Re: U.K. Jews worried by 'Jewish conspiracy' claims....
On Dec 10, 1:37 pm, NOMOREWARFORISRAEL
wrote:
> U.K. Jews worried by 'Jewish conspiracy' claims....
>
> http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=82450
----------------------------------------------------------------------------ISRAEL AND TOP ZIONIST LEADERS ATTACK INTELLIGENCE
James Petras
December 8, 2007
"The most important thing (sic) that should be said about Bush is that
had I told him that I was opposed to this move (Annapolis meeting), he
wouldn't have embarked on it. I could have blocked the move. Had I
been unwilling to co-operate with him, Bush wouldn't have coerced
me....I spoke to the President with unparalleled sharpness about these
matters (bombing Iran's nuclear facilities) and my comments were
extremely well received - regarding the freedom (to bomb Iran) we are
reserving for ourselves and what we will and won't do.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Haaretz November 29, 2007.
Introduction
During and immediately after the Annapolis meetings to discuss peace,
Israel abducted the student president of Beir Zeit University for
dissent, launched over 50 attacks on Gaza killing and wounding over 50
Palestinian civilians, police and militia, set in motion a vast
building project of 250 new apartments in Palestinian East Jerusalem,
projected permanent Israeli military posts in the West Bank, rejected
any time limits or specific goals in their negotiations with the PLO
and launched a virulent dismissal of the major US intelligence report
(National Intelligence Estimate) on the non-existence of an Iranian
nuclear weapons program.
Israel's presence at Annapolis had absolutely nothing to do with peace
or promises to negotiate in good faith: Their purpose was to deflect
attention from their meat-grinder style genocidal policies in Gaza and
their relentless drive to savagely dispossess all Palestinians of any
territory or semblance of autonomy, literally turning off the lights
(energy), gas and water to 1.4 million Palestinians residing in Gaza.
Since September 11, 2001 the Israeli state, Zionists inside the US
government and the entire leadership of the Major American Jewish
Organizations have been entirely devoted to pushing the US into Middle
East wars on behalf of Israel. In the run-up to the Iraq War, Zionists
in top strategic decision-making positions in the Pentagon, the Vice
President's Office, the White House and the National Security Council
designed and executed war policy, fabricated evidence, wrote
Presidential speeches, organized press conferences and presidential
agendas, purged critics in the military and intelligence agencies and
altered intelligence reports to suit their purposes.
Israeli and Zion-Con success in destroying Iraq however was secured at
an enormous cost in US military casualties, demoralization and one
trillion dollars (and counting) in cost to the US taxpayers. As a
result, public opinion dramatically shifted against the war, despite
the intervention of the Israeli regime in shaping US public opinion
via its army of 'Israel-First' academic and journalistic scribes and
propagandists with broad access to the US mass media.
As I pointed out in an earlier article, the devastating effects, which
the Israeli-Zioncon-promoted Iraq War has had on the US military, and
intelligence agencies, led to widespread opposition within the US
state to the Israeli-Zionist push for mounting a new war against Iran.
This historic struggle over Iran policy split the top echelons of the
Washington policy making. On the one hand, the Israeli Firsters
controlled or influenced the White House, the majority of Congress and
key Congressional committee chairpersons, the financing of both major
political parties, the leading presidential candidates and the bulk of
the mass media. The opposition was led by senior active and retired
military officers, backed by the great majority of middle level
officers and ground troops, especially the reserves. The entire range
of top intelligence officials were disgusted by the 'Israel Firsters'
in the Pentagon because of their distortion of their previous reports
and fabrication of 'intelligence' via newly invented agencies and
their reliance on Israeli disinformation over US intelligence.
This monumental struggle within the government was not merely about US
military policy toward Iran (which is crucial) but also about who
rules the US, who commands the US military and who formulates
intelligence reports that inform policy, and more basically whose
interests are being served. The military command in the Middle East,
led by Admiral William Fallon, came out publicly opposing the Israeli-
Fifth Column policy to bomb Iran. The active commanders were meekly
backed by the rubber-spined Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, and
surreptitiously (at first) by the top intelligence chiefs. The Zion-
Cons retaliated by launching the White House and Congress in a crusade
to escalate economic sanctions and to 'keep the military option' on
the table. Every major Israel-First academic and propaganda think tank
followed up the Israeli war planning with a wave of op-ed articles and
interviews throughout the mass media about Iran's immediate nuclear
threat. The President, who does nothing contrary to Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert (as trumpeted by Olmert himself), pronounced an
apocalyptic message to the world in October 2007 (six weeks before the
National Intelligence Estimate was finally released) proclaiming the
advent of 'World War Three' against Iran's nuclear weapons program and
the threat of a nuclear attack (a 'holocaust') by Iran against the
people of the US and Israel.
The White House was privy to the findings in the National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) on Iran at least 9 months before they were made public,
as witnessed by President Cheney's frequent interventions to alter
their content and conclusion and repeated efforts to postpone their
publication because it undermined the basis for their push to attack
Iran. The Israeli government and its US Fifth Column, well aware of
the forthcoming publication of the findings of sixteen top US
intelligence agencies, did everything in their power to precipitate a
US war with Iran, from issuing hair-raising tales of the 'existential
threats to Israel's survival' to encouraging, rousing bellicose
speeches by AIPAC, Zionist and Jewish community leaders. Israel went
to war with Iran's ally (Hezbollah) in Lebanon, bombed Syria which has
a mutual security pact with Iran, escalated Israeli-trained Kurdish
terrorist attacks across the Iranian border in order to provoke
Iranian retaliation - to no avail. AIPAC and its Congressional allies
led by Israeli-US Senator Lieberman pulled all stops to force a
conflict, increasing sanctions against bankers and corporations
dealing with Iran and even labeling the Iranian military special
force, the 'Republican Guards' as an illegal 'terrorist organization'
and thus an automatic target of US military attacks under the doctrine
of the 'War against Terror'. The hyper-activity, the vicious military
attacks, the strident rhetoric against all critics of the military
option, and the urgency, with which the Israelis and their US
supporters acted, was not due to any imminent Iranian nuclear threat
but a desperate effort to precipitate the war before the US NIE became
public and undermined their entire war propaganda campaign and
military preparations for an attack.
The NIE findings temporarilyclosed the book on the White House-Israeli-
Zionist Big Lie that Iran was engaged in developing weapons to launch
a nuclear war. The NIE report refuted its own previous conclusions of
2005, which were heavily influenced by the White House and its Zionist-
Israeli backers. The reversal of conclusions was not based on 'new
data' or information techniques as is claimed. The change resulted
from a dramatic shift in the balance of forces within the US
government and in particular the strengthening of the US military
elite versus the pro-war Zionist Power Configuration, a shift shaped
by the enormous and unending American losses in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A key factor in pushing the US intelligence agencies to break with
their past subjugation to White House manipulation and Israeli-Zionist
fabricated intelligence was the repeated failures and incredible
stupidity of the Israeli intelligence agencies - leading to a loss of
their credibility. Israeli intelligence blundered and miscalculated on
Hezbollah's strength and organization which led to a debacle when
Israel invaded Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israeli estimates on
Iraqi capacity to resist invasion and foreign occupation (so eagerly
accepted and propagated by top Zionist Pentagon officials in the lead
up to the invasion) led to the now 6 years of a US war of attrition in
Iraq with no end in sight. Israel's intelligence totally
underestimated Hamas' electoral strength in the run-up to their
electoral victory over the PLO. Israeli intelligence overestimated the
PLO's military capacity to defeat and destroy Hamas in Gaza. Israel's
claim to have detected a nuclear facility in Syria, which it bombed,
was an international joke - as even Moses could not have destroyed a
(fictional) nuclear facility without producing a speck of radioactive
dust! Learning from Israeli intelligence agencies' tendency to feed
disinformation to its clients in the US Government in order to further
Greater Israel's claims to Mid-East hegemony at the expense of
Washington's long term interests, the US national intelligence
community asserted its independence and published its report denying
each and every Israeli-Zionist-White House assertion concerning Iran's
nuclear weapons program and, in particular, pointing to the end of
research into nuclear weapons as far back as the fall of 2003.
Israel Rejects the US NIE
While governments, the United Nations and experts around the world
recognized the rigorous, systematic, comprehensive methods used to
compile the data leading to the report declaring that Iran was free of
nuclear weapons programs, one and only one state objected: The Jewish
State of Israel. And in the USA only one nationwide configuration of
organizations refused to reconcile itself to the absence of any
Iranian military threat to Israel (not to speak of the US, a distant
secondary consideration) and that was predictably the Zionist Power
Configuration, specifically the Presidents of the Major American
Jewish Organizations.
Speaking for the Israeli Government, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, with
the predictable arrogance and contempt that Israeli officials treat
any US policy analysis or statement that doesn't pass their editorial
approval and toe their line, dismissed the NIE: 'We cannot allow
ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the
other side of the earth (sic) even from our greatest friend'.
(Guardian of London, December 4, 2007). Though the NIE may weaken the
White House drive to war, the fact that Israel rejects the report
means that its war preparations will continue and that means that its
entire Zionist Power Configuration in the US will continue to pursue
Israel's interest in destroying Iran.
Following Orwellian logic AIPAC twisted the NIE report to fit Israel's
rejectionist lead (as it never fails to do) by arguing that the NIE
report bolsters the case for continued confrontation, belligerency and
isolation (Jewish Telegraph Agency, December 4, 2007). In fact
according to the perverse argument of AIPAC spokesman Josh Block, the
absence of any Iranian nuclear weapons threat should result in greater
pressure on Iran! 'All in all, it's (the NIE) a clarion call for
additional and continued (my emphasis) effort to pressure Iran
economically and politically to end its illicit nuclear
program.'(Jewish Telegraph Agency, December 4, 2007).
Once again the Israel Firsters - embracing all the major Zionist
organizations and community councils - defy all logic, and the most
comprehensive and in depth empirical intelligence report of the US in
favor of the propaganda emanating from the failed Israeli intelligence
agencies and the Israeli regime. In a continuous barrage of articles
and television interviews, the entire Zionist Power Configuration
(ZPC) buried the NIE report, refocusing attention on themes like
'Iran's nuclear program still a threat' (Daily Alert, December 7,
2007). During the entire week (December 3-7, 2007) the Presidents of
the Major American (sic) Jewish Organizations - covering the entire
range of financially powerful Jewish organizations in the USA -
published an average of nine articles (nearly 50) propagating the
Israeli line. The articles disparaged, distorted and dismissed the NIE
and continued to push for the 'military option' (euphemism for
launching a massive attack on Iran) as well as new economic sanctions
to destroy the Iranian economy and the livelihood of its 70 million
citizens. The euphoria of anti-war critics who claim the NIE report
laid to rest the threat of a new US war with Iran is premature, as is
their idea that the 'Israel Lobby' was dealt a decisive blow. The ZPC
never lost a beat: Israel Firster and Zion-Con fanatic, US Treasury
Undersecretary, responsible for terrorism and financial intelligence,
Stuart Levey, succeeded in convincing China to tighten trade credit,
making trade more difficult and costly for Iran's private sector.
(Financial Times, December 6, 2007, p. 1).
Internationally, the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary David Millband
- a long-time supporter of Israel with close family ties to the
Zionist state - predictably followed the Bush-Israel-ZPC line in all
but dismissing the NIE report and emphasizing the need to 'keep the
pressure on Iran'. Millband, who on his recent visit to Israel,
refused to even pass a glance at Israel's shutdown of electricity and
fuel to the 1.4 million Palestinians caged up in Gaza, spent an entire
evening exchanging pleasantries with his settler relatives in Tel
Aviv. He accused the non-nuclear Iran of being a major threat to the
international community because it produces what he called 'fissile
material' and 'missiles'. Every large and medium size country in the
world produces enriched uranium and possesses missiles; to impose a
sinister construction on Iran's civilian and defense projects is
laughable. (Financial Times, December 6, 2007) Millband dismisses out
of hand their civilian application and parrots word for word his
Israeli mentors' line about 'hidden programs' and other such
unsubstantiated Zionist propaganda. Recent revelations of large-scale,
long-term Zionist financing of the highly indebted Labor Party's
electoral campaigns by millionaire moguls and self-proclaimed 'Labor
Friends of Israel' (Independent, December 6 2007) suggests that
Millband's rapid rise to head the Foreign Ministry had less to do with
his minimal international affairs experience and more to do with the
'special relations' between millionaire Zionist fundraisers and past
and present Labor Party leaders, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
In France President Sarkozy appointed Zionist zealot Bernard Kouchner,
(a fervent supporter of humanitarian intervention including the US
invasion of Iraq), to head the Foreign Ministry after 'consultations'
with leading French Jewish organizations, which had rejected an
earlier candidate, deemed not pro-Israel enough. Bernie Kouchner and
Nicky Sarkozy immediately picked up the Israeli line, dismissing the
NIE Report and calling for new economic sanctions even as the original
justification (Iran's so-called nuclear weapons program) was found to
be a lie. Nicky and Bernie called for a new UN National Security
Council resolution adding greater sanctions against Iran (AFP,
December 7, 2007). The Bush-Millband-Kouchner-Israeli logic parallels
Stalinist-Nazi logic -- the more the intelligence reports demonstrate
the absence of a nuclear weapons program, the greater the nuclear
threat; the lesser the present threat, the greater the future threat;
the lesser the empirically verifiable threat, the greater the secret
threat. The NIE report made liars of the White House and Congressional
Democrats and the Presidents of the Major American Jewish
Organizations who 'knew' Iran had a nuclear weapons program. Even more
revealingly, it demonstrates that for the same war mongers, Iranian
nuclear weapons is not the motivating force for their drive to attack
Iran. Leaving out the weapons motive, it is abundantly clear that
attacking Iran through sanctions and military threats is deeply rooted
in the Israeli priority of destroying Iran as an adversary to its
Middle East power grab and its assault and territorial dispossession
of Palestinians.
The ZPC, Millband, Kouchner, Olmert, and the White Houses' efforts to
push for a third round of UN sanctions is likely to be rejected. On
December 4, China's UN Ambassador, Wang Guangya, announced that the
NIE report called into question the need for new sanctions, 'I think
we all start from the presumption that now things have changed. I
think council members will have to consider that.' (Al Jazeera,
December 5, 2007). China, with $17 billion dollars in direct trade
with Iran and up to $30 billion via Dubai, and with Iran as a major
Middle East oil supplier and with no Zionist lobby to reinforce
Israeli diplomatic pressures, is free to pursue its own national
interests. The case can be made that Russia, under President Vladimir
Putin, will follow China's lead and object to new sanctions.
Nevertheless, the US Congress and in particular its influential
Committee chairpersons continue to blindly follow Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert's pronouncement post-NIE: 'It is vital to pursue
efforts to prevent Iran from developing a capability like this (sic)
in the United States'. Leading Congressional Israeli-American zealot,
Thomas Lantos, convoked a congressional hearing on the NIE Report and
invited two top ex-government advisers and ultra-Zion zealots, David
Wurmser and Martin Indyk to testify.
Conclusion
There is no question that the anti-(Iran) war groups in the US
military and intelligence agencies struck a serious blow to the
ongoing war plans of the White House, Israel and their agents in the
ZPC. The setback includes a temporary defeat of its massive war
propaganda and their fabrication of an 'existential threat' to the
world community (Israel)'. Nevertheless the publication of the NIE hit
the headlines for only a few days, followed by a barrage of hostile
propaganda in all of the US mass media which called into question the
peaceful intentions of Iran and even twisted certain probabilistic
phrases to contradict the main findings.
From the vantage point of Americans trying to free their government
and the American public of Israeli and ZPC tyrannical monopoly of
opinion, the NIE Report struck a blow against the credibility of the
White House and Zionist spokespeople in the Congress, National
Security Council, Homeland Security and the Justice and Treasury
Departments regarding Iran's so-called nuclear weapons program. But
the quickness, depth and scope of the Israeli response especially
magnified by its representatives in the US, the French and British
foreign offices, demonstrates that the pro-war Israel Firsters are
still deeply embedded in positions of political power and willing to
defy the US intelligence and military establishment. Without shame or
substance, with aggressive outbursts and manipulative semantical
skills, the ZPC moves forward toward new sanctions, despite the
systematic empirical refutation of its principle argument. Only a
blind, irrational tribal-ethnic loyalty to Israel can account for the
ready denial of the NIE report and automatic embrace of Israel's
continued fabrications. As in the thirties when overseas Nazi
sympathizers defended Hitler's' lies about Communists torching the
Reichstag and Communist fellow travelers defended Stalin's purges as
exemplary judicial processes, our Zionists continue to deny every
systematic empirical report (like the NIE) which contradicts Israel's
lies and fabrications about Iran's nuclear weapons programs.
Beyond the important issue of dual loyalties (very much in evidence in
the ZPC's response to the NIE report) there is the re-emergence of the
question of a US-backed Israeli war with Iran. The military option
will be buttressed by an Israeli military intelligence propaganda
report dismissing the NIE. It will claim secret Iranian nuclear
weapons programs buried somewhere near the center of the earth and
therefore undetected by US intelligence informants, satellite photos,
UN inspectors, defecting (or kidnapped) Iranian Generals or any other
US source. Only Israel's superior intelligence agencies (which failed
in Lebanon, Iraq and the Gaza Strip), based on its Chosen People (with
their unassailable intelligence hot-line to the 'Omniscient One' - the
same 'One' who does the 'Choosing') can be right - even if they have
to once again 'cook the data' to make the case to the uninitiated.
The NIE and the US Military have struck a blow against the planners of
World War III. Will this lift the US Congress off its collective knees
to finally address US interests in the Middle East? Will it re-awaken
a currently moribund peace movement, terrified to confront the most
virulent organized warmongers? Will it allow Congress and the US
public to challenge the ZPC's stranglehold on US-Middle East policy?
Will the British public and peace movement dare to challenge a Labor
Government and Foreign Office bought and paid for by the 'Labor
Friends of Israel'? Will the French public and intellectuals of Paris
recover their republican credentials and reject its first and foremost
Israel First regime?
Two weeks after the Annapolis Meeting, Israeli Housing Minister Zeev
Boim gave US Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice the 'bristly
cucumber' (a Mediterranean style 'slap in the face') when she pleaded
with the Jewish state to stop building new settlements in Palestinian
East Jerusalem because, 'it doesn't help to build confidence'. Boim
went on to say, 'Secretary of State Rice should be congratulated for
her efforts in re-launching the peace process (sic)...but this cannot be
constantly linked to the cessation of construction in Jerusalem...There
is thus nothing to prevent construction anywhere else in Israel.' (Al
Jazeera, December 8, 2007).
Just as the Jewish state can dismiss its vague promises to the Bush
regime on the so-called 'peace process' in short order, so does Israel
reject the NIE report on the absence of a nuclear weapon program in
Iran and prepare for war - backed by the entire ZPC.
Surprisingly it is not liberal or leftist opinion leaders who have
raised the relevant issues pertaining to the questions of war and
peace in the Middle East, the Israeli-White House threats of starting
World War III. It is the spy agencies in the US and their allies in
the US military, the paragons of past wars and present destabilization
campaigns (read - Venezuela). It is an irony of history. But just the
same, this is the real world in which we live, where Western
intellectuals and cultural heroes have abdicated their responsibility
to challenge the Zionist Power Configuration operating on behalf of an
aspiring Middle East colonial power.
James Petras 'latest books are The Power of Israel in the United
States(Clarity Press 2006) and Rulers and Ruled in the US
Empire:Bankers ,Zionists and Militants(Clarity Press 2007)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------Date: Mon, 03 Dec 2007 20:31:11 -0800
From: "Jeff Blankfort"
Subject: American Conservative: The Lobby Strikes Back
"By the end of October, two months after The Israel Lobby appeared in
stores, there had not been a single positive review in the mass-market
media. For a long time it seemed that no editor dared trust the
subject to a gentile, causing blogger Philip Weiss to ask cheekily,
"Do the goyim get to register an Opinion Re Walt/Mearsheimer?" By
then, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Sun, and
The New Republic between them must have printed 25 attacks on Walt and
Mearsheimer, virtually all of them designed to portray the authors as
beyond the pale of rational discourse....
This is a thoughtful review from the American Conservative which is
far better than anything I have seen in the traditional ideologically
oriented "Left" journals, another example of how the Left keeps its
eyes shut and its mouth closed when the lobby's puppets genuflect to
Israel as if that is part of the natural order of things. As the
article points out, just like the by-lines of non-Jews can almost
never be found on stories regarding Israel, and just like every
ambassador to Israel has to be Jewish, any gentile that has the
temerity to criticize Israel publicly will quickly find herself or
himself branded as an "anti-semite" or considered as such by those
"pwogwessive" Jews who act as if they are the only ones (apart from
Palestinian Arabs who don't have the same access to the general
public) with the right to criticize Israeli policies towards the
Palestinians. Hence, we have Jews-only demonstrations of which gentile
supporters are not informed and to which they are not invited.
Someone, after all, might just show up with a sign that reads "Zionism
= Racism."
This sentence alone, further down in the article, is a real winner.
Discussing the neocons, McConnell writes: "But in view of their
convictions and pivotal positions inside the executive branch and
ability to shape policy at the very top, to say that neoconservatives
"overlap" with the Israel lobby hardly does them justice: the faction
might more properly be described as, to borrow the well-known phrase,
the highest stage of the Israel lobby."
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_12_03/cover.html
December 3, 2007 Issue
The Lobby Strikes Back
A new book riles the AIPAC crowd, but makes it to the bestseller list
anyway.
by Scott McConnell
One prism through which to gauge the impact of John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt's The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy is a
September incident involving Barack Obama. His campaign had placed
small ads in various spots around the Internet, designed to drive
readers to its website. One turned up on Amazon's page for the Walt
and Mearsheimer book. A vigilant watchdog at the New York Sun spotted
it and contacted the campaign: Did Obama support Walt and
Mearsheimer?
The answer came within hours. The ad was withdrawn. Its placement was
"unintentional." The senator, his campaign made clear, understood that
key arguments of the book were "wrong," but had definitely not read
the work himself. In short, Walt and Mearsheimer had reached a
pinnacle of notoriety.
Though The Israel Lobby was on the way to best-sellerdom and has
become perhaps the most discussed policy book of the year, the
presidential candidate touted as the most fresh-thinking and
intellectually curious in the race hastened to make clear he had not
been corrupted by the toxic text.
The episode illustrates one of the book's central arguments: the
Israel lobby is powerful, and American politicians fear its wrath. Any
Democrat running for president--drawing on a donor stream that is
heavily Jewish, very interested in Israel, and perceived as hawkish--
would have reacted as Obama did.
In their book's introduction, Walt and Mearsheimer summarize the
consequences of this power. In an election year, American politicians
will differ radically on domestic issues, social issues, immigration,
China, Darfur, and virtually any other topic. But all will "go to
considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one
foreign country--Israel--as well as their determination to maintain
unyielding support for the Jewish state." The authors find this
remarkable and deserving of analysis, which they provided first in a
paper, posted last year on Harvard's Kennedy School website and
published in the London Review of Books, and now expanded into a
book.
This is not the first time a prominent American has taken on the
subject. George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Johnson and
Kennedy administrations and the government official most prescient
about Vietnam, a bona fide member of the Wall Street and Washington
establishments, called for the recalibration of America's Israel
policy in a much noted Foreign Affairs essay in 1977, and at the end
of his life co-authored a book on the subject with his son. Eleven-
term congressman Paul Findley, defeated after a former AIPAC president
called him "a dangerous enemy of Israel," wrote a book that became a
bestseller, and there are others.
But no one with the combined skills and eminence of Walt and
Mearsheimer has before addressed the subject systematically. These two
are mandarins of American academia, having reached the top of a field
that attracts smart people. They have tenure, job security, and
professional autonomy most journalists lack. They have the
institutional prestige of Harvard and the University of Chicago behind
them. Most importantly, they bring first-rate skills of research,
synthesis, and argument to their task.
One might wish that their book had been different in some ways--more
literary, more discursive, more precise in some of its definitions,
deeper in some areas, more (my favorite, from blogger Tony Karon)
"dialectical." But The Israel Lobby is an extraordinary
accomplishment, completed with great speed--a dense, factually based
brief of an argument that is often made but rarely made well.
In public appearances discussing their book, Walt and Mearsheimer are
tremendously effective: measured, facts at their fingertips, speaking
with the fluency of men accustomed to addressing demanding audiences.
Most of all, while treating a subject where hyperbole is common, they
are moderate. They are respectful of Israel, admiring of its
accomplishments, and extremely aware that criticism of Israel or the
Israel lobby can turn ugly and demagogic. As might be expected of top
scholars in America, they are fully conscious of what Jews have
suffered in the past and how much anti-Semitism has been a moral blot
on the West as a whole. So while they have none of the excessive
deference, guilt feelings, and reluctance to engage so typical of the
remaining WASP elite, they are very well-modulated. Their detractors
would have preferred loose-tongued adversaries, Palestinians whose
words are raw with loss and resentment, a left wing anti-Zionist like
Noam Chomsky, or genuine anti-Semites. Instead, with Walt and
Mearsheimer, they are encountering something like the American
establishment of a vanished era at its calm, patriotic best.
It is obvious that The Israel Lobby, both the article and the book,
would be extremely unwelcome to those pleased with the status quo.
Under the current arrangement, the United States gives Israel $3-4
billion in aid and grants a year--about $500 per Israeli and several
orders of magnitude more than aid to citizens of any other country.
Israel is the only American aid recipient not required to account for
how the money is spent. Washington uses its Security Council veto to
shield Israel from critical UN resolutions and periodically issues
bland statements lamenting the continued expansion of Israeli
settlements on the Palestinian land the Jewish state has occupied
since 1967. When Israel violates U.S. law, as it did in Lebanon by
using American-made cluster bombs against civilian targets, a low-
level official may issue a mild complaint. These fundamentals of the
relationship go unchallenged by 95 percent of American politicians
holding or running for national office.
Walt and Mearsheimer's goal was to ignite a conversation about the
lobby--which they define expansively as an amorphous array of
individuals, think tanks, and congressional lobbying groups that
advocate Israeli perspectives--and its consequences, which they believe
are damaging to America's core strategic interests in the Middle East.
They support Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and while they
readily summarize Israeli blemishes, drawing on Israeli sources and
the arguments of the country's revisionist "new historians," they are
fully aware that no modern state has been built without injustices.
They seek a more normal United States relationship with Israel, rather
like we have with France or Spain, and an Israeli-Palestinian peace
settlement that can start to drain the poison out of American
relations with the Arab world.
At least in a preliminary sense, they have started a discussion. The
initial working paper on the Kennedy School website was downloaded
275,000 times, throwing Israel's most ferocious partisans into a
panic. Deploying a McCarthyite tactic, the New York Sun quickly sought
to link the authors to white supremacist David Duke. The New Republic
published a basketful of hostile pieces. Several pro-Israel
congressmen initiated an embarrassing effort--ignored by the
institution's president--to get the Naval War College to cancel
scheduled lectures by the two. In a column about "the Mearsheimer-Walt
fiasco," neoconservative writer Daniel Pipes summed up his dilemma: it
would have been better, Pipes said, to have ignored the essay by "two
obscure academics" so that it disappeared "down the memory hole"
instead of becoming "the monument that it now is." Pipes was wrong
about this. Hostile reaction to the piece hadn't inspired a quarter of
a million downloads. With the United States mired in a quagmire in
Iraq, increasingly detested in the Muslim world, and wedded to an
Israel policy that, beyond America's borders, seems bizarre to friend
and foe alike, Walt and Mearsheimer had touched a topic that was
crying out for serious analysis.
And the book could do more than the article. Arguments could be filled
out, footnotes could be easily read. The 2006 Lebanon War--which saw
the American Congress endorse the Israeli bombardment by the kind of
margin that would satisfy Nicolae Ceausescu, while seeming genuinely
puzzled that moderate Arab leaders did not join their applause --was
analyzed as a test case. A book could continue the discussion and
deepen it. But the book's enemies (how odd that a book could have
enemies, but there is no better word for it) had time to prepare their
ideological trenches, and within a month or two of publication, one
could see the shape of the defense.
By the end of October, two months after The Israel Lobby appeared in
stores, there had not been a single positive review in the mass-market
media. For a long time it seemed that no editor dared trust the
subject to a gentile, causing blogger Philip Weiss to ask cheekily,
"Do the goyim get to register an Opinion Re Walt/Mearsheimer?" By
then, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Sun, and
The New Republic between them must have printed 25 attacks on Walt and
Mearsheimer, virtually all of them designed to portray the authors as
beyond the pale of rational discourse.
Anti-Semitism was not a credible charge. The authors make clear that
the lobby isn't representative of the views of all or even most
American Jews, and they support an Israel within recognized
boundaries. Their recommendation that the United States treat Israel
like a normal country is hard to demonize. Ditto their repeated
assertions that lobbying is a perfectly normal part of the American
system and that conflicted or divided loyalties have become
commonplace in the modern world. But what many did was to discuss the
book in a context of anti-Semitism, to convey the impression that The
Israel Lobby was a deeply anti-Semitic book without explicitly saying
so. Thus Jeffrey Goldberg, in a 6,000-word New Republic piece,
introduced Walt and Mearsheimer after a detour through Osama bin
Laden, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, and, of course, David Duke.
He eventually called the book "the most sustained attack ... against the
political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father
Coughlin."
Samuel G. Freedman in the Washington Post opened his discussion of the
book by invoking the New Testament concept of original sin, whose
burden one can escape only through acceptance of Jesus Christ. A
passage from Romans, Freedman claims, framed the book's argument--"if
unintentionally." When was the last time the Washington Post
introduced a serious foreign affairs book with Bible talk that had no
bearing on the work in question?
One of several Wall Street Journal attacks on the work claimed, "it is
apparently the authors' position that ... [in the face of Arab
lobbying efforts] American Jews are obliged to stay silent." This
statement is more than a misrepresentation of Walt and Mearsheimer's
argument, it is a flat-out lie. Did the editors who assigned and
published the piece know this? Was discrediting the book so important
that normal American journalistic standards had to be waived?
Another track of the demonization campaign was the repeated effort to
cancel the authors' appearances or to demand that opposing speakers be
invited to "rebut" their noxious views, a format hardly typical for
authors on book tours. Unfortunately, these initiatives sometimes
succeeded, as when the Chicago Council for Global Affairs cancelled an
event at a venue where the two professors had spoken many times
before. Some efforts to marginalize the book were more like parody, as
when Congressman Elliot Engel complained that Professor Mearsheimer
had been invited to participate in a Columbia University forum on
academic freedom.
It would be naïve to think that the campaign waged against the authors
had no impact. It managed to muddy the debate about the book. Even on
some of the wonkier Washington blogs, where there was manifest
interest in contending with the book's arguments, the focus got
shifted to whether The Israel Lobby was anti-Semitic. As one
frustrated commenter on Ezra Klein's blog wrote, "[P]art of the theory
is that the power of the 'lobby' is to effectively remove certain
topics from the debate. And the closest we come to debating those
topics is a meta-discussion of whether debating those topics is
appropriate or some evidence of anti-semitism/self hating Jewry."
Klein rued that "marginalizing the authors as anti-semitic is more
effective than arguing back their viewpoint."
The barrage also had an intimidation effect, a sort of "shock and awe"
for the political journalism set. What humble book-review editor could
fail to be impressed by the sheer volume of rhetoric painting the book
as disreputable or avoid wondering what bombs might explode under his
own career if he asked former national security adviser Brent
Scowcroft or Palestinian-American professor Rashid Khalidi to review
the book. Television producers took note as well. While Mearsheimer
managed an amiable ten minutes on "The Colbert Report," the authors
got nowhere near the regular public-affairs discussion shows. Scholars
and writers got the message: if men as esteemed in their field as Walt
and Mearsheimer were subject to the Coughlin/Duke treatment and had
their appearances cancelled, surely those less cushioned by tenure and
eminence had good cause to keep silent. This probably explained the
sheer ferocity of the campaign against The Israel Lobby.
Not all the negative reviews were as egregious as those cited above.
But those that tried to address the substance of the book tended to
land weak blows. Les Gelb's critique in the New York Times was
representative. His central point was that if the Israel lobby--
actually, he incorrectly claimed that Walt and Mearsheimer called it a
"Jewish lobby" --was indeed so powerful, why has every American
president over the past 40 years "privately favored" the return of the
Palestinian territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state,
and why has Washington consistently "expressed displeasure" at
Israel's settlement expansion? This is precisely the question to which
Walt and Mearsheimer provide an answer. If, as is indeed the case,
most American presidents have "privately" sought Israeli withdrawal,
and since Israel is extraordinarily dependent on American largesse,
why has the United States never seriously put pressure on Israel to
stop the settlements and give back the land? How did Israel manage to
move 400,000 settlers into the West Bank in 40 years, often using
American funds, if this was contrary to the wishes of every president?
Gelb goes on to acknowledge that Walt and Mearsheimer were prescient
in their opposition to Bush's Iraq folly, but asserts that the Israel
lobby had nothing do with the decision to go to war. Bush and Cheney
needed no lobbying on this point, and they don't about Iran either.
This last area is easily the most disputed point between Walt and
Mearsheimer and those reviewers who sought to answer their book rather
than smear it. The Israel lobby, the two assert, helped drive the
United States into Baghdad. It couldn't have done it by itself--that
required 9/11 and Bush and Cheney. But, argue Mearsheimer and Walt,
"absent the lobby's influence, there almost certainly would not have
been a war. The lobby was a necessary but not sufficient condition for
a war that is a strategic disaster for the United States."
This is a powerful polemical charge, if only because tens of millions
of Americans who could care less who has sovereignty over the West
Bank recognize that the Iraq War has been a painful failure on every
level. But is it true? The Economist says the argument about Iraq
"doesn't quite stand up," but might make sense if "neoconservatives
and the Israel lobby were the same thing." Leonard Fein, who writes on
the dovish Americans for Peace Now website, called the charge
"monstrous" and accused the authors of treating the lobby and
neoconservatives "as if the two are interchangeable." Are they?
On one aspect of the argument, the historical record is clear. The two
authors do valuable service by documenting the near hysterical "attack
Iraq now" recommendations made by various Israeli politicians to
American audiences during the run-up to the war. Benjamin Netanyahu,
whom the U.S. Congress customarily treats with the kind of deference
it might reserve for a Lincoln returned from the dead, warned senators
and congressmen that Saddam was developing nukes that could be
delivered in suitcases and satchels, and Shimon Peres told Americans
that Saddam was as dangerous as bin Laden. The lobbying was so blatant
that some political consultants warned Israel to cool it, lest
Americans come to believe that the war in Iraq was waged "to protect
Israel rather than to protect America." AIPAC, too, pushed for the
invasion. It is clear that the Israel lobby, as everyone understands
it, was part of the rush-to-war atmosphere that swept the capital in
2002.
But the critics do have a point: AIPAC and similar groups played a
comparatively minor part in the frenzy. But what of the
neoconservatives, who had openly pushed for war against Saddam since
the late 1990s and who held several key posts in the Bush
administration?
For Walt and Mearsheimer, neoconservatives are an integral part of the
lobby, and indeed, for their argument to make sense, the lobby has to
be defined broadly. Of course there is AIPAC, which exists to
influence Congress, and its myriad associated groups that raise money
for candidates. The recent emergence of Christian Zionism as an
electoral force is an important addition, adding ethnic and social
diversity and increased political weight to the lobby. This is a
sociologically and psychologically rich area, which the authors don't
explore as deeply as they might. What currents in American
Protestantism suddenly made Israel so compelling? It is interesting to
learn, for example, that in 1979, Menachem Begin gave Jerry Falwell a
private jet as a gift and soon after bestowed upon him the Jabotinsky
Medal for "outstanding achievement." (Other recipients include Elie
Wiesel and Leon Uris.) But such facts, intriguing as they are, don't
entirely speak for themselves. And whatever enhanced political clout
Christian Zionism brought to the lobby, it did not include access and
influence to inner decision-making sanctums of the Pentagon and White
House or the ability to start a war.
That required the neoconservatives. The path that took the United
States from 9/11 to Iraq has yet to be precisely documented, but it is
generally accepted that Bush, Cheney, and other key policymakers
became converts to neoconservative views after the attack, if they
weren't already sympathetic. This is important because neoconservatism
has a broad gravitational pull that more focused lobbying groups, no
matter how effective, can never match.
It is one thing to motivate a senator or congressman to vote for "pro-
Israel" legislation--and AIPAC does that well. The recent Kyl-Lieberman
bill labeling Iran's military "terrorist" was reportedly first drafted
by AIPAC, and an AIPAC aide's boast that he could have the signatures
of 70 senators on a napkin within 24 hours was altogether believable.
But that kind of lobbying has obvious limitations. How many of those
70 senators would vote the lobby's way while discretely rolling their
eyes, disliking the pressure they are subjected to but willing to go
along because it is the course of least resistance? People don't start
wars for such reasons.
Neoconservatism is something far more than advocacy of the interests
of a foreign country. It is a full-blown ideological system, which
shapes the way people interpret events and view their own society and
its relation to the world. Yes, its foreign-policy views are strongly
pro-Israel. The main shapers of neoconservatism would readily argue
that their foreign-policy positions were good for Israel, while those
they opposed imperiled the Jewish state. No one who has spent time
with major neocons would doubt the centrality of Israel to their
worldview or their attachment to the no-compromise-with-Arabs parts of
the Israeli political spectrum. But such attitudes come embedded in a
larger set of viewpoints, which are now fairly disseminated among the
American elite. While it is one thing for a lawmaker to accommodate
the Israel lobby over something like the Kyl-Lieberman bill, it is
quite another for an executive-branch policymaker to see the world
through a neocon perspective, to have fully internalized slogans like
"moral clarity" and "Islamofascism" and "the lessons of appeasement"
and elevated them as lodestars.
Neoconservatives did play a crucial role in preparing the Iraq War--in
the press, in generating dubious intelligence conclusions and piping
them into the executive branch, and in framing an argument that George
Bush would be "surrendering" to terror if he didn't attack Iraq. It
was a performance that more conventional lobbying organizations like
AIPAC or the Zionist Organization of America couldn't match in their
wildest dreams. Walt and Mearsheimer don't go into this history
deeply. (In The Assassin's Gate, New Yorker writer and author George
Packer gives one of the most nuanced portraits of the attitudes of the
Bush administration's intellectuals, exploring the difficult to pin
down matter of how intellectuals' attitudes seep into policy choices.)
But in view of their convictions and pivotal positions inside the
executive branch and ability to shape policy at the very top, to say
that neoconservatives "overlap" with the Israel lobby hardly does them
justice: the faction might more properly be described as, to borrow
the well-known phrase, the highest stage of the Israel lobby.
Moreover, as an ideological movement, neoconservatism has a reach that
more focused pro-Israel advocacy could never duplicate. Does one call
Donald Rumsfeld a neoconservative? Few do. While obviously quite
capable, he isn't known as an intellectual, isn't Jewish (though of
course not all neocons are Jewish), isn't an ex-liberal or leftist. He
is usually described as a Republican "nationalist," though he pretty
much delegated Iraq policy to men--Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and
others--who fit most classical definitions of "neoconservative." But
there are connections: in the 1980s Rumsfeld was enlisted by Midge
Decter to chair the neoconservative Committee for the Free World, so
certainly the neocon cast of mind was not unfamiliar to him. In short,
just as the boundaries of the Israel lobby are blurry, so are those of
neoconservatism. The revival of terms like "fellow traveler" would
probably be helpful.
The most striking aspect of the reception of The Israel Lobby was the
distance between the reviews in the U.S. and those abroad. In England,
reviewers for the major papers (including the Murdoch-owned Times)
treated the book's argument as self-evidently true. Geoffrey
Wheatcroft, author of a prize-winning book on Zionism, noted in The
Guardian that it must be obvious to a 12 year old that the Israel
alliance, "far from advancing American interests, gravely damages them
and has hindered every American endeavour in Arab countries or the
whole Muslim world." Israel's most influential paper, Ha'aretz, ran a
review by Daniel Levy, who was involved in the last serious round of
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He told his readers that Walt and
Mearsheimer's most shrill detractors either had "not read the book,
are emotionally incapable of dealing with harsh criticism of something
they hold so close, or are intentionally avoiding substantive debate
on the issue." Like others, Levy draws a line between the neocons and
the Israel lobby proper and explains the Iraq War as a sort of perfect
storm: Bush and Cheney, 9/11, many neoconservatives in the executive
branch, and for the first time a Republican administration with
Christian Zionists as a substantial part of its electoral base. He
regrets that mainstream parts of the lobby have been co-opted by the
neocons and closes with a plea for moderate Israelis to take American
politics seriously and devote as much attention to forming American
alliances as the Israeli Right does. This is very welcome advice, for
Americans as well, because, as Walt and Mearsheimer stress (and Levy
helpfully repeats), it is not Israel per se but Israel as an occupier
that constitutes a major strategic liability for the United States.
But it should be noted that casual newspaper readers in Israel, in
Britain, and soon in the rest of Europe, where the book is being
translated into seven languages, are being treated to far more nuanced
and serious discussion of The Israel Lobby than Americans have been.
At least there has been the blogosphere. One wouldn't know it from the
major American newspapers or magazine reviews, but a fresh breeze is
beginning to blow. The Israel Lobby did receive more attention on the
serious blogs than any other book this year. M.J. Rosenberg, the
director of policy analysis for Israel Policy Forum and a prominent
"two-state solution" advocate, describes the influence of the book as
enormous: "Capitol Hill staffers are talking about the book, everybody
is arguing about it, people are intrigued. ... it has opened up
discussion."
Despite, or perhaps because of, ferocious attacks in The New Republic
and the Wall Street Journal, The Israel Lobby made it onto the New
York Times bestseller list. It remained there only a couple of weeks,
soon displaced by Alan Greenspan's memoir and Laura Ingraham's latest.
But the book's influence is still early in its trajectory.
International sales will be large, there will be paperback editions,
and the book will be assigned in course readings. The Israel Lobby
will be around a long time, perhaps longer than AIPAC itself. Israeli
peace activist Uri Avnery has already compared the work to Uncle Tom's
Cabin, Philip Weiss to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. To build upon
Tony Karon's analogy that glasnost is breaking out in the American
Jewish community, and that younger Jews are questioning Israel like
never before, The Gulag Archipelago didn't receive good reviews in
Russia when it came out either.
Walt and Mearsheimer haven't written the last word on American-Israeli
relations. Other books, more psychologically probing and more
discursive, are in the works or waiting to be written. But in clearing
the first path since the pivotal date of 9/11, these two authors have
done their country a great service.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------AIPAC Pushing US to War with Iran for Israel:
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/10/re-aipac-is-pushing-us-to-war-with-iran.html
Here is a tiny URL of the above one:
http://tinyurl.com/22br9u
Newt Gingrich Propagandist for Israel:
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/12/newt-gingrich-propagandist-for-israel.html
Here is a tiny URL for the above one:
http://tinyurl.com/yv55zp
Israel considering strike on Iran despite US intelligence report
http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?p=402392#402392
----------------------------------------------------------------------------JINSA/PNAC/AEI Neocon Richard Perle Still Playing Chess With The
Middle East (for Israel):
http://tinyurl.com/37ksut
Iran War: American Military vs. Israel Firsters:
http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?p=400387#400387
Additional at the following URLs:
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com
date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:39:28 -0800 (PST)
author: NOMOREWARFORISRAEL
|
