Jews, Judeo-Communism, and Judeo-U.S. Imperialism:
Trotsky's ghost
wandering the White House. Influence on Bush aides: Bolshevik's writings
supported the idea of pre-emptive war,
by Jeet Heer,
National Post (posted here at
majority.com) June 07, 2003
"Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, was paranoid. Perhaps his deepest
fears centred around his great rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik
movement, Leon Trotsky. Stalin went to extraordinary lengths to obliterate
not only Trotsky but also the ragtag international fellowship known as the
Left Opposition, which supported Trotsky's political program. In the late
1920s, Stalin expelled
Trotsky from the Communist Party and
deported him from the Soviet Union. Almost instantly, other Communist
parties moved to excommunicate Trotsky's followers, notably the Americans
James P. Cannon and
Max Shachtman. In 1933, while in exile in
Turkey, Trotsky regrouped his supporters as the Fourth International.
Never amounting to more than a few thousand individuals scattered across
the globe, the Fourth International was constantly harassed by Stalin's
secret police, as well as by capitalist governments ...
Trotsky's
movement, although never numerous, attracted many sharp minds. At one time
or another, the Fourth International included among its followers the
painter
Frida Kahlo (who had an affair with Trotsky), the novelist
Saul Bellow, the poet André Breton and the Trinidadian polymath C.L.R.
James. As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of Trotsky,
consider the curious fact that some of the books about the Middle East
crisis that are causing the greatest stir were written by thinkers deeply
shaped by the tradition of the Fourth International. In seeking advice
about Iraqi society, members of the Bush administration (notably
Paul
D. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, and Dick Cheney, the
Vice-President) frequently consulted Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi-American
intellectual whose book The Republic of Fear is considered to be the
definitive analysis of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. As the journalist
Christopher Hitchens notes, Makiya is 'known to veterans of the
Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of the Fourth
International.' When speaking about Trotskyism, Hitchens has a voice of
authority. Like Makiya,
Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who is
influential in Washington circles as an advocate for a militantly
interventionist policy in the Middle East. Despite his leftism,
Hitchens has been invited into the White House as an ad hoc
consultant. Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged
past. On the left, the historian
Paul Berman, author of a new book
called Terror and Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who
want a more muscular struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman
counts the Trotskyist C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among
neo-conservatives, Berman's counterpart is
Stephen Schwartz, a
historian whose new book, The Two Faces of Islam, is a key text among
those who want the United States to sever its ties with Saudi Arabia.
Schwartz spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group. To
this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as "the old man" and "L.D."
(initials from Trotsky's birth name,
Lev Davidovich Bronstein). "To
a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of
L.D," he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the
ghost of
Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February
celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with
Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and
Max Shachtman. 'I've
talked to Wolfowitz about all of this,'
Schwartz notes. 'We had
this discussion about
Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was
never part of it. He's definitely aware.' The yoking together of
Paul
Wolfowitz and
Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous
history explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican
right. To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S.
expansionism, it is important to know something about
Max Shachtman,
Trotsky's controversial American disciple.
Shachtman's career
provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people
from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon ... By the early
1970s, Shachtman was a supporter of the Vietnam War and the strongly
anti-Communist Democrats such as Senator Henry Jackson.
Shachtman
had a legion of young followers (known as Shachtmanites) active in labour
unions and had an umbrella group known as the Social Democrats. When the
Shachtmanites started working for Senator Jackson, they forged close ties
with hard-nosed Cold War liberals who also advised Jackson, including
Richard Perle and
Paul Wolfowitz; these two had another tie to
the Trotskyism; their mentor was
Albert Wohlstetter, a defence
intellectual who had been a Schachtmanite in the late 1940s. Shachtman
died in 1972, but his followers rose in the ranks of the labour movement
and government bureaucracy. Because of their long battles against
Stalinism, Shachtmanites were perfect recruits for the renewed struggle
against Soviet communism that started up again after the Vietnam War.
Throughout the 1970s, intellectuals forged by the Shachtman tradition
filled the pages of neo-conservative publications. Then in the 1980s, many
Social Democrats found themselves working in the Reagan administration,
notably Jeanne Kirkpatrick (who was ambassador to the United Nations) and
Elliott Abrams (whose tenure as assistant secretary of state was
marred by his involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal)."
Coleman works to rally Jewish support for Bush,
by FREDERIC J. FROMMER, Ledger-Enquirer, June
8, 2003
"Sen. Norm Coleman, one of only three Jewish Republicans in
Congress, makes an unorthodox sales pitch to recruit Jews to vote for
President Bush. 'Compassionate conservatism is a Jewish ethic,' the
Minnesota senator tells Jewish audiences in an effort to reverse nearly a
century-long trend of Jewish support for Democrats. In the 2000
presidential election, Bush won only 19 percent of the Jewish vote,
according to exit polls. But recent surveys show that Republicans could
pick up gains among Jewish voters. 'What I hope to get is more support for
George W. Bush,' Coleman said in an interview. 'He's uniquely
situated to significantly expand the percentage of votes he gets from the
Jewish community.' That vote could be important in next year's
presidential election, even though Jews make up only about 2 percent of
the population. That's because they are concentrated in several
competitive states, such as Florida, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania.
'If you get another 10 to 15 percent of the Jewish vote, that could be
enough in a close election to tip a lot of those big states,' said Steve
Schier, a political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield,
Minn. Coleman hopes to improve Bush's standing in the Jewish
community by playing up the president's efforts to fight terrorism and his
support for Israel. 'Israel has never had a stronger ally than George W.
Bush,' Coleman told a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition
in Washington last month. That perception could change, however, as Bush
pressures Israel to make concessions as part of his 'road map' for peace
with the Palestinians. Coleman, a staunch supporter of Israel, defends the
president's handling of the peace process. ... Matthew Brooks,
executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which has booked
Coleman at several events, said that Coleman's story resonates with many
Jews. "His personal, intellectual, philosophical journey is one that so
many in the Jewish community are undertaking right now," Brooks
said. Among them is Geoffrey Greene, a 55-year-old physician from
Columbia, Md., who came out to hear Coleman speak last month. "The main
thing for me was the security issue," said Greene, who quit the
Democratic Party last year. "Security and the survival of Jews and Israel
became the key issues for me." Hillary Brendzel, a Republican who
works at a health care management firm, said she came to see Coleman
because he was a new Jewish face in Congress ... Ira Forman,
executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council and coeditor
of the 2001 book, "Jews in American Politics," disagreed with Coleman's
analysis. "Sen. Coleman's philosophy might makes sense if there was
truly a compassionate conservative agenda in the Republican Party," he
said, arguing that Jews agree with Democrats on most domestic issues.
"Israel in times of trouble becomes more of an issue for Jews, but
Democrats are just as pro-Israel as Republicans are," Forman said."
Defending the Jewish Lobby:
Joining LaRouche In the Fever Swamps. The New York Times and The New
Yorker go off the deep end,
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY,
Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2003
"'Just
weeks after the LaRouche in 2004 campaign began nationwide circulation of
400,000 copies of the Children of Satan dossier, exposing the role of
University of Chicago fascist 'philosopher' Leo Strauss as the
godfather of the neo-conservative war party in and around the Bush
Administration, two major establishment publications have joined the
exposé.' So brags an article under the byline Jeffrey Steinberg on
Executive Intelligence Review, a Web site devoted to the perennial
presidential campaign of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. This time around, Mr.
LaRouche is running on a platform equating the Sept. 11 attacks on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon with the 1933 Reichstag fire, set by Nazis
so they could blame the Communists and take over the German government. In
his part of "Children of Satan," Mr. Steinberg charges that a
"cabal of Strauss disciples, along with an equally small circle of allied
neo-conservative and Likudnik fellow-travelers" has been hovering around
the government for 30 years, "awaiting the moment of opportunity to launch
their not-so-silent coup." It does seem to be true that the LaRouche
screed was first in line in thrusting Leo Strauss, author of such
volumes as "Natural Right and History," into the middle of the debate over
the Iraq war. The theme was later sounded by James Atlas in the New York
Times and Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Mr. Atlas's article on
"Leo-Cons" included a photo essay with shots of Mr. Strauss and
presumed disciples including Edward Shils, Allan Bloom,
Saul Bellow, Albert Wohlstetter, on to Clarence Thomas and
Leon Kass. It ended with big photos of Richard Perle (along
with the howler, later corrected by the Times, that he was married to
Wohlstetter's daughter Joan) and Paul Wolfowitz. Mr. Hersh's
"Selective Intelligence" basically aired one side of an intelligence
debate, defending dovish (or if you prefer, intellectually conservative)
CIA analysts. It described the other side as "the Straussian movement,"
citing Mr. Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky, head of a special
Pentagon shop set up to review intelligence on Iraq. And it included a
quote from an academic about "Strauss's idea--actually Plato's--that
philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but
also to powerful politicians." Looking at the striking similarities in
these accounts the conspiracy-minded might conclude that the New York
Times and New Yorker have been reduced to recycling the insights of Lyndon
LaRouche. But it's entirely possible that Mr. Atlas and Mr. Hersh
have stumbled into the fever swamps all on their own. To those of us who
have lived this history over the decades, the notion of a Strauss
conspiracy is totally unhinged. Leo Strauss, I learned as graduate
student in the 1960s, was a champion of ancient philosophers, a critic of
attempts at empirical political science if not of modernity itself. While
this is centuries and leagues removed from Saddam Hussein, it's true that
Mr. Strauss did influence Irving Kristol and his wife Gertrude
Himmelfarb, and through them other neo-conservatives ... As one of the
few people who ran with both neo-conservatives and the Wohlstetter
circle, let me testify that they did not appear at each other's
conferences or dinner tables. But prominent members of each are Jewish.
This is what the recent conspiracy charges are ultimately about. Sometimes
it is overt anti-Semitism; with "Children of Satan," Mr. LaRouche has
chosen an Aryan-nation phrase for Jews (descendants of Cain, who was the
result of Satan seducing Eve, in this perfervid theology). At other times,
often in the hands of accusers who are Jewish themselves, it is a charge
of secret loyalties. The Jews, or Israel, or the Likud have conspired to
take over American foreign policy."
"The New Mafia",
By Mark Glenn, The March for Justice
"It didn't change the fact that America was discovered by an Italian and
later named after one. It was and still is a racism with which Americans
are comfortable. They aren't offended by the huge amount of business
created and maintained by an entertainment industry that depicts Italians
as a violent, greedy, treacherous and lascivious people. Names like Vinny,
Rocco, Guido, and Tony are passed around in jokes without a second thought
as to what the whole business of gangsterism implies when it is applied to
a group of people. Shows like the Sopranos win rave reviews from American
audiences, and movies like the Godfather have acquired their own cult
following. And to a certain extent, it is understandable as to how it got
this way. After all, the whole business involving the Italians and the
Mafia is an established fact of history, and only a fool would try to say
it didn't happen. But imagine if someone today did try to refute it.
Suppose someone tried to sell the story that the Mafia never existed, that
the whole concept had been orchestrated back during the turn of the last
century as a result of Anti-Italianism, an attempt by jealous others to
drag the good name of the Italians through the mud and to justify
displacing them of any acquired power or influence in American society.
Interestingly enough, 60 yrs or so ago, when people spoke (in hushed
tones) of a quiet yet powerful criminal conspiracy organized along a
single nationality of people, there were those who denounced them for it,
using some of the same arguments listed above. And who denounced them?
Members of this criminal conspiracy and the political lackeys who were on
their payroll. They used all the familiar terms; Racist, anti-Italian,
anti-Catholic, bigot. Yet today, the existence of this criminal conspiracy
is an established fact, and only someone who is either making a joke or
else deliberately wishes to be ridiculed tries to deny it. Now consider
the upset that occurs today when someone suggests that there is a criminal
conspiracy, much like the Italian Mafia that is operating again, only on a
bigger scale, and instead of being run by the Italians, it is run by
Israelis. The reactions by these gangsters and their controlled
mouthpieces, the media, (and in particular, right-wing talk show hosts)
are almost identical to the reactions by Italian gangsters and their
defenders in the last century. People are branded as racists, bigots,
jealous, envious, and now, thanks to 50 years of daily propaganda, Nazis.
It is very effective. Criticize Israel for anything, and you will be
called any of the above and ruined for life. Consider what happened to Pat
Buchanan throughout his career as a commentator and presidential
candidate. Now, as a result of the browbeating he has received for
exposing these people for what they are, he barely ekes out snippets of
the truth for fear of the backlash. Not limiting the scope of their
warfare to only assassinating their opponent's character, they may kill
him physically as well. Consider the case of Randy Weaver's wife and son.
Mr. Weaver made the mistake of openly calling this criminal conspiracy for
what it is, the Kosher Mafia, and they tried to murder him and his family
for it. At the very least, you can expect a letter from some government
agency telling you that they need to "talk to you" about some matter,
usually involving an audit or an inspection, and the harassment will
continue for years. Tactics like these and many others not listed are not
new, although those individuals using them, members of the New Mafia,
would prefer that the rest of America pretend that they don't exist. What
else do you call a well-run organization with long reaching tentacles that
wields silent, yet powerful influence in government, finance, and media?
An organization that extorts over 6 billion dollars a year from the
American taxpayers? An organization that can hush-up war crimes 50 years
old of such enormity that they scream out to heaven for justice? An
organization that can pick up the phone, call the President of the United
States and order him to bomb another nation back into the stone age on
completely false pretenses? An organization that deals in illegal arms
sales, the sex-slave business, drugs, counterfeit money, money laundering,
prostitution and the protection racket on a world wide scale? Talk about
it being run by the Italians, and everyone calls it the Mafia. Talk about
it being run by the Arabs, and everyone calls it terrorism. Talk about it
being run by the Israelis, and everyone calls it a wacky conspiracy theory
created by anti-Semites ... We, the Americans, have been given a
'contract' by the New Mafia to carry out a series of "hits" in the Middle
East in bringing the other families to heel. The New Mafia has done a good
job of laying the propaganda groundwork years ahead of time by bringing to
prominence ardent supporters of this crime family such as Limbaugh, Liddy,
Savage, Hannity and the others. They have done their jobs well, deflecting
attention away from the real causes of anti-Americanism in the Middle
East, and instead blame it on kindergarten-level explanations such as
'hatred for freedom' and other such nonsense. They have polished up the
image of the New Mafia, like Capone used to do with his soup kitchens, by
calling Israel 'the only democracy' in the Middle East, despite the fact
that the tactics they employ against even their own citizens fly in the
face of everything we hold dear as Americans. And, last but not least,
they, the New Mafia, have for 50 years, inculcated into the minds of
Christian Americans the idea that they are dysfunctional, prudish,
backwards, racist, and therefore that they are directly to blame for the
tribulations that caused many of them to suffer and die. The unspoken
understanding operates like this: 'You owe us. We have suffered terribly
because of you, and now you are going to allow us to move about as we
please without restraint, and without the hassle of scrutiny or public
criticism' ... The Italians have La Cosa Nostra, the Irish have the PIRA,
the Germans have the Nazi's, the Colombians have the drug cartels, the
list goes on and on. However, we should not make the mistake of letting
this consideration of national origin nor the sensitivity of race-related
issues get in the way of us acknowledging that a criminal conspiracy
exists in our midst. To do so puts us as a society, indeed as a world, in
great danger, and to ignore the existence of such a criminal conspiracy
allows it to continue in its destructive path, like a cancer, eating up
all the life in the body. If we, as Americans, can be brave enough and
honest enough to call the Old Mafia what it was, namely a criminal
conspiracy run by Italians, than there is no reason why we shouldn't call
the New Mafia, a criminal conspiracy run by Israelis, what it is."
This article dares not note that the names highlighted below are
Jewish.
Bush Under Fire in Congress for Criticizing Israel,
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN and JAMES DAO, New York Times,
June 11, 2003
"Supporters of Israel in and out of Congress assailed President Bush today
for criticizing Israeli attacks on Palestinian militant groups as the
administration worked to protect its Middle East peace initiative from a
new cycle of violence. On a day of new attacks and counterattacks by
Israeli and Palestinian militant forces, diplomats said there was concern
in the administration that without dramatic improvement of some kind, the
peace initiative known as the road map could founder. A day after he
criticized Israel for its attempt to kill a militant Palestinian leader,
Mr. Bush today denounced a suicide bomb attack on a bus in Jerusalem that
killed 16 people and wounded more than 100. 'I strongly condemn the
killings,' he said, 'and I urge and call upon all of the free world,
nations which love peace, to not only condemn the killings, but to use
every ounce of their power to prevent them from happening in the future.'
At a hearing of the House International Relations Committee,
Representative Gary L. Ackerman, said that Mr. Bush's rebuke might
lead his critics 'to think of the word hypocrisy.' 'How can we take
certain actions in response to terrorism, and then tell others that when
they do the same exact thing that it is not helpful?' Mr. Ackerman,
a New York Democrat, said during questioning of William J. Burns, the
State Department's senior diplomat for Middle Eastern affairs. The
influential pro-Israel lobbying group, the American-Israel Public Affairs
Committee, known as Aipac, issued a rare criticism of Mr. Bush, if only
obliquely. Israel, it said, 'will and must take the responsibility to
fight terrorist organizations' and 'it should be the policy of the U.S. to
support' such actions. The bombing today was an apparent retaliation for
Israel's attempt to kill Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a top leader of Hamas, on
Tuesday. It happened at about the same time as an Israeli missile attack
in Gaza. Despite the violence, senior administration officials said that
the peace initiative was still alive .. If there was a new wrinkle to the
day's developments, it was the criticism directed at Mr. Bush for his
rebuke of the Israeli government on Tuesday. Reflecting dismay that a new
round of violence might undermine the spirit achieved in Aqaba and Sharm
el Sheik, Mr. Bush said the attack on the Hamas leader would not help
Israel's security. His statement drew fire from those saying that Israel
had carried out the attacks to defend itself, just as the United States
has done. Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, said
Israel's use of military force to protect itself against 'a ticking time
bomb factory' was '100 percent justified.' Representative Tom Lantos
of California, the ranking Democrat on the International Relations
Committee, defended Israel's right to protect itself, saying that the
Palestinian Authority under Mr. Abbas was unable to do the job. If the
Palestinians will not disarm terrorists, 'then Israel clearly will do so,'
he said. 'We would do so,' he continued. 'Any self-respecting society will
do so. People in government have to defend their citizens.'"
Michael
Chertoff: Ashcroft's Top Gremlin Spreading Mischief from DoJ to the
Federal Bench,
By ELAINE CASSEL, CounterPunch, June 11, 2003
"It never ends-the [John] Ashcroft watch. It only gets worse, and more
frightening. But now I have a new gremlin to watch, someone who is as
intent on undermining the law and Constitution as Ashcroft. I am referring
to the man behind the criminal prosecution of terrorists, Michael
Chertoff. Chertoff, former chief of the Justice Department's
criminal division, and a scary looking guy if ever there was one, has been
elevated to the level of Court of Appeals judge--the 3rd Circuit Court of
Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes Delaware, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania. What's so scary about Michael? Well, besides having no
judicial experience and being a right-ring radical who does not believe in
the Constitution and wants to rewrite federal law and rules of procedure
on an ad hoc, case by case basis, as it suits him, nothing I guess. A good
place to look for Chertoff's legal philosophy is in the prosecution
of Zacarias Moussaoui , now taking place in the Eastern District of
Virginia. Chertoff is not the prosecutor of course, Paul McNulty of
the Eastern District is. But Chertoff is McNulty's boss and he is
calling the shots. So Chertoff argued the government's case in the super
secret hearing before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals last week. The
government is trying to block trial judge Leonie Brinkema's ruling that
Moussaoui and his lawyers have access to the government's star witnesses
against him. The government has refused and appealed. Judge Brinkema, who
still believes in the Constitution, rightly ruled that to deny Moussaoui
that access is a blatant violation of the Sixth Amendment right to
confront witnesses. Brinkema indicates that she will not be a party to
making exceptions to the Constitution on a case-by-case basis. She, in
effect, suggests that maybe Justice better take Moussaoui to Guantanamo
and try him there in secret, in the military tribunals they set up. Easy
there to not only try him, but convict him, and execute him . So why is
the government insisting on keeping him in federal court? I have the
answer, and it lies in Chertoff. Chertoff's goal, I believe,
and the goal of Ashcroft and Bush in supporting this prosecution in
federal court, is to subject federal trials, as they see fit, to ad hoc
exemptions of whatever laws (be they constitutional, criminal code, or
rules of procedure) that will suit their purposes. Their grand scheme is
to ultimately cripple and dismantle the federal courts as we know them,
one brick at a time. Support for this theory of mine includes their
prosecution of attorney Lynne Stewart, for, in effect, zealously
representing her client; rules created by Ashcroft that subject attorneys
and their clients to surveillance, be they under secret wiretaps issues by
the secret FISA court or monitoring of all contacts in prison settings.
These procedures came about by fiat from Ashcroft. They make any attorney
who represents someone charged with an act of "terrorism" (and a terrorist
crime is one defined by Bush and Ashcroft-that is an ad hoc determination,
as well). The Moussaoui case has many examples of legal changes. Moussaoui
and even his attorneys (!) cannot receive all documents related to the
case, because of 'national security' interests. Witnesses may appear in
court behind screens (!) so that they cannot be seen. And, the Fourth
Circuit hearing last week was closed-closed-for the first time in history.
Under Ashcroft we have had secret warrants (or no warrants), secret
hearings denying bail, secret trials, and now secret appellate court
arguments. Next, we can expect the Supreme Court to be closed, can't we?
... The absurd arguments contrary to the letter and spirit of all that not
only the Constitution, but current federal law provides, is appalling and
shameful. Chertoff will be making those arguments for the
government when they appear before his court (and if you think that
appellate judges don't make arguments, you did not hear Supreme Court
Chief Justice Rehnquist make Bush's arguments for his attorney, not
Solicitor General Ted Olson. And you have not read the rulings of the
Fourth Circuit when it denied an American citizen, Yasir Hamdi, the right
to see a lawyer. He is locked up in some military brig. He has not been
charged with a crime and has been in custody for close to a year. The
opinion was a political treatise, not a legal argument. And the
treatise-opinion supported the government's argument that courts step back
and not conduct meaningful judicial review or, heaven forbid, overrule the
government in a time of 'war.' And that treatise said that the 'war' on
terror will only be over when the President says it is over, and that the
"front" of the war may change from time to time ...
As bad for the law and Constitution as many of Bush's judicial appointees
are, Chertoff has been the architect of prosecutions in the 'war on
terror.' And he may have big changes in mind for you, me, the courts, and
the Constitution."
Jewish Law Comes to D.C.,
by James D. Besser, Jewish Week, June 12,
2003
"What does the Talmud have to say about legal and moral controversies in
modern America? Plenty, according to the creators of the new
Washington-based National Institute for Judaic Law, which opened with a
lavish Supreme Court dinner last month. Some Orthodox activists say they
can’t figure out exactly the point of the whole thing. But Noson Gurary,
a Lubavitch rabbi who came up with the idea and won backing from some top
Jewish legal experts, harbors no doubts. 'It will be an eye opener for
judges, scholars and law students,' he told The Jewish Week. 'Before you
know where you’re going, you have to know where you came from. And Jewish
law is the basis of our legal system in America.' Gurary said that the
idea for the institute came in an exchange of letters in which Supreme
Court Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most conservative Justices,
expressed his 'fascination with Jewish law.' 'And as a teacher of Judaic
studies, I began to see the excitement of students who were being exposed
to Jewish law for the first time, who now had a better understanding of
where Western law come from,' Gurary said ... The Buffalo rabbi is
a relative unknown in the Jewish world. Not so some of the participants in
the new project, including Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz,
former U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman and top constitutional
lawyer Nathan Lewin and his law-partner/daughter, Alyza.
Alyza Lewin noted that 'the idea is to make Jewish law accessible to
the public — to jurists, legal scholars, the press, anybody.'”
Springer a step closer to run for Senate,
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), June 12
2003
"Jerry Springer, the television talk-show host, has moved a step
closer towards standing for the United States Senate, with the
announcement that he is setting up an exploratory campaign committee in
Ohio. Springer, 59, a registered Democrat and former Cincinnati
mayor whose syndicated talk show is produced in Chicago, has been
considering a run against the Republican senator, George Voinovich, in
2004. While an exploratory committee falls short of an official
declaration of candidacy, it almost always signals an unofficial start of
a campaign. Springer, who must win Ohio's Democratic primary next year for
the right to face Senator Voinovich, has said he will announce a decision
in July. There is mounting evidence that Springer is headed towards a
Senate candidacy. He has spent several months giving speeches across Ohio,
and is setting up a website selling T-shirts, CDs and autographed
pictures, and soliciting campaign contributions. The prospect of a
Springer candidacy has divided Ohio Democrats, who have not won a
statewide race since 1994. A statewide poll late in the northern winter
showed overwhelming sentiment against Springer. But the
multi-millionaire has deep pockets and is ready, by his own admission, to
bankroll much of the campaign. A Springer spokesman discounted the Ohio
poll and said new polling research and public response to campaign
appearances had been 'extremely positive'. Springer has said that
if he is judged by the content of his raucous television show, he will
lose."
Richard N. Perle. From Disinfopedia, the encyclopedia of propaganda,
Disinfopedia
"Long-time Washington cold warrior Richard N. Perle is a man of
many hats: Pentagon policy adviser, former Likud policy adviser, media
manager, international investor, op-ed writer, talk show guest, think tank
expert and, most of all, a man who ardently wants Saddam Hussein toppled.
Known in Washington circles as "The Prince of Darkness", Perle is
associated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the
New American Century, both of which have been prominent behind-the-scenes
architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy, in particular its
push for war with Iraq. He is closely allied with Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz, another Iraq hawk. Perle is also a
vocal supporter of Israel and a critic of Saudi Arabia. Perle is on
the Advisory Board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA),
and is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Defense Department advisory
group composed primarily of former government officials, retired military
officers, and academics. Born in New York City, Perle graduated from the
University of Southern California in 1964 and worked in a variety of
Senate staff jobs, including the office of late Senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson from 1969 to 1980, when he went to work for a private
military-consulting firm. The following year he was appointed Assistant
Secretary of Defense in the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan.
During the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, Perle served as
a foreign policy advisor. A veteran Washington insider,
Perle has on occasion been accused of being an Israeli agent of influence.
It has been reported that, while he was working for Jackson, an "FBI
summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified information
with someone in the Israeli embassy." In 1983, after stepping into a
Pentagon job in the Reagan administration, Perle came under fire for
accepting a $50,000 payment from an Israeli arms manufacturer. He
explained that the payment was for work done as a Washington lobbyist
before entering government. According to a Dec. 24, 1985, Associated Press
report, Perle, still a Reagan Defense Department official, was
challenged by Jeremiah Denton, then a Republican senator from Alabama, on
Perle's choice of Stephen D. Bryen as a Pentagon aide. In
the email copy of Lee Byrd's report provided by John Sugg (JohnSugg@aol.com),
Denton charged that Bryen, moving from a job with the powerful
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, had been forced to resign his
Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff job after being investigated for
trying to gain information for the Israeli government. Federal prosecutors
dropped the case, with Perle defending Bryen's integrity, the AP
report says. In February 2002, the dispute spilled over into theWashington
Post's editorial pages, with one writer blasting the 'toxic' charge that
Israel is unduly influencing President Bush's Iraq policy. A Post
editorial responded by pointing out that Perle, who is chairman of
the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and two other Bush policy men,
Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, and David
Wurmser, a State Department special assistant, had in 1996
participated in Likud policy deliberations. Under the auspices of the
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a Likud-leaning
Israeli think tank, the three helped come up with a paper, 'A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,' which declared that 'removing
Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq' was an 'important Israeli strategic
objective in its own right as a means of foiling Syria's regional
ambitions." The paper also recommended that Israel drop the Labor Party's
'comprehensive peace' slogan and aim for 'balance of power,' launch 'hot
pursuit' strikes into Palestinian territory - now a staple of the Sharon
government - and work to loosen Yasir Arafat's grip on the Palestinian
Authority, a policy reflected in the recent pressure to compel Arafat to
accept a prime minister."
[Partial List of Jews in the Bush Administration]
Jewish Virtual Libary
Ari Fleischer White House Press Secretary; Josh Bolten
Deputy Chief of Staff; Ken Melman White House Political Director;
David Frum Speechwriter; Brad Blakeman White House Director of
Scheduling; Dov Zakheim Undersecretary of Defense (Controller);
Paul Wolfowitz Deputy Secretary of Defense; I. Lewis Libby
Chief of Staff to the Vice President; Adam Goldman White House
Liaison to the Jewish Community; Chris Gersten Principal Deputy
Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families at HHS;
Elliott Abrams Director of the National Security Council's Office for
Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations; Mark D. Weinberg
Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Public
Affairs; Douglas Feith Under Secretary of Defense for Policy;
Michael Chertoff Head of the Justice Department's criminal division;
Daniel Kurtzer Ambassador to Israel; Cliff Sobel Ambassador
to the Netherlands; Stuart Bernstein Ambassador to Denmark;Nancy
Brinker Ambassador to Hungary; Frank Lavin Ambassador to
Singapore; Ron Weiser Ambassador to Slovakia; Mel Sembler
Ambassador to Italy Martin Silverstein Ambassador to Uruguay; Jay
Lefkowitz Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the
Domestic Policy Council
Admiral Rickover and the Cult of Personality,
by Dr. Paul R. Schratz , Airpower,
July-August 1983
"When Admiral Hyman G. Rickover cleared his desk and took final
departure from the U.S. Navy and the Naval Reactors Branch on the last day
of January 1982, it marked the end of an era. None of us can quite share
the feeling, for no one else ever completed 63 years of continuous active
service before heading for pasture at age 82. The Norman Polmar and Thomas
B. Allen biography of that career, written without Rickover’s support and
published despite the threat of a lawsuit, offers a fascinating view of
the spawning, growth, and maturation of the Rickover empire. During the
last hundred years, only a few names come to mind of those who have made a
major impact on their navies or nation: Mahan, Fisher, Gorshkov. Rickover
can join them. He changed the U.S. Navy’s ship propulsion, quality
control, personnel selection, and training and education, and has had
far-reaching effects on the defense establishment and the civilian nuclear
energy field. The book is tremendously important for the military
professional in uniform or for the Washington bureaucrat. Whatever his
branch of service, Rickover raises trenchant issues ... From his entry
into the U.S. Naval Academy in June 1918, Rickover was in conflict with
the aristocratic WASP aura of Annapolis ... Rickover stood far from
the top of his class, but he was resented as a loner, a cutthroat with an
abrasive personality, and he happened to be Jewish ... . In his naval
service to midcareer, Rickover showed little promise of future greatness.
He volunteered for submarine duty but was not a particularly good
submariner. He rose to executive officer of the USS S-48 but was not
selected for command. His pattern of sea and shore assignments up to the
rank of captain was unimpressive. But in the fall of 1946 he saw nuclear
power "as an opportunity for the Navy—and for himself." Chosen almost by
chance for a four-month assignment to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Rickover soon
parlayed the opportunity into a fortuitous dual responsibility to the
Atomic Energy Commission, later the Department of Energy, and the Navy.
Playing one against the other, he used the exploding technology of nuclear
power to project his own career. Proving himself a master at bureaucratic
infighting, he built his empire, sensing shrewdly what few others ever
realized, that congressmen prefer giving money to people rather than
institutions. Going before committees as an individual and not as a Navy
official, he gave a strong and convincing impression that he spoke as a
man of truth and right, not to support the U.S. Navy but for his nuclear
navy. No witness attacked another flag officer or another Navy program;
Rickover could and did. He told congressmen what they wanted to hear,
things they said to each other but rarely heard from a government witness
... Thanks to outstanding preparation and delivery by a truly expert
witness, his flawless performances generated their own fame in the press
as a folksy, down-home philosopher. Beneath the surface, however, was
always the cold, unrelenting, ruthless workaholic, undermining the
bureaucracy while creating his own. His was a management textbook for the
inside operator, organized to the smallest detail, intolerant of error,
devoting everything including his personal life to a cause, an obsession.
Rickover established a constituency in Congress by superior salesmanship
of his own product and skillful sowing of dissension and division in
competing programs. Carefully slanting facts and covering up what he did
not want disclosed, he skillfully manipulated his two bosses to become
what the authors call "The Unaccountable Man." He destroyed any competing
nuclear program within his own organization and any person likely to
emerge as a competitor or successor. In time, he became increasingly
conservative if not reactionary, putting space between himself and any
responsibility for failure or accident. When the USS Thresher was lost in
April 1963, he immediately phoned the Bureau of Ships to dissociate
himself from any likelihood of failure of the nuclear plant in the
incident. The bureau chief thought this action "thoroughly dishonest."
The Hard Edge of American Values. Robert D. Kaplan on how the United
States projects power around the world—and why it must,"
Atlantic Monthly, June 18, 2003
"In "Supremacy by Stealth," his cover story for the July/August Atlantic,
Robert D. Kaplan states simply that we have gotten ourselves into
the business of empire. (He leaves it to others to debate the necessity or
morality of such a move.) Concentrating on empire's practical side, he
asks, How do we manage this world? In order to answer that question,
Kaplan has spent much of his time over the past several years
traveling with the U.S. military, observing the implementation of American
power on a day to day basis by Special Forces troops who work on the
ground in countries around the globe. Based partly on these extensive
travels, Kaplan has come up with a list of "Rules for Managing the World":
1. Produce More Joppolos 2. Stay on the Move 3. Emulate Second-Century
Rome 4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy 5. Be Light and Lethal 6.
Bring Back the Old Rules 7. Remember the Philippines 8. The Mission is
Everything 9. Fight on Every Front 10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan In
essence, these rules are an articulation of power on a global scale. Have
the best men possible on the ground; be everywhere; use American
citizens—foreign and native born; use the military to further democracy;
do a lot with a little; covert means and dabbling in moral ambiguity are
sometimes necessary; a country united under one name may need more than
one policy; the mission cannot be forgotten or compromised; sell the
product; be idealistic, but know that realism wins the day. For now,
Kaplan argues that maintaining American pre-eminence is paramount—both
for the sake of other countries and for our
own."
Military action against Iran an option: US official The United States
reserves the right to take military action against Iran over its nuclear
program, a senior member of the US administration said, but added that any
such move was "far from our minds" at present, ABC, June 20, 2003
"John Bolton, Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International
Security, told BBC radio that military action was a last resort but
insisted that Iran could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapons
capability. Interviewed on the BBC's Today program, Mr Bolton said that US
President George W Bush 'has repeatedly said that all options are on the
table. But that (military action) is not only not our preference, it is
far far from our minds.' Pressed on whether military action remained a
possibility, Mr Bolton said: 'It has to be an option.' 'Nuclear weapons
are incredibly dangerous and when you couple the Iranian nuclear program
with their aggressive efforts to expand the range of their ballistic
missiles, they are bringing more and more of our
friends and allies within range,' he said."
Three US States
Invest Millions in Israel,
Israel National News, June 20, 2003
"Israel Bonds has sold more than $900 million worth of Independence and
Development Issue bonds so far this year, out of a 1.25 billion goal for
2003. Bonds President Joshua Matza disclosed that three American
states have also purchased tens of millions of dollars worth of Israel
Bonds: New Jersey ($20 million), South Carolina ($10 million), and
Pennsylvania $4.5 million. 'These purchases speak of trust in Israel's
future and its economy and are an expression of friendship for Israel,'
said Matza."
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is Jewish
Seven searching questions for Jack Straw to answer,
Independent (UK), June 22, 2003
"Jack Straw will appear before the parliamentary Foreign Affairs
Committee on Tuesday, to answer questions about the decision to go to war
with Iraq. This may be the only occasion the Foreign Secretary has to
justify, in public and in detail, the extensive allegations he made about
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Here Dr Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge
expert on the WMD issue who has given written evidence to the Committee,
reviews what we have learnt so far, and poses seven questions the
committee should put to Mr Straw to understand how the case for war
was constructed. When Mr Straw became Foreign Secretary in 2001, was it
the assessment of the British Government that Iraq had no active nuclear
programme, long-range missiles or anthrax weapons? ... Was new information
available that rendered previous assessments invalid? Or did Mr Straw
believe that the Iraqi regime had stepped up its activities? What was the
nature of the suggestions offered by ministers and special advisers to the
Joint Intelligence Committee during the production of the Prime Minister's
dossier of September 2002, "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction"? ... What
reason could there be for political input into the drafting process? Who
took the decision to produce the dossier, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of
Concealment, Deception and Intimidation", and when? This, the plagiarised
dossier released in January, was put together in a slapdash way, with even
the typographical errors in the original academic articles retained. The
Government has never explained why it produced a dossier that contained no
information about Iraq's weapons, but was largely about the history of
Iraq's intelligence services. Was it to shore up the claim Colin Powell,
the US Secretary of State, was about to make to the UN Security Council:
that weapons inspectors were unable to find prohibited weapons because of
Iraqi deception? To what extent has the Government been reliant upon
"human intelligence" - sources inside Iraq - in making its claims about
Iraq's weapons? Mr Cook said that during his time as Foreign Secretary, he
found that neither the US nor Britain "really had much human intelligence
inside Iraq". If this is indeed the case, what was the major source used
by the British Government: individuals who claimed to be defectors,
technological sources such as telephone taps or UN weapons inspectors?
Does the Foreign Secretary still believe that Iraq was attempting to
import "significant quantities of uranium from Africa", as the Prime
Minister claimed in his September 2002 dossier? The documents presented to
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), purporting to show that
Niger had agreed to supply Iraq with uranium, are widely acknowledged to
be fabricated. Tony Blair has insisted that the claim made in his
September 2002 dossier was based on other sources. What are these sources
and why were they not presented to the IAEA? Mr Straw's memorandum to the
Foreign Affairs Committee says that "at no stage prior to the publication
of the dossier did the UK possess or have sight of these [fabricated]
documents". A few days ago, I met a former US ambassador who had
investigated these documents on behalf of the CIA. He told me the
documents were passed to Washington by British intelligence agencies, who
had obtained them in Italy in early 2002. Is Mr Straw able to confirm that
documents on alleged uranium sales were passed to Washington? Did the
British Government keep significant amounts of intelligence information on
Iraq's weapons from the UN weapons inspectors?"
As Bush seeks Jewish voters, traditional groups feel ignored,
By Matthew E. Berger, Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
June 23, 2003
"When President Bush sat down to dinner with about 120 Jews at the White
House recently, many familiar faces in the organized American Jewish
community ate at home. Instead of Jewish organizational leaders, the guest
list for the dinner, which honored the opening of an Anne Frank exhibit at
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, included Jewish friends of the
president, political supporters, rabbis and Jewish White House staffers.
Just two leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations were chosen to represent the entire organized Jewish world.
The White House´s handpicked representation of the Jewish community was
the latest in a number of events since Bush came to office two and a half
years ago that have ruffled the feathers of American Jewish leaders. Bush
is seeking American Jewish support this summer for two very different
agenda items — to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
to win re-election for another four years in office. But in seeking that
support, some Jewish leaders say, this White House has sidestepped the
traditionally liberal Jewish organizations because of frequent scuffles
over domestic policy issues. Instead, the administration has focused its
efforts on ingratiating itself with more conservative Jewish leaders
inside and outside the major policy groups, and on direct appeals to
Jewish voters. Public gestures, such as the June 11 White House dinner and
Bush´s recent visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp, are seen as
examples of such appeals ... The White House liaison to the Jewish
community, Adam Goldman, and others at the White House did not
respond to requests for on-the-record interviews ... Some analysts have,
for years, predicted a rightward shift in the Jewish vote, but the White
House believes that the Jewish vote is now truly in play, and that they
can win over a substantial percentage of the American Jewish community in
the 2004 election. Bush received about 19 percent of the Jewish vote in
the 2000 presidential election. Administration officials and their
supporters argue that American Jews across the political spectrum, even
those who oppose some of Bush´s domestic policy
positions, are likely to support the president — both politically and
financially — because of his strong actions against terrorism and on
behalf of Israel. ... David Frum, a former Bush
administration staffer, said the new dynamic between the White House and
the Jewish leadership is part of a movement away from the Democrats who
lead most Jewish groups and toward the general Jewish population, which he
believes is more supportive of Bush´s policies."
THE NEW THOUGHT
POLICE. The campaign to criminalize criticism of Israel,
by Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com, June 23, 2003
"Last week, after Israel targeted Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi – and,
instead, got a woman passer-by and a three year-old child, while 27 others
were injured. – George W. Bush came out with some very mild criticism of
Israel: 'I am troubled by the recent Israeli helicopter gunship attacks. I
regret the loss of innocent life. I also don't believe that the attacks
help Israeli security.' From the hysterical reaction, one might have
thought that he had uttered a blood libel, or suddenly taken to wearing a
kaffiyeh. Such a commotion! House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas),
reportedly strode into the Oval Office and threatened to push a resolution
through Congress offering unconditional support to Sharon and
implicitly rebuking the President. God forbid the President of the United
States should mourn the death of a three-year-old child whom the Israelis
say was inadvertently kill ... We hear constantly about the supposed rise
of anti-Semitic sentiments in Europe: this is not neo-Nazi activity, or
the "old" anti-Semitism of the Protocols, but the "new anti-Semitism,"
which boils down to criticism of Israel and its supporters. As officials
of the Anti-Defamation League recently put it in the Denver Post: 'Today's
strain of anti-Semitism usually targets Israel in some form. The most
socially acceptable way to vent anti-Semitism today is to criticize
Israel, the only state controlled by Jews, by holding Israel to standards
not applied to any other country. Of course, it is not anti-Semitic to
express sympathy with the Palestinian people or to disagree with Israeli
government policies. But a hateful bias is revealed when critics subject
Israel, and Israel alone, to invective and demonization, while
human-rights abuses of other countries are overlooked or excused.' If you
criticize "the only state controlled by Jews" you aren't necessarily
anti-Semitic – but you probably are. And just what are these standards
that Israel alone is held to? Any other country that separated out the
majority of the population on the basis of ethnicity, and subjected them
to draconian controls, controlling their movements, and keeping them
penned up in special ghettos, would long ago have been declared an
international pariah. How has Israel managed to get away with it – and,
not only that, but how have they managed to go on the offensive, and
target their critics as "bigots"? Make no mistake about it: they are
indeed on the attack, and not only in the occupied territories. At a
recent international conference on anti-Semitism called by the O.S.C.E. ,
addressed by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a number of Orwellian
proposals were floated "Another idea advanced by some delegates that would
certainly provoke disagreement if it ever became actual policy by O.S.C.E.
governments was that ways need to be found to control publications and Web
sites that promote anti-Semitism. One delegate, for example, Jean Kahn,
president of the Union of French Jewish Communities, argued that the Arab
television network Al Jazeera fomented anti-Semitism and that it should be
suppressed." The American representatives, far from dissenting, sat
complicit with this totalitarian proposal, and hailed others just as bad
if not worse. Giuliani, whose Mussolini-like reign in New York City made
the trains run on time, endorsed the totalitarian spirit of the proposals:
"Words aren't going to suffice to turn the tide of anti-Semitism, which is
once again growing in Europe and other parts of the world." Israel's
international amen corner is hoping that criticism of the Jewish state is
now going to be made a "hate crime," at least in Europe. So that if harsh
words for Ariel Sharon aren't accompanied by equally harsh words
for, say, Yasser Arafat, the author may find him- or herself fined,
jailed, and silenced. The ever-expanding definition of "anti-Semitism" is
certain to put a chill on Israel's critics, as the socialist EU imposes
limitations on speech throughout the continent: even, now, in England. The
campaign to stamp out all but the mildest criticism of Israel is also
likely to impinge on the Internet, as the New York Times reports: 'That
idea [the banning of Al Jazeera] was not challenged, given the nature of
the conference proceedings, but it also did not become a main theme of the
conference, though worries about the power of the Internet to spread
anti-Semitism did. 'Hypertexts and cybertexts are mostly imitations
through which the social deviancy present in society speaks,' Jacques
Picard, a professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland told the
conferees. His point was that the ideas being expressed on the Internet
hate sites are imitations of old anti-Semitic notions but that they have
gained new force both by the power of the Internet and by the anonymity of
many of those who use it. 'What's new here is that the Internet
disseminates these ideas with the protection of anonymity,' Mr. Picard
said. 'Anonymity should be lifted.'" This pompous frog flapping his lips
about "hypertexts and cybertexts" is the voice of the new Euro-commies, at
once absurd and deadly dangerous. "Hate speech" as defined by some
committee of commissars is a crime throughout Europe, including the
once-free British isles, as well as Canada. And our own would-be
commissars on this side of the Atlantic are all too eager to start
implementing the same totalitarian methods here. The Simon Wiesenthal
Center, to its ever-lasting shame, has been especially active on this
front, leading the charge to enforce and extend "hate speech" laws that
could never be enacted in the United States without first overturning the
First Amendment. That hasn't happened, as yet. They can get away with
banning newspapers and prohibiting speech in Iraq on the grounds of an
"incitement" to violence, but treating U.S. citizens like the inhabitants
of a conquered province is still out of bounds. For how much longer is an
open question…. What really disgusts me is the silence of the so-called
"libertarians," who are so quick to pounce on instances of censorship,
both real and imagined, especially when it comes to the Internet. Yet a
campaign that seeks to ban plain speech about Israel and its supporters is
ignored."
[The Jewish Thought Police Panel takes form:]
Defense
deputy gets authority for military tribunals,
by Barbara Starr, CNN, June 24, 2003
"U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as
'appointing authority' for military commissions to his deputy, according
to Pentagon officials. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a
delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban
suspects, the officials said. Under an order that President Bush issued in
November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused
of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no
right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to
judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include
death. Wolfowitz will exercise key powers in the commission
process. After the chief military prosecutor drafts charges against a
detainee, Wolfowitz will have the authority to approve those
charges and send the detainee to trial. As appointing authority, he also
will select military officers to sit on commissions. If commission members
cannot resolve matters related to procedures, motions or facts,
Wolfowitz will make the final decision. The Pentagon's Office of
General Counsel and chief prosecutor are reviewing information known as
'reasons to believe' a detainee might be subject to a commission, Pentagon
officials said."
Flirting with
Fascism. Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian
fascism than from the American Right,
By John Laughland, American Conservative,
June 30,. 2003
"[T]here is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal
political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but
instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early
decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen,
leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom
Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National
Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on
terror to include regime change in Iran. Ledeen has gained
notoriety in recent months for the following paragraph in his latest book,
The War Against the Terror Masters. In what reads like a prophetic
approval of the policy of chaos now being visited on Iraq, Ledeen
wrote, Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own
society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to
science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the
law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and
creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and
shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo
traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone.
They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very
existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They
must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to
advance our historic mission. This is not the first time Ledeen has
written eloquently on his love for “the democratic revolution” and
“creative destruction.” ... Ledeen’s conviction that the Right is
as revolutionary as the Left derives from his youthful interest in Italian
fascism. In 1975, Ledeen published an interview, in book form, with
the Italian historian Renzo de Felice, a man he greatly admires. It caused
a great controversy in Italy. Ledeen later made clear that he relished the
ire of the left-wing establishment precisely because “De Felice was
challenging the conventional wisdom of Italian Marxist historiography,
which had always insisted that fascism was a reactionary movement.” What
de Felice showed, by contrast, was that Italian fascism was both
right-wing and revolutionary. Ledeen had himself argued this very
point in his book, Universal Fascism, published in 1972. That work starts
with the assertion that it is a mistake to explain the support of fascism
by millions of Europeans “solely because they had been hypnotized by the
rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skilful propagandists.” “It
seems more plausible,” Ledeen argued, “to attempt to explain their
enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist
cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people.”
For Ledeen, as for the lifelong fascist theoretician and practitioner,
Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal lay in the fact that fascism was “the
Revolution of the 20th century.” Ledeen supports de Felice’s distinction
between “fascism-movement” and “fascism-regime.” Mussolini’s regime, he
says, was “authoritarian and reactionary”; by contrast, within
“fascism-movement,” there were many who were animated by “a desire to
renew.” These people wanted 'something more revolutionary: the old ruling
class had to be swept away so that newer, more dynamic elements—capable of
effecting fundamental changes—could come to power.'"
Israel to fight for U.S. visa exemption,
By Aluf Benn and Irit Rosenblum,
Haaretz (Israel), July 8, 2003
"Israel has launched a diplomatic offensive to persuade the United States
to exempt Israelis from requiring a visa to enter the country. Foreign
Minister Silvan Shalom raised the issue with Secretary of State
Colin Powell two weeks ago and has ordered the ministry's North America
desk to prepare a plan of action. Powell advised Shalom to exploit
Israel's good relations with Congress in the case ... Contrary to
popular myth, the U.S. is not strict about issuing visas to Israelis
because it fears their staying on in the country illegally. According to
the most recent report of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service,
of about one million people picked up for visa violations in the year
after 9/11, only 350 were Israelis, although 316,000 Israelis entered the
country legally that year, including tourists, businessmen, students,
legal workers and government officials. About 4,000 Israelis get green
cards for permanent residence every year, half of them after marrying
Americans ... According to U.S. Ambassador Dan Kurtzer,
about 94 percent of Israeli visa applications are
accepted."
Jewish lobby loses faith in Labor,
By Dennis Shanahan, The Australian, July 8,
2003
"LABOR'S traditionally strong relationship with the Jewish community has
fractured over Israel, and Simon Crean has become a target for Jewish
anger. Leading Jewish voices are suggesting Jews will shift their support
from Labor to the Liberals at the next election, and donations to Labor
are at risk. Senior ALP sources are aware of the deep Jewish discontent
with Labor and concede fundraising from the Jewish community may not be as
"dependable" as it once was. Jewish antipathy towards Labor stems from the
ALP's policy on Iraq and trenchant criticism of Israel from Labor back
benchers who described Israel as a "rogue state" and Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon as a "war criminal". The Jewish frustration with Labor
re-emerged after Kim Beazley - who is seen as a friend of Israel - failed
to win a leadership challenge. The Australian Jewish News has
editorialised on relations with the ALP, saying it
was "quite conceivable that some Australian Jews will shift their support
from Labor to Liberal at the next federal election based on one factor -
Israel". The newspaper said Israel had endured an "unrelenting
public-relations battering" played out in parliament with "an implicit
green light under Simon Crean's stewardship".
Congressional Aide
Reality Show May Air By Year End,
Drudge Report, July 9 2003
"Hoping to overcome Capitol Hill's perception of reality television, a
Hollywood producer developing a show about Capitol Hill Aides said he
would allow lawmakers to provide input on what appears on the air, ROLL
CALL reported on Wednesday. This should help alleviate the fears that many
people on Capitol Hill have about his goal of producing a reality
television show that chronicles the lives of young Hill aides. Producer
Peter Schankowitz of Vin di Bona Productions, explains, "It is really
a balance issue where I am going to have to make editorial choices along
with the broadcaster and along with the office to say what goes into the
show ... I am not going to offer them veto power over content, but I am
going to offer them meaningful consultation." There is concern among
people on Capitol Hill that a reality television show will inaccurately
portray the young aides by trying to capture salacious moments in their
day-to-day lives. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who met with Schankowitz,
said, "I would want to have pretty strong assurances from them that they
would stay on point with what they are describing." Tthe show would center
on a group house occupied by Congressional aides and other young people
living in the D.C. area. The idea is to capture these people at work,
providing viewers with a window into the inner-workings of Capitol Hill."
One step away from the "J" word. The "neo-conservatives" are
overwhelmingly Jewish. Their foreign policy revolves around defense of
Israel.
Congressman Ron Paul addresses the U.S. House of Representatives,
"Neo-conned,"
The Liberty Committee, July 10, 2003
"Unfortunately, after 9-ll, the cause of liberty suffered a setback. As a
result, millions of Americans voted for the less-than-perfect conservative
revolution because they believed in the promises of the politicians. Now
there’s mounting evidence to indicate exactly what happened to the
revolution. Government is bigger than ever, and future commitments are
overwhelming. Millions will soon become disenchanted with the new status
quo delivered to the American people by the advocates of limited
government and will find it to be just more of the old status quo.
Victories for limited government have turned out to be hollow indeed ...
In spite of the floundering economy, the Congress and the administration
continue to take on new commitments in foreign aid, education, farming,
medicine, multiple efforts at nation building, and preemptive wars around
the world. Already we’re entrenched in Iraq and Afghanistan, with plans to
soon add new trophies to our conquest. War talk abounds as to when Syria,
Iran and North Korea will be attacked. How did all
this transpire? Why did the government do it? Why haven’t the
people objected? How long will it go on before something is done? Does
anyone care? Will the euphoria of grand military victories—against
non-enemies—ever be mellowed? Someday, we as a legislative body must face
the reality of the dire situation in which we have allowed ourselves to
become enmeshed. Hopefully, it will be soon! We got here because ideas do
have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences, and even the best of
intentions have unintended consequences. We need to know exactly what the
philosophic ideas were that drove us to this point; then, hopefully,
reject them and decide on another set of intellectual parameters.
There is abundant evidence exposing those who drive
our foreign policy justifying preemptive war. Those who scheme are proud
of the achievements in usurping control over foreign policy. These are the
neoconservatives of recent fame. Granted, they are talented and
achieved a political victory that all policymakers must admire. But can
freedom and the Republic survive this takeover? That question should
concern us. Neoconservatives are obviously in
positions of influence and are well-placed throughout our government and
the media. An apathetic Congress put up little resistance and
abdicated its responsibilities over foreign affairs. The electorate was
easily influenced to join in the patriotic fervor supporting the military
adventurism advocated by the neoconservatives. The numbers of those who
still hope for truly limited government diminished and had their concerns
ignored these past 22 months, during the aftermath of 9-11. Members of
Congress were easily influenced to publicly support any domestic policy or
foreign military adventure that was supposed to help reduce the threat of
a terrorist attack. Believers in limited government were harder to find.
Political money, as usual, played a role in pressing Congress into
supporting almost any proposal suggested by the neocons. This
process—where campaign dollars and lobbying efforts affect policy—is
hardly the domain of any single political party, and unfortunately, is the
way of life in Washington. There are many reasons why government continues
to grow. It would be naïve for anyone to expect otherwise. Since 9-11,
protection of privacy, whether medical, personal or financial, has
vanished. Free speech and the Fourth Amendment have been under constant
attack. Higher welfare expenditures are endorsed by the leadership of both
parties. Policing the world and nation-building issues are popular
campaign targets, yet they are now standard operating procedures. There’s
no sign that these programs will be slowed or reversed until either we are
stopped by force overseas (which won’t be soon) or we go broke and can no
longer afford these grandiose plans for a world empire (which will
probably come sooner than later.) None of this
happened by accident or coincidence. Precise philosophic ideas
prompted certain individuals to gain influence to implement these plans.
The neoconservatives—a name they gave themselves—diligently worked their
way into positions of power and influence. They documented their goals,
strategy and moral justification for all they hoped to accomplish. Above
all else, they were not and are not conservatives dedicated to limited,
constitutional government ... Many neocons now in positions of influence
in Washington can trace their status back to Professor Leo Strauss
of the University of Chicago. One of Strauss’ books was Thoughts on
Machiavelli. This book was not a condemnation of Machiavelli’s philosophy.
Paul Wolfowitz actually got his PhD under Strauss. Others
closely associated with these views are Richard Perle, Eliot
Abrams, Robert Kagan and William Kristol. All are key
players in designing our new strategy of preemptive war. Others include:
Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute; former CIA
Director James Woolsy; Bill Bennett of Book of Virtues fame; Frank
Gaffney; Dick Cheney; and Donald Rumsfeld. There are just too many to
mention who are philosophically or politically connected to the neocon
philosophy in some varying degree. The godfather of modern-day
neo-conservatism is considered to be Irving Kristol, father of
Bill Kristol, who set the stage in 1983 with his publication
Reflections of a Neoconservative. In this book, Kristol also
defends the traditional liberal position on welfare. More important than
the names of people affiliated with neo-conservatism are the views they
adhere to. Here is a brief summary of the general understanding of what
neocons believe: 1. They agree with Trotsky on permanent revolution,
violent as well as intellectual. 2. They are for redrawing the map of the
Middle East and are willing to use force to do so. 3. They believe in
preemptive war to achieve desired ends. 4. They accept the notion that the
ends justify the means—that hard-ball politics is a moral necessity. 5.
They express no opposition to the welfare state. 6. They are not bashful
about an American empire; instead they strongly endorse it. 7. They
believe lying is necessary for the state to survive. 8. They believe a
powerful federal government is a benefit. 9. They believe pertinent facts
about how a society should be run should be held by the elite and withheld
from those who do not have the courage to deal with it. 10. They believe
neutrality in foreign affairs is ill-advised. 11. They hold Leo Strauss
in high esteem. 12. They believe imperialism, if progressive in nature, is
appropriate. 13. Using American might to force American ideals on others
is acceptable. Force should not be limited to the defense of our country.
14. 9-11 resulted from the lack of foreign entanglements, not from too
many. 15. They dislike and despise libertarians (therefore, the same
applies to all strict constitutionalists.) 16. They endorse attacks on
civil liberties, such as those found in the Patriot Act, as being
necessary. 17. They unconditionally support Israel
and have a close alliance with the Likud Party."
The truth about the Jewish Lobby.
Harry Truman's Forgotten Diary. 1947 Writings Offer Fresh Insight on the
President,
By Rebecca Dana and Peter Carlson, Washington Post,
July 11, 2003; Page A01
"The Jews, I find are very, very selfish," President Harry S. Truman wrote
in a 1947 diary that was recently discovered on the shelves of the Truman
Library in Independence, Mo., and released by the National Archives
yesterday. Written sporadically during a turbulent year of Truman's
presidency, the diary contains about 5,500 words on topics ranging from
the death of his mother to comic banter with a British aristocrat. But the
most surprising comments were Truman's remarks on Jews, written on July
21, 1947, after the president had a conversation with Henry Morgenthau,
the Jewish former treasury secretary. Morgenthau called to talk
about a Jewish ship in Palestine -- possibly the Exodus, the legendary
ship carrying 4,500 Jewish refugees who were refused entry into Palestine
by the British, then rulers of that land. "He'd no business, whatever to
call me," Truman wrote. "The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they
have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews
to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed." Truman then
went into a rant about Jews: "The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.
They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or
Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the
Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial
or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or
mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no
difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor,
Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember
their past condition when prosperity comes." Yesterday, those comments
startled scholars because Truman is known as a president who acted to help
Jews in postwar Europe and who supported recognition of Israel in 1948,
when his State Department opposed it. "My reaction is: Wow! It did
surprise me because of what I know about Truman's record," says Sara J.
Bloomfield, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Truman's
sympathy for the plight of Jews was very apparent." But Truman's comments
were, Bloomfield says, "typical of a sort of cultural anti-Semitism that
was common at that time in all parts of American society. This was an
acceptable way to talk." "Truman was often critical, sometimes
hypercritical, of Jews in his diary entries and in his correspondences,
but this doesn't make him an anti-Semite," says John Lewis Gaddis, a
professor of history at Yale University and a prominent Cold War scholar.
"Anyone who played the role he did in creating the state of Israel can
hardly be regarded in that way."
The Jewish takeover of American foreign policy
What Israel does to Palestine, we are doing to Iraq.Want to criticise the
Israelis for shooting stone-throwers in Gaza? The US does the same in
Falujah, by Robert Fisk, The Independent
(UK), July12,2003
"A few days ago, the American forces in Baghdad drove 17 truckloads of
rubble and dirt up to the secret military area of Baghdad airport to
air-freight to the United States. No journalists reported on this macabre
operation, even if they knew about it. For the muck came from the site of
an atrocity committed by the US Air Force at the end of its bombardment of
Iraq. The Americans believed Saddam Hussein was hiding in a suburb called
Mansour and so, despite knowing that the area was packed with civilians -
the operation would not be "risk-free", as one of the US spokesmen later
claimed, the nearest he acknowledged that it was a gross breach of the
Geneva conventions - they dropped "bunker-buster" bombs on the densely
packed houses of Mansour. They killed 16 civilians, including children.
But where was Saddam? It was a sign of their desperation that almost two
months after they occupied Baghdad, the Americans suddenly began
scrabbling through the Mansour debris. Back in the United States,
scientists would be tasked to hunt for evidence of Saddam's DNA in the
dirt. I'm not sure whether precedents allow others to commit war crimes in
the future - or whether a repeat performance allows others to justify past
precedents. But does Mansour not remind you of Ariel Sharon's little
operation in Gaza a few months ago, when he ordered an Israeli pilot to
drop a massive bomb on a crowded Gaza slum, demolishing a building,
killing a Hamas official and - by the strange and beautiful symmetry of
such atrocities - massacring 16 Palestinian civilians, including many
children? We condemned Sharon's slaughter of the innocent, which he called
"a great success". But how can we do so now, when we are silent about our
own murders in Mansour? Want to criticise the Israeli army for brutally
shooting down stone-throwers in the West Bank and Gaza? Well, we'd better
be careful now that the US army does the same in Falujah. Care to demand
an end to the torture of Palestinian prisoners at the notorious Russian
Compound interrogation centre in Jerusalem? Not much point any more. With
three prisoners beaten or tortured to death by American interrogators at
the Bagram prison in Afghanistan - the US admitted to two of the three
"deaths under interrogation" back on 6 March - and the scandal of
Guatanamo with its trussed-up, drugged and hooded prisons, its drumhead
courts and its probable death chambers (for Brits, too, it seems), we can
forget Israel's beatings. Loud were we in our outrage when Israel's
indisciplined soldiery looted and vandalised the Palestinian homes of
Ramallah last year - but we can complain no more. For now we know that
America's indisiplined soldiery (from the 3rd Infantry Division, to be
exact) looted their way through Baghdad airport in the days after its
capture on 3 April. All praise to Time magazine - of all publications -
for breaking this story. But please, no more criticism of Israel's venal
soldiers. Europeans chorused their indignation at Israel's murder of
"wanted" Palestinians - or "targeted killing", as Israel and the BBC like
to call this revolting practice. Yet now that America openly boasts just
the same vile tactics - attacking cars in Yemen, convoys in Iraq, villages
in Afghanistan (and just who did they kill in that latest convoy attack
near the Syrian border?) - we must be silent. Last year, the Israelis
produced a "dossier" culled from captured Palestinian documents, "proving"
that Arafat was directing "terrorism" against Israel. The papers,
mistranslated and doctored, proved nothing of the kind. But after Tony
Blair's mendacious "dodgy dossier" before the Iraq war, who are we to
criticise Israel for its lies? And how can we ever protest Israel's
flagrant violation of UN Resolution 242 and its occupation of Palestinian
territory when the United States is occupying the entire ancient land of
Iraq after illegally invading the country, killing thousands of its
civilians, taking over its oil fields and then failing even to capture the
murderous dictator who brutalised his own people (let alone the weapons of
mass destruction which don't exist?) Yes, precedents are dangerous things.
Take the signal prescient event that occurred in the life of many
Independent readers. A massive construction, symbol of a nation's power,
was destroyed by "terrorists". The nation's president immediately signed
into law a decree for the "protection of the people and the state",
including mass arrests and the right to impose "restrictions on personal
liberty ... violations of the privacy of postal ... and telephonic
communications and warrants for house searches ..." The government then
said it had "proof" that "terrorists" were going to attack the homeland,
to destroy "government buildings, museums ... and essential plants". This
legislation then allowed the elected leader of that nation to embark on a
series of cruel occupations, after the second of which he announced that
"not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators". The public building
destroyed by "terrorists" was the Reichstag, the "enabling legislation" to
destroy human rights legislation was signed by Hindenburg, the "proof" of
the terrorist plots was provided by the Prussian government. The elected
leader who claimed to be "liberating" Austria was Adolf Hitler."
HILLARY A
SHABBOS PREACHER, HILLARY CLINTON Downright kosher,
New York Post, July 13, 2003
"Mazel tov to Hillary Clinton. New York's junior senator delighted
and captivated congregants during Saturday services at The Hampton
Synagogue in Westhampton. Clinton, whose step-grandfather was Jewish,
addressed a number of topics, including terrorism and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The Senate has come through with a
significant commitment of funds for the Israeli Defense Fund," she said to
applause. "We will, I'm sure, be approving that in the coming weeks." On
Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen: "He must demonstrate in deed what he
has pledged to accomplish in word." On the war against terrorism, she
said: "Eventually we will be victorious because of what we stand for and
who we are."
With presidential race so crowded, Jewish donors pulled different ways,
By Matthew E. Berger , Jewish Telegraphic
Agency, July 17, 2003
"Faced with a plethora of candidates and a complex set of political
issues, many Jewish Democratic political contributors have chosen to
support more than one candidate in the 2004 presidential primaries. While
it’s impossible to know exactly how much of each candidate’s war chest
comes from Jews, Jewish donors traditionally have been active political
givers to Democratic candidates. Fund-raisers in the Jewish community for
several Democratic candidates report that some donors are offering small
donations but are reluctant to give the maximum $2,000 individual donation
to a single candidate, while others are giving the maximum to two or more
candidates. Among the famous names giving large amounts to multiple
candidates are entertainment magnate Haim Saban and Daniel
Abraham, founder of the Slim Fast Foods Company and an activist for
Middle East peace. Donors say that they support the policy positions of
more than one Democrat hopeful, and have formed relationships with people
on different campaigns over the years, creating a sense of obligation to
several candidates. “A litmus test for me is a
candidate has to be good on Israel,” said Buttenwieser, who is
Jewish. “But all of these candidates are good on Israel” ... “To
me, political fund raising is all about relationships,” said Lonnie
Kaplan, a former president of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee who is on Lieberman’s finance committee. “When I ask my
friends for help, I am guessing that other people have asked them for help
as well" ... Other campaigns say Lieberman
fund-raisers have been “playing the Jewish card,” appealing to the shared
heritage of the donors and asking donors to preserve the viability of a
Jewish candidate. “A lot of them felt an obligation to give some
amount to Lieberman,” one political fund-raiser said. The Lieberman
campaign denies that it is using the candidate’s religion as a
fund-raising tool. “The pitch has never been one of entitlement,” a source
close to the Lieberman campaign said. “If anyone expected the American
Jewish community to flop behind the Jewish guy, it’s ridiculous.”
Spokesman Jano Cabrera said the Lieberman campaign is asking for the
support of the Jewish community and other communities as well. “It’s
always easy for anonymous sources to make wild accusations,” he said. “We
are pleased with our Jewish support, but we recognize we can do better.”
Sources close to the campaign acknowledge that they face trepidation on
the part of some older Jews — mostly born before World War II — who are
concerned that having a Jewish president might spark anti-Semitism. But
that sentiment is counterbalanced by a sense of pride and energy among
younger Jews, the campaign says. Complicating the
fund-raising efforts of several candidates is the strong support in the
Jewish community for President Bush’s actions against terrorism and on
behalf of Israel."
Julian Borger reports on the shadow
rightwing Judeo-Con intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the
CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force,
by Julian Borger, Guardian (UK), July 17,
2003
"As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to
give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming
increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small,
well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that
helped steer America into war. It represents the Bush administration's
second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability
to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal
institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging
for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and
contaminating its own source of intelligence. According to former Bush
officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration
figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by
ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart,
the Defence Intelligence Agency. The agency, called the Office of Special
Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to
second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline
conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at
the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. The ideologically
driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the
official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved
powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the
CIA by establishing a justification for war ... Democratic congressman
David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged
with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside
of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information
collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with
established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on
to the national security council and the president without having been
vetted with anyone other than political appointees." The OSP was an open
and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi
opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel,
ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel
specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with
more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to
authorise. "None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon
through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits.
Instead, they were waved in on Mr [Douglas] Feith's
authority without having to fill in the usual forms. The exchange of
information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other
Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party. In 1996, he
and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as
advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy
paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the
Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and
Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or
destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe. The Israeli influence was
revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in
the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been
found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence
sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime
minister. The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence,
rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious
stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House."
The Entertainer:
Amid the Ruins of Babylon, Paul Wolfowitz Finds "Final Vindication,"
by Michael A. Hoffman II, Hoffman Wire, July
22, 2003
"With village idiot Bush appointing clinically insane spokesmen like [Paul]
Wolfowitz and Lubavitcher cultist Ari Fleischer, the US is
as patently thuggish and ugly as the hideous Ariel Sharon and his
government. McNamara didn't dare admit that US government assassinations
were the deliberate result of high level White House decisions, but last
autumn Ari Fleischer frankly told the nation that war with Iraq
could be avoided at the cost of "one bullet." Here was open US government
incitement to the assassination of head of state Saddam Hussein by the
President's own press secretary. With crazies like Fleischer at the
Washington wheel, the US government is losing goodwill and influence
around the world, while opening a lid on a retributive Pandora's box
brimming with vendetta, state terror and popular rage. Pandora's door
swings both ways, of course. One can't help noting in the wake of
Fleischer's obscene remark, that the war with Iraq might also have
been prevented with a single bullet aimed at another head of state besides
Saddam. I confess to being an unabashed Wolfowitz fan. Who better
to bring this filthy, rotten System crashing down upon the lodge brothers
than the Wolf of the White House himself, the exalted policy wonk who, in
actuality, is little more than a tribalist of the most primitive and
chauvinistic dye? No American government can long maintain its prestige
and effectiveness when led by a fanatic (the p.c. term is "activist"),
from the fever swamps of Israeli apartheid. The ruins of Babylon are found
not only in Iraq, but on the banks of the Potomac."
States Put Up Fight, Dollars To Defeat Divestment Push, By E.J.
KESSLER,
[Jewish] Forward, January 31, 2003
"New York is the latest state to adopt measures to counter the movement to
force governments and universities to withdraw their investments in
Israel. The state's second highest-ranking official, Comptroller Alan
Hevesi, told the Forward that he intends to increase the investments
of the state's $105 billion pension in Israel, and has spoken to
entrepreneurs and fund managers about plans to lead an economic
development mission there. "We want more jobs, business and economic
growth, which are excellent strategies for advancing the peace process,"
Hevesi said. Hevesi joins politicians from Pennsylvania and
California, among others, in speaking out against divestment and in
increasing investments in the Jewish state even as pro-Palestinian
activists increase their calls for divestment at colleges and
universities. "The divestment movement is not gaining ground. If anything,
we are finding that people are rallying around investing in Israel," said
a spokesman for State of Israel Bonds, Raphael Rothstein.
Rothstein said 2002 was a banner year for his organization, which sold
$1.3 billion in bonds. "We sold South Carolina, where there are very few
Jews, $5 million. Illinois bought $10 million....We have close to two
dozen states buying bonds. We've had very good support from states, labor
unions and pension funds." While such investments help shore up Israel's
shaky economy, the rhetorical support of Israel by American officials also
has been strong and welcome, Jewish officials say. Last month, calling the
divestment campaign "immoral," Philadelphia Mayor John Street recommended
to the city's pension board that it buy $10 million more in Israel Bonds,
a six-fold increase its investment in the Jewish state. "I am particularly
outraged by the immoral campaign calling for disinvestment in Israel,"
Street said in a speech to the Philadelphia chapter of the Anti-Defamation
League. "This initiative to injure Israel's economy and reputation is
reprehensible.... It is particularly offensive to me given the effort to
analogize this divestment movement to the campaign used against South
Africa," continued Street, who is black. "I was the author of Philadelphia
legislation recommending divestiture as a means to fight apartheid and >
the racist South African state. I find it disgraceful that some could use
that model to attack the one Jewish state and only Middle East democracy
and a country that, every day, is a front line in the war on terrorism."
Two weeks ago, New York City Comptroller William Thompson announced the
purchase of $5 million of Israel Bonds for the city teachers' pension
fund, its first such direct purchase. >In August, California's State
Assembly passed a bill urging the University of California, a flash point
of the divestment movement, to reject calls to divest its pension funds
from companies with ties to Israel. A petition calling for divestment at
the university has garnered more than 6,000 signatures, including those of
211 faculty members. While the University of California is a separate
entity that does not necessarily take direction from the state, the
legislature "thought it was important to take a clear stance against this
kind of movement," said the bill's sponsor, Assemblyman Keith Richman."
[Judeocentric "neo-con" fascism:]
NEOCOSERVATISM, WHERE TROTSKY MEETS STALIN AND HITLER,
by Srdja Trifkovic, Chronicles Magazine, July
23, 2003
"The neoconservatives are often depicted as former Trotskyites who have
morphed into a new, closely related life form. It is pointed out that many
early neocons—including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol
and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert
Wohlstetter—belonged to the anti-Stalinist far left in the late 1930s
and early 1940s, and that their successors, including Joshua Muravchik,
and Carl Gershman, came to neoconservatism through the Socialist
Party at a time when it was Trotskyite in outlook and politics. As early
as 1963 Richard Hofstadter commented on the progression of many
ex-Communists from the paranoid left to the paranoid right, clinging all
the while to the fundamentally Manichean psychology that underlies both.
Four decades later the dominant strain of neoconservatism is declared to
be a mixture of geopolitical militarism and “inverted socialist
internationalism.” Blanket depictions of neoconservatives as redesigned
Trotskyites need to be corrected in favor of a more nuanced analysis. In
several important respects the neoconservative world outlook has diverged
from the Trotskyite one and acquired some striking similarities with
Stalinism and German National Socialism. Today’s
neoconservatives share with Stalin and Hitler an ideology of nationalist
socialism and internationalist imperialism. The similarities deserve
closer scrutiny and may contribute to a better understanding of the most
influential group in the U.S. foreign policy-making community.
Certain important differences remain, notably the neoconservatives’
hostility not only to Nazi race-theory but even to the most benign
understanding of national or ethnic coherence. On the surface, there are
also glaring differences in economics. However, the neoconservative
glorification of the free market is more rhetoric, designed to placate the
businessmen who fund them, than reality. In fact, the neoconservatives
favor not free enterprise but a kind of state capitalism—within the
context of the global apparatus of the World Bank and the IMF—that Hitler
would have appreciated. Some form of gradual but irreversible and
desirable withering away of the state is a key tenet of the Trotskyite
theoretical outlook. The neoconservatives, by contrast, are statists par
excellence. Their core belief—that society can be managed by the state in
both its political and economic life—is equally at odds with the
traditional conservative outlook and with the non-Stalinist Left. In this
important respect the neoconservatives are much closer to Stalinism and
National Socialism. They do not want to abolish the
state; they want to control it—especially if the state they control is
capable of controlling all others. They are not “patriotic” in any
conventional sense of the term and do not identify themselves with the
real and historic America but see the United States merely as the host
organism for the exercise of their Will to Power. Whereas the American
political tradition has been fixated on the dangers of centralized state
power, on the desirability of limited government and non-intervention in
foreign affairs, the neoconservatives exalt and worship state power, and
want America to become a hyper-state in order to be an effective global
hegemon."
Campaign Confidential,
[Jewish] Forward, July 25, 2003
"Their Guy: Jewish Republicans are pointing to the pro-Israel credentials
of President Bush's new deputy press secretary, Dan Senor, as
evidence that Jewish concerns are being noted regarding that position now
that Ari Fleischer has left his post as press secretary. Senor got
his start in politics in 1993 as an intern at the lobbying powerhouse the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "Whether I was learning the ins
and outs of Washington with my fellow interns or attending briefings on
Capitol Hill, my internship at Aipac prepared me for my work in politics,"
Aipac's Web site quotes Senor as saying. More recently, Senor
served as deputy press secretary for the top American administrator in
Iraq, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer."
Commitment to Israel 'unshakable': Bush,
CBC News, July 29, 2003
"U.S. President George Bush told Israel Tuesday to carefully consider the
consequences of its actions in the Middle East peace process, while
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon defended Israel's building of a
security fence. "Much hard work remains to be done by Israelis and
Palestinians and by their neighbours," Bush said. "I also urged the prime
minister to carefully consider all the consequences of Israel's actions as
we move forward on the road to peace," he added. Bush urged both Israel
and the Palestinians to do more to move the peace process forward.
"America is firmly committed to the security of Israel as a Jewish state
and we are firmly committed to the safety of the Israeli people," said
Bush. "My commitment to the security of Israel is unshakable," he added."
[Our Congressmen are now "Israelis at heart." The subsuming of
America to Judeocentric Israelism is nearly total.]
Palestinians Must Bear Burden of Peace, DeLay Tells Israelis,
By JAMES BENNET, New York Times, July 31,
2003
"Calling himself "an Israeli at heart," Tom DeLay, the House majority
leader, told Israeli legislators today that the burden for achieving peace
here rested with the Palestinians, who he said must eradicate terrorism.
Speaking a day after President Bush met at the White House with the
Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, Mr. DeLay said Mr. Bush had "made
clear that the prospects of peace are the responsibility of the
Palestinian Authority," which must "fight terror and dismantle terrorist
capabilities." Mr. Bush also urged Mr. Sharon to ease restrictions on
Palestinians and to restrain Israel's own actions. Yet Mr. DeLay, while
declaring that Palestinians "have been oppressed and abused," said the
culprit -- and "their enemy" -- was Yasir Arafat, not Israel. "Israel is
not the problem," he said. "Israel is the solution." An evangelical
Christian, Mr. DeLay is a leader in Washington of the Christian Zionist
movement, a bloc of conservative Republicans whose strong support for the
Jewish state is based on their interpretation of the Bible. Before leaving
Washington, Mr. DeLay was sharply critical of the international peace plan
known as the road map, which envisions a Palestinian state in three years.
Mr. Bush says he is committed to the plan, but Mr. DeLay said last week in
an interview with The New York Times, "I can't imagine this
president supporting a state of terrorists." He added, "You'd have to
change almost an entire generation's culture."
Flawed
decision-making Cliques, groupthink dominate work of Defense Department,
by KAREN KWIATKOWSKI, Charlotte Observer
(NC), Auguest 1, 2003
"After eight years of Bill Clinton, many military officers breathed a sigh
of relief when George W. Bush was named president. I was in that
plurality. At one time, I would have believed the administration's
accusations of anti-Americanism against anyone who questioned the
integrity and good faith of President Bush, Vice President Cheney or
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. However, while working from May 2002
through February in the Pentagon, I observed the environment in which
decisions about postwar Iraq were made. Those observations changed
everything. If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of
"intelligence" found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the
post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false
steps, one need look no further than the process inside the office of the
secretary of defense. I can identify three prevailing themes. •
Functional isolation of the professional corps. Civil service and
active-duty military professionals were noticeably uninvolved in key areas
of interest to Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, Deputy
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. In
terms of Israel and Iraq, all primary staff work was conducted by
political appointees ... Cross-agency cliques: Much has been
written about the role of the founding members of the Project for a New
American Century, the Center for Security Policy and the American
Enterprise Institute and their new positions in the Bush administration.
Certainly, appointees sharing particular viewpoints are expected to
congregate, and that an overwhelming number of these appointees have such
organizational ties is neither conspiratorial nor unusual. What is unusual
is the way this network operates solely with its membership across the
various agencies -- in particular the State Department, the National
Security Council and the Office of the Vice President. I personally
witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their
counterparts at State or the National Security Council because that
particular decision would be processed through a different channel. •
Groupthink. Defined as "reasoning or decision-making by a group, often
characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points
of view," groupthink was, and probably remains, the predominant
characteristic of Pentagon Middle East policy development. The result of
groupthink is the elevation of opinion into a kind of accepted "fact," and
uncritical acceptance of extremely narrow and isolated points of view. The
result of groupthink has been extensively studied in the history of
American foreign policy, and it will have a prominent role when the
history of the Bush administration is written. Groupthink, in this most
recent case leading to invasion and occupation of Iraq, will be found, I
believe, to have caused a subversion of constitutional limits on executive
power and a co-opting through deceit of a large segment of the Congress."
Former employee of Denise Rich claims she told him to illegally donate to
Hillary Clinton, Newsday, August 2, 2003
"A lawsuit filed against Democratic fund-raiser Denise Rich [wife
of criminal Marc Rich who as pardoned by President Clinton] charges
that she asked an employee to make an illegal donation to Sen. Hillary
Clinton and then fired him after he told her he had HIV. Jimmy Hester, who
worked for Rich's record company until February 2002, reportedly
filed the $30 million lawsuit Friday in federal court in Manhattan. The
suit, reported in the Daily News and the New York Post on Saturday, claims
Rich told Hester to donate $2,000 to Clinton's Senate campaign in October
1999 and said she would reimburse him for the money. The lawsuit said it
was "clear" to Hester that "this demand was made so that Rich could
disguise the source of the contribution." Federal law bans campaign
contributions disguised in the name of another person. Filings for
Clinton's campaign show that Hester made two $1,000 donations, the News
said. Hester also claims that Rich fired him after he told her he had HIV
and hid the reason by accusing him of sexually harassing another employee,
according to the lawsuit. Rich's spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, told
the News and the Post that Rich was traveling Friday and could not
comment."
Ginsburg: Int'l Law Shaped Court Rulings,
by GINA HOLLAND, Kansas City Star, August
2, 2003
"The Supreme Court is looking beyond America's borders for guidance in
handling cases on issues like the death penalty and gay rights, Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Saturday. The justices referred to the
findings of foreign courts this summer in their own ruling that states may
not punish gay couples for having sex. And in 2002, the court said that
executing mentally retarded people is unconstitutionally cruel. That
ruling noted that the practice was opposed internationally. "Our island or
lone ranger mentality is beginning to change," Ginsburg said during
a speech to the American Constitution Society, a liberal lawyers group
holding its first convention. Justices "are becoming more open to
comparative and international law perspectives," said Ginsburg, who
has supported a more global view of judicial decision making. Ginsburg
cited an international treaty in her vote in June to uphold the use of
race in college admissions. The shift has angered some conservatives.
Justice Antonin Scalia, in the gay sex case, wrote with two colleagues
that the court should not "impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on
Americans." David Rivkin Jr., a conservative Washington attorney,
said foreign trends can be helpful to legislators in setting policy, but
not to judges in interpreting the U.S. Constitution."
]
N.Korea Says Will Hold Talks, but Not with Bolton,
by Sameul Len, Reuters, August 3, 2003
"North Korea said on Sunday it would go ahead with six-way talks to
resolve a crisis over its nuclear ambitions but would refuse any dialogue
with a U.S. arms control envoy after his sharp criticism of the country
and its leader. In a speech on Thursday U.S. Undersecretary of State John
Bolton said life in the communist country was a "hellish nightmare," and
accused leader Kim Jong-il of living like royalty while keeping hundreds
of thousands in prison camps and millions more mired in poverty. Analysts
said North Korea's decision not to pull out of the six-way talks, in spite
of the scathing U.S. criticism, showed that the reclusive country had few
options left. "If the six-way talks don't take place, then what's left are
a tougher U.S. stance and the United Nations Security Council," said Yu
Suk-ryul, a North Korea expert at South Korea's Institute of Foreign
Affairs and National Security. Kim Jong-il was in the news again on
Sunday, with official media reporting that he ran unopposed for a seat in
North Korea's rubber-stamp legislature, the Supreme People's Assembly.
Reporting on the first general election the Stalinist state has staged for
more than five years, the KCNA news agency said 96.4 percent of eligible
voters had cast their ballots by 2 p.m. North Korea said on Saturday that
any move by the United States to take the crisis to the U.N. Security
Council would derail the planned talks and could lead to war. North Korea
and the United States said on Friday they had agreed to hold six-way talks
on the nuclear standoff. China, Japan, Russia and South Korea will also
attend. Pyongyang previously insisted on bilateral talks with the United
States. Washington had rejected that option, demanding North Korea
dismantle its nuclear weapons programs first."
Castenada is of Jewish heritage.
Castañeda eyes run for Mexican presidency in 2006,
By Jerry Kammer, San Diego Union-Tribune,
August 3, 2003
"In a speech last week at a prominent think tank here, one of Mexico's
most provocative, colorful and controversial political figures sounded
very much like a man with a plan to be his country's next president.
Jorge Castañeda, an urbane and admittedly arrogant Princeton
University graduate fluent in English, French and Spanish, proposed a
package of political, social and fiscal reforms that he says could
transform the country in a decade. He said he wants to energize civil
society and stanch the U.S.-bound flow of millions of migrants who can
find no place in a land of shrunken possibilities. "This can be done, and
if we do it, we will have a different country, a country where people
fit," said Castañeda, speaking to a large crowd at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars. A former
Marxist now bitterly estranged from Mexico's political left,
Castañeda is presenting himself as a clear-eyed and pragmatic centrist
with a program for pulling Mexico out of the political stalemate and
torpor that has hounded the presidency of Vicente Fox. In January,
Castañeda resigned as Fox's foreign minister, mostly because he was
frustrated that his bold effort to win a sweeping immigration deal with
the United States had bogged down in the aftermath of the 2001 terror
attacks. He took criticism in the United States for continuing to press a
Bush administration preoccupied by terrorism, but his stubborn insistence
won him praise south of the border, where nearly everyone has a friend or
relative in the United States. As Castañeda noted in his speech, 10
percent of Mexicans have left the country. Nearly all are in the United
States. For the past several months, Castañeda has been
barnstorming Mexico, testing the presidential waters in the sort of town
hall-type meetings familiar in the United States to the field of Democrats
who want to take on President Bush next year. He said he plans to continue
his cross-country evangelizing for about another six months "and then make
decisions I have to make regarding the future."
Jews know that Lieberman is a red flag for "Anti-Semitism" to
flourish. A Jewish president will reduce Jewish power and ethnocentrism to
its bare elements. That may be Lieberman's main problem in getting more
Jewish money.
Lieberman
Unveils Drive to Gain Jewish Donors,
Fox News, Tuesday, August 05, 2003
"Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Joe Lieberman has unveiled
an Internet fund-raising drive devoted entirely to attracting
contributions from Jewish Americans, highlighting a subplot in the
Democratic race. The push for Jewish support reveals that the nation's
first credible Jewish candidate for the White House has not automatically
attracted the financial resources of American Jews, especially Jewish
Democrats. The Connecticut senator plays down the whiff of history and
Jewish-American aspirations that would come with a win. "I am running for
president as an American who happens to be Jewish, not the other way
around," Lieberman told Fox News. "I am proud of my heritage. I have been
pleased to find in this campaign that a lot of others are proud that I
have this barrier-breaking opportunity." ... "A lot of donors are giving
to more than one Democrat in this crowded field of nine," Lewis said. One
problem for Lieberman is that President Bush's Israel policy is playing
well with many Jewish Democrats. Another problem is that Lieberman is
selling centrism to liberal Democrats who tend to vote and contribute in
large numbers in Democratic primaries and caucuses, say political
analysts. "Sen. Lieberman's problem in the Jewish community, I mean first
of all, we're talking about donors and not voters — is that he's to the
right of the Jewish activist donor who's going to be involved in the game
now," Kessler said. With that in mind, Lieberman is retooling, including
adding a fund-raising method to his Web site that attempts to appeal to
new Jewish donors. The 1,800 Challenge uses the number 18, which carries
great significance in the Jewish faith. The Hebrew alphabet assigns a
letter to each number and "18" translates into "Chai," meaning life. "It's
a kind of a soft ethnic pitch. It should bring in some money on the
margins," Kessler said."
The 'wall' and the 'messiah',
by Robert Novak, Town Hall, August 4, 2003
"One of Washington's leading private power brokers, with intimate contacts
inside the Bush administration, suggested a meaningful line for the
president of the United States when he met the prime minister of Israel at
the White House last Tuesday: "Mr. Sharon, tear down this wall!" In
fact, President Bush did not come close. A self-confident Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon encountered no resistance from the president when he
made clear he would continue building the "security fence" as a physical
barrier between Palestinians and Israelis. Bush's passivity was
underscored by a remarkable performance inside Israel at the same time by
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The powerful Republican leader,
addressing members of the Knesset, did not mention the "wall" in an
unqualified call to arms for Israel. This combination of events was
profoundly depressing for those Republicans, in the administration and
Congress, who have prayed that George W. Bush would capitalize on the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein by insisting on a Middle East settlement
including a Palestinian state. They feel that the president's intent is
pure, but that he is overpowered by the combination of Sharon and
DeLay. Nobody can quite recall anything to match the four-day reception
afforded DeLay in Israel. The former pest exterminator from Sugarland,
Texas, has been derisively dubbed the "Messiah" by a Democratic political
operative active in Jewish affairs for the past generation. Sharon
delayed his eighth visit to Washington to confer with Bush for a private
session with DeLay. DeLay represents the unconditional support for Israel
that once was limited in Congress to Jewish Democrats, who are far less
influential than the born-again Christian. He is an important
counterweight to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has convinced Bush
to lead in pursuing the "roadmap" for the Palestinian state essential to
peace. Bush sincerely accepts this, but shares with DeLay his Christian
beliefs and uncompromising commitment to the Jewish state. The president,
according to close associates, also is drawn to "Ariel," as he
calls him. The rough-hewn style of the 75-year-old former general may
offend some fellow statesmen, but Bush admires and likes him. In
one-on-one sessions, the president finds it difficult to confront the
prime minister. Sharon's confidence in his relationship with both
Bush and DeLay may convince him it is no longer necessary to continue the
visits to Capitol Hill common to his previous stays in Washington. For the
first time as prime minister, Sharon did not schedule a session with the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee (where he could expect vigorous
examination, from both sides of the aisle, about the wall) ... Last
Tuesday's meeting in the White House duplicated past dialogues between
Bush and Sharon -- the president backing away from confrontation after
spending time with the old Israeli warrior. Four days earlier while
meeting with Abbas, Bush had promised to push Sharon about the
wall. In their joint press conference in the Rose Garden, however,
Sharon defied U.S. opposition to the wall, and Bush supported the
prime minister's position by expressing the hope the barrier would become
"irrelevant." Speaking the next day at a Knesset reception hall, DeLay
delivered an unequivocal endorsement of Israeli policy with assurances
that Bush is no even-handed mediator."
Undermining the Road Map to Peace,
by James O. Goldsborough, THE SAN DIEGO
UNION-TRIBUNE, August 7, 2003
"The Bush administration says its road map for peace is working. Tom
DeLay, the House leader and evangelical rabble-rouser, has visited Israel
at taxpayers' expense to drum up Republican votes and promise U.S. support
against "desert scorpions" like Yasser Arafat. "Your liberation is at
hand," DeLay informed a bemused Knesset. More on that later. Yet all is
not well. Israel's defense minister predicts an "onslaught of terror" to
come, and warns that Palestinian groups are using the cease-fire to build
up arms supplies. He knows what he says: Cease-fire depends on Israel
taking steps to ease the wretched lives of Palestinians, including ending
illegal settlements and withdrawing from Palestinian land. Ariel Sharon
has no taste for these steps. A further problem is Israel's border fence,
snaking down from the north and into Palestinian territory wherever Israel
has a settlement to annex. A fence along the so-called "green line," the
1967 border, would be bad enough, a confession that Israel can never live
with its neighbors. A fence that cuts into the neighbor's territory,
creating little Arab ghettoes, is a casus belli. The defense minister
understands this. The cease-fire depends on a lot of things, few of which
are happening. Even the Bush administration, completely pro-Israel so far,
is worried. Now that the two main justifications for Bush's Iraq war –
Iraq's alleged poison weapons and links to al-Qaeda – have been proven
bogus, and with anarchy raging in Iraq, Bush does not need a new
Israeli-Palestinian war. Sharon is not helping. Visiting the White House
July 29, he told Bush the fence would not be stopped. For the first time,
the White House stiffened. Isn't U.S. money being used to build this
fence? If Sharon won't halt the fence, perhaps America should halt the
money – some $9 billion in loan guarantees voted by Congress. Enter DeLay.
This strange man, a Texas exterminator become Republican majority leader,
is an apocalyptic Christian, a believer in Christ's second coming in
Jerusalem after the great battle called Armageddon. Before this battle,
DeLay and his fellow evangelicals believe, Jews will convert to
Christianity and admit their great mistake. Or they will be killed. Such
"liberation" for Israel may not be quite what Jews have in mind ...
Politics plays into this: Is Bush the man to put muscle on Sharon when
DeLay's plan is to win Jewish votes in next year's elections? No wonder
Israel's defense minister is worried. So far, the Bush administration is
only leaking, not acting. Last week it leaked that it was studying
Israel's latest move. The latest move caught people by surprise. In the
midst of a cease-fire aimed at defusing tensions and building confidence,
the Knesset voted to block Israelis who marry Palestinians from bringing
their spouses to Israel. This means Israel's 1.2 million Arab citizens –
18 percent of the population – as well as Israeli Jews, cannot live in
Israel with Palestinians they happen to marry. This law, its proponents
claim, will protect Israel's Judaism from dilution, but its clearly racist
intention has infuriated Palestinians and created another problem for
Bush, for Americans aren't racists. Israel claims its Arab citizens have
full democratic rights. But most democracies allow citizens to live with
their spouses. The second leak concerns the fence: If U.S. money is being
used to build an illegal fence or to free up Israeli funds to build it,
the money should be stopped. So say the leaks. But where is the action?"
Billionaire Commits $10M to Defeat Bush. Multibillionaire George Soros
Commits $10 Million to New Democratic-Leaning Group,
ABC News, Aug. 8, 2003
"Making a major foray into partisan politics, multibillionaire George
Soros is committing $10 million to a new Democratic-leaning group
aimed at defeating President Bush next year. Soros, who in the past
has donated on a smaller scale to Democratic candidates and the party,
pledged the money to a political action committee called America Coming
Together, spokesman Michael Vachon said Friday. The group plans a $75
million effort to defeat Bush and "elect progressive officials at every
level in 2004," targeting 17 key states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa,
Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico,
Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. "The
fate of the world depends on the United States, and President Bush is
leading us in the wrong direction," Soros said in a written
statement ... ACT said it plans a large-scale effort to register voters
and mobilize them to go to the polls. It has $30 million in commitments so
far and plans a national fund-raising drive starting next month. The group
is headed by Ellen Malcolm, president of EMILY's List, a group dedicated
to winning the election of Democratic women candidates who support
abortion rights, such as New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. The new
PAC's co-founders include Steve Rosenthal, head of the Partnership
for America's Families and former political director for the AFL-CIO;
Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union;
Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director; and Cecile Richards,
president of America Votes, a new Democratic-leaning group that includes
many of the same members as America Coming Together. Under the nation's
new campaign finance law, the group must remain separate from the
Democratic Party to accept contributions on the scale of what Soros has
pledged. The law bans national party committees from accepting
contributions of that size from any source."
Jewish dimensions of Korean anti-Americanism
SOUTH KOREAN
ANTI-AMERICANISM,
by Meredith Woo-Cumings, Japan Policy Research
Instiute (JPRI), July 2003, Working Paper No. 93
"In a December 2002 survey of national attitudes, conducted in forty-two
countries by the Pew Research Center, a stunning 44 percent of South
Koreans were found to hold unfavorable views of the United States. This
level of disaffection topped France’s 34 percent, Germany’s 35 percent,
and in fact, any country in Europe or East Asia. In the non-Muslim world,
only Argentina, whose economy was in ruins for two years (arguably done in
by the neoliberal nostrums pushed by Washington) was shown to harbor more
unhappy sentiments vis-à-vis the United States. A Korean Gallup Poll,
conducted around the same time as the Pew Research Center survey,
confirmed as much and more, reporting that some 53.7 percent of South
Koreans held “unfavorable” and “somewhat unfavorable” view of the United
States. Most of these malcontents happened to be young, and included
upwards of 80 percent of the college students polled. In the United
States, the reaction to the alleged South Korean “anti-Americanism” was
one of shock, and petulance—above all, because more than 53,000 Americans
lost their lives during the Korean War ... What is this
“anti-Americanism,” a sentiment that is purportedly held by South Koreans,
and that so provokes the ire of many Americans who feel that the Koreans
have just bitten off the American hands that have so long fed them? I
believe we need to go beyond the opinion polls, and examine the unraveling
of the Cold War alliance between the United States and South Korea ...
This is a long and involved story, but the main point is that by the late
1990s Korea was of interest to American economic policy makers only to the
extent that it provided markets for U.S. exports, which had become
important as an engine of growth. The fact that Korea was an important
strategic ally played very little role in the IMF decision to “bail-out”
Korea. Quite the contrary, the desire of some American policy makers to
use IMF conditionality to crack open the Korean financial and commodities
market ended up in a huge mishandling of the initial “bail-out.” Similar
to Japan’s, the Korean system of industrial financing was largely based on
the banking sector, which doled out loans to a hugely leveraged corporate
sector. As a consequence the banks were saddled with loan portfolios that
contained massive amounts of non-performing loans. So long as the economy
was growing and corporations were able to service their debts, the
perennial problem of non-performing loans could be papered over. In a
global downturn, however, an economy as exposed as South Korea’s was
likely to have trouble with the huge fixed costs of interest payments, and
predictably, South Korea would slip periodically into severe financial
crisis ... So, at any time before 1989, Seoul could expect Washington and
Tokyo to step in and help it out bilaterally, with the best example being
the crisis of 1979-1980, which was probably the worst financial crisis in
recent South Korean history. During the economic debacle of 1979-1980, the
United States acted swiftly to stabilize Korea, sending signals to the
international financial community that—notwithstanding the assassination
of Park Chung Hee and the Kwangju rebellion—Korea was a sound investment
for more loans ... Paul Blustein, whose The Chastening: Inside the
Crisis that Rocked the Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF (New
York: Public Affairs, 2001) is a fine account of the Asian crisis, writes
that James Steinberg, the deputy national security advisor, argued
that “By failing to show strong support for Korea, the United States
risked stirring an anti-American backlash in Seoul that could lead to
pressure for the removal of U.S. troops.” Sandy Berger, the
National Security Advisor, wondered if North Korea might cause mischief if
the South Korean economy collapsed, and Madeleine Albright, the
Secretary of State, was most emphatic in favor of bailout, even in the
face of derision by Treasury officials who thought she knew little about
economics (Blustein, pp. 137-38). In the end, the members of the foreign
policy and national security establishment lost the argument. There were a
number of reasons why the tried-and-true national security argument did
not gain traction in Washington. One was intellectual: the argument that
South Korea was too important to be allowed to default was one that
Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin hated because, as the Assistant
Secretary Tim Geithner explained to Blustein, “you can’t let some
perceived imperative of action dictate your choices, and you may not have
alternatives that are a plausible response to the problem.” There were
other, deeper reasons. Rubin, Lawrence Summers and their
lieutenants saw the crisis as the perfect opportunity to break up Korea
Inc. once and for all, and to do this, they wanted the International
Monetary Fund to impose conditions on South Korea that went far beyond the
Fund’s traditional boundaries. Thus the U.S. Treasury kept steady pressure
on Fund officials to extract more and more concessions from South Korea,
including instant resolution of all trade related issues in favor of the
United States. The exasperated Koreans were soon accusing the IMF of
always raising new issues at the behest of the United States—something
that the Fund officials readily acknowledged. Foremost in the minds of
Treasury officials was also the interest of Wall Street, especially
American financial services firms. Joseph Stiglitz has argued that
the origins of the Korean financial crisis rested, in the first place,
with the excessively rapid financial and capital market liberalization
that the U.S. Treasury had pushed on Korea, on behalf of Wall Street, and
over the protests of the Council of Economic Advisors, of which he was the
chairman .... The rush for the exits began, and by December 12 the IMF and
U.S. Treasury were contemplating the unthinkable—allowing Seoul to
default. In the end, the method chosen to rescue the failed rescue attempt
was a “bail-in.” Banks that had made big loans to South Korea were asked
to reschedule these debts, or else allow South Korea to default on them
Once this decision was made—and it took an inexcusably long time, with
Rubin and Alan Greenspan holding out until the last minute—the
bankers moved extraordinarily fast. South Korea was an ideal candidate for
a bail-in. It had a sound economy, good macroeconomic fundamentals, a good
payment record, and it owed almost all its money to banks, which are more
easily organized in a collective action situation, and not to mutual funds
holding bonds. Why, one might ask, as the bankers who rescheduled the
Korean debts also did, had it taken Washington so long to accept the call
for a bail-in? If Washington had asked American banks at the outset of the
crisis to roll over Korean debts, the situation would never have gotten so
out of control. On the other hand, if the whole point of the exercise had
been to teach South Korea a lesson, then the U.S. Treasury succeeded
brilliantly. Koreans suffered through massive bankruptcies of big and
small firms, and a recession that contracted national income by seven
percent, bringing down wages for the average worker by ten percent and
sending the jobless rate to nearly nine percent. But along the way, they
also learned another kind of lesson. The Koreans learned in the hardest
way possible that at the moment of their financial ruination,
the United States had chosen to further its
parochial self-interest, rather than helping an ally. The economic
basis of the U.S.-South Korean alliance now stands on a very different
footing than it did before."
All Jewish names bold-faced
How
neo-cons influence the Pentagon,
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times, August 8,2003
"An ad hoc office under US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of
mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal
inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq. The Office of
Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia
(NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to
review raw information collected by the official US intelligence agencies
for connections between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Retired
intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged
that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq
before passing it along to the White House. But key personnel who worked
in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative
ideologues and activists who worked with other George W Bush political
appointees scattered around the national security bureaucracy to move the
country to war, according to retired Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski,
who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003. The heads of
NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary William Luti and Abram Shulsky,
respectively. Other appointees who worked with them in both offices
included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with
the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David
Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-conservative
icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a
senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of the pro-Likud Jerusalem
Post; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a
prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under
former president Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.
Along with Feith, all of the political
appointees have in common a close identification with the views of the
right-wing Likud Party in Israel. Feith, whose law partner
is a spokesman for the settlement movement in Israel, has long been a
fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process, while WINEP has acted as the
think tank for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which generally follows
a Likud line. Also like Feith, several of the appointees were
proteges of Richard Perle, an AEI fellow who doubled as chairman
until last April of Rumsfeld's unpaid Defense Policy Board (DPB), whose
members were appointed by Feith, and also had an office in the
Pentagon one floor below the NESA offices ... The offices fed information
directly and indirectly to sympathetic media outlets, including the Rupert
Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and FoxNews Network, as well as the
editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and syndicated columnists, such
as Charles Krauthammer. In inter-agency discussions, Feith
and the two offices communicated almost exclusively with like-minded
allies in other agencies, rather than with their official counterparts,
including even the DIA in the Pentagon, according to Kwiatkowski. Rather
than working with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and
Research, its Near Eastern Affairs bureau, or even its Iraq desk, for
example, they preferred to work through Undersecretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security (and former AEI executive vice
president) John Bolton; Michael Wurmser (another Perle
protege at AEI who staffed the predecessor to OSP); and Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter
of the Vice President Dick Cheney. At the National Security Council (NSC),
they communicated mainly with Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security
adviser, until Elliott Abrams, a dyed-in-the-wool neo-conservative
with close ties to Feith and Perle, was appointed last
December as the NSC's top Middle East aide ... Kwiatkowski said that she
could not confirm published reports that OSP worked with a similar ad hoc
group in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office. But she
recounts one incident in which she helped escort a group of half a dozen
Israelis, including several generals, from the first floor reception area
to Feith's office. "We just followed them, because they knew
exactly where they were going and moving fast." When the group arrived,
she noted the book which all visitors are required to sign under special
regulations that took effect after the September 11, 2001. "I asked his
secretary, 'Do you want these guys to sign in'? She said, 'No, these guys
don't have to sign in'." It occurred to her, she said, that the office may
have deliberately not wanted to maintain a record of the meeting. She
added that OSP and MESA personnel were already discussing the possibility
of "going after Iran" after the war in Iraq last January and that articles
by Michael Ledeen, another AEI fellow and Perle associate
who has been calling for the US to work for "regime change" in Tehran
since late 2001, were given much attention in the two offices. Ledeen
and Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, recently created the
Coalition for Democracy in Iran to lobby for a more aggressive policy
there. Their move coincided with suggestions by Sharon that
Washington adopt a more confrontational policy vis-a-vis Tehran."
Democrats Add to Chaos in Bid to Foil [California] Recall,
New York Times, August 9, 2003
"With more than one Democrat on the ballot, we realize that the cleanest,
most concise and only unifying message is `no' on the recall," Josh
Wachs, executive director of the Democratic National Committee, said
today. "That's why we have embraced that. We're doing what a party should
do."
The Ameri-Israel shadow government in action
Secret Talks With Iranian Arms Dealer,
Newsday, August 8, 2002
"Pentagon hardliners pressing for regime change in Iran have held secret
and unauthorized meetings in Paris with a controversial arms dealer who
was a major figure in the Iran-contra scandal, according to administration
officials. The officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith have held
"several" meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in
U.S. arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s. The
administration officials who disclosed the secret meetings to Newsday
said the talks with Ghorbanifar were not authorized by the White House and
appeared to be aimed at undercutting current sensitive backchannel
negotiations with the Iranian regime. "They [the Pentagon officials] were
talking to him about stuff which they weren't officially authorized to
do," said a senior administration official. "It was only accidentally that
certain parts of our government learned about it." The official would not
identify those "parts" of the government, but a former intelligence
official confirmed they are the State Department, the CIA and the White
House, itself. The senior official and another administration source who
confirmed that the meetings had taken place said that the ultimate policy
objective of Feith and a group of neo-conservatives civilians
inside the Pentagon is regime change in Iran. This second official said,
"United States policy officially is not regime change, overtly or
covertly," but to engage Iranian officials in dialogue over contentious
issues, such as Iran's nuclear weapons program, and to press the regime to
extradite al-Qaida operatives. He said that the immediate objective of the
Pentagon hardliners appears to be to "antagonize Iran so that they get
frustrated and then by their reactions harden U.S. policy against them."
He confirmed that Secretary of State Colin Powell complained directly to
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld several days ago about Feith's
policy shop conducting missions that countered U.S. policy. A spokesman
for Feith's Near East, South Asia and Special Plans office, the
controversial intelligence office that sources said played a key role in
the Ghorbanifar contacts, did not respond Thursday to an e-mailed inquiry
about those contacts. Newsday's inquiry was e-mailed at the spokesman's
request. The senior administration official identified two of the Defense
officials who met with Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Feith's top
Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defense Intelligence Agency
analyst on loan to the undersecretary's office. Rhode recently acted as a
liaison between Feith's office, which drafted much of the
administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi
exile disdained by the CIA and State Department but groomed for leadership
by the Pentagon. Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, a
neo-conservative who was a National Security Council consultant in the
mid-1980s when he introduced Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a National
Security Council aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-contra
affair. A former CIA officer who himself was involved in some aspects of
the Iran-contra scandal said that current intelligence officers told him
it was Ledeen who reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Feith's
staff. Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in
Washington and an ardent advocate for regime change in Iran, would neither
confirm nor deny that he arranged for the Ghorbanifar meetings. "I'm not
going to comment on any private meetings with any private people," he
said. "It's nobody's business."
A Bigger,
Badder Sequel to Iran-Contra,
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet (from Inter Press
Service), August 13, 2003
"The specter of the Iran-Contra affair is haunting Washington. Some of the
people and countries are the same, and so are the methods – particularly
the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel
foreign policy that is at odds with official policy. Boiled down to its
essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials
based in the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) that ran an "off-the-books" operation to secretly sell arms
to Iran in exchange for hostages. The picture being painted by various
insider sources in the media suggests a similar but far more ambitious
scheme at work. Taken collectively, what these officials describe and what
is already on the public record suggests the existence of a disciplined
network of zealous, like-minded individuals. Centered in Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas Feith's office and around Richard
Perle in the Defense Policy Board in the Pentagon, this exclusive
group of officials operates under the aegis of Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick
Cheney. This network includes high-level political appointees, such as
Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who are scattered around several
other key bureaucracies, notably in the State Department, the NSC staff,
and most importantly, in Cheney's office. Cheney, of course, has a direct
link to Bush (and all the heads of agencies), while his powerful chief of
staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, also
enjoys exceptional access and influence. Indeed, the two men's frequent
visits (as well as those of another DPB member, former Republican House
Speaker Newt Gingrich) to CIA headquarters before the Iraq war have been
cited by retired and anonymous intelligence officers as having actively
intimidated analysts who disagreed with the more sensational assessments
about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda produced by
Feith's office."
When politicians are in trouble, they often try to identify with
Jews by falsely sharing in their victim status
Democrats court old friends. Davis calls recall an 'insult' in visit to
Jewish center,
By Laura Mecoy, Sacramento Bee, August 12,
2003
"[California] Gov. Gray Davis on Monday called the recall election an
"insult" to the millions who voted for him last year and predicted Lt.
Gov. Cruz Bustamante's candidacy could increase Latino and minority voter
turnout on Oct. 7. The governor appeared at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a
leading Jewish human rights organization in West Los Angeles, to announce
his plans to sign a bill not yet approved by the Legislature that would
add intolerance and hatred prevention as approved training categories for
schoolteachers. Davis, who's been tailoring his
appeals to key Democratic constituencies, used the event to strike a chord
with Jewish voters. He toured an exhibit the state funded, recounted the
$26 million the state has provided for the center and renewed his appeal
to extend the deadline for Holocaust victims and their families to apply
for financial compensation for their suffering. But the horde of
reporters at the Wiesenthal Center wanted only to talk about the state's
first gubernatorial recall, Democrat Bustamante's entry into the race to
replace Davis, and polls showing Republican actor Arnold Schwarzenegger
leading a field of nearly 200 potential candidates."
US clears
Israel-India radar deal. The radar will be mounted on Russian aircraft The
United States has given the formal go-ahead for Israel to sell its Phalcon
early warning airborne radar system to India,
BBC, August 12, 2003
"State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said Washington had informed
both governments that it had no objection to the $1bn sale. He said the
improving security situation between India and Pakistan made the sale of
the radar less likely to destabilise the region. The deal had been held up
for 18 months because of fears it could heighten tension between Delhi and
Islamabad. Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesman said the sale would
adversely affect the delicate nuclear balance between the two neighbours.
China sale blocked The Phalcon is a long range warning, control and
command system - a more sophisticated version of the US Awacs. It operates
without the latter's trademark rotating dome, increasing the aircraft's
manoeuvrability and making it less vulnerable to hostile fire. The Phalcon
system can pick up aircraft hundreds of miles away in any weather - even
those flying at low altitudes, by day or night. It can also intercept and
decode enemy radio transmissions. Correspondents say its purchase is
expected to significantly enhance the intelligence gathering and defence
capabilities of India's air force. India and Israel share a growing
security relationship. Three years ago, Israel dropped plans to sell
Phalcon-equipped aircraft to China following objections from Washington."
Fish
hailed for judicial brilliance, integrity,
Canadian Jewish Congress, August 13, 2003
"Canada’s newest Supreme Court justice grew up on Montreal’s storied St.
Urbain Street, the heart of the old Jewish immigrant district, and
graduated from Baron Byng High School, a Protestant school that had a high
number of Jewish students who became very successful. Morris Fish,
64, who took his seat on the highest court Aug. 5, is the younger son of
the late Zlata Gruber and Aaron Fish, who came from an area in eastern
Europe that has changed hands between Poland and Russia ... Mount Royal MP
Irwin Cotler has been friends with Fish since they were law
students at McGill University in the early 1960s.
Reached in Jerusalem, Cotler called Fish’s
appointment “simply brilliant, an ideal appointment. He is an exemplary
judge in every respectr ... “Although Morris’s background is more secular
or cultural than religious, he has a good knowledge of Jewish history and
culture, and he speaks a good Yiddish,” Cotler said.
Fish has been to
Israel and once visited with Cotler as part of an exchange program
between Canadian and Israeli appellate judges. He is a friend of Aharon
Barak, chief justice of Israel’s highest court, and former deputy
chief Menachem Elon, Cotler said ... The Supreme
Court is due to soon hear a case of a very Jewish nature. In April, the
Supreme Court granted leave to B’nai Brith Canada to appeal a Quebec Court
of Appeal ruling that prevents residents of a high-end condominium from
erecting sukkot on their balconies. The Quebec court upheld the side of
the condo corporation. B’nai Brith says the permanent injunction infringes
on religious freedom."
Daniel Pipes is the zealous Jewish Zionist who started the
"Campuswatch" witch hunt program to monitor pro-Palestianian
academics.
Expected Peace Appointee Is Criticized,
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Newsday, August 14, 2003
"A broad array of Arab, religious and Muslim groups Thursday denounced the
expected appointment of outspoken Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes
to a federally funded peace think tank. The groups slammed Pipes as a
racist, anti-Islam extremist whose appointment to the U.S. Institute of
Peace would be akin to naming former Ku Klux Klan figure David Duke to a
civil liberties post. And they vowed to strike back at President Bush on
Election Day if he goes ahead with the appointment. Bush is expected to
bypass the Senate confirmation process and appoint Pipes, who is
head of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, during the August
recess. Last month, Senate Democrats voiced strong objections to the
appointment, postponing a committee vote on it. Opponents Thursday said
the nomination would negate Bush's efforts to reach out to the Muslim
community after the terrorist attacks. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the
Interfaith Alliance, said the nomination "strikes at the very heart of the
notion that America is a place where religious diversity is valued."
The author of this article, Joseph Farah, is a self-described
"conservative" and a rare Arab who is pro-Zionist. Here's his take on
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ginsburg, the politician,
by Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily.com, August
15, 2003
"When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke to the
American Constitution Society recently, I focused my criticism on the
substance of her remarks. I hoped others might join my in my outrage that
a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice might actually suggest that the U.S.
judiciary should be influenced by the constitutions and courts of foreign
countries. In condescending language undermining the principle of American
sovereignty, she said, "our island or lone-ranger mentality is beginning
to change." Justices, she said, "are becoming more open to comparative and
international law perspectives." "While you are the American Constitution
Society, your perspective on constitutional law should encompass the
world," she told the group of judges, lawyers and students. "We are the
losers if we do not both share our experiences with and learn from
others." Now I discover there is even more cause for concern regarding
Ginsburg's address to this group. The American Constitution Society is
a highly partisan, political extremist organization with an agenda not to
support the U.S. Constitution, but to undermine its most basic precepts.
Is this the kind of audience responsible Supreme Court justices should be
seeking? "We want to counter the dominant vision of American law today, a
narrow conservative vision that lacks appropriate regard for the ways in
which the law affects people's lives," explains the group in its mission
statement. "... We want to strengthen the intellectual foundations of –
and the public case for – a vision of the law in which these values are
paramount, on such issues as: privacy; freedom of speech; federalism;
antidiscrimination and affirmative action; gay rights; reproductive
choice; disability rights; labor and consumer rights; protection of
health, safety, and the environment; the criminal justice system;
immigration; and international human rights." Thus, this is a political
organization with a strong political agenda – homosexual rights, racial
preferences, abortion on demand, etc. Check out the roster of
"non-partisan" speakers this non-profit, tax-exempt group has previously
heard: Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards, Tom Harkin, Edward
Kennedy, and Paul Wellstone; Reps. Barney Frank and Jesse
Jackson, Jr.; former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis; former Rep.
Robert Drinan; former Attorney General Janet Reno. Are you getting the
picture? It gets worse. Here's what a feature on the American Constitution
Society in the Nation had to say in June: "Supreme Court Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg will step into the debate this summer, when she
addresses the first-ever national convention of the American Constitution
Society, an organization founded, as the group's executive director
David Halperin explains, to 'encourage students and others to care
about and influence a progressive vision of the law' ... A survey of the
entire American Constitution Society website shows one thing conspicuously
absent – a copy of the U.S. Constitution! Ginsburg's appearance
before this new extremist front group is just one more reason she should
be impeached from the court. She swore an oath to uphold and defend the
Constitution. Instead, she has used her position on the court to undermine
it, to illegitimately usurp authority from the people and the states and
to provide aid and to politicize a branch of the government that should be
above partisanship and the narrow agendas of special-interest groups."
The Amazing Warnings
Of Benjamin Freedman, [1961]
rense.com (From Bible Believers.org), August
17, 2003
"Here in the United States, the Zionists and their co-religionists have
complete control of our government. For many reasons, too many and too
complex to go into here at this time, the Zionists and their
co-religionists rule these United States as though they were the absolute
monarchs of this country. Now you may say that is a very broad statement,
but let me show you what happened while we were all asleep. What
happened?"
More US Lawmakers Visiting Israel This Summer Than Ever Before,
By Julie Stahl,
CNS News, August 18, 2003
"More members of the U.S. Congress are visiting Israel this summer than
ever have before, said a spokesman for one of the groups organizing the
lawmakers' tours. During the month of August alone,
more than 10 percent of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives
will have visited here, said David Kreizelman, a foreign
policy associate in Jerusalem of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC is associated with the American Israel Education
Foundation (AIEF), which sponsors fact-finding trips for many members of
Congress. Senators and representatives often take advantage of the summer
recess to visit Israel, but "this year is especially big," said
Kreizelman. "It's a good way for them to get a handle on the issues,"
Kreizelman told CNSNews.com ... [T]wo weeks ago, 29 Democratic
lawmakers visited Israel for a one-week fact-finding tour. It was the
largest group ever to visit at one time. Next week, a delegation of
Republican congressmen of similar size will visit Israel through the AIEF,
Kreizelman said."
Fear of the Jewish Lobby is worldwide. Could we have an article
like this in a major American newspaper? Never. The Jewish American Lobby
controls commentary about itself.
Muzzled, say ALP's critics of Israel,
By Mike Seccombe, Sydney Morning Herald
(Australia), August 19, 2003
"Concern that Labor is in danger of losing votes and donations from the
Jewish community appear to have driven the Opposition Leader, Simon Crean,
to stop two pro-Palestinian backbenchers from speaking yesterday in a
parliamentary debate on the Middle East. One of the
censored backbenchers, Julia Irwin, a strong critic of the Israeli
Government, last night said she was appalled that Labor policy on the
Israel-Palestine conflict had been "hijacked by powerful forces"
associated with the Jewish lobby. She said she had been told by Mr Crean's
foreign policy adviser, Karl Ungerer, that she was not allowed to speak,
following a complaint to Mr Crean by the president of the Executive
Council of Australian Jewry, Jeremy Jones. Before Parliament
rose last week, three backbenchers - Ms Irwin, Leo McLeay and the
pro-Israel Michael Danby - were scheduled to speak to a private members
motion on the so-called road map to peace in the Middle East. But
following the complaint to Mr Crean on Wednesday they were told the next
day that they could not. They were replaced by Mr Crean, the shadow
foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, and the former leader Kim Beazley - a rare
collection of Labor heavyweights for a minor debate on a Liberal-sponsored
backbenchers' motion. "I've definitely been muzzled in this debate," Ms
Irwin said last night. "It's quite clear that . . . the leader's office
wants Labor to toe the line and they just will not tolerate any different
views. "The Labor Party has been hijacked by
powerful interests. And there are a lot of members on my side on the back
bench who are absolutely horrified." A spokesman for Mr Crean
denied that the sudden change in speakers was a response to concern that
the Jewish community was deserting Labor because of pro-Palestinian
comments made by a number of prominent ALP members over recent months. But
he did acknowledge a need to "clarify" where Labor stood. "There has been
a lot of debate about what Labor's position is on Israel," the spokesman
said. "Mr Crean thought this was a good opportunity to put Labor's
position on the record." Ms Irwin and Mr McLeay are from the NSW Right,
but it is understood several backbenchers, mostly on the Left, are also
concerned about the move. In a speech to the house on Monday last week Mr
McLeay savaged Mr Jones for what he called "regular attacks on
members of Parliament and others who give any support for the plight of
the Palestinian people". "The attacks that have been made on my colleague
[Ms Irwin] . . . have been disgraceful. It amazes me how intolerant Mr
Jones and the pro-Israeli lobby can be. "If
you are not an enthusiastic supporter of the Sharon version of the
Berlin Wall , you are considered to be anti-Jewish. When will the
Jeremy Joneses of this world understand that criticism of the Israeli
Government and its actions is not anti-Semitism?"
Citziens' Indictment
of Bush, Cheny, et al
Israel Inks $9 Billion U.S. Loan Guarantee Package,
Yahoo (from Reuters), August 20, 2003
"Israel's Finance Ministry said on Wednesday it signed a final agreement
to receive a $9 billion package of loan guarantees from the United States.
Eldad Fresher, acting Israeli accountant-general, told Reuters
the country plans to sell $3 billion of 20-year or 30-year bonds in
the United States in the fourth quarter."
For AIPAC, congressional trips are effective way to boost Israel,
By Matthew E. Berger, Jewish Telegraphic
Agency, Aug. 20, 2003
"The next time Rep. Jim Langevin goes into the U.S. House of
Representatives to vote on a matter concerning Israel, no background
briefing will be as valuable as what he experienced earlier this month.
Visiting Israeli towns that border the West Bank, the second-term Democrat
from Rhode Island said he saw for himself how the controversial security
fence Israel is building will prevent suicide bombers and other terrorists
from entering Israel, making the country safer. The trip gave him a new
appreciation of Israel’s commitment to putting security first and
foremost, he said. “It gave me a better understanding of why things like
the fence are necessary — and a rational response to the terrorist threats
Israel faces,” Langevin told JTA. Even without the visit, he probably
would have voted for pro-Israel measures, Langevin said, but now he is
more sympathetic to Israel’s plight. “I will forever
feel a closeness to Israel, having been there and seen the
challenges they face on a day-to-day basis,” he said. That’s just what the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main pro-Israel lobby in
Washington, likes to hear. Through its affiliate organization, the
American Israel Education Foundation, AIPAC sent
Langevin and 28 other congressional Democrats on a one-week trip to Israel
earlier this month, the largest congressional contingent ever to visit the
Jewish state. Next week it plans to send 19 Republicans on a similar tour
... The trips also give representatives an opportunity to show their
support for Israel — which can be critical to winning political backing
from Jews and conservative Christians — ahead of elections. Critics argue
that the AIPAC trips present a monolithic view and don’t show all sides of
the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First-term Rep. Ed Case
(D-Hawaii), part of the Democratic delegation, said he was disappointed
that no time was scheduled for meetings with regular Palestinians, but he
said he was not put off by the “uniform” position speakers took on
hot-button issues such as the fence ... AIPAC’s goal is to give lawmakers
a first-hand understanding that support for Israel should be the
cornerstone of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and that Israel needs
American economic and military support. Most agree that the strategy has
worked: Over the years, lawmakers and their staffers have returned from
such trips more interested in the Middle East, more likely to vote for aid
to Israel and more likely to back AIPAC on other matters concerning the
Jewish state. Lawmakers get more than an expense-paid week in the Middle
East: They get to vocalize their support for Israel as elections approach,
helping them tap into the wealth of pro-Israel Jewish money that AIPAC has
access to, even though AIPAC doesn’t endorse specific candidates. That’s
especially important for Democrats this year, as pro-Israel sentiments
from President Bush and Republican leaders like DeLay appear to have led
to increased Jewish contributions to Republican candidates. Doug
Bloomfield, a former legislative director for AIPAC, says he has seen
lawmakers who previously had shown little interest in the Middle East
become real leaders on Middle East policy after visiting Israel."
The Protocols - a Neocon Manifesto,
by Simon Jones, Dissident Voice, August 21,
2003
"I have to confess. The outrageous in-your-face behavior of the neocons
finally got to me as Armageddon approaches, after seeing more and more
references to it (albeit usually wacky), I recently downloaded the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Guiltily, mind you, as if it were Mein
Kampf or porno. I bet you haven’t dared (or bothered) to read it. So what
is this best-selling political tract of the 20th century, the reading of
which carried the death penalty in Stalinist Russia, lauded by the likes
of Henry Ford and Winston Churchill, and then loudly condemned for the
past 60 years since it was briefly declared an anti-Semitic forgery (in a
Swiss court in 1935 overturned by the Appeals Court in 1937)? The bile
aside, it is in fact an series of 24 mostly articulate, well-argued
lectures outlining a plan for world capitalist domination, with sharp
political and social analysis, lots of Machiavelli and a Marxian
sophistication in its understanding of capitalism and historical
processes. Briefly, it outlines a plan of world conquest by first
establishing world government by consent. As with any brilliant political
analysis, it has been denounced, dismissed, misinterpreted and banned. And
made very good use of by those lusting for world power. What immediately
struck me was that with a little dusting off, abridging and updating, it
could easily be the handbook of the neocons. With the wonders of modern
computers, you can download a free copy from the Internet, cleanse it of
anti-Semitism by replacing "fellow Jews" with "neocons" and make sense of
what’s happening in the world today. Mysterious origins? Not really Though
its origins are still unknown, it was clearly inspired by the French
revolution and its aftermath, the then-popular Masonic order, and most of
all the nascent 19th century Zionist movement. All that we know is that it
was written in France and brought to Russia, supposedly in 1884. It first
appeared in print in St Petersburg in 1903, but reached the West only
after the Russian revolution. It caused an immediate sensation, originally
crudely interpreted as foretelling the Bolshevik revolution as the crucial
link in a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. As such, it was admired by
the likes of Churchill and Ford, both confirmed anti-communists and
anti-Semites. True, it has the prescience to allow for an anti-capitalist
revolution on the way to its final goal, but there’s nothing even vaguely
socialist in it. It’s firmly founded on a plan for capitalist domination
through Jewish control of international finance and just happened to
appear at the very moment of the founding of the Zionist movement, with
its goal of establishing as soon as possible a Jewish state in Palestine,
backed by powerful worldwide Ashkenazy Jewish economic interests. It's as
if an especially ruthless and well-read 19th c Zionist, inspired by the
Rothschilds and other great Jewish financiers of the time, wrote it or
most of it, as I am sure is the case. Really, it reads as if it were
written by the Jungian shadow of the likes of Zionism's founder, Theodore
Herzl, or any of Israel's notables from Ben Gurion to Ariel Sharon ... The
Jews referred to in the Protocols are the European Ashkenazy Jews, who had
been traditionally usurers and who were in the 19th century becoming
increasing wealthy and part of the mainstream European culture. From them
sprang the Zionists, who transformed a religion where God is to bring them
to the 'promised land' someday into an active plan to seize Palestine
based on their growing international economic and financial might. So it
is this group that is the real inspiration behind the Protocols and not
some amorphous Jewish RACE. Think of the authors as the neocons of the
day. For by the 19th century, usury was the norm, and the rapid spread of
capitalism meant that the Western world effectively became Jewish, as Marx
put it, and adopted the Jewish idea of success. Yet another problem. It is
loudly dismissed as a forgery. Hello? It was anonymous, so how can it be a
forgery. Who forged what? No wonder the Swiss Appeals Court threw the case
out. In that case we can dismiss the Bible as a forgery. And who cares who
wrote the Psalms anyway? They stand on their own merits, as does the
Protocols stripped of a few provocative phrases here and there, which
could have been slipped in by anyone. You may well protest: “The Protocols
attributes the conscious machinations of Jews to be behind all historical
developments. I don’t believe the Zionists are either so powerful, or so
far-sighted.” In answer: It’s not necessary for our actions to be
premeditated. The logic of world capitalism sweeps us along, whether we
like it or not. Some players are more conscious (and ruthless) than
others. They become the Herzls, the Wolfowitzes, the Sharons. The rest of
us get swept along, either yielding to, or fighting the current: the
Bushes and the Schwartzeneggers or the goyim. The Protocols (or its
original, if it is indeed a forgery) was inspired by the new economic
system sweeping the world, and composed by the 19th century equivalent of
the neocons. It hasn’t played itself out yet, just as capitalism hasn’t
played itself out. We ignore it at our peril. Arise, ye prisoners of
starvation? Contrast the Zionist movement with the other great attempt at
a NWO from the 19th century on -- the world socialist movement. It is far
weaker, split by nationalism and hundreds of ideological splinters, and
motivated by social justice, a far less competitive motivation that money,
wealth and power-for-its-own-sake ... Divide and rule! The Holocaust gave
the fanatical Zionists their long-sought state, which allowed them to
discard any socialist pretensions and nurture the capitalist-Zionist
alliance essential to the goal of world domination. The defining moment is
perhaps the triumph of the neocons under Reagan in the 1980s. The Zionists
had consolidated their hold on American foreign policy under Democrat
Carter, and were ready to make the alliance official under Republican
Reagan. It is at this point that the very term Zionist and even Jew can be
discarded. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘We are all Jews now.’
(http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles4/Jones_Palestine.htm) And with the
Bush coup in 2000, we all (for the present at least) have become neocons
(or goyim). As the opposition grows weaker, with the shield of the
Holocaust at the ready, the neocon-Zionist alliance has begun to act more
and more brazenly to consolidate its hold on the world and destroy the
last meaningful resistance - the Islamic world. The ultimate trump card
Not only was the Holocaust and the way to defeat it foreseen in the
Protocols, but, like the anti-Semitism that gave rise to it, it has been
turned into the ultimate defense of the Zionist cause. A kind of perverse
win-win situation for the Zionists. It transformed important anti-Semites
into Judeophiles overnight. While Churchill was an enthusiastic reader of
the Protocols before WWII, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the
foundation of Israel after, and shifted his anti-Semitism onto the Arabs.
Stalin, also a confirmed anti-Semite, provided the key vote at the UN to
approve the foundation of Israel and supplied crucial arms via
Czechoslovakia to the beleaguered state, foolishly thinking he could
ultimately manipulate. Ha, ha! Finally it became the linchpin in
consolidating today’s neocon-Zionist alliance, and a brilliant defense for
all manner of Zionist crimes: “We can do anything to defend ourselves
after the Holocaust!” The icing on the cake is the impressive Holocaust
museum which blends in tastefully with the Lincoln and Washington
memorials in the heart of Washington, D.C."
Why is the Jewish mayor of New York heading to Israel to declare
support for it? Nothing going on of importance in the AMERICAN city he
runs?
BLOOMBERG
WILL RIDE A BUS IN JERUSALEM,
By STEPHANIE GASKELL, New York Post, August
22, 2003
"Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday he is heading to Israel on Monday,
where he plans to ride a public bus as a show of support for the Jewish
state. "I want to shake hands with people on the street. I want to take a
bus. I want to just be able to say to the Israeli people, 'You've got to
go about your business, and I'll show you that I can do the same thing and
that we are behind you,' " Bloomberg said yesterday during a prayer vigil
in front of the United Nations. The mayor will leave on Monday, traveling
by private jet, and spend most of Tuesday in Jerusalem, where a suicide
bomber on Tuesday killed 20 people on a bus returning from the Western
Wall. Bloomberg plans to be back at City Hall by Wednesday. Bloomberg is
likely to be well-protected during his trip. The mayor travels with NYPD
bodyguards, and Israel often provides its own security for visiting
dignitaries. His office would not comment on security arrangements.
Bloomberg said it would be a "very simple trip." He is bringing only
one elected official — City Councilman Simcha Felder (D-Brooklyn),
who represents the heavily Jewish Borough Park. "This is not a political
trip in the sense that I want to see the elected officials in Israel,"
Bloomberg said. "I want to see the man on the street and just show them
that we're not afraid to go over and we're not afraid to stand next to
them." This will be the mayor's third trip to Israel."
Some say the American travesty of Zionist occupation goes on and on. Pipes
is Jewish. He is the founder of Campus Watch, a witch-hunt hit list of
professors who support the Palestianin struggle for human rights and
justice.
Bush Appoints Daniel Pipes to Think Tank,
Guardian (UK) Friday August 22, 2003
"President Bush bypassed the Senate Friday and appointed an outspoken
Middle East scholar to a federal think tank over the objections of
Democrats and others who say he is anti-Muslim. Bush appointed Daniel
Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, to the
board of the U.S. Institute of Peace. The White House, which made the
announcement in a statement released in Burbank, Wash., where Bush was
visiting, called him a well-respected scholar. His supporters include a
number of Jewish groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Critics call Pipes an
extremist who should not be named to a peace organization. Democrats on
the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee have raised
strong objections to Pipes' nomination, forcing the panel to
postpone a vote on the appointment. The appointment won't be valid until
the next Congress is sworn in, which would be January 2005. Pipes
is a Harvard-trained scholar who, as head of the Middle East Forum, has
called for a war on Islamic extremism, declaring in one post-Sept. 11
interview, ``What we need to do is inspire fear, not affection.'' The
Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based civil rights
group, said Pipes is ``known for his hostility to Muslims,'' and called
the appointment ``a backdoor move'' that is ``an affront to all those who
seek peace.''
Say "too many whites," and there is no problem. Say "too many Jews,"
and you are suddenly branded a
bigot. But there could not be too many Jews in Philadelphia politics.
He says 'ethnic slur' got him unfair treatment. City official files
complaint over reprimand,
By DAVE DAVIES, Philadelphia Daily News,
August 27, 2004
"An official of the city's Minority Business Enterprise Council has filed
a discrimination complaint against the city, charging he was unfairly
reprimanded for complaining about too many Jewish
firms working on a city project. Hanford Jones filed the complaint
June 9 with the city's Commission on Human Relations, five days after he
was publicly criticized by city officials for his alleged remarks. City
Finance Director Janice Davis said then she'd given Jones a "tongue
lashing" about comments he made in April complaining that developers
competing for a North Philadelphia project were
slanted towards "Jewish architects and Jewish lawyers." Davis said
her meeting with Jones had been so intense that he had wept. Jones, who is
black, alleges in the complaint that the city "discriminated against the
black complainant with regard to terms, conditions and privileges of
employment, including but not limited to failing to conduct a thorough
investigation with regard to comments he made at a meeting which were
misconstrued by some to be an ethnic slur." Jones, a $64,000-a-year
coordinator for the city's Minority Business Enterprise Council, is now on
paid leave. He could not be reached for comment yesterday, but in June, he
contended city officials had listened to a few people who complained about
his remarks, "and they took their word carte blanche, never gave me a
chance to confront my accusers...I'm not going to take this lying down."
Jones insisted he was not anti-Semitic and was simply emphasizing the need
to recruit more minorities for city projects. "I could just as easily have
said 'white architects,' " Jones said."
Jews must reward Bush for stance on Israel,
By Edward I. Koch, Jewish World Review,
August 27, 2003
"In President George W. Bush, Israel has a friend and supporter who has
exhibited more concern for the Jewish state than any other President,
Republican or Democrat. President Reagan was a firm supporter of Israel.
But George W. Bush is far and away more willing to stand up for the Jewish
state and support its right to a secure existence. Israel's security
should be a very high priority for American Jews. When Jews were
persecuted and murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe, almost no one was willing
to help them or give them refuge. During the Holocaust, from 1941 to 1945,
six million Jews were murdered. The citizens of almost every country
occupied by the Nazis, particularly France, collaborated with Hitler and
turned their Jewish fellow citizens over to the Germans for extermination
in the gas chambers ... . President Harry S. Truman, for American Jews an
icon in the pantheon of presidents and, for me personally, a hero, was
recently revealed in a newly-discovered diary written in his own hand to
have held Jews in great contempt. Will we learn as a community to never
again walk in lockstep with a single party, undeviating in our support,
and instead, hold those at the top of our government accountable for how
they feel about our community's worldwide security and concerns? How
public officials feel about abortion and taxes is important, but not as
vital as how they feel about our living and dying. The American Jewish
community appreciated the support President Reagan gave to the Jewish
state and it responded with 39 percent voting to reelect Reagan in 1984,
whereas normally Democrats receive up to 90 percent of the Jewish vote. I
believe that next time around, the American Jewish community will express
its appreciation to President Bush by voting for him in even greater
numbers than was the case with President Reagan. Before Wall Street
Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was decapitated by his Muslim
abductors who videotaped the atrocity, he was compelled to say with his
last breath, "My mother is a Jew. My father is a Jew. I am a Jew." Every
Jew should embrace his or her identity with pride and vote their
conscience. I remain a Democrat, but have supported candidates from other
parties when my conscience so dictated. So let me now proclaim, "My mother
of revered memory was a Jew. My father of revered memory was a Jew. I am a
Jew."
P.C.
libertarianism and the Jewish taboo,
By HENRY GALLAGHER FIELDS, Thornwalker,
August 28, 2003
"American libertarians were once freedom-loving, truth-loving iconoclasts
who took pleasure in spurning the shibboleths of Establishment pundits and
intellectuals. No dogma was deemed too sacred to be safe from their
skepticism, and every alleged truth was subject to examination by free
minds reveling in free inquiry. They were totally outside the mainstream,
and they relished that position: one thinks of giants such as Frank
Chodorov, Albert J. Nock, Murray N. Rothbard, and Roy A. Childs,
Jr., standing lonely but unafraid. But libertarians today, with some
honorable exceptions, are a changed breed. They shy away from the
ever-multiplying taboo issues, if they do not actually celebrate the
reigning intellectual orthodoxy. Libertarian principles are noticeable
chiefly by their absence. To illustrate the decline, let's look at a new
star in the libertarian literary firmament: Ilana Mercer. A
self-styled "wandering Jew," Miss Mercer was born in South Africa,
the daughter of an anti-apartheid rabbi who fled to Israel, where she grew
up. Having lived in Canada for a time, Miss Mercer is now ensconced
in the United States, where she has moved to the fore among what passes as
the libertarian punditry ... Miss Mercer has more than a soft spot
for her homeland, by which I do not mean South Africa. At some point
during her peregrinations she conjured up the fantasy that libertarians
"loathe" Israel and that she must leap to the defense of that perpetually
victimized state. To illustrate the existence of a vast libertarian
anti-Israeli groundswell, Miss Mercer manages to come up with a
grand total of three individual examples — Sheldon Richman, Justin
Raimondo, and Stephen P. Halbrook. The Halbrook article she cites comes
from 1981, and Halbrook happens to be a Canadian, which inconvenient
tidbits underscore the fact that anti-Israel feeling is hardly burgeoning
among American libertarians. While Miss Mercer probably could have added
to her census of sinners by pointing out a few anti-Zionist libertarian
souls from the West Bank and Gaza, the bulk of American libertarians would
require megadose testosterone injections before ever daring to mentally
entertain, much less discuss publicly, such a taboo idea. Miss Mercer's
adoring assessment of the Jewish state doesn't gibe too well with the
cardinal tenets of the libertarian canon. She holds to a historical view
that Jews deserve the land of Israel, and she doesn't see much wrong with
Israel's expropriating Palestinian private property and expelling
Palestinian people, crimes that are still being committed, by the way.
Presumably, in her mind the "collective rights" of the Jewish people trump
individual rights, a position that harks back to the days a hundred years
ago when "libertarian" often referred to communists of a somewhat
unorthodox kidney. In any case, the notion is alien to modern
libertarianism insofar as that body of thought proceeds from individualist
premises. While referring to the former white-ruled South Africa as
fascistic, Miss Mercer insists that the Jewish state should be free
to resist contamination by the multiculturalist contagion that an influx
of Palestinians would bring. She lauds Ariel Sharon's new Israeli
"security" wall (which would rightly be called an incarceration wall),
finding nothing wrong with the fact that it is being built on Palestinian
property, restricts the Palestinians to economically non-viable areas, and
leaves more than half of the West Bank and all the water resources in
Israeli hands! To Miss Mercer, the fact that all
Palestinians hate Israel because of what it has done to them only
demonstrates their innate savagery. Apparently we are to believe
that rational, freedom-loving Palestinians, if such chimeras could exist,
would joyously accept their Israeli overlords and give thanks to Uncle
Ariel for letting them pace back and forth in the postage-stamp areas
still left to them and sip a cup of dirty water when that precious
commodity became available. Rothbard, whom Miss Mercer identifies as one
of her philosophical mentors, saw the Revolutionary War as one of the few
justified wars fought by the American people; but the oppression of the
American colonists by the British Empire was nugatory compared to the
suffering inflicted on the Palestinian people by Israel for more than half
a century. While principled libertarians will find nothing to admire in
the Israeli state and much to abhor, it must be acknowledged that Israel
is no worse than many of its national counterparts. But American
libertarians must take special notice of the crimes of Israel because that
state is supported by the American government and because it is immune
from criticism, largely thanks to its American backers, who can make
things very difficult for those who dare to differ. As Raimondo bluntly
put it in his response to Miss Mercer's article: It isn't Israel we
loathe, it's Israel's American amen corner, typified by La Mercer. Why, we
just love Israel, and would love it even more if only its leaders and
supporters would commit war crimes on their own dime, without American aid
and without continually hectoring us for more. Look, nobody really cares
about Israel, per se: the problem is the effect that nation's knee-jerk
supporters have on the American political process and the way their shrill
cries distort and degrade the national debate on U.S. policy in the Middle
East. As many observers both at TLD and elsewhere
have pointed out, this whole war on Iraq was spearheaded by Zionist
neocons. Now, it strains credulity to believe that Miss Mercer,
who has stood against the war, can be unaware of that ... As is the usual
modus operandi for rabid champions of Israel, Miss Mercer resorts
to the "anti-Semitic" tar brush to stigmatize those who dare criticize
that state, stooping so low as to indirectly smear Richman as a "Holocaust
denier" because the Journal of Historical Review also criticizes Israel
... The term "Holocaust denier" itself is Establishment-invented and
Establishment-approved, and it is not what the actual people so diagnosed
would call themselves. Like "racism," "sexism," "homophobism," and other
current demon-indictments, the charge of "Holocaust denial" is a
grindingly tendentious blunt instrument. It is an un-unpackable
intellectual package deal, a contradictory accusation of moral evil and
mental disorder. It has about it the whiff of the psychiatric clinic: the
Soviet psychiatric clinic, that is. It is designed to stop all debate in
its tracks. It is designed to abruptly and definitively curtail thinking.
The Establishment advertises the Holocaust as the greatest evil in human
history. The established media cite it incessantly and produce more
programs on it every year. Official accounts of the Holocaust receive
state support for promotion in schools and various museums. And
questioning the story is absolutely verboten. But we
may wonder why debate on the Holocaust has become impermissible —
why people are incarcerated in "free" Western democracies for doubting
that mass killings in gas chambers occurred six decades ago — why we see
an effort to ban Internet sites that deal with the issue. Holocaustians
claim that such punishment is necessary to protect truth and stop "hate."
But isn't that completely contrary to libertarian concepts of freedom?
Isn't it completely contrary to the enterprise of reason and science,
which calls for freedom of inquiry and depends on it absolutely? Instead
of punishing unbelievers, wouldn't it be better to just bring forth the
documentary and physical evidence proving that millions of Jews perished
in German death camps?"
Arnold’s Challenge. What the moderate Republican must do to win over
liberal Jewish voters,
by Marc Ballon, Jewish Journal of Greater Los
Angeles, August 29, 2003
"With his bulging biceps, $20 million megawatt smile and charisma, actor
Arnold Schwarzenegger has injected some real star power into the circus
that is California’s gubernatorial recall campaign. As the lights dim on
Gov. Gray Davis and shine on the Terminator, scores of voters have thrown
their support behind Austria’s most famous export, even if his political
vision appears not to extend beyond winning the Oct. 7 election. Yet, for
all the excitement surrounding his candidacy, Schwarzenegger has so far
failed to galvanize the Jewish community, whose influence and wealth far
outweigh its numbers. Although many Jews share Schwarzenegger’s liberal
views on abortion and gay rights, they part with him over his fiscal
conservatism. More than two-thirds of Jews are registered Democrats, which
could make it difficult for Schwarzenegger to generate widespread
community support, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior scholar at USC’s
School of Policy, Planning and Development. And Jews might have difficulty
voting for the son of a Nazi storm trooper, regardless of what they tell
pollsters. Although political consultants have said that Schwarzenegger
has inoculated himself against the sins of his father by, among other
things, donating about $750,000 to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and raising
up to $5 million for the nonprofit over the years, his refusal to publicly
disavow his friendship with ex-Nazi Kurt Waldheim, the former Austrian
president and secretary general of the United Nations, is seen as a
negative ... Then there’s the Davis question: Despite the growing
likelihood that voters will boot him from office, the governor still
enjoys a high standing in the Jewish community. With a 30-year track
record of supporting issues and programs of interest to many Jews, the
community might stick with him and vote against the recall, said Howard
Welinsky, chairman of Democrats for Israel. As
governor, Davis has visited Israel, signed legislation expanding the
definition of hate crimes to include such acts as painting a swastika on a
synagogue. He has also channeled millions through the California Arts
Council and the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to the
Zimmer Museum, Wiesenthal Center and Skirball Museum. At an Aug. 25
anti-recall fundraiser in Beverly Hills, Davis admonished a mostly Jewish
audience of 450 to support him during these difficult times. After
sprinkling his speech with some Yiddish and asking for donations,
Davis quipped that he won his first gubernatorial
election, against all odds, by "going to more bar mitzvahs than anyone
else, a record I intend to keep."
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Occupied Governments:
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JEW$ AND GOVERNMENT
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