Philip Weiss on AIPAC

Despite its general unwillingness to tread too far into Jewish issues, The American Conservative certainly has done itself proud with the publication of  Philip Weiss’s account of the recent AIPAC convention.

The AIPAC convention is really a ritual of Jewish dominance in America. We read about the sheer political power able to command the presence of both presidential candidates and over half the Congress. The politicians truckle before their masters, competing to outdo each other with their promises and concern for Israel.  There are large banners featuring photos of wealthy AIPAC donors with their presumably non-Jewish trophy wives.

The clear message is: “We’ve got your politicians eating out of our hand. You will do what we want when it comes to anything related to Israel no matter what the cost to the U.S. Life is good.”

Power is not just having official Washington do one’s bidding. It’s also the ability to prevent public discussion of Jewish influence. There is almost no journalistic coverage of the event. “The reason seems obvious: the press would have to write openly about a forbidden subject, Jewish influence.”

Most egregiously, Weiss notes that the New York Times printed an article on a major Jewish fund raiser without mentioning that his main motivation is Zionism:

There was Donald Diamond, an Arizona real estate developer whom the New York Times recently profiled on the front page after he raised $250,000 for John McCain. The Times said nothing in its piece about Diamond’s Israel work. But that was all the banner was about. “The U.S.-Israel relationship is the single most important determinant of democracy in the world, and we must commit to securing it,” Diamond wrote. “It is so obvious to us that the Jewish community is a family and that we have to take care of each other.”

The reader of the New York Times article goes away thinking that Diamond is just a regular Republican kind of guy, when his main motivation is presumably to get McCain to hew to AIPAC’s line on Israel.

The result is that organized Jewry is able to have its cake and eat it too. All those politicians and the media elite are quite aware of Jewish influence. But they cannot mention it in public without suffering the consequences.

Of course, in the case of much of the media—including the NYT, the taboo against discussing Jewish influence is self-imposed. And for very good reason:  The NYT is itself a paradigm of Jewish influence.

Another example of the media blackout of AIPAC relates to the dual loyalty issue. AIPAC would probably not want it widely known that “when the national anthems are played, one cantor sings the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ but the ‘Hatikvah’ has two cantors belting it out, with the audience roaring along.”

Dual loyalty? What dual loyalty? If emotions are any indication (and they are), it’s pretty clear where their hearts lie. But don’t worry. The New York Times or, for that matter, Fox News or any other American media outlet would never think of publicizing such incidents.

As Weiss notes, “AIPAC and its roll call of politicians would say that American and Israeli interests are identical.” But how would they know? Everything we know about human psychology argues that their powerful emotional attraction to Israel would cloud their judgment and bias their thinking on anything related to Israel.

 

In addition to the dominance and power theme, the article is a primer on other aspects of Jewish psychology.

1.)  There’s a constant stream of Holocaust imagery designed to motivate the Jews, legitimize whatever Israel does to the Palestinians, and pull at the heartstrings of the goyim.

2.)  Tying in with the Holocaust imagery, there is a palpable sense of threat. The situation is dire—1939 all over again, and we’ve got to rally round the flag to avert total destruction. Sure, the wine is flowing and just about everyone at an AIPAC convention is rich; the goyish political and social elite are bowing and scraping before you. But disaster looms, so we have to batten down the hatches and rally the troops.

3.)  But it’s not all negative emotions. There is an unbounded love for Jews and all things Jewish. “Even a sharp critic like myself of what AIPAC is doing to American policy in the Middle East was frequently moved by the pure loving feeling that surrounds you at every moment.” Of course it’s not love for humanity as a whole (much less the Palestinians), but love for one’s tribe.

4.)  Stuff that’s okay to say among the tribe should not be publicized outside the ingroup. It’s okay to worry about whether Obama is sufficiently pro-Israel. But this sort of talk should be relegated to private conversations—exactly what Mearsheimer and Walt have found as a general characteristic of discussion of Israel. As they note, there’s far more public discussion of controversial aspects of Israel policy in Israel than in America.  And Jews who publically criticize Israel are ostracized by the Jewish community.

 

5.)  When someone like Obama is not an entirely known quantity in the Jewish community, then the group relies on trusted tribe members to plead his case. In this case, it’s Lee Rosenberg , a board member of AIPAC, whose main point was that Obama had “gotten to know” Benjamin Netenyahu, a stalwart on the Israeli right and well known as a strong supporter of colonizing Palestinian territory.

Besides Jewish psychology, we really have to wonder what’s going through the minds of the non-Jews in attendance. We can assume that the politicians are completely cynical and self-serving sociopaths who feel no twinges of guilt for truckling before their masters even though their masters are hardly subtle about where their loyalties lie. Who else but a sociopath could perform such a degrading ritual?

But what about the Christian evangelicals? Weiss describes one evangelical as follows: “Carrie said that at a synagogue she addressed, the first question came from a high-school girl who said, ‘But isn’t Israel an apartheid state?’”

 

That must cause a bit of cognitive dissonance. Let’s see. God wants the Jews to control all the land of Israel, including the West Bank, expel or otherwise dispose of the Palestinians (even the Christian ones), and erect an apartheid state where Jew and non-Jew live in separate worlds behind high barriers. And when all this comes about, then God will rapture the believers, the Jews will finally be converted, and the Second Coming will be at hand.

God works in mysterious ways.  Can these people really be that out of touch with reality? Sadly, the answer seems to be yes. But the good news is that, for a variety of reasons, their influence may be on the wane. Let’s hope so.

In the meantime, we should all be thankful to Philip Weiss for shedding a little more light on the Israel Lobby.