Friday, February 27, 2009

The CIA2/MOSSAD Lobby





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

its criminal enterprise, the newfound Siamese twins of CIA2/MOSSAD, and the White House Murder Machinations INC, which is globalized in nature since 1994/95....remember Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and take stock...

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:

In covert wars terms, the White House Murder Machinations Inc, will approach a "Nash equilibrium" this year, as every player in Lebanon and in "Syria of the Mafiosi Assad", accepts and executes CIA's sub-optimal outcome..., with Asef Shawkat still at the helm of the criminal Syrian Military Intelligence thugs in Damascus, in collusion with the weak, "faiblard..." indecisive stooge of CIA2 Michel Suleiman, who was instrumental in hiding, effacing, defacing... and eradicating facts on the ground, with his military intelligence goons of the LAF, during ALL political assassinations in Lebanon since January 24th 2002...despite all the obfuscations of the Media.... because they simply cannot trust anyone else to do better...at executing political assassinations, in order to "trigger monumental events" leading to more fracturing of the whole Middle East, the GCC....Central Asia, and on to Africa soon.... this is the core policy of CIA2/MOSSAD and it will never change under Obama/Clinton or anyone else for that matter....during the next 100 Years of continued militarization of energy security, for the Nexus of evils of the UKUSA alliance...all else is garbled FDDC rhetoric for the gullible...Hence:
The Smoke and Mirrors speaks for Truth for all those who will listen - and, even those who will not... Meanwhile, the Zio-cons rant on and people suffer and die as Rome burns about them...
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 White House, New Zeal on murder, assassinations, destruction, death, agony down into the abyss of the atrocious White House Murder INC,
The right to criticize (and offend) is one held dear and near the heart of every American, just like the first and 14th amendments....

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

HK

HK
RIP

Arithmetics of Disdain,

At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"

It is noteworthy that the State Department's list of global terrorist incidents for 2002 worldwide failed to list the car bombing attack on Hobeika and his party.... But Listed a small Hand Grenade thrown at a U.S. franchise in the middle of the night when the place was closed, empty and no one was hurt? The White House wanted to ensure the terror attack on Mr. Elie Hobeika, and his party of three young men with families, was censored from the report. The reason was simple: this attack ultimately had Washington's and Israel's fingerprints all over it....Given the actual climate of political cacophonies, deceit, deception and intrigue in Lebanon of today, Lebanon of the LIARS of NEOCONVILLE, it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Mr. Elie Hobeika was a visionary Leader and a Hero.Lebanon will probably never know a Leader of this caliber.My dear friend ELIE, you have been reborn on January 24th 2002.Heroes are reborn the day of their Martyrdom .ELIE, you are more alive today, than many living political corpses,walking and talking in Beirut Lebanon every day, until resurrection.At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"- G. Orwell A U.S. intelligence source revealed to me, that in the world of intelligence "carve out" subcontracts such confusion is often the case with "plausible deniability" being a foremost concern in ALL covert operations, especially in Elie Hobeika's case on January 24th 2002, & Hariri's Feb. 14th 2005... Notwithstanding Jacques CHIRAC's gesticulations and false sorrow for the loss of his "friend" Rafic HARIRI, he has been regularly organizing official meetings in Paris for Asef Shawkat with his services to secure SYRIA for and with Assef Shawkat,....


The propensity of governments to create secrets out of the obvious is one of the more tedious aspects of international relations. But this secret is not obvious, and it is not trivial. Though it is true, and I hold the KEY.



Fabrications, LIES , False Flag operations, CIA and MOSSAD.It has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt,that ALL stories which came out immediately after the Assassination of Mr.Elie Hobeika, Fares Sweidan,Dimitri Ajram, and Waleed El-Zein, were completely &utterly FALSE. It was a pure fabrication by the KILLERS;AND the CIA'S Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC),to cover their tracks. Standard operating procedure...101I mean by that, the stories relating to Elie trying to find IMAD Moughnieh, the alleged attempted contacts with CIA, MOSSAD, etc. , the missing Iranian diplomats, the 9 most wanted by CIA, whose names have been circulated then,on purpose by CIA, to 7 ministers in the Lebanese Government, etc. [names which CIA has completely forgotten now,one of them has proven since to be a CIA asset himself...] ALL these were a tortuous web of lies to cover the tracks of the Murderers of CIA, MOSSAD, and their Syro-Lebanese tools.Special ongoing Investigation.Oct. , 2007- On September 15, 2001, just four days after the 9-11 attacks,CIA Director George Tenet provided President [sic] Bush with a Top Secret"Worldwide Attack Matrix"-a virtual license to kill targets deemed to be a threat to the United States in some 80 countries around the world. The Tenet plan, which was subsequently approved by Bush, essentially reversed the executive orders of four previous U.S. administrations that expressly prohibited political assassinations. Mr. Elie Hobeika will be the first target of the US administration, to pave the way for its Iraq Invasion .It planned to directly control the "Energy Basin" and ALL the OIL Transportation routes,from Pipelines to the Maritime avenues and choke points in the Gulf areas, and from central Asia to Mauritania and beyond.But most of all, Mr. Elie Hobeika will be made to pay dearly with his life,for daring to change his politics and views, after experiencing first hand,THE BRUTALITY OF THE ISRAELIS AND THE AMERICANS ,and their CULTURE OF VIOLENCE , Intrigue, murder & very bad Politics.The BUSH+CHENEY Energy MATRIX, coming to a place near you SOON.The awakening is near. It will be like a hurricane passing with untold fury.Mark my Words: .....

http://anaconda-manifesto.blogspot.com/


THE assassination of yet another Lebanese MP — the seventh anti-Syrian figure to be murdered since the slaying of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005 — has brought Lebanon to the brink of a catastrophe. It threatens to be even more devastating than the 1975-90 civil war. The country’s survival as an independent unified state is now at stake. The divide between anti-Syrian and pro-Syrian blocs is now unbridgeable.

As to fears of fresh civil war, it is already a reality. With ministers and pro-government MPs being assassinated, the government even more besieged than the one in Iraq, surviving MPs in hiding, who can talk of political normality? Lebanon is at war with itself. How long before that translates into general armed conflict is anyone’s guess. It would be naive to imagine that Ghanem’s killing will be the last. The anti-Syrian majority in Parliament is now razor-thin. Those behind this and the other killings are obviously determined to bring down the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora by the physical elimination of its parliamentary majority.

There can be no doubt that more assassinations are planned and will be attempted. If that happens and the Lebanese government falls as a result and is replaced by a pro-Syrian government, it will trigger a wave of retaliatory violence — against Hezbollah, against the Shiite community and against pro-Syrian figures. Open warfare waits in the wings.

Syrian protestations that it had nothing to do with Antoine Ghanem’s murder and the others may be true. It is quite possible that the killings are wholly internal, the work of pro-Syrian elements inside Lebanon who want power back. There are certainly some who do not want a new president elected to replace Emile Lahoud. It is even possible that Israelis were behind the killings, intent on destabilization and making Syria appear the villain — possible but unlikely; they have much to lose if a Hezbollah-dominated, pro-Syrian government were installed in Beirut.

The problem is that very few believe Syria’s innocence. They ask the question “who benefits?” and, in the case of each assassination, come up with the same answer: Damascus and its clients in Lebanon. That belief robs Syria of having an acceptable role in Lebanon for a long time to come. The majority of Lebanese want their sovereignty to be absolute; with no interference from anyone — be they Syrian, Israeli, Iranian, American or whatever. That dream, however, is being car-bombed to oblivion....

Forget what you've heard about objectivity. Not even cameras are objective. To nearly everything you analyze (and report on) you bring notions based on - but not limited to - your class, gender, skin color, ethnicity, native language, upbringing, education, religion, culture, playground experiences, political orientation, the influences of people you trust and things about the way our brains work that nobody even knows yet. Like sponges, we absorb stereotypes and clichés about other people's attitudes and behavior which skews our perceptions in ways we don't even realize. So don't fool yourself into believing in objectivity. The best you can achieve is fairness, and that's a tough path to stick to as well.

And then we'd have a talk about the textbook description of objectivity, which is that "every story has two sides," a pernicious dualistic myth that profoundly undermines what is supposed to be a search for truth....



The even greater danger with these dark clouds forming over Lebanon is for the region. With Syria’s links to Iran, Iran’s links to Hezbollah, rising tension over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, there is a chain explosion waiting to happen. An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, an American attack on Iran, a Syrian attack on Israel, more Lebanese assassinations: One could trigger another. The temperature is fast rising on the Middle East’s northern rim — and it is near flash point.

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Petition USA

Dear Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
http://judiciary.senate.gov/ , thanks for your
great work defending the USA Constitution, with
"EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW" ,Separation
between Churches and State and Free Speech,
and my questions are:1) since most likely the Senate

will approve Michael Mukasey as the new A.G.of

the United States, and since as you know,he is an

orthodox Israeli-American and with dual citizenship,
American and Israeli,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_B._Mukasey
http://phillyfreedom.blogspot.com/ , NYT Sept.
18.07 "Washington outsider with many sides"
http://voxpopnet.net/
for info on Mukasey as Judge of the WTC-
Insurance 9/11 case , will he respect other
religions exactly thesame as his?2) since he is an

ordained rabbi within his orthodox community,will his partners get treatment better or different in any way
from the one you or I or anybody else would get from

him in the United States of America?

3) what happens to all the Security Contracts
and Military deals he and his son Marc are
doing with the Companies and Interests of
Giuliani Partners and other associates ?

4) what happens with all the deals they
worked on in his son's law firm,
Bracewell&Giuliani?since Bracewell&Giuliani has

offices in the South Asia, like in Kazakhstan,a big

oil supplier ruled by an extreme undemocratic leader,
Nazarbayev, will the Mukasey's and Giuliani's
get special deals? with no supervision? political
donations? will the actual law firm of Mukasey
get special deals too? will anybody ask ? or will
they just say yes :blindly?

5) Michael Mukasey

and his son Marc are strong AIPAC supporters ,

but will anyone in the Senate ask anything about their relationship to these political-military-religious-financial
and foreign groups? we know that no one
will,but is that right? isn't special treatment?
the A.G.?

6) Chairman,this powerful military-religious-
financial group , of which Michael Mukasey is
a leader, will have unprecedented influence in
the Justice Dpt. ,White House and Congress,
not to mention over the average taxpayer,
and since many members of the orthodox
community to which he belongs are diamond,
gold,jewelry,insurance ,real estate and tobacco
dealers and wholesalers while claiming Tax
Exemption due to religious condition,will his
appointment stop all the Investigations of the
IRS and Justice Dpt.as well as Commerce,etc.?
and back taxes?
do average Americans have a guarantee of
equal treatment?
when we start getting prosecuted for asking
questions,what recourse do we have ? any ?
and since orthodox Mukasey will most likely
install many members of his organized religious
group into office,will we be forced to request
help from the same community like his with
the special privilege?7) Judge Mukasey was in

charge of the 9/11/01 Trial case between the

leaseholders of the WTC,SIlverstein-Goldman-

Pacific-etc., and the 23 Insurance Companies these

new leaseholders called just days before 9/11 to
open dozens of policies over everything in
the Towers, services,leases,businesses,contracts,
profits,hardware,you name it,their premiums
were millions of dollars a week, didn't make
any business sense,unless they knew what was
going to happen a few days later ,and
everybody in N.Y. and around the world
was waiting for answers from the Trial ,
and then Judge Mukasey put a lid on the
Trial and no news came out, NOTHING !!!!
and everybody asked why ?, if it is a patriotic
case,why no news at all ?why the secrecy ?
why Judge Mukesay didn't want anybody in
America to know everything about Silverstein
and his dozens of policies? , then we also found
out that then N.Y.State A.G. Eliot Spitzer
wrote a Friend of the Court brief supporting
Silverstein,the AG siding with one of the
parties!, and the Judge and Spitzer started to
push the Insurance Companies to settle for 2
events,a total of 7 billion dollars to Silverstein
and his partners, many of the Insurance
Companies refused because they knew
something was not right and eventually they
settled on 4.6 billion dollars for Silverstein ,
but we still never got any details in any
newspaper ,radio or TV,NOTHING ! I WOULD
LIKE TO ASK JUDGE MUKASEY WHY ? ,
but we do know that no one will ask him
anything in D.C., he and his Orthodox
Congregation partners rule,after all they all
go to Israel together and share Religious
Ceremonies with Kissinger, Chertoff,
Bloomberg ,Silverstein,etc., and yet we hear
S. Schumer and other neocons saying to the
media that they want to learn more from
the man !8) Chairman,this new A.G. will have
unprecedented influence over President Bush
and VP Cheney,since he is the only one that
can prosecute the 2,is it wise to have a
member of a foreign religious-political group
having so much power over the President and
the Vice-President of the United States of
America ? safe ? smart? patriotic?We know that MR..Mukasey was selected by
Joshua Bolten and approved by Senator
Schumer and others,so since "they" run
Washington,it's a done deal ,hearing Senator
Schumer telling the Media how wonderful
Mukasey is and that his nomination cuts
down on pressure on the White House, do
they extorted a deal from the President:
Our orthodox candidate and we stop asking
for White House U.S. Attorney papers and
information?is that why Bush looks so depressed?

is that how Schumer,Bolton, Emanuel,Specter,
Lieberman and Bloomberg are going to run
this country?
because clearly with Mukasey as A.G.,they
run this country lock,stock and barrel,it's
that how our Constitutional Rights end ?
Extortion of the President of the United
States?,
hearing Schumer and Specter, it's clear that it
was all about getting the Christians out of the
Justice Dpt. and installing the neocon orthodox
in, is that how they do it ?A partner of Mukasey

as adviser to Giuliani , the neocon Pedhoretz,

has repeatedly pushed with Pr.Bush to bomb Iran,

to attack, and since Sen. Lieberman and Sen. Kyl

are pushing to brand Iran's Military a terrorist

Organization, is this the beginning of a concerted

effort to push for war? it's important to remember
all this , because in 2002 and 2003 all these
neocons with Sen.Schumer,S.Coleman,
Sen.Boxer,R.Emanuel,Kristol,Safire, Wolfowitz,
Perle,Feith,Kagan,Abrams,Fleischer,Edelman,
Whitman, Kaplan,Kellner,Gutman,Berman,
Sulzberger,Murdoch,Karmazin, ex-sec.Cohen,
Gorelick,Chertoff,Wainstein,Kissinger,etc.,
were pushing for war every day on the media
and yet now they are attacking anyone that
mentions it, they are warning elected officials
like R.Moran that to mention these facts is
anti-this and anti-that and "watch it ", they
are bullying any one that mentions what happen
before the USA went to Iraq,and worst: they
insist now on their media that only Bush-
Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld are responsible , that
no one else pushed for this war:

THEY ARE RE-WRITING HISTORY!!! and
it looks like its not the first time, it sounds
like they always pull the same trick: they push
for war,financed with their Hedge Funds and
then with the media they erase any links to
themselves, this is criminal; to push for war
and then to hide and blamethe Christians
only,that's evil and SHOWS LOTS OF
WEAKNESS ON THE PART OF THE USA,
THIS IS A DISASTER FOR THIS GREAT
COUNTRY! to confirm an organized
religious-political-military from a foreign sect
and laws to Attorney General is
un-Constitutional,illegal, un-American and
goes against the core of the USA values,
thousands died to defend the USA
Constitution from foreign religions, how can
the Senate now approve a religious leader ?
will they even ask this question? will they
commit High Treason ?when you look at these

incompetent and criminal decisions against the

Rule of Law and the Declaration of Independence,
how can Taxpayers petition the Government
for any rights?Thanks for your great work defending
America from foreign and domestic enemies,
in my humble opinion, this situation
looks to me like occupation and foreign control,
and to you ?America knows that George Washington,

Lincoln and all the Founding Fathers would be proud of
your defense of the USA Constitution against
High Treason and High Crimes,

thanks.

US Citizens

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NO COMMENT ....... "For Now..."


Saakashvili Ordered me to Get Rid of Patarkatsishvili’ – Okruashvili


Ex-Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili has made yet another startling allegation against his former ally, President Saakashvili. The president, he said, had personally ordered him to liquidate Badri Patarkatsishvili, a business tycoon.
Speaking live on Imedi TV’s talk show On the Air late on September 25, Okruashvili said: “Saakashvili told me that we should get rid of him [Patarkatsishvili], in the same way as happened to Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, who was killed in a car bomb attack.”
“In July 2005,” Okruashvili said, “Saakashvili asked me: what did I think about getting rid of one person… - Badri Patarkatsishvili? And then he [Saakashvili] outlined a very detailed plan on how to get rid of him.”
Okruashvili continued: “It was absolutely clear to me that it was a trap for me as well, because they would have gotten rid of me as well after getting rid of Patarkatsishvili.”
He said in response he told Saakashvili that he needed time to think about it.
“Meanwhile, I met with one person who at that time was working with the Americans and told him about the president’s proposal,” Okruashvili said. “I did it in the hope that the information would have been passed on to the Americans… It was Zaza Gogava [now Chief-of-Staff of the Georgian armed forces] However it did not work. Because after a month Saakashvili again repeated his demand about getting rid of Patarkatsishvili.”
“Then I met with another person in Turkey, whose identity I can not reveal. He also has close links with the Americans. He's not a Georgian citizen. I told him about Saakashvili’s plan. This information, it seemed, was delivered to the Americans, because since then Saakashvili never talked with me about getting rid of Patarkatsishvili.”President Saakashvili, who is currently in New York for the UN General Assembly Session, has yet to comment on his former ally’s allegations.

more:






Irakli Okruashvili, ex-defense minister and once President Saakashvili’s closest ally, has accused the president of engaing in “anti-state steps” and “ordering murders.”
In his first public statement since he quit the government last November, Okruashvili also finally announced the launch of his political party – Movement for United Georgia. He refused to take question after his ten-minute speech, but said he planned to give further details and “answer all questions” during a TV appearance planned for later on Tuesday.
“I will definitely speak more on these crimes, which were masterminded by the authorities,” he said. Okruashvili added: “I was ordered by Saakashvili several times to liquidate certain influential and important people, which I refused to do.” He gave no further details.
There has been considerable speculation that “a war of compromising materials” would precede Okruashvili’s political comeback and the unveiling of his new opposition party.
Okruashvili said at the news conference in his party's headquarters in downtown Tbilisi that “fascist trends” and “anti-state steps undertaken by the authorities” had convinced him and his co-thinkers to set up the new movement. He also suggested that it hadn't been easy to launch the party.
People, he said, “are terrorized” because of “repression.” “Those with dissenting opinions are deemed ‘enemies of the state’ and the government is refusing to hold a dialogue with them,” he said.
This, he said, had made it difficult to convince people to engage in public life.
Okruashvili said that the anti-corruption campaign was “unreal.” The prisons, he said, were full of petty criminals, while corruption continued to thrive among “top level officials, Saakashvili’s inner circle and his family.”
“Three years ago when I was Interior Minister,” Okruashvili said, “I arrested Temur Alasania, the president’s uncle, for extortion of USD 200,000. I, however, had to release him on the president’s insistence.”
He also accused the authorities, and personally Saakashvili, of, as he put it, “a deliberate anti-Orthodox Church campaign” and “of fighting against Georgian traditions and values.”
“Saakashvili has an inner hatred of the Georgian Orthodox Church,” Okruashvili said. “The Georgian church is the most respected institution in Georgia. [Because of this] he [Saakashvili] perceives the Church as his main competitor. While in his inner circle, I often heard him talking about splitting the Church and discrediting the clergy.”
He also said that there was “a clear attempt” by the Saakashvili administration “to re-write Georgia’s history, as if nothing Georgian existed before the Rose Revolution, and everything new is being created by Saakashvili.”
Okruashvili also made an obvious attempt to appeal to other walks of life by saying that the older generation, those over 50, had been “neglected and humiliated.”
Internally displaced persons from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he said, “were not regarded as human beings during ex-President Shevardnadze’s regime and this trend has continued in the Saakashvili regime as well.”
He also criticized the authorities’ policies towards the secessionist regions.
“We were one step away from reclaiming one of our lost territories,” Okruashvili said, apparently referring to South Ossetia.
Several months before his resignation from the cabinet, Okruashvili said that he had planned to celebrate the 2007 New Year in Tskhinvali, the capital of breakaway South Ossetia. Commentators said that Saakashvili’s decision to move Okruashvili last November from the Defense Ministry to the Ministry of Economy was largely because of Okruashvili’s perceived hawkish stance on South Ossetia.
In his speech on September 25, Okruashvili said that “only Saakashvili’s weakness, inability and fear” had foiled plans to reclaim the secessionist region. He also said Saakashvili was too weak to take an unspecified “historic decision.”
He also criticized Tbilisi’s decision to create the provisional South Ossetia administration, led by Dimitri Sanakoev. Okruashvili said Sanakoev had no respect and authority among the population of the region. He also said that installing Sanakoev was “an imaginary attempt” to unite the country.
Okruashvili explained his decision to “quietly” quit the government without voicing his discontent was because of, as he put it, his sense of “civil responsibility.”
“Army officers, who are still my friends, asked me to do it quietly,” he said and added that by doing so he had denied the country’s enemies an opportunity to speculate on a split within the government.
Okruashvili admitted that he shared “the responsibility for some mistakes because I was also once part of this government.”
“I, however, have done nothing but good for my country when in government,” he added. “So any attempt to discredit me will fail.”
Towards the end of his speech, he implied that he might have presidential ambitions.
“Georgia will be united only if it has a president who doesn't humiliate and insult its own people,” Okruashvili said.
Throughout his speech, Okruashvili's fellow party members stood beside him. They include: lawmakers Tea Tlashadze, Ketevan Makharashvili, Koka Guntsadze, Gia Tortladze and Gia Tsagareishvili; former Deputy Defense Minister Levan Nikolaishvili and a lawyer, Eka Beselia.
Two former journalists from Rustavi 2 TV station, Nana Lezhava and Natia Lazashvili, were also there. Both quit the TV station shortly after Rustavi 2 changed hands last November following Okruashvili’s resignation.