[The following is a lightly edited version of a speech I gave on March 1 st in Washington during the anti-AIPAC and Netanyahu visit demonstrations. Two days later Israeli Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, whom I cite below, was sitting in the House VIP visitors’ gallery beaming as he listened to Netanyahu’s love fest with Congress. It might have been the first time a clandestine agent for a foreign country who spied on the United States was so honored but I would observe that the event was doubly significant in that the speaker Prime Minister Netanyahu was also involved in the same theft of American nuclear technology.]
[Here is the video of the event, just received: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYXOsBMktWI&feature=youtu.be . Miko Peled is well worth hearing and many of the questions are very interesting, revealing the depth of revulsion for AIPAC and all its works.]
I would like to concentrate on two issues. First is the nature of the special relationship between Israel and the United States and second is the role of the Israel Lobby and most particularly AIPAC in shaping that relationship. I was a foreign policy adviser for Ron Paul in 2008 and consider myself politically conservative. I respect the fact that nations must be responsive to their interests, but because of my personal experience of living and working overseas for many years I have come to recognize that the United States is an anomaly in that it persists in going around the world doing things that just do not make any sense. This has been particularly true during the past fourteen years, with invasions, interventions and targeted assassinations having become the preferred form of international discourse for Washington.
Many would agree with what I have just observed, but few recognize the role of the special relationship with Israel in shaping what the United States has become. Quite frankly, the relationship is both lopsided in terms of favoring perceived Israeli interests as well as being terrible for the long suffering Palestinians, very bad for the United States as it damages the American brand worldwide and even bad for Israel as it enables its governments to act in ways that are ill advised and ultimately self-defeating.
I would first like to address the often repeated mantra that Israel is America’s best friend or closest ally as it is a bedrock issue that is frequently trotted out to excuse behavior that would otherwise be incomprehensible. Apart from being a recipient of more than $3 billion per year from the US taxpayer, Israel is no ally and never has been. There is no alliance of any kind with Israel, in part because Israel has a border that has been moving eastward for the past fifty years as it continues to absorb Palestinian land. Without an internationally recognized border it is impossible to define a relationship between two nations. Israel also has no strategic value to the United States, so to speak of an alliance, which posits reciprocity is ridiculous.
But that is not to say that Israel does not interact with Washington. Indeed, some might say that it is possesses a disproportionate voice relating to some foreign and domestic policies. The penchant to use force as a first option in international interactions is perhaps itself due to Washington imitating Tel Aviv or vice versa as neither the United States nor Israel seems any longer interested in diplomacy.
American protection of Israel in international bodies like the United Nations is a disgrace, making the United States de facto complicit in Israeli violations of international law, to include its settlement expansion, as well as its war crimes. Under Bill Clinton the United States more or less adopted the Israeli model in dealing with terrorism, which consists of overwhelming armed response and no negotiations ever. Washington’s uncritical support for Israel politically and militarily was a major factor in motivating the perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attack.
Deferring to Israel often results in U.S. policies that are absurd and highly damaging to other interests. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described Israel’s devastation of Lebanon in 2006 in which nearly 1,000 civilians were killed and more than $2 billion in infrastructure was destroyed as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” Rice, who also spoke of fear of a nuclear mushroom cloud rising above Washington to justify invading Iraq, far from being discredited due to her lack of discernment, is currently a professor at Stanford University and is now being spoken of as a possible Senator from California or, alternatively, as the next Commissioner of the National Football League. So much for accountability in the United States.
One might well conclude that Israel is not only not an ally but also not much of a friend. It has run massive spying operations inside the United States to include hundreds of Art Students and celebrations by the employees of an Israeli moving firm located in New Jersey when the twin towers were going down. Israel is regularly named by the FBI as the most active friendly country in terms of running espionage operations against the U.S. but nothing ever happens. Israeli spies are sent home quietly and Americans who spy for Israel are rarely prosecuted. Last year we witnessed Hollywood producer and Israeli citizen Arnon Milchan receiving an Oscar even as stories were circulating about his criminal collusion to obtain restricted American technology to enable Israel to build nuclear weapons. The Justice Department has not seen fit to do anything about him.
Israel also has a hand in what is going on domestically in the United States. Many states now have their own departments of homeland security and many of the companies that obtain contracts to provide security services are Israeli. Airport security is a virtual Israeli monopoly. Increasingly militarized American police officers now use federal government grants to travel to Israel for training based on the Israeli experience with the Palestinians. Israelis have advised CIA and Pentagon torturers and Israeli advisers were also present at Abu Ghraib.
Israel’s influence over Washington policies frequently means war. American officials extremely close to the Israeli government were behind the rush to war with Iraq. If the Washington goes to war with Iran in the near future it will not be because Tehran actually threatens America, it will be because Israel and its powerful lobby in the U.S. have succeeded in creating an essentially false case to mandate such action. Congress is obligingly advancing legislation that would commit the United States to intervene militarily in support of a unilateral Israeli attack, meaning that Israel could easily be empowered to make the decision on whether or not the U.S. goes to war.
Israel interferes in American elections, in 2012 on behalf of Mitt Romney, and also this week by aligning itself with the Republicans against the President of the United States to harden existing policy against Iran. Looking ahead to elections in 2016, two Jewish billionaires have already stated clearly that they will spend whatever they have to to elect the candidate that is best for Israel. As Sheldon Adelson is a Republican and Haim Saban is a Democrat both major parties are covered and I would warn “Watch out for Hillary,” Saban’s candidate of choice.
Israel has corrupted our congress which we will witness again on Tuesday. Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rebukes and belittles our own head of state, its government ministers insult and ridicule John Kerry, and its intelligence officers have free access to Capitol Hill where they provide alarmist and inaccurate private briefings for American legislators. In short, Israel has no reluctance to use its enormous political and media clout in the US to pressure successive administrations to conform to its own foreign and security policy views.
Beyond the corruption of our political process, I believe many in this room would agree that the depiction and treatment of the Palestinians has been disgraceful. Israel has engaged in land and water theft and is doing its best to make Palestinian life so miserable that they will all decide to leave. Some would describe that as ethnic cleansing. Just last week there were reports of how Israeli authorities cut off water and electricity to parts of the West bank and also won a bogus court case in New York City that will bankrupt the Palestinian authority.
Netanyahu’s policy is to punish the Palestinians incessantly no matter what they do. The United States has certainly embraced a lot of unpleasant policies over the past fourteen years, but I honestly think that most Americans would be appalled if they knew how Palestinians really have been treated. Unfortunately the Israel propaganda machine has been able to maintain a tight grip on the narrative promoted in the mainstream media. Arabs are depicted as terrorists while Israelis are seen as folks just like us.
How does all this happen? Because of money which enables the Israel firsters to control the media and buy the politicians, but unfortunately no one is allowed to say that lest Abe Foxman of the Anti Defamation League accuse one of propagating a stereotype that is an “anti-Semitic myth.” American media corporations and national politics are in fact totally corrupted by money and the control that it buys and not just on behalf of Israel. One would have to be blind not to recognize that fact.
This is where groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee better known as AIPAC come in. AIPAC is only one part of the octopus like Israel Lobby but it might well be regarded as the most effective component. AIPAC has an annual budget of $70 million and 200 full time employees. It has thousands of volunteers and tens of thousands of contributors and supporters, many of whom are in Washington right now. On Tuesday they will descend on Congressional offices to pressure congressmen to agree to conform to AIPAC talking points.
AIPAC, which is an IRS 501(c)4 lobbying organization, is able to keep its donor list secret. It characteristically operates in the shadows. It prepares position papers that are then distributed in congress and many congressmen, largely ignorant of the issues, parrot what AIPAC gives them. AIPAC operative Steve Rosen once boasted that he could have the signatures of seventy Senators on a napkin in twenty-four hours.
Congressmen know that crossing the Israeli Lobby is career damaging. Senators William Fulbright and Chuck Percy were among the first to feel its wrath when they were confronted by well-funded challengers backed by effective media campaigns who defeated them in spite of their own outstanding records as legislators. The founder of my own organization the Council for the National Interest Congressman Paul Findley also suffered the same fate when he fell afoul of the Lobby. Within the government the purge has also been widespread with the traditional Arabists at State Department forced out to be replaced by friends of Israel, many of whom have been political appointees rather than career diplomats.
There is no easy solution to what I have been telling you. Certainly a more honest media would produce American voters who are better informed, but even though AIPAC has long been defending the indefensible the corruption in Congress runs deep and it is difficult to find a constituency anywhere in the United States where it is possible to vote for a candidate who is not openly and enthusiastically supportive of the Israel relationship. In Virginia last year there were several important congressional elections. All the candidates were vetted for their views on Israel well before the voting took place.
But to return to AIPAC there should be demands that it and other similar Israel-advocacy organizations register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. That would require them to have complete transparency in terms of their funding and it would also tell the American people that the organizations themselves are not necessarily benign and acting on behalf of U.S. interests, which is the subterfuge that they currently engage in. It is certainly past time to push back against an organization that is brazenly promoting the interests of a foreign government at the expense of the American people. Thank you.
Screw the Palestinians too….they let Yasser Arafat screw them for decades. If a Palestinian State was soooo important why didn’t one of the Arab countries give them a homeland before the creation of Isreal?
Israel, the Palestinians, and all the others around the world. All of their “foreign aid” is simply leveraging some narrative to mask the flow of vast sums of money from the USA to a few wealthy hands in the foreign country, while insuring that the U.S. politicians and their patrons get a healthy cut of the loot.
Someone once said foreign aid is, “money taken from (relatively) poor people in rich countries and given to rich people in poor countries.”
In a nation with GDP of 12 $trillion, and a government that spends $3 trillion, an astronomical amount of wealth simply disappears in rounding errors. Add this to the fact that tens, even hundreds of BILLIONS simply cannot be accounted for, due to “sloppy accounting,” and it’s easy to see that the U.S. government is the world’s largest criminal organization.
Becoming a general or admiral is like becoming a head of a mafia family. Ditto an elected or appointed position high up in any of the executive branch offices.
“Foreign aid is taking money from poor people and giving it to rich people”. -Ron Paul.
Zara’s mentor.
Henry Brooks Adams
Adams, like many a contemporary antisemite, believed the Jews conspired to control the world. His letters were “peppered with a variety of antisemitic remarks”, according to historian Robert Michael. Adams wrote: “I detest [the Jews], and everything connected with them, and I live only and solely with the hope of seeing their demise, with all their accursed Judaism. I want to see all the lenders at interest taken out and executed.”[29] Historian Edward Saveth quotes Adams as follows:
“We are in the hands of the Jews”, Adams lamented. “They can do what they please with our values.” He advised against investment except in the form of gold locked in a safe deposit box. “There you have no risk but the burglar. In any other form you have the burglar, the Jew, the Czar, the socialist, and, above all, the total irremediable, radical rottenness of our whole social, industrial, financial and political system.”[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams
I’d like to see CON-gress pass a bill that eliminates all foreign aid until and unless the U.S. has a surplus. What the hell sense does it make to make taxpayers borrow money so Unc Sam can just give it away. For nothing in return, especially in the case of Israel.
Flash, as usual you’re completely full of shit. Zara didn’t say anything remotely disparaging towards Jews. This is about the Israeli government and their domestic infiltration/espionage activities, and the fact that those cuntnuggets need to GO THE FUCK HOME. Get your head out of your ass.
Stigsy says:
Flash, as usual you’re completely full of shit. Zara didn’t say anything remotely disparaging towards Jews. This is about the Israeli government and their domestic infiltration/espionage activities, and the fact that those cuntnuggets need to GO THE FUCK HOME. Get your head out of your ass.
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Mr. Cut and Paste is clueless. If Israel were created by Eskimos and nothing else were different, unless he would claim that I hate Eskimos, he and anyone else that wants to pin the anti-semite label on my breast needs to recant, unless their motives are less than honorable.
Another standard hit job on Israel. Meh. Read the same shit before, and I’ll read it again.
Just a matter of rearranging paragraphs. “Now let’s see. Do I put the plight of the poor, misunderstood Palestinians at the beginning of the article, in the middle, or at the end?” So many decisions, so little time.
SSS says:
Another standard hit job on Israel. Meh. Read the same shit before, and I’ll read it again.
Just a matter of rearranging paragraphs. “Now let’s see. Do I put the plight of the poor, misunderstood Palestinians at the beginning of the article, in the middle, or at the end?” So many decisions, so little time.
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Israel must have some nice golf courses. Please move there and leave American to Americans.
Jews in Iran ……
During the evil U.S-backed Shah’s reign: 100,000.
After the enlightened, loving, kumbaya 1979 Ayatollah Revolution: 8,000. Maybe, because that’s an Iranian GOVERNMENT figure.
But, oh no, let’s not come to the conclusion that “Persia Now, Persia Forever” Zara and the Iranian government are anti-Semitic. Iran’s welcome mat is out for Jews, isn’t it, Zara? Iran loves Jews, doesn’t it, Zara? It’s only that pesky Zionist government in Jerusalem, right Zara?
And those figures I posted are proof-positive of the Iranian government’s love of Jews. Simply because the number of Iranian Jews isn’t ZERO. As long as there is one, single, verifiable living Jew in Iran, Zara will continue to defend that evil regime, won’t you, Zara? And you’ll do it through slamming Israel, as you have always done.
SSS
Iran wants their jews back, who have lived there since the time of Cyrus. Jews have guaranteed representation in the Iranian parliament and are free to practice their religion. Your message to the victims of the Israeli assault on the USS Liberty: Tough shit.
Iran unveils monument to jews killed in the war with Iraq:
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.632532
What say you, Mr. CiA
Sound of crickets….
well then, apparently Zarra and newly found pet, Stigsy now love da’ Joos and so does Iran.It’s anyone living in Israel they hate, especially Eskimos.
BTW, Henry Adam’s was not only the grandson of John and John Quincy Adams , but son and secretary of Charles Adams . US Ambassador to UK under Stinkin’ Linkin’ .He was also a rabid abolitionist preaching death to Southerners and Jews whilst acting so pious towards the man in bondage…taking one’s freedom is a crime, their life…meh….typical New England blue blood suffering from the common Rethuglican malady of two wrongs always make a right …same as they always were.
the chief parasites in American politics are Republicans.
RES!
Senate Republicans Push for War With Iran
If anything can persuade Iran’s rulers to go for a nuke, it’s these hardliners’ lust for war.
So the hawks and hardliners are demonstrably wrong about the alternative to the current talks, but that does not matter to them. Why not? Because they don’t really want a “better deal” with Iran. What they, like Netanyahu and other Israeli hawks, want is war and nothing less than regime change. (Remember when John McCain sang “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”?) Thus they’d be delighted if Iran stormed out of the negotiations and added centrifuges to its nuclear program. The hawks would have their casus belli at last.
What they overlook is that everyone else will know that Iran was not the party that scuttled the negotiations. The cruel sanctions regime will then crumble, leaving the United States and Israel as the only countries trying to throttle Iran. At that point, Israel may well attack the Islamic Republic, expecting the United States to finish the job that Israel would be unable to finish. Catastrophe would follow.
http://reason.com/archives/2015/03/12/senate-republicans-push-war-with-iran
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Jewish Hospital a Fixture in Tehran
By THOMAS ERDBRINKFEB. 9, 2014
The Dr. Sapir Hospital and Charity Center on Mostafa Khomeini Street is the only Jewish hospital in Tehran and sits across from a Shiite seminary. Credit Morteza Nikoubazl for The New York Times
TEHRAN — Sitting in his office at Tehran’s only Jewish hospital, Ciamak Morsadegh lit another cigarette and reminisced about how his wife left Iran for the United States after he insisted on staying.
Dr. Morsadegh, the director of the Dr. Sapir Hospital and Charity Center here, said that unlike thousands of other Jews he has never thought about leaving the Islamic Republic, for the simple reason that Iran is his home.
“I speak English, I pray in Hebrew, but I think in Persian,” said Dr. Morsadegh, a surgeon who is also a member of Parliament. “I am Iranian. Iranian-Jewish.”
Many were surprised last week when the government of President Hassan Rouhani donated $400,000 to the Dr. Sapir Hospital, but Dr. Morsadegh was not among them.
“We Jews are a part of Iran’s history,” he said. “What is important is that Mr. Rouhani makes big news out of supporting us. He is showing that we, as a religious minority, are part of this country, too.”
‘I speak English, I pray in Hebrew, but I think in Persian.’ CIAMAK MORSADEGH Director of the Dr. Sapir Hospital and Charity Center in Tehran. Credit Morteza Nikoubazl for The New York Times
“When I am sick I go across the street,” Mohammad Mirghanin, a seminary student, said as he rushed to class. “They might have a different religion, but they are fellow Iranians. I do not see why I should not go to the Jewish hospital.”
On Saturday, a woman in a traditional black chador approached Khoddad Asnashahri, the hospital’s managing director and a Muslim, and asked for help.
“I went to the Iman Khomeini hospital with my daughter who needs a sonogram, but over there it costs 500,000 toman,” or roughly $200, said the woman, Zahra Hajabdolmaleki.
“We will help you here for half that amount,” Mr. Asnashahri pledged.
Named after a Jewish doctor who died in 1921 while trying to cure patients during a typhus epidemic raging through Tehran, the hospital started out as a clinic where all Iranians could come for medical care at vastly reduced rates. For more than 50 years it has been a meeting point for Iranian Jews and Muslims and the most prominent Jewish charity in the capital.
Mr. Asnashahri, who has worked at the hospital for nearly 48 years, praised the “good atmosphere” while also noting that only five Jewish physicians remained. “Many have migrated and others have bought shares in more modern hospitals,” he said.
About 96 percent of patients are Muslim, like most of the hospital’s employees. But what mattered most, he said, was the message that “here all people can come, no matter what religion, color or race.”
An Iranian orderly at the pharmacy counter in Dr. Sapir Hospital. The hospital began as a clinic with reduced rates for care. Credit Morteza Nikoubazl for The New York Times
Though the Jewish population of Iran is dwindling — now at about 9,000, according to an official census by the Statistical Center of Iran, though other estimates range to 20,000 — the country has the largest number of Jews in the Middle East after Israel.
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Dr. Morsadegh, the surgeon, has devoted his life to that diminishing community. He was a leader of the Tehran Jewish Committee, a group that supports synagogues, schools and other facets of Jewish life in Iran, and in 2008 was elected as the Jewish representative in Parliament, where five official religious minorities have a permanent seat.
He will not say that the situation for Jews and the other official religious minorities — Christian Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Zoroastrians — is perfect in Iran. The five minorities would like to see an Islamic law changed that allows one of their faith who converts to Islam to get the entire inheritance of his or her non-Muslim family, for example. Yet things are worse for evangelical Christians and Bahais, who can face prison sentences and in many cases exclusion from higher education.
Dr. Morsadegh said former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated Holocaust denials left psychological scars, as well. “Look, all Jews believe in the Holocaust,” he said. “It would have been much better if the former president had not raised that issue.”
President Rouhani has remained silent on the Holocaust, and in September his social media team wished Jews around the world a happy Rosh Hashana.
“It has gotten a lot better,” Dr. Morsadegh said, recalling how thousands of Jews left the country after the 1979 revolution. Many more have emigrated since then, often because of Iran’s bad economy.
Though Dr. Sapir Hospital is Jewish owned, there is not much that would remind one of Jewish heritage. On the wall of Dr. Morsadegh’s office are two portraits of Iran’s past and current supreme leaders, facing a painting of Moses holding up the Ten Commandments.
In September, Dr. Morsadegh joined President Rouhani on his trip to the United Nations in New York. Some in Iran have hinted at a connection between the president’s financial donation to the hospital and Dr. Morsadegh’s enthusiastic defense of Iran and the position of Jews in the country.
But the doctor is not bothered by those questions. “I helped out in the war with Iraq for this country, as a first aid doctor,” he said. “And I’d do it again tomorrow.”