Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Israeli
Interference in US Politics: A Conspiracy in Plain Sight
Philip Weiss
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
Mondoweiss
I
completely believe that Donald Trump was in bed with the Russians before the
election and the campaign may well have intrigued with Vladimir Putin with
respect to Wikileaks and that helped defeat Hillary Clinton. I believe that
because that’s how the world works; because a lot of very smart people in the
liberal establishment believe it; and because the New York Times and Washington
Post are documenting some of it, with the fervor of Watergate.
Maybe it
will bring the liar in chief down some day and end this short national
nightmare. I certainly hope so.
But there
are two large exceptions to the Russian conspiracy. The first is that it is
good policy for the United States to be talking to Russia. If Clinton were
president today, there might be dogfights over Damascus. Her gang was all for
regime change in Syria, and for confrontation over the Ukraine. That’s bad
policy. I’m glad they’re not running the show– though they are certainly
running this story. Before you get too upset about Russia winking at the
sanctions, the scandal that brought down Michael Flynn, please recall that in
2012, President Obama sent secret signals [1] to
Iran to ignore congressional sanctions, we’ll be talking to you once I’m
reelected. Obama got reelected; and his deal with Iran is one of the greatest
achievements of a very good presidency. Again, this is how the world works.
Which brings
up the second exception. Israel tried to interfere in that 2012 election, as
Chris Matthews sensibly reminded his audience recently: Benjamin Netanyahu
tried to help Mitt Romney beat Obama. Sheldon Adelson held a fundraiser in
Jerusalem for Romney.
Netanyahu
didn’t stop there. After Romney lost, Netanyahu came to Congress to tell the
Congress to reject President Obama’s nuclear deal. That was an unprecedented
interference of a foreign leader in our policy-making, enabled by the Israel
lobby; but there were never any investigations about that. Subsequently Chuck
Schumer said he was torn between a Jewish interest [2]and the
American interest, before voting against the president, and he paid no
political/reputational price for it; while President Obama said that it would
be an “abrogation” of his constitutional duty if he considered Israel’s
interest ahead of the U.S.; for which Obama was called an anti-semite.
Throughout
those negotiations, Obama could never address the fact that Israel has nukes.
This lie is honored by the press, in a way that it would never honor Trump’s
lies. And the manner in which Israel got nukes, including thefts
from an American company with the complicity of the White House [3], is only
investigated by peripheral figures.
The Israeli
interference in our politics is the conspiracy in plain sight that no one in
the media talks about because they’re too implicated themselves. The two top
executives at the largest media company, Comcast, are pro-Israel; one of them,
David Cohen, raised money [4] for
the Israeli army. Netanyahu’s speeches to Congress were written by Gary Ginsberg, an executive at another media company,
Time Warner [5], but hey, that’s not an issue.
Four New York Times reporters have had children serve in the Israeli army. One
of them is columnist David Brooks, who says that he gets gooey-eyed when he
visits Israel. He is one of several Zionists with columns at the Times. Tom
Friedman justified the Iraq War because suicide bombers were going into Tel Aviv pizza parlors [6]. (Huh?)
Yesterday
Martin Indyk said on National Public Radio that Jared Kushner’s strong Jewish
background was an asset for his being a Middle East mediator, a job that Aaron
David Miller, who also has a strong Jewish background, defined as being
Israel’s lawyer. Indyk, himself a mediator, started a pro-Israel think tank
with Haim Saban, an Israeli-American who was Clinton’s biggest funder and who
lately smeared Keith Ellison at a giant gathering at Brookings, which he also helps fund [7], as
“clearly an anti-semite” and “anti-Israel;” and Jake Tapper of CNN moved on to
the next question, presumably because smearing a public official in that manner
is not news. Saban is also chummy with Jeffrey Goldberg, one of whose
qualifications for being the best journalist in his generation, according to
the Atlantic’s publisher, is that he served in the Israeli Defense Forces,
because he felt that America was unsafe for Jews. One of Goldberg’s first hires
as editor at the Atlantic is Julia Ioffe, who hates Russia, and who told a synagogue audience last year after she was attacked [8] as a
Jew by Trump supporters: “Personally I was kind of glad to see the outpouring
of antisemitism” because people had forgotten that Jews and Israel are the
“underdog.” At another NY synagogue, believing that he was speaking off the
record, Dennis Ross, the longtime White House “mediator” of the peace
process, said that American Jews [9] must
be “advocates” for Israel, not for Palestinians. Again, not a scandal. But when
Rashid Khalidi, who wrote a book about the U.S. being imbalanced in the peace
process, warned that neoconservatives would “infest” the Trump administration [10], he was
smeared up and down as an anti-semite.
I could go
on and on. I can’t because Netanyahu is in the White House today, and I need to
get on the news. Netanyahu who President Obama met with countless times,
Netanyahu who John Kerry talked to as secretary of state four times [11] as
often as he spoke to (Russian) Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Which is hardly
surprising, because as Kerry complained [12] to
Jeffrey Goldberg, we give Israel more military aid than we give the rest of the
world combined, and meantime they ignore our warnings. They can ignore us
because of the Israel lobby, including AIPAC, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, which doesn’t have to register as a foreign agent because of sleight-of-hand they pulled back [13] in
the 60s, defying Senator Fulbright. AIPAC never gets called for this
because the two countries are viewed to have completely congruent interests–
when we don’t. So Phil Gordon leaves the State Department and goes to a
conference in Israel just like Super Bowl winners going to Disneyland; all the
Israeli ambassadors grew up in the States; and Benjamin Netanyahu came of age
here, a subject that is never considered problematic; because we have a
political discourse in which a leading liberal journalist, Eric Alterman,
brags: “I was raised dually loyal my whole life.”
Alterman
told a Jewish audience in New York he was alright with that because the U.S.
can take a hit but Israel can’t. He then conceded that “bin Laden and 9/11 were
to some degree inspired by U.S. support of Israel,” and so are the “pool of
potential terrorists who want to attack the United States.” Though: “Dammit, if
that’s the price we have to pay, then I’m willing to pay it.”
Other
Americans may make a different calculation of U.S. interests. But let’s talk
about Russia.
Philip
Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net. See other posts by Philip
Weiss [14]. Annie Robbins contributed to
this story, particularly on the 2012 Iran/Obama detail.
Links:
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/world/iran-said-ready-to-talk-to-us-about-nuclear-program.html
[2] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/06/schumer-american-interests/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlPsC8sOmRA
[4] http://www.fidf.org/page.aspx?pid=881
[5] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/moonlights-speechwriter-netanyahu/
[6] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2013/0318/Thomas-Friedman-Iraq-war-booster
[7] http://mondoweiss.net/2017/01/accusation-relationship-recovery/
[8] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/personally-outpouring-journalist/
[9] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/06/american-advocates-palestinians/
[10] http://mondoweiss.net/2017/02/neocons-kristol-semitic/
[11] http://mondoweiss.net/2017/01/palestine-conflict-supporter/
[12] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/12/entire-israel-ignores/
[13] http://www.antiwar.com/orig/gsmith.php?articleid=11727
[14] http://mondoweiss.net/author/philweiss/
[2] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/06/schumer-american-interests/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlPsC8sOmRA
[4] http://www.fidf.org/page.aspx?pid=881
[5] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/moonlights-speechwriter-netanyahu/
[6] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2013/0318/Thomas-Friedman-Iraq-war-booster
[7] http://mondoweiss.net/2017/01/accusation-relationship-recovery/
[8] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/personally-outpouring-journalist/
[9] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/06/american-advocates-palestinians/
[10] http://mondoweiss.net/2017/02/neocons-kristol-semitic/
[11] http://mondoweiss.net/2017/01/palestine-conflict-supporter/
[12] http://mondoweiss.net/2016/12/entire-israel-ignores/
[13] http://www.antiwar.com/orig/gsmith.php?articleid=11727
[14] http://mondoweiss.net/author/philweiss/
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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