The Absurdity of US/Israeli Relations

Israel is not a good ally. In fact, they are probably the worst ally a nation could have. USS LIBERTY, anyone?

We are You and You are Us?

by THOMAS H. NAYLOR


“We are you, and you are us,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrogantly proclaimed to President Barack Obama in the White House recently.

How is it possible that Israel, a tiny country with only eight million people, can have so much influence over the foreign policy of the most powerful empire of all-time? Yet Israel played a major role in shaping the war on terror against Islam, the war with Afghanistan, two wars with Iraq, and the annihilation of Libya by NATO. And now Israel is aggressively doing everything within its power to provoke a war between the United States and Iran – a war which could quite easily precipitate World War III. That’s a lot!

The $3 billion in annual economic and military aid which the United States officially provides Israel enables it to engage in continuous acts of terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing against its Palestinian neighbors whose land was stolen by Israel at its inception back in 1948. This process of Israeli expansion into Palestinian occupied territory continues unabated. The Obama administration pretends to be opposed to further Israeli encroachment into Palestinian lands, but obviously couldn’t care less.

The moral justification for all of this can be traced to the Holocaust. Because six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War II, Jews are entitled to their own country within what was once the Biblical Holy Land. Never mind the fact that the land happened to be occupied by Palestinians. For similar reasons, Jews are also entitled to revenge against anyone or any government which challenges the moral authority of Israel. According to Israeli writer Gilad Atzmon in his provocative book entitled The Wandering Who?, this way of thinking has given rise to a new Jewish religion grounded in revenge, which he calls the “Holocaust religion.” In the name of Jewish suffering, the Holocaust religion “issues licenses to kill, to flatten, to nuke, to annihilate, to loot, to ethnically cleanse. It has made vengeance into an acceptable Western value.” According to Holocaust theology a nuclear attack against Iran by either Israel or the United States would be morally justifiable, since Iran has challenged Israel’s right to exist. “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

Because Americans were slow to respond to the horrors of the Holocaust, they are expected to do penance. The U.S. government is obliged to provide Israel with unconditional economic and military support. It must veto all U.N. Security Council resolutions deemed to be critical of Israel and boycott all international conferences which might embarrass Israel.

Israel expects the United States to treat it as its only true ally in the Middle East. The so-called Arab-Israeli peace process is a complete sham, since the United States always sides with Israel.

In return for the unconditional support which the United States extends to Israel, Israel is encouraged to destabilize the Middle East so as to justify American intervention in the region enabling it to hegemonize the supply of oil. It’s all a very cozy relationship.

The Israeli military machine is free to invade any country in the Middle East of its choosing and can expect the full support of the Pentagon, no questions asked. Israel is the only country in the Middle East which has the right to possess nuclear weapons. Any other country in the region which aspires to membership in the elite club will be demonized and treated as a terrorist state.

Few Americans are aware of the role Israel played in derailing détente in 1974 and prolonging the Cold War unnecessarily for at least fifteen years by accusing the Soviet Union of discrimination against Soviet Jews who wanted to leave. The charges were a complete fabrication. The vast majority of Soviet citizens allowed to emigrate to the West between 1968 and 1989 were, in fact, Jews. By portraying itself as both a victim of communism and America’s only true non-communist friend in the Middle East, Israel extracted billions of dollars from the United States to finance its never ending war with the Palestinians. This strategy also helped deflect public opinion away from Israel’s own human rights abuses.

All of this is made possible by the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), our nation’s most powerful political lobbying organization. Anyone who has the audacity to challenge America’s foreign policy towards Israel is by definition an anti-Semite and can expect to receive the full wrath of the Israeli Lobby and become the target of a disinformation campaign. Candidates for Congress who are not openly pro-Israel will fall victim to a negative media blitz which virtually assures political defeat.

Nothing better illustrates the power of AIPAC than the invitation by Columbia University to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on the campus on September 24, 2007. Rather than withdrawing the invitation in response to the political firestorm created by the Israeli Lobby, Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger opted personally to introduce Ahmadinejad. His introduction took the form of a highly inflammatory, arrogant, insulting diatribe against the University’s guest – all to appease AIPAC and its constituents. As a graduate of Columbia University, I was overcome by a sense of shame as a result of Bollinger’s demagogic behavior. He reminded me of white racist politicians such as George W. Wallace and Ross Barnett in the South in the 1960s. The rage against Iran expressed by Republican Presidential candidates Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum is more of the same.

Since President Ahmadinejad is one of only a handful of surviving political leaders in the world who has ever stood up against Israel and the United States, he must not only be demonized but eventually taken out. Indeed, there is no more important test of one’s Americanism than one’s stand against Iran and its president.

In the eyes of the United States, Iran has been persona non grata since Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy on November 4, 1979. Few Americans recall that in 1953 when the Eisenhower administration disapproved of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the CIA removed him from office, had him placed under house arrest, and installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as head of state. Most Americans have also forgotten that Ronald Reagan collaborated with his buddy Saddam Hussein to destroy Iran. All the while Reagan had arranged for the Israelis to sell weapons to the Iranians to finance the Contras in Nicaragua whose aim was to overthrow the duly elected Sandinista government. Such financial aid had been specifically banned by the U.S. Congress. Is there any wonder that the Iranian government is not particularly fond of the United States?

Although American politicians like to quote the Founding Fathers, no admonition has ever been more systematically ignored than President George Washington’s warning in his 1796 farewell address, about the inherent dangers of blindly siding with one nation, “a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of ills.”

The U.S.-Israeli relationship gets right to the very essence of what the American Empire is all about. The United States and Israel are the two foremost technofascist nations in the world. That’s why there is such a close symbiotic relationship between the two war mongering nations. The answer to the question, “Who controls whom?” remains in doubt. But as we previously noted, Israel is nevertheless useful to the United States, even though it pulls our string.

About Israel, Human Scale author Kirkpatrick Sale once said, “The original idea of a Jewish state was a mistake, and to establish it in an Islamic Middle East essentially by force and with the immiseration of millions of natives was a tragic mistake. We are reaping the awful results of that error today.” Continuing he said, “It is not so easy to know what to do to undo that mistake, but I would argue that a world that can make a state can unmake it.”

Because the compliant American media marches in lockstep to the beat of the AIPAC drum, no change in the U.S. – Israeli relationship is expected anytime soon.

The only way to stop Israeli terrorism is for the U.S. to discontinue all economic and military aid to Israel. Only then will the fighting cease. But this will never happen so long as the Empire remains intact. So strong are the ties between Israel and the United States that only the dissolution of the Union itself could put an end to the relationship.

If there is any hope for Israel and Palestine, it lies in some form of Swiss federalism. The crux of the Swiss Confederation is a loosely defined three-dimensional matrix consisting of 26 cantons, 4 cultures, and 7 major departments of the federal government. One could envision Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights as Palestinian cantons which cooperate with Israel, the State which surrounds two of them.

Nothing good can ever come from the confluence of American military might and the lust for revenge of Israel.

Clever Response to the Racist Charge Against Ron Paul

Why the Establishment is Terrified of Ron Paul
by DAVE LINDORFF

It’s fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, now that according to some mainstream polls he has become the front-running candidate in the Jan. 3 GOP caucus race in Iowa, and perhaps also in the first primary campaign in New Hampshire.

Remember, we’re talking about a guy who has been in Congress on and off for 12 terms, dating back to 1976. His views have been pretty consistent, and because he has run for president several times, also pretty well known. A practicing physician who claims to have helped in the births of over 4000 babies in his career, the 76-year-old Paul is a free-market advocate, an abortion opponent, an uncompromising defender of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, an opponent of government regulation, the Federal Reserve and the IRS, and of big government in general–especially big federal government.

What’s interesting is what he’s being attacked for: being a racist, being “anti-Israel” and being an isolationist.

The racist bit is funny. After all, if we’re honest, the whole political infrastructure of the US is riven with racism. Just check out the public schools in any urban area, where you’ll find most of the students are non-white, or check out the schools in rural parts of the southeast in areas where most of the students are black — compare the condition of those schools and the class sizes to schools in the white neighborhoods. Check out the wildly different jobless figures for whites and for blacks. Check out the (very pale) complexion of the student bodies at just about any state university, check out the skin tones of the judges on the US Supreme Court, or for that matter, the whole federal bench. Check out the racial breakdown of the nation’s jails, and especially on the country’s many death rows, where you’ll find a wildly outsized percentage of people with black or brown skin waiting to be killed by the state.

Being a racist is clearly no disqualifier for national political office. It’s just that you are not supposed to say overtly racist things, at least in public.

It’s fine to pass laws and push for enforcement actions and “tough” judges that end up putting most young African-American males in prison at some point in their lives. It’s okay to promote a “War” on drugs that ends up creating a whole new slavery in the form of black men locked up in for-profit prisons. It’s okay to shortchange minority school districts. You just aren’t supposed to say you’re doing these things on purpose.

When it comes to Ron Paul, his problem is that he has allowed his supporters and his newsletters and campaign literature in years past to actually say things in public that other candidates only say, or think, in private, or that are the actual result of legislation that they sponsor or support, though always supposedly without the intent being the racist thing that is a consequence (wink, wink).

Some of those things Paul has said or allowed in his literature, like the line in one of his newsletters that the race riots in Los Angeles only ended when it came time for people to “pick up their welfare checks,” are truly offensive, and if he wants to be a serious contender for office, Paul should publicly and forcefully disavow them and the people who have expressed them in his name or on his behalf, as he should forcefully denounce any white racists and anti-semites who offer him support (his statements to date that he “doesn’t agree” with such people, or “doesn’t like” their support are far too limp). But it’s worth noting that with all the charges floating around that he hangs out with white supremacist types, Nelson Linder, president of the Austin, Texas NAACP, says he has known Ron Paul for 20 years, and reports that he is “not a racist.” Linder notes that Paul has called Martin Luther King a “hero,” and adds that he has condemned the police repression of black communities as well as the mandatory sentencing rules (supported by Democrats and Republicans over the years) that have condemned many blacks to long prison terms for minor offenses–concrete positions that you will not hear coming from either Obama or any of Paul’s competitors for the GOP nomination.

In fact, if we’re talking racist guilt-by-association, then the media’s favorite Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, should be hearing demands that he renounce his Mormon faith, as the Mormon scriptures state that the “seed of Cain” were made black in what amounts to a racist curse by the Mormon god. So should fellow Mormon Jon Huntsman. (Even if the Mormon church “received” blacks in 1978, many of its adherents remain white supremacists, and many of its priests continue to oppose inter-racial marriage.) Rick Perry, meanwhile, should have to sever his ties with white supremacist Christian evangelist David Barton. As for Newt Gingrich condemning Paul for hanging around with racists, talk about your pot calling the kettle racist!

Then there is the foreign policy stuff.

Ron Paul is being called anti-American, both by some of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, and increasingly even by fearful Democrats who are starting to wonder, and apparently worry, about how Paul might fare against Barack Obama in the 2012 general election. The basis for this claim is Paul’s argument that the 9-11 attacks on the US were the predictable result of the history of American imperialist activity in the Middle East, and his claim that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were gleeful after that attacks because it allowed them to go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq.

The thing is, while you aren’t supposed to say it in polite company, Ron Paul is right about that. You don’t have to buy into conspiracy theories claiming that 9-11 was an “inside job” to see that Middle Eastern terror campaigns against the US were the predictable result — blow-back if you will — of a history of US imperialism in the Middle East and elsewhere, or of what Native American activist Ward Churchill rightly referred to as “chickens coming home to roost.” And we have it from a member of Bush’s own cabinet, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, that planning for an invasion and occupation of Iraq was in the works before Bush was even sworn into office in January 2001, while work on the fine print of the so-called USA PATRIOT Act was underway well before the first plane hit the first tower.

Paul is being labeled an “isolationist” (a hoary term that is supposedly a pejorative, dating back to World War I days, but which these days should actually be considered a compliment). The basis for this charge is that he calls for an end to America’s endless wars and to the fraudulent and enormously dangerous and damaging “War” on Terror. He also says he wants to close down the over 800 military bases that the US operates all around the world. Again, what has his establishment critics in high dudgeon is that his perspective is winning over an increasing number of Americans (including Republicans), who are finally waking up to the reality that a country that spends more than half of every tax dollar on its military, its wars, the debt for those wars, and on its secret spying operations, and that has itself on a permanent war footing, cannot prosper or even long endure.

Also making Ron Paul a pariah for the establishment is his position on Israel. He rightly points out and condemns the terrible distortion of US foreign policy that has occurred because of the unseemly power of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., which has most members of Congress in the pocket of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). As he put it in a 2007 interview<> : “The First Amendment grants all citizens the right to petition the U.S. government, and this applies to AIPAC as much as anyone else. However, I oppose certain lobbying groups having more of an undue influence than others, and since one of the main purposes of AIPAC is to lobby for generous taxpayer subsidies to Israel, that portion of their influence would end under my administration.”

But the truth is: What other country can you name which is almost totally dependent upon the US for its military, yet can nonetheless make threats to use its US-supplied weapons to start a potential global war (by invading Iran), with Washington left pleading with it not to take such an action? There is no other such country. Any other country dependent upon the US for its military weapons has to march to US orders or else. While we’re at it, what other lobby can you name that has had spies working for it, including spies in the Pentagon who have gone to jail for disclosing US military secrets, and which nonetheless remains a prime venue for presidential candidates to come and speak? Answer: There is no other such lobby.

Israel can even murder an American citizen, as it did in 2010 in the case of unarmed 19-year-old humanitarian volunteer Furkan Dogan on the Turkish Gaza aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, and there isn’t a peep of protest from Washington (the White House actually tried to bury a report from the Turkish national forensic medicine body declaring that their tests showed Dogan had been executed by IDF bullets fired at his head at close range). Indeed, Israel was able to announce in advance that it planned to have its IDF thugs board ships of a second aid flotilla carrying many unarmed American citizens, and instead of warning Israel not to harm any of those Americans, Washington warned the Americans that they were putting themselves at risk. Our government even gave Israel the go-ahead in advance to have its boarding parties use violence against those US citizens.

What has Paul’s critics, right and left, worried is that a growing number of Americans agree with his view of Israel, seeing support of that increasingly isolated irredentist theocracy with its ongoing illegal occupation and absorption of Palestinian territories, and its official policy of apartheid towards the Arabs within its borders as being inimitable to American interests.

There are plenty of things wrong with Ron Paul, but the charge of racism doesn’t hold up very well, and in any case, it’s a charge that can be leveled equally against most of the rest of the nation’s white political leaders, and is hardly a disqualifier, judging by the people who currently hold high office in Washington, not to mention state governments. As for his anti-Israel stance and his isolationist foreign policy, these are both positives and could end up winning him votes in an honest national presidential race–if we still have such things here in America.

Where I part company with Paul is in the area of economics. His Libertarian philosophy may be right on when it comes to support for individual rights, and to a belief in strict adherence to the Constitution. We desperately need a radical pull-back from the unconstitutional policies of the Bush and Obama administrations, which have made the president into a virtual dictator, relegated Congress to the role of a debating society, gutted at least nine of the 10 articles in the Bill of Rights, and overseen the creation of a police state where it is now possible for American citizens to be captured and hauled away from their homes in secret, to be locked up and held indefinitely without trial on some military base on the basis of unproven rumors and trumped-up charges, with no right to see family members or even a lawyer.

But Libertarianism is not so great when it calls for an end to federal regulation of corporations, however large and powerful, or when it says the federal government should do nothing when the entire planetary biosphere is threatened by rampaging climate change caused by the rapacious and unbridled pursuit of profit and growth by those same corporate interests.

It’s not so great either when it opposes, as Paul does, legislation like the Civil Rights Act on the grounds that private employers and owners of private shops and restaurants should have the right to discriminate on the basis of race if they wish, free of government intervention.

Libertarianism is at its core an ugly anti-social philosophy of selfishness carried to the extreme. It is the antithesis of all that has been good in human social evolution — the creation of philosophies of caring and of societies in which suffering and want are addressed and, where possible, ameliorated.

Interestingly though, Paul is not being pilloried by his establishment critics in the GOP or the Democratic Party, or in the media, for his Libertarian economic theories or even his far-out property-rights theories. These are, after all, also quietly shared by most people in both of the major parties, and of course are wildly popular among the ranks of the corporate elite, who know they can always get all the favors they want or need from politicians by buying them, and who are happy to spout the gospel of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman when it comes to government regulation of their businesses or taxation of their personal hoards. Unfettered capitalism is also an article of faith in the corporate media.

That said, sometimes it all comes down to a couple of big issues, and in the unlikely chance that the election next November were to end up being the choice between Barack Obama and Ron Paul (and assuming no emergence of a viable Third Party progressive candidate like Rocky Anderson and hisJustice Party), while I might have a hard time pulling the lever for Paul unless he can really make it clear he has no truck with White Supremecists and their ilk, it would be easier than pulling a lever for Obama.

Why? Because with President Obama we would get more war, increased military spending, and at the rate he’s been going stripping away our Constitutional rights, there wouldn’t be any of those after another four years. We would also be electing someone who we now know lies through his teeth, who takes money from some of the biggest corporate thieves in human history, and who has appointed some of those very criminals to most or all of the key economic policy positions in his administration.

With Ron Paul as president, at least we’d be done with all the wars, the people of the rest of the world would be finally free of US military interference, including attacks by US drones. The long-suffering Constitution and its Bill of Rights would mean something again. We might even get a Supreme Court justice or two who actually believed that Congress should declare any future wars before we could fight them, and that citizens who were arrested had an absolute right to a speedy trial by a jury of peers. And we’d be electing someone who appears, especially for a politician, to be that rare thing: an honest man who says what he means and means what he says — and who doesn’t seem to be owned by the banksters.

We’d have a hell of a fight on our hands in a Ron Paul presidency, defending Social Security and Medicare, promoting economic equality, fighting climate change and pollution, defending abortion rights and maybe fighting a resurgence of Jim Crow in some parts of the country, but at least we wouldn’t have to worry about being spied upon, beaten and arrested and then perhaps shipped off to Guantanamo for doing it.

Michele Bachmann: If We Don’t Completely Support Israel, God Will Curse Us

Doug Mataconis - Outside the Beltway

Apparently, Michele Bachmann bases  her foreign policy views on obscure quotes from a book written 5,000 years ago:

At a Republican Jewish Coalition event in Los Angeles last week, Rep. Michele Bachmann offered a candid view of her positions on Israel: Support for Israel is handed down by God and if the United States pulls back its support, America will cease to exist.

Here’s a transcript of some of her remarks at the RJC event:

I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle.

Right now in my own private Bible time, I am working through Isaiah . . . and there is continually a coming back to what God gave to Israel initially, which was the Torah and the Ten Commandments, and I have a wonderful quote from John Adams that if you will indulge me [while I find it] . . . [from his February 16, 1809 letter to François Adriaan van der Kemp]:

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

. . . So that is a very long way to answer your question, but I believe that an explicit statement from us about our support for Israel as tied to American security, we would do well to do that.

Leaving aside the question of whether it would be a good idea to give any more political power to a person who apparently makes her foreign policy decisions based on religion rather than the facts on the ground and what might actually be in America’s national interest, I’ve really got to wonder if the author of this verse:

The LORD said to Abram: “Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you.

really meant to say Bibi Netanyahu, right or wrong. Somehow, I think not.

Why the U.S. Won't Cut Ties with Israel, No Matter How Extreme Its Government Gets

A thick web of military-strategic ties is at the heart of the US-Israeli relationship.
By Phyllis Bennis, AlterNet
August 4, 2010

Rumors are floating around about why Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was in Washington – again – last week when Israel’s official top diplomat, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, is nowhere to be seen. This was Barak’s seventh visit to DC; Lieberman has been here exactly once.

So what’s up with that? Why isn’t Israel’s most important envoy playing the key diplomatic role with Israel’s most important diplomatic sponsor? One reason is that Lieberman is an embarrassment to many, even here in Washington’s Israel-can-do-no-wrong political culture. His party, Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) is so far right that Kadimah -- the party of the 1982 “Butcher of Beirut” Ariel Sharon and Tzipi Livni who helped orchestrate the assault on Gaza -- and the extremist settlement-backing Likud party of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, look centrist and center-right by comparison.

Lieberman’s gang goes way beyond normal Israeli extremism, calling not just for unconstrained settlement expansion, but various versions of “transfer” – the preferred Israeli euphemism for ethnic cleansing. That means the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, including some who are Israeli citizens, starting with those who refuse to sign an oath of loyalty to Zionism. In May 2004, Lieberman announced that 90 percent of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who amount to 20 percent of the population, would “have to find a new Arab entity” to live in because “they have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost.” He called for executing Arab members of the Knesset who speak to Hamas, or who call for commemoration of the nakba, the Palestinian expulsion and dispossession from what would become Israel in 1947-48. Back in 1998 Lieberman urged Israel to bomb Egypt’s giant Aswan Dam, a move that would have flooded pretty much all of Egypt and drowned most of Egypt’s 80 million people. And in 2003, as transport minister, Lieberman called for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons to be drowned in the Dead Sea – and offered buses to take them there.

So it’s not particularly surprising that even in Washington he creates a bit of a cringe factor. (That’s not to say it bothers everyone – shortly after his 2009 selection as foreign minister, Lieberman was a special guest of Brookings’ Saban Center, welcomed by former president Bill and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.)

But it’s not only delicate U.S. political sensibilities that have made the defense minister Israel’s key interlocutor with Washington. It’s because the U.S.-Israel relationship is, even after the Cold War, grounded in a web of military-strategic ties that put the Pentagon-IDF links, the connections between the other military-intelligence agencies, and the ties of arms manufacturers in both countries, at the center of the alliance.

Despite the very public spat between the Obama administration and Netanyahu over settlement policy, the U.S. never threatened to reduce those strategic and military ties. Every U.S. request to Israel about settlements began with the reminder that Israeli security remained at the top of U.S. priorities, that the U.S. remained committed to maintaining Israel’s “qualitative military edge.” What is unchanging is the collaboration of military, military-industrial, military-intelligence alliances that makes all the political efforts of the pro-Israel and arms manufacturing lobbies, and then Congress, much more lucrative and thus much easier.

Just a few days ago Israel and the U.S. agreed on mutual development of the Arrow-3 anti-missile interceptor. Built jointly by Boeing and the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, it will cost up to $100 million – all paid by U.S. taxpayers. The Jerusalem Post reported Israel was worried that President Obama might abandon the funding because of the economic crisis. Maybe Israel feared the Obama administration thinks $100 million could better be used funding 2000 new green union jobs here at home? But not to worry – the funding remains. New missile interceptors for nuclear-armed Israel are apparently more important than U.S. jobs.

A couple of weeks earlier, the Obama administration had asked Congress – not that they needed much urging – for an additional $205 million to pay for Israel’s new Iron Dome anti-rocket system. That one will replace 4,100 more potential U.S. jobs. But who’s counting?

And let’s not forget all of this is on top of the $30 BILLION in military aid George W. Bush promised to Israel over the next ten years, which President Obama immediately agreed to implement. And on top of the absolute commitment to make sure Israel is never held accountable at the United Nations for its violations of international law, or in the U.S. for its violations of U.S. domestic law (like the Arms Export Control Act).

Although many of the far-right hawkish elements, neo-cons and otherwise, that have mobilized for years for an attack on Iran are mostly not inside the Obama administration, there are exceptions. Non-partisan hawk Dennis Ross is still President Obama’s top adviser on Iran. And we should not forget that 47 members of Congress – fully a third of the Republicans in the House – recently supported a resolution explicitly endorsing, really almost encouraging, Israel’s “right” to attack Iran. And then the joint military exercises. One of them, Juniper Cobra (don’t you love these tree-grows-in-the-desert names?) was last fall, just as war-talk against Iran was rising once again. According to Brig-Gen Doron Gavish of the Israel Air Force, it was “not aimed at any country in the region,” but was simply to “present the opportunity for a technological and professional exchange with the US military.” Oh, okay. So it’s not about Iran. Uh-huh.

Recent reports indicate some in the U.S. have decided the best response to Israeli threats of a strike against Iran, is perhaps to keep relations with Israel really really tight – maybe to head off such an attack, maybe to keep abreast of the planning, maybe to help in the attack, maybe all of the above. The dangerous consequences of such a reckless action remain. (A few years ago I wrote about what would happen “the day after” a military attack on Iran…unfortunately it remains relevant.)

Of course the strategic ties are not only military – they include economic, political, diplomatic and other support, some of them even more important than the military.

But right now the military ties are key. Look at a few of what Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, prepared as 2010 election talking points for Democrats:

• President Obama has spent more time trying to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions than any other foreign policy issue and it’s something he raises as his top priority in virtually every conversation with world leaders.

• President Obama and Democrats in Congress have provided Israel with every single penny of foreign assistance appropriations that Israel has asked for. In 2007, the United States and Israel signed a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that calls for the U.S. to provide $30 billion in security assistance over the following 10 years.

• Under President Obama, Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, or QME, is being reestablished, after having been neglected for too many years, and the U.S. and Israel have achieved new levels of close security cooperation. Later this year, the Pentagon is likely to sell Israel an initial batch of 25 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, the most advanced aircraft in the U.S. arsenal, and other sensitive technology.

• The United States and Israel recently completed their largest-ever joint military exercise. The three-week Juniper Cobra 10 air defense exercise involved deployment of a thousand U.S. troops, from all four branches of service, alongside an equal number of Israel Defense Forces personnel.

• The Obama Administration has integrated U.S. missile defense technology into Israel's expanding anti-missile shield. …The Administration also will continue to fund development of the Arrow-3, the most advanced variant of Israel's long-range, high-altitude system for countering Iranian ballistic missiles.

• President Obama asked Congress for $205 million to support Israel’s deployment of the Iron Dome rocket defense system, … in addition to the $3 billion budgetary request the Administration had already made for security assistance for Israel.

• In June 2009, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2410, the “Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal years 2010 and 2011”. This bill, introduced by Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), authorizes appropriations to Israel; amends the Arms-Export Control Act to authorize the President to export spare and replacement parts or components of defense items to Israel; amends the Arms Export Control Act to require the Administration to certify that an arms sale to another Middle Eastern country does not threaten Israel's qualitative military edge (QME); authorizes appropriations for co-development of missile defense projects with Israel, including the Arrow, David's Sling, and Iron Dome systems; and expresses the sense of Congress that Israel has the inalienable right to defend itself in the face of an imminent nuclear or military threat from Iran as well as from terrorist organizations and the countries that harbor them.

That’s what they want to brag about – so maybe they’re not so embarrassed after all. Defense Minister Barak comes to Washington because he’s in charge of Israel’s military – and that’s what the U.S. is interested in. And boy does that make the work of the pro-Israel lobbies and the arms profiteers easier!

The Unchallenged Power of the Israel Lobby

On Being Led By the Nose
By JAMES ABOUREZK

I picked up a copy of a memoir written by the long-gone CIA Director, George Tenet. On the first page of the book's preface, Mr. Tenet described what it was like on the day after the World Trade Towers had exploded as a result of the terrorists' actions on 9-11-01.

I quote Mr. Tenet here:

“All this weighed heavy on my mind as I walked beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing and saw Richard Perle exiting the building just as I was about to enter. Perle is one of the godfathers of the neoconservative movement and, at the time, was head of the Defense Policy Board, an independent advisory group attached to the Secretary of Defense. Ours was little more than a passing acquaintance. As the doors closed behind him, we made eye contact and nodded. I had just reached the door myself when Perle turned to me and said, 'Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. 'They bear responsibility.' (Italics added).

“I was stunned but said nothing. Eighteen hours earlier, I had scanned passenger manifests for the four hijacked airplanes that showed beyond a doubt that al-Qa'ida was behind the attacks. Over the months and years to follow, we would carefully examine the potential of a collaborative role for state sponsors. The intelligence then and now, however, showed no evidence of Iraqi complicity."

The idea that George W. Bush's neocon advisers--Perle included--convinced him that the U.S. should invade Iraq received some attention after the Iraqi war started. But to my knowledge, no one, either in politics or the media, pressed the case too hard, lest they discover that those who wanted to invade Iraq had, not America's interest, but Israel's interest in mind.

There was never a threat to the United States from Saddam Hussein. He was a threat to his own people, but not to our country, a fact which became much more clear as the war went on. But Bush's critics stopped short of implicating Israel's interests as a reason for invading Iraq. A great many people believe, myself included, that Israel wanted Saddam out of the way because, while he was not really a military threat to Israel, he was a political threat. He was someone, like Hizbollah, who stood in the way of Israeli hegemony over the entire Middle East.

That desire by Israel goes a long way toward explaining why Israel has launched so many attacks on Lebanon and Syria. During the last several decades, Israel tried very hard to tame the country of Lebanon by using one excuse or another to invade that battered country. Each time, Israel came away without achieving its objective of control of Lebanon. It had installed Bashir Jamail as president only to see him assassinated during the confusion of the Lebanese Civil War. It conquered militarily the south of Lebanon in 1982, holding on to enough Lebanese territory to allow it to steal water out of the Litani River. By the year 2000, Hizbollah was strong enough to chase Israel out of Lebanon, remaining as a threat to Israel's hegemony from that time onward.

And Syria was warned not to get too rambunctious when Israel bombed Syria using one or another pretense to do so.

The most recent military planning by Israel to solidify what little hegemony it has over the area is the way it is shaking its fist at Iran, with the United States looking over its shoulder, adding weight to its threats against Iran.

What is different about this most recent threat is that Iran is no Iraq. Iran has the ways and means to retaliate against not only Israel, but against the United States as Israel's principal supporter in its efforts to tame Iran.

If we were to look rationally at the situation, we would soon realize that, while Iran is able to defend itself with the kind of military it possesses, it is quite incapable of invading another country, particularly one as militarily powerful as Israel. If we assume that Iran's nuclear program is intended to make a bomb, what earthly reason would it have to start a nuclear war against either Israel or the United States? Iran's leadership, while mouthy, and cruel toward its political dissidents, is not crazy enough to ask for someone to come in and wipe out their entire country, which is what certainly would happen should it start a war with nuclear weapons. Certainly, military and political people both in Israel and in the United States must realize this fact.

The most likely and rational reason behind such a nuclear program is one of self-defense against Israel, which has had a minimum of 200 nuclear warheads in its arsenal.

What, then, is behind this most recent insanity by Israel's supporters in America and by Israel itself? We can almost certainly agree that Iran is another country standing in the way of Israel's desired hegemony. I've been told by those who should know that the publicity given to Iran's nuclear program is cutting down on Jews either visiting or emigrating to Israel. That is an economic argument that the United States should not enter into, especially by going to war on Israel's behalf. But it's clear that is what Israel and its supporters here want.

One wonders what to make of the American politicians who are very much like an echo chamber for Israel's talking points concerning Iran. Do they realize that by being led around by the nose by Israel and its Lobby is very much against U.S. interests? Do they realize that even if Israel begins bombing Iran, the United States will pay the price?

Do our politicians understand, that while it is good for their campaign contributions to be solicitous of Israel's objectives, it would be devastating for America to be threatened by even more terrorist attacks than we have been.

What has been unspoken by the media and by political leaders is that our continuing support of Israel's objectives by not only financing Israel's military, but by invading Muslim countries for whatever reason only creates more danger for American interests?

This has been largely unspoken by our military and political leaders, but on occasion something will accidentally slip out, exposing the dangers to us for our blind support of Israel. George W. Bush, for example, blurted out, during a statement on the Iraq War, that it was not Israel's fault that we invaded Iraq. And lately, some of our generals are voicing their concerns about the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. But by and large, there is total silence on the issue by the media. Our leaders choose to remain silent on why our complicity with Israel puts us in danger from terrorist groups around the world, but plain and simple, that's what is causing the attacks on our interests. G.W. Bush tried to put a different face on it by saying that "they" hated our freedoms. We deserve better by our presidents.

It does not appear that any of our leaders, from President Obama on down to state legislators, care to rally solve our terrorism problem. (Last year, the South Dakota legislature enacted a resolution approving the 1998 Israeli slaughter in the Gaza Strip).

Iran has offered to join a nuclear weapons free Middle East, but it does not appear that our President cares to take them up on that offer. He would, it appears, need permission from Israel's right wing government to do so. After witnessing his most recent surrender to Netanyahu and his policies, it's not likely that he ever will join. For now, it is sufficient that a nuclear country like the United States can lecture other, smaller countries on who can and who can't have a nuclear weapon.

Are we asking too much that all nations foreswear possession of nuclear weapons, and not just those who are smaller than us?

Does anyone beside a few people in the United States see the danger to our country in being led around by the nose by the Israeli government?

Helen Thomas: an Appreciation

Paying the Price for Objectivity Toward Palestinians
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The propagandists for the Israel Lobby, who occupy the Wall Street Journal editorial page while pretending to be journalists, are determined to remove Helen Thomas from the annals of journalism. In case you have already forgotten, a few days ago the distinguished career of Helen Thomas, the 89-year-old doyen of the White House Press Corps, was ended by the Israel Lobby, which made an issue about her opinion that immigrant Jews should leave Palestine and go back to their home countries.

The White House Correspondents’ Association fell in line with the demands of the Israel Lobby, and the cowardly president of the organization added the association’s disapprobation to that of the neoconservative cabal.

Having removed Helen Thomas from the journalism scene, the Israel Lobby is now working with its agents on the Wall Street Journal editorial page to eliminate the Helen Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society of Professional Journalists.

A nonentity in the world of journalism, James Taranto, apparently is associated with the Wall Street Journal editorial page, although Wikipedia reports that he was incapable of graduating from journalism school at California State University, Northridge. On a Wall Street Journal web site, Taranto writes: “We’ve been calling Thomas ‘American journalism’s crazy old aunt in the attic’ for years,” and he asks who would now accept the Helen Thomas award after Ms. Thomas revealed she really was crazy by criticizing Israel.

I would for one. Of course the Society of Professional Journalists would never give the award, assuming the distinguished award survives the assault of the Israel Lobby’s assassins, to a critic of Israel. Helen excepted, American journalists are cowards. With the concentrated ownership of the corporate media today, no independently-minded journalist can have a career in print or TV media. You defend the Washington/Tel Aviv line, or you are out of work.

The absence of independently-minded journalists on the Wall Street Journal editorial page is an extraordinary change from my days as Associate Editor of that page. The editorial page editor, Robert Bartley was ambitious and forced himself to tolerate talented colleagues. Mere opinion was not our task. Often we scooped the reporters on the news side of the paper. Our editorials reported new developments and provided factual analysis.

I was hired as Jude Wanniski’s replacement. Jude, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, was fired, allegedly because the journal’s brass caught him handing out election campaign literature on a train platform, but if you believe American journalism was ever that pure, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.

Jude was fired, because the neoconservatives got rid of him by telling Bartley that Wanniski was over-shadowing him. That was too much for Bob’s ego. Jude, of course, being a real journalist, was objective toward the Palestinians and thus had earned the enmity of the Israel Lobby.

Once Bob was rapidly declining with prostate cancer, neoconservatives engineered the takeover of the editorial page. Today the once proud Wall Street Journal editorial page is a leading apologist for Israeli/American war crimes and police states.

To return to the nonentity, James Taranto, who wants to throw Helen Thomas down the memory hole: Helen Thomas’ opinion that Israelis should stop stealing the villages, homes, and lands of Palestinians, while confining Palestinians to the equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto, is equated by Taranto to the advocacy of “ethnic cleansing” by Helen.

Of course, it is the Israelis who are doing the ethnic cleansing. Many Jews have documented Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, such as Uri Avnery, a former member of the Israeli terrorist organization, Irgun, Ilan Pappe, Israel’s most distinguished historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and the Israeli peace group, ICHAD, who have been my house guests. The Israeli newspaper, Haaratz, is far more critical of Israeli policy than Helen Thomas, and so is MIT professor Noam Chomsky, the distinguished British journalist and film maker John Pilger, and the distinguished scholar, Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors.

But Taranto prefers an 89-year old adversary.

Israel is an unnatural state. It was created by terror that was accommodated by craven British and US “diplomacy.” Israel exists for one reason only: the US government provides the money, weapons, and diplomatic protection. Any other government that murdered thousands of civilians in other countries, as Israel does routinely in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, would have its entire government and military on trial before the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. Israelis have no worst enemy than their own government.

Every time the rest of the world tries to hold the Israeli government accountable for its crimes, the US vetoes the UN resolution. America has become the enabler of the Zionist-hijacked Israeli government. And the Israeli government knows it. Israeli government leaders have publicly bragged for decades about their control over the US government. US Admiral Tom Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after whom the F-14 “Tomcat” jet fighter was named, declared publicly: “No American President can stand up to Israel.” Apparently no American journalist can either.

I am a critic of Israel’s heartless policy toward the Palestinians, but I do not want Israel destroyed. I want it moved or reformed. Bring the small number of Israelis to America before there is a nuclear war over the fact that they are where they should not be. To try to claim a land and dispossess its people on the basis of a spurious two thousand year year old deed is an audacious act of conquest and dispossession.

My proposal to relocate Israelis in the US is rhetorical, but why not insist that the Israelis, who are heavily dependent on US largess, reform? Why should Americans support an apartheid racist state that denies citizenship to the rightful inhabitants? What kind of morality, if any, does the Wall Street Journal editorial page represent when it defends Israelis who force Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettos, deprived of water, food, medical care and schools? Why must Palestinians live in dread of Israeli bulldozers arriving to flatten their homes in order to create space for Zionist “settlers.”

Allegedly, the US is a superpower, but in fact it is a puppet state of the Israeli government. Witness, for example (the examples are numerous), the fate of the Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed in Israel’s assault on Gaza during December 2008-January 2009. Goldstone is a Zionist Jew and a distinguished judge. He was given the task by the United Nations to investigate the Israeli attack on Gaza. Being an honest person, he provided evidence of Israeli war crimes.

What was the result? The bought-and-paid-for US Congress voted, on the instructions of their master, the Israel Lobby, to deep-six the Goldstone Report by a vote of 344 to 36.

Amazing, isn’t it, there were only 36 US Representatives who were not owned by the Israel Lobby.

Of course, James Taranto serves the Israel Lobby. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, not even a shadow of its former self, when it speaks, speaks for Israel and for the Bush/Cheney militarist police state.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has fallen into the low ranks of Brownshirt propaganda. The fact that management tolerates the continuation of totally nonobjective journalism shows why print newspapers are failing everywhere.

The hubris of Taranto, a mere propagandist who will never come close to the league in which Helen Thomas resides, causes him to think that he is fit to pass judgment on a real journalist. Taranto epitomizes the hubris of the neoconservatives. Not a single one of them has the smallest accomplishment. Yet, blinded with arrogance, they remain in ignorant bliss of their status as prostitutes.

Roberts: 'AIPAC Purchases US Elections'

Why is it that whenever anyone criticizes Israel's actions, or even questions them, they are called "anti-semitic"? Criticizing their govt has nothing to do with hating the Jews. Besides, the people are cool for the most part. It's Israel's govt and the violent lengths they will go to that is under fire, not their race.