(First released on April 5, 2019)
With the Putin/Russia Collusion Fairytale debunked, the undeniable cancer of real foreign interference in our government demands an honest airing.
Israel PM B. Netanyahu admonishing a Joint Session of the US Congress in 2015—the third time he had done so. Although it happened on Obama's watch, the invitation had been first negotiated by the Republicans. (Getty Images)
In terms of influence, there can be no serious denial that Israel exerts by far the most powerful suasion of any foreign power on America. Influence exerted by a foreign power’s registered lobby is legitimate per our toothless protocol. Israel’s is not so registered, but... details, details. So, when Republicans invite Bibi to smarmily insult a sitting President in a joint session of Congress, that’s influence, not interference. When, besides financing most Senators and Representatives elections, Israel takes them on cushy, free PR junkets to Tel Aviv, that’s influence, not interference.
Conversely, when Clintonista subversion of the Sanders campaign appears on Wikileaks and is instantly imputed to Russia and Putin--without proof and against expert technical evidence--that’s not influence, it’s Russki interference. More absurdly, when--again, without proof--the same Dem CFOs howl that Putin Trolls bought chump change worth of dingy ads on Facebook that swung the election to Trump that’s... but you get the picture.
What is obvious and has long been so--and has been emphasized by two years of fraud and insanity regarding imagined Russian collusion--is that influence is what your friends have; interference is what your enemies do.
Why, when it is so blatantly obvious as to be a source of outspoken pride for them, is the fact that Israel’s right-wing ruling clique brazenly and continually interferes in American government in the most aggressive and offensive way, universally denied? You want flagrant foreign collusion with high officials in U.S. government? Open your eyes. And your mind...
The reason it’s officially denied is that Israel’s Congressional whores know that not to do so violates their deal. Not to back Israel unquestioningly terminates it, and the loss of that money means loss of office... to say nothing of the beating they’d take in the press and on their reputations.
The great mass of Americans won’t admit what many can’t help but know because they, too, fear being attacked for such bold honesty. They are equally vulnerable to rough handling from the same source: the massively powerful Israel Lobby, a unified phalanx of militant American Zionists.
To be clear: Zionism has always insisted that Israel exists for Jews only.
The Israel Lobby--financed by vast American Zionist wealth--potent as it is, could not leverage our politics if its tactics were exposed, and it knows it. History gives it the key that makes rational assessment of Israel’s policies impossible: the Holocaust and the true anti-Semitism that was its cause.
Evocation of that horror allows any critique of Israeli government to be sleazily labelled Anti-Semitism, and so to effectively nullify argument. The dishonest and cynical Israel Lobby uses this tactic shamelessly to blunt and derail sound criticism or even plain examination of Israeli state behavior.
What then is Anti-Semitism? By definition it is antipathy or hatred of the Jewish people as a whole. An Anti-Semite espouses that categorical prejudice, and Anti-Semitism in word or deed pertains to Jews in toto. In contrast, behavior that is ugly, hateful, or injurious but not directed at Jews as a whole, though execrable, is not Anti-Semitic, just as it’s possible to hate a Catholic or Muslim without hating their religion or their people.
It follows then, that criticism, even vicious, hateful criticism of the Israeli State, is not inherently Anti-Semitic, and the claim is false on its face. To attack the Israeli State is not to attack Jews as a people since Israel is not home to most of Jewry and its polity by no means defines or represents Jews in all their broad, complex range of beliefs, practices, and principles.
To say that criticizing the brutal, repressive apartheid Israeli government’s actions is Anti-Semitic is no more legitimate than to say that condemnation of the American State’s vicious imperialist wars makes one anti-American.
This disingenuous con needs to be named and refuted around the world.
Is there criticism of Israel that is clearly Anti-Semitic? Of course, there is! Plenty of it. Anti-Semitism is no less real and evil because it does not apply to all critiques of Israel or all insults to Jews or Jewish entities. Precisely because Anti-Semitism is so vile and toxic a disease, and because it will continue to live in its odious carriers, it is critically important not to vitiate the ubiquitous contempt it arouses by cynically muddling its meaning.
The dishonest and defensive crying of wolf that the government of Israel and the Israel Lobby deploy against any criticism of their history and policy is, in addition to being morally contemptible, deeply counterproductive in terms of Israel’s standing in world opinion. Mounting a transparently false, blanket, all-purpose lament as a cover for their most obvious and glaring crimes and cruelties cannot prevent the world from seeing them for the corrupt and unjust power they are and fiercely, adamantly opposing them.
Beyond the damage Israel’s cowardly dishonesty does to itself, a more critical concern for Americans concerns what it has done and is doing to exacerbate the rolling debacle of our misruled and floundering country. The Israel Lobby, Zionism’s American voice, wielding the bogus trope of Anti-Semitism as a club, infects and pollutes through its agents and activists every niche of our government from the Presidency and Congress, to Federal Departments and Bureaus, to State and local offices.
Without Zionist acceptance Trump would not have been President, but neither would Obama. Through the Lobby’s diligence we have made our country hated by carrying Israel’s dirty water in the Middle East, crippled and hamstrung enlightened policy at home, and been afflicted with such creatures of nightmare as the Harpy, Nikki Haley, bughouse pseudo-Christian loon, Mike Pompeo, and murderous psychopath, John Bolton.
Nothing suggests the death grip Israel and its Lobby have on our fate can be broken. So long as the Anti-Semitic Con is viable, even our security is in jeopardy with its blind, sick, demented chosen monsters in charge.
The fable of the eagle and scorpion comes painfully to mind. When the bird, stung and bearing them both down to death, asks how the scorpion could sting it after swearing not to do so, it replies, “You knew what I was when you let me ride.” It was all too clear what Israel was in 1947.
Paul Edwards, a Senior Contributing Editor, is a genuine Renaissance man, gifted with many talents and participant in many events and struggles of our tormented times. Our colleague Jeff Brown, who did a fine interview with him, sums it up thusly: “Paul’s life story is worthy of a biography: a rebel youth growing up, traveling and working around the world and then a long career as a Hollywood writer. Through it all, he has never lost his lifelong wrath against US imperialism and global capitalism, while seeking social and economic justice for humanity’s 99%…”" . . . there's a quick way of figuring out just how badly Israel is behaving . . . You see a brisk uptick in the number of articles here accusing the left of anti-Semitism. These articles adopt varying strategies, but the most obvious one is that nowhere in them is there much sign that the author feels it necessary to concede that Israel is a racist state whose obvious and provable intent is to continue to steal Palestinian land, oppress Palestinians, herd them into smaller and smaller enclaves and ultimately drive them into the sea or Lebanon or Jordan or Dearborn or the space in Dallas-Fort Worth airport between the third and fourth runways. .. . The real problem is that most Jews here don't like hearing bad things said about Israel, same way they don't like reading articles about the Jewish lobby here. . . . Anti-Semitism has become like a flit gun to squirt at every inconvenient fly on the window pane."
—Alexander Cockburn, My Life as an "Anti-Semite"
| Jeff J. Brown
We should also remember that Semites include Arabic speakers, as both Hebrew and the latter are members of this language group. Aramaic/Syriac, the language that Jesus probably spoke is also Semitic. I’ve even read that “Semite” is really only for the languages and not peoples, but was adopted to create a demonization term. So, if you call someone an anti-Semite, they are also against most Arabs and Aramaic/Syriac speakers! Eric Schechter I'll give you my own little memoir about bigotry. It's not very insightful. Actually, maybe you'll get some insight from my =lack= of insight, somehow, as I'll explain*.
I don't know whether I'm Jewish. My parents were both Jewish, and for Hitler that would be enough reason to classify me as Jewish, my father was fond of telling me. If being Jewish is a racial thing, then yes I'm Jewish. But I became an atheist at the age of 10, so the religion meant nothing to me.
I was dragged off to the synagogue once every few weeks, to listen to other people praying. And I had to study Hebrew for a while, in order to go through a Bar-Mitzvah. I still remember a couple of words of Hebrew. But my parents failed to inculcate any Jewish "culture" in me. They claimed that their humanism was Jewish, but it seemed to me that it was inherent in the very nature of humanism to refuse to be affiliated with any particular religion. Growing up atheist in a Jewish family in a country that called itself "Christian," I saw that the difference between Judaism and Christianity was much like the difference between Pepsi and Coke -- they taste similar, and they are poisonous in the same way.
I've personally experienced extremely little anti-semitism in my life. Apparently Jews in the USA have mostly assimilated. It looks that way to me. Or perhaps I experienced some anti-semitism that was subtle, and I was not aware of it. For instance, I was once turned down for a job; maybe some anti-semite was involved in the decision process. Who knows.
But here is my big huge lack of insight: I have always felt that all kinds of racism -- against Jews, against blacks, against whomever -- was stupid, and would soon collapse under its own weight. People everywhere would wake up and realize how stupid it was, and they would just stop doing it. Maybe not all people, but enough people to stop the others. And in recent years I've felt that way about capitalism too. I've been wrong on both counts, and yet the feeling persists. Apparently I have not yet understood how racism really works. *And maybe one of the people reading this can figure out something about people like me who do not really understand racism.
But I have to say a few words about Zionism, too. My first knowledge of it was as a child, studying Hebrew in the synagogue. There were donation boxes labeled "plant a tree in Israel," and I put a few coins in. It sounded like a good idea at the time -- Israel was a desert, and they were going to turn it green. It was only decades later that I learned the real use of those coins: bulldoze an ancient Palestinian home and its ancient olive trees, then plant some other trees to finish erasing the Palestinian history.
In recent years I've begun to see that Judaism and Christianity are not as alike as Coke and Pepsi. I've discovered the book of Joshua, which is the book after Exodus in the Old Testament. Moses dies, and then Joshua becomes the leader of the tribe. In the story, Yahweh says to Joshua, now it is time to enter Canaan, the promised land. Go, kill all the people who currently live there, and take their land. It's a very bloodthirsty book. And now the Zionists are reenacting it, and they take the book of Joshua as their "deed" for the territory. As though the fact that their priests wrote it down long ago made it the word of God.
But I've never known any Zionists personally. All the Jews I've known personally have been like most people in the world: nice people who never took religion very seriously. I think all the wars that have been fought in the name of religion were really fought over property; they just used religion as an excuse. I keep feeling that religion is really stupid, and someday it will just collapse under its own weight, but so far that hasn't happened either.
If anyone reading this can understand what is really going on, please explain it to me.
Posted Aug 15 2020 14:08 utc Albert Whitford Kudos to Paul Edwards for providing a sweeping indictment of Israeli meddling in our cultural and political life. Indeed, if there is any huge pink elephant in the room, while media presstitutes hyperventilate about the practically non-existent Russian and Chinese influence, it is the long shadow cast by Israel and its army of apologists and deeply embedded political influencer organizations that deserve serious concern. AIPAC —to name just one—has long been the shameful shrine where all US politicians of any respectable caliber must travel to proclaim their love and devotion to Israel, under penalty of subtle but real injury to their careers. Being self-selecting for their egotistical sociopathy and opportunism, It's not surprising they all comply. Posted Aug 15 2020 14:19 utc J.F. Fernandez-Llanos Thank you for republishing Mr Edwards' article on this highly controversial topic. He spells out the problem perfectly. The cynicism of the Israel Lobby in the US (perhaps the most extensive in the West, as the situation is quite similar in both Britain and France these days, not to mention Germany, where lingering guilt apparently paralyses common sense) has acquired a momentum that demands attention, such attention nonetheless hindered by the manufactured threat of being accused of indiscriminate hatred of Jews. It's obvious to me (and I think many others, including many Jews who have found their voice to stand up to Israel but are constantly blocked by the media) that the crimes of modern Israel issue from a criminal symbiosis between the US and the Israeli establishments. It's a matter of record, in fact, that Israel has often served Washington as an instrument for sordid errands the profoundly hypocritical American elites were afraid to tackle in broad daylight. Their role in arming and training Contras in Nicaragua, and death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador, will not be soon forgotten by the people at the receiving end of such brutal ministrations. There are many other instances of such "criminal integration", including the recently revealed "Epstein sex scandal," whose actual significance does not derive from putative abuses against young women, as the feminist noise machine would have us believe, but from the actual purpose of such networks of nymphets, the luring of powerful men to "pedophillic" dalliances by Western intel operatives for later use in political blackmail. Posted Aug 15 2020 15:07 utc |
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