…by Jonas E. Alexis
Last June, Margaret Sullivan, public editor of the New York Times, wrote that the war in Iraq was “driven by outside agendas,” which she said lacked serious “skepticism.”
“Many Op-Ed columns,” she continued, “promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous.”[1]
Who gave those columnists the advantage to produce those Op-Ed columns in the New York Times? Russia? Iran? Sullivan never told us.
She only hinted that the war was developed and advanced by the neoconservatives. Yet once again she refused to tell us who they were—not because she lacked the moral and intellectual sophistication, but because naming names would have almost certainly ruined her career as an editor.
One of the people who actually fleshed those ideas out was New York Times Jewish Zionist Thomas Friedman, who bragged in 2003 that the war in Iraq
“was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals, people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history.”[2]
Hear this:
“Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It’s the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It’s the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite.
“Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.”[3]
Who are some of those Jewish neocons? Here is just a short list:
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, Scooter Libby, Charles Krauthamer, Stephen Bryen, David Frum, Robert Kagan, David Wurmser, Dov Zakheim, Norman Podhoretz, John Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, Frederick Kagan, Donald Kagan, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Eliot Cohen, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Jonathan S. Tobin, Marc Grossman, Joshua Bolten, etc.
Other lesser known figures who propagated the lies through different vehicles included Reuel Marc Gerecht, Peter Wehner, and David Horowitz.
Right after the Iraq war, much of America went broke. Since 2004, “one in three Americans has debt in collections.”[4] And the war in Iraq itself, as we have repeatedly documented in previous articles, will cost us at least six trillion dollars.
Yet since the Iraq war is over, you would think that the neoconservatives would go into intermission and at least give the American people a break. What is so sad is that those same people have been running around like wild chickens propagating other wars around much of the world.
While Victoria Nuland sought to “fu$k the E.U.” and got the U.S. into a bloody confrontation with Russia on the political side, Jewish academics such as Vladimir Tismaneanu has been hopelessly trying to say that Putin is another dictator,[5] leaving the reader with the impression that the West needs to get rid of him.
Since those Jewish neocons believe that political ideas are to drive “the force of history,” they continue to lead America and much of the West into one conflict after another with countries that they do not like.
Diana Magnay, a reporter for CNN, seemed to have witnessed this phenomenon in an indirect way. Magnay declared that she actually witnessed Israelis cheering the bombing of Gaza and they even threatened her. She tweeted:
“Israelis on hill above Sderot cheer as bombs land on #gaza; threaten to ‘destroy our car if I say a word wrong’. Scum.”[6]
Instantly, CNN pulled her out. A spokeswoman for CNN declared,
“She [Magnay] deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew. She certainly meant no offense to anyone beyond that group, and she and CNN apologize for any offense that may have been taken.”[7]
The network ultimately did not want Magnay to report negative things about Israel. What we have been told over and over is that Israel is always justified and Hamas ought to be blamed. What if young and innocent women and children die in the process, even while they were sleeping at a UN school?
Too bad. They too were either terrorists or human shields. What if you resist this diabolical force? You are an anti-Semite.[8]
Emma Barnett, a Jewish journalist and broadcaster from England, declares that she is scared because there is a “rising tide of anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Israel sentiment…”
The simple fact that Barnett admitted that the “anti-Israel sentiment” was being marshalled by Jews and Israelis themselves in Britain![9] Even in the United States, Benjamin Silverman, a long-time Jewish activist, has recently written,
“Those of us, those Jews who have spoken out against Israel’s inhumane actions or Zionism’s warped nationalistic beliefs, have never been well received within our community.
“When we have argued for human rights and international law, we have been ostracized and excluded from all aspects of mainstream Jewish life. When we have argued against an exclusionary, segregationist regime, we have been attacked with the most vicious of slanders; ‘self-hating Jews,’ ‘Nazi collaborators,’ and worse.
“When we have tried to stand up against colonialist violence and occupations, we have been met with angry rejection from our closest friends and family.
“When we have tried to reaffirm the values that Palestinians are human beings, deserving of equal rights and a future with dignity, we have been met with the full force of an incredibly powerful and well-funded Pro-Israel public relations machine.
“A climate of neo-McCarthyism has reigned within side the Jewish community stifling all debate, dissent and free thought on the issues of Israel, Palestine and Zionism. But its time for all of that to end…
“Every facet of our Jewish life has been infected with Zionism, from our youth groups, to our synagogues, to our Hebrew schools, to our family Seders. ‘The world hates us, Israel protects us, there we are free and safe and democratic’– we’ve come to believe.
“But in the last few weeks we have seen that supposed progressive, freedom loving, democratic Israel unmask itself before the whole world as a lynch mob society.
“We American Jews have been tricked into projecting all of our hopes and insecurities onto Israel, and to have those beautiful dreams and illusions shattered so brutally can be difficult.
“But for all the emotional pain we may be going through in seeing our Star of David pasted on the bombs being dropped on innocent civilians, it’s nothing compared to the pain being felt by those civilians.
“Palestinians have suffered greatly at our hands. They have been violently forced from their land and homes to appease the Holocaust guilt of Europe and the greed of Zionist colonists.
“They have been forced to live under an openly Jim Crow, discriminatory and segregationist ‘Jewish Only’ apartheid state. And the whole process has become endemic in its repetition, with wave after wave after wave of land theft, oppression, segregation and violence.
“The Nakba has been made into a continuous, never ending, 66-year-old ongoing catastrophe. Palestinians have been bombed, shot, detained, brutalized, tortured, dehumanized, occupied, and worse. All in our name.
“We Jews have a lot of blood on our hands, we have been made complicit in these inhuman acts, and we have a responsibility now to do something about it. We need to rethink what ‘Never Again’ really means; does it mean for us ‘Never Again for Jews Only,’ or does it mean ‘Never Again For Everyone’?
“I am not asking or expecting you, the whole American Jewish community, to renounce everything you have been taught to believe overnight, just yet.
“But I am asking and expecting you to open your minds a little, to start questioning what you have been taught. The Pro-Israel bias in our community has corrupted and stifled open free discourse for far too long.
“The exclusion of any dissenting Jewish opinion outside of the most narrow of ultra-Zionism has led our people into a cul-de-sac of intellectual dishonesty, moral poverty and political thuggery, where questioning is discouraged and obedience is rewarded. This must come to end, now, if we are to redeem ourselves and pave a path for the future.
“All I ask is the following; that you reopen our community to dissenting opinion, that you open up every synagogue, every Jewish community center, every Hillel, every Hebrew School, to a free debate and discussion on Israel, Palestine and the core beliefs of Zionism.
“I and others like me, want to make our case to you, directly, as Jews to Jews, on why the Palestinians deserve our solidarity, on why Israeli militarism must be opposed, on why the ‘Jewish State’ of Israel necessarily leads to apartheid, and on why the nationalistic and supremacist beliefs of Zionism have led to the corruption of our people with the sins of racism and colonialism.
“I don’t expect a warm reception. But I do expect at least a moment of your time, and a part of your attention. You owe it to yourself, to your people, to your children, and to all Palestinians, to enter into this discussion with open minds and open hearts and start confronting the hard questions. Please help us in taking this moment and reassess who we are, what we have done, and where we want to go from here.”
Barnett said she is scared about what the future of Jews in Europe, but she is not scared about what is happening to innocent lives in Gaza. Jewish neocon Charles Krauthammer is of the same opinion. Listen very carefully here,
“The rest of the world’s reaction to what’s happening in Gaza is Orwellian. It is shocking. Especially in Europe. It is a resurgence of anti-Semitism not seen since the 1930s.”
Krauthammer is quite shocked because he thinks that the world should accept Israel’s pathetic killing of innocent lives in Gaza. In fact, “Almost two thirds of the British public (62%) believe that the Israeli government is committing war crime.”
To Krauthammer, this is a function of Anti-Semitism and has nothing to do with the Israeli regime slaughtering even Jews living in Gaza and who claim to be Holocaust survivors.[10]
What is even pathetic is that those same neocons would invent dumb theories to defend their actions. Here are two examples. When the Israelis were slaughtering civilians in Gaza, Dov Zakheim wrote an article in the National Interest entitled “A War for Israel’s Right to Exist,” declaring,
“Israelis cannot begin to fathom why so many in the West, including some in the Obama administration, focus on civilian Palestinian deaths, and demand “proportionality,’ as if Israel’s cause would only be legitimate if it lost more of its people. Israelis demand to know what proportionality is meant to connote? That the military should dismantle its remarkably successful Iron Dome system so that more Israeli civilians should be killed? That the incursion into Gaza would only be justifiable if as many Israelis are killed as are Palestinians?
“Israelis note that proportionality was never a consideration when America and its allies fought other wars, whether in Vietnam, Bosnia, Afghanistan or Iraq (twice).
“Israelis acknowledge the tragic circumstances that have led to the deaths of over a thousand Palestinian civilians. But they continually point out that Hamas stocks its weapons in schools, hospitals and mosques, as well as the tunnels, and that it fires its rockets from those locations, as well as from other heavily populated areas.
“They argue that whereas their own military has warned civilians of impending attacks, Hamas instructs, and perhaps forces, civilians to stay in place. And they wonder why the same observers who relentlessly pummel Israel for attacking civilians seem to overlook the ongoing butchery that Bashar Assad has carried out against his own citizens.”[11]
This argument falls flat on the surface when it was announced that the Israelis bombed a UN school, killing at least 20 children. Did Hamas use that school as civilian shields as well?
In a similar vein, Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, declared,
“When you are part of an election process that asks for a terrorist organization which proclaims in word and in deed that their primary objective is to destroy their neighboring country and not to build schools or commerce or jobs, you are complicit and you are not a civilian casualty.”
Let us accept this dumb premise as if it were true and let us follow it to its logical conclusions. Does that mean that the U.S. and Israel are terrorist states for supporting terrorist organizations such as MEK (under Bush) and the Syrian rebels (under Obama)? Is the CIA complicit in spreading terrorism?
Kirshner cannot answer those questions properly precisely because that would ruin his Zionist world. As Glenn Greenwald has recently pointed out,
“‘terrorism’ is, and from the start was designed to be, almost entirely devoid of discernible meaning. It’s a fear-mongering slogan, lacking any consistent application, intended to end rational debate and justify virtually any conduct by those who apply the term.
“But to the extent it means anything beyond that, it typically refers to the killing of civilians as a means of furthering political or military goals.
“In American media discourse, when Palestinians overwhelmingly kill soldiers (95% of the Israeli death toll) who are part of an army that is blockading, occupying, invading, and indiscriminately bombing them and killing their children by the hundreds, that is ‘terrorism.’
“When Israelis use massive, brutal force against a trapped civilian population, overwhelmingly killing innocent men, women and children (at least 75% of the Palestinian death toll), with clear intentions to kill civilians (see point 3), that is noble ‘self-defense.’
“That demonstrates how skewed U.S. discourse is in favor of Israel, as well as the purely manipulative, propagandistic nature of the term ‘terrorists.’”[12]
And which country is supplying and resupplying Israel with ammunitions to literally send Gaza back to the Middle Ages (as Jewish writer Jesse Rosenfeld of the Daily Beast adequately put it[13])?
You guess it: It is the United States of America—or shall we properly say the Zionist States of America. But listen to mush-head Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post:
“The problem is that in every war, in every conflict and in every contest of wills that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took office, he has sided with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, against America’s allies. Under Obama, America has switched sides.”[14]
What can one really say? Here is a president who has been listening to the Jewish neocons by invading Afghanistan and Libya[15] and by covertly attacking countries like Russia and Iran, but now Glick is telling us that Obama has sided with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood since he took office!
In other words, Obama, without a question, should listen to every single plan that Israel has proposed. He should continue to give billions upon billions of dollars to the terrorist state, should support the killing of civilians in Gaza, and should take orders from Netanyahu (or shall we say Satanyahu, as one of my academic friends put it). If you do not think that this is actually what they mean, think again. Netanyahu has “reportedly warned Shapiro that President Barack Obama and his administration was ‘not to ever second-guess me again.'”
If that is not diabolical, what is?
[youtube 41YTAZHIWN8#t=39]
[1] Margaret Sullivan, “Covering New War, In Shadow of Old One,” NY Times, June 28, 2014.
[2] Quoted in Ari Shavit, “White Man’s Burden,” Haaretz, April 4, 2003.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Phil Izzo, “One in Three Americans Has Debt in Collections; So What?,” Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2014.
[5] Vladimir Tismaneanu, “From Andropov to Putin: The Last Spasm of a Decrepit Dictatorship,” FrontPageMag.com, July 30, 2014.
[6] Michael Calderone, “CNN Removes Reporter Diana Magnay From Israel-Gaza After ‘Scum’ Tweet,” Huffington Post, July 18, 2014.
[7] Ibid.
[8] For recent development, see Justin Huggler, “ Anti-Semitism on the march: Europe braces for violence,” The Telegraph, July 26, 2014.
[9] Emma Barnett, “Gaza conflict: As a British Jew, I am now scared to talk about Israel and Gaza,” The Telegraph, July 23, 2014.
[10] See for example Ben Sales, “From Israel, a Holocaust survivor worries about her Gazan daughter,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 29, 2014.
[11] Dov S. Zakheim, “A War for Israel’s Right to Exist,” National Interest, July 31, 2014.
[12] Glenn Greenwald, “Terrorism in the Israeli Attack on Gaza,” The Intercept, July 29, 2014.
[13] Jesse Rosenfeld, “Israel’s Campaign to Send Gaza Back to the Stone Age,” Daily Beast, July 29, 2014.
[14] Caroline B. Glick, “Our World: Israel, Hamas and Obama’s Foreign Policy,” Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2014.
[15] Conor Frieddersdorf, “The Right-Wing Delusion That Obama Is an Israel-Hating Dove,” Atlantic, July 30, 2014.
Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
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