The CIA2/MOSSAD Lobby
For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the
centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The
combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread
‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and
jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation
has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its
own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another
state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared
strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account
for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic
politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups
have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from
what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans
that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially
identical......It’s all very revealing...of the hold on power by those occult forces behind the power in USA, the new found Siamese twins of CIA2/MOSSAD, that cannot distinguish American and Israeli interests....hence Israel "and" America....becomes a covert paradigm...used by the power behind the power in USA to steamroll US politics into complete submission to the elite's of the elite boys and women ... the CFR,...etc...the so-called ISRAEL's influential lobby....is a myth propagated by this occult power behind the power....because it is a very handy and a "cheap" way ...of controlling both houses of congress ...without ever disclosing any of the rogue intelligence and covert...extra-judicial operations...and all policies....in USA and the world for that matter... and the so-called Israeli lobby, with all of its spectacular ramifications worldwide is completely and utterly subservient to this power behind the power in USA, they are just a front and a cover...for the real power behind all powers in USA, and
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support
dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct
economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since
World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives
about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid
budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially
striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly
equal to that of South Korea or Spain....
Other recipients get their money in quarterly installmMisunderstanding the Lobby.....YES, this is what it is actually about:
1 of 2 CBS: Israeli settlers trying to prevent peace deal....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_UwGgLdmdI&eurl=http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/2747/t/3251/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=2523
2 of 2 CBS: Israeli settlers trying to prevent peace deal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8KwUSQL9zc&feature=related
events, but Israel receives its entire
appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most
recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but
Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence
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industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent,
which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes
the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has
provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access
to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US
gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to
Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US
has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number
of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab
states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue
in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration
protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October
War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as
in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the
negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was
occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported
the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far
too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s
ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s
strategic situation.
This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic
asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is
convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as
America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and
inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally
helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess
forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful
intelligence about Soviet capabilities.
Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the
Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid
during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable
damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position
to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when
the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and
had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.
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The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden.
The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to
divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that
might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003:
although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without
triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.
Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the
claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and
Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass
destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free
hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all
Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries
like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its
enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the
broader effort to deal with rogue states.
‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political
groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United
States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover,
Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is
largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza
Strip.
More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat
has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part
because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is
not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes
winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida
leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem
and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for
extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US
interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire
nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could
be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without
suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is
equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go
undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship
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with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear
arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening
them with regime change merely increases that desire.
A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal
ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including
pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of
Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals
like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and
growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office,
Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any
ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of
classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union
in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when
it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified
information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the
US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic
value.
Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves
unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy;
the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special
treatment; and Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On
close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for
supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and
present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.
Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to
the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better
led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won
quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in
1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest
military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its
neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and
Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria
has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is
hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone
an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv
University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours
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Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military
capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog
were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.
That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account
for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none
receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in
the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has
good relations with a number of dictatorships today.
Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the
US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or
ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the
principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are
treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found
that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its
democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable
state of their own or full political rights.
A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially
during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe
only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special
treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an
appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought
about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.
This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum
Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:
If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we
have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and
what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but
was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their
country. Why should they accept that?
Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national
ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is
no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian
population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza
Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was
willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer
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at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto
Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help
Israel today no matter what it does.
Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and
shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have
acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable
from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far
from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments –
which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state
on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic
cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent
conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949
and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab
infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds
of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled
between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and
drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.
During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged
them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the
Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for
their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were
aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent,
leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose
efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first
days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians,
the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli
children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists
relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir,
once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor
Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’
The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians
believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once
admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist
organisation’.
So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for
Israel, how are we to explain it?
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The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as
shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to
steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the
Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do
not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because
Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36
per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally
attached to Israel.
Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations
in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who
generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the
Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make
concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace –
strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both
favour giving steadfast support to Israel.
Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure
that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation
wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must
check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong
prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered
out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was
accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to
persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said
that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to
lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the
government of Israel.’
Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised
Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in
the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said,
‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the
security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced
that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’
Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence
American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997,
Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful
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lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of
Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A
National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in
second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.
The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry
Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former
majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is
the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise,
they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John
Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the
former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the
influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.
The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process.
Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch,
make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They
enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to
which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate
those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest
of the population will not penalise them for doing so.
In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or
textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about
American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s
activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only
doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast,
pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel
Lobby’s task even easier.
The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in
Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an
individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make
supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse
portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by
promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments
from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to
guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead
Americans to favour a different policy.
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A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is
virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely
shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential
critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick
Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect
Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect
America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US
foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.
Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As
Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the
working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . .
to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a
position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful
lot done just at the staff level.’
AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is
due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its
agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the
scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC
makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel
political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that
AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also
organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse
pro-Israel candidates.
There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984
elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a
prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’.
Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in
America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians –
those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’
AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a
former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to
turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress,
the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More
important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation,
advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.
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The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a
stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated
there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In
other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to
supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving
office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’
Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can
help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’
Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby
also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer
than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates
from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential
candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the
money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in
key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential
candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.
Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do
not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his
first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the
Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is
encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli
policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.
When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in
the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down
the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in
the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star
reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders
around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be
bad for Israel.’
This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair
was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more
closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace
Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act
as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate
even-handedness.
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During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by
officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them,
Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the
pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined
WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and
often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp
David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and
favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what
would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak,
co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer
independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they
were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an
American flag’.
The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have
included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton,
Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David
Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured
by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.
The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans
to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations
work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.
The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle
East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot
imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be
counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found
just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions.
Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the
balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream
media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.
‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert
Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along
with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times,
regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the
New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.
Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally
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criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate
grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor
Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I
was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my
knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East
commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a
pro-Israel perspective.’
News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective,
but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without
acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting,
the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news
outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he
sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May
2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America
(CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33
cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its
Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station,
WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts.
Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked
for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.
The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping
public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985,
when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to
Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East
issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s
agenda.
The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years,
pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise
Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy
Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for
Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).
These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.
Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East
was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for
even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center
for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American
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businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk.
What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.
Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university
campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only
mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to
power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring
2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.
The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like
the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established
groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group,
the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now
sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on
programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to
‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel
effort’.
The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin
Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a
website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged
students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This
transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and
Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to
report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.
Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities.
Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late
Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the
Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of
emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either
sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia
recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a
problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away
from Columbia.
A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004,
when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s
Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish
students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty
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committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of
anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had
‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the
academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of
intimidation.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to
push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they
manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be
denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication
of the importance placed on controlling debate.
A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies
programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in
existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May
2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar
programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic
administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are
intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub
Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter
the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East
programmes.
No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its
most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s
actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle
Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled
an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the
risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to
America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and
then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is
something no one wants to be accused of.
Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which
some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a
point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in
the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence
points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European
anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion
conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for
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the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast,
anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered
quite acceptable.
The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in
Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not
more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French
police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005;
and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European
country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim
gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn
anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s
memorial service to show their solidarity.
No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it
provoked by Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly
racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is
like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent
autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their
numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.
Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new
anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise
Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of
England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it
manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the
Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on . . .
Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the
Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on
anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the
Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government
policy.
Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to
exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its
right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis
themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians
elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to
international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly
the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.
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In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration
tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for
terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied
Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant
means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and
diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have
supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans
were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that
number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that
the United States should not favour either side.
Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up
backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its
position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a
Washington Post headline summarised the situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly
Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.
The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show
restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign
minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly
critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of
a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our
expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.
Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House
press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma
apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and
the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from
terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real
difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said,
should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.
The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a
letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not
restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote,
must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the
letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American
Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in
providing advice on the letter’.
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By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved
considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial
victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing
with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly
meeting with Bush.
In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield
and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush
knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and
undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and
begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel
to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security
adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same
day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and
start negotiating.
Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office
and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William
Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated
the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being
pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were
especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate
minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.
The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to
withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president
believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s
return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded
satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such
thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.
Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the
administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel.
(The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.)
Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that
the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common
struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support
and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the
terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few
days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel
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stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a
House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200
million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and
Powell lost.
In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and
triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that
Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw
the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it
was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key
role in defeating Bush.
The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again
to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader,
Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan
to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement’ from
Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with
Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian
people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral victory. With Hamas
in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration
has supported Sharon’s actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has
even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the
stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.
US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to
help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little
finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If
Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the
Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in
Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life,
which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for
Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.
Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as
the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to
help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel
groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy
towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.
Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack
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Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for
oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was
motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip
Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the
executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice,
the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’
was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in
September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard
on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’
On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a
hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that
‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam
Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and
the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had
given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one
retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture
presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional
capabilities.’
Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council
authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN
inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres
told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent
people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’
At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest
risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu,
published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling
Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I
believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive
strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military
and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’
As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s
leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country
in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon
Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support
the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were
so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it
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would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.
Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of
neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major
organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the
. . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations
rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed
the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The
editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the
deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’
Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the
broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel
Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew
Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the
population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the
war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s
influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.
The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush
became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to
Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had
close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams,
John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard
Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to
adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve
that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the
early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That
help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to
reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.
At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated
attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was
involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush
rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now
regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military
planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.
Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don’t
have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of
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Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was
the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah
and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in
the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush;
and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.
Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case
that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were
designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to
the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent
neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does
not link Iraq directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of
terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein
from power in Iraq.’ The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains
America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the
Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as
soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the
Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next,
followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we
finish off ‘the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.
This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for
an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such
a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby
pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare
Colin Powell’s now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the
Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding
links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly
missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and
Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group,
the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that
could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with
long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think
tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas
Feith.
Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has
long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and
arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with
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Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for
Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended
that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important
Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also called for Israel to take steps to
reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle
and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals.
The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line
between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.
Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most
hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first
among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same
time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for
promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the
Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in
2003.
Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives’ prewar support of Ahmed
Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. They
backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and
had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was
precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger
laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: ‘The INC saw improved
relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up
increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to
pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is
involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.’
Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their
influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected
that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the
American Jewish Committee acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the
neo-conservatives had conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was ‘pervasive’ in the
intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who
did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were
condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of
public discussion about the role of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The
reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being labelled an
anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the
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decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take
without their efforts. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A
front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all:
‘President’s Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-US, Democratic
Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-Conservative Roots.’
Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly
involved in the Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because
America acted as an ‘off-shore balancer’ in the region. Most forces designated for the
Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept ‘over the horizon’ and out of
harm’s way. The idea was to play local powers off against each other – which is why the
Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the
Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.
This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a
strategy of ‘dual containment’. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in
order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The
father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the
strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and
South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.
By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment,
because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each
other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a
strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by
AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of
1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted
more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions
on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum
resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz,
noted at the time, ‘Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not
conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.’
By the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment
was not enough and that regime change in Iraq was essential. By toppling Saddam and
turning Iraq into a vibrant democracy, they argued, the US would trigger a far-reaching
process of change throughout the Middle East. The same line of thinking was evident in
the ‘Clean Break’ study the neo-conservatives wrote for Netanyahu. By 2002, when an
invasion of Iraq was on the front-burner, regional transformation was an article of faith
in neo-conservative circles.
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Charles Krauthammer describes this grand scheme as the brainchild of Natan
Sharansky, but Israelis across the political spectrum believed that toppling Saddam
would alter the Middle East to Israel’s advantage. Aluf Benn reported in Ha’aretz (17
February 2003):
Senior IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as National
Security Adviser Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the wonderful future Israel
can expect after the war. They envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam
Hussein followed by that of Israel’s other enemies . . . Along with these leaders will
disappear terror and weapons of mass destruction.
Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging
Washington to target Damascus. On 16 April, Sharon, interviewed in Yedioth Ahronoth,
called for the United States to put ‘very heavy’ pressure on Syria, while Shaul Mofaz, his
defence minister, interviewed in Ma’ariv, said: ‘We have a long list of issues that we are
thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done
through the Americans.’ Ephraim Halevy told a WINEP audience that it was now
important for the US to get rough with Syria, and the Washington Post reported that
Israel was ‘fuelling the campaign’ against Syria by feeding the US intelligence reports
about the actions of Bashar Assad, the Syrian president.
Prominent members of the Lobby made the same arguments. Wolfowitz declared that
‘there has got to be regime change in Syria,’ and Richard Perle told a journalist that ‘a
short message, a two-worded message’ could be delivered to other hostile regimes in
the Middle East: ‘You’re next.’ In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report
stating that Syria ‘should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam’s
reckless, irresponsible and defiant behaviour could end up sharing his fate’. On 15 April,
Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled ‘Next, Turn the
Screws on Syria’, while the following day Zev Chafets wrote an article for the New York
Daily News entitled ‘Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too’. Not to be outdone,
Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on 21 April that Assad was a serious threat
to America.
Back on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel had reintroduced the Syria
Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It threatened sanctions
against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD and stop supporting
terrorism, and it also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace
with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by the Lobby – by AIPAC especially –
and ‘framed’, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘by some of Israel’s best
friends in Congress’. The Bush administration had little enthusiasm for it, but the
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anti-Syrian act passed overwhelmingly (398 to 4 in the House; 89 to 4 in the Senate),
and Bush signed it into law on 12 December 2003.
The administration itself was still divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria. Although
the neo-conservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and the State
Department were opposed to the idea. And even after Bush signed the new law, he
emphasised that he would go slowly in implementing it. His ambivalence is
understandable. First, the Syrian government had not only been providing important
intelligence about al-Qaida since 9/11: it had also warned Washington about a planned
terrorist attack in the Gulf and given CIA interrogators access to Mohammed Zammar,
the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Targeting the Assad regime would
jeopardise these valuable connections, and thereby undermine the larger war on
terrorism.
Second, Syria had not been on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war (it had
even voted for UN Resolution 1441), and was itself no threat to the United States.
Playing hardball with it would make the US look like a bully with an insatiable appetite
for beating up Arab states. Third, putting Syria on the hit list would give Damascus a
powerful incentive to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to bring pressure to
bear, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first. Yet Congress insisted on putting
the screws on Damascus, largely in response to pressure from Israeli officials and
groups like AIPAC. If there were no Lobby, there would have been no Syria
Accountability Act, and US policy towards Damascus would have been more in line with
the national interest.
Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as
their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons.
Virtually all Israelis regard an Islamic country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons
as a threat to their existence. ‘Iraq is a problem . . . But you should understand, if you
ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq,’ the defence minister, Binyamin
Ben-Eliezer, remarked a month before the Iraq war.
Sharon began pushing the US to confront Iran in November 2002, in an interview in the
Times. Describing Iran as the ‘centre of world terror’, and bent on acquiring nuclear
weapons, he declared that the Bush administration should put the strong arm on Iran
‘the day after’ it conquered Iraq. In late April 2003, Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli
ambassador in Washington was calling for regime change in Iran. The overthrow of
Saddam, he noted, was ‘not enough’. In his words, America ‘has to follow through. We
still have great threats of that magnitude coming from Syria, coming from Iran.’
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The neo-conservatives, too, lost no time in making the case for regime change in
Tehran. On 6 May, the AEI co-sponsored an all-day conference on Iran with the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, both champions
of Israel. The speakers were all strongly pro-Israel, and many called for the US to
replace the Iranian regime with a democracy. As usual, a bevy of articles by prominent
neo-conservatives made the case for going after Iran. ‘The liberation of Iraq was the
first great battle for the future of the Middle East . . . But the next great battle – not, we
hope, a military battle – will be for Iran,’ William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard
on 12 May.
The administration has responded to the Lobby’s pressure by working overtime to shut
down Iran’s nuclear programme. But Washington has had little success, and Iran seems
determined to create a nuclear arsenal. As a result, the Lobby has intensified its
pressure. Op-eds and other articles now warn of imminent dangers from a nuclear Iran,
caution against any appeasement of a ‘terrorist’ regime, and hint darkly of preventive
action should diplomacy fail. The Lobby is pushing Congress to approve the Iran
Freedom Support Act, which would expand existing sanctions. Israeli officials also warn
they may take pre-emptive action should Iran continue down the nuclear road, threats
partly intended to keep Washington’s attention on the issue.
One might argue that Israel and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy
towards Iran, because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear.
There is some truth in this, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a direct threat to
the US. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a
nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must
keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would
hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be more temperate and
preventive war would not be a serious option.
It is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the US to deal with any
and all threats to Israel’s security. If their efforts to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s
enemies will be weakened or overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the
Palestinians, and the US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying. But
even if the US fails to transform the Middle East and finds itself in conflict with an
increasingly radicalised Arab and Islamic world, Israel will end up protected by the
world’s only superpower. This is not a perfect outcome from the Lobby’s point of view,
but it is obviously preferable to Washington distancing itself, or using its leverage to
force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.
Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so, given the Iraq debacle,
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the obvious need to rebuild America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, and the
recent revelations about AIPAC officials passing US government secrets to Israel. One
might also think that Arafat’s death and the election of the more moderate Mahmoud
Abbas would cause Washington to press vigorously and even-handedly for a peace
agreement. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to distance themselves from
the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more consistent with broader US interests. In
particular, using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the
Palestinians would help advance the cause of democracy in the region.
But that is not going to happen – not soon anyway. AIPAC and its allies (including
Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world. They know it has
become more difficult to make Israel’s case today, and they are responding by taking on
staff and expanding their activities. Besides, American politicians remain acutely
sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major
media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does.
The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger
that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to
end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful
recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and
contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.
Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead
the US to attack those countries, with potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need
another Iraq. At a minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it
almost impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against al-Qaida and
the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.
There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has
become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it
complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts
Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when
it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation
appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal,
which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability.
Besides, the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy.
Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics
are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends.
The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues
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paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free
to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle
debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.
Finally, the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington
to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities –
including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo
Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian
extremists. Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not
made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of
Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the
number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able
to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less
powerful and US policy more even-handed.
There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the
adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can
maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever.
What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate
about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its
continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open
debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support
and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with
the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as
well....
NEW YORK: Scientists have found that about 98 percent of the human genome is similar to that of the chimpanzee. If anything, the relationship between a certain chimp and a man named Carl Wilhelm Baumgartner is even closer.
You may now be asking: Carl who? Stick around. But you may have heard about this chimpanzee.
It appeared in a grotesque cartoon that ran last week in The New York Post. This was after a real chimp had viciously attacked a woman in Connecticut and was then shot to death by police officers. The Post's illustration, by Sean Delonas, shows a bullet-riddled chimp lying dead. Two officers stand over him. One holds a smoking gun while the other says, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
At a minimum, the drawing was thoroughly vulgar, even for an illustrator whose work is often synonymous with vulgarity.
But was it intentionally racist?
Protesters, led as usual by Al Sharpton, insist that it was. It was a direct attack on President Barack Obama, they say. Vile comparisons of blacks to chimpanzees and monkeys are as old as the republic. This chimp, in the critics' view, clearly represented our first African-American president, the leading figure behind the new economic stimulus program. Worse, some protesters charge, the newspaper in effect said that Obama should be shot.
Nonsense, Post editors have replied: The point was merely that the stimulus plan was so ill-conceived, in their opinion, that it was as if it had been written by a chimpanzee. Nonetheless, feeling the heat, the newspaper ran an editorial apology of sorts.
In no way did it mollify the critics, who have called for, among other things, reader and advertiser boycotts of The Post.
As might be expected, not all African-Americans shared the outrage or felt that the cartoon was meant to represent Obama. Governor David Paterson of New York, who is black, said that he accepted The Post's apology. As for the "invitation to assassination," as the drawing was described by Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP, it is a federal crime to threaten the life of the president. If the Secret Service thought the cartoon amounted to a threat, its agents would presumably have descended on the newspaper. They haven't.
The protests continue, though. Certainly, everyone has a right to refuse to buy a newspaper. But Sharpton has gone further. He wants the Federal Communications Commission to re-examine waivers to its media ownership rules that allow Rupert Murdoch to own two newspapers (The Post and The Wall Street Journal) and two television stations (WNYW and WWOR) in the New York area.
Normally when it comes to such waivers, the question is whether a single hand controls too many media outlets in a given market. But Sharpton has made editorial content the reason for asking the government to step in. "How can you continue to have these waivers," he told a CNN interviewer, if you "don't understand what would offend a large amount of African-Americans - and whites, by the way?"
Thus did he take the first step down a very slippery slope. The First Amendment protects even the most despicable form of expression from government interference. It is why the Supreme Court has upheld the right to burn a U.S. flag even though flag desecration is as offensive to many people as Sharpton says this cartoon was to him.
That brings us to Carl Wilhelm Baumgartner, Karl Rove, Elliott Abrams, George Tenet.... We didn't forget them....and we will never forget about the infamous White House Murder INC, Again and again, a killer in murder/assassinations , starting from the CIA2/MOSSAD assassination of Mr. Elie Hobeika in Beirut/Hazmieh January 24th 2002, and the infamous : "White House Murder Inc." , headed by Asef Shawkat in Syria. http://newhk.blogspot.com/2008/12/uniiic-ii-report-revisited.html
He was born in Germany in 1895 and became a naturalized American in 1932. But he was an ardent admirer of Hitler and the Nazis. He was so outspoken that the government tried in World War II to strip him of his U.S. citizenship. The Supreme Court blocked that effort. In a memorable passage from his majority opinion in 1944, Justice Felix Frankfurter (who was Jewish and hardly enamored of Nazis) wrote:
"One of the prerogatives of American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures - and that means not only informed and responsible criticism but the freedom to speak foolishly and without moderation." It is an American right, Frankfurter went on, to express "silly or even sinister-sounding views."
In this regard, the cartoon chimp's DNA, if you will, is no different from Baumgartner's. If the government has no business going after a citizen because he reveres Hitler, it will probably want to think twice before taking on a newspaper because of a dopey drawing....
Someone once said that "no matter how paranoid you are" (about the evils of the ZOG),
"it's infinitely worse than you think!" Christ called the jew demons the "sons of the
devil." And contrary to what the filthy Christ killers would have the naive "inferior
goyim" believe, Christ does not lie. Ever. But the Christ killers always lie. Always.
Lucky for all of us 6.7 billion "inferior goyim" human beings, the filthy piece of shit
Jewnited States of Zionism is breaking apart "by 2010." Just as the Russians predicted.
Good fucking riddance to the God damn filthy piece of shit "US" ZOG enclave! May they
all die and burn in the lowest reaches of Hell for all fucking eternity! And they will.
You can be absolutely certain of that. Zionists always die and burn in Hell.
It is important to remember the statistics of the matter. The jew demons incarnate
always eventually die and are dragged down to the deepest and darkest pits of Hell from
whence they emerged. And the God damn traitorous "goy" pigs who sold their souls always
follow their jew demon masters to the lowest regions of Hell that a "goy" can possibly
go. Not nearly as deep as the dead jew demons go. But just barely above the dead jew
demons' heads imprisoned in eternal torture. It's where all the filthy dead Zionists go.
God punishes them for all eternity. God damn murderers! Serves them fucking right.
You may not believe it. And who could blame you? Who would dare to believe something
so magnificently justified after living in such a horrible hellish world so unnatural and
Satanically unjust and cruel? It's hard to see that the Universe is just. That Mother
Nature works against the Zionist pigs to destroy them and everything they've touched with
their filthy Zionist hands. The God forces them into the most horrible parts of Hell.
Life on Earth is a test. A test to see if the careless "goy" falls into the jew demon
trap. Many "goys" do. Looks like. Many "goys" sell their souls for small and temporary
riches. Can't take it with them, however. So why do the foolish "goys" do it? What
tempts the "goy" fools to sell their souls and eat rotten meat from the jew demon table?
Is it the glitter of gold? I really don't understand why the foolish "goys" so
readily exchange their souls for 30 pieces of silver from the Zionist treasury. Could
be that it is because the naive "goys" were brainwashed from youth to serve the jew
devils. And the foolish "goys" never realized what had happened to them until they died
and woke up in the second lowest and darkest and hottest regions of Hell. With the
searing fires of the dead jew demons scorching their feet for all eternity. The "goy"
fools are damned. Why did they do it? Greed. Selfishness. Looks like.
That's the only rational explanation. The foolish "goys" didn't realize how evil the
jew demons were until it was too late. You see this happening in the ZOG "US" military
and "IDF." The "goy" fools enlist and go out and commit murder for the filthy hook nosed
jew bankers. The "goys" that survive the Zionist reign of terror invasion zones in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and elsewhere return to find they have lost everything. No job. No home.
No family. All the while seeing the filthy greedy criminal hook nosed shyster jew
bankers laughing on the jewtv television screens. Giving each other trillions while the
whole world is descending into Chaos. To top it off, the "goy" military veterans begin
to feel guilty for the murders and atrocities they committed against the poor human
beings whom they had murdered in the ZOG invasion zones expressly on the orders given to
them by the same filthy fucking jew bankers who are laughing at the poor "goy" fools.
On a local radio show, several ZOG military commanders were being interviewed about the
morale holocaust within the lower ranks of the genocidal ZOG "US" military. The military
commanders were so utterly brainwashed I couldn't hardly believe what I was hearing.
They were specifically asked why there were more suicides among the guilty "goy" ranks of
the "US" genocide force than there were "US" "goys" killed in the ZOG invasion zones over
the month of January? The brainwashed ZOG military commanders had no answer. They only
said "we're working on it" and other Zionist claptrap like that. You never hear them
admit to the truth of the matter. That suicides in the military are the direct result of
the guilt "goys" feel after they realize that they committed murder for the rich jew
bankers. They realized that the blood of their human victims was on their guilty hands.
And the ghosts of their human victims haunted them without end. It was too much guilt
for them to bear. So they did the only honorable thing that a murderer can do, and took
their own life so God could punish them for their crimes against humanity in the horrible
afterlife in Hell. You never hear the brainwashed military commanders admit the truth.
Because they don't even know what the truth is. They don't know they are damned to Hell
when they die. Until their dying day comes to them like a thief in the night.
And the jew demons propped up the African born moolie Barack Jewbama as a sick joke to
rub "kosher" salt into the foolish "goy" wounds. The jews know no limit to the evil they
inflict on the "inferior goyim" world. Christ called the filthy jew demons exactly what
they fucking are! The jews are the sons of the devil. The only good jew is a dead jew.
And any "goy" who serves at the pleasure of the jew demons must die and burn in Hell
also. Guilt does not wash off. That's why so many ZOG military "goys" commit suicide.
The foolish "goys" were taught to be jewish. Taught to steal. Taught to lie. Taught
to be greedy. Taught to stab their "goy" brothers in the back. Taught to commit murder
for fun and profit. Taught to throw their "goy" brothers into ZOG torture chambers they
call "prisons" and "jails." Taught to murder women and children in exchange for gold.
Once the "goy" fools realized what has happened to them, that they had been brainwashed
in the ZOG public schools and by the ZOG media. And by the ZOG military. And by the ZOG
"agencies." Many guilt ridden "goys" react in the only honorable way available to them.
Many of these Zionist employed terrorists commited suicide. And many more have suicidal
tendencies.
Would that all of the Zionist criminals commit suicide. All of their ZOG Army. ZOG
Navy. ZOG Air Force. ZOG Marines. ZOG Coast Guard. ZOG National Guard. ZOG FBI. ZOG
CIA. ZOG IRS. ZOG HLS. ZOG USSS. ZOG NSA. ZOG CFR. ZOG alphabet soup. ZOG NRO.
ZOG judges. ZOG corporate executives. ZOG bankers. ZOG stock brokers. ZOG real estate
agents. ZOG police. Every God damn one of them dead and roasting in the hottest and
darkest and deepest parts of Hell that the guilty dead Zionists go. Good riddance!
If you don't want blood on your hands. Never do business with the ZOG. But always
only oppose them. That's the only way you will ever get into heaven. Zionists and their
supporters go to the other place. The place that nobody, but nobody, ever wants to go.
Aren't you glad that guilty Zionists don't have a choice in the matter? That their guilt
does not wash off? I am very glad about that.
Now, how to wipe Israel off the map. That's what the human race should be focused on.
Death to Ersatz Israel. Death to Zionism. Death and Hell to the Zionists. Let natural
Chaos consume the natural Order everywhere on Earth. Chaos. Death. And Hell.
The Juwes are the men that Will not be Blamed for nothing -W.W. Gull
