See also:
System Update | December 2023
AIPAC, the leading Israeli lobby group, and its role in subversion of US democracy
By David Miller | Press TV | July 23, 2024
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the most famous and equally notorious Israeli lobby group in the world. But how important is it really?
Some argue that its influence has been exaggerated and it can at best influence American policies at the margins, while others say it wields considerable clout in US power corridors.
Many of these arguments come from the political left like the one published in Mother Jones, the US leftist magazine, or the one from the former stalwart of the Palestinian cause, Christopher Hitchens, or even the one by Novara Media, a British “leftist” website.
In it, David Wearing presents his argument in these words:
AIPAC may best be seen as performing a disciplinary function within US politics. One can certainly argue that US support for Israel is made somewhat firmer given AIPAC’s role, and these marginal factors matter. But they are still marginal.
Certainly, the Zionist movement is keen to downplay its influence. A report in the Tablet: “How Influential Is AIPAC? Less Than Beer Sellers, Public Accountants, and Toyota” states:
The way AIPAC is talked about, you’d think they’d be a lobbying juggernaut, surely one of the largest in the nation’s capital. Wrong…:
Between 1998 and 2018, AIPAC didn’t make a dent in the Center for Responsive Politics list of the top-spending lobbying groups. In 2018, total pro-Israel lobbying spending was around $5 million, of which AIPAC accounted for $3.5 million.
In contrast, Native American casinos spent around $22 million that year. By Tablet’s count, AIPAC was the 147th highest-ranked entity in terms of lobbying spending in 2018.
This is an attempt to pretend that the influence of the Zionist movement is much less than suggested by observers.
However, based on our findings, we can present these facts:
- Taking the figure disclosed to the lobbying regulator as if that was all AIPAC spends on lobbying is profoundly mistaken. Though it disclosed only $2.7 million lobby expenditure in 2022, its actual total expenditure was £79.1 million.
- In addition, AIPAC controls another nonprofit, the American Israel Education Foundation. It discloses nothing to the regulator, yet had a 2022 expenditure of a further $44.6 million.
- When we add campaign contributions the figures rise significantly. Donations by AIPAC’s Political Action Committee (PAC for short) and its new Super PAC, the United Democracy Project, in the most recent period (2024) total $17.4 million and $31.5 million respectively. It’s worth noting that none of this was donated by AIPAC itself. This adds to donations it has raised from others. The United Democracy Project is the third largest Superpac in the US in terms of 2024 expenditure, according to Open Secrets, the US lobby watchdog. This easily outstrips all corporate-related Superpacs.
- Looking more widely at the Israel lobby in general declared lobbying expenditure by the lobby in 2018 was $7 million not “around $5 million” as stated by the Tablet. The figure for 2022 was $5.4 million, with the following groups making significant declarations: Anti-Defamation League ($340,000), Christians United for Israel ($240,000), Foundation for Defense of Democracies ($180,000), J Street ($640,000), Jewish Federations of North America ($893,000), Republican Jewish Coalition ($320,000), Zionist Organisation of America ($160,000). But of course, their actual budget/expenditure is much higher than the narrow specific lobbying disclosure data.
However, taking figures the lobby narrowly conceives are woefully inadequate as it does not include money spent by Israeli firms or by foreign agents registered with the US Federal government’s Foreign Agents Registration Act office.
- $6.3 million was spent in 2022 by Israeli firms including arms firms Elbit ($770,000), Rafael ($680,000), Israel Aerospace Industries ($446,000), and phone hacking firm Cellebrite ($440,000).
- $16 million in the same year was spent by registered foreign agents of Israel including the regime itself, the World Zionist Organisation ($4.2 million), the Jewish Agency ($9.5 million), and the phone hacking firm NSO Group ($1.5 million).
But even that pales in comparison to data compiled by the Israellobby.org website.
It collates data on Zionist groups providing subsidies to the Zionist entity (including illegal settlements and the occupation forces) and lobbying and education.
It shows a total annual budget of £3.6 billion as long ago as 2012, rising to an estimated £6.3 billion in 2020. These figures do not include the data above on Israeli firms or foreign agents.
However extensive this data is (the best available source on the extent of the economic basis of the Zionist movement), it does not include the following:
- The American Zionist Movement is the official US affiliate of the World Zionist Organisation. It has 46 members. Of these, only 13 are included in the Israellobby.org data.
- The many branches of Chabad-Lubavitch in the US. Chabad is an extreme, genocidal ultra Zionist Hasidic sect. Two Chabad-Lubavitch foundations are included in the data, but according to Lubavitch official figures, which almost certainly underestimate its full reach there are some 1,274 Chabad-Lubavitch groups in the US, (by far the largest number anywhere in the world). Internal Revenue Service data on Chabad-Lubavitch lists 1,313 separate groups in the US.
- Virtually none of the other Hasidic and Haredi groups in the US are included in the data. These groups are overwhelmingly ultra-Zionist, though some refuse to allow their young men to serve in the occupation forces and the Satmar appears to remain anti-Zionist.
- Lastly and perhaps of most significance, the non-profit Foundations which funds many of the groups above, of which there are many hundreds, are excluded. These are Zionist family foundations or Zionist community foundations, including the following well-known examples: Adelson Family Foundation, Allegheny Foundation, Anchorage Charitable Fund, Castle Rock Foundation, Earhart Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, Klarman Family Foundation, Paul E. Singer Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Scaife Family Foundation, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, William Rosenwald Family Fund.
There is hardly any research on the depth and extent of the Zionist penetration of US society which is cognizant of this data.
It’s time to dig deeper and reveal the actual spending power and reach of the lobby.
Turning back to AIPAC, it has a deserved reputation as the most powerful Israeli lobby group in the US. However, a key Zionist talking point is the claim that it is not so powerful.
AIPAC was created by Isiah Kenen a contractor for the Zionist regime in 1963. It was initially called the American Zionist Council. Two months after the American Zionist Council was ordered to register as a foreign agent, Kenen incorporated AIPAC which did not register as a foreign agent, though it is.
One element of AIPAC activities not well understood is its role in spending millions every year ferrying Israeli settlers for eight-day junkets.
The trips are organized through a cutout called the American Israel Education Fund, a charitable organization founded by AIPAC, from which it borrows its offices, board members, and even part of its logo. Like other tax-exempt nonprofits, AIEF must file a Form 990 every year with the Internal Revenue Service, but donors are redacted from the public version.
Recently, an unredacted tax filing for 2019 was obtained by The Intercept. It revealed that the financiers are a clutch of large foundations and nonprofits, some of which are family-run, which also offer funds to other genocidal Zionist groups.
They include foundations associated with the following families, Koret, Swartz, Schusterman and Singer.
The role of AIPAC in campaign contributions is also poorly understood. In November 2023, it was reported that AIPAC was “airing attack ads and beginning to back primary opponents to challenge Congress members who are not voting for or supporting Israel’s war on Gaza.”
According to the report in the Guardian :
Although AIPAC’s roots trace back to the 1950s, the group spent decades focusing most of its attention on lobbying members of Congress – only getting directly involved in races in the past few years. In late 2021, AIPAC announced the formation of a political action committee, known as AIPAC Pac, and a Super Pac, the United Democracy Project, to get more directly involved in congressional campaigns.
The groups hit the ground running in the 2022 midterms, spending nearly $50m across the election cycle. Aipac Pac boasts that it supported 365 pro-Israel candidates from both parties in 2022, while critics condemned the group’s endorsement of dozens of Republicans who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The Guardian reported that A group of Super Pacs and dark-money non-profits – most notably groups such as the United Democracy Project ($31,679,020) and the Democratic Majority for Israel ($35,000) – as well as other PACs (AIPAC PAC ($1,491,025) tied to Israeli interests contributed about significantly to US campaigns during the last cycle, according to Open Secrets, a campaign finance watchdog.
Open Secrets data show that this amounts to some $58.4 million in the past year.
In the spring of this year, it was revealed that AIPAC had a $100 million war chest for the upcoming election cycle.
AIPAC’s Super Pac is amusingly named the United Democracy Project. It spends targeted funds on lawmakers who challenge any pro-Israel policy including the mildly critical Squad of Democrat representatives and also Libertarian Republicans such as Thomas Massie who has voted against military aid to Israel.
It was Massie who revealed in an interview with Tucker Carlson that AIPAC appoints handlers for each Congress person.
Here is his description: ”It’s like your babysitter. Your AIPAC babysitter who is always talking to you for AIPAC. They’re probably a constituent in your district, but they are, you know, firmly embedded in AIPAC.
In November 2022, AIPAC claimed that “more than 95% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their election last night! Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!”
In July 2024, AIPAC claimed “So far this cycle, all 90 AIPAC-endorsed Democrats have won their primary election”
When all of this data and activity is considered we can see that AIPAC is much more of a player than is admitted in those views from the right and left who minimize its importance.
AIPAC is part of a complex network of lobby groups which collectively can be described as the “Israel lobby”. Further, the lobby is itself only a smallish part of the much larger Zionist movement. It is this which needs to be assessed in all its complexity.
When we do that a more rounded and complex account emerges. The role of AIPAC cannot be considered outside its role in the wonder movement because its activities including raising funds and deploying them through other groups and organizations are a core element of its strategy.
Reducing AIPAC to its lobbying disclosure expenditure or its total budget cannot capture its significance in the movement, let alone the significance of the Zionist movement in total.
Hence, AIPAC, and the rest of the Zionist movement, must be stopped.
David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy.
Israel Lobby Cash Dominates and Perverts American Elections
Where is the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 when you really need it?
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JUNE 28, 2024
Once upon a time the United States of America was a constitutional republic that was by design constructed with checks and balances to limit corruption and constrain the ability of any branch of government to initiate certain potentially harmful actions, like going to war, which required approval by both Congress and the Executive Branch. Of course, that was 261 years ago and things change over time. Today’s America, what claims to be both a democracy and the issuer plus enforcer of international rules and norms, is arguably one of the most corrupt as well as most disliked countries on earth, with a political system that is exceptionally vulnerable to those who have deep pockets and a willingness to spend freely to obtain favors from the professional politicians and bureaucrats who now proliferate throughout the system.
If one measures the consequences arising from all the corruption, there is no better example than the heavily lopsided relationship with Israel, which has been produced through the infusion of hundreds of billions of dollars coming primarily from Jewish billionaire and corporate sources. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson famously gifted Donald Trump with $100 million and in return received what he demanded, i.e. a United States decision to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and a recognition that Jerusalem would be recognized as the country’s capital, which was illegal under international law. Additionally, Trump’s team headed by Israeli apologist Ambassador David Friedman, brought about the recognition of the Jewish state’s annexation of the occupied formerly Syrian Golan Heights, also an illegal concession, and the de facto granting of a free hand to Israel for dealing with the Palestinians as it sees fit, which is playing out currently. Trump also was in the business of canceling a nuclear monitoring agreement with Iran, which was very much in the US interest, and the assassination senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Qassim Soleimani, a war crime.
The heavily pro-Israel policies have not developed in the US because of some actual affinity between the two nations but rather because of great dollops of Jewish money liberally applied to politicians and journalists to create a myth of an actual beneficial alliance between the two to produce a narrative that the US public would be inclined to accept. In this massive coordinated effort by what is euphemistically referred to as the Israel Lobby there is no more active entity than the basically illegal American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its conjoined AIPAC-Political Action Committee, which delivers the cash and also the intimidation of political candidates who do not embrace the Jewish state with enthusiasm. Such dissidents are marked for removal through the surfacing of opposing prospective candidates who are particularly well-funded and sure to receive exceptionally favorable press. In the current round of primaries just concluded, AIPAC-Pac has boasted that it has achieved 100% success as “an AIPAC-endorsed candidate has won in every district (224 races) where an endorsee was on the ballot. All 90 AIPAC-backed Democrats who have had their primary races in 2024 have won. These Democrats are strong pro-Israel voices. 134 AIPAC-backed Republicans have [also]won their elections. Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics.”
How does it work? As international lawyer John Whitbeck has described the process “the primary reasons why virtually all members of the US Congress prioritize the desires of the Israeli government over the interests of the American people are money and fear — and particularly the fear of all the money that Israel-Firsters will devote to ending your political career, most notably through primary elections, if you manifest anything less than unconditional support and/or abject subservience to Israel.” In the most recent primary in New York state, AIPAC boasts over having devoted a record $15 million, a record amount spent on a primary election, to delivering exemplary punishment to end the political career of Representative Jamaal Bowman, a rare progressive in Congress who has been an outspoken critic of Israeli apartheid and genocide. Among other damnation of Bowman’s record, he was inevitably accused of “antisemitism.” Only a single such example every few years has proven to be enough to keep virtually all members of Congress in line. One might ask former Congressmen like Cynthia McKinney and others in a long line who felt the wrath of AIPAC and its sister organizations. That would include now deceased Senators William Fulbright, Charles Percy and James Abourezk and Congressmen Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey and Jim Traficant.
It has recently been revealed that nearly all congressional candidates are routinely and openly approached by AIPAC representatives who ask in advance their views on Israel. If they are cooperative, sometimes requiring a written statement of intent, they are given a pass and can count on financial support and favorable media. If they are not, they are marked for removal. And one can even sympathize with members of Congress who are self-defined careerists in politics, as, again per Whitbeck, “what is the point, when all around you are groveling flat-out- prone in subservience to Israel, in raising your head on a matter of principle? Your head will simply be cut off, and nothing will change for the better as a result of your sacrifice. There is really no rational choice but to faithfully follow the orders of your ‘AIPAC babysitter.’” The “babysitter” is an AIPAC endorsed staffer placed in nearly every congressional office to monitor and report on Israel issues, a development which has recently been revealed by Congressman Tom Massie while being interviewed by Tucker Carlson.
So how do we limit the ability of Israel to corrupt America’s political system to such an extent that many now believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu controls US foreign policy while his domestic lobby creatures at the same time influence as well many other aspects of how the government operates at state and national levels? And why do I refer to the actions of AIPAC and other groups as illegal? Israel is able to act with impunity because of the undeniable powerful influence of its domestic US lobby coupled with its skill at being able to hide what it is up to. The Lobby also has a free hand because the federal government does not enforce its own laws when it comes to the illegally nuclear armed Jewish state. AIPAC, not to mention groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), are actually acting as directed agents of the Israeli government and therefore subject to the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 which requires organizations that take foreign direction regarding their activities to open up their books and records to scrutiny. It also requires some transparency vis-à-vis their contacts and relationships with the Israeli Embassy and the country’s Foreign Ministry and intelligence and security agencies.
The Act is usually referred to as FARA and was originally intended to monitor groups acting on behalf of the German and Italian governments prior to World War 2. It has since been used to limit the activity of Russian and other entities that have operated in the US but has never been applied against Israel, in itself yet another indication of the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to suppress any exposure of its activities. Journalist and lawyer Isaiah Kenen had founded the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (AZCPA) as a lobbying division of the American Zionist Council in 1953 but it soon separated from AZC and became AIPAC in 1954. Kenen, an actual lobbyist for the Israeli government, had earlier worked for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. AIPAC is today generally considered the most powerful and wealthiest Israeli lobby in the United States. President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy understood the threat that it represented and sought to compel both AZC and AIPAC to register under FARA but JFK was assassinated shortly thereafter, which have led many to believe that the killing was a Mossad job. Registration under FARA would have inter alia blocked any funding of US political parties and politicians by those groups acting in support of Israeli interests. It would with one stroke take away much of Israel’s ability to corrupt America’s political system in its favor.
In comments to my articles I am often asked what can we ordinary Americans do to bring the Israeli influencers in this country under control. Well, after recognizing that there is a problem, a partial answer is there by enforcing FARA. One needs to put pressure on individual congressmen and the White House through the media to register AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. Corrupting money is the key to their power and if the spigot of cash is shut off to the politicians and parties their influence will be greatly diminished. And don’t be surprised if there will be many politicians who are privately ashamed at what has been going on who will suddenly become supporters of control over the Jewish groups. The Lobby has been bad for America and not even particularly good for Israel as “sacrosanct” US support for Israel, as Joe Biden puts it, has freed folks like Netanyahu to engage in very dangerous enterprises for his own country as in Gaza and also against its neighbors and for so-called allies like the US. Time to put an end to the status quo.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Massie Taunts AIPAC After Demolishing Primary Challengers
By Tyler Durden | Zerohedge | May 22, 2024
Despite having been targeted by the most powerful, pro-Israel political organization operating in America, libertarian-minded Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie stomped his two Republican primary challengers on Tuesday — and then used social media to mock his Israel-first detractors.
Massie cruised to victory, amassing 76% of the vote, while his two would-be vanquishers roughly split the difference, with Michael McGinnis edging Eric Deters by about 1%. With no Democratic opponent even bothering to take on Massie in November, he’s set up for a sixth term representing Kentucky’s 4th congressional district, which stretches all along the northernmost part of the state.
“Tonight’s victory is a referendum on thousands of independent votes I have cast in Washington DC on behalf of Kentucky’s 4th District,” said Massie.
“I’ve consistently upheld the Constitution by voting for and sponsoring legislation to support the right to keep and bear arms, the right to free speech, freedom of religion and the right to privacy. I’ve also fought against endless foreign wars, foreign aid and inflationary policies, regardless of who is in the White House.
Earlier this month, the independent campaign-spending arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) announced that it was pouring $300,000 into advertisements on Fox television affiliates across the Bluegrass State. The over-the-top ads said, “Israel, the Holy Land [are] under attack by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah… and Congressman Tom Massie.”
Massie has repeatedly stood out as one of the very few Republicans willing to defy the wishes of the potent pro-Israel lobby. In recent months, he voted against the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would make universities tolerating unacceptable statements about Israel targets of federal civil rights-based punishments. He also voted against the latest, $14.3 billion aid package, noting that “Israel has a lower debt-to-GDP ratio than the United States.”
After Massie’s lopsided win was apparent, AIPAC tried to downplay the outcome, saying that, rather than trying to oust him in the primary, the group wanted to damage him statewide — clearly in anticipation of a possible Massie 2026 Senate run to take the seat of retiring Senate Majority Leader and quintessential establishment swamp creature Mitch McConnell.
Massie said AIPAC was guilty of “election campaign malpractice.” Referring to the $400,000 total that AIPAC had spent against him recently, he told McClatchy DC, “I’m laughing because it has the same effect as lighting it on fire and burning it… What it could do is up my name ID statewide, but two years from now nobody’s going to remember what the ad was about.”
He also deftly turned AIPAC’s announcement of its attack-blitz into a fundraising opportunity. As word of AIPAC’s campaign spread on social media and via ZeroHedge and other outlets, more than 1,200 people contributed $101,000 to his coffers in just four days.
On Tuesday evening, Massie seized on AIPAC’s defensive tweet, drawing attention to the fact that it had been “ratio’d” by the Twitterverse.
Tracing the origins of Zionist lobby’s malign influence on American academia
By Ivan Kesic | Press TV | April 29, 2024
The ruthless police crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests in universities across the United States is a continuation of years of silent repression and malign Zionist influence on American academia.
More than 20 universities in the US are protesting against the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza, where nearly 34,500 people have been killed since October last year, mostly women and children.
According to reports, more than 900 people have been arrested on US campuses since April 18 when a pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University in New York was forcefully removed by police.
The police were called by university president Nemat Minouche Shafik to dismantle the tent encampment set up on campus, which triggered a massive outcry from students and faculty members.
The unwarranted police action against students at Columbia University led to the expansion of protests to other university campuses including Yale University in Connecticut, City University in New York, Northeastern University in Boston, Arizona State University in Phoenix, Indiana University in Bloomington, Washington University in St Louis, University of Texas in Texas and University of California in Los Angeles among others.
Like Columbia, the University of Texas president Jay Hartzell also faced a strong backlash from students and faculty members on Friday after he called in police to break up the pro-Palestinian demonstration.
Hundreds of Texas University faculty members signed a letter expressing no confidence in Hartzell for “needlessly putting students, staff and faculty in danger” after riot police moved against protesters.
The protesting students and professors are calling for universities to divest and disassociate themselves from companies that are aiding the occupying regime’s no-holds-barred aggression on Gaza.
The US police, known for its notoriety, has responded with brute violence, drawing anger and outrage.
According to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the authors of ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’, a major monograph on the influence of the Israel lobby in the US, the Zionist influence on academia has faced more problems than politics, media and think tanks.
The origins of Zionist influence on US academia
The origins of the Israeli lobby’s influence can be traced to the late 1970s when the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) monitored campus activities and trained young advocates for Israel.
AIPAC, along with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), also recruited students to help them identify professors and campus organizations with anti-Israel positions, which they would document in dossiers and then systematically slander in their publications.
Toward the end of the 20th century, these lobby groups did not pay much attention to shaping the discussion at universities because the Oslo peace process was underway, with little violence in the occupied territories, and consequently with less criticism of the Israeli regime’s policies.
However, at the beginning of the new century when peace negotiations failed, the extremists led by Ariel Sharon took the helm of the Israeli regime and the Second Intifada ensued, the criticism at higher education institutions in the United States became much stronger and more intense.
The Israeli lobby, exerting considerable influence, responded with an aggressive attempt to “take back the campuses,” and the most important organization in that campaign was once again AIPAC, which more than tripled its spending on pro-Israel college programs.
According to AIPAC leadership at the time, these funds were intended to significantly expand the number of students involved in activities in favor of the Israeli regime on campuses, their competence, and their involvement in the national pro-Israel effort.
Hundreds of students were sent to AIPAC all-expenses-paid courses in Washington DC where they received intensive advocacy training, and they were instructed to concentrate on networking with campus leaders of all kinds and winning them over to promote the regime’s cause.
The multi-year campaign resulted in annual AIPAC Policy Conferences being attended by over 1,200 students from 400 colleges and universities across the US, including 150 student body presidents.
Simultaneously, this campaign to cultivate students has been accompanied by efforts to influence university faculty and hiring practices.
Israel lobby groups involved in US academia
In addition to AIPAC, other pro-Israel lobby groups have also been involved in pro-Israel campaigns at American universities, notably the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), an umbrella organization for the coordination of 26 different Zionist groups in US universities.
Although the ICC is not registered under the required Foreign Agent Registration Act, its leadership admitted that they have close ties and coordinate actions with Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) likewise initiated a series of advocacy training sessions for college students with the aim of defending the Israeli regime on their campuses.
A similar role was played by the David Project (TDP), which partnered with Christians United for Israel (CUFI), organizing training programs for students to agitate for Zionism.
The founder of the David Project was an Islamophobe who advocated banning the construction of mosques on American soil and co-founder of CAMERA, another Zionist group involved in smearing pro-Palestinian students on campuses.
New groups also emerged, such as the Caravan for Democracy (CFD), which brought Israeli settlers to speak at American universities, promoting the farce of Israel as “the only democracy in the region.”
The website Campus Watch, an affiliate of the Middle East Forum (MEF), was also established, whose dossiers continued AIPAC’s tradition of publicly defaming all campus critics of Israeli politics.
Press TV website in July 2023 published an investigation on how the Middle East Forum has shaped into a hardline Zionist and anti-Muslim think tank, founded by Daniel Pipes in 1990.
Its website stated that its mission is to “promote American interests in the Middle East (West Asia) and protect Western values from Middle Eastern threats”, secretly serving the Zionist agenda.
Rodney Martin, a former Congressional staffer, says the AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups in the US have successfully placed a chokehold on the US government.
American-Israeli agendas at work
The ICC and the TDP were actively engaged in pressuring American universities to reject multimillion-dollar donations from Muslim governments to Islamic studies programs, characterizing them as “anti-American.”
On the other hand, under the guise of expanding cultural cooperation and with the true goal of whitewashing the regime, Zionist megadonors launched a series of so-called “Israel studies” programs at American universities.
Fred Lafer and Sheldon Adelson, donors to such programs at New York University and Georgetown University, respectively, admitted that their motivation was to counter the Arab viewpoint at those institutions, referring to the pro-Palestine position.
After the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) spread across American colleges and universities, Adelson raised an additional 50 million in a secret summit in 2015 to fight the movement.
According to him, the funds raised were to go to operations on US campuses to fight the BDS movement and to “researchers” who would supply information about groups on campuses critical of Israel and recommend possible legal avenues to block their activities.
The precise amount of donations to American universities is difficult to determine because dozens of donors and Zionist charities regularly pay millions and some are given anonymously.
In the case of the University of Pennsylvania alone, pro-Israel lobbyists Marc Rowan and Ross Stevens are known to have donated 50 million and 100 million respectively.
AIPAC, the group that enjoys maximum influence on American academia, received about 12 million monthly donations before the start of the war in Gaza, and the receipts have multiplied since then.
Last month, prominent progressive organizations in the US formed a coalition to defend lawmakers targeted by the powerful AIPAC and counter its sway in US Congress.
Pertinently, one of the key but underreported factors of the unwavering US support for the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza is the overwhelming presence of Zionist Jews in the Biden administration.
The Zionist Jewishness of Biden’s cabinet was pointed out recently by The Forward, a progressive media for a Jewish American audience, as well as the Israeli right-wing newspaper Times of Israel.
Scott Ritter: Ukraine ‘Owned’ by US, While With Israel It’s the Other Way Around
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – April 15, 2024
Senior Ukrainian officials couldn’t help but feel sidelined by the outpouring of US attention and support for Israel as Tel Aviv sought to fend off an unprecedented Iranian missile and drone attack over the weekend. There’s a good reason for that, says former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
President Zelensky took to X on Sunday to plead with US lawmakers not to forget about Ukraine, saying “it is critical that the United States Congress make the necessary decisions to strengthen America’s allies in this critical time” by delivering on the aid package promised by President Biden six months ago.
Zelensky’s comments were echoed by Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who told reporters on Monday that Ukraine also needs help from its Western partners, even if it’s not in the form of direct military help – like Israel got. “All we ask our partners is, even if you cannot act the way you act in Israel, give us what is needed, and we will do the rest ourselves,” Kuleba urged.
“Let me make this very clear to the Ukrainian crowd. You see, the difference between Israel and Ukraine is that, whether you like it or not, Israel has bought and paid for the United States’ support,” while Ukraine hasn’t, Scott Ritter told Sputnik.
“Israel, through its political action committee, AIPAC, in the United States, has pretty much bought the United States Congress. They’ve bought the United States presidency. They control American media. And as a result, America comes to the defense of Israel because we’ve been paid to do so,” Ritter said.
With Ukraine, it’s the other way around, the observer said.
“America, on the other hand, has bought and paid for Ukraine. You’re not a friend. You’re not an ally. You’re a tool being used by the United States for its larger foreign policy and national security objectives vis-à-vis Russia. We provide you weapons only so far as it facilitates our objective of creating a problem for Russia. We don’t want you to win. We don’t care about you. We give you just enough to keep you going. And then we stand by and watch you bury your dead. Because we don’t care,” Ritter said, channeling the sentiments of the American establishment.
“You’ve done your ‘duty’. You created a problem for the Russians. But now you’ve become inconvenient. And we’re going to stand by and let the Russians finish the job without spending any more money or providing you with much more assistance. You don’t matter to us. You’re not Israel. You don’t own us. We’re not going to fight and die for you. I hope I made that clear,” Ritter summed up.
Israel received unprecedented military support from the US, the UK, France and Jordan on Saturday night, with the countries scrambling fighter jets and deploying ground and sea-based air and missile defense systems to shoot down a barrage of Iranian drones and missiles fired in response to Israel’s April 1 attack on the Iranian Embassy compound in Damascus, Syria. Despite foreign assistance and its own sophisticated air and missile defense network, some of the Iranian projectiles nevertheless managed to make it through, striking two vital Israeli airbases.
“You got a win. Take the win,” President Biden reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warning that the US wouldn’t support any Israeli aggression against Iran.
Top Democrat-linked PR firm tapped by pro-Israel groups to control Gaza war narrative
By Kit Klarenberg | MintPress News | December 29, 2023
On December 6, it was announced with much fanfare that the 10/7 Project, a new “centralized communications operation to promote continued US bipartisan support for Israel; push for accurate, complete coverage of the Israel-Hamas war,” and achieve a “stronger” media “focus” on the victims of October 7’s Al-Aqsa Flood would be launched, by a quintet of the largest Israeli lobby groups on U.S. soil.
Who and what is funding the 10/7 Project isn’t at all clear. Publicity material spoke vaguely of an unnamed “coterie of philanthropists” and the organization’s interest in sourcing “more philanthropic support” moving forward. Future formal financial disclosures may make for fascinating reading, but its founders offer some clues.
The five comprise the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. This is quite the rogue’s gallery of Zionist entities, several of which have deplorable track records of actively whitewashing, if not outright facilitating, Israeli apartheid propaganda activities that have become turbocharged since October 7.
As such, the 10/7 Project’s professed mission of countering “disinformation” about October 7 and “Israel’s response” to the events can only be considered highly disquieting, especially given its target audience is “key media and government influencers.” In reality, of course, the organization is just the latest salvo in the Zionist state’s long-running information war against Palestinians and the Western world. This pitched battle has recently become ever more treacherous, specifically due to Tel Aviv’s genocidal “response” to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
One could be forgiven for thinking the 10/7 Project had already floundered in its objectives. After an initial ripple of mainstream interest, primarily from Israeli outlets and Zionist news platforms, the organization has seemingly vanished without a trace from the media landscape – or at least, its name has. As we shall see, though, it’s evident that in the manner of an iceberg, the 10/7 Project’s public footprint represents but the visible tip of something far larger and considerably more destructive.
‘STRANGLEHOLD ON CONGRESS’
While the 10/7 Project may not be directly making headlines daily, its parent organizations certainly are. The ADL has since October 7 published a steady stream of reports, lapped up by the media largely without question, testifying to an explosion of “anti-Semitic incidents” across the Western world in the wake of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Shocking stuff, one might think. Yet, as an investigation by MintPress News Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod revealed, the ADL is producing such staggering figures by categorizing anti-Israel and pro-Palestine rallies and corresponding chants at both as individual “anti-Semitic incidents.” Despite the exposure of its embarrassing, Enron-style accounting, the League continues to pump out the same bogus “research” at regular intervals. On December 12, it claimed “anti-Semitism” in the US was now up 337% in the wake of October 7, “an all-time record.”
It is far from the first time ADL definitions of anti-Semitism have failed to pass muster. For example, in December 2022, The Grayzone’s Alex Rubinstein revealed that the League did not categorize Ukraine’s openly Neo-Nazi paramilitary Azov Battalion to be the “far right group it once was.” This, despite the fact that Azov’s mission to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led Untermenschen,” as articulated by founder Andriy Biletsky, remains unchanged.
Meanwhile, the infamous AIPAC – accurately described by U.S. political scientist John Mearsheimer as “a de facto agent for a foreign government, [with] a stranglehold on Congress” – has made clear its significantly intensified mission to rid Washington DC of any elected official possessed of even vaguely anti-war, pro-Palestinian views, by declaring war on lawmakers such as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
When AIPAC moves against, or in favor, of particular politicians, they mean business – and depressingly, the organization usually wins. Annually, the organization publishes a report on its “policy and political achievements” that year. Its 2022 installment boasts, among other things, of bagging $3.3 billion “for security assistance to Israel, with no added conditions” and having gifted $17.5 million – the most of any U.S. PAC – to “pro-Israel candidates,” 98% of whom won their elections, in the process defeating 13 anti-Israel challengers.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The official website of the 10/7 Project is spartan in the extreme. Visitors are offered a “contact us” form, a link to subscribe to its regular newsletter, and a “what we do” section listing purported activities. This includes informing the public “with credible, real-time information about events in Israel and Gaza,” highlighting “excellent reporting,” calling out “biased coverage,” holding “biased media accountable,” and offering “expert spokespeople for press and broadcast outlets.”
Unmentioned anywhere is that the 10/7 Project is represented by a trio of notorious PR and political consultancies – CKR Solutions, OnMessage Public Strategies, and SKDK. Together, they move in the shadows to advance the organization’s interests and messaging publicly and on Capitol Hill. SKDK’s contribution will inevitably be the most insidious and impactful.
Since its founding in 2004, the company has careened from damaging scandal to damaging scandal yet consistently secures major, big-ticket clients. The reason for this is clear. SKDK was founded by and employs a retinue of high-ranking, well-connected Democratic operatives. Among them is Anita Dunn, Barack Obama’s White House Communications Director, credited as the “mastermind” of Joe Biden’s 2020 election win and widely regarded as a key member of the President’s “inner circle.”
Joe Biden speaks with SKDK’s Anita Dunn ahead of his State of the Union address in February 2023. Adam Schultz | White House
Ever since Obama’s 2008 election win, SKDK has been plausibly accused of selling privileged access to the White House to clients despite failing to register as a lobbying firm. This means major corporations have a direct means of encouraging – and bribing – the Oval Office to offer tax breaks, shred regulations, dump legislation, smash unions, and generally harm the U.S. public interest with total impunity and in absolute secrecy.
SKDK’s expansive Rolodex also helps politicians get out of serious trouble. In 2018-2019, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan paid the company $200,000 for “crisis communications” assistance after one of his campaign workers sued him for harming her professionally when she complained of sexual harassment by one of his top aides. Meanwhile, in August 2021, it was revealed a senior SKDK staffer personally intervened to suppress negative media coverage of sexual harassment allegations against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Even more perversely, it’s since been revealed that at the same time, SKDK was advising Madigan on how to navigate his public controversy, the company was also helping his former campaign worker bring a lawsuit against the aide who’d sexually harassed her. A more perfect demonstration of the DC blob’s incestuous nature and SKDK’s total lack of ethical and professional scruples one would be hard-pressed to find. And both are highly competitive categories.
SKDK played a pivotal role in Biden’s 2020 presidential bid, decisively reversing his fortunes after abysmal performances in various caucuses. While the mainstream media primarily praised the miraculous work of the company and Dunn – his de facto campaign director – there has also been fierce controversy surrounding its electioneering activities. For example, SKDK fired off daily “Misinformation Briefings” to major tech and social media firms, including Google, Meta and Twitter, requesting that specific content be suppressed or removed.
In most cases, the recipients complied, meaning SKDK exerted extraordinary influence over what voters did and did not know and could and could not see during the controversial 2020 Presidential election. Which surely at least partially accounts for Biden’s victory. To make matters even worse, the company was simultaneously. reaping a $35 million windfall from the government of California by running the state’s supposedly bipartisan “get-out-the-vote” campaign. The contract, originally to be financed by local taxpayers, was mysteriously awarded to SKDK on a “no-bid” basis.
‘DICTATE TERMS’
Clearly, the 10/7 Project was intended to be a very public affair. In an early promotional interview, executive director Josh Isay – perhaps unsurprisingly, until August 2022 SKDK’s longtime CEO – boasted about the “widespread enthusiasm” with which the organization’s “efforts to set the record straight and combat misinformation spouted by Hamas terrorists and their anti-Israel allies” had so far been received:
We look forward to continuing to do the critically important work of providing policymakers and the American public with reliable information about Israel and Hamas, and uplifting the stories of the innocent victims of the October 7th massacre.”
Yet, there is no obvious sign of those ambitions bearing fruit to date. A partial explanation for this failure may lie in the 10/7 Project’s wish to transform the “innocent victims” of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood into human interest stories and atrocity propaganda while elevating the organization’s eponymous date to the position of 9/11 in the American public’s mind.
In the weeks since the 10/7 Project’s inception, it has become ever-increasingly clear the Zionist narrative of what unfolded when Hamas breached Gaza’s armored concentration camp walls – unquestioningly regurgitated over and again for weeks after that by the Western media – is completely and grotesquely fraudulent.
For example, on December 15, it was reported based on social security data that Tel Aviv’s claim that 1,200 civilians died in the initial assault was greatly exaggerated. In reality, just 695 lost their lives. The previous figure was itself a revision from an initial civilian casualty “estimate” of 1,400.
Every civilian death in a warzone is an extremely grave crime. It is surely for this reason that Tel Aviv on December 12 desperately argued “it would not be morally sound” to investigate “friendly fire” incidents in “kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities” during Operation Al Aqsa Flood – civilians killed by Israeli Occupation Forces. Nonetheless, the numbers involved are avowedly “immense.”
Among the “stories of the innocent victims of the October 7th massacre” selected by the 10/7 Project for public “uplifting” in service of whitewashing and justifying the Gaza genocide will have been a great many individuals slaughtered in cold blood by indiscriminate, excessively violent IDF actions. This is all but inevitable. Urgently casting those victims into obscurity while ensuring the entire issue of Zionist “friendly fire” is not examined is now of paramount importance.
More significantly, though, the exposure – and occasional admission – of Tel Aviv’s brazen lies has fundamentally shifted mainstream narratives and sympathies away from Israel and towards the Palestinians. Audiences of every extraction globally can witness the monstrous reality of the genocide in Gaza and learn of Zionist abuse of the Palestinians even before the colonial entity’s founding in 1948 with their own eyes and ears.
Israeli deceit has been so relentless and so readily exposed that even typically subservient Western news networks and their featured pundits are treating official claims with enormous skepticism. Similarly, Zionist violence is so constantly unremitting and wantonly sadistic that graphic reports of carpet bombs maiming and slaughtering every generation of Palestinians are now commonplace.
Meanwhile, developments such as the revelation that IDF soldiers killed three shirtless Israelis waving a white flag, speaking Hebrew and seeking their assistance have traveled widely, in turn highlighting prior examples of identical “peacetime” atrocities inflicted upon Palestinians. By contrast, there has to date been no “misinformation spouted by Hamas terrorists and their anti-Israel allies” to combat at all.
A LOSING BATTLE
As a result, the 10/7 Project and its founders are placed in the invidious position of having to publicly defend the indefensible – namely, a modern-day genocide unfolding on television screens and front page headlines the world over. In such circumstances, overt and unashamed advocacy work is best conducted behind the scenes. Yet, it is precisely in this context that the 10/7 Project may be most dangerous and potent due to its open-door Oval Office access.
Tireless solidarity efforts by European activists, protesters, citizen journalists, and civil society organizations have produced significant results. Paris went from mulling legislation criminalizing anti-Zionism in November to now leading global pressure for a ceasefire. Multiple governments and opposition leaders are likewise changing their tune. Senior British officials openly warn Netanyahu to drastically rein in his unquenchable bloodlust if he wishes to retain any international support.
Stateside, however, while the crusading work of grassroots pro-Palestine voices and groups has been redoubtable, the Biden administration’s commitment to facilitating, encouraging, and exacerbating the Gaza genocide, however it can, remains undimmed. While the President has demanded Netanyahu’s slaughter be wrapped up by the new year, there is no indication material, financial, and diplomatic support upon which the new Nakba depends is being curtailed. On December 18, during an official visit to Tel Aviv, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a bloodcurdling oath:
This is Israel’s operation, and I’m not here to dictate timelines or terms. Our support [for] Israel’s right to defend itself is ironclad, as you’ve heard me say a number of times, and that’s not going to change.”
One way greater pressure could be brought to bear against the Biden administration might be for citizens to demand their elected representatives in Washington to disclose what dealings they may have had with the 10/7 Project or its representatives since its launch.
To ascertain whether and how White House policy and public pronouncements are being directly informed, if not explicitly dictated, by the wishes and wills of a shadowy and unaccountable lobbying coalition with indeterminate but no doubt intimate political and financial connections to the perpetrators of a 21st century Holocaust.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
Israel lobby offers another candidate $20m to run against Rashida Tlaib in Michigan
MEMO | November 28, 2023
Nasser Beydoun revealed on social media that he had been contacted by the Israeli lobby group AIPAC and offered $20 million to run against Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in Michigan. Beydoun is the second candidate who has been offered funds to run against Tlaib, with Senate candidate Hill Harper speaking of a similar offer last week.
Taking to X, Beydoun wrote: “Even knowing where I stand on AIPAC’s influence on our elections and foreign policy, the pro-Israel lobby had the nerve to suggest that I would even consider taking a dime from them.”
Adding that he had been asked to “run against my friend Rashida Tlaib.”
“The pro-Israel lobby will go to any length to remove anybody from the US Congress that has any opposition to their agenda and their total unequivocal support for Israel, good, bad, or indifferent.”
Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 12th District in Congress, is the only Palestinian-American in the US House of Representatives. She is known for her criticism of Israel’s occupation and its invasion of Gaza.
Earlier this month, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib for some statements that angered the Zionist lobby and the right-wing movement in the US, such as the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea.”
Politico first reported on 22 November that a Michigan businessman had offered Harper $20 million in campaign money if he stood against Tlaib in next year’s Democratic primary race, identifying Linden Nelson as the figure.
Israel lobby offers US politician $20mn to unseat Rashida Tlaib
Actor and US Senate candidate Hill Harper – October 20, 2023 [Jemal Countess/Getty Images for NOBCO]
The Cradle | November 23, 2023
A prominent US actor turned politician was offered $20mn by the Israel lobby to run in upcoming elections against Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, as she faces fierce criticism for her stance against what she says is Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American lawmaker in the US Congress, has stood alone in opposing the Biden White House’s staunch support for an Israeli military campaign that has killed over 13,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, in six weeks.
The $20mn was offered to Hill Harper on 16 October by Michigan businessman Linden Nelson, who is connected to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful Israeli lobby group in Washington.
Frank Eugene “Hill” Harper, 57, a Hollywood actor who most recently portrayed Dr. Marcus Andrews in The Good Doctor on CBS, is running to succeed retiring Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow in Michigan.
But Nelson offered the money to Harper in exchange for dropping out of the Senate race and running for Congress against Tlaib instead.
Harper confirmed the report on Wednesday, tweeting: “I didn’t intend for a private phone call to turn public. But now that it has, here’s the truth. One of AIPAC’s biggest donors offered $20m if I dropped out of the US Senate race to run against Rashida Tlaib. I said no. I won’t be bossed, bullied, or bought.”
He also tweeted: “Yes, telling the truth here will put a target on my back. But if we ALL come together, we can win.”
“I’m not going to run against the only Palestinian-American in Congress just because some special interests don’t like her,” he added.
Harper revealed that he had been approached to primary Tlaib after Politico reported that Michigan businessman Nelson offered him $10mn in direct contributions to his potential campaign and another $10mn in independent expenditures if he ran against her.
Regarding his transition to politics, Harper explained, “I’ve had a successful acting career, and I’m not someone who grew up thinking I wanted to be a politician,” he said.
“I’m running because I want to break the stranglehold wealthy special interests have on our politics, whether it’s the Israel lobby, the NRA or Big Pharma,” he added.
Nelson’s decision comes despite his history of ties to AIPAC, which has contributed to previous failed campaigns to oust Tlaib from Congress.
In a social media post, Tlaib accused President Joe Biden, the leader of her Democratic Party, of supporting the “genocide of the Palestinian people” by providing unconditional military support to Israel.
Earlier this month, many of her fellow Democratic members of Congress joined Republicans to censure Tlaib for her comments over the war, which critics slammed as antisemitic.
“It is important to separate people and government,” Tlaib said. “The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent. And it’s been used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation.”
What Should We Do About the Powerful Israel Lobby?
Make them register as “foreign agents”
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 12, 2023
World Jewry is on the attack against Elon Musk, who has threatened to sue the Jewish advocacy group Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for as much as $22 billion for defaming him and doing material damage amounting to many billions of dollars to his company X, which used to be known as Twitter, falsely smearing the platform and its owner for allegedly providing an antisemitic haven for “hate speech.” Per Musk, the ADL has gone so far as to put pressure on potential advertisers not to do business with him and to engage in a total boycott of X.
I for one can only say “Thank you Mr. Musk and it is only regrettable that no one did anything against an organization dedicated to spewing hatred directed against many Americans while also seeking to deprive an entire nation of constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. And while you are at it, I would also recommend that you take a look at the other groups that are partners in Zionist crime, most significantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which has now created a PAC dedicated to defeating any politician who is known to be critical of Israel. After the 2020 national election, AIPAC boasted that the PAC that it had set up had raised $17 million to defeat candidates critical of Israel, while also supporting those politicians who were friends, 95% of whom were elected. To pretend that the Lobby exists to provide some kind of perspective or balance in foreign policy is a case of who is kidding whom on the issue of Israel. ADL and AIPAC are dedicated to enriching and protecting a foreign country that is on a daily basis engaged in a broad series of crimes against humanity as well as war crimes and which is characterized by persecution based on religion and race. ADL and AIPAC have no concern for what damage is done to the American people due to their persistent corruption of our body politic and media to achieve their treasonous objectives.”
So what has the physically hideous and mentally deficient Mr. Jonathan Greenblatt, the Chief Executive Officer of ADL, been up to and why has it taken so long for some Americans, to include Musk and Tucker Carlson, to react to being abused, stripped of rights, and vilified every time anyone dares to speak up? Well, the simple answer is that anyone who dares to challenge Israel’s vile behavior or Jewish control over large parts of the United States economy plus near total dominance of its political class can count on being attacked in the media and labeled an antisemite, which means that, increasingly, one might well be charged with a “hate crime” which can bring with it both civil and criminal penalties. Even at the state level, in 35 jurisdictions, one can now even be denied a job or benefits for supporting an economic boycott of the Jewish state.
Greenblatt and company believe that they can get away with murder, both metaphorically and literally, because they are protected by their money, media access and the political cover that they have flat out bought and also obtained through intimidation and threats. The interaction with Tucker Carlson began when Greenblatt began fulminating over Tucker’s willingness to discuss on his talk show controversial subjects that are familiar to conservatives but are generally banned by the media, to include “replacement theory.” The theory suggests that the decline of birth rates of whites is deliberate due to government policies that make it economically difficult to raise more than one or two children. The decline in workers is being replaced by the hordes of illegal immigrants allowed into the country, which will produce a permanent Democratic Party majority that will be docile and controllable. Jewish groups are seen as enthusiastic for the open borders and cultural and political shifts that go with them.
Greenblatt and the ADL initially focused on Tucker Carlson in particular given his high profile and popularity. Greenblatt repeatedly demanded that Fox News fire Tucker for discussing the “great replacement” theory as well as other white-nationalist talking points. Greenblatt has denounced Carlston’s alleged willingness “To use his platform as a megaphone to spread the toxic, antisemitic, and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.” He called on advertisers to stop supporting the Carlson program and Fox with their dollars. Also, under-fire conservative Republican Representative Matt Gaetz subsequently became involved in the argument, saying that Tucker Carlson is correct about openly discussing white nationalist ‘replacement’ conspiracy theory and he called out Greenblatt and the ADL as “racist,” i.e. “anti-white.” Carlson has retorted that the ADL is trying to destroy freedom of speech in the United States, most particularly whenever the issue under discussion is the abuse of Jewish power or Israel.
Greenblatt was delighted, invoking woke buzzwords to confirm his own superior ethical status, when Carlson was fired in April, tweeting that “It’s about time. For far too long, Tucker Carlson has used his primetime show to spew antisemitic, racist, xenophobic & anti-LGBTQ hate to millions.” Apparently Greenblatt is not disturbed by racism and xenophobia and related crimes against humanity in Israel, but that is to be expected.
Musk’s history with Greenblatt is revealing. Shortly after Musk obtained control of Twitter in April 2022, he was contacted and pressured by ADL in a bid to remove what Greenblatt described as antisemitic content. Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino negotiated the issue, but Musk believes that the platform should be characterized by allowing all forms of legal speech, and beyond excluding sites calling for violence, Twitter became exemplary as a free speech zone. Free speech includes criticism of the Jewish religion, Jewish group behavior and the Jewish state of Israel, even including doubting the evidence for the perpetual victimhood holocaust myth, all of which Greenblatt regards as antisemitism and therefore hate crimes. As the disagreement with ADL heated up, the hashtag #BanTheADL began to appear and it has now become the most used tag with more than a quarter of a million appearances on X. Greenblatt has denounced the users of the hashtag as “white supremacists,” in line with his apparent belief that antisemites and other racist evildoers are basically political conservatives. Musk responded to Greenblatt’s “intimidation tactics” by suggesting that “Perhaps we should run a poll on this… with the ‘we’re labeling everything we don’t like as hateful/racist/dangerous/far-right’ BS.” He also observed accurately that “The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform.”
One hopes that Elon Musk’s proposed lawsuit will proceed and bring about the dismantlement of ADL and the dethronement of Greenblatt, but as important as the free speech issue is, there is also another aspect to the entitlement and immunity that groups representing narrowly construed Jewish and Israeli interests currently enjoy. ADL is firmly entrenched with the power brokers in Washington and is even involved in training new FBI agents how to recognize antisemites and other types of racists. Nevertheless, one might suggest that the labeling of all critics and many white Americans as antisemites just might be a weapon that is beginning to lose its effectiveness since it is used so promiscuously by Greenblatt and others.
Beyond constitutional rights, there is a national security issue which no one in government dares touch and that is the corruption of American foreign policy on behalf of the state of Israel by Greenblatt and his friends. Jewish and Israeli power is sometimes jokingly referred to as “wag the dog” but when it is employed to involve America in unnecessary wars and to gift one of the world’s wealthiest countries with billions of dollars in “aid” every year, something is seriously wrong. And it all happens out in the open due to something called “hubris” whereby most major Jewish organizations meet regularly with Israeli Embassy diplomats and spies to cooperate on activities that benefit both Israel and its Jewish partners.
A key bit of legislation intended to monitor the activities of foreign agents residing in the US is the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.) which “imposes public disclosure obligations on persons representing foreign interest. It requires ‘foreign agents’—defined as individuals or entities engaged in domestic lobbying or advocacy for foreign governments, organizations, or persons (‘foreign principals’)—to register with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and disclose their relationship, activities, and related financial compensation. FARA does not prohibit lobbying for foreign interests, nor does it ban or restrict any specific activities. Its explicit purpose is to promote transparency with respect to foreign influence over American public opinion, policy, and laws; to that end, the DOJ is required to make such information publicly available. FARA was enacted in 1938 primarily to counter Nazi propaganda.”
The actual legislation, which perfectly describes groups like ADL and AIPAC interact with the Israeli government, reads as follows: “The term ‘agent of a foreign principal’ means–(1) any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or any person who acts in any other capacity at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal or of a person any of whose activities are directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed, or subsidized in whole or in major part by a foreign principal, and who directly or through any other person (i) engages within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal.”
Famously, President John F. Kennedy tried to compel AIPAC’s predecessor organization the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs to register under FARA, but he was assassinated before that could be accomplished. He also was seeking to block Israel’s nuclear program, which has suggested the obvious conclusion about how and why he died. That aside, for today’s US government the question becomes, “When is our Attorney General Merrick Garland, who seems to be preoccupied with finding Russian war criminals in Ukraine and white supremacists in America, going to enforce the FARA statute on the numerous Jewish organizations like ADL and AIPAC and compel them to register?” That will require them to be transparent both on their “foreign” relationships and also reveal the sources of their funding. ADL had a reported $238 million in assets in 2021. The act of registering will also confirm that they do no routinely represent American interests but rather Israeli priorities, which will hopefully shift the public perception on what they represent. Jewish and Zionist Garland who works for a declared Zionist president who claims to be Catholic is hardly likely to do the right thing, but we can always hope that ADL’s recent foray will prove to be a step too far!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
What Is Happening In Syria?
Washington’s interventionism and its disregard for its own highly promoted “rules based international order” is outrageous
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • AUGUST 15, 2023
Which are the governments generally regarded as “rogue” by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations? If you answered either Russia or China you would be wrong, even though many countries have condemned Russia’s attack on Ukraine on grounds that no government has an intrinsic right to invade another unless there is an imminent serious threat that would excuse such an intervention. I would however expect that most readers of this review would have made the right choice, which is that the United States is probably number one based on its ability to destabilize whole regions with a military reach that spans the globe. And indeed, it is important to note that the Russian “special military operation” directed against Ukraine would not have happened at all if the Joe Biden Administration had simply indicated clearly and non-ambiguously to the Russian government that there was no intention of allowing Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. Ironically, the White House knew very well that inviting Kiev to enter into the alliance was a legitimate red-line, existential issue for the Kremlin, but opted to push hard on the issue instead. Instead of opting for a negotiated peaceful settlement, Biden and his clown show foreign and national security policy team opted to kill possibly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians to somehow “weaken” Russia, an intention that has borne no fruit even after more than a year and a half of fighting.
So yes, by the world’s reckoning the United States of American is both “exceptional” and “number one,” which a series of White House inhabitants have aspired to, though perhaps not in the same way as buffoons like Senators Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz refer to it. Most non-Americans see the US as the greatest threat to world peace. And then there is America’s “closest ally and best friend in the whole world” Israel in second place, a government which commits crimes against humanity and even war crimes on a nearly daily basis with absolute impunity as it is protected and defended by the very same United States, where the Jewish state runs the foremost and most powerful foreign policy lobby. It is a lobby that has inserted itself in all levels of government and which has corrupted huge majorities of politicians and both major political parties while also controlling the “message” on the Middle East promoted by the media.
Even as I write this, 41 Democratic Party politicians are spending their recess on a Lobby sponsored trip to Israel. Their leaders include the inimitable traitor 80 year old Congressman Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who is on his twenty-third trip to the country that he loves and admires beyond all others, and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries is on his second trip to Israel this year. He should be ashamed but, of course, isn’t. It is the largest-ever delegation of Democratic lawmakers on a tour of Israel, sponsored in this case by the American Israel Education Foundation, an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Not to be outdone House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is leading 31 Republican Congressmen on the same mission though the groups will not mingle and the speaker will be careful to render his own obeisance separately to the Israeli leadership.
The Democrats and Republicans, will as always be unable to enunciate any good reasons for American bondage to Israel beyond bromides like “Israel has a right to defend itself,” which will be repeated over and over before the Solons head back to Washington to send billions more of US taxpayer dollars to the Jewish state. While in Israel they will be fed a special diet of “all Arabs are terrorists” and good old Steny will be nodding his head in time with the song. That is before he and his colleagues engage in crawling on their bellies before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a sign of their total submission to his will.
If one is seeking a single example of the failure of the United States and its ally Israel to abide by the clearly mythical “rules based international order” one might well examine what is going on in Syria, where both the US and the Jewish state have been punishing the country through lethal sanctions and direct military intervention for many years with no sign that the interaction will be ending any time soon. The activity is rarely reported in the US and European media, which somehow has decided that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is some kind of tyrant who deserves whatever he gets, even if it is dished out by “apartheid” Israel and the clueless US, which has been illegally militarily occupying roughly one third of Syria since 2015, including the areas that have producing oil facilities and good agricultural land, both of which are being exploited or stolen. Israel meanwhile has annexed the Syrian Golan Heights, which it occupied in 1967. Donald Trump gave his blessing to the illegal annexation and also gave his consent to whatever the Jewish state decides to do both with the Syrians and the Palestinians while also conniving at the nearly daily air attacks carried out by Israel against targets in both Palestine-Gaza and Syria, killing scores of local soldiers and civilians.
The US military occupation has been supplemented by an increasingly harsh series of sanctions that have effectively cut off food, medicines and other basic commodities to the Syrian people while also denying access to international banking services. Russia, which is assisting Syria at the invitation of the country’s government, has made up for some of the shortages but there is considerable suffering among the ordinary people, not the country’s leaders. The claim by Washington is that Syria has to be protected from its own “totalitarian” government and the US is there to fight terrorists, most particularly ISIS. Ironically perhaps, but Tel Aviv and Washington actually support some of the groups that many would consider to be themselves terrorists, including providing direct US aid to al-Qaeda clone Hayat Tahrir al Sham and Israeli support for ISIS to include treating wounded terrorists in Israel’s hospitals. The US air base at Al-Tanf, near the border with Iraq and Jordan, has, in fact, become a support hub for terrorist groups opposing the al-Assad government.
Sanctions on energy imports were temporarily lifted by the US and EU after the disastrous earthquakes the shook the region in February, but in June, US lawmakers introduced the Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act of 2023 which would use secondary sanctions to penalize those countries that might be tempted to help restore services to the areas of Syria affected by both war and the impact of the quakes. Israel reportedly has exploited the opportunity provided by the natural disaster to increase its air attacks on Syrian infrastructure.
Indeed, recent history tells us that both Israel and the United States are particularly fond of occupying someone else’s land and are capable of coming up with excuses for doing so at the drop of a hat. The reasons generally sound like saying “Hey! We are the good guys who support democracy!” Repeat as necessary until the audience either goes to sleep or wanders off. The western media reporting on what is taking place in Syria can be regarded as being in the “wanders off” category.
I certainly am not the only one who has noted that the United States tends to do everything ass-backwards in its conduct of foreign policy since the time of the Clintons. That has certainly been the case in dealing with nations like Syria and Russia, where ambassadors Robert Ford and Michael McFaul were openly hostile to the respective local governments and openly sought to empower declared opponents of the countries’ leaders. Syria presumably was demonized to please Israel, beginning with the seeking to destabilize Syria through the passage of the Syria Accountability Act in 2003, even though Damascus posed no threat whatsoever to American interests. The current sanctions come at a time when Syria is continuing to struggle to rebuild after a still active twelve year civil war that destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. US sanctions are making more difficult ongoing reconstruction efforts and are de facto largely punishing the Syrian people, with only minor impact on its government.
And sanctioning to punish Syria is bipartisan, perhaps reflecting a desire to satisfy Israeli demands. Donald Trump, who ran for president pledging to end America’s pointless wars overseas, on June 17th 2020 nevertheless initiated new sanctions against Syria and its government. US Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft informed the Security Council that the Trump Administration would implement the measures to “prevent the Assad regime from securing a military victory. Our aim is to deprive the Assad regime of the revenue and the support it has used to commit the large-scale atrocities and human rights violations that prevent a political resolution and severely diminish the prospects for peace.”
Subsequently, the most recent block of sanctions was imposed through the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, signed by President Trump in December 2020 after he was due to leave office, with the objective of stopping “bad actors who continue to aid and finance the Assad regime’s atrocities against the Syrian people while simply enriching themselves.” At that time, the existing US sanctions on Syria had already frozen all government assets and had also targeted companies and even individuals. The new sanctions gave the White House and Treasury the power to apply so-called “secondary sanctions” to freeze the assets of any entity or even individual, regardless of nationality, for doing any business in Syria. The threat of secondary sanctions have in fact had a major negative impact on Damascus’s remaining trading partners, to include Lebanon and Iran. Russia might also be impacted as it is involved in Syrian reconstruction.
The United States and Israel clearly hope that punitive sanctions will eventually force the starving Syrian people to rise up against the government, as some sought to do during the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. That means that a sanctions routine, much favored by both the Trump and Biden Administrations, never succeeds in compelling rogue governments to behave better because the way it works it is always really about regime change no matter how it is packaged. In the case of Syria, and contrary to the claims made by Ambassador Craft at the United Nations, the Bashar al-Assad government has already won the war in spite of US and Turkish intervention on behalf of the largely terrorist group supported insurgency. And the evidence for Syria’s having carried out “large scale atrocities and human rights violations” has mostly been manufactured by enemies of the government, to include the Hollywood and Washington think tank favorite, the White Helmets, a terrorist front group funded at least in part by western intelligence agencies, which was featured in a self-generated documentary that won a Hollywood Motion Pictures Academy Award in 2017. The film was effusively praised by the usual celebrity brain-deads including Hillary Clinton and George Clooney. It is indeed overall a very impressive piece of propaganda. The National Holocaust Museum even gave the coveted 2019 Elie Wiesel Award to the group. The White Helmets are still active in Syria in areas that are still held by the so-called rebels and they featured in a film clip just last week. They are still being funded by western governments and Israel to destabilize the government of Bashar al-Assad.
One might well ask what the US objective in continuing to promote the carnage and suffering in a Syria that poses no threat to Americans or to any vital security interests. It is similar to a question that might well be raised regarding Ukraine, which is confronting an unneeded escalation of 3,000 US military reservists to reinforce the 20,000 American soldiers that have arrived in theater since February 2022. And then there is Iran, which responded to its oil tankers being hijacked in international waters under the unilaterally imposed authority granted by US sanctions. Iran has sought to respond in kind and now the US will dispatch Marines to the Persian Gulf to ride shotgun on foreign tankers and other commercial vessels traversing the Straits of Hormuz. If Iranian vessels come too close, they will shoot to kill. It is another escalation that is asking for trouble. Why can’t the United States leave the rest of the world alone? That is perhaps the fundamental question for our times.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Leslie Wexner’s Young Global Leaders
By Whitney Webb |
UNLIMITED HANGOUT| August 8, 2022
The following is an adapted excerpt from Whitney Webb’s upcoming book, One Nation Under Blackmail, which examines the network behind Jeffrey Epstein and traces it back to the merging of American organized crime and intelligence beginning in the early 1940s. In this excerpt, Whitney examines the Wexner Foundation’s origins and the ties of Leslie Wexner’s philanthropy and Jeffrey Epstein to Harvard as well as the now infamous Young Global Leaders program of the World Economic Forum. Whitney’s book can be pre-ordered here, here or here.
The Origins of the Wexner Foundation
It is hard to know exactly when the Wexner Foundation was originally created. The official website for the foundation states clearly in one section that the Wexner Foundation was first set up in 1983 alongside the Wexner Heritage Foundation. However, the 2001 obituary of Wexner’s mother, Bella, states that she and her son created the foundation together in 1973. Regardless of the exact year, Wexner’s mother, Bella, became the secretary of the foundation (just as she had with his company The Limited), which Wexner wanted people to refer to as a “joint philanthropy.”
The foundation’s website states that the original purpose of the Wexner Foundation was to assist “emerging professional Jewish leaders in North America and mid-career public officials in Israel.” Per the website, Wexner’s main philanthropic endeavors were created after Wexner “reached the conclusion that what the Jewish people needed most at that moment was stronger leadership.” As a result, Wexner sought to focus his foundation’s attention chiefly on the “development of leaders.” As a consequence of this, Wexner’s programs have molded the minds and opinions of prominent North American, as well as Israeli, Jewish leaders who went on to work at the top levels of finance, government and, even, intelligence.
One of the Wexner Foundation’s original advisors, and perhaps one of the most important, was Robert Hiller, who had previously been executive vice president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. Robert I. Hiller was described in an article in The Baltimore Sun as a “nonprofit leader who helped develop community fundraising strategies and was active in the Soviet Jewry movement.”
As well as being known as a community development leader, Hiller was also an executive with Community Chest of Metropolitan Detroit in 1948. In that position, Hiller helped bring together corporations such as General Motors to create “social service groups under an umbrella organization, a precursor to collective fundraising efforts today.” In 1950, Hiller became the associate director of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland and six years later he also joined the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh. He would spend another nine years in that position before his move to Baltimore.
In his autobiography, Hiller wrote about his extensive dealings with various Israeli heads-of-state, saying: “I had pictures of every Israeli Prime Minister from David Ben Gurion to Menachem Begin. I would have many more with Begin because he was the current Prime Minister. My favorite picture, however, (it was to be hung) was taken in Washington, D.C. at a gala party where Marianne and I were with the then Ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin, and his wife, Leah.”
Hiller was extremely proactive when it came to seeding suitable, high ranking candidates for appropriate positions in Jewish community organizations, a task that the Wexner Foundation would later reproduce on a grand scale via its various Fellowship programs and subsequently apply to the worlds of business and government. One example of this matchmaking was the appointment of Larry Moses as assistant to Rabbi Maurice Corson. Corson is credited as having co-founded the Wexner Foundation with Leslie Wexner in 1983, per the foundation’s website, and he served as its first president. After Corson left that post, Moses stepped in to serve as the foundation’s president.
Maurice Corson and Leslie Wexner in an undated photo, Source: The Wexner Foundation
Hiller wrote in his autobiography that he had “personally enticed” Moses to become Rabbi Corson’s assistant and this later resulted in Larry Moses becoming the executive vice president of the Wexner Foundation. When Hiller was 33 years-old, he was presented with an opportunity to become a member of the Big 16, which was classed as an informal grouping of the 16 largest communities in North America headed by prominent Jewish executive members. One of the people who Hiller connected with the Wexner Foundation was originally meant to lead the Big 16 Federation, Fern Katelman. Katelman declined this prestigious leadership role in order to join Larry Moses, where he became his assistant at the Wexner Foundation.
Hiller, when revisiting his life, would state: “One of the most stimulating relationships I had was with the Wexner (Leslie) Foundation of Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. Rabbi Maurice Corson was the foundation president. My relationship with him started in Baltimore where he had been a new rabbi for one of the city’s largest Conservative synagogues. He came from Philadelphia with an interesting background and credentials.”
Hiller goes on to write: “He [Corson], however, seemed bored and uneasy with the routine of being a synagogue rabbi. When he and the congregation decided to part company, I assisted in getting him an executive position with the United Israel Appeal of Canada. He did so well that he was recruited to return to the U.S.A. in an executive position with International B’nai B’rith. Leslie Wexner met him through his work with B’nai B’rith, and when Les began to put together a formal foundation, he engaged Rabbi Corson as the chief executive.” B’nai B’rith is a “Jewish fraternal organization” that was founded in the 19th century and is modeled as a secret society, leading some to compare the group to the freemasons.
Hiller went on to assist Corson in the initial stages of setting up the Wexner Foundation while they put together “a distinguished advisory group” with the group meeting in Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. Hiller describes assisting Corson in creating the foundation, which Hiller called: “an unusual foundation with its own agenda and programming.” After several years of service to the Wexner Foundation, Hiller retired from his consultancy role and was replaced by Philip Bernstein, the former executive of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds (CJF).
Now, it makes sense to examine Rabbi Maurice S. Corson himself. Corson was a prominent Jewish educator who, as previously mentioned, already had associations with various Jewish welfare organizations prior to serving as co-founder and then president of the Wexner Foundation. Corson had been ordained as a rabbi in 1960 through the Jewish Theological Seminary, after previously studying at the University of Cincinnati where he graduated in 1955. By 1964, Corson had become the president of the Religious Education Society in Seattle, and he remained in that position until 1966.
Over the following decade, he began working for the Zionist Organization America in Atlantic City and, shortly thereafter, became the Senior Rabbi at the Chizuk Amuna Congregation, a position he held from 1976 until 1979. Around this time, Hiller helped Corson get an executive position with the United Israel Appeal of Canada, where he went on to work for only a year before joining B’nai B’rith.
Once recruited into serving a leadership role within the influential “secret society,” Corson worked as director of development for B’nai B’rith International, based in New York City, between 1980 until 1985. During this very period, the board of overseers of B’nai B’rith included Edmond Safra, a notorious banker with close ties to Robert Maxwell and later Jeffrey Epstein; Edgar Bronfman, scion of the family behind Seagrams whose fortunes have long been tied to organized crime and Max Fisher, a Detroit businessman who re-launched the Jewish Agency, worked as a “private” diplomat on Israel matters and later served as a mentor to Leslie Wexner.
As noted previously, while Corson was at B’nai B’rith, he first met Leslie Wexner, who persuaded him to co-found the Wexner Foundation (per the version of events on the foundation’s website). Although he had been recruited by Wexner and subsequently left the B’nai B’rith organization, Corson became a member of the executive committee of B’nai B’rith Hillel Commission in Washington in 1987.
Another key figure who is important to mention is the co-founder of the Wexner Heritage Foundation, Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman. Depending on which part of the Wexner Foundation site you visit, that Foundation is listed as having been founded in either 1983 or 1985. However, Friedman is clearly listed as the co-founder of the foundation and as having served as its president for a decade.
The Wexner Heritage Foundation, per its website, was created “to strengthen volunteer leaders in the North American Jewish Community.” It spawned the Wexner Heritage program, which “provides young North American Jewish volunteer leaders with a two-year intensive Jewish learning program, deepening their understanding of Jewish history, values, and texts and enriching their leadership skills.”
Friedman was a US Army chaplain during World War II and also served as an “adviser on Jewish affairs to General Lucius D. Clay, the commander of American occupation forces in Germany.” He was later personally recruited by David Ben-Gurion, who went on to serve as Israel’s first Prime Minister, to join the paramilitary group, the Haganah. The Haganah was the pre-cursor to the Israeli military and was armed in large part by organized crime-linked networks. Per the New York Times, “as a member of the Haganah, Rabbi Friedman participated in the Aliyah Bet, the illegal transport of European Jews to Palestine.”
From 1954 to 1971, Friedman was the chief executive of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) and, in that role “raised more than $3 billion to support the fledgling state of Israel.” During this period, UJA was intimately involved in the relaunching of the Jewish Agency by Wexner’s mentor Max Fisher in 1970. Fisher was also intimately involved with the related United Israel Appeal. Throughout the 1980s, Wexner was “one of the largest individual contributors to the United Jewish Appeal in America” and, after creating the Wexner Heritage Foundation with Friedman, Wexner became UJA’s vice chairman.
While Wexner was serving in these capacities, he was also engaged in closed door meetings with the highest levels of Israeli leadership, not just about “philanthropy,” but also about his business interests. One specific meeting saw him meet with top Israeli government officials about “Chinese and Israeli interests” working with his company, The Limited, to establish factories in the occupied Golan Heights.
Notably, the Wexner Foundation has direct and controversial ties to at least one former Israeli head of state, Ehud Barak, who was intimately involved with Jeffrey Epstein and an alleged participant in his sex trafficking operation. As reported by Israel Today in 2019:
“[Barak’s ties to the Wexner Foundation] became an issue only after right-wing journalist Erel Segal called last October to investigate the $2.3 million ‘research’ grant Barak received from the Wexner Foundation, which has in turn for years been the beneficiary of Epstein’s financial contributions. According to Segal, the grant under question was given to Barak in 2004-2006, when he held no public position. Barak insists he has no authority to disclose details about this grant. Only the Wexner Foundation can, if they so choose (they choose silence).”
Developing Leaders
Set up simultaneously alongside the Wexner Foundation, Wexner’s Heritage Program (WHP) planned to connect American Jews with the ever expanding nation-state of Israel. The program was created so as to “expand the vision of Jewish volunteer leaders, deepen their Jewish knowledge and confidence and inspire them to exercise transformative leadership in the Jewish community.” The foundation defines the program as: “essentially a Jewish learning and leadership development program for volunteer leaders in North America.”
There have been, to date, around 2000 “leaders” who have taken part in the program. The WHP is a vehicle for standardizing a certain perspective on the history of Israel, as well as Judaic texts. The two year program is made up of 36 evening seminars, which occur bi-monthly for four-hour periods, as well as three short-term and out-of-town summer institutes hosted in either the US or Israel. Each of these summer institutes are between 5 and 7 days long and take place throughout the program.
As with other well-founded leadership programs, such as the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader program, the Wexner Heritage Program targets a very specific age group, aiming at professionals who are generally between the ages of 30 and 45 years-old. Some of the most important criteria required of program participants include showing a demonstrated commitment to Judaism, the Jewish community and/or Israel and a track record of leadership in Jewish communal life.
The Wexner Foundation website claims that:
“The 2,300 Alumni of the Wexner Heritage Program are top lay leaders at the local, national and international level. In the 35 cities where we have convened WHP cohorts, virtually every Jewish communal organization continues to be supported by our alumni. They become presidents or chairs of synagogues, Federations, JCC’s, Hillels, day schools, camps and more; they often are founders or chairs of allocations or annual campaigns. They serve on the boards of JFNA, 70 Faces Media, the Foundation for Jewish Camp, International Hillel, AIPAC and J Street; The Shalom Hartman Institute, Pardes, Hadar and every US rabbinical seminary; the Jewish Education Project, Prisma, the JDC and so many more.”
It is worth noting that, of those aforementioned groups, the Wexner Foundation (and especially the Wexner Heritage program) enjoys particularly close ties to AIPAC. For instance, Elliot Brandt, AIPAC’s national managing director, is an alumnus of the Wexner Heritage Program and, in a 2018 speech at that year’s AIPAC policy conference, Brandt noted that “most of the [AIPAC] National Board consists of Wexner Heritage Alumni, not to mention its regional chairs and some of its most committed donors as well.”
Elliot Brandt and Alan Dershowitz at the 2017 AIPAC policy conference, Source: Screenshot
Wexner’s close ties to AIPAC take on a different tone when one considers, not only his close association with the Israeli intelligence-connected Jeffrey Epstein, but also the fact that AIPAC itself has long-standing and controversial ties to Israeli intelligence. For instance, AIPAC was at the center of an Israeli espionage scandal in the US in the mid-1980s as well as again in 2004, when a high-ranking Pentagon analyst was caught passing highly classified information over to Israel’s government via top officials at AIPAC.
Despite extensive evidence, particularly in the latter case, AIPAC itself avoided charges. As journalist Grant Smith noted at the time, “the Department of Justice’s chief prosecutor on the [AIPAC] espionage case, Paul McNulty, was suddenly and inexplicably promoted within the DOJ after he backed off on criminally indicting AIPAC as a corporation.” The charges against the specific AIPAC officials involved were also dropped.
In the years after the Wexner Heritage Program was launched, other similar efforts followed. In 1987, the Wexner Foundation announced it would begin channeling “$3-$4 million in grants to the first year of a program dedicated to the enhancement and improvement of professional leadership in the North American Jewish community.”
Per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Wexner said an Advisory Group drawn from among leading Jewish academicians and communal professionals recommended that attention be focused on three critical groups: rabbis, communal professionals and educators.” These efforts would result in the formal creation of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship in 1988. Chairmanship of the Wexner Fellowship Committee was given to Professor Henry Rosovsky.
Henry and Harvard
Henry Rosovsky was an economist at Harvard University. Like Wexner, and like many other of the Wexner Foundation’s associates, Rosovsky was born to Russian Jewish parents. He grew up speaking Russian, German, and French and, in 1940, Rosovsky emigrated to the United States of America with his parents.
During World War II, he served in Counterintelligence Corps of the US Army. He became a naturalized US citizen 9 years later. That same year, he received his B.A. degree from the College of William and Mary public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia, followed by his PhD from Harvard in 1959.
Rosovsky taught overseas as a visiting professor in Japan at Hito Subashi and Tokyo Universities, and subsequently taught Japanese studies, economics and history at the University of California at Berkeley until 1965. He also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, again as a visiting professor, as well as working as a consultant with the United States government, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and UNESCO.
Rosovsky settled down into his eventual career at Harvard in 1965 and brought with him the intention of making Jewish life at Harvard flourish. By 1978, Rosovsky had helped to establish the Center for Jewish Studies, which was led by Harry Wolfson, the first chairman of a Judaic studies center at any American college. Rosovsky was the first Jew to serve on the board of the Harvard Corporation. Rosovsky’s wife, Nitza Rosovsky, also had a presence at Harvard, and in 1986, during Harvard’s 350th anniversary celebrations, she wrote a piece entitled “The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe,” which traces the Jewish history at the university dating back to the 1720s.
Henry Rosovsky posing with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Source: Harvard Hillel
Rosovsky developed a close relationship with some key faculty members at Harvard, including future US Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. In 2017, Summers stated in a video tribute to Rosovsky the following: “Thirty-five years ago, I sat in your office as a young recruit to the Harvard faculty, and I was trembling with the majesty of it all,” he said. “Over time I became less intimidated and came to value your wisdom and your experience.”
Rosovsky became involved with the Wexner Foundation in 1987, when the Wexner Foundation announced the aforementioned initiative to recruit, support, and retain “the highest quality professional leadership” in the American Jewish community through grant-making to individuals and institutions. Those individual grants were awarded as Wexner Foundation fellowships and the Foundation appointed Rosovsky to serve as the chairman of the Wexner Fellowship Committee.
Rosovsky was prominent and well-connected by the time Wexner approached him, with his connections including Israeli politicians and heads of state like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin. By this point, Rosovsky was also being publicly honored for his many achievements. In 1987, after Wexner had launched several of his philanthropic endeavors, the American Academy of Achievement – a non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving individuals in the country – had awarded Rosovsky its “Golden Plate Award.”
One of Rosovsky’s most important links that were likely of interest to Wexner was his strong connection with Harvard Hillel. What is today referred to as the “Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel,” the Harvard Hillel is commonly described as a service organization that provides Jewish educational, cultural, religious, and social opportunities for students and faculty. Rosovsky had been a key player in paving the way for Hillel’s relocation from a simple home at the outskirts of campus to a location at the heart of Harvard life. Wexner’s subsequent involvement with Harvard Hillel would also mark Epstein’s own entry into what would become his controversial, and intimate, relationship with the prestigious university.
According to a 2003 article in the Harvard Crimson on Epstein’s donations to the University, Rosovsky was not only one of Epstein’s closest associates at Harvard, but was also Epstein’s “oldest friend of the bunch,” having been introduced to Rosovsky by Wexner around 1991. That is notably the same year that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell began their sexual blackmail/sex trafficking operation.
1991 was also the year that the New York Times reported that four donors, among them Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein, had pledged to raise $2 million for the construction of the new student center of Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel. In that article, the Times lists Epstein as the “president of Wexner Investment Company.” The building was completed in 1994 and named Rosovsky Hall in Henry Rosovsky’s honor. Rosovsky Hall is a 19,500-square-foot building, which cost $3 million to complete and includes a garden courtyard, a student lounge, a dining hall, a library, offices, and multi-purpose rooms for worship and meetings.
After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Hillel executive director Rabbi Jonah Steinberg claimed that Epstein had merely “facilitated” a gift that was actually donated by the Wexners and did not involve Epstein’s personal money. However, a now-absent plaque on the building, cited by the Harvard Crimson in 2003, named both Epstein and Wexner as donors responsible for funding the center’s construction.
Steinberg did note that Epstein did donate $50,000 to Hillel in 1991, the same year that the gift for the construction of Rosovsky Hall was also made. The following year, records from Harvard’s Office of Alumni Affairs and Development reveal that Epstein was courted as a potential donor by the University, with Harvard’s “most senior leaders” first officially meeting with Epstein to “seek his support.” It is unclear exactly what resulted from this meeting, as Epstein’s first official donation to Harvard was recorded in 1998, raising the possibility that support could have been given in other ways that did not necessarily involve direct donations to the University.
Indeed, when Harvard moved to reject donations from Epstein following his 2008 conviction, Epstein continued to donate indirectly to the University by directly sponsoring several professors as well as a student social club at Harvard. Epstein may have contributed in this fashion during this earlier period, especially given that he had already donated to Harvard’s Hillel by the time of the 1992 meeting.
Jeffrey Epstein speaks with Larry Summers at a 2004 dinner he hosted for Harvard’s biggest names. Also pictured is Alan Dershowitz, among others. Source: Sott
It is worth noting that Epstein’s first “official” donation to Harvard in 1998 was the same year he was using his private plane, now best known to the public as the “Lolita Express,” to transport then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence “Larry” Summers. Summer’s then-boss, Treasury Secretary Richard Rubin, had previously facilitated Epstein’s first official visit to the Clinton White House in early 1993. Summers would become president of Harvard University shortly after the conclusion of the Clinton administration, in July 2001. During Summer’s tenure, Epstein’s access to Harvard’s campus and many of its most notable professors increased exponentially. While president of Harvard, Summers continued to fly on Epstein’s plane.
Developing Young Global Leaders
Though Epstein’s ties to Harvard have been scrutinized, Wexner also dramatically expanded his donations to Harvard during much of the same period. However, the role this may have played in facilitating Epstein’s own connections to the university have been largely glossed over by mainstream media reports on the matter.
Even before Wexner and Epstein donated to Harvard’s Hillel in 1991, Wexner’s philanthropic “development of leaders” had become entangled with Harvard University. In 1989, the year after the Wexner Graduate Fellowship was launched, the Wexner Israel Fellowship program was created to specifically “support up to 10 outstanding Israeli public officials earning their Mid-Career Master of Public Administration (MC/MPA) at Harvard Kennedy School.”
Per the Wexner Foundation’s website: “The goal of the Fellowship is to provide Israel’s next generation of public leaders with advanced leadership and public management training. More than 280 Israeli public officials have participated in the Israel Fellowship, including leaders who have gone on to become Directors General of government ministries, Generals and Commanders in the Israeli military, and top advisers to Prime Ministers.” As part of the program, participants “meet with senior U.S. government officials.” Wexner Israel Fellows also “commit to returning to Israel and remaining in the public sector for at least three years after completing the program.”
Similar claims can be found among Israeli media. For example, Israel 21c stated the following about the program in 2002:
“Several Wexner graduates have gone on to become Director-Generals of government ministries. Others have reached the highest echelons of the military, the health service, and the educational establishment. But ultimately, for Israel, the value of the program is not the titles of its participants, but in the quality of leadership exercised by these individuals at every level.”
That same article also notes that Wexner’s interest in having this program be hosted at Harvard’s Kennedy school “is the quality of the international exposure it permits. It attracts the highest caliber of public sector leadership from around the world and Israeli participants find themselves sitting next to ex-presidents and future prime ministers from every continent. It also creates a rare opportunity for high quality public relations, as future world leaders are exposed to some of the finest and most dedicated individuals Israel has to offer.”
Among the 10 alumni of the first class of Wexner Israel Fellows is Shay Avital, a prominent leadership figure in the Israeli military and who had first served under Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan Netanyahu. Other alumni include Avinoam Armoni, former special adviser to Teddy Kollek, as well as Israeli prime ministers; Moshe Lador, former Israeli state prosecutor; Arik Raz, former governor of Israel’s Misgav region; Uzi Vogelman, current justice on Israel’s Supreme Court; Eduardo Titelman Goren, a Chilean economist who has played a major role in managing Chile’s copper mining industry (the world’s largest); and Yossi Tamir, Director General of the JDC-Israel, “the leading global Jewish humanitarian organization.”
Another interesting alumnus from this first class was Amos Slyper, who was Deputy Director-General of the State Comptroller’s Office in Israel, making him responsible for the auditing of Israeli government ministries and offices. During Slyper’s tenure, the legal adviser to that office was Nurit Israeli, an alumnus of the second class of Wexner Israel Fellows.
As can be seen from just the first class of fellows, the Wexner Israel Fellow programs and its active alumni community have given Wexner considerable clout with prominent Israelis in major positions in government and industry. Years after this program was launched, it has since expanded to include the Wexner Senior Leaders program, which “leverages the training and scholarship of the Harvard Kennedy School to strengthen Israel’s public service leadership and spur innovative, collaborative projects across government departments and agencies.” It specifically seeks applicants from “senior level positions within Israel’s public service sector, including the civil service, local government, government agencies, and security forces.”
Thus, even before the 1991 donation by Wexner and Epstein, Wexner was actively bringing prominent Israelis, many with careers in Israel’s national security apparatus or in the public sector, to study at Harvard’s Kennedy school. In the years that followed, Wexner would become one of the guiding forces behind this particular school and would have even greater influence over the “development of leaders” at the institution.
Shortly before Larry Summers became Harvard’s president, Leslie Wexner, via the Wexner Foundation, funded the creation of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership (CPL). The CPL is described as “a premier training ground for emerging public leaders in the United States.”
The long-time director of CPL, who was likely chosen with direct input from Wexner, is David Gergen, an adviser to former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. Gergen has also had a parallel career in journalism and, in the late 1980s, “he was chief editor of U.S. News & World Report, working with publisher Mort Zuckerman.” Zuckerman was a close associate of Epstein and bought the New York Daily News after the death of its previous owner, Robert Maxwell. Gergen is also a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, where Epstein also had memberships.
Wexner’s contributions to Harvard’s CPL reached $19.6 million by 2006 and totaled more than $42 million by 2012. Notably, during this period, Jeffrey Epstein – one of Wexner’s closest associates until they parted ways between 2007 and 2008 – was also making major connections and gaining unprecedented access to the school.
In 2006, when the Wexner’s announced an additional donation of $6.8 million to the CPL, Gergen was quoted by the Harvard Crimson as saying:
“It has been a great personal privilege to work with Les and Abigail Wexner over the past half-dozen years, at the University and beyond. They are both leaders in their own right – people of vision, imagination, and keen dedication to advancing the quality of public life. They have been wonderful partners.”
In 2014, Gergen participated in the Wexner Foundation’s 30th anniversary gala, hosting a session where he interviewed former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at length.
Before Epstein’s second arrest, the Wexner-dominated CPL saw Epstein associates like Glenn Dubin and Leon Black creep into its top leadership bodies. For example, Dubin had become a member of CPL’s advisory council, which Leslie and Abigail Wexner co-chaired. Both Wexner and Dubin were pressured to remove themselves from that council after Epstein’s second arrest and subsequent death and departed in February 2020. At the time, the Harvard Crimson noted that the chief of staff to then-Harvard president Lawrence Bacow, Patricia Bellinger, had been added to the board of directors of Wexner’s L Brands (the current corporate name of The Limited).
Also at the time, Dubin had been named in court documents as one of the men Virginia Giuffre was forced to have sex with when she was under Epstein’s control, with another being Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. In addition, as noted by the Crimson, a “former manager of the Dubin household Rinaldo Rizzo recount[ed] his encounter with a 15-year-old girl allegedly trafficked by Epstein who was brought to the Dubins’ house in 2005.” In 2010, Dubin had donated $5 million to the CPL to create his own fellowship aimed at “developing leaders,” called the Dubin Graduate Fellowships for Emerging Leaders.
In another example, Leon Black, of Apollo Global Management and whose “philanthropic” family foundation was also managed by Epstein for years, was on the CPL’s leadership council. Black, however, did not resign his post after the Epstein scandal became a national concern. However, after Wexner and Dubin had left their positions on the advisory council, Black’s connection to Epstein resulted in considerable media scrutiny as well as an “internal investigation” by Apollo. As of 2022, Black is no longer listed on the CPL’s website as a member of its leadership council.
In 2006, plans were made for the Wexner-funded CPL to team up with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) program. The World Economic Forum, which describes itself as the pre-eminent facilitator of “public-private partnerships” on a global scale, originally created what would become YGL in 1992 under the name the Global Leaders of Tomorrow. It was rebranded as the YGL program in 2004.
In recent years, the Forum and its YGL program have become infamous in some circles, specifically after a clip of the Forum’s chairman Klaus Schwab went viral. In that clip, Schwab states the following of the YGL program:
“I have to say then I mention names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on they all have been Young Global Leaders of The World Economic Forum. But what we are really proud of now with the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, is that we penetrate the cabinets… It is true in Argentina and it is true in France now…”
Notably, that clip comes from a 2017 discussion between Klaus Schwab and the CLP’s David Gergen that took place at the Harvard Kennedy school. In the introduction to that discussion, the close ties between the Harvard Kennedy school and the World Economic Forum are highlighted and it is also mentioned that YGL participants are also present and attending the Harvard Kennedy school for an executive session. Gergen, in addition to his many roles and appointments, is also formerly a board member of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which Klaus Schwab co-founded with his wife in 1998, and is also an agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum.
The CPL began hosting an Executive Session for Young Global Leader participants in order to allow “the Young Global Leaders a much greater opportunity to form personal connections and bonds that will encourage opportunities for the leaders to working together, across multiple sectors, to solve international issues and problems in the future.”
These executive sessions were “designed and hosted by the Kennedy School of Government” and a significant amount of the funds raised were connected to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). In 2007, Epstein’s defense lawyers claimed that Epstein had played a major role in developing the CGI, writing to federal prosecutors that “Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative, which is described as a project ‘bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges’.”
At the time, the executive director of the CPL, working under David Gergen, was Betsy Meyers, a former senior adviser to president Clinton, specifically on women’s issues. Meyers also played a “critical role in Clinton’s re-election effort in 1996.” The corruption surrounding Clinton’s re-election campaign that year and Epstein’s own connections to that corruption are a key focus of my upcoming book.
Klaus Schwab’s now infamous “penetrate the cabinets” quote may offer insight as to Leslie Wexner’s own interest over the decades in “developing leaders” in American Jewish communities, in Israel and beyond. With nearly 40 years focused specifically on training men and women of influence in American Jewish society – as well as in Israel’s government and private sector – ideas and policies that benefit Wexner both personally and professionally have been instilled into generations of leaders and influencers, who then go on to influence many others. In the specific case of the Wexner Israel fellows, Wexner has been able to “penetrate” key posts in Israel’s government, and even its national security/intelligence apparatus, with people he has funded and who have participated in courses that were shaped by, and reflect, Wexner’s views.
Over the past two decades, Wexner’s foray into becoming one of the main donors of the Harvard Kennedy school allows for much the same to occur, but this time for leaders who operate and influence those far outside of the boundaries of the global Jewish community.
Wexner’s exact reasons for establishing and maintaining this legitimate yet massive influence operation, which paralleled Epstein’s own blackmail-based influence operation, have never been made explicit.
Yet, in speculating as to why he would want to mold the powerful and soon-to-be powerful, it is worth considering Wexner’s lesser known connections, including to organized crime and to Jeffrey Epstein.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
Featured Video
‘AIDS, The Deadly Deception’ (2022)
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Zionist Lies
By Raji Abuzalaf | Dissident Voice | August 7, 2014
“There is no such thing as Palestine” … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Do Palantir’s bosses have blood on their hands over the Starobelsk massacre?
- US Eyes Spreading its Nuclear Footprint Deeper into Europe – Report
- Kiev admitted it launched drones at NATO member – media
- Russia Raises Alarm Over Ukraine’s Surging Black Sea Terrorist Activity
- ‘Luring Russia into war’
- Russia accuses France and the UK of piracy over cargo ship seizure
- Hungarian PM Magyar claims that he has obtained billions in EU funds, but what strings are attached?
- Persian Gulf Strait Authority says it processed 300+ transit requests since May
- IRGC Navy strikes US-Israeli cargo ship MSC Sariska in retaliation for attack on Iranian vessel
- Australian Sumud Flotilla activists file ICC war crimes case against Israel over torture, sexual violence
- If Americans Knew
- A Slow-motion Execution of the West Bank Health System
- The Palestinian journalists held in Israel’s ‘cemeteries for the living’
- Super PAC Network Backing Connie Chan Received Hundreds of Thousands from AIPAC
- Israel’s Solution to the Gaza Problem Is Well Underway
- UK Bans Prominent Commentators Over Their Statements on Israel
- Israel’s killing machine deepens its invasion into Lebanon – Daily Update
- ‘To call it a ceasefire is a joke’: Israeli soldiers share rare accounts from Gaza with AP
- Israeli Espionage: How Israel and its American agents stole US uranium
- From Paul Findley to Thomas Massie: How the Israel Lobby Purges Republican Dissenters
- Israeli US Attorney Drops Charge Against Israeli Connected to Biolab
- No Tricks Zone
- 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
- Germany’s AfD Party Calls Debunked Climate Scenarios “Greatest Fraud In Human History”
- Researchers Find Rapid Global Warming Phase At End Of Last Ice Age (Ca.18,000 Years Ago)
- Even The DNA Of Single-Celled Plankton Can Upend Alarmist Arctic Sea Ice Melt Claims
- Scandal: Although Climate Panic Is Canceled By IPCC, Europe’s Policymakers Continue With Their Crushing Policies
- How Once Hardcore Climate Alarmist Lucy Biggers Realized It Was All A Scam, Brainwashing
- German Expert: “No Climate Crisis” …”Warming Generally Better For Humanity”
Aletho News 