Israel Lobby

The Bomb Iran Lobby Gears Up for 2016

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“The Bomb Iran Lobby Gears Up for 2016: A tight-knit group of neocon dead-enders is pushing Iran to the forefront of the GOP’s foreign policy agenda“ by Sina Toosi; Foreign Policy in Focus

In a recent TV ad, a van snakes its way through an American city. As the driver fiddles with the radio dial, dire warnings about the perils of a “nuclear Iran” spill out of the speaker from Senator Lindsey Graham and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The driver then steers the vehicle into a parking garage, drives to the top level, and blows it up in a blinding flash of white light. Words shimmer across the screen: “No Iran Nuclear Treaty Without Congressional Approval.” …

These think-tank gurus, special interest groups, and media pundits have peddled a plethora of alarmist narratives aimed at scuttling the diplomatic process — and they’ve relied far more on fear mongering than facts.

So who are these people?

A Close-Knit Network

Despite their bipartisan façade, these reflexively anti-Iran ideologues are in reality a tight-knit group. Many were also prominent supporters of the Iraq War and other foreign policy debacles from the last 15 years. They work in close coordination with one another and are often bankrolled by similar funders.

Four GOP super-donors alone — the billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Seth Klarman — keep afloat an array of groups that ceaselessly advocate confrontation with Iran, like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Other groups forming the core of this network include the neoconservative Hudson Institute  and the Foreign Policy Initiative, as well as more explicitly hardline “pro-Israel” groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Emergency Committee for Israel, The Israel Project, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

Several of these outfits also rely on right-wing grant-making foundations such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Scaife Foundations, which together funnel millions into hardline policy shops.

Hardline Senators

Together these groups have established what amounts to their own echo chamber. They’ve built an anti-Iran communications and lobbying infrastructure that enjoys substantial influence in Washington’s corridors of power, particularly in Congress.

And if you think that this has nothing to do with Jewish money aimed at furthering Israeli interests, you are simply avoiding reality. It’s very difficult to see how a Republican candidate could win the nomination without the support of the Republican Jewish coalition. It’s yet another example where Jews pursue a top-down strategy that begins by dominating elite discourse,  shaping public opinion by having access to the elite media, and by the role of money in influencing politics at the highest level.  Of course, many non-Jews are involved in this movement, from well-paid foreign policy hacks who work at the think tanks mentioned, Senators (Toossi mentions Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, Mark Kirk, Kelly Ayotte, and John McCain),  to presidential candidates. As Lindsey Graham famously said,

“If I put together a finance team that will make me financially competitive enough to stay in this thing…I may have the first all-Jewish cabinet in America because of the pro-Israel funding. [Chuckles.] Bottom line is, I’ve got a lot of support from the pro-Israel funding.”

It’s not just Republicans who are in fealty to Jewish pro-Israel money. Hilary Clinton, who seems to be the inevitable Democratic candidate despite being little more than a grifter, depends on Haim Saban and the liberal Jewish establishment ensconced in Hollywood. Saban is totally on board with bombing Iran. Clinton also has close ties to Wall St. and has welcomed important neocons like Robert Kagan to her foreign policy team. War with Iran in 2017 seems almost a foregone conclusion.

Toossi’s entire article is well worth reading. He concludes:

Yet by so vigorously denouncing the Obama White House’s negotiations with Iran, these armchair warriors are pushing for a war that wouldn’t only be terrible for the region and the people who live there. It would harvest more lives and limbs from American soldiers, waste trillions more taxpayer dollars, and undoubtedly erode U.S. standing in the world even further.

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A review of Jewcentricity by Adam Garfinkle, Part 3 of 4: The Israel Lobby

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Part 1
Part 2

It angers Garfinkle (doubtless due in large part to his role as speechwriter for Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) that the influence exerted by the Israel Lobby over the foreign policy of the United States, and other Western nations, provides yet another focal point for “negative Jewcentricity.” Garfinkle’s discussion of this issue centers on the publication and reception of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2007. He notes how:

In recent years, this debate has revolved around the writings of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, notably a paper and then a book they wrote called The Israel Lobby. The authors argue in essence that U.S. foreign policy has been distorted, particularly in the Middle East but really on a global scale, by the exertions of Jews in the United States who have managed to bend the American national interest to that of Israel. The authors believe that the Israel Lobby — they always use a capital L for that word — has made U.S. foreign policy too interventionist, notably in causing the Iraq war, and that U.S. support for Israel is a main source of Islamic terrorism directed against the United States.[1]

Garfinkle freely engages in ad hominem attacks on Mearsheimer and Walt, implying that they wrote their book mainly out of desire for financial gain, rather than from a deeply felt conviction about the misdirection of American foreign policy under the influence of the Lobby. He claims “the authors parlayed the ruckus [over the influence of AIPAC] into the book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007, for which the two reportedly received an advance of $750,000 to split between them.”[2] He likewise notes the furor over the book soon died down “despite the authors’ efforts to keep the buzz buzzing, the better to sell more books and promote their views.”[3]

As well as writing their book for mercenary reasons, Mearsheimer and Walt were also, Garfinkle contends, unqualified to offer their thoughts on American foreign policy because they are not “Middle East experts” and do not speak any Middle Eastern language. He writes:

Like many other Israel lobby critics before them, Mearsheimer and Walt are not themselves Middle East experts. Before their Israel Lobby essay and book, neither had written much on the region and anything at all for scholarly, expert audiences. They have never claimed to be regional experts, and rightly so, for neither seems to have studied, let alone mastered, any Middle Eastern language. The many factual errors they make illustrate their lack of familiarity with the basic literature on the subject. … [S]erious scholars are supposed to respect certain standards of logic and rules of evidence, and tenured faculty at prestigious institutions are presumed to be among those professionals.”[4]

Having engaged in some initial character assassination, Garfinkle finally addresses Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis that American foreign policy has been unduly influenced by an Israel Lobby which has pushed the American government into wars not in the American national interest. Garfinkle claims this assumption is based on a “vast exaggeration” and claims The Israel Lobby is marred by a “fundamental illogic,” despite himself having, as previously noted, acknowledged in other parts of Jewcentricity the existence of a plethora of powerful and well-funded activist organizations “serving parochial Jewish ethnic interests that are simultaneously distinct from broader American interest but not related directly to religion.”[5] Read more

Netanyahu election aftermath: Reaping the consequences of Israeli fanaticism

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In my 2007 review of The Israel Lobby I noted that

Mearsheimer and Walt try to see Israel as a normal state capable of making rational decisions, but the extremists are in charge and have been so at least since the 1967 War. Any attempt to make a meaningful withdrawal from the West Bank and Jerusalem and to allow a viable Palestinian state would produce a civil war among Israelis and likely provoke a strong response by the lobby on the side of the nonaccommodationists. The fate of the Oslo peace process, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the support by the lobby of the most radical elements within Israel certainly argue that there is little chance of a successful move in this direction.

As throughout Jewish history, it is the most committed members who determine the direction of the entire group. This is doubtless true of most groups, but it is especially the case with Jews where there is a long history of fanaticism. I am reminded of Christiane Amanpour’s depiction of Jewish fanatics in her excellent TV documentary, God’s Jewish Warriors. These West Bank settlers and Jewish activists are massively ethnocentric, and, unlike the propaganda put out by the lobby, they are not at all democratic. They live in a completely Jewish world where their every thought and perception is colored by their Jewish identity. Theirs is an apartheid world separated by high concrete walls from their Palestinian neighbors, where even tiny settlements are necessarily protected by the Israeli army. And at a time when Americans are constantly being encouraged by Jewish organizations like the ADL to be ever more tolerant of all kinds of diversity, these people are anything but tolerant. Calls for expropriation and expulsion of the Palestinians are commonplace among them. Israel has created a classic Middle Eastern segmented society in which different groups live in an ingroup/outgroup world, completely isolated from each other.

And  since the fanatics are the ones having the children, this situation will become more extreme with time.

Which is why I was unsurprised by the results of the Israeli election. A Labor government would have been a sign that the most extreme elements were not in charge and would have been heartening news to the Obama administration eager to make a deal with Iran.

But this time Netanyahu may have gone too far. His speech to the U.S. Congress and open dispute with the Obama administration were incredibly aggressive moves, bound to further sour relations with the Obama administration. In this context, some pre-election rhetoric by Netanyahu has provided an opening for some real changes in policy. In the desperate lead up to the election, with polls indicating that he would lose, he pulled out all the stops, stating that there would never be a Palestinian state while he was prime minister. Read more

Steve Sailer on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement

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Steve Sailer has produced an interesting piece over at Takimag, with his thoughts on the growth (or lack thereof) of the BDS movement on US college campuses. The overly-optimistic title of the article can be overlooked in favor of what remains — a very astute summation of the state of this decade-old movement in America. Given that BDS is ostensibly built along the same lines and moral foundations as the agitation against White rule in South Africa, Sailer questions why BDS “hasn’t yet become respectable in the United States.” His answer is that as long as Whites clung to the top rung of America’s demographic ladder, Jews enjoyed power and control, as victim and outsider, over the Israel-Palestine discourse. They could also present themselves to the gullible and venal members of the White “pro-Isruhl” crowd as the apple of Jehovah’s eye, with every moral and divinely sanctioned entitlement to their ‘birth right.’ With the grip of the White demographic slipping (or lost entirely in the case of many Californian college campuses), the rainbow coalition of minorities, religions, identities and perversions now challenges organized Jewry for the gold medal in the farcical victimhood Olympics which comprises modern political culture.

Sailer points out that in the quest to crush ‘privilege,’ the new coalition has not failed to note the “privileges of the single richest and most influential group in America: Jews.” In response, Jewish journalists like Jonathan Chait and Jamie Kirchick have become increasingly alarmed over “whether the Obama Coalition’s identity politics jihad against white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, and now even cisgender privilege” will eventually turn against them. One of the ways in which this had become manifest is in relation to the BDS movement on California’s college campuses. Sailer demonstrates that BDS has been least successful on those campuses which retain the highest percentage of White students (e.g. UC Santa Barbara which has a 36% White student body — the whitest college to table a BDS resolution). But among those colleges burgeoning with the new ethnic demographic, Jewish influence and arguments hold little sway: “So far, BDS resolutions have been passed by eight student governments, Loyola of Chicago and seven California schools: private Stanford and a half dozen public University of California campuses, including Berkeley and UCLA, both of which are of symbolic importance.” Read more

Philip Weiss on Jewish Power

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Not for the first time (see here and here), Philip Weiss has expounded on Jewish power, this time as it relates to Netanyahu’s speech (“Netanyahu’s speech and the American Jewish condition“).

The fear [of persecution] blinds Jews to our power, in Israel and the United States. It is hard for Jews to think of ourselves as powerful because of a historical and collective memory of persecution. Yet the world regards us as powerful. It sees the Jewish state as a nuclear armed country with a huge army, and it sees Jews as an elite in the United States with a ton of clout. “Why is the American Jewish community so determined to convince itself that we are living in 1938?” the late Tony Judt asked nine years ago. “Why does the most successful, the most well integrated, the most culturally and politically influential, the most socially and economically well situated Jewish community since the late years of the Roman republic, why is it so worried about the demon of anti-Semitism?”

We are as I like to remind readers the wealthiest American group by religion and we took over many establishment perches in the last generation. We are three of the four Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court, and whenever I turn on the news, I see influential Jews. Andrea Mitchell the wife of Alan Greenspan interviews Kenneth Pollack, Matt Lauer interviews Lorne Michaels. Last night I watched a panel on CSPAN about the Charlie Hebdo murders at the French-American Foundation and it appeared that all four speakers were Jewish.

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UN Reveals Israel’s Support for ISIS

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I think that there are two prominent phenomena which will soon make people aware of the fundamental importance and extent of the Jewish question in the present world.

The first phenomenon is the existence of Israel, a prime signal of Jewish ethnocentrism’s inevitable double standard when compared to the ethnically and culturally pluralist attitudes of Diaspora Jews in the West.

The second phenomenon is the exposure of how easy it is for Jews to ally themselves with (or taking the side of) Muslims, if it suits their interest either in their war against the White gentiles — their perceived main Western enemies — or in other ways.

Among major examples of this tendency are European Jewry’s “heightened empathy and sympathy for Islam” and invention of the myth of Islamic tolerance; and the Jewish collaboration with Muslims during the invasion of Christian Spain.

Both phenomena are on display in the Middle East’s current events. Read more

I agree with Adelson: Democracy is not a Jewish value (or a reality in the U.S.)

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The meeting of Jewish oligarchs Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson at the Israeli-American Council has attracted considerable comment. Obviously, it’s another illustration of the power of a minuscule number of very wealthy individuals to influence the political process. And since Adelson is partial to Republicans to the tune of $150 million in the last election (more to come) while Saban donates to the Democrats (substantially less [after all, he’s only worth 3.4 billion], but certainly not to be ignored), both parties are quite prone to doing their bidding. The Israel Lobby is nothing if not bi-partisan.

As Justin Raimondo noted, “Oh, it was quite a party, as the two philanthropists did their best to conform to every caricature out of the anti-Semites’ playbook” (“Oligarchs for Israel“).

(Isn’t it amazing that if one listens to activists on the left, such as MoveOn.org [originally funded by Jewish megadonors of the left, George Soros, Peter B. Lewis, and Linda Pritzker], one would think that the only wealthy individuals involved in U.S. politics are the safely non-Jewish Koch brothers?)

In the paranoid world of pro-Israel fanatics, even the New York Times and Washington Post are insufficiently pro-Israel. Scott McConnell in The American Conservative:

The two naturally agreed that the American media was terribly biased against Israel, except for maybe Fox News, and they discussed whether they could buy the Washington Post or New York Times to correct the problem. This aspect of the performance was comic, the lament, commonplace enough among neoconservatives, that the American press is biased against Israel. Consider that the Washington Post runs (the Wall Street Journal aside), the most neoconservative major editorial page in the country, and it’s been a long time since someone that one can even conceive of being slightly sympathetic to those subjected to Israeli occupation (perhaps the late Mary McGrory?) has written there. TheTimes is more diverse and makes occasionally sincere efforts at both balance and objective journalism, but if one looks at the roster of Times-men who regularly cover Israel, one could conclude that having a child serving in the IDF is a job requirement.

Sheldon and Haim then amused themselves and their audience by talking about taking over the Times and Washington Post.

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