As this colonial project grew, the indigenous Palestinians reacted with occasional bouts of violence; Zionists had anticipated this since people usually resist being expelled from their land.
When the buy-out effort was able to obtain only a few percent of the land, Zionists created a number of terrorist groups to fight against both the Palestinians and the British. Terrorist and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin later bragged that Zionists had brought terrorism both to the Middle East and to the world at large.
By the eve of the creation of Israel, the Zionist immigration and buyout project had increased the Jewish population of Palestine to 30 percent and land ownership from 1 percent to approximately 6 percent.
This was in 1947, when the British at last announced that they would end their control of Palestine. Britain turned the territory’s fate over to the United Nations.
Since a founding principle of the UN was “self-determination of peoples,” one would have expected to the UN to support fair, democratic elections in which inhabitants could create their own independent country.
Instead, Zionists pushed for a General Assembly resolution to give them a disproportionate 55 percent of Palestine. (While they rarely announced this publicly, their stated plan was to later take the rest of Palestine.
U.S. Officials Oppose Zionism
The U.S. State Department opposed this partition plan strenuously, considering Zionism contrary to both fundamental American principles and US interests.
For example, the director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs consistently recommended against supporting a Jewish state in Palestine. The director, named Loy Henderson, warned that the creation of such a state would go against locals’ wishes, imperil US interests and violate democratic principles.
Henderson emphasized that the US would lose moral standing in the world if it supported Zionism:
“At the present time the United States has a moral prestige in the Near and Middle East unequaled by that of any other great power. We would lose that prestige and would be likely for many years to be considered as a betrayer of the high principles which we ourselves have enunciated during the period of the [second world] war.”
When Zionists began pushing the partition plan in the UN, Henderson recommended strongly against supporting their proposal, saying that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and was “not based on any principle.” He warned that partition “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.… ”
Henderson elaborated further on how plans to partition Palestine would violate American and UN principles:
“…[Proposals for partition] are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [UN] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based. These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race… ”[97]
Zionists attacked Henderson virulently, calling him “anti-Semitic,” demanding his resignation, and threatening his family. They pressured the State Department to transfer him elsewhere; one analyst describes this as “the historic game of musical chairs” in which officials who recommended Middle East policies “consistent with the nation’s interests” were moved on.[98]
In 1948 Truman sent Henderson to the slopes of the Himalayas, as Ambassador to Nepal (then officially under India). (In recent years, virtually every State Department country desk has been directed by a Zionist.)
But Henderson was far from alone in making his recommendations. He wrote that his views were not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by “nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the [State] Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems.”[99]
He wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism.
In 1947 the CIA reported that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.”[100]
Henry F. Grady, who has been called “America’s top diplomatic soldier for a critical period of the Cold War,” headed a 1946 commission aimed at coming up with a solution for Palestine. Grady later wrote about the Zionist lobby and its damaging effect on US national interests.
Grady argued that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had “the ill-will with the Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the soviets.” He also described the decisive power of the lobby:
“I have had a good deal of experience with lobbies but this group started where those of my experience had ended….. I have headed a number of government missions but in no other have I ever experienced so much disloyalty…. [I]n the United States, since there is no political force to counterbalance Zionism, its campaigns are apt to be decisive.”[101]
Grady concluded that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had “the ill-will with the Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the Soviets.”[102]
Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson also opposed Zionism. Acheson’s biographer writes that Acheson “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Another Author, John Mulhall, records Acheson’s warning of the danger for American interests:
“… to transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.”[103]
The head of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned against the partition plan on moral grounds:
“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter – a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN’s own charter.”[104]
Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate prediction.
An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:
“… the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN.… In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.”[105]
And American Vice Consul William J. Porter foresaw one last outcome of the “partition” plan: that no Arab state would actually ever come to be in Palestine.[106]
Truman Accedes to Pro-Israel Lobby
President Harry Truman, however, ignored this advice and chose instead to support the Zionist partition plan. Truman’s political advisor, Clark Clifford, believed that the Jewish vote and contributions were essential to winning the upcoming presidential election, and that supporting the partition plan would garner that support. (Truman’s opponent, Dewey, took similar stands for similar reasons.)
Truman’s Secretary of State George Marshall, the renowned World War II General and author of the Marshall Plan, was furious to see electoral considerations taking precedence over policies based on national interest. He condemned what he called a “transparent dodge to win a few votes,” which would make “[t]he great dignity of the office of President seriously diminished.”[107]
Marshall wrote that the counsel offered by Clifford “was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem which confronted us was international. I said bluntly that if the President were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the President… ”[108]
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal also tried, unsuccessfully, to oppose the Zionists. He was outraged that Truman’s Mideast policy was based on what he called “squalid political purposes,” asserting that “United States policy should be based on United States national interests and not on domestic political considerations.”[109]
Forrestal represented the general Pentagon view when he said that “no group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.”[110]
A report by the National Security Council warned that the Palestine turmoil was acutely endangering the security of the United States. A CIA report stressed the strategic importance of the Middle East and its oil resources.
Similarly, George F. Kennan, the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning, issued a top-secret document on January 19, 1947 that outlined the enormous damage done to the US by the partition plan (“Report by the Policy Planning Staff on Position of the United States with Respect to Palestine”).[111]
Kennan cautioned that “important U.S. oil concessions and air base rights” could be lost through US support for partition and warned that the USSR stood to gain by the partition plan.
Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s nephew and a legendary intelligence agent, was another who was deeply disturbed by events, noting:
“The process by which Zionist Jews have been able to promote American support for the partition of Palestine demonstrates the vital need of a foreign policy based on national rather than partisan interests…. Only when the national interests of the United States, in their highest terms, take precedence over all other considerations, can a logical, farseeing foreign policy be evolved. No American political leader has the right to compromise American interests to gain partisan votes… ”[112]
He went on:
“The present course of world crisis will increasingly force upon Americans the realization that their national interests and those of the proposed Jewish state in Palestine are going to conflict. It is to be hoped that American Zionists and non-Zionists alike will come to grips with the realities of the problem.”
Truman wrote in his memoirs: “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance.” There were now about a million dues-paying Zionists in the U.S.[113]
Then, as now, in addition to unending pressure there was financial compensation, Truman reportedly receiving a suitcase full of money from Zionists while on his train campaign around the country.[114]
Personal influences on Truman
One person key in such Zionist financial connections to Truman was Abraham Feinberg, a wealthy businessman who was later to play a similar role with Kennedy and Johnson.
While many Americans at the time and since have been aware of Truman’s come-from-behind win over Dewey, few people know about the critical role of Feinberg and the Zionist lobby in financing Truman’s victory. (When the CIA later discovered that Feinberg also helped to finance illegal gun-running to Zionist groups, the Truman administration looked the other way.[115] )
An individual inside the US government who worked to influence policy was David K. Niles, executive assistant first to FDR and then to Truman. Niles, according to author Alfred Lilienthal, was “a member of a select group of confidential advisers with an often-quoted passion for anonymity. Niles… though occasionally publicized as Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man, remained totally unknown to the public.”[116]
Behind the scenes Niles was regularly briefed by the head of the Washington Office of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
When it was discovered that top secret information was being passed on to the Israeli government, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Omar Bradley told Truman he would have to choose between Bradley and Niles. Not long after, Niles resigned and went on a visit to Israel.[117]
Another who helped influence Truman was his old Kansas City friend and business partner, Eddie Jacobson, active in B’nai B’rith and “a passionate believer in Jewish nationalism,” who was able to procure Zionist access to the President at key times.[118] Truman credited Jacobson with making a contribution of “decisive importance.”[119]
Still another was Sam Rosenman, a political advisor to Truman, who screened State Department memos sent to Truman. A longtime diplomat reports that one of the departments memoranda was returned, unopened, with a notation, “President Truman already knows your views and doesn’t need this.”[120]
Evan M Wilson, a career diplomat who had been U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem, later wrote that Truman had been largely motivated by “domestic political considerations.”[121] At least one of Truman’s key policy speeches had been drafted primarily by the Washington representative of the Jewish Agency.[122]
Acting Secretary of State James E. Webb in a dispatch to Secretary of State Acheson noted the obvious: “Past record suggests Israel has had more influence with US than has US with Israel.”[123]
Pro-Israel Pressure on General Assembly Members
When it was clear that, despite US support, the partition recommendation did not have the two-thirds support of the UN General Assembly required to pass, Zionists pushed through a delay in the vote. They then used this period to pressure numerous nations into voting for the recommendation. A number of people later described this campaign.
Robert Nathan, a Zionist who had worked for the US government and who was particularly active in the Jewish Agency, wrote afterward, “We used any tools at hand,” such as telling certain delegations that the Zionists would use their influence to block economic aid to any countries that did not vote the right way.[124]
Another Zionist proudly stated:
“Every clue was meticulously checked and pursued. Not the smallest or the remotest of nations, but was contacted and wooed. Nothing was left to chance.”
Financier and longtime presidential advisor Bernard Baruch told France it would lose U.S. aid if it voted against partition. Top White House executive assistant David Niles organized pressure on Liberia; rubber magnate Harvey Firestone pressured Liberia.[125]
Latin American delegates were told that the Pan-American highway construction project would be more likely if they voted yes. Delegates’ wives received mink coats (the wife of the Cuban delegate returned hers); Costa Rica’s President Jose Figueres reportedly received a blank checkbook. Haiti was promised economic aid if it would change its original vote opposing partition.
Longtime Zionist Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, along with ten senators and Truman domestic advisor Clark Clifford, threatened the Philippines (seven bills were pending on the Philippines in Congress).
Before the vote on the plan, the Philippine delegate had given a passionate speech against partition, defending the inviolable “primordial rights of a people to determine their political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of their native land… ”[126]
The delegate went on to say that he could not believe that the General Assembly would sanction a move that would place the world “back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic documents of theocratic governments.”
Twenty-four hours later, after intense Zionist pressure, the Philippine delegate voted in favor of partition.
The U.S. delegation to the U.N. was so outraged when Truman insisted that they support partition that the State Department director of U.N. Affairs was sent to New York to prevent the delegates from resigning en masse.[127]
On Nov 29, 1947 the partition resolution, 181, passed. While this resolution is frequently cited, it was of limited (if any) legal impact. General Assembly resolutions, unlike Security Council resolutions, are not binding on member states. For this reason, the resolution requested that “[t]he Security Council take the necessary measures as provided for in the plan for its implementation,”[128] which the Security Council never did. Legally, the General Assembly Resolution was a “recommendation” and did not create any states.
What it did do, however, was increase the fighting in Palestine. Within months (and before Israel dates the beginning of its founding war) the Zionists had forced out 413,794 people. Zionist military units had stealthily been preparing for war before the UN vote and had acquired massive weaponry, some of it through a widespread network of illicit gunrunning operations in the US under a number of front groups. (see below)
The UN eventually managed to create a temporary and very partial ceasefire. A Swedish UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, who had previously rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazis was dispatched to negotiate an end to the violence. Israeli assassins killed him and Israel continued what it was to call its “war of independence.”[129]
At the end of this war, through a larger military force than that of its adversaries and the ruthless implementation of plans to push out as many non-Jews as possible, Israel came into existence on 78 percent of Palestine.
But let us take a closer look at the violence that followed the UN recommendation.
Massacres and the Conquest of Palestine
The passing of the partition resolution in November 1947 triggered the violence that State Department and Pentagon analysts had predicted and for which Zionists had been preparing. There were at least 33 massacres of Palestinian villages, half of them before a single Arab army joined the conflict.[130] Zionist forces were better equipped and had more men under arms than their opponents[131] and by the end of Israel’s “War of Independence” over 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were ruthlessly expelled.[132] Zionists had succeeded in the first half of their goal: Israel, the self-described Jewish State, had come into existence.
The massacres were carried out by Zionist forces, including Zionist militias that had engaged in terrorist attacks in the area for years preceding the partition resolution.[133]
Descriptions of the massacres, by both Palestinians and Israelis, are nightmarish. An Israeli eyewitness reported that at the village of al-Dawayima:
“The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead… One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her.”[134]
One Palestinian woman testified that a man shot her nine-month-pregnant sister and then cut her stomach open with a butcher knife.[135]
One of the better-documented massacres occurred in a small, neutral Palestinian village called Deir Yassin in April 1948 – before a single Arab army had joined the conflict. A Swiss Red Cross representative was one of the first to arrive on the scene, where he found 254 dead, including 145 women, 35 of them pregnant.[136]
Witnesses reported that the attackers lined up families – men, women, grandparents and children, even infants – and shot them.[137]
An eyewitness and future colonel in the Israeli military later wrote of the militia members: “They didn’t know how to fight, but as murderers they were pretty good.”[138]
The Red Cross representative who found the bodies at Deir Yassin arrived in time to see some of the killing in action. He wrote in his diary that Zionist militia members were still entering houses with guns and knives when he arrived. He saw one young Jewish woman carrying a blood-covered dagger and saw another stab an old couple in their doorway. The representative wrote that the scene reminded him of S.S. troops he had seen in Athens.
Richard Catling, British assistant inspector general for the criminal division, reported on “sexual atrocities” committed by Zionist forces. “Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered,” he reported. “Old women were also molested.”[139]
The Deir Yassin attack was perpetrated by two Zionist militias and coordinated with the main Zionist forces, whose elite unit participated in part of the operation.[140] The heads of the two militias, Menachem Begin and Yitzakh Shamir, later became Prime Ministers of Israel.
Begin sent the following message to his troops about their victory at Deir Yassin:
“Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest. Convey my regards to all the commanders and soldiers. We shake your hands. We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack. We stand to attention in memory of the slain. We lovingly shake the hands of the wounded. Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.”[141]
Approximately six months later, Begin (who had also publicly taken credit for a number of other terrorist acts, including blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people) came on a tour of America. The tour’s sponsors included famous playwright Ben Hecht, a fervent Zionist who applauded Irgun violence,[142] and eventually included 11 Senators, 12 governors, 70 Congressmen, 17 Justices, and numerous other public officials.
The State Department, fully aware of his violent activities in Palestine, tried to reject Begin’s visa but was overruled by Truman.[143]
Begin later proudly admitted his terrorism in an interview for American television. When the interviewer asked him, “How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?” Begin proclaimed, “In the Middle East? In all the world!”
Terrorists set up U.S. front groups Hillel Kook and “The Bergson Boys”
The Irgun had been operating in the U.S. since the 1930s. As one of their leaders later wrote, “It was in Europe of those days that the idea of transferring the focal point of our activity to the United States was born, and it was from there that we left on a mission that lasted far longer than originally planned… ”[144]
The “we” referred to a small group known as the Irgun Delegation that operated in the U.S. from the late 1930s until 1948 and that formed a half dozen front organizations for what they themselves called “a military operation.”[145]
Two of the leaders were Yitshaq Ben-Ami (father of Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of today’s J-Street) and “Peter Bergson,” the pseudonym of the senior Irgun officer working outside Palestine, Hillel Kook. The group is often called the Bergson Group.[146]
Among their numerous activities they lobbied Congress and the White House, organized a march on Washington, D.C. of 500 Rabbis, placed full-page ads in newspapers around the U.S., and produced a pageant “We Will Never Die!” celebrating the Jewish contribution to Western civilization, written by Ben Hecht, directed by Moss Hart, featuring music by Kurt Weil, and starring Edward G. Robinson.
Forty thousand attended the extravaganza’s New York performances. It then went on to play in most of America’s largest cities.[147]
While the various organizations created by the Irgun Delegation frequently pushed for rescuing European Jews, one of the major demands was for the creation of a “Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews.” This was a goal that Revisionist Zionists had sought even before the Nazi holocaust had begun and is believed to have had a mixed agenda.
Author William Rubinstein writes, “It is rather difficult to believe that Bergson’s implausible proposal did not have far more to do with creating the nucleus of a Jewish Palestinian force, to be used against the British and the Arabs, than with saving Europe’s Jews from the Nazis.”[148]
Critics point out that the delegation did not manage to rescue any Jews during the Nazi holocaust.[149]
Bergson-Kook’s uncle was Rabbi Avraham Ytzhak Kook, often known as “Rabbi Kook the Elder.” Rabbi Kook was originally from Eastern Europe, had worked toward the Balfour Declaration in Britain, and eventually became the “Chief Rabbi of Palestine.”
Perhaps his most significant accomplishment was to devise an ideology that merged a kabalistic version of religious Judaism with political Zionism, founding an extremist religious Zionism that continues today.[150]
The Kabala teaches that non-Jews are the embodiment of Satan, and that the world was created solely for the sake of Jews.[151] Rabbi Kook, who achieved saintly status among his followers in Israel and the U.S., stated: “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews… is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”[152]
In addition to spanning the Jewish religious-secular continuum, the Irgun Delegation spanned the political spectrum from left to right. Its historian Judith Baumel writes that it “evinced many of the unique characteristics of Eastern European protofascism” while also forming partnerships with communists and Jews who belonged to left-wing American groups.
All of this was hidden from view, however, as the “Bergson Boys” aimed for the American man in the street, using tantalizing slogans, illustrated advertisements, and “seductive curiosity-whetting gimmicks.” As Baumel notes, the Irgun Delegation’s primary triumph was to understand “the power of Madison Avenue.”[153]
Rabbi Korff and the “Political Action Committee for Palestine”
Another terrorist front group, the Political Action Committee for Palestine, was formed by Rabbi Baruch Korff[154], who indirectly admitted that the financing of terrorism was among its activities.[155]
In actuality, Korff did more than just finance terrorism.
In 1946 British intelligence uncovered plots by Jewish terrorists to assassinate the British foreign minister. Details were heavily censored from the public for many years, but eventually it came out that Korff was part of this.[156]
In 1947 Rabbi Korff and his group planned to drop explosive bombs on the British foreign office, accompanied by 10,000 Stern Gang leaflets. The plot was foiled by a young American aviator they had tried to recruit, Reginald Gilbert, promising him “lucrative jobs” after the mission was completed.[157]
Gilbert, who had flown 136 combat missions over Europe, shooting down three German planes and damaging seven, informed the American Embassy, and then worked with Scotland Yard and the Paris police to have the would-be assassins arrested. French police, who said they “feared for the flier’s life if the Stern gang ever caught up with him,” flew him to London until he could return to the U.S.[158]
Although almost no one remembers this plot, it was headline news at the time in newspapers across the United States,[159] though many sanitized versions mentioned only the leaflets.
In a first-hand account of the plot published by the New York Herald Tribune, Gilbert writes that the group planned much more than a leaflet drop. The first idea was to drop bombs on Parliament, but the target was subsequently changed to the Foreign Ministry, “because Korff held a grudge against that office for refusing him a visa to Palestine.”
When Gilbert (who, at the direction of the Paris police, was pretending to go along with the plot) mentioned that fog might prevent them from locating the exact target, Korff told him in that case they would just drop the bombs anywhere on London. When Gilbert protested that innocent people might be killed, Rabbi Korff replied, “They are British, so they are our enemy.’”[160]
Korff then came up with various stories. At one point he claimed that Gilbert had been the guilty party. Next, he and Peter Bergson claimed that the plot was a British “frameup” and that Gilbert was a British agent.[161]
According to the London Times, Rabbi Korff later said that “millions of dollars had been subscribed by private American sources’ to fund the purchase of the aircraft.”[162]
In 1948 Korff published a large advertisement in the New York Post calling a State Department policy against enforcing partition “pure and simple anti-Semitism… plain everyday anti-Semitism, incorporated in the hearts and minds of those who govern free America.”[163]
Later, Rabbi Korff became a close friend and strong supporter of President Richard Nixon, who called him “my rabbi.”[164] Korff is reported to have influenced Nixon’s strong support for Israel and efforts to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate.[165]
Korff served as a chaplain for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health for 21 years.[166] He later acted as a consultant to Brown University in conjunction with the school’s acquisition of his archives.[167] According to the London Independent, Korff had many supporters in high places in Israel, including Ytzahak Rabin and Golda Meir.[168]
The “Sonneborn Institute”
Another American front group for illegal Zionist activities was known as the “Sonneborn Institute,” named after its founder, Rudolf G. Sonneborn, scion of a wealthy German-Jewish family from Baltimore.[169]
Sonneborn had first met Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1919 when Sonneborn, at the behest of family friend, Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, had traveled to the Versailles peace conference as secretary of a Zionist delegation and afterward gone on a tour of Palestine.[170]
In 1945 Sonneborn and Ben Gurion hosted a meeting of 17 well-connected guests at Sonneborn’s Manhattan penthouse. They came from Los Angeles, Toronto, Miami, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Newark, New Haven and New York. One was a rabbi, five were lawyers, and the others were highly successful businessmen.
The purpose, Ben Gurion explained, was to create a secret underground organization that would be the American arm of the Zionist paramilitary in Palestine, the Haganah. The organization was to have a representative in at least 35-40 industry groups, and in one month alone there were meetings in Memphis, Ohio, New Jersey, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Washington DC, and 40 more were scheduled.[171]
Their objective was to raise money and support “for purposes which could not be publicized or even fully disclosed.” A variety of front groups were created for military arms and equipment smuggling of everything from machine guns to B-17s.[172]
Zionist youth groups were organized, the members sometimes helping load guns onto boats headed for Palestine.
US authorities tried to stop what were not only illegal but also extremely damaging activities.
In 1948 the Director of Central Intelligence, Rear Admiral R.H. Hillenkoetter, filed a top-secret report with the Secretary of Defense about the Zionist arms trafficking. He warned, “U.S. National security is unfavorably affected by these developments and it could be seriously jeopardized by continued illicit traffic in the ‘implements of war.’”[173]
Author Grant Smith reports that under Truman “the role of Feinberg and Haganah operative groups active in arms trafficking within the US, like the terrorist charges, would only be lightly investigated and seldom prosecuted.”[174]
Infiltrating displaced person’s camps in Europe to funnel people to Palestine
A similar underground campaign was operating in Europe. Zionist cadres infiltrated Europe’s displaced person’s camps to orchestrate a clandestine operation to funnel people to Palestine.
When it turned out that only a minority of Jewish refugees wished to go to Palestine, a Zionist report by Rabbi Klaussner concluded that “the people must be forced to go to Palestine.”
Author Alfred Lilienthal reports that numerous means were employed, including confiscation of food rations, dismissal from work, expulsion from the camps, taking away legal protection and visa rights; in one case, “even the public flogging of a recalcitrant recruit for the Israel Army.”[175]
The American public, however, was led to believe that European Jews desperately wished to go to Palestine, and the well-organized and well-funded operation behind this (including $25 million from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) was hidden from view.
A British general who had been Eisenhower’s deputy credited with the buildup for the Normandy invasion, Sir Frederick Morgan, publicly noted that many of the refugees were well dressed and well fed – “their pockets bulging with money” – and concluded that something must be encouraging their travels.
Morgan commented:
“The Jews seem to have an organized plan for becoming a world force, a weak force numerically, but one which will have a generating power for getting what they want.”
He was attacked viciously by the press and others; comedian Eddie Cantor took out a New York Times ad saying, “I thought Hitler was dead.”
The World Jewish Congress stated officially and duplicitously, “General Morgans allegation of ‘ secret Jewish force inside Europe aiming at a mass exodus to Palestine’ is… fanatically untrue.”
Morgan was forced to apologize, despite the fact that, as a pro-Israel author writes, “Morgan’s analysis of the situation was quite correct.”[176]
The Sieff group: Blocking a counter-Balfour declaration
Another secret group working on behalf of Zionism was formed in 1942 by Israel M. Sieff, a British clothing magnate who was temporarily living in the U.S.
The Sieff group was, as historian Grose puts it, “a sophisticated version of Brandeis’s Parushim.”
While its existence was never openly acknowledged, it grew into the secret back channel through official Washington during the last years of FDR’s presidency and the critical first years of Truman’s.
Its members included such men as Ben Cohen, a member of the White House staff; Robert Nathan, in intelligence; David Ginsburg, a New Deal bureaucrat; David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and David Niles, a high White House official under both Roosevelt and Truman. Grose reports:
“The little nucleus possessed the entree and the clout to carry the message of Jewish Palestine into the highest policymaking circles – through casual suggestion, indirection, chance remarks among well-placed colleagues in the corridors of power and the salons of social Washington.”[177]
When State Department and English diplomats, concerned that Zionist activities were causing serious harm to the war effort, were about to issue a “reverse Balfour” declaration on July 27, 1943 calling on these activities to cease, the Sieff group, Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., David Niles, Bernard Baruch, et al took emergency, and successful, action to block it.[178]
Palestinian refugees
By 1949 as a result of Israel’s “War of Independence” and its campaign to cleanse the land of as many non-Jews as possible,[179] there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The U.S. Representative in Israel sent an urgent report to Truman:
“Arab refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a disaster. …. Of approximately 400,000 refugees approaching winter with cold heavy rains will, it is estimated, kill more than 100,000 old men, women and children who are shelterless and have little or no food.”[180]
The number of refugees continued to grow, reaching at least three-quarters of a million. U.S. Diplomats in Cairo and Amman described a disastrous situation in which the “almost nonexistent resources” of Arab countries inundated by desperate, starving Palestinian refugees were stretched practically to the breaking point.
The State Department reported that during the last nine months of 1948 Arab states had donated $11 million to refugee aid, stating, “This sum, in light of the very slender budgets of most of these governments, is relatively enormous.”[181]
During this time, the report noted, “… the total direct relief offered… by the Israeli government to date consists of 500 cases of oranges.”[182]
Meanwhile, Israel had acquired properties worth at least $480 million in 1947 dollars; one estimate put the figure at $35 billion in 1990 dollars.[183]
Journalist and academic Anders Strindberg reports:
“In the process of ‘Judaizing’ Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion.
“The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.”[184]
Truman, whose caving in to Zionist pressures had helped create the disaster, now tried to convince Israel to allow the refugees to return to their homes. His main representative working on this was Mark Ethridge, former publisher of the Louisville Courier Journal.
Ethridge was disgusted at Israel’s refusal, reporting to the State Department:
“What I can see is an abortion of justice and humanity to which I do not want to be midwife… ”[185]
The State Department finally threatened to withhold $49 million of unallocated funds from an Export-Import Bank loan to Israel if it did not allow at least 200,000 refugees to return. The U.S. coordinator on Palestine Refugee Matters George C. McGhee delivered the message to the Israeli ambassador and later described his response:
“The ambassador looked me straight in the eye and said, in essence, that I wouldn’t get by with this move, that he would stop it… Within an hour of my return to my office I received a message from the White House that the President wished to dissociated himself from any withholding of the Ex-Im Bank loan.”[186]
Edwin Wright, a State Department Middle East specialist from 1945-66, was the subject of an oral history interview many years later for the Truman Library. He stated when this was completed:
“The material I gave Professor McKinzie was of a very controversial nature–one almost taboo in U.S. circles, inasmuch as I accused the Zionists of using political pressures and even deceit in order to get the U.S. involved in a policy of supporting a Zionist theocratic, ethnically exclusive and ambitious Jewish State. I, and my associates in the State Department, felt this was contrary to U.S. interests and we were overruled by President Truman.”[187]
Zionist influence in the media
As historian Richard Stevens notes, Zionists early on learned to exploit the essential nature of the American political system: that policies can be made and un-made through force of public opinion and pressure. Procuring influence in the media, both paid and unpaid, has been a key component of their success.[188]
From early on, the Zionist narrative largely dominated news coverage of the region. A study of four leading newspapers’ 1917 coverage showed that editorial opinion almost universally favored the Zionist position. Author Kathleen Christison notes that “editorials and news stories alike applauded Jewish enterprise, heralding a Jewish return to Palestine as ‘glorious news’.” Other studies showed the same situation for the 1920s. Christison writes:
“The relatively heavy press coverage is an indicator of the extent of Zionist influence even in this early period. One scholar has estimated that, as of the mid-1920s, approximately half of all New York Times articles were placed by press agents, suggesting that U.S. Zionist organizations may have placed many of the articles on Zionism’s Palestine endeavors.”[189]
At one point when the State Department was trying to convince Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return, Secretary of State Marshall wrote:
“The leaders of Israel would make a grave miscalculation if they thought callous treatment of this tragic issue could pass unnoted by world opinion.”[190]
Marshall underestimated the ability of Zionists to minimize the amount of information on this from reaching Americans. A State Department study in March 1949 found the American public was “unaware of the Palestine refugee problem, since it has not been hammered away at by the press or radio.”[191]
As author Alfred Lilienthal explained in 1953:
“The capture of the American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete. Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.”[192]
When the Saturday Evening Post published an article by Milton Mayer that criticized Jewish nationalism (and carried two other articles giving opposing views), Zionists organized what was probably the worst attack on the Post in its long history.
The magazine was inundated with vitriolic mail, subscriptions cancelled, and advertising withdrawn. The Post learned its lesson, later refusing to publish an article that would have again exposed it to such an onslaught, even though the editor acknowledged that the rejected piece was a “good and eloquent article.”[193]
This was typical in a campaign in which Zionists exploited sympathy for victimized Jews, and when this did not sufficiently skew reporting about Palestine, they used financial pressure. Lilienthal writes:
“If ‘voluntary’ compliance was not ‘understanding’ enough, there was always the matter of Jewish advertising and circulation. The threat of economic recriminations from Jewish advertisers, combined with the fact that the fatal label of ‘Anti-Semite’ would be pinned on any editor stepping out of line, assured fullest press cooperation.”[194]
Author Christison records that from the moment partition was voted by the UN, “the press played a critical role in building a framework for thinking that would endure for decades.” She writes that shortly before May 15, 1948, the scheduled beginning of the Jewish State, a total of 24 U.S., British, and Australian reporters converged on Palestine.
“Virtually all reporting was from the Jewish perspective. The journals the Nation and the New Republic both showed what one scholar calls ‘an overt emotional partiality’ toward the Jews. No item published in either journal was sympathetic to the Arabs, and no correspondent was stationed in Arab areas of Palestine, although some reporters lived with, and sometimes fought alongside, Jewish settlers.”[195]
Bookstores were inundated with books espousing the Zionist point of view to enthusiastic press reviews. Conversely, the few books published that dared to provide a different perspective were given scathing reviews, when they were reviewed at all.[196]
When Professor Millar Burrows of the Yale School of Divinity, a distinguished scholar and archaeologist, wrote Palestine Is Our Business, the American Zionist Council distributed a publication labeling his book “an anti-Semitic opus.”
In fact, Professor Burrows’ life history showed the opposite. He had been one of the organizers and Vice-President of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism and had long been active in the interfaith movement in New Haven.[197]
In his book Burrows wrote, “A terrible wrong has been done to the native people of [Palestine.] The blame for what has happened must be distributed among all concerned, including ourselves. Our own interests, both as Americans and as Christians, are endangered. The interests of the Jewish people also have suffered. And we can still do something about it.”[198]
Burrows emphasized: “This is a question of the most immediate and vital concern to many hundreds of thousands of living people. It is an issue on which one concerned with right and wrong must take a position and try to [do] something.”[199]
Burrows wrote that imposing a Jewish state on Palestine violated the principle of self-determination, and noted that the “right of a majority of the people of a country to choose their own government would hardly be questioned in any other instance.”[200]
Burrows criticized what he termed “pro-Zionist reporting,” and pointed out that a “quite different view of the situation would emerge if the word ‘resistance’ were used” when describing Palestinian and Arab fighting in 1948.[201] He wrote that the “plan for Palestine advocated by the Arabs was a democracy with freedom of religion and complete separation of religion and the State, as in this country.”[202]
In his conclusion, Burrows stated: “All the Arab refugees who want to return to their homes must be allowed and helped to do so, and must be restored to their own villages, houses, and farms or places of business, with adequate compensation from the Government of Israel for destruction and damage.”[203]
He also stated: “Homes must be found in this country or elsewhere for Jews desiring to become citizens of other countries that Israel, and their religious, civic, social, and economic rights must be guaranteed.[204]
In their onslaught against him, Zionists accused Burrows of “careless writing, disjointed reporting and extremely biased observation.”[205]
Another author who described the misery of Palestinian refugees (as well as the suffering of Jewish suffering in Israel), Willie Snow Ethridge, was similarly attacked by pro-Israel reviewers. When she was invited to address the Maryland Teachers Association and chose to speak on her book, Journey to Jerusalem, she was told she must speak on a different subject. The secretary of the association explained that so much pressure had been brought on him that he would lose his job if she didn’t changed to another topic.[206]
Still another was the eminent dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, a highly distinguished personage with impeccable credentials as a humanitarian. When she wrote that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their homes, a campaign was begun against her as a Christian “anti-Semite.”[207]
Gildersleeve, who had been instrumental in drafting the Preamble to the U.N. Charter and had taken a leading role in creating the U.N. Human Rights Commission, later devoted herself to working for human rights in the Middle East. She testified before Congressional committees and lobbied President Truman, to no avail. In her memoir, she attributed such failures to “the Zionist control of the media of communication.”[208]
Dorothy Thompson, played by Katharine Hepburn & Lauren Bacall
America’s most famous female journalist of the time also attempted valiantly, but unsuccessfully, to tell Americans about Palestinian refugees.
According to the Britannica encyclopedia, Dorothy Thompson was “one of the most famous journalists of the 20th Century.”[209]
Her column was in newspapers all over the country, her radio program listened to by tens of millions of Americans, she had been married to one of America’s most famous novelists, graced the cover of Time magazine, been profiled by America’s top magazines and was so well-known that “Woman of the Year,” a Hollywood movie featuring Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracey and a Broadway play starring Lauren Bacall, were based on Thompson.[210]
She had been the first journalist to be expelled by Adolph Hitler and had raised the alarm against the Nazis long ahead of most other journalists. She had originally supported Zionism, but then after the war had visited the region in person. She began to speak about Palestinian refugees, narrated a documentary about their plight[211], and condemned Jewish terrorism.
Thompson was viciously attacked in an orchestrated campaign of what she termed “career assassination and character assassination.” She wrote: “It has been boundless, going into my personal life.” She wrote of this organized attack:
“… when letter after letter is couched in almost identical phraseology I do not think the authors have been gifted with telepathy.”[212]
She was dropped by the New York Post, whose editor Ted Thackry, and his wife, Dorothy Schiff, were said by other Post editors to be close to the Irgun and Menachem Begin. Begin, the Irgunists, the Stern Gang and other Zionists organizations had what was termed “inordinate access” to the Post’s editorial board.[213]
(Dorothy Schiff, granddaughter of financier Jacob Schiff and owner of the Post, later divorced Thackry and married Rudolf Sonneborn.[214])
Thompson’s mail was filled with ferocious accusations that she was “anti-Semitic.” One such correspondent told her that her “filthy incitements to pogroms” would not be tolerated by New York’s Jews.[215]
Before long, her column and radio programs, her speaking engagements, and her fame were all gone. Today, she has largely been erased from history.
In the coming decades other Americans were similarly written out of history, forced out of office, lives and careers destroyed; history distorted, re-written, erased; bigotry promoted, supremacy disguised, facts replaced by fraud.
Very few people know this history. The excellent books that document it are largely out of print, their facts and very existence virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans, even those who focus on the Middle East. Instead, false theories have been promulgated, mendacious analyses promoted, chosen authors celebrated, others assigned to oblivion.
George Orwell once wrote: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”[216]
Perhaps by rediscovering the past, we’ll gain control of the present, and save the future.
Works Cited
Abu-Sitta, Salman H. Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966. London: Palestine Land Society, 2010. Print.
Alexander, Michael. Jazz Age Jews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.
Web. 1 June 2012. <http://newspaperarchive.com/hagerstown-daily-mail/1947-09-09?tag=reginald+gilbert+german&rtserp=tags/german?py=1947&pf=reginald&pl=gilbert>.
Jan 15 (1999): n. pag. Print. Accessed at http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/9929/balfour-declaration-author-was-a-secret-jew-says-prof/
Ball, George W., and Douglas B. Ball. The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Print.
Barrett, Mary. “In Memoriam: A Respectful Dissenter: CIA’s Wilbur Crane Eveland.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (1990): n. pag. Print.
Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor. The “Bergson Boys” and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2005. Print.
Beisner, Robert L. Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.
Berger, Elmer. Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978. Print.
Brownfeld, Allan. C. “Book Review: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (2000): 105-06. Print.
Burrows, Millar. Palestine Is Our Business. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949. Print.
Burrows, Millar. Palestine Is Our Business. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949. Print.
Council on Foreign Relations. Web. 06 Apr. 2012. <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/38470/john-c-campbell/israel-in-the-mind-of-america>.
Canfield, Joseph M. The Incredible Scofield and His Book. Vallecito, CA: Ross House, 2004. Print.
Christison, Kathleen. Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. First Paperback Printing ed. Berkeley, Calif: University of California, 2000. Print.
Nov. (2005): 44-50. Print. Online at http://www.wrmea.com/component/content/article/278-2005-november/8356-special-report-the-hidden-history-of-the-balfour-declaration.html
Curtiss, Richard H., and Janet McMahon. Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters with the Middle East and Islam. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1997. Print.
Davidson, Lawrence. America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood. Gainesville (Fla.): University of Florida, 2001. Print.
Davis, John Herbert. The Evasive Peace: A Study of the Zionist-Arab Problem. First American ed. [N.Y.]: New World, 1970. Print.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2011. Web. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/592960/Dorothy-Thompson>.
Esber, Rosemarie M. Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians. Alexandria, VA: Arabicus & Media, 2008. Print.
Eveland, Wilbur. Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East. London: W.W. Norton, 1980. Print.
Finkelstein, Norman G. Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-semitism and the Abuse of History. Berkeley: University of California, 2005. Print.
[London] 3 Aug. 1995: n. pag. Web. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituaries-rabbi-baruch-korff-1594514.html>.
[London, England] 3 Aug. 1995: n. pag. Print. Online at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituaries-rabbi-baruch-korff-1594514.html
Gildersleeve, Virginia Crocheron. Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs of. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Print.
Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993. Print.
Goldberg, Jonathan J. Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment. Reading, Mass. [u.a.: Addison-Wesley, 1996. Print.
Grady, Henry Francis, and John T. McNay. The Memoirs of Ambassador Henry F. Grady: From the Great War to the Cold War. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 2009. Print.
Green, Stephen. Taking Sides, America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel. Brattleboro: Amana, 1988. Print.
Grose, Peter. Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print.
Gurock, Jeffrey S. American Zionism Mission and Politics. London: Routledge, 1998. Google Books.
Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: Palestine between 1914-1979. New-York: Caravan, 1979. Print.
“The Israel Lobby Archive.” Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, n.d. Web. <http://irmep.org/ILA/default.asp>.
“The Israel Lobby Archive.” N.p., n.d. Web.
Web. 31 May 2012. <Link>.
John, Robert, and Sami Hadawi. The Palestine Diary 1914-1945 Britain’s Involvement (Vol. I). Reprint of Third Ed. Charleston: BookSurge, 2006. Introduction by Arnold Toynbee. Print.
Kauffman, Bill. Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-imperialism. New York: Metropolitan, 2008. Print.
Khalidi, Walid. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992. Print.
Khalidi, Walid. “The Palestine Problem: An Overview.” Journal of Palestine Studies 21.1 (1991): 5-16. Print.
Kolsky, Thomas A. Jews against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. Print.
Kurth, Peter. American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Print.
Lilienthal, Alfred M. The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978. Print.
Lilienthal, Alfred M. What Price Israel? 50th Anniversary ed. Haverford, PA: Infinity.com, 2004. Print.
Maisel, Louis Sandy, Ira N. Forman, Donald Altschiller, and Charles Walker Bassett. Jews in American Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Print.
Martin, Dave. “Who Killed James Forrestal?” DC. N.p., n.d. Web.
Martin, Dave. “Who Killed James Forrestal?” DCD. N.p., n.d. Web.
N.p., 10 Nov. 20. Web. 17 June 2012. <http://www.dcdave.com/article4/021110.html>.
Marton, Kati. A Death in Jerusalem. New York: Arcade, 1996. Print.
Marton, Kati. A Death in Jerusalem. New York: Arcade, 1996. Print.
McCarthy, Justin. The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Print.
McGowan, Daniel A., and Marc H. Ellis. Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel and Palestine. New York: Olive Branch, 1998. Print.
N.p., 26 July 1974. Web. 21 July 2011. <http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm>.
Medoff, Rafael. “The Bergson Group vs. The Holocaust – and Jewish Leaders vs. Bergson.” The Jewish Press June 6 (2007): n. pag. Print.
Menuhin, Moshe. The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969. Print.
Merkley, Paul Charles. Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001. Print.
Mulhall, John W., CSP. America and the Founding of Israel: an Investigation of the Morality of America’s Role. Los Angeles: Deshon, 1995. Print.
Naeim, Gilad. “The Jews of Iraq.” The Link April-May (1998): n. pag. Print.
n.d.: n. pag. Print.
Neff, Donald. Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945. Reprint ed. Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002. Print.
Neff, Donald. Fifty Years of Israel. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 2000. Print.
Nur, Masalha. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Fourth ed. Washington, DC: Inst. for Palestine Studies, 2001. Print.
27 July 1995, Obituaries sec.: n. pag. Print. Online at http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/27/obituaries/baruch-korff-81-rabbi-and-defender-of-nixon.html
Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld, 2007. Print.
Nov. 17 (1958): n. pag. Print. online at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,810661,00.html
N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Apr. 2012. <http://findingaids.princeton.edu/getEad?eadid=MC227>.
Qumsiyeh, Mazin B. Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle. London: Pluto, 2004. Print.
29 May 1975: 12. Web. <http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1876&dat=19750529&id=f5QeAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HcwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7086,5202171>.
Reynier, Jacques De. A Jerusalem, Un Drapeau Flottait Sur La Ligne De Feu. Neuchâtel: Editions De La Baconière, 1950. Print.
Rubinstein, William D. The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Rubinstein, William D. “The Secret of Leopold Amery.” History Today 49.Feb (1999): n. pag. Print.
Said, Edward W., and Christopher Hitchens. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London: Verso, 1988. Print.
Sanders, Marion K. Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time. New York: Avon, 1974. Print.
N.p., 1950. Web. 09 July 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ6lIsl-pHU>.
Sarna, Jonathan D., Ellen Smith, and Scott-Martin Kosofsky. The Jews of Boston. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, 2005. Print.
Schmidt, Sarah. “The Parushim: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65.Dec (1975): 121-39. Print.
N.p., n.d. Web. 18 June 2012. <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/folke.html>.
Shahak, Israël, and Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. London: Pluto, 1999. Print.
Shahak, Israel. Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand Years. London [etc].: Pluto, 1997. Print.
Sheean, Vincent. Dorothy and Red. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1964. Print.
Sheean, Vincent. Personal History. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Comapany, 1935. Print.
Slater, Leonard. The Pledge. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Print.
Smith, Grant F. Declassified Deceptions: The Secret History of Isaiah L. Kenen and the Rise of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Washington, D.C.: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2007. Print.
Snetsinger, John. Truman, the Jewish Vote, and the Creation of Israël. Stanford Calif.: Stanford Univ., 1974. Print.
Stevens, Richard P. American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1942-1947. Reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970. New York: Pageant, 1962. Print.
Aug. 4 (1995): n. pag. Print. Online at http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/1382/baruch-korff-nixon-s-rabbi-and-activist-dies-of-cancer-at-81/
Strindberg, Anders. “Forgotten Christians.” American Conservative May 24 (2004): n. pag. Print.
Supplement to Survey of Palestine Notes Compiled for the Information of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. Washington, D.C.: Inst. of Palestine Studies, 1991. Print.
A Survey of Palestine. Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, by the British Mandatory Commission, 1946. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991. Two volumes. Print.
N.p., n.d. Web. July 2011. <http://www.ravkooktorah.org/timeline.htm>.
Tivnan, Edward. The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Print.
N.p., n.d. Web. July 2011. <http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm>.
[UK] 22 May 2003: n. pag. Print. Online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1430766/Jewish-groups-plotted-to-kill-Bevin.html
Web. <http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/details/C11602817?uri=C11602817-details>. 1945 Oct 31 – 1946 Aug 17 Reference: KV 2/3428
[Israel] 19 Sept. 2006: n. pag. Print. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/hans-herzl-s-wish-comes-true-76-years-later-1.197621
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Peter Bergson.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007041. Accessed July, 2011
[Lima, Ohio] 8 Sept. 1947: 1. Web. <http://newspaperarchive.com/lima-news/1947-09-08?tag=korff,york,denied&rtserp=tags/korff,york,denied?py=1947>.
Urofsky, Melvin Irving. We Are One: American Jewry and Israel. Garden City, N.Y: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978. Print.
March 17 (2011): n. pag. Web. <http://ifamericansknew.org/media/sacbee.html>.
Wilson, Evan M. Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recognize Israel. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1979. Print.
Wilson, Evan M. Jerusalem, Key to Peace,. Washington: Middle East Institute, 1970. Print.
Wright, Edwin M. The Great Zionist Cover-up: A Study and Interpretation. Cleveland, OH: Northeast Ohio Committee on Middle East Understanding, 1975. Print.
10 Sept. 1947: n. pag. Web. <http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19470910&id=8VtIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=3E4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=2421,4272387>.
[London] 22 May 2003: n. pag. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article1908776.ece>.
July 1, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | American Jews, David G. Dalin, Grover Cleveland, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, World Zionist Organization, Zionism | Leave a comment
Rumsfeld’s Papers: The Perennial Anti-Syrian
Yitzhak Shamir (R) meets with Ronald Reagan (L) in the oval office at the White House. (Photo: Al-Akhbar)
By Sabah Ayoub | Al Akhbar | June 28, 2012
In the second installment of “Rumsfeld’s Lebanon Papers,” Al-Akhbar publishes the minutes of his meetings with the Israeli prime minister and defense minister at the end of 1983.
Rumsfeld does not request anything from the Israelis, nor does he interrogate them like he does with Lebanese and Arab counterparts. His meetings with the Israelis are closer to deliberations concerning common interests.
In the published documents going back to the period between 2001 and 2006, the most noteworthy seems to be a memo written following the 11 September 2001 attacks.
In the memo, Rumsfeld explains his “war on terror” strategy and its main objectives to former US President George W. Bush.
It spells out five main steps in the war, including “Syria out of Lebanon.” This came true four years later following the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February 2005.
Rumsfeld Engineers a Lebanese Propaganda Campaign Against Syria
Following a shuttle diplomacy tour of the Middle East, Rumsfeld presented the results of his visit to five Democratic and Republican congressmen, in a breakfast meeting on 24 January 1984.
Rumsfeld spoke about “state-sponsored terrorism,” “those who don’t share our values,” and “the radical wing” (terms that would be later heard in the Bush era).
The US envoy warned about “the radical wing” gaining ground in the Arab world, which is made up of Syria, Iran, Libya, and South Yemen.
He tried to convince the participants of the necessity of keeping US forces in Lebanon. “If we decide as a country […] that we can thus use only diplomatic and economic means to pursue mid- to long-range US goals, we will have effectively yielded the field to those who don’t share our values,” he said.
He was asked about the reason why US troops should remain in Lebanon although it is not geographically strategic and in circumstances that makes them easy targets for the Soviets and their proxies.
Rumsfeld replied that a pullout from Lebanon “would almost surely bring down the constitutional government.”
In addition, “Jordan is convinced that they are next on the
Syrian list” at a time when King Hussein is being considered as a “linchpin of a rejuvenated peace process with Israel.”
“Syria, virtually the only Soviet card in the Middle East, will have proved that standing up to the US pays dividends,” he maintained. Although he said it was “clear that Assad desires to maintain a line of contact with the West.”
“The IDF remains only 23 kilometers from Damascus,” said Rumsfeld.
On the other hand, a memo dated 3 February 1984, shows Rumsfeld preparing a secret propaganda campaign to support the implementation of the US’s new plans regarding Lebanon’s security.
Rumsfeld said that “Syria and Syrian factions in Lebanon have been winning the public relations battle.” He insisted that the Amin Gemayel government must “unambiguously demonstrate to the world” that they are seeking reconciliation.
Rumsfeld suggested that “this might include publicized requests” by Gemayel for PSP leader Walid Jumblatt and Amal leader Nabih Berri to come to the Presidential Palace and meet with him.
He proposed that Gemayel gives “a public speech well in advance of any possible military step” to say the government has made an offer for national reconciliation but that “Syria and factional leaders” are the ones blocking it.
“In short there needs to be a concentrated public effort to demonstrate that it is Syria that is blocking the political reconciliation process [and] the formation of the GNU [Government of National Unity] […], that is conducting the infiltration into the city of Beirut, [and] that is maintaining artillery within the range of Beirut for political intimidation,” Rumsfeld explained.
He proposed that the idea of Lebanon’s inability to confront Syria on its own, therefore it will need US and/or Israeli support, and the only solution remaining is military.
Yitzhak Shamir: The Lebanese Are Too Soft
“Something must be done to ‘liberate’ Beirut,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told US envoy Donald Rumsfeld in a meeting held on 16 January 1983. By “liberate” Shamir meant getting rid of what he called the terrorists. But how?
Shamir said that they “must support Gemayel” politically. On the ground, they must get rid of terrorist targets in Beirut and its suburbs, in a manner similar to the attack on what he called an Iranian Revolutionary Guard training camp in Bekaa that led to 30 persons being killed.
He stressed that Beirut must be cleaned up and that US-Israeli allies must be protected because they are in constant danger.
Shamir warned that Hafez al-Assad will prepare for the “grand war” on Israel after taking control of the PLO. “Syria must also accept the principle that Lebanese territory could not be used by the PLO or the Iranians for terrorist purposes,” he maintained.
Rumsfeld also relayed to Shamir that Gemayel was unhappy with Israeli involvement in attempts to create a Druze “mini-state” in the Chouf region. The Israeli PM replied by saying that the Lebanese side must cooperate better.
He held that “[US] Ambassador [and special envoy to the Middle East Philip] Habib had previously stressed the importance of intelligence cooperation but there had been no results.”
“Gemayel had to realize [that the Druze] wanted to have their piece of the political cake and they had a considerable fighting force to back up their position,” Rumsfeld added.
The both agreed on saying that the Lebanese are “too soft” and “have become accustomed to depending on the support of others.”
On 17 November 1983, Rumsfeld met with the Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens to discuss the Lebanese and Syrian conflicts.
Strategically, they agreed on the “necessity for both the US and Israel to bolster [Amin] Gemayel’s position in every possible way” to realize the “shared US-Israeli goals for Lebanon.”
Arens believed that “if the US withdraws its Marines [from Beirut], then Gemayel would be finished” and warned of a prolonged war with Hafez al-Assad in Lebanon.
“If the worst case eventuates, you will take Amin Gemayel out of Beirut and we will end up having to stay in South Lebanon,” Arens continued.
The Israeli Defense Minister indicated that the Lebanese forces will not “fall apart. Their morale is indeed poor and they are upset about what they see as President Gemayel’s mistakes in his not being sufficiently pro-Christian, pro-Israeli, and strong enough in standing up to the Muslims in general and Syrians in particular.”
“Gemayel wants it both ways. He wants to attack us publicly while telling us privately that he needs our help. He wants to tell the Syrians that he detests the Israelis but has to keep the agreement in order to get rid of us, while telling us privately to back him up,” Arens maintained.
Syria Out of Lebanon
On 30 September 2001, just 19 days after the attacks on New York and Washington DC, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent a memo to President George W. Bush elaborating his “strategic thoughts” on the “war on terrorism,” which should be implemented without haste.
He begins by defining the general framework of the war plans, arguing that “the US strategic theme should be aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves from regimes that support terrorism.”
Practically, “US Special Operations Forces and intelligence personnel should make allies of Afghanis, Iraqis, Lebanese, Sudanese, and others who would use US equipment, training, financial, military, and humanitarian support to root out and attack the common enemies.”
The second practical suggestion was to conduct “some air strikes against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets” in Afghanistan soon.
“We should avoid as much as possible creating images of Americans killing Muslims until we have set the political stage that the people we are going after are the enemies of the Muslims themselves,” he stressed.
One of the main goals of the war “would be to persuade or compel States to stop supporting terrorism. The regimes of such States should see that it will be fatal to host terrorists who attack the US as was done on September 11.”
“If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map, the US will not achieve its aim,” he maintained.
He concluded that the US government “should envision a goal along these lines:
– New regime in Afghanistan and another key State (or two) that supports terrorism,
– Syria out of Lebanon.
– Dismantlement or destruction of WMD capabilities [in two countries whose names have been removed].
– End of [name removed] support to terrorism.
– End of many other countries’ support or tolerance of terrorism.”
Related articles
- Israelis Grapple with an Unfinished War (ipsnews.net)
June 28, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | al-Akhbar, Donald Rumsfeld, Lebanon, Middle East, Syria | Leave a comment
US Sanctions Policy on a Collision Course against Iran; Increasing Tensions with China
By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | Race for Iran | June 27th, 2012

America’s policy on Iran-related secondary sanctions is on a collision course with itself as well as China. Secondary sanctions violate the United States’ obligations under the World Trade Organization and are, thus, illegal. (While a WTO signatory may decide, on national security grounds, to restrict its trade with another country, there is no legal basis for one state to impose sanctions against another over business that the second state conducts with a third country.) If Washington actually imposed secondary sanctions on another state for, say, buying Iranian oil and the sanctioned country took the United States to the WTO’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism, the United States would almost certainly lose the case.
Given this reality, the whole edifice of Iran-related secondary sanctions is in reality a house of cards. It rests on an assumption that no state will ever really challenge the legitimacy of America’s Iran-related extraterritorial sanctions—and this means that the United States cannot ever really impose them. Instead, successive U.S. administrations have used the threat of such sanctions to elicit modifications of other countries’ commercial relations with the Islamic Republic; when these administrations finally reach the limit of their capacity to leverage other countries’ decision-making regarding Iran, the United States backs off.
The Obama Administration is bringing this glaring contradiction increasingly to the fore, by supinely collaborating with the Congress to enact secondary sanctions into laws that give the executive branch less and less discretion over their actual application. This dynamic is now coming to a head in the Administration’s dealings with China.
We are currently in China, as Visiting Scholars at Peking University’s School of International Studies. And that means we are here during the run-up to formal implementation of the United States’ newest round of Iran-related secondary sanctions, due to go into effect on June 28.
These new sanctions, at least as legislated, threaten to punish financial and corporate entities in countries that continue to purchase Iranian oil at their historic levels of consumption. So far, the Obama Administration has issued sanctions waivers to all of the major buyers of Iranian oil, see here and here—all the major buyers, that is, except the People’s Republic of China.
Trade data indicate that China’s imports of Iranian oil declined significantly in the first quarter of this year. It is unclear to what extent this reduction was intended as an accommodation to the United States and to what extent it was the product of a payment dispute with Tehran. But, whatever the reason, the reduction prompted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to note last week that “we’ve seen China slowly but surely take actions,” see here. Clinton even seemed to hint that the Administration might be looking for an opening to waive the imposition of sanctions against China: “I have to certify under American laws whether or not countries are reducing their purchases of crude oil from Iran and I was able to certify that India was, Japan was, South Korea was… And we think, based on the latest data, that China is also moving in that direction.”
Since the resolution of the payments dispute between China and Iran, however, China’s imports of Iranian oil have picked up once again, see here and here. And the Chinese government continues to insist that the country’s purchases of oil from the Islamic Republic are “fully reasonable and legitimate,” see here.
Once June 28 comes the White House and State Department will be under enormous pressure from the Congress (Hill Democrats will provide the President no cover on the issue), the Romney campaign, and various domestic interest groups to sanction China over its continued oil buys from Iran. The Administration’s alliance with Congress and the pro-Israel lobby on Iran sanctions, combined with its misguided assessment that the United States can somehow compel Iran’s “surrender” on the nuclear issue, have put the President and his team in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position. This is very much a problem of the Administration’s own making.
Related articles
- Russia: US anti-Iran sanctions against international law (alethonews.wordpress.com)
June 27, 2012 Posted by aletho | Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | China, Flynt Leverett, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama, Sanctions against Iran, U.S. sanctions against Iran, United States, World Trade Organization | Leave a comment
Featured Video
Trita Parsi: Iran War Ends Today? Threats of Deporting Trita Parsi
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
The Crusades – colliding narratives
Ashes of Pompeii | June 13, 2026
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.

But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
Blog Roll
-
Join 2,451 other subscribers
Visits Since December 2009
- 7,552,917 hits
Looking for something?
Archives
Calendar
Categories
Aletho News Civil Liberties Corruption Deception Economics Environmentalism Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism Fake News False Flag Terrorism Full Spectrum Dominance Illegal Occupation Mainstream Media, Warmongering Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity Militarism Progressive Hypocrite Russophobia Science and Pseudo-Science Solidarity and Activism Subjugation - Torture Supremacism, Social Darwinism Timeless or most popular Video War Crimes Wars for IsraelTags
Afghanistan Africa AIPAC al-Qaeda Australia BBC Benjamin Netanyahu Brazil Canada CDC Central Intelligence Agency China CIA CNN Covid-19 COVID-19 Vaccine Donald Trump Egypt European Union Facebook FBI FDA France Gaza Germany Google Hamas Hebron Hezbollah Hillary Clinton Human rights Hungary India Iran Iraq ISIS Israel Israeli settlement Japan Jerusalem Joe Biden Korea Latin America Lebanon Libya Middle East National Security Agency NATO New York Times North Korea NSA Obama Pakistan Palestine Poland Qatar Russia Sanctions against Iran Saudi Arabia Syria The Guardian Turkey Twitter UAE UK Ukraine United Nations United States USA Venezuela Washington Post West Bank WHO Yemen Zionism
Aletho News- With one strike, Netanyahu tries to kill two peace deals
- Iran warns ‘no point’ in deal with US if Israel remains unrestrained
- Ukraine as a laboratory of ‘techno-fascism’
- Desperate Starmer choosing piracy as distraction over UK crime crisis – Putin envoy
- The Crusades – colliding narratives
- Trita Parsi: Iran War Ends Today? Threats of Deporting Trita Parsi
- What Is SIDS?
- DHS docs: Govt bracing for nationwide anti-AI riots, preparing to crack down on dissent
- India signals rethink over West Asia
- Israeli Ex-Navy Chief admits massive damage from Iran missiles
If Americans Knew- Did Trump just threaten a nuclear attack on Iran? Another merger for Israel-Firster David Ellison –Daily Update
- Israeli Firm Accused of Launching Smear Campaigns During US, European Elections
- As World Cup kicks off, Gaza amputee girls chase football dreams
- Oxfam: More Palestinians killed by Israel across West Bank in last 3 years than previous 17 years combined
- US-Iran ceasefire may be imminent, but will Israel blow it up? – Daily Update
- The Issue of Israel Is Ending Democracy In Michigan
- Israel is stealing homes, livelihoods, and lives in West Bank
- Gaza is not an aberration – Israel planned this genocide decades ago
- Israel is changing the face of Lebanon, mainstream media is normalizing it – 3 articles
- Genocide lobby benefits from EU anti-racist fund
No Tricks Zone- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
- European “Expert Commission” Urges COVID-19-Like Global Climate State Of Energency!
- Real-World Observations Do Not Support The Position That Climate Change Is Human-Caused
Contact:
atheonews (at) gmail.com
Disclaimer
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.



