19:57 2001-10-25
BILL WHITE: ISRAELI LOBBY SCRAMBLING FOR NEW APPROACH TO CRISIS (PART 1)
The following is the first in a two-part series by Bill White. We will feature the second installment tomorrow.
As Their Allies In Defense Face A Purge, America’s “Official” Jewish Groups Look For Justice To Promote Agenda
“America is finally running out of patience with us” the headline read in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz Tuesday. Sharon had just rebuffed the American demand that Israel withdraw its troops to behind the lines of occupation, and was holding more than five thousand Palestinian refugees trapped in the 'Aida and 'Azza/Beit Jibrin camps. On Wednesday, the butcher Sharon began shooting the refugees as he did in 1982.. The US State Department was “feeling like a fire brigade” struggling with the potential for war not just in Afghanistan, but in Occupied Palestine and Kashmir as well. On the home front, Israel’s allies in the United States were also scrambling. Having been defeated in their attempts to use the September 11 bombing to draw the United States closer to Israel, they were facing a purge of their supporters in the Defense Department, as it became clear that their agents on the inside were leaking US secrets to both Israel and the press. The “official” Jewish lobby was now scrambling for damage control, and grasping at anything to distract public attention away from the US-Israeli relationship.
“Saudi Arabia is the home of … one of the most fanatical, intolerant, and extreme forms of Islamic fundamentalism,” Mortimer Zuckerman, an American media baron, publisher of US News and World Report as well as the New York Daily News, and head of the powerful Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, wrote in his weekly column. There had been a “mendacious implication … that the September 11 attacks were related to America's relationship with Israel” but now, Zuckerman wrote, “we … must face the harsh fact that Saudi Arabia, a nation we have long supported, is a central disseminator of the poisonous spores of fanaticism.”
Could the Zionist lobby be serious? Could it really be trying to persuade the public that the reason for bin Laden’s attack on New York was not US support of Israel, but the fact that the US paid “moderate” Muslim regimes in the Middle East primarily to keep them from attacking Israel? If a directive issued by Israel’s Foreign Ministry to pro-Israeli journalists was indication, they were. And the attempt to distract the public showed the growing desperation the lobby is using in its efforts to keep the disintegrating situation in the Middle East from becoming a disintegration of their political power here at home.
The Changing Tune
Only a month ago, the Zionist-dominated elements of the American press were demanding the heads not of just the Taliban, but of the entire population of the Islamic world.
“America's enemy is the Islamic Axis: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Afghanistan and the groups they fund, support and direct. These groups include the cells of Osama Bin Laden, Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO,” wrote ex-Israeli propaganda minister turned American journalist Zev Chafets, in Zuckerman’s New York Daily News, “The U.S. must invade these countries (if there is time), dismantle their unlatched governments, disperse their armies and seize their arsenals. … If there isn't time [they] will have to be destroyed by whatever means necessary: the Japanese model.”
Chafets was not alone.
“The enemy has identified itself in public and openly … Its name is radical Islam” wrote columnist Charles Krauthammer on Sept 12, “there should be no talk of bringing these people to ‘swift justice’ … We must carry their war to them.”
They were just two of hundreds of voices, most of them Zionist, or at least tied into America’s “official” Jewish lobby, that demanded the destruction of Islam.
Little more than a month later, their tune had changed, from a rumbling war-mongering drum beat to a softer song of explanation and excuses:
“What spawned the real Osama bin Laden … was the infidel's ‘occupation’' of Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca and Medina, the holiest cities in Islam.” wrote Krauthammer on October 19, as he played along with the fiddlers trying to dance America’s attention away from Israel, “Bin Laden … in giving reasons for his jihad on America, never fails to cite the starving and bombing of Iraq.”
Newspaper columns now avoided talk of Israel, not even recognizing the Israeli occupation as a possible complaint of bin Laden’s, and certainly not mentioning it in the context of “terrorism”. Israel was no longer safe. The Israeli lobby was on the defensive.
Elder Lore
There is no question that a Jewish lobby, with goals and interest beyond just Zionism and Israel, exists in America. It is divided into three major “umbrella” organizations – the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NCRAC or “nacrac”), the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (the “President’s Conference”), and the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Each organizations is a council of smaller groups, and has responsibility for a certain area of Jewish political life -- NCRAC issues a yearly document laying out the domestic political line that the nation’s Jewish groups have agreed to adhere to, the President’s Conference issues the foreign policy line, and AIPAC conducts the actual lobbying of Congress and the Administration.
There are nine major groups that form these councils, though each group has between 50 (for the President’s Conference) and several hundred members on its theoretical governing body (and AIPAC is unofficially controlled by it’s four-member “officer’s committee”). There are the groups that represent the three main trends of American religious Judaism – the national unions for the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox synagogues. There are the three “defense agencies” – the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee. Then there are the three women’s organizations – Hadassah, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Women’s American ORT. There are additionally as many as 300 other “official” Jewish organizations
active in the country and contributing representatives to the councils in various ways.
The lobby works like the Mafia within its own community, brutally suppressing Jewish voices that dissent from its foreign policy dictates. According to Jewish writer JJ Goldberg, editor of the Jewish commentary paper the Forward, and author of the book “Jewish Power”:
“By mid-1976 … NCRAC and the American Jewish Committee ordered up internal studies on the limits of dissent. The Presidents Conference and the Synagogue Council of American held public inquiries on the topic. All the organizations reached the same conclusion: American Jews had the right to discuss issues freely, but only within discreet forums, outside public view. …
“Working closely with [Israeli Ambassador Simcha] Dinitz and his staff, the Presidents Conference and NCRAC began to draw up a set of baseline principles to govern behavior within the organized Jewish community. They boiled down to three basic tenants. One was that Israelis were the only ones entitled to decide Israeli policy, since they alone bore the risks. The second was that American Jews must stand publicly united with Israel, and air disagreements only in private. The third was that Israel would no negotiate with Palestinian terrorists, since talking to them would grant them legitimacy
“These rules were quickly taken up by the Jewish leadership as sacred write from Jerusalem. Jews who disagreed found themselves unwelcome in community forums, asked to leave governing boards, shouted down at meetings. Even luminaries … began to find themselves ostracized after they endorsed Middle East compromise.”
Like the mafia, they will rub you out – not your life, but your reputation. With extensive contacts inside both political parties and the mainstream press, the “official” Jewish community keeps its members under tight lock and key.
Cracks In The Press
The Lobby’s muscle arm in America and abroad, though it is often impolitic to state it outright, are the major media institutions in America that are owned by Jews, combined with those that are not owned by Jews, but dominated by non-Jewish Zionists. (see “American Media Uses Disinformation To Guide Policy”) To this they add many of America’s most widely published and widely read opinion columnists, editors, “independent” publishers, and reporters. Even those in the media who choose to distance themselves are not immune to its pressures, as two American journalists recently discovered when they were purged from their newspapers for anti-Israeli statements.
Freelance writer Jim Moore was the first of the two. Over the weekend, he submitted an article to the Tallahassee Democrat, daily newspaper of Tallahassee, Florida, and owned by the Knight-Ridder Corporation. The article was one of several he had written that were critical of Israel, but this one was a little different. It included a quote from Ariel Sharon, broadcast on Col Yisrael radio, that “Jewish people rule America.” Managing Editor Mizell Stewart feared the implications of Moore’s piece and refused to print. Moore received notice barred from ever again writing for the paper the next day.
Though Israeli officials have publicly admitted that Sharon “had bouts of anger during a recent Knesset meeting and that he said ‘things that shouldn't be said,’” this didn’t matter to
Knight-Ridder. Though it is not a Jewish owned or managed company, it still plays ball. When asked to explain their actions, Stewart referred Pravda’s inquiries to a secondary editor who declined to respond.
A second, and bigger, crack appeared over the weekend in upstate New York, where two editors for the Oneida Daily Dispatch were fired after publishing an article quoting a Pakistani man who claimed that the September 11 attacks were conducted by Israel’s Mossad. The article, and all references to the two, were pulled from the Daily Dispatch’s website ( http://www.oneidadispatch.com), and according to an Associated Press article on the case that ran on October 19, Managing Editor Jean Ryan and City Editor Dale Seth were dismissed from the paper. Notsurprisingly, the paper is owned by the Newhouse Media Group, a Jewish newspaper group owned by the brothers Samuel and Donald Newhouse – two men who’s wire services regularly carry often ridiculous articlesattacking “right-wingers” and “racists”, real and imagined, across America.
But the third “crack”, though it was only slight, is perhaps the one that most threatens the currently locked armed approach of the media in its attempts to misinform the American public. When Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud had his $10 million dollar check rejected by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, every newspaper in New York applauded Giuliani but one – the usually Zionist New York Post if Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Why? According to columnist Johnathan Tobin, writing in Jewish World Review, “[the Prince] is, among other things, a major stockholder in News Corp., the multinational media conglomerate that owns the Post.”
Defensive Front
It is not the occasional slip of a reporter’s tongue, however, which has the Lobby in a dither, nor is it the small financial influence of one Saudi on one paper that has never truly been in their control. What bothers them most is that everything they demanded of the Bush administration – war on Iraq, war on Syria, war on Hizbollah, war on Hamas – had not only been denied them, but they are facing, for the first time in thirty years, a government that seems ready to simply remove them from policy making altogether.
Two Defense Department officials – Richard Perle on the Defense Policy Board and Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense – comprise the core of the Zionist lobby’s influence over US foreign policy. But their dual loyalty has caused them to leak to the press a number of important details of the US military’s actions in the Afghan campaign – including top secret information on a US Special Forces raid on airfield near the city of Kandahar. The information caused the raid to fail, and the nearly 200 Special Forces troops involved in it to force evacuate the area only two hours into their mission. The result has been a Secretary of Defense who has threatened to not only dismiss, but possibly arrest, the “unknown” individuals responsible:
“The fact that some members of the press knew enough about those operations to ask the questions and
to print the stories was clearly because someone in the Pentagon had provided them that information. And clearly, it put at risk the individuals involved in the operation,” Rumsfeld told the London Times Monday, and “It is terrible. And I just can’t imagine people being that irresponsible that they’re willing to do that … I couldn’t care less where the source of the leak is, the responsibility is the same.”
Though Rumsfeld did back off his threats to arrest those responsible, and stated that responsibility was “unclear”, it is clear that the lead candidates for the leak, two men who have been previously identified as leaking Pentagon data to the members of the press such as radical pro-Israeli journalists Bill Safire and William Kristol, were Perle and Wolfowitz, causing some observers to wonder if the President’s Conference’s dynamic duo were about to be dismissed from public duties.
And as a further indication of US unhappiness with Israeli-loyal “American” citizens in the military, the Jerusalem Post reported Tuesday on the first wartime purge of an Israeli-American “dual citizen” from US forces. US Army Reserve Major Shawn Pine was relieved of his command of the 300th Military Intelligence Company of Austin, Texas, Tuesday after being accused of suspicious links to the Israeli military-intelligence complex. Pine, of course, accused the Army of “anti-Semitism”, but all his complaining has not gotten him his reinstatement.
Tomorrow, Bill White continues his in-depth article
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