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Zion-power
and War: From Iraq to Iran
The Deadly Embrace
By James Petras
11/06/07 "ICH"
--- - Explanations for the US attack on
Iraq range from military-political pretexts to accounts focusing
on geopolitical and economic interests.
The original official
explanation was the now discredited claim that Saddam Hussein
possessed chemical, biological and other weapons of mass
destructions (WMD), which threatened the US, Israel and the
Middle East. Subsequent to the US military occupation, when no
WMD were discovered, Washington justified the invasion and
occupation by citing the removal of a dictator and the
establishment of a prosperous democracy in the Arab world. The
imposition of a colonial puppet regime, propped up by an
imperial occupation force of over 200,000 troops and irregular
death squads, which have killed close to a million Iraqi
civilians, forced over 4 million into exile and impoverished
over 95% of the population, puts the lie to that line of
argument. The latest line of justification revolves around the
notion that the US occupation is necessary to ‘prevent a civil
war’. Most Iraqis and military experts think the presence of
the US colonial occupation army is the cause of violent
conflict, particularly the US military’s devastating attacks on
civilians, their financing of rival tribal leaders and Kurdish
mercenaries and their contracting of local police-military to
repress the population. Since most Americans (not to speak of
the rest of the world) are not convinced by these specious
arguments, the Washington regime rationalizes its continued war
and occupation by citing the need for a colonial military
victory to maintain its world and regional status as a
super-power, and to assure its Middle East client regimes that
Washington can defend their ruling cliques and their hegemonic
ally, Israel. The Bush White House and pro-Israel Congressional
leaders claim a victory in Iraq will bolster Washington’s image
as a successful global ‘anti-terrorist’ (anti-insurgent)
regime. These post-facto justifications have lost credibility
as the war drags on, popular resistance grows in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia, Thailand, Philippines,
Pakistan and elsewhere. The longer the war continues, the
greater the economic cost and the demoralization and depletion
of military personnel, the more difficult the task of sustaining
the capacity to intervene in defense of the empire.
If the official
political and military justifications for the US colonial wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan ring hollow and convince few, what of
the other economic explanations for the war put forth mostly
but not exclusively by critics of the Bush administration?
The major focus of the economic
determinists of the war centers on the issue of oil, as in ‘war
for oil’.* These explanations in turn break down into several
variants: The first and most popular is that the big US oil
companies were behind the war, that Bush and Cheney were
pressured by their Big Oil handlers into launching the war so
that US oil companies could seize the nationally-owned Iraqi oil
fields and refineries. A second, slightly modified, version
argued that the White House was not pressured by Big Oil but
acted on their behalf as a reflex action. (This is put forth to
explain why the spokesmen for Big Oil multinationals were so
conspicuously absent from the media and halls of Congress in the
lead-up to the war.)
(* see recent statements in
September and October by former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan
Greenspan and US General John Abazaid among others)
A third version argued
that the US went to war to secure oil for US national security
interests threatened by Saddam Hussein. This explanation cites
the danger of Saddam Hussein closing down the Strait of Hormuz,
invading the Gulf States, inciting revolts in Saudi Arabia
and/or reducing the flow of Middle East oil to the US and its
allies. In other words, the ‘geopolitics’ of the Middle East
dictated that a non-client regime was a threat to US, European
and Japanese access to oil. This is apparently the latest
argument put forth by Alan Greenspan, a former proponent of the
WMD propaganda.
The major advocates of
the ‘war for oil’ (WFO) argument fail several empirical tests:
Namely that the oil companies were not actively
supporting the war via propaganda, congressional lobbying or
through any other policy vehicle. Secondly the proponents of
WFO fail to explain the efforts by major oil companies to
develop economic ties with Iraq prior to the invasion and were
in fact, working through clandestine third parties to trade in
Iraqi oil. Thirdly, all the major oil companies operating in
the Middle East were mainly concerned with political stability,
the liberalization of the economic policies of the region and
the opening of oil services for foreign investors. The big oil
companies’ strategies were to advance their global interests
through the on-going liberalization process in the Middle East
and conquering new markets and oil resources through their
formidable market power – investments and technology. The onset
of the US invasion of Iraq was viewed with anxiety and concern
as a military action, which would destabilize the region,
increase hostility to their interests throughout the Gulf and
slow down the liberalization process. Not a single CEO from the
entire petroleum industry viewed the US invasion as a positive
‘national security’ measure, because they understood that Saddam
Hussein, after over a decade of economic and military sanctions
and frequent bombing of his military installations and
infrastructure throughout the Clinton years, was not in a
position to launch any acts of aggression against Gulf oil
companies or states. Moreover the oil companies had several
real prospects of developing lucrative service and commercial
oil contracts with Saddam Hussein’s regime in the lead-up to the
war. It was the US government pressured by the Zionist Power
Configuration (ZPC), which pushed legislation blocking (through
sanctions) Big Oil from consummating these economic agreements
with Iraq.
The argument that Big
Oil promoted the war for its own benefit fails the empirical
test. A corollary to that is that Big Oil has failed to benefit
from the US occupation because of the heightened conflict,
continuous sabotage, the predictable resistance of the Iraqi oil
workers to privatization and the general insecurity, instability
and hostility of the Iraqi people.
The American Left
jumped on Alan Greenspan’s declaration that the Iraq war was
about oil, as some kind of confirmation in the absence of any
evidence. Yet everyday that has transpired since the beginning
of the war five years ago, demonstrates that ‘Big Oil’ not only
did not promote the invasion, but has failed to secure a single
oil field, despite the presence of 160,000 US troops, thirty
thousand Pentagon/State Department paid mercenaries and a
corrupt puppet regime. As of September 19, 2007 the
Financial Times of London featured an article on the
conspicuous absence of the ‘Oil Majors’ in Iraq: “Big Oil Plays
a Waiting Game over Iraq’s Reserves’ (September 19, 2007). Only
a few small companies (‘oil minnows’) have contracts in Northern
Iraq (‘Kurdistan’), which has only 3% of Iraq’s reserves. ‘Big
Oil’ did not start the Iraq war, nor has ‘Big Oil’ benefited
from the war. The reason why ‘Big Oil’ did not support the war
is the same reason they haven’t invested after the occupation:
“The level of violence is still unacceptably high…if anything
the prospects of agreement appears to be receding as tensions
between parties grow.” (ibid) ‘Big Oil’s’ worst nightmares
leading up to the Zionist-influenced war have all been utterly
confirmed. Whereas ‘Big Oil’s’ negotiations and third party
deals with pre-war Iraq provided a stable and consistent flow of
oil and revenue, the war has not only reduced these revenues to
zero, but has all but eliminated any new options for the next
decade.
Despite the war,
liberalization elsewhere in the region has proceeded and US oil
and financial interests have advanced despite the increased
obstacles and hostilities, which have grown out of the US
slaughter of Muslims.
Big Oil, Texas billionaires, even big contributors to the Bush
family political
campaigns were no match for the ZPC
when it came to Middle East war policy. They lacked the inside
and outside power, the disciplined grass roots organization of
Jewish community organizations to overcome the Zionist
warmongering power over Congress, their position in strategic
executive offices and their army of academic scribes from
Harvard, Yale and Hopkins churning out bellicose propaganda in
the US media. What is striking about the position papers and
op-ed reprints in the Daily Alert is the total absence of
any deviation from official Israeli pro-war positions: Whether
it is killing children in Jenin, bombing population centers in
Lebanon, shelling Arab families relaxing at the beach in Gaza,
the Daily Alert simply echoes the official Israeli line
and blatant lies about human shields, accidents, gunmen among
school children, self-induced atrocities. Never in the entire
period analyzed is there a single critical article questioning
Israel’s massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians. No crime against humanity is too great for the
Presidents of the Leading American Jewish Organizations to
defend. It is this slavish obedience to the official Israeli
policy that marks out the Zionist Power Configuration as
something much more than just another lobby as its ‘left’
apologists and even Walt and Mearsheimer claim. The ZPC is much
more sinister both as a transmission belt for the policies and
interests of a colonial power hell-bent on domination in the
Middle East and as the most serious authoritarian threat to our
democratic freedoms: no single individual who dares criticize
can escape the long hand of the pro-Israel authoritarians. Book
sellers are picketed, editors are intimidated, university
presses and distributors are threatened, university presidents
are blackmailed, local and national candidates are browbeaten
and smeared, meetings are cancelled and venues are pressured,
faculty are fired or denied promotion, corporations are
blacklisted, union pension funds are raided, theater
performances and concerts are cancelled. And the list of
repressive actions taken by these authoritarian Zionist
organizations at the national and local levels runs on, arousing
fear among some, anger among many more and a slowly burning
resentment and growing awareness among the silent majority. The
second geo-political version of ‘oil for war’ focuses on the
national security issues. After the First Gulf War in 1991 and
eleven years of economic sanctions and military disarmament,
Iraq was an impoverished, weak nation partially dismembered by
the US backed Kurdish enclave in the north and constant US
bombing and over flights. Iraq was severely bombed several
times during the Clinton regimes and over 1 million of its
citizens, including an estimated 500,000 children, died
prematurely from conditions related to the US imposed
deprivation of food and essential medical and water treatment
supplies.
Before the invasion in 2003 Iraq
did not even control its shorelines, airspace or even a third of
its national territory. As the US invasion demonstrated,
Saddam’s military lacked the most elementary capacity to mount
any defense in a conventional war, not even a single fighter
plane presented a threat to any offshore US client or to the
Strait of Hormuz. The stiff resistance to the US came later in
the form of irregular forces engaged in guerrilla warfare, not
from any organized force established by the Baathist regime. In
other words no matter how far the concept of ‘national security’
is stretched to include US military bases, oil installations,
client rulers and transport and shipping lanes in the Middle
East, Saddam Hussein was clearly not a threat. If however the
concept of ‘national security’ is re-defined to mean the
physical elimination of any potential opponent of US and Israeli
domination in the region, then Saddam Hussein could be labeled a
national security threat. But that takes the discussion of the
explanation for the US war against Iraq to another terrain and a
discussion of the political forces who manipulated the phony WMD
and ‘War for Oil’ propaganda to justify a war for US and Israeli
hegemony in the Middle East. Even more important the
disinformation campaign about who was responsible for the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq is highly relevant to the
current propaganda blitz driving us toward a war with Iran.
From the Iraq War Cover-up on to Iran War Propaganda
The pro-Israel power
configuration beats the war drums for an assault on Iran with
greater insistency and successfully induces the Democratic
Congress and Presidential hopefuls as well as the Republican
White House to “put the military option on the table.” Parallel
to overt war propaganda, a number of liberal critics of the Iraq
war have published articles arguing that Israel “really opposed
the Iraq war.” Writers as diverse as Gareth Porter, ex-CIA
analyst Ray McGovern, Colonel Wilkerson (Colin Powell’s Aide),
ultra Zion-Con Michael Ledeen and others claim that Israel
opposed the war because they wanted the US to target Iran.
Others argue that Israel had advised the US that an invasion of
Iraq would have dire consequences for the Middle East, tipping
the balance toward Iran and which they now claim to have
predicted. These Israel-exonerators point to other culprits,
namely Bush-Cheney-Rumsfelt or the American Neo-Cons (better
known as the Zion-Cons) who, they insist, have acted
independently of Israel or ignored Israeli priorities in the
region.
There is an alternative
view, which argues that Israel promoted the US attack on Iraq,
did all in its power through its US pro-Israel followers to
design, propagandize and plan the war. This alternative view
sustains that at no point did the Zion-Cons act contrary to
Israeli state interests. In fact, Israeli officials worked on a
daily basis with its US agents inside the government,
particularly the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans to provide
disinformation to justify the military attack. If, as we will
show, Israel was deeply involved in pushing the US to attack
Iraq and is behind the current disinformation campaign to
provoke a US war against Iran, then anti-war forces and US
public opinion must openly confront the ‘Israel factor’.
We will argue that the
exoneration of Israel is mainly an attempt to deflect US public
hostility away from those Israel Firsters who manipulated us
into this costly, bloody unending war. Exoneration of Israeli
responsibility for the US invasion of Iraq allows the Jewish
state and its US agents to escape any blame for the degradation
of US forces in Iraq and provides them a ‘clean moral slate’ for
launching a new bloody US attack against Iran. Rather than
seeing Israel as giving us a double dose of an incurable
colonial disease, exoneration allows Israel and its agents to
follow the same Iraq invasion pattern of manipulation and
duplicity in leading us to war with Iran. The White House and
Democratic Congress, echoing Israel, are using inflated threats
of nuclear attack, demonizing Iran’s leaders, financing low
intensity warfare through the training and funding of violent
Iranian exile-based clients, economic sanctions and ‘failed’
diplomatic maneuvers …to lead up to a new war. Taking advantage
of their liberal (Zion-lib)-led exoneration for their role in
the invasion of Iraq, the Zionist Power Configuration, through
such loyal mouthpieces as Senator Joseph Lieberman, blame the
Iranians for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq. It is not the
Zionist pro-war officials in and out of the government who sent
young American soldiers to die in Iraq at the behest of the
Israeli state to whom the US public should direct its anger, but
rather the Iranians who are accused of arming and training Iraqi
resistance fighters. Leaving Israel out and bringing Iran into
the debacle in Iraq serves the Israeli purpose of covering their
backsides while inciting Americans into a new military adventure
against the much larger and better-armed Iranians.
The exonerators of
Israel are not homogeneous in their political background or
goals. Some liberals, fearful of arousing a powerful Zionist
backlash, seek to whitewash Israel’s lobby operatives in the US
as a way of gaining sympathy among pro-Israel Congressional
Democrats and financial backing from wealthy Jewish liberals
critical of the Iraq war. Democratic Party Chairman Howard
Dean, following the new Israeli script declared during a visit
to Tel Aviv in 2006 that the ‘the US invaded the wrong country!’
The price of the
‘exonerate Israel’ strategy is to overlook the powerful role
that the Israel First lobby is playing in bringing us to a new
war with Iran as part of a sequence of invasions promoted by
Israeli strategists. These clever ploys are backfiring.
Playing to the prejudices of the liberal pro-Israel crowd in the
Democratic Party has lead to the current absence of any
significant anti-war movement against the Zionist-led propaganda
and war-mongering blitz against Iran.
There is no question
that some anti-war Zion-Libs are trying to put some distance
from the Zion-Con/Israeli policymakers who promoted the invasion
of Iraq. But this does not come from any opposition to another
new and more dangerous military commitment. On the contrary,
the Zion-Libs criticize the discredited Bush-Cheney-Iraq policy
in favor of a new more aggressive war policy toward Iran. By
exonerating Israel and its transmission belt of organized local
and national Jewish and fundamentalist Christian organizations,
the liberals have not found allies for peace – they have revived
the powerful influence of Israel and its US apparatus which was
being increasingly rejected by the US public and elements in the
US military. By putting the blame for the debacle in Iraq
exclusively on Bush/Cheney and their allies in ‘Big Oil’ and
excluding the role of Israel, the ZPC and their toadies among
the Democrats in Congress, the liberal exonerators, open the way
for a new cycle of war in the Middle East. To prevent a future
Zionist and Israeli-orchestrated US attack against Iran, we must
be perfectly clear about who maneuvered the US into attacking
Iraq.
Israel, the ZPC and the Run-up to the
Invasion of Iraq
Analytically, the
differences between Israeli state policy and the leading US
Zionist organizations are, with very rare exceptions,
indistinguishable. The run-up to the US attack on Iraq is a
case in point. From the late 1980’s, through the first Gulf
War, the Clinton Administration’s sanctions, daily bombings and
territorial separation of northern Iraq, ‘Kurdistan’, from the
rest of the country, to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the
Israeli government pressured US Congress-people and senior
policy makers toward bellicose policies toward Israel’s
‘enemies’. Israeli state policy urging further US degradation
of Iraq was transmitted through the major Zionist organizations
and key Zionist officials in the Clinton and later Bush
administrations. Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Madeleine
Albright, Richard Holbrook, Sandy Berger, William Cohen and
others were the most important foreign policy-makers toward the
Middle East in the Clinton Administration and they produced and
implemented the sanctions, bombings and territorial
dismemberment of Iraq. Following their term of office, key
Clinton Zionists went to work at pro-Israeli think tanks in
Washington. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the
Zion-Cons in top level positions in the Bush Administration (Ari
Fleischer, Paul Wolfowitz, David Frum, Richard Perle, Douglas
Feith, Eliott Abrams, Irving (Scooter) Libby, David Wurmser and
others) and key Zionist Congress-members like Senator Joseph
Lieberman, called for the US to attack Iraq, as part of a series
of sequential wars, to include Syria and Iran. They echoed the
policies of the Israeli state and in particular Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon.
Israeli state
officials, at no point expressed any reservations or differences
with the bellicose efforts of its highly placed liaison agents
in the Bush Government, nor with its servile lobby, AIPAC, nor
with the pro-Israel Op-Ed writers of the major newspapers and
broadcast media. Zionist ideologues prevailed everywhere
berating the US military officials for their timid caution.
Israel, consistent with its policies since the late 1980’s,
encouraged the Bush Administration toward an invasion and
occupation of Iraq in all of its top level meetings with
Rumsfelt, Powell, Rice and Bush. The Israeli media, with rare
exceptions, demonized Saddam, played up his ‘threat’ to the
Middle East and Israel’s security, conflated Palestinian suicide
bombings with Iraqi support for the Palestinian people’s
national aspirations, and energized their fundamentalist
Christian allies in the US to follow suit in calling for an
invasion of Iraq.
An analysis of the
relationship between the Israeli state and highly placed Zionist
officials in the Bush Administration reveals first and foremost
that Tel Aviv laid out the strategic policies of eliminating
Middle East regimes opposed to its ethnic cleansing of the
occupied territories and unlimited expansion of colonial
settlements in Occupied Palestine and the consolidation of
Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The Zionist elite in the
Bush regime invented the pretext and the propaganda for war and
most important, successfully designed and operationalized the US
invasion of Iraq. This ‘division of labor’ included the
Zion-Cons in the executive branch, backed by the Presidents of
the Major Jewish American Organizations (including AIPAC), the
regional, state and local Jewish federations through their
influence over Congress.
Testimony by former
Pentagon analyst, retired U.S.
Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski confirms that throughout
the period leading to the Iraq war, Israeli military officials,
intelligence officers and other high ranking functionaries had
daily access with top Zionist Pentagon officials like
Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Frequent consultation,
intelligence coordination and joint planning between top
Zion-Cons in the Pentagon and top Israeli military operatives in
the US indicates that there was close agreement in directing the
US to invade Iraq. There was Zion-Con/Israeli agreement,
confirmed in the immediate aftermath of the initial ‘successful’
occupation, that Iraq was the first of a series of invasions in
the Middle East, to be followed by attacks against Iran and
Syria. The Israeli joke current at the time was: ‘Anyone can
take Baghdad, real men go for Tehran.’ In November 2002, Ariel
Sharon, in an interview with the Times of London, called for the
bombing of Iran ‘the day after the US invades Iraq’.
The Zion-Con/Israeli blueprint for sequential wars
was explicitly stated in the policy paper “Project for a New
American Century’, a kind of American-Israeli Mein Kampf of US
world domination in which Israel would be a co-benefactor of
American military might and treasure. Most of the Zion-Con
designers and executers of US war policy in the Middle East were
listed as authors or sponsors of the ‘New American Project’.
Many were also contributors to the policy paper for Likud
leader, Benyamin Netanyahu, which specifically called for the
dismemberment of Iraq into manageable ethnic enclaves.
Israeli intelligence ‘disinformation’ about Saddam
Hussein’s ‘threat’ to the region was embellished
One is by parleying
influence over a small group of Congressmen into a large
majority. For example, AIPAC wrote up the bill, presented by
Senator Lieberman and co-signed by Senator Kyl, labeling the
Iranian Revolutionary Guards as ‘terrorists’, which paves the
way for Bush to launch an attack. It was passed by 80% of
Congress.
Cumulative
power is the convergence of different sectors of the ZPC on
a single issue. For example, pro-Israel writers and Jewish
leaders from all major organizations and spheres of its media
from Left to far Right, joined to denounce Mearsheimer and
Walt’s essay and subsequent book, most resorting to either ad
hominem attacks (‘anti-Semites’) or illogical and convoluted
arguments ignoring the empirical data.
Propaganda of the
deed is a favorite power tool of the ZPC. This involves
publicizing the successful punishment of critics of Israel
and the ZPC in order to intimidate current or future
policymakers. An example is how Ziono-fascist Professor Alan
Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School successfully campaigned,
with backing from the ZPC, ousted Professor Norman Finkelstein
from his university post, thus serving as ‘exemplary punishment’
to any future academic critics of Israel. Dershowitz campaign
went so far as to slander Professor Finkelstein’s deceased
mother, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, as a Jewish ‘kapo’
or Nazi collaborator.
The ZPC has multiple
resources that are mutually re-enforcing in both the
private, and public spheres. Large-scale, long-term party and
electoral financing buy Congressional influence. This in turn
increases the power of the large minority of Zionist Congressmen
in gaining control over party nominations and committee
assignments in Congress. This in turn feeds back into greater
influence for the ZPC in shaping US-Middle East foreign policy
and facilitating access of pro-Israeli writers to the Op-Ed
pages of the major dailies, weeklies and other branches of the
corporate media.
Zionist power is also
the result of a long-standing, pervasive and totally one-sided
propaganda campaign which demonizes Israel’s Arab, especially
Palestinian critics, and paints Israel (the world’s fourth
largest and Middle East’s only nuclear power) as a democratic
fortress, surrounded by hostile authoritarian governments.
Through its access and partial control over most of the major
media, the Zionist Power Configuration provides heavily biased
reports on events such as the Israeli terror bombings of
populations centers in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere.
Reputational power projected by the ZPC in the US counteracts
reality in the Middle East to the extent that Palestinian
victims of all ages and genders, suffering 40 years of Israeli
military rule, land expropriation and constant violent assaults
are made into aggressors and the Israeli executioners are
portrayed as virtuous, peaceful victims.
Israel Lobby or ‘Zionist Power
Configuration’?
Mearsheimer and Walt
describe the pro-Israel power configuration as a ‘lobby, just
like any other US lobby’, a ‘loose collection of individuals and
groups’ outside of government, acting on behalf of Israel.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The power of Israel in
the United States is manifested through a multiplicity of highly
organized, well financed and centrally directed structures
throughout the United States. The ZPC include several score
political action committees with innocuous names, at least a
dozen propaganda mills (‘think tanks’) employing scores of
former highly connected top policymakers mostly in Washington
and the East Coast, and the 52 major American Jewish
Organizations grouped under the umbrella listing ‘Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ (CPMAJO).
AIPAC and other national organizations (ADL, AJC etc ) are
important influences at the national Executive-Congressional
lobbying levels. But equally or even more important in
censoring and purging critics, controlling local media and
shaping opinion throughout cities, towns and villages are the
local Jewish community federations and organizations which
browbeat local cultural programmers, editors, bookstores,
universities, churches and civic groups to deny public platforms
to speakers, writers, artists, religious spokespeople and other
public figures critical of Israel and its Zionist
disciples.
The power base of the
ZPC is found in the local activist doctors, dentists, lawyers,
real estate brokers and landlords who preside over the local
confederations and their several hundred thousand affiliates.
It is they who harass, badger, browbeat, raise money and
organize propaganda junkets for elected officials and ensure
their support for Israeli wars and increases in the US
multi-billion dollar aid packages to Israel. The local Zionist
power structure organizes successful campaigns forcing state
pension funds to purchase billions of dollars in underperforming
Israel state bonds and to disinvest in companies engaged in
economic transactions with Israel’s self-described ‘state
terrorists adversaries’. It is the Jewish based pro-Israel
student organizations which spy on US professors, who may or may
not be critical of Israel and smear them in local and national
newsletters and pressure administrations to fire them. Even
where less than 1% of the local population is Jewish, Zionist
zealots are able to pressure small private Christian colleges to
ban a Nobel Peace Prize winning theologian, like Bishop Desmond
Tutu, from speaking on their campus. The Zionist octopus has
extended its tentacles far beyond the traditional centers of big
city power and national politics, reaching into remote towns and
cultural spheres. Not even the American small town obituary
pages are exempt: When a Connecticut newspaper published a
memorial of a prominent Palestinian grandmother and community
leader from Hebron (May 2003) the 61 year old Shadeen abu
Hijleh, who was shot in her home by Israelis soldiers, members
of the local Jewish confederation expressed outrage at the
exposure of Israeli military crimes – thus censoring a moving
obituary page tribute written by her American friends and
relatives.
Centralized structures
– coordinated policy, targets, quotas, fund raising, large-scale
special campaigns, black lists (‘anti-Semites’ and ‘self-hating
Jews’), and networks all are integral parts of the ZPC.
Mearsheimer and Walt have failed to analyze the organizational
relations between the head office, regional staff and local
organizations of the major pro-Israel Jewish organizations and
how quickly they can be mobilized to stigmatize, censor or
support a given speaker, activity or fund raiser in favor of
Israeli interests.
Throughout the country the
newsletters of local Jewish Community Relations Councils have
parroted the line or reprinted libelous canards of their
national offices denouncing Mearsheimer and Walt’s book The
Israel Lobby – and from their rather ill-informed
caricatures of M and W’s discussion it is clear they have barely
even read the book’s cover.
One thing is clear from the largely
emotional ejaculations from the predominantly Jewish
intellectuals’ attacks against the book, the intellectual level
of contemporary Jewish intellectuals has seriously deteriorated
to the point that envy, communal spite and partisan vitriol has
gotten the better of a reasoned review of data and logic. The
literary efforts by Abraham Foxman of the ADL to answer M and H
are reminiscent of the Stalinist diatribes featured during the
Moscow show trials of the 1930’s (our Jewish version of Andrei
Vishinsky). What accounts for the influence of these
intellectual mediocrities is neither the evil vapors emanating
from their venomous writing, nor their appeal to reason – though
some pretense to reasoned debate is made by Zionist progressives
– if such exist – but the fact that their repetitious message
circulate throughout their mass media outlets uncontested.
The ZPC, having
organized the war through falsified data, via the top two
officials in the Pentagon (Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith), the
Vice Presidents office (Wurmser and Irving Scooter Libby) and
the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) organized the
President’s office (Ari Fleischer) and written Bush’s
pre-emptive war speech (David Frum) are now fearful they will
face the anger of the American people who have suffered the loss
of thousands of soldiers – to an extent not experienced by the
authors and implementers of this war for Israel. To avoid
identification with this disastrous war, Zionist Power
Configuration War planners and propagandists have resorted to
lies (denial of the crucial role of Israel in bringing the US to
war) and the somewhat more clever operators like Alan Greenspan
have joined the mindless American left to drag out the old
canard of ‘War for Oil’.
War For Oil or War For Israel: The
Public Record
Zionist Power
Configuration support for the Iraq War was an open, relentless,
propaganda campaign by well-known writers, publicists, and
community leaders as well as by the 52 leading Jewish
organizations. There was ‘no conspiracy’ or ‘cabal’ – the
Zionist campaign was brazenly public, aggressive and
reiterative.
A systematic review of
the major propaganda organ of the Presidents of the Major
American Jewish Organization’s newsletter, Daily Alert,
from 2002 to September 2007 – 1,760 issues – provides us with a
scientific sample of ZPC opinion. On average, each issue
contained 5 articles in favor of the war or moves toward war
with Iraq and/or Iran. The Daily Alert featured op-ed
articles by the major liberal, conservative and Zion-fascist
writers and academics which regularly appeared in the Washington
Post, Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun, and the New York
and Los Angeles Times, the Daily Telegraph and Times of London,
YNet and others. In other words, in the crucial pre-war to
post-invasion period, the leading pro-Israel Jewish
organizations produced approximately 8800 pieces of pro-Iraq war
propaganda and circulated it to all its member organizations,
every Congressman, every leading member of the executive branch
with follow-ups by local activists and an army of Washington
lobbyists (150 from AIPAC alone) plus several hundred full-time
activists from local and regional offices.
In a comparable survey
of the leading Anglo-American business and financial newspaper,
the Financial Times between 2002 and September 2007,
regarding Big Oil’s policy toward war with Iraq and now Iran is
just as revealing. I reviewed the opinion, editorial and letter
pages of 1,872 issues of the Financial Times and there is
not a single article or letter by any spokesperson or
representative of a major (or minor) oil company calling for the
invasion and occupation of Iraq or the bombing of Iran. There
was no oil lobby or grass roots organization demanding Congress
or the Bush Administration to go to war in defense of US oil
interests. But the ZPC was active, promoting the lie that
disarmed and embargoed Iraq represented an ‘existential threat’
to the nuclear armed Israel.
A similar comparison of
Zionist and Big Oil regarding propaganda for a US military
confrontation with Iran reinforces the argument of the
centrality of the major Jewish organizations in promoting United
States involvement in Middle East wars for Israel. Between 2004
and September 2007 (3 years and 9 months) the Zionist propaganda
sheet, the Daily Alert, published 960 issues in which an
average of 6 articles argued for an immediate or near future US
or Israeli preemptive military attack on Iran, tougher economic
sanctions than the Security Council was willing to support,
organized disinvestment and boycotts of Iran. A survey of the
Financial Times during the same period, 1053 issues, (the
FT prints 6 times a week, the Daily Alert 5
times), fails to produce a single letter or op-ed article by any
representative or spokesperson of Big Oil supporting war against
Iran. On the contrary, as was the case with Iraq, major oil
leaders expressed anxiety and fear that an Israeli instigated
war would destabilize the entire area and lead to the
destruction of vital oil installations, undermine transport
routes and shipping lanes and cancel lucrative service
contracts. Contrary to the latest Zionist propaganda, Big Oil
wants the US to lift its sanctions against investment in Iran,
since it has lost lucrative deals to competitors.
In complete
contradiction to the ‘leftist’ Trotskyist-Zionist finger
pointing at Big Oil as the main push for war, big Texas oil was
working profitable with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, signing hundreds
of millions of dollars in illegal contracts with the now
executed ruler. Oscar Wyatt, a Texas oil billionaire, recently
convicted for paying bribes to Saddam Hussein, was one of many
big oil dealers involved in the lucrative pre-war oil trade with
Iraq (Financial Times Oct. 2, 2007, p.2).
Zionist Warmongering: Fear and Venom
As the pressure from
Israel for a US-backed military attack on Iran mounts, and as
top US military officials and the general public grow
increasingly hostile to Zionist arm twisting and gross
manipulation of policy makers, the ZPC turns aggressively
authoritarian in its effort to silence opposition which exposes
its role as a disloyal actor for a foreign power. In the past,
agents for a foreign power, once detected, usually received
severe sanction or worse. Today, numerous Zionist insiders know
they are playing an increasingly risky game as the perceived
costs of a new war with Iran rise and their Israeli ‘handlers’
press them to promote an attack Iran at the top of their agenda.
Ultimately, the Zionist
Power Configuration, despite their wealth and current dominance
over US Middle East policy, know that they represent less than
1% of the population: They are an elite without a mass base.
They have power only as long as the other 99% of the population
is inactive, manipulated or intimidated to serve Israel’s
interests. But as the growing flow of books, articles and
speeches begin to call attention to the Israeli-directed ZPC and
their destructive war-mongering activities, their self-promoted
images of their members as brilliant professionals, successful
leaders in the world of business and finance and compassionate
politicians serving the best interests of the USA, begins to
erode. The ugly side of their servile loyalty to Israel, an
arrogant, racist colonial power provoking wars via the US to
establish itself as an unchallenged regional power has entered
into the American public debate.
The ZPC is at or near
the peak of its political power – in Congress, the Executive,
the Office of Homeland Security and prospective Attorney
General, in ‘culture’ and the mass media propaganda. But
paradoxically, as the ZPC peaks, it also exposes more of itself
– much more than it wants to be seen by the American public.
Even the brash and
impudent Zionist polemicists who hole up in the prestigious
universities and ‘think tank-propaganda mills’ are beginning to
feel public anxiety, even perhaps private worries. As they do
so, they back track, trying to cover their fingerprints on all
the war plans and propaganda leading to the now-massively
unpopular invasion of Iraq. They resort to outright lies in the
form of denials or complicity or ‘war-mongering’. Outrageous
denials abound! For the more aggressive die-hard Zion-Cons,
exposure of the disloyal role of the ZPC and their complicity
evokes savage rejoinders, academic screeds in the gutter
language of ad hominem abuse which reflects poorly on their
vaunted academic positions. The ZPC, its scribes, operatives
and power brokers are vulnerable – they have committed
great crimes against the interests of the American people.
Their actions have led to the death and maiming of tens of
thousands of US soldiers, 99.9% of whom have no ‘loyalties’ to
the interest of greater Israel or its US agents who have their
own children pursuing lucrative civilian careers. Recent
estimates found less than 0.2% of US soldiers serving on the
ground in Iraq are American Jews, some of whom were Jewish
immigrants from the former Soviet Union. This despite the
strong Zionist pressure to invade and destroy Iraq and Iran.
The manipulations of the ZPC in pushing the Bush Administration
into invading and occupying Iraq has led the US military into an
unprecedented state of disgrace and demoralization, with
thousands of officers tendering their early retirement,
thousands of troops going AWOL and facing court-martial, and an
increasing number of retired senior officers expressing
outrage. It is no surprise that Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates secured the support of top military officers in the Middle
East in opposing an immediate invasion of Iran.
Zionist vituperation
against their critics expresses fears of exposure and unmasking
of their double discourse, their false amalgamation of Israeli
colonial policies with the democratic values of the American
people. Nothing else can explain the shrill verbal personal
assaults – aimed at killing the messenger rather than facing
unpleasant realities and working to rectify a disastrous
situation. While the state of Israel has placed its American
promoters in an uncomfortable position as the occupation of Iraq
crumbles and Americans resist shrill calls for attacking Iran,
nevertheless Israel has turned out to be the real winner, in the
short term, having achieved the destruction of the unified,
secular republic of Iraq.
From a Scratch to Gangrene: The
Transition from Zionism to Zion-Fascism
The ‘mainstream’
Zionist conservatives early on demonstrated their authoritarian
politics through their whole-hearted and un-problematical
support for Israel’s brutal campaigns driving hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians from their homes and lands.
Subsequently, the Zion-Cons fully and un-questioningly endorsed
the killing and jailing of thousands of Palestinian civilians
protesting the Israeli military occupation and conversion of the
occupied West Bank and Gaza into ‘open air’ concentration camps,
with over 500 military outposts and roads blocks. More recently
the entire leadership of the major Jewish organizations,
comprising both Zion-Cons and Zion-Libs, defended Israel’s
building of a massive 30 meter wall, effectively corralling the
entire Palestinian population in ghettos resembling the walls
constructed around the huge Jewish population in Warsaw by the
Nazis. The wall and the military outposts strangle trade,
movement of food and people from the occupied territories to
markets, schools and hospitals and prevent farmers from even
tilling their lands.
On Octobert 10, 2007
the Jerusalem Post quoted Aron Soffer, head of research
and lecturer at the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) National
Defense College. The 71-year old father of 4 and grandfather of
8 had said on May 21, 2004: “When 2.5 million people live in
a closed off Gaza, its going to be a human catastrophe. Those
people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with
the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the
border will be awful. Its going to be a terrible war. So if we
want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.
All day…every day.”
This is the literal
message of murder taught to Israeli officers at their most
advanced military school by eminent Zion-Fascist lecturers.
This helps us understand the naked brutality and homicidal
behavior of Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories.
A recent Israeli study
by two prominent psychologists illustrates the deep strain of
sadism and racism inculcated by Israel’s military academies and
backed by Israel’s top politicians, including the Prime
Minister’s Office. According to Haaretz on September 21, 2007,
two Israeli psychologists interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers, who
expressed “their innermost emotions about the horrendous
crimes, in which they took part: murder, breaking the bones of
Palestinian children, acts of humiliation, destruction of
property, robbery and theft.” One of the Israeli
psychologists was “shocked to find that the soldiers enjoyed
the ‘intoxication of power’ and had pleasure from using
violence.” She said, “Most of my interviewees enjoyed their own
instigated violence during the occupation.” (Haaretz
September 21, 2007) Absolute colonial domination brings out the
psychopathic tendencies in an occupation army. Soldier C
testified, “If I didn’t enter Rafah (Palestinian City in
Gaza) to put down some rebellion – at least once a week I’d go
beserk.” Like previous colonial occupiers, the Israeli
soldiers adopt a totalitarian ‘super-race complex’. Soldier D
testified, “What is great is that you don’t follow any law or
rule. You feel that YOU ARE THE LAW. Once you go into the
Occupied Territory YOU ARE GOD!.” The soldiers’
internalization of the powerful Zion-fascist ideology provides a
self-justification in the eyes of the interviewees for
castrating a man, bashing in the face of a woman protester,
shooting an innocuous pedestrian, breaking the arm of a 4-year
old child and other ‘gratuitous’ acts of random violence.
The Presidents of the
Major American Jewish Organizations never ever mention, let
along criticize, the daily psychopathic behavior of the IDF.
Major Jewish billionaire philanthropists contribute hundreds of
millions in support of the IDF’s violent occupation and
repression of Palestinian civilians, described with cruel
pleasure by the soldier-subjects of the Israeli study. In fact,
the biggest Zionist contributor to the Democratic Party, Haim
Saban ($12.3 million dollars in 2002), has a ‘soft spot for
Israeli combat soldiers.’ According to Haaretz
(September 12, 2006), Saban declared, “I can’t handle combat
soldiers, whenever I have any interaction with them…I cry.”
There is a powerful emotional bond that links Israeli
Zion-fascism to its US counterparts. Saban arrogantly points to
the primacy of his loyalty to Israel, “I strut around like a
peacock in America and say I am an Israeli-American. What you
hear…an Israeli-American.” (Haaretz October 14,
2007). The formerly respectable Brooking’s Institute now houses
the ‘Saban Center’, financed by Haim Saban, turning Brookings
into just another of a dozen propaganda mills churning out
apologetics for the totalitarian practices of the IDF – their
leading research directors and their Prime Minister. The deadly
‘sentimentality’ of the Israeli-American billionaires toward the
psychopaths in the IDF does not extend to the young Americans
serving Israel’s interests as US soldiers in Iraq and who are
suffering the burdens of a war to extend Israel’s regional
power. Saban, like the great majority of the top leaders of the
most influential Zionist organization are pushing for another
war – this time with Iran. According to Saban, “I would try
other things first, but if they don’t work, then attack…In Iran
you go in and wipe out their infrastructure completely. Plunge
them into darkness. Cut off their water.” (Haaretz
October 14, 2007). These are not the homicidal ranting of a
fanatical Jewish settler beating a pre-adolescent Palestinian
shepherd. Saban is a major leader in AIPAC, family friend and
political broker of the Clintons and the entire current Israeli
leadership. His $2.8 billion dollars buys the fawning attention
of all major US presidential “candidates courting Jewish
support” (MSNBC, October 14, 2007).
The Zionist Power
Configuration has buried 3 top level political initiatives
designed to reach a settlement of the Israeli colonial
occupation of Palestine. A statement to President Bush and
Secretary of State Rice sent by former top political officials
of both political parties, including Brzezinski, Lee Hamilton,
Brent Scowcroft and others calling for Israel to abide by UN
Security Council Resolution 242 and 338 and other initiatives,
was totally dismissed by the Democratic Congress and the
Republican White House, after the ZPC intervened and labeled
Brzezinski as ‘hostile to Israel’ – following the Israeli
state’s complete dismissal of the statement. Tony Blair’s
efforts as head of the ‘Quartet Peace-Making Mission’ has been a
total failure in resolving even the humanitarian plight of the
Palestinians, in the face of Israeli intransigence and rejection
of any but the most banal conversations with the now subdued
(formerly so frenetic) ex-British Prime Minister (Guardian
October 13, 2007). Secretary Rice’s efforts to organize a
Middle East peace conference for late November in Annapolis,
Maryland were diluted to the point of pointlessness by Israeli
pronouncements. Israel rejects any substantive agreements on
borders, timetables, Jerusalem, settlements, territory etc..
They insist the conference focus on meaningless general
agreements that commit them to nothing. In action designed to
further humiliate US Secretary of State Rice, the Israeli
government illegally seized several hundred acres of Palestinian
lands – a clear example of extending the settlements (Aljazeera
October 14, 2007). While trying to appear stylish in a dunce
cap, Secretary Rice responded that the new Israeli confiscation
of Palestinian land might ‘erode confidence in the parties’
commitment to a two state solution’ (BBC October 14,
2007).
Recognizing that the
ZPC has completely tied up her negotiation position, that she
cannot demand anything substantive from Israel, Secretary Rice
has signaled the futility of the Annapolis meeting by calling
for ‘lower expectations’, that is no agreements of substance.
There is good reason to believe that Israel and its Fifth Column
have effectively scuttled Bush’s own Annapolis initiative. Even
US clients like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and even the
Palestinian puppet Abbas have expressed doubts since there are
no substantive agreements on state boundaries, anathema to
Israel and the ZPC. Whether the conference is ‘postponed’ or
actually takes place, the event promises to be another
inconsequential gesture, another US Middle East defeat, another
victory for Israel’s colonial status quo and another reason for
increased Arab resistance in the Middle East.
What is more ominous,
Israel and the ZPC will find that their successful sabotage of
the White House Annapolis Peace Conference is likely to
encourage them to press ahead with further violent seizures in
the Occupied Territories, new more deadly incursions in Lebanon
and Syria and heightened pressure for war with Iran.
Zion-fascism feeds into the sense of irresistible power over US
Middle East policy against any major US institutional force,
which fails to follow the Israeli line.
Along with the
right-wing radicalization of Zion-Con ideology with regard to
Israel’s push toward totalitarian solutions, came overt
manifestations of racist anti-Islamic, anti-Arab and
anti-Persian practices and speeches from leading Zion-Con
spokespeople and especially academic propagandists in the United
States.
War propaganda and
military solutions dominate Zion-Con rhetoric: first against
Palestine, then Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia and
Sudan. Accompanying the radicalization of Zion-con rhetoric is
a growing number of repressive acts within US society.
The ZPC and Holocaust Denial: At the
Service of Israel
Leading Zionist Democrats following
Israeli directives played a major role in undermining a
Congressional resolution condemning as genocide the Turkish
murder of 1.5 million Armenians. For many years the state of
Israel and its academic specialists both in Israel as well as in
the US have denied Turkish-led Genocide against the Armenians
in their ancient homeland between 1915-1917 despite the
voluminous documentary record complied by scholars throughout
the world. One reason is that the Jewish Holocaust industry
insists on the exclusive franchise on 20th century
genocide, in order to push its fundraising and propaganda
efforts. An even more important contemporary reason for Israeli
and US Zionist holocaust denial is the close military
collaboration between Israel and Turkey and more recently the
heavy presence of Israeli military advisers and secret police
(Mossad) operations in Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq, dubbed
Kurdistan.
Former member of the Israeli armed
services, ‘US’ Congressman Rahm Emanuel, Chairman of the House
Democratic Caucus, opposed the resolution from the start and
convinced a group of senior House Democrats to demand the
Democratic Congressional leadership drop plans for a vote on the
measure. Deeply implicated with the interests of Israel,
Emanuel has both feet in the terrain of an Israeli-defined
Middle East reality. Congressman Emanuel cynically rationalized
his service for the state of Israel in a convoluted statement:
“This vote (on the Armenian genocide) came face to face with the
reality on the ground in that region of the world.” (NT Times,
October 16, 2007) The Israeli fifth column in the US Congress
has extended the scope of its control beyond narrow focus on the
contemporary Middle East and Israel’s quest for regional
dominance to encompass historical issues involving non-Arab,
non-Muslim people who indirectly affect Israeli strategic
interests. Israeli strategists see the Congressional resolution
on the Armenian genocide as provoking Turkish hostility to the
US, increasing the likelihood of an invasion against the US and
Israeli-backed ‘Kurdistan’ in Northern Iraq. Israeli officials
have been training and arming Kurdish commandos to engage in
terrorist activities in Iran and elsewhere on the Turkish,
Iranian and Syrian border. A Turkish land invasion and aerial
attack would, at a minimum, destroy or disarticulate these
terrorist bases and more likely lead to a generalized Kurdish
mobilization in defense of the Kurdish irregulars. The Kurds
are loyal clients and their Pershmerga militias play an integral
role in ethnic cleansing of non-Kurds in Northern Iraq and
savage repression in Central Iraq as US-led mercenary forces
against the Iraq Arab resistance. A Turkish invasion is likely
to result in the transfer of the Kurdish military toward their
Turkish frontier, undermining US control in Iraq and weakening
their assaults on Iran. The Israelis will have to choose between
its alliance with Turkey, its only consequential ally in the
Middle East, by withdrawing its operative and arms sales from
‘Kurdish’ Northern Iraq or its support for Kurdish separatists.
The entire ZPC was on maximum alert
to block or defeat the Armenian resolution in the US Congress in
order to show the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan that Israel is
using its power over the US Congress on Turkey’s behalf. In
this conflict between, on the one hand, millions of Americans
who abhor genocide – wherever it occurs and whoever is
victimized – and the influential Armenian lobby, and, on the
other hand, a few dozen highly placed ‘Israel First’ Congress
members and their billionaire Zionist political contributors,
the latter won out. Even on an issue as palpable as genocide,
the ZPC has no fear or shame in opposing a symbolic resolution
recognizing a world-historic crime.
The Zionist Congressional victory
on the Armenian resolution illustrates in the most graphic
manner the way Israeli interests degrades our institutions and
values. The fact that many Congress-members, including the
majority of Democrats, were initially convinced of the justice
of passing the resolution, and later under the pressure of the
Zionist Congressional leadership, withdrew their support, is
indicative of just how far Congress has degenerated into a
Zionist colonized institution. Not only does Congress ignore
its electorate, the values of the people who elected them, but
also they surrender their own values and conscience, for what
Seymour Hersh aptly refers to as ‘New York Jewish money.’
The Israeli effort to head off a
Turkish attack on their Kurdish clients is closely related to
their efforts to undermine Iranian defenses and gain
intelligence via terrorist ‘commando operations’ by Kurdish
irregulars.
The centerpiece of activity for all
the major national, state and local pro-Israeli Jewish
organizations is to isolate and destroy Iran, by economic
sanctions and a massive military attack by the US. There is
absolutely no consideration of the millions of Iranians who
would be killed, injured or made homeless by a US or Israeli
effort to ‘wipe Iran off the map.’
The major recipient of ‘New York
(and Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago) Jewish money’ is Hillary
Clinton, the most hawkish Democratic war monger in the 2008
president race – in fact the most hawkish Democratic candidate
since the Vietnam era. Clinton, in a recent article in
Foreign Affairs, has all but written the date and weapons
with which the US will strike Iran. She argues that ‘Iran poses
a long-term strategic challenge to America and its allies and
that it must not be permitted to build or acquire nuclear
weapons…” If Iran does not comply, all options must remain on
the table. (Guardian, October 15, 2007).
Israel keeps a
box-score on how servile US presidential candidates are to
Israeli state interests and obedient to the dictates of the
Israel lobby. Clinton, by far, is the Zionist choice among
Democratic presidential candidates. They have forgiven her for
kissing Suha Arafat over a decade ago, because she has kissed
both cheeks of each and all male and female Zionist lobbyists
and Israeli officials in Washington and applauded the repression
of Palestinians. Clinton aroused the passion and pleasure of
the pro-Israel Presidents of the Major American Jewish
Organization by being the only Democratic presidential candidate
to support the Senate resolution calling on the US government to
declare the Iranian government’s ‘Revolutionary Guards’, an
elite division of Teheran’s military, to be a ‘terrorist
entity’, thus providing the Bush administration with a
justification for a massive pre-emptive attack against Iran and
its infrastructure.
Both in terms of financing war
resolutions and sanctions campaigns against Iran, in terms of
lobby authored legislation and Congressional speeches, of hours
campaigning for an attack on Iran, of op-ed columns published
and media pundits comments, the Zionist Power Configuration
exceeds by a multiple of ten any other group in pushing for a
war with Iran. Not only do the Zionist monopolize the ‘attack
Iran’ propaganda, but they are leading all other authoritarian
groups in silencing US critics of this aggressive military
option.
Let us be perfectly
clear that the ZPC, the Presidents of the Major American Jewish
Organizations, the Rahm Emanuels (Israeli-Americans) controlling
the Democratic caucus agenda…do not always and everywhere speak
for the majority of American Jews, especially on the denial of
the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Pugnacious ADL President
Abraham Foxman found out in Watham, Massachusetts that both the
local Armenian-American community and their Jewish-American
compatriots and neighbors do not tolerate the denial of genocide
– even by the ADL. Substantial sectors of American Jews object
to Clinton’s war mongering and find her servile truckling to
Israeli officials offensive, even obscene. Zionist polls reveal
the majority of educated young American Jews are less and less
interested in Israel and its local Fifth Column – much to the
chagrin of the self-styled ‘leaders’ of the community. Saying
that a Jewish minority speaks in the name of an unwilling
majority, however, does not lessen its power and stranglehold
over US political institutions and public opinion with regard to
policy or appropriations touching on the Middle East or
Israeli-defined interests.
“Jew-haters’ became the
agitation slogan animating the Zion-con purge of public forums
and a call for mass direct action by hundreds of local Jewish
notables and ‘community’ councils. Even Presbyterian elders
were brow-beaten by Jewish Zionists because of their tepid stand
divesting from US companies involved in oppressing
Palestinians.
There is no transcendent event,
which defines the moment in which Zion-conservation became
Zion-Fascism. The transition was an evolutionary process,
during which racism, militarism and authoritarianism developed a
mass community base and took hold over time and became the
definitive modus operendi of the ZPC.
Like earlier fascist movements,
Zion-fascism subscribes to racialist doctrines of knowledge:
According to Zionist epistemology only Jews can (if they dare)
criticize Jews as knowledge of Jewry is monopolized by a closed
communally defined people. This Zion-fascist theory of
knowledge is buttressed by the frequent utterances of
progressive or leftist Zionists who frequently dismiss or warn
non-Jewish writers that they enter the ‘Jewish’ debate at their
peril.
Zion-fascism is not merely an
ideological expression of a marginal group of unbalanced
extremists – its ideology and practice, in full or part, has
been taken over by mainstream Jewish organizations.
Zionist Authoritarianism on the March
Grassroots Zionist-led
authoritarianism, practicing coercion, repression and financial
blackmail in defense of Israel and the ZPC is occurring in every
region of the country, in every sphere of social, cultural and
academic life at an accelerating pace. Below we cite a small
sample of cases which have gotten national and even
international attention and which illustrate a far more
extensive pattern. We lack a comprehensive data bank to cover
the hundreds of incidents of Zionist intimidation and thought
control which occur on a weekly basis and go unreported by their
victims for fear of retaliation or because they would not
receive sympathetic public attention given the media bias. In
informal interviews, writers and journalists have reported to me
‘visits’ by local Jewish ‘notables’ and members of the Jewish
Community Councils to local newspaper editors to demand the
firing of columnists who dared to criticize, for example,
Israel’s horrific invasion of Lebanon. After one such ‘visit’
and ‘talk’, a local columnist never ventured to criticize or
even write about the Middle East. This is not a matter confined
to the United States. In 2004, after I wrote an article for the
Mexico City daily, La Jornada, critical of Israel’s
savage repression of Palestinians in Jena and the US Zionist
apology for mass killings, the Israeli Ambassador in Mexico
visited the editors to demand they discontinue publishing my
articles. The editor refused to accede at that time, but
immediately afterwards they published several vicious personal
attacks by their regular columnists (one a Troskyist, and the
other a Jewish dentist) labeling my critiques as ‘Nazi’
propaganda , in line with the ‘Protocols of Zion’. This was in
a reputed independent progressive daily newspaper.
‘Private visits’, abusive phone
calls by Zionist zealots, including death threats are not
uncommon practices among ‘respectable’ Zion-fascists. One
incident involved a local doctor who received a ‘visit’ to her
office by a fanatical Zionist ‘colleague’ complaining of her
letter to the local newspaper criticizing the role of the
Zionists in financing the electoral defeat of Georgia
Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney because of her criticism of
Israeli policy. She was ‘warned’ that it was anti-Semitic to
criticize the activities of organized Jewry in destroying
politicians, especially black politicians, for their support of
Palestinian civil rights. African Americans, she was told, were
increasingly ungrateful to American Jews, who had lead and
financed the civil rights struggle, and therefore had to be
taught a history lesson. A local ‘group’ of notables had chosen
her Harvard-educated Zionist colleague to deliver this
message. When he declared himself ‘a Jew and a Zionist’, she
countered that she was ‘an anti-fascist and an anti-Zionist’ and
pointed to the door but not before asking him how an educated
man of high professional standing could stomach such a degrading
task of trying to censor a colleague. These types of ‘visits’
from ‘respectable’ Zionists intimidate others with less standing
and intestinal fortitude.
When presented with the manuscript
of my book, The Power of Israel in the United States,
many of my previous editors informed me that it would make a
great book…but…they didn’t want to face the backlash, threats
and vituperation that they expected from the ZPC, Jewish
academics, writers on contract and publishers. Even the
publisher and editor who finally agreed to publish my MS
expressed real fear of Zionist hostility – and eventually a
dozen or so Jewish academics cancelled book orders for their
classes.
A sample of the most publicized
cases of Zionist efforts to silence and purge American society
of critics of Israel and the Zionist Power Configuration
includes the case of over one thousand Zionist alumni of Barnard
College campaigning to deny tenure to Professor Nadia Abu el-Haj
for publishing Facts on the Ground , her ground-breaking
critique on Israeli archeologists efforts to erase centuries of
continued Palestinian presence in the Holy Lands (Chronicle
of Higher Education, August 5, 2007).
More recently there was the public
campaign to rescind Colombia University’s invitation to Iranian
Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmedinejad resulting in an unprecedented
insulting introductory address by the President of Colombia
University.
Banning the successful British play, ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie’
based on the writings of the murdered American activist from
scheduled performances in New York, Miami and Toronto caused
consternation among theater goers and actors on both sides of
the Atlantic. The Israeli soldier who murdered the young woman
was exonerated in Israel while Rachel’s words were banned from
the cultural capital of her own country.
Even more recently, the Chicago
Council of Global Affairs bowed to pressure from the Zionist
lobby and cancelled a lecture by the respected professors of
political science, John Mearsheimer and Stephan Walt because of
their critical study The Israel Lobby.
The list goes on to include the
cancellation of a concert by Marcel Khalife in San Diego,
California and the cancellation of an invitation to Nobel Peace
Prize winner, South African Bishop Desmond Tutu because of his
criticism of Israeli apartheid policies in the occupied
territories.
There was a successful campaign to
prevent author Susan Abulhawa from presenting her gripping
novel, The Scar of David, at a Barnes and Noble Bookstore
in Bayside, New York. This was followed by a cyberspace attack
on the author to undermine a scheduled speaking tour. This
pro-Israel attack was led by 14 rabbis and the President of the
Queens Jewish Community Council.
The University of Michigan Press
was pressured to withdraw distribution of Joel Kovel’s
Overcoming Zionism, violating a contract with his publisher,
Pluto Press. The University Press then threatened to stop
distribution of all books published by Pluto Press.
The recent Congressional Hearings
of a blue ribbon committee, which finally got around to
investigating the Israeli military attack on the USS Liberty
(after 40 years of successfully preventing an official
investigation through the pressure of the Israel lobby) found
Israel guilty of the deliberate killing and maiming of over 100
US service personnel. Its explosive findings, published in the
Congressional Record, never appeared in the print and broadcast
media.
In violation of United Nations
resolutions, Israel’s military aggression against Lebanon, Syria
and Palestine, were rewarded by the US Congress with an
additional $30 billion dollars in military aid over the next 10
years, making the US annual ‘tribute to Israel’ in excess of $6
Billion dollars a year (NY Times, August 16, 2007). At a
time of record US deficits and cuts in domestic health programs
for poor children and educational services, the vote to give
Israel an additional $30 billion dollars passed with virtually
no opposition or even discussion.
Australian journalist and
documentary maker, John Pilger produced a searing critique of
Israel entitled “Palestine is Still the Issue” which has been
viewed all over the world. Its scheduled showing on the public
educational channel in San Francisco was blocked by a campaign
led by the Jewish Community Relations Council.
The bilingual Arabic-English public
middle school in New York City named after the Lebanese
Christian poet, Kahil Gibran, was attacked by the ZPC (NY Times
August 11, 2007) leading to the firing of its Arab American
Principal. Her ‘crime’ was accurately translating the Arabic
word ‘intifada’ into ‘shaking off’ instead of ranting against
the Palestinian rights movement in the Occupied Territories.
The Zionist-controlled United Federation of Teachers actively
backed the blatant purge of one of its own members for her
thought crimes.
At San Francisco State College
there was a campaign led by the executive director of the Jewish
Community Relations Council of San Francisco to ban a mural
depicting a famous Palestinian cartoon character, a little boy
defiant before Israeli occupiers. The subject in question was a
child holding a key in his hand, which, according to the local
Jewish leadership represented a ‘veiled reference to Palestinian
right of return to Israel’ (Jewish Forum, August 10,
2007).
One of the most bitter and
successful Zionist Purge campaigns was to deny tenure to highly
respected scholar, Professor Norman Finkelstein of De Paul
University in Chicago. The purge, led by Harvard Law Professor
Alan Dershowitz, was a direct response to Finkelstein’s numerous
scholarly studies critical of Israel and the exploitation of the
Holocaust to further the aims of the Zionist Power
Configuration.
Despite the recommendations of
three academic committees at Yale University, Zionist
millionaire philanthropists were able to block the appointment
of renowned Middle East specialist, Professor Juan Cole. The
millionaires threatened to withdraw contributions and several
Zionist professors prepared a scurrilous attack on Professor
Cole (June 1, 2006).
A campaign was mounted to pressure
several state pension funds to divest funds from any company
doing business with Iran and pushing the funds to invest in
Israel bonds. This has so far succeeded in Texas, Florida, New
York, and New Jersey. Several state governors were ‘persuaded’
while on Zionist-paid junkets to Israel (see Houston Chronicle,
July 18, 2007). During one of these junkets, the now disgraced
New Jersey Governor McGreevy met an Israeli operative with whom
he formed a homosexual relation and later had him installed as
‘Homeland Security’ Chief for the State of New Jersey, until the
FBI intervened. McGreevy resigned from office after denouncing
the Israeli, Golan Cipal, for blackmail.
The Anti-Defamation League,
pro-Israel transmission belt, forced the only Muslim
Congressman, Keith Ellison, to recant and humiliate himself for
daring to compare the tactics of the Bush Administration to the
Nazis (Jewish Telegraph Agency, July 20, 2007). As in
the case of Congresswoman McKinney, Zionist ‘punishment’ against
African-American politicians is particularly vehement.
The major Zionist organizations led
by the American Jewish Committee successfully mobilized the
major US trade union bureaucrats to denounce the United
Kingdom’s militant trade union’s boycotts of Israel (Jerusalem
Post, July 22, 2007). The AFL-CIO unions are under the
thumb of the ZPC and have purchased over $5 billion dollars of
their members pension funds in Israel bonds which consistently
under-perform market indexes, thus costing their 12 million
members hundreds of millions of investment returns each year.
The dean of religion Barry Levin, a
pro-Israel activist at McGill University recently fired
Professor Norman Cornelt after 15 years of teaching for his
support of Palestinian human rights (Montreal Gazette,
June 2, 2007).
Every major newspaper published
editorials and scurrilous book reviews attacking former US
President Jimmy Carter’s critical study, Palestine: Peace Not
Apartheid. This was part of a high-priority propaganda
campaign coordinated by major Zionist organizations and
prominently included Professor Alan Dershowitz (Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2007).
The prominent Jewish writer,
Professor Tony Judt of New York University was dis-invited from
a scheduled talk at the Polish Consulate because of Zionist
opposition to his criticism of Israeli policy.
B’nai Brith of Vancouver, Canada
attacked a Canadian web site called Peace, Earth and Justice
forcing the removal of 18 articles critical of Israel.
In early 2007 the ZPC intervened in
the US Civil Rights Commission and introduced a section equating
anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and slandered dozens of academic
Middle Eastern studies programs as centers of campus
‘anti-Semitism’. The Middle East Studies Association of North
America, the major academic group, wrote a reasoned refutation
on June 11, 2007.
Plans to construct a mosque for the
Muslim community in Roxbury, Massachusetts were attacked in a
campaign by the ‘David Project’, a Zionist front group
affiliated with the Jewish Community Council of Greater Boston.
On the basis of secret testimony by
Israeli intelligence agents and backed by the ZPC ‘terrorism’
charges were made against 16 members of a US Islamic charity. A
Texas court convicted them of ‘crimes’ against Israel, even
though many of the accused were US citizens and had no access to
challenge their hooded accusers, Israeli secret agents operating
in the US. The lead defendant, Dr. Rafil Dhofer received a
sentence of 22 years for an ‘Israeli’ crime – although he was
never convicted of any crime committed in the US. The
defendants and their attorneys were never allowed to question
the secret foreign ‘witnesses’.
Campus Zion-fascist organizations
run by their ‘little fuehrer’ David Horowitz, routinely bait
blacks, Latinos and Arab Americans by praising the ‘benefits’ of
the African slave trade and defend the use of torture and
assassination by Israelis and their US counterparts in Iraq and
Guantanamo. In addition, they smear professors not sufficiently
favorable to Zionism, spy on instructors, disrupt classes, bring
lawsuits for ‘anti-Zionist’ bias against teachers, other
students and college administrators throughout the US.
Despite the Zionist turn to fascist
tactics and embrace of authoritarian-coercive measures, the fact
of the matter is they still only have partial control over civil
society and political power. Some of the Zion-fascist power
plays were, at least temporarily, defeated in specific
circumstances. The play, My Name is Rachel Corrie played to
packed houses in London, Seattle and other courageous cities
even as it was banned in New York, Toronto and Miami.
Norman Finkelstein was fired, but
he got powerful support throughout the academic world and was
able to negotiate monetary compensation for De Paul University’s
cowardly betrayal of one of its faculty. Above all, Professor
Finkelstein is fighting back.
The University of Michigan was
forced to distribute Kovel’s book even as they threatened to
cancel their contract with his publisher, Pluto Press.
The lesson is clear: the rise of
Judeo-fascism (JF) represents a clear and present danger to our
democratic freedoms in the United States. They do not come with
black shirts and stiff-arm salutes. The public face is a
clean-shaved, necktied, pink-jowled attorney, real estate
philanthropist or Ivy League professor. They work hard to send
the family members of non-Zionists to fight wars in the Middle
East in the interest of Greater Israel. And they tells us to
keep quiet or face slander, ostracism in our communities, loss
of jobs or worst… And it is the exemplary punishment of the
many small voices, which keeps the number of vocal critics
low…until recently. There is rising anger and hostility in
America against the ZPC, against its arrogant authoritarian
communal attacks on our democratic values. Sooner or later
there will be a major backlash – and it ill behooves those who,
through vocation or conviction, engaged in the firings,
censoring and intimidation campaigns against the American
majority. The American people will not remember their cries of
‘anti-Semitism’ they will recall their role in sending thousands
of American soldiers to their death in the Middle East in the
interests of Israel.
Let us
hope that those who seek justice will not use the same
authoritarian laws like the Patriot Act, nor the harsh
interrogation techniques of degradation (torture) and
anti-Arab/Muslim practices promoted by the Zionists in the
Pentagon, Congress, Justice Department and Homeland Security.
Those who oppose Zionism need to abide solidly by higher moral
standards.
James Petras’ latest books: The Power of Israel in the United
States (2006) and Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers,
Zionists and Militarists (2007).
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