Israel Lobby

Philip Giraldi on the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act

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From Philip Giraldi, “Fake News Versus No News” on Unz.com:

… The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is intended to give the Department of Education investigatory authority over “anti-Jewish incidents” on America’s college campuses. Such “incidents” are not limited to religious bigotry, with the examples cited in the bill’s text including criticism of Israel and claiming that the holocaust was “exaggerated.” It is a thinly disguised assault on the Boycott Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, which is non-violent, does not criticize Jews as a religion or ethnicity, and is actually supported by many Jewish American who are concerned about Israel’s apartheid regime.

The Anti-Semitism bill makes Jews and Jewish interests a legally protected class, immune from any criticism. “Free speech” means in practice that you can burn an American flag, sell pornography, attack Christianity in the vilest terms or castigate the government in Washington all you want but criticizing Israel is off limits if you want to avoid falling into the clutches of the legal system. The Act is a major step forward in effectively making any expressed opposition to Israeli actions a hate crime and is similar to punitive legislation that has been enacted in twenty-two states as well as in Canada. It is strongly supported by the Israel Lobby, which quite likely drafted it, and is seeking to use legal challenges to delegitimize and eliminate any opposition to the policies of the state of Israel.

As the Act is clearly intended to restrict First Amendment rights if they are perceived as impacting on broadly defined Jewish sensitivities, it should be opposed on that basis alone, but it is very popular in Congress, which is de facto owned by the Israel Lobby. That the legislation is not being condemned or even discussed in the generally liberal media tells you everything you need to know about the amazing power of one particular unelected and unaccountable lobby in the U.S.

And there is always Iran to worry about. If the United States can successfully avoid a war with Russia, a conflict with the Mullahs could have major consequences even if the all-powerful U.S. military successfully rolls over its Iranian counterpart in less than a week. Iran is physically and in terms of population much larger than Iraq and it has a strong national identity. An attack by Washington would produce a powerful reaction, unleashing terrorist resources and destabilizing an economically and politically important region of the world for years to come. Currently, the nuclear agreement with Iran provides some measure of stability and also pushes backwards any possible program by Tehran to build a weapon. Iran does not threaten the United States, so why walk away from the agreement as some of Trump’s advisors urge? Or violate the agreement’s terms as the U.S. Congress seems to be doing by extending and tightening the sanctions regime with its just passed Iran Sanctions Extension Act? Look no further than the Israel Lobby. Hobbling Iran, a regional competitor, is a possible Israeli interest that should have nothing to do with the United States but yet again the United States government carries the water for the extreme right wing Netanyahu regime.

Israel for its part has welcomed the Trump election by building 500 new and completely illegal settler homes in what was once Arab East Jerusalem. Trump has surrounded himself with advocates for Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s expectation that he will have a free hand in dealing with those pesky Palestinians is probably correct. I would like to think that Donald Trump will unpleasantly surprise him based on actual American rather than Israeli interests but am not optimistic.

Indeed, deference to perceived Israeli interests enforced by the Israel Lobby and media permeates the entire American foreign policy and national security structure. Congressman Keith Ellison who is seeking to become Democratic National Committee Chairman is being called an anti-Semite for “implying U.S. policy in the region [the Middle East] favored Israel at the expense of Muslim-majority countries, remarks ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt described as ‘deeply disturbing and disqualifying.’ ” Donald Trump and his senior counselor Steve Bannon have also both been called anti-Semites and several other potential GOP appointees have been subjected to the media’s fidelity-to-Israel litmus test.

The recently nominated Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who can hardly be called a moderate when it comes to Iran, has also been labeled an anti-Semite by the usual players. Why? Because in 2013 he told Wolf Blitzer “So we’ve got to work on [peace talks] with a sense of urgency. I paid a military security price every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel, and [because of this] moderate Arabs couldn’t be with us because they couldn’t publicly support those who don’t show respect for Arab Palestinians.”

Mattis will no doubt be reminded of his remarks when he is up for Senate confirmation. A predecessor Chuck Hagel was mercilessly grilled by Senators over his reported comment that the “Jewish lobby” intimidates congressmen. But ironically nearly everyone who is not an Israel-firster who is involved in U.S. foreign and security policy knows that aggressive Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank and its siege of Gaza contribute greatly to terrorism against the United States, since Washington is regularly blamed for enabling Netanyahu. When General David Petraeus said pretty much the same thing as Mattis back in 2010 he was forced to “explain” his comments, retract them and then grovel before he was eventually given a pass by the Lobby.

And there is considerable self-censorship related to the alleged sensitivity of “Jewish issues,” not only in the media. I recently attended a conference on the Iraq invasion of 2003 at which the role of Israel manifested through its controlled gaggle of American legislators and bureaucrats as a factor in going to war was not even mentioned. It was as if it would be impolite or, dare I say, anti-Semitic, to do so even though the Israeli role was hardly hidden. Former Bush administration senior official Philip Zelikow has admitted that protecting Israel was the principal reason why the U.S. invaded Iraq and others have speculated that without the persistent neocons’ and Israel’s prodding Washington might not have gone to war at all. That is apparently what then Secretary of State Colin Powell also eventually came around to believe.

So let’s stop talking about what Russia is doing to the United States, which is relatively speaking very little, and start admitting that the lopsided and completely deferential relationship with Israel is the actual central problem in America’s foreign policy. Will the media do that? Not a chance. They would rather obsess about fake news and blame Putin.

 

Tyrannical Elites Criminalize Opposition to Jewish Interests

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bds

“The existence of a Zionist State will bring into relief the separate character of the Jew.” Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, 1922.

In the course of several articles for TOO (e.g. here and here) I have attempted to explain a slow and gradual tightening of the noose on our freedoms, and to make predictions based on current trends. Despite my close attention to these details and developments, I have to confess that organized Jewry has impressed me with the unparalleled impudence of its latest success story — the effective criminalization in Britain of non-violent protest against Israeli human rights abuses. A report in The Independent states that:

Local councils, public bodies and even some university student unions are to be banned by law from boycotting “unethical” companies, as part of a controversial crackdown being announced by the Government. Under the plan all publicly funded institutions will lose the freedom to refuse to buy goods and services from companies involved in the arms trade, fossil fuels, tobacco products or Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Any public bodies that continue to pursue boycotts will face “severe penalties”, ministers said. Senior government sources said they were cracking down on town-hall boycotts because they “undermined good community relations, poisoned and polarized debate and fuelled anti-Semitism”.

Thus, in one stunning move, a key aspect of the autonomous decision-making processes of British local government has been abolished. The central government has arbitrarily vetoed the power of local governments and groups of private citizens to divest from trade or investments they regard as unethical. It goes without saying that the move has been introduced without any public referendum, or any public consultation. This is a diktat passed down on the people by an elite so distant from its people as to represent nothing less than the officialdom of an alien colonial power. Read more

Far Left Center for American Progress Hosts Netanyahu, Leader of the Israeli Ethnonationalist Right

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When Israeli PM Netanyahu visited the US at the invitation of then House Speaker John Boehner in March, the take-home message was that support for Israel had become a partisan issue, with strong Republican support and relatively weak, dwindling Democrat support. Indeed, the Democrats have an analogous split between the donor class and it base that we  see among the Republicans, but for different reasons.

The Democratic Party establishment and donor class are strongly supportive of the Jewish state and are seeking to find new ways to increase U.S. military aid for Israel following the Iran deal. But recent polling shows that support for Israel among rank-and-file Democrats has fallen by 10 points in one year. A Gallup poll released this year found that fewer than half of Democrats, 48 percent, report sympathizing more with Israelis than with Palestinians as it relates to the Middle East conflict, while 83 percent of Republicans sympathize more with Israel. (John Hudson, Foreign Policy: “Netanyahu Visit Sparks Internal Backlash at Powerhouse D.C. Think Tank“

The White Republican base is more supportive of Israel (at least partly because of a large, terribly misguided Evangelical component) and thus more in tune with the donors on that issue. But it is famously out of step with the donors on social issues—immigration, gay marriage, abortion, etc. On the other hand, the Democrat base is far less supportive of Israel than the donors but, as a coalition of the ascendant non-White majority, it is entirely in step with them on social issues.

The common denominator is that in both parties the donors are substantially Jewish, and these wealthy Jews are pursuing a Jewish diaspora strategy of favoring Israel and leftist stances on social issues.

So in his recent trip to the US, in addition to dunning the Obama administration for a hefty increase in military aid in return for the US not bombing Iran (at least until the Republicans are back in charge), Netanyahu was invited to give a speech at the Center for American Progress, a powerful left-wing lobbying group. The result was that Netanyahu, dedicated to ethnonationalist policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing vis-á-vis the Palestinians and expelling African migrants in Israel, spoke at CAP which is dedicated to the dispossession of White America via immigration and multiculturalism in the name of universal human rights and empathy for the oppressed. There were some tensions, but in the end, the strength of the Israel Lobby on the left in the US was reaffirmed — and CAP bigwigs burnished their credentials for high-level positions in a putative Hillary Clinton administration. Read more

Glenn Greenwald denounces Hillary Clinton for pandering to Israel-firster Haim Saban

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I was very critical of Glenn Greenwald in a recent article for attacking European-American interests and indeed the very notion of nationhood, for advocating lawlessness on immigration, and for being silent on Jewish-Zionist oligarchs’ media and financial influence in the United States. I in turn was criticized by some for being naïve, like the foolish frog inevitably stung by the scorpion in Aesop’s fable.

But I like to give credit where credit is due. In his latest piece attacking Hillary Clinton for a militaristic and imperialistic speech, Greenwald prominently mentions that the presidential candidate is pandering to Israeli-American oligarch Haim Saban, who has made no secret of his loyalty to Israel or his significant financial influence over the Democratic Party:

[The] Brookings [Institute] is funded in part by one of the Democratic Party’s favorite billionaires, Haim Saban, who is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel and once said of himself: “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” Pollack advocated for the attack on Iraq while he was “Director of Research of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.” Saban became the Democratic Party’s largest fundraiser — even paying $7 million for the new DNC building — and is now a very substantial funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In exchange, she’s written a personal letter to him publicly “expressing her strong and unequivocal support for Israel in the face of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement.”

And if Saban plays such a large role among the Democrats, it is worth recalling that Sheldon Adelson — who supports Jewish supremacism in Israel and mass immigration to the U.S. — plays a similar role among the Republicans, providing more money to their candidates than the next nine contributors put together.  Read more

Kissinger’s role in gaining U.S. acceptance of Israeli nukes a case study in Zionist manipulation

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On August 20 PressTV carried an article titled “Kissinger tried to curb Israeli nukes: State Dept. documents.” The article starts by stating “The US State Department has released documents that show the administration of former president Richard Nixon had sought to curb Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.” In fact, the documents were released in 2006, but they are fascinating and certainly relevent to the Iran nuclear deal in that they show the unbelievable double standard that is being applied to Iran compared to Israel.

The title of the article is also misleading, as it becomes apparent upon reading the documents that while the gentiles in the administration wanted to halt Israel’s nuclear weapons development, Kissinger (the National Security Advisor and the administration’s most high-profile Jew) actually restrained the administration from using its considerable leverage to halt the Israeli nuclear program and instead successfully championed the policy of accepting Israel as a de facto nuclear weapons state as long as it made no public declarations of its possession of nuclear weapons and allowed the United States to maintain plausible deniability of knowledge of Israeli nukes.

The PressTV article specifically quotes from a July 19, 1969 memo from Kissinger to Nixon (available here from the Nixon Library). Kissinger told Nixon that “while we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession, what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact,”

Kissinger, as National Security Advisor, was head of a small task force made up to handle the issue of Israel’s nuclear weapons program that was made up of himself, Under Secretary of State Elliott Richardson, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, CIA Director Richard Helms, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler. Read more

The Labour Party turns on the Israel Lobby

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Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn

It would be fair to say the massacre of around 100 Palestinian villagers by Jewish Stern Gang and Irgun terrorists in the village of Deir Yassin nearly 70 years ago is not well remembered today.

Like many of the horrific events surrounding the creation of the state of Israel, the massacre on April 9, 1948 has been quietly dropped down the memory hole.  It was a horrific tale of British betrayal and Jewish ruthlessness, and is still too embarrassing for both Jewish elites and the British government.

But those events have now come back from the grave and might have a pivotal effect on who is to become a future British prime minister. For Britain is on the verge of a small political earthquake if, as seems likely, a far-left politician becomes leader of the opposition Labour Party. Not only is  Jeremy Corbyn a bit of a seventies throwback with his beret, beard and leftie enthusiasm for anti-austerity measures, there is another factor that sets him well apart from the other three safe, establishment candidates.

For no friend of Israel is he. Jeremy Corbyn is a long standing supporter of the Palestinian cause and has shared platforms with many Muslim radicals in the past including Hamas. Read more

“Jew baiter” Obama: The same people who brought you Iraq are opposing the Iran deal

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Sometimes Jewish comments related to anti-Semitism seem so unhinged that they surprise even me.  A Tablet article describes the meeting between Obama and a raft of Jewish leaders on the Iran deal (“Obama to Jewish Leaders: Lay Off the Iran Deal, and I Will Lay Off You“).

Words have consequences, and when they come from official sources, they can be even more dangerous, the president was told. The community worked hard to keep it from getting personal and didn’t make it specific to him. The president complained about the lobbying, and said some of the same people who brought you Iraq are opposing the Iran deal. He was told those characterizations are not accurate. Jewish lobbyists didn’t support the Iraq war.

Another participant who also asked to remain anonymous told me that some people expressed discomfort with  “how the debate is being framed—framed as, ‘if you are a critic of the deal, you’re for war.’ The implication is that if it looks like the Jewish community is responsible for Congress voting down the deal, it will look like the Jewish community is leading us off to another war in the Middle East.”

Read more